Competition and the purpose of educational choice
On Thursday, decades’ worth of aged, decrepit talking points died in the New Hampshire House.
Opponents of parental choice in education say the purpose of creating such choice is to “defund,” “privatize,” or “destroy” public schools.
Public money should stay entirely in public schools, they say.
This year, House Education Policy and Administration Chairman Glenn Cordelli called their bluff. His House Bill 741 creates statewide universal open enrollment for public schools. Students would be able to transfer to any public school, provided it has room. The student’s home district would even get to keep 20% of each transferring student’s per-pupil allotment of public education funds, leaving those districts with more money to spend on their remaining pupils.
Here is a school choice program that keeps public school funding in public schools. In its debate, those old, reactionary attacks vanished like so many cremated remains scattered to the wind.
Were those attacks true—were the point of school choice really to destroy public schools—then every school choice supporter should’ve voted against this bill.
As we highlighted in a policy brief published with the Reason Foundation this week, research from states with open enrollment statutes shows that they tend to improve outcomes for both students and public schools. Moreover, open enrollment keeps public school money entirely within the public school system while directly engaging parents to get involved in the system.
Why would people who want to defund, privatize or destroy public schools vote for a program that would strengthen them?
School choice supporters voted for open enrollment for the simple reason that there’s never been any truth to the ad hominem attacks on them. The point of school choice isn’t to destroy public schools. It never has been. The point is to create a marketplace in which every student is matched with the education that best fits that student’s needs.
As of January, 34 states, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia have some form of school choice. In all, 75 choice programs enroll 1.2 million students nationwide, by EdChoice’s latest count.
And yet public school spending is at record highs and no state or municipality has closed its school system.
Instead, research has shown marginal improvements in overall outcomes for both students who left their assigned public schools and those who remained. When public schools face strong competition, they improve. That’s consistent with economic theory, and it’s how competition works in other industries.
Last month, a summary of research on competitiveness published in the Journal of Applied Business and Economics concluded that firms subjected to higher levels of competition were more resilient and better able to survive unexpected events. To no one’s surprise, the researchers found that “competition pushes businesses to innovate, adapt, and prepare for crises.”
The beneficial effects of competition are so well established that when companies achieve or come close to achieving monopoly status, it’s long-standing practice for government to intervene.
“Right now, too many companies are engaging in behaviors that stifle competition — like blocking new competitors from entering the market or limiting the information and options that give consumers real choice. As a consequence, the rest of us pay higher prices for lower quality products and services,” President Barack Obama said in 2016.
In other words words, robust market competition improves quality and lowers prices.
A 2002 Teachers College, Columbia University study reviewing 41 empirical studies of competition in education found “reasonably consistent evidence of a link between competition (choice) and education quality. Increased competition and higher educational quality are positively correlated.”
Market competition empowers consumers, which in turn improves services and lowers costs. It does this in all industries. Pretending that markets will harm education alone, while benefitting all other industries, is to indulge in self delusion.
The point of school choice is not to steer students to one particular option. It is to create options so that public education will work as well as it possibly can for all students.
Whether a student chooses a chartered public school, an Education Freedom Account, an out-of-district public school or their assigned public school is immaterial. What matters is that they have the freedom to choose among multiple options.
And choosing among multiple options matters because choice empowers, competition improves, and markets work.
