Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia
[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]
Open enrolment treats education as a consumer good and students and their parents as customers rather than as a public good established for the benefit of society. But, even in the context of consumerism, open enrollment lures parents to believe that their offspring are getting a better education when, in fact, that’s uncertain.
Parents whose children attend schools outside of the district in which they are resident are disfranchised. They lose the right to vote for the governors of the district in which they reside. Out-of-district choice is a trade off in which parents exchange their political capital for the placement of their children in schools beyond the boundary of the community in which they reside.
Open enrolment policies are often touted as mechanisms to improve education. According to this point-of-view, low-performing schools will seek improvement to prevent parents from transferring their children to other schools. Parents will “vote with their feet.”
The evidence on this point is thin. Charter schools, “schools of choice,” perform about as well as the schools from which their clientele are recruited despite their less than universal acceptance of students. This is not surprising considering their selectivity and the complexity of influences on student achievement.
There are many factors that affect student achievement, including ones associated with the characteristics of the school as well as ones associated with the students. Researchers use sophisticated statistical analyses to identify the impact that different combinations of factors produce for students at different knowledge levels. When parents choose schools, they are doing so on – I want to be generous here – on inadequate information.
Open enrollment is to my mind primarily symbolic for the individual parent, satisfying the parent’s consumer preference. The substantive impact on learning of choosing an out of boundary school or district would be difficult for anyone to discern in advance. A school’s past performance would be a poor indicator of the school’s impact on children given variations in performance over time.
Open enrolment is a way of shifting the responsibility of producing better outcomes from schools and school boards to the individual parent. Open enrolment creates the illusion of having autonomy and, having chosen, relies on the tendency to bring our perceptions into line with our beliefs or behaviour.
Because open enrolment treats education as a consumer good, the logic of the marketplace applies. When I purchase a car whose performance does not meet my expectations, I have made a bad choice. If the school a parent has chosen does not meet the parent’s expectations, the parent has made a poor choice.
Open enrolment disfranchises
parents and reduces the obligation of local schools and school districts to be
accountable to produce better outcomes.