In Canada, Too, the Case for School Choice Is Strong

T he school-choice boom that began in the U.S. during the Covid-19 pandemic has carried on in 2023, with states across the country implementing or expanding programs that give families better access to private educational alternatives. In Canada, unfortunately, the story is quite different; there’s been no such progress for school choice.

This is not due to a lack of evidence that families are better off with more choice and more competition than under public-school monopolies. In British Columbia, the provincial government helps families access private schools by funding almost all of them at 35 to 50 percent of the per-student cost of the government-run schools. As researchers with Simon Fraser University concluded in a paper last year, based on reading- and numeracy-test scores, “We find that the average private school is more effective than the average public school in both reading and numeracy, with an effect size of between 0.12 and 0.15 standard deviations.”

The differences in test scores cannot simply be attributed to richer, better-educated families’ sending their children to private schools and pushing those schools’ test scores upward. A Fraser Institute study in 2018 found that only 8 percent of private schools in British Columbia have the characteristics of elite preparatory schools. Excluding these elite schools, the family incomes of private-school students are comparable to those of public-school students, and the non-elite private-school students materially outperform public-school students.

Neighboring Alberta is the only Canadian province with charter schools. These are publicly funded but operate autonomously, cannot charge tuition, and cannot turn away students if they have capacity. Charter-school students, the data show, on average academically outperform even private-school students, and both the charter- and private-school students significantly outperform those in traditional public schools.

Importantly, the case for school choice is strengthened by but does not rely on test-score data showing that private and charter schools outperform government-run schools. Many families prefer private or charter schools for nonacademic reasons, such as more focus on sports, music, or religion. Whatever their reasons, the demand from families for access to alternatives is considerable. In Alberta, while only about 10,000 students are enrolled in charter schools, another 20,000 are on waiting lists. To its credit, unlike in other provinces, the Alberta government has taken recent steps to improve school choice by loosening restrictions on establishing charter schools.

Moreover, the case for school choice, as Milton Friedman said, does not assume that private schools are better than public schools, but simply that competition is better than monopoly. Whether in schools or anything else, diversity is better than an imposed monolithic conformity. And as in the United States, in Canada the consequences of political mismanagement, overly powerful teachers’ unions, and education bureaucrats run amok provide plenty of strong evidence of the value of divergence from the government monopoly.

In Ontario, where unlike in British Columbia and Alberta, families that send their children to private schools have no access to public funding, education-worker strikes and the longest government-imposed school closures in Canada during the pandemic have underscored the benefits of accessible alternatives to the monopoly system. So too has the deterioration in educational instruction. As math scores decline, school boards, including the Toronto District School Board — the largest in the country — and teachers’ unions in Ontario are focused on infusing social justice into math classes.

Other teachers’-union antics are even more discouraging. In 2021, a local bargaining unit of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation, which represented some 1,400 teachers, changed its voting rules so that, for decisions made by the board of local presidents, some votes would be weighted by skin color to increase minority representation. It’s possible that some families would like their educational system to be run this way, although it is not widely reported that they do. Such developments underscore the benefits of having accessible alternatives to the government and union monopoly regardless.

The government-monopoly system does not shine even in its own accounts of its performance. In the neighboring Peel region, a booklet published by the school district declared that school staff must have an “anti-oppressive and anti-racist approach” because “our system has been built upon colonial structures meant to uphold white supremacy.” But if indeed the government system is rife with racial discrimination, then that’s all the more reason to give families access to alternatives.

Wherever you look, the demand for school choice and evidence of its benefits are abundant. Expanding school choice is in truth a simple question of political will, and hopefully Canadian provinces will eventually follow the lead of many American states in expanding access to private and charter schools for those families that want it.