SECOND OPINION
Let us shop for education

By Cliff Slater

Hawai'i voters wondering how we might reform public education might well consider how we are provided with the very basics of life: food, shelter and clothing.

Quite wisely, we keep the provision of these crucial items out of the hands of government officials. Instead, we more sensibly rely on providers of these essentials competing for our business. We are then able to choose the best cost/quality compromise for our needs from among competing providers.

In short, we do what all Americans do well — shop. As it stands for your child's public education you cannot shop; it is take it or leave it at the school to which the authorities have allocated you.

Our elected officials might well consider passing a bill allowing parents to apply their child at any public school of their choosing without concern for residence. Consider the implications:

• Just having choices would have many parents (customers) thinking hard about the quality of our different public schools. This would be a valuable exercise in itself because it would spark awareness and discussion and reveal to our taxpayers the wide differences between schools.
• We would all be able to judge how parents (customers) rate the management of the various schools by the length of the school's waiting list — if any. Schools with little demand would make it obvious that their principals should be reassigned to teaching and new principals appointed. Highly successful schools with long waiting lists would prompt us to emulate in other schools the characteristics that made these schools successful.
• Having choices would have many parents (customers) paying attention to the quality of teachers in the schools. Those principals concerned about the length of their waiting list would demand the ability to pay more money for both better teachers and also those in short supply, such as science and math teachers.

In short, we would have a system where schools would compete and parents would shop. It works for food, shelter and clothing; it would work for public education.

Here are the indicators: The Educational Freedom Index, a project of the Wall Street Journal and Heritage Foundation, has scored parental public school choices in the 50 states. The rating favors states with smaller and less dense school districts, better charter school options, less homeschooling regulation and more vouchers. As one might expect, Hawai'i had the worst rating.

A major impact on the rating is the ability of parents to move their homes to another school district while keeping their jobs. For example, the average school district in the U.S. is small, with just 3,200 students, and parents can easily move from one school district to another.

Hawai'i would have to break up our one school district of 185,000 students into 58 separate ones just to be average for the U.S. This would really enhance the ability for Hawai'i parents to move their homes to one in a better school district.

The other interesting finding of the Freedom Index study is that there is a clear correlation between a state's rating on the Freedom Index and its students' educational achievements. That means more parental choice and better student outcomes.

In addition, there is also a correlation between a state's smaller average district size and superior student outcomes. The best 10 states for students' scores have half the average school district size as those of the worst 10 states.

So, let's forget the DOE's latest deckchair shuffling attempt and decentralize to 58 self-governing independent school districts funded individually by the state. This would only give us an average school district size for the U.S., but it's a start.

For education: Let our people go; let them shop.

Cliff Slater is a regular columnist whose footnoted columns are at available online.