Elections matter, but the strongest form of accountability comes when parents can choose the best school for their children.

We obviously believe school board elections are important - that’s why we try to keep you informed about them.

They are important specifically because they provide accountability to the residentially assigned system of schools!

But the best accountability doesn’t come from voting every four years - as important as that may be.

The best accountability comes from families having the ability to opt out of their residentially assigned school and send our children elsewhere.

The research is clear that residentially assigned schools improve when faced with competition from schools of choice (rather than assignment), giving families reasons to choose them rather than defaulting to them.

There are quite a few fundamental reasons why competition can provide accountability that politics simply cannot, and today we’ll discuss two of them.

A School Division Is Not A Business

Sometimes, using the language of competition brings the retort that education cannot be run like a business.

It may surprise you that we agree, at least, that school divisions fundamentally cannot be run like a business.

Businesses, you see, run on profits (or losses) from voluntary exchanges that signal to them what lines of goods or services are most beneficial.

But your exchanges with the local school division aren’t voluntary.

For one, no one asked you how much the school division’s services would be worth to you in taxes - they just took more every year, whether services improved or not.

Neither is attendance voluntary - every child must be signed up for “education services” somewhere, by law.

Thus, they are immune to the most basic input a business receives - do people even want what they’re selling?

This can especially be seen when it comes to decisions about expenses.

A business is constrained from spending more on things that don’t increase their profits, while government schools (like other government “services”) face no such constraint.

This is especially true if government schools hold an essential monopoly without true challengers who do have to attract “customers”.

A School Division Has Interests Of Its Own

It turns out that school divisions don’t simply selflessly pursue the public interest.

Neither do school divisions resolutely focus on student, or even teacher, outcomes.

Rather, school divisions naturally, and without any of the people involved needing to be particularly evil, develop interests of their own that can run counter to the public interest.

As an example, when cuts need to be made, school divisions often cut the most necessary things they need to do, rather than the least necessary things.

This means, of course, that harm to the public is maximized … and therefore the public is more likely to demand more funding for the school division.

It’s hard not to see this in action, even now, with teachers declaring a five-alarm-fire in the classroom, even while central office administration budgets grow ever more bloated.

This makes sense, if you understand the school division central office staff as an interest of its own, advising the school trustees in direct defiance of the public interest.

Of course, then, it’s important to elect trustees who will rein in an administration run amok, but it’s also important to have other options that need to meet families’ expectations to even exist.

Again, choice in education can provide the education system with bottom-up accountability that politics simply cannot.

So, we need an organization to advocate for more true choice in election years and outside of them - when, in either case, politician and media attention tends to gravitate elsewhere.

We need an organization to not just inform people which school trustees are least likely to monopolistically resist empowering families with choices, yes.

But we also need one to remind school trustees - even far from election periods - that real accountability sometimes looks like “voting with our feet”.

The Alberta Parents’ Union is exactly such an organization!