School Choice - Criticisms

Criticisms

Many opponents of school choice such as Martin Carnoy argue that public schools perform similarly to private schools when teaching similar groups of students, and that the conception of public schools as "failing" in comparison to private schools is more due to the demographic differences between public and private schools than to actual differences in the quality of the education the schools offer. "School choice" as it entails a switch from public to private schooling would therefore do little to solve the problems facing the educational system, since a private school would perform no better than a public school when faced with exactly the same student body.

Opponents of school choice often object to the use of the term itself, viewing it as loaded political vocabulary.

Opponents also argue that school choice in the form of vouchers could result in nothing more than a cash-handout for many middle-class and wealthy families already sending their kids to private schools, with disadvantaged families either unable to secure enrollment or unable to cover costs in addition to the vouchers. Under voucher programs, private schools may be able to reject students who are expensive to educate due to special needs or students who they feel would disrupt the learning environment, and opponents of voucher programs argue that this would leave such students under a system of de facto segregation. School choice opponents also charge that students who are unable, because of their parents' educational level or the lack of reliable transportation, to leave their local schools may be hurt as additional funding is cut from their schools.

Although school choice does give parents the option the move their children to a better school, opponents of school choice draw attention to the affects this choice has on the ‘bad’ schools left behind. They argue that the movement from bad schools leaves behind an increased ethnic segregation. Although the neighbourhoods around a school may be ethnically diverse, because of the option for intra-district choice, there has been an increasing amount of segregation within some schools. Schools that are failing to attract students often are found to have larger students poverty rates as well as higher proportions of minority students.

Within countries with high immigration rates, such as Canada, parents within the dominate group leave behind schools that have high levels of immigrant students in order to attend schools that have a higher majority of students that are fluent in the national language. Parents move their children away from these schools in order to protect them from ethno-linguistic neediness that may cause their children to receive less attention or get behind academically because of new immigrant students. . It has also been found in countries with large proportions of immigrants, that although school choice is an option for all parents, parents who do not fluently speak the official language have a much harder time accessing information related to ratings of schools and school activities that would give them the necessary knowledge to make the appropriate school selection.

School Choice is also criticized as being beneficial to urban and suburban families, but not to families living in remote rural areas. School Choice is not practical for rural families who live in areas with limited accessibility to different choices of schools within reasonable distances. While urban schools provide more options to move away from schools that are failing, rural families do not have the options available to provide an 'escape' from bad schools, making the use of school choice as competition for schools to create innovative programs, unproductive in rural areas. Families in rural areas are therefore only able to make improvements in academic quality is to actively work toward these changes instead of creating competition to encourage the school to make changes on its own.