How can school choice deal with socio-economic inequalities amongst parents?

As an economist by training and a liberal inspired by Mill, I’m a staunch advocate for school choice – parents should be allowed to design their children’s education in a marketplace of schools.

But posts like these worry me. Ostensibly, it’s a tragic-funny blog post about the kind of stupid complaints from parents teachers have to deal with – it makes you laugh, but it’s nothing unusual. Yet how commonplace such ridiculous parent complaints are – across countries and cultures – has worrying implications for proponents of school choice. It deals with two issues: a) parents’ lack of information, such that most of what they know about their children’s education is filtered through the unreliable lens of their children; and b) parents’ capacity to make good choices.

The first is easier to tackle – we just need to increase information flows. Websites like SchoolMatters and StandUp go a long way towards helping parents find out more about the educational landscape, from the level of the school to the level of the state. However, the concern is that the parents who need it most – i.e. the parents with children trapped in low-achieving schools – may be least likely to access this information.

And this brings us to the bigger problem of school choice: allowing parents more freedom to choose may result in the exacerbation of existing socio-economic inequalities, as differences in the socio-economic status of parents are reflected and magnified in the differences in educational opportunity and hence achievement of children. Parents of higher-SES will have more economic and social capital, allowing them to expend more time and resources to making educational decisions for their children, which presumably will result in better educational decisions for their children. In contrast, parents of lower-SES may not be able to spare the same amount of time and resources, resulting in poorer choices or them not choosing at all. This fear was realized during New Zealand’s national experiment with pure school vouchers, which resulted in greater socio-economic segregation within schools as better schools with more applicants than places were allowed to select their students (if you're interested, refer to Helen Ladd’s work on school choice). If the problem is parents being ill-equipped to exercising their right to choice, or simply not choosing at all, even progressive vouchers that give less privileged students more money - already a politically difficult policy - will not help.

I still firmly believe that individual choice is better than paternalism, that a diversity of choices will lead to better outcomes for all than a centrally-impsed one-size-fits-all model, but proponents of school choice have to take seriously the argument that sometimes, parents may not be the best people to decide a child’s education. More critically, other than progressive vouchers, how can school choice proponents design a school choice system that does not exacerbate existing socio-economic inequalities amongst parents? To borrow Nancy Birdsall's definitions, how do we maximise constructive inequality that creates positive incentives at the micro level, while minimizing destructive inequality that 'reflects privileges for the already rich and blocks potential for productive contributions of the less rich'?


(NOTE: The Quick and the Ed has quite a few relevant recent blog posts on this topic, especially this one.)