SCHOOL CHOICE HELPS POOR FAMILIES
Alberta Shows School Choice Helps Poor Families
The Alberta Parents’ Union brought your voice to an international audience!
We've told you before that Alberta is a world leader in school choice.
Recently, our Executive Director was able to sit on a panel at the International School Choice and Reform Conference (ISCRC) to explain why that matters.
We had the privilege of providing our local insights into Alberta’s educational landscape to support and talk about Dr. Merrifield’s research into how education policy impacts poorer families in Canada.
Dr. Merrifield is one of the founding fathers of school choice research and is also one of the founders of the ISCRC
He was the professor who inspired Corey DeAngelis (probably the most famous advocate for school choice alive today) to take up the cause.
Dr. Merrifield’s research showed that a “free” public school assigned to your family, based on where you live, simply moves the true cost back a step.
The cost of a “free” public school education is now a house in a neighbourhood assigned to a given public school.
Dr. Merrifield shows that this means richer families will buy up the housing around the best schools, while poorer families will be left in the neighbourhoods assigned to worse schools.
He demonstrates that flight to neighbourhoods with better schools (demonstrated by the flight happening disproportionately as children reach compulsory schooling age) is sufficient to explain families sorting to live in cohorts with similar family incomes.
The worse this sorting gets, particularly in large cities, the more negative outcomes other than schooling - crime, social disorder, additional poverty, and (perversely) higher prices for many goods and services - accumulate in neighbourhoods with concentrated poverty.
Conversely, as richer families (who tend to be families with greater economic and political influence) are geographically shielded from this decay in social welfare, they are less apt to work towards and advocate for improvements.
Thus, residentially assigning schools hurts poorer families the most - whether or not they have kids in school!
Dr. Merrifield shows that stronger school choice - which does not depend on geographically assigning families to schools - results in fewer neighbourhoods characterized by concentrated poverty.
Applying his model to the nine most populated Canadian metro areas, Ontario’s population centres (which have the least choice in education) jump out.
Ottawa tops the list with almost twice as much concentrated poverty as Edmonton (the highest concentration in Alberta).
Surprisingly, Vancouver actually showed the lowest overall income segregation.
British Columbia has the highest level of school choice in Canada other than Alberta, lacking only charter schools to match us.
Calgary had the second-lowest concentration of poverty among Canadian metros.
Anyone familiar with the vast array of schools in Calgary that are not assigned based on residential address would expect, then, to see Alberta’s largest city do well on this measure.
Alberta and British Columbia also benefit, of course, from making home education more accessible by reimbursing some of the costs.
Our Executive Director offered his thoughts as to how Edmonton Public School Board has been comparatively successful in keeping competition from schools of choice out of the capital city, accounting for its comparatively high levels of poverty concentration.
Two of Edmonton’s charter schools, also, are focused on serving low-income families - which, while admirable, is unlikely to attract higher-income families to their neighbourhoods.
This brings us to the last insight we will share for today from this study:
School choice only for poorer families will not alleviate the poverty concentration that hurts all poorer families!
Dr. Merrifield showed this with reference to Milwaukee, Wisconsin - which has a voucher system, but only for poorer families.
Poorer families with access to vouchers can escape the worse schools in the neighbourhoods they can afford, but not the other social ills resulting from the flight of richer families with no access to vouchers.
Without school choice for them, rich families still have to pay the premium for housing near the best schooling, leading to flight.
Thus, paradoxically, to help all poorer families - with or without kids in school - escape the effects of concentrated poverty (crime, social disorder, additional poverty, higher prices for many goods and services) you cannot concentrate your school choice efforts on poorer families alone.
Aside from participating in this cutting-edge research process, we benefited from learning from other organizations doing similar work and talking strategies to notch more policy wins.
We also loved the opportunity to let international leaders know about Alberta’s success story!
In turn, we learned in depth about successful school choice and reform policies around the world, including Ireland, Portugal, and Spain.
And, of course, eleven American states now have universal eligibility (no longer limited to just poorer families or just children assigned to failing schools) school choice.
Just five years ago, no American state had a universal eligibility school choice program.
So, this is a story of, whether they realize it or not, America following Alberta, not the other way around.
What it does mean, though, is that Alberta is losing our edge over many American states in attracting and retaining families with school-aged children.
Flight to more attractive geography for your kids’ education doesn’t just happen within metro areas, of course.
Alberta has seen large numbers of families moving here from Ontario and citing K-12 education as the reason.
We don’t see families leaving Alberta for those reasons yet.
But now Florida, Arizona, Iowa, Utah, and others are attracting families citing K-12 education as the reason for their move.
Alberta must regain our edge, or the social decay from families of means taking flight to better options will afflict us all.
Even those who don’t care about education for its own sake will be made to care, at that point.
So, we know we have a lot of work to do, but we are proud of what we've built already.
Our grassroots activism was the envy of many people trying to build what we have, in all corners of the world.
We are grateful to you, our supporters, for helping build this organization that can provoke international envy.
We understand that things like this don't just happen.
It takes a mom who doesn't want to become a full-time advocate herself, but needs someone in her corner to fight for better for her kids.
It takes a grandparent who can see us losing our edge and who is desperate to stop it.
It takes a taxpayer and teacher who is tired of exclusively funding people advocating against his voice, no matter how much he cries out.
So thank you, if you have joined our merry band of reformers!