Beyond school choice

The right of parents to choose their child’s school is the foundation of CIS’s education program. We have been talking about vouchers, defending non-government schools and advocating choice for decades.

So it’s only fitting that our new report explores some of the newest policy innovations on the school choice front, and their applicability to the Australian education context.

Milton Friedman is the best known advocate of vouchers. But what is less known is that he wanted to move beyond ‘school choice’ and to what he called ‘educational choice’. In a 2003 interview, Friedman emphasised that education could develop in several ways, saying “Why is it sensible for a child to get all his or her schooling in one brick building? Why not add partial vouchers? Why not let them spend part of a voucher for math in one place and English or science somewhere else?”

A policy tool that has recently gained traction in the United States is the ‘education savings account’ (ESA), which provides a way to make Friedman’s idea a reality.

ESAs involve money that is transferred from the government to parents, generally of the same or similar amount the student would be entitled to if they attended a public school. These funds are then used to purchase a variety of education-related goods and services, through the use of ‘whitelisting’ and a restricted-use debit card. Five US states have ESA programs.

In Friedman’s theory of the four types of spending, government spending on education is spending someone else’s money on someone else, and is thus the least efficient. In contrast, because the leftover funds from ESAs can also be used for college savings, the funds in an ESA are more like one’s own money. Spending one’s own money on one’s own children creates an incentive for value-driven spending in a way that other policies — even vouchers — cannot.

This is a radical proposition for a country like Australia. Nevertheless, education savings accounts have the potential to be carefully implemented on a small scale, and could be especially beneficial for children with special needs.

Trisha Jha is the co-author, with Dr Jennifer Buckingham, of the research report One School Does Not Fit All.