A grade 5 class at Monsignor Uyen Catholic School in Chatham, Ont., in this 2010 photo. Basic economics would predict that the competitive pressures on separate school administrators would provide stronger incentives to provide better education outcomes. And that seems to be just what is happening.GEOFF ROBINS
Public funding for the Ontario separate school system is sometimes a controversial topic for reasons I won't get into here. But by offering one set of parents with the choice of which school they can send their children, the Ontario education system has set up a remarkably clean and ongoing experiment in the effects of school choice. Catholics have the choice of sending their elementary-school aged children either to separate or to public schools, and non-Catholics do not have this choice.
Elementary school administrators in the two systems face very different constraints:
• Public schools have a monopoly on non-Catholics who can't afford private school.
• Separate schools face a clientele that always has the option of switching to the public school system.
Of the two, separate school administrators have the greater incentive to provide higher-quality education: if the separate system were widely known to be dysfunctional, it would likely disappear.
Basic economics would predict that the competitive pressures on separate school administrators would provide stronger incentives to provide better education outcomes. And that seems to be just what is happening. A recent study ( pdf) by McMaster University economists Martin Dooley and Abigail Payne in collaboration with UC-Berkeley's David Card that examine these effects finds "a statistically significant but modest-sized impact of potential competition on the growth rate of student achievement." In a related study using similar data, a CD Howe study done by Wilfrid Laurier's David Johnson finds that of the 13 'above-average' school boards, 11 are in the separate school system, while none of the 10 'below-average' school boards are.
A similar experiment is going on in Quebec. As in Ontario, there are two public systems: English and French. And as in Ontario, only one system has a captive market: unless a child's parent was educated in English in Canada, she must go to a French school.
If we wanted to apply the Ontario story to Quebec, we'd predict that the English system generated better outcomes than the French system. And anecdotal evidence would appear to be consistent with that claim. For example, a 2008 open letter by Jacques Parizeau called attention to the sizable gap in graduation rates in the English and French school boards.
Clearly, the English/French distinction in Quebec is not as clean as the separate/public distinction in Ontario: many -- if not most -- of the students in the English system are there because they are not sufficiently proficient in French. But if it were widely known that English schools were not doing a good job, they too would have difficulty retaining at least some of their clientele. And as far as I can tell, some 90 per cent of the students attending English school in the Quebec City area speak French at home.
The Ontario separate schools and the Quebec English schools do not benefit from extra funding, and they both follow their respective province-wide curricula. But the simple fact that their students have the choice of attending another school seems to be enough to generate better education outcomes.
This systematic discrepancy in education outcomes doesn't seem fair. So the question is: do we remove the choices available to these fortunate subgroups? Or do we look for some way to extend these benefits to the entire population?
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Update: In the comments on this blog post, Professor Abigail Payne offers the following clarification: "this finding applies to BOTH public and separate school students. Students from BOTH systems potentially benefit from a competitive effect."
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