Lessons about school choice from down-under

What lessons can U.S. educators and policymakers learn from school-choice experiments in New Zealand? That's what co-authors Edward B. Fiske and Helen F. Ladd explore in their new book, When Schools Compete: A Cautionary Tale (Brookings Institution Press, 2000). The authors, who are husband and wife, spent five months in New Zealand in 1998 examining that country's decade-long experiment with self-governing schools and parental choice - ideas that underlie the current interest in charger schools and voucher experiments in the United States.

One important lesson is that school-choice reforms are not likely to solve the problems of struggling schools and may even make them worse, according to Ladd, a professor of public policy studies and economics at Duke, and Fiske, the former education editor of The New York Times.

"Advocates of charter schools and vouchers often share a belief that if urban schools were forced to compete for students, the quality of education would improve," said Ladd. "We found that in New Zealand, a market-based reform strategy did not solve the problems of the most troubled schools. In fact it exacerbated them."

While in New Zealand, Ladd and Fiske visited nearly 50 schools, analyzed data from the Ministry of Education and other sources, and interviewed teachers, principals, parents, government officials and other policy makers. Findings from When Schools Compete include:

• While market-based school reforms provide benefits to some families, they are unlikely, in and of themselves, to address the problems of struggling urban schools. Some form of direct intervention is also necessary.
• Charter schools are most likely to succeed in their goals of innovation and diversity if they remain a minority of schools and do not become the norm.
• Unless policy safeguards are built in, the setting up of an educational marketplace will unleash forces that tend to polarize enrollment patterns by race and ethnicity.

Ladd is the editor of Holding Schools Accountable: Performance-Based Reform in Education (Brookings Institution Press 1996). From 1996 to 1999, she co-chaired the National Academy of Sciences Panel on Education Finance, which recently released the book, Making Money Matter: Financing Americas Schools (National Academy Press, 1999).

Fiske is author of Smart Schools, Smart Kids (Simon and Schuster) and editor of the annual Fiske Guide to Colleges (Times Books/Random House). He writes frequently on issues of education in developing countries for UNESCO, the Academy for Educational Development, the World Bank and other organizations.

Their book is available at http://www.amazon.com