The many advantages of choosing your own school

Progress has dedicated space in this edition to the concept of publicly funded school choice. The educational arguments for school choice are well laid out here and elsewhere, but in this time of economic downturn and panicked calls for government spending to “prime” our economic “pumps,” I offer one more reason to support choice: it’s economically stimulating.

It’s stimulating over the short, medium, and long term without spending one dollar more of your tax money. No deficits, no additional debt, no added taxes. Just stimulus. 

In the short term, what better way to use half-empty school buildings and unemployed teaching graduates—two subjects that occasion regular hand-wringing in our government boardrooms and on our editorial pages—than by putting them to work doing what they were intended to do, educate kids? Looking to put carpenters, electricians, plumbers, and painters to work? Expanded choice results in more working schools and offers the immediate potential for construction and renovation jobs. And don’t forget the jobs created for maintenance, administrative, and food-service staff.

From the government perspective it’s a winning proposition as well. A finance minister desperate to find additional revenue sources at a time when traditional tax bases have gone soft can leverage existing public investment with private funds, with far greater returns and far less risk than VLTs. School choice offers the opportunity to increase total spending on education while increasing per-pupil amounts available to government-run schools. The math is clear and simple; the impact almost immediate. 

A government seeking to convince people to spend instead of save could find no better incentive than our children’s futures to convince us to open our wallets. School choice also offers government a way to work with, instead of against, communities desperate to save their school, such as St. Mary’s School in Halifax, or their cherished programs, including early French immersion in New Brunswick. 

Medium and long term, school choice offers hope to the hopeless, the disengaged, the disenfranchised, and the poorly served. Experts in the education field, such as Dr. Caroline Hoxby of Stanford and Dr. Howard Fuller (a former superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools), have demonstrated the benefits of educational choice for the most vulnerable among us. 

Dr. Jay Greene of the University of Arizona, among others, has demonstrated the positive performance and funding effects of publicly funded choice on government schools and on the students, both those “left behind in” and those who “leave” government-run schools. And we need not look even that far for evidence of this fact. Nova Scotia already has publicly funded school choice, in the form of the tuition-support program for children facing special challenges. This program over the past several years has blended public and private funds to create a solution that works for the students that our government schools were failing, and failing spectacularly.

Opponents will tell you that simply increasing spending on government schools would supply similar stimulus. That is not the case. Choice begets more and different schools, innovative schools, and expanded private investment. Increased spending on existing government schools and government programs will give us none of those things. 

Opponents will also tell you that every dollar supporting school choice is a dollar stolen from public schools. That  simply isn’t true. It’s a dollar “stolen,” if stolen at all, from government-run schools. Government education and public education are not, and never have been, synonymous. And this money isn’t stolen; it’s public money that belongs to us, to spend as we see fit. If anything, it was stolen from us long ago, and we would simply be taking it back.

Spending this public money wisely is our right and our obligation. In fact, using public funds to support school choice and leveraging increased private spending at the same time would only bring us into line with most of the developed world and increasingly large swaths of the underdeveloped world as well.  

Every public dollar is a public trust; we have an obligation to spend it to the maximum benefit for the taxpayer, for society, and for the person we are spending it to help. If we elect to deliver publicly funded education through a variety of means—means that encourage private spending on education to rise, means that drive down pupil-teacher ratios while driving up per-pupil spending—then we have demonstrated prudence, responsibility, and a clear and measurable return on our investment. What a stimulating change that would be.

Charles Cirtwill is the executive vice-president of the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies.