The 'let's give parents the ability to shop' ethos is what directly led to the current clusterfuck that is the US public education system, through NCLB and its state equivalents.
I'm not opposed in principle to the idea of statistically ranking teachers and giving the power of choice to parents, but you guys have royally fucked it up in practice.
Signed,
A victim of the evil socialist Canadian public school system.
While I agree that it's introduced some problems in states where I've lived (Utah, for example), it's also allowed parents to move their children around a bit more easily, and there are some benefits to that.
On the flip side, I'm now in Georgia. We live on the boundary between a poor school district (98% "minority" district-wide) and a rich one (10-50% "minority" depending on the school). I can only "shop" for schools in my poorer district, which are typically around the bottom quintile of schools in the state. The kicker is, because of the geographic boundaries, the bus stop for the "richer" district stops on either side of our subdivision, and our kids pass withing 1 mile of five different elementary schools in the "rich" district on their way to their assigned "poor" one. Shop for schools? I'd love to. I'd even like for my kids to go to a school close to their home. But a long history of bussing (which in our area has reinforced segregation rather than combat it) and civil rights policies perversely means it's more difficult to move to the better schools.
If I think I need a new suit and the only information available to me is the colors of various suits and their thread counts, I might be forced to make a selection solely based on these attributes. But, because I can touch the suits, try them on, and examine their quality in whatever ways I deem fit, I don't have to rely upon price as a measure of quality. Without exchanging experiences with other kids' parents, aren't these "shoppers" forced to make do with the available data? Perhaps a parents' "shopping night" where each teacher gives a short talk on his/her education philosophy and then sticks around for Q/A would allow use of better selection criteria?
Hi, Canadian here. There is a bit of leg room when it comes to what school you go to (at least in the region where I went to school). Most high schools in the region have some sort of magnet program that allow for students to attend without living in the school's defined area. Both my sister and I went to different schools than where we were 'supposed' to go. So it's not a hard line, but these magnet programs only accept so many students. So for the most part it is true. Just giving some clarification.
My parents did. It's called private school and then you can choose any place you want.
But in all seriousness, while there are exceptions for arts schools, you generally cannot choose where to send your kids except by moving. Some people "rent a room" in a desirable district so their kids can go to a better school, but really all that happens is that housing prices skyrocket in the "right" areas.
> The 'let's give parents the ability to shop' ethos
There's no way to avoid it, even in principle. What if you move?
In the US, home prices are elevated in certain areas because people who live at that address get to go to a good school. So there's still school shopping, when it comes to deciding where to live (it's often a key factor in that decision).
I think that's how it is most places, actually. At least where I grew up in California, I was assigned to a certain high school based on where I live. We could have applied for a transfer, but those aren't often granted. This is all for the public school system, of course. There are private schools as well, which operate differently, but I think for the most part people go to public schools.
I see that this thread has been busy overnight. I'll quote here first another kind reply I received, and then respond both to it and to your reply.
If you give the parents the ability to "shop", what happens when everyone thinks that teacher X is the best English teacher for 7th grade and they ALL want their kids in her class?
For me, this is not a theoretical question, because I live in a state of the United States where there is actual "power to shop." In the entire state of Minnesota in the United States, there is public school open enrollment,
and the school district for the neighborhood in which I live includes open-enrolled students from the territories of more than forty other Minnesota school districts, with funding following the students on a per-capita basis.
but parents with power to shop and funding that follows students allows school districts with the better programs, overall, to thrive and produce innovative new programs (e.g., language immersion programs, specialized fine arts programs, and school-within-a-school programs for highly gifted learners) and the schools that are forced to lay off teachers (alas, by seniority rather than by effectiveness) are the schools with laggard overall programs.
the evil socialist Canadian public school system
This is from your comment. I'm not aware what province you grew up in, but it's my understanding that there have been elements of school choice in some Canadian provinces in our liftime,
In principle, as already observed in reality, it is perfectly possible for there to be a general public subsidy for some service that is deemed to have a positive externality, while still allowing user choice of the provider of the service.
There are other international examples of school choice. I particularly like the example of the Netherlands with its very wide array of choices for parents, all at equal publicly subsidized expense,
By the OECD testing program called PISA, the Netherlands does as well as or outperforms other countries both as to helping students from disadvantaged families
I'm not opposed in principle to the idea of statistically ranking teachers and giving the power of choice to parents, but you guys have royally fucked it up in practice.
I'll heartily agree with you and with other comments here that the current state testing systems, which vary state by state, but which are mostly poorly designed, are a weak basis for publishing ratings of schoolteachers, but as you correctly point out, that's not to prove that a better system of assessing students and their academic progress has NO value in helping parents shop for schools. What I don't want to go back to is the day in which no one had any idea how well any teacher was teaching, because no one was looking, and no one was looking because parents couldn't shop for schools anyhow. If parents can make global evaluations of what is good for each of their children, better incentives exist to improve teaching, improve school administration, and improve all other aspects of the school experience.
Returning to the other comment's thoughtful question,
If you give the parents the ability to "shop", what happens when everyone thinks that teacher X is the best English teacher for 7th grade and they ALL want their kids in her class?
that is precisely the kind of situation that builds curiosity among other teachers about "What is that teacher doing that I'm not doing?" and among administrators about, "What value do families perceive in that class that they don't perceive in our classes?"
As other comments have already pointed out, parents in all countries of the world shop for schools at least by how they choose their residence addresses. But decoupling school choices from residence choices allows schools and families to respond more efficiently to their own mix of trade-offs. When many shoppers prefer one grocery store to another, and take their business to the better grocery store, what usually happens is that the worse grocery store changes the way it does business and improves its overall customer value proposition for shoppers. As I noted above, one HUGE problem with schools all over the United States, even schools in states that do not formally have "union shops" with mandatory schoolteacher union membership, is that administrators have little flexibility in reassigning teachers to the work that they do the best. So today is a somewhat slow process at the margins for schools to improve (by realigning staff assignments) as families shop for the best classrooms. But I've seen what Minnesota school districts have been able to do even within the limitations of the current system, and I'm confident that adding incentive for school improvement by giving learners more power to shop makes as much sense (as a matter of basic public policy) as it does for providing most other services.
AFTER EDIT: Commentary on the link submitted here by a blogger based in New York City,
which I learned about from a Facebook friend who lives in New York State and has been following the controversy on school testing in New York State closely.
From the responses, it seems many people misread my comment, so I'll clarify:
I'm not opposed to choice. I love it. I myself went to an out-of-catchment school so I could participate in the challenge program there (3 years of certain classes in 2, makes AP easier to take in gr 12). My point is that, as implemented, you guys borked it.
It's far too simplistic to say, "let's reward the good schools and punish the bad ones, and the market sort itself out". It results in schools in disadvantaged neighbourhoods getting even worse, and the least well-to-do segments of society being put even further into a hole from which they can't escape. It results in idiotic "teach to the test" systems, instead of good teachers teaching creatively.
It might be possible that a truly free market school system would give better results than the norm, but we've seen what your first forays into it have brought: unmitigated disaster. The US seems particularly poor at political innovation, so why not simply imitate those countries that do education well like Korea, Finland, and the like?
Take a look at this list [1] (pdf, pg8) and tell me which of the top scoring countries have achieved educational success by adopting policies that share the same principles as NCLB.
I'm not opposed in principle to the idea of statistically ranking teachers and giving the power of choice to parents, but you guys have royally fucked it up in practice.
Signed,
A victim of the evil socialist Canadian public school system.