Year: 2001
Type: article
Abstract: School choice is currently the most hotly debated educational policy in the United States.Nearly every state has adopted some sort of school choice provision (open enrollment, charter schools, or vouchers), and yet the academic community is still uncertain whether school choice succeeds in improving schools or whether it is merely another in a long series of educational reforms.When Schools Compete: A Cautionary Tale by Helen Ladd and Edward Fiske and Policy Entrepreneurs and School Choice by Michael Mintrom are two fresh contributions to the debate about school choice.While Mintrom defines and examines the role that policy entrepreneurs have played in enacting school choice, Ladd and Fiske analyze the successes and failures of New Zealand's overarching school choice reform, The Tomorrow Schools.Ladd and Fiske's work is by far the most comprehensive, readable case study on school choice reforms to date.They start by describing New Zealand's pre-reform, state educational system.In this system, a powerful teachers' union and a large, national Department of Education maintained a hierarchal and highly centralized decisionmaking process.For example, the central government decided what curriculum to implement, the types and numbers of supplies that each school needed, and even the appropriate color of school gyms.Most notably during this period, like in most U.S. school districts now, geographic boundaries were used to decide school enrollments.But in New Zealand, this regime ended in the late-1980s.Economic recession and privatization efforts led to calls for education reform, and in 1989, New Zealand approved a dramatic restructuring of the educational system-an almost completely decentralized, open enrollment program.Besides describing the process leading to educational reform, Ladd and Fiske meticulously document underlying institutional details of pre-and post-reform education.Again, in one of the more readable descriptions available, they describe
DOI: 10.1002/pam.2118
Author: Nicholas H. Steneck
Institution: University of Michigan
Language: English
Subfield: Information Systems and Management
Field: Decision Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2124884019