Headline, December06, 2013

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Opponents will always argue that those who exercise choice will be the most able and committed, and by clustering themselves together

in better schools they will abandon the weak and voiceless to languish in rotten ones

Some cite the example of Chile, where universal voucher scheme that allows schools to charge top-up fees seems to have improved the education of the best-off most.

The strongest evidence against this criticism from Sweden, where parents are freer than those in almost any other country to spend as they wish the money the government allocates to educating their children. 

Sweeping education reforms in 1992 not only relaxed enrolment rules in the state sector, allowing students to attend schools outside their own municipality, but also let them take their state funding to private schools, including religious ones and those operating for profit.

The only real restrictions imposed on private schools were that they must run their admissions on a first-come-first-served basis and promise not to charge top-up fees  -most American voucher schemes impose similar conditions.

The result has been a burgeoning variety and a breakneck expansion of the private sector. At the time of the reforms only around 1% of Swedish students were educated privately; now over  10%  are, and growth in private schooling goes unabated.

Ander Hultin of   Kunskapsskolan, a chain of Swedish schools founded by a venture capitalist in 1999 and now running at a profit, says its schools only rarely have to invoke the first-come-first-served  rule  -the chain has responded to demand by expanding so fast that parents keen to send their children to its schools usually get a place.

So the private sector, by increasing the total number of places available, can ease the mad scramble for the best schools in the state sector  -bureaucrats, by contrast, dislike paying for extra places in popular schools if they are vacancies in bad one.

More evidence that  choice  can raise standards for all come from Caroline Hoxby,  an economist at Harvard University, who has shown that when American Public Schools must compete for their students with schools that accept vouchers, their performance improves.

Swedish researchers say the same. It seems that those who work in state schools are just like everybody else; they do better when confronted by a bit of competition.

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