Forsey, Martin; Davies, Scott & Walford, Geoffrey (Eds.) (2008). The Globalisation of School Choice? Reviewed by Joshua Hall, Beloit College

Forsey, Martin; Davies, Scott & Walford, Geoffrey (Eds.) (2008). The Globalisation of School Choice? Oxford: Symposium Books Pp. 252         ISBN 978-1-873927-12-0 Reviewed by Joshua Hall Beloit College August 20, 2009 This volume is a collection of papers that were presented at a conference at the University of Western Australia in 2006. The original goal of the conference and the book coming from the conference papers is to provide empirical research on global trends towards choice in education. Thus each of the eleven non-introductory chapters touches on school choice in a different country. Scholars of school choice will find comfort in the fact that frequently discussed countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom are represented. More important, however, is the fact that most of the chapters discuss the school choice experiences of several countries that are likely to be unfamiliar to most school choice researchers. Since the cultural, economic, and political institutions in a country play a large role in shaping not only the implementation of school choice but also their various outcomes, all serious school choice scholars should find volumes like this of interest. The book begins with an introductory chapter by the editors—Martin Forsey, Scott Davies, and Geoffrey Walford. Each of the editors is from a different country and has a different disciplinary background, which no doubt proved to be quite useful in bringing together and synthesizing such diverse chapters from scholars of all disciplines. Forsey is a lecturer in anthropology at the University of Western Australia, Davies is a professor of sociology at McMaster University in Canada, and Walford is a professor of education policy at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. In the introduction, the editors explain the purpose of the book, summarize each of the chapters, and then they briefly try to synthesize the findings of each of the chapter into some common theme. Chapter 2 is by Christopher Lubienski, an associate professor of education policy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In his essay, Lubienski provides both a descriptive overview of school choice reforms in the United States (such as vouchers and charter schools) as well as a review of the literature on the effectiveness of school choice programs. While anyone could quibble with his reading of a particular study or the absence of a particular paper, it would be a waste of time to do so. This is because the reason for the research summary is to show that the findings from academic research are far from conclusive and in fact are quite mixed. Lubienski provides this summary because his primary point in the chapter is to look at the role of advocacy coalitions in the school choice debate. Specifically, he looks at the political economy of advocacy-based research and the bypassing or supplanting of traditional peer-reviewed outlets by some school choice researchers. While there is a lot to be taken away from this chapter—in particular a detailing of the reasons why we should be concerned about the quality of the arguments that voters finds persuasive—I am left wondering, as an empirical matter, how important these ideas are in changing public opinion. To put it another way, if the pro-school choice think tanks that Lubienski talks about did not exist, how pervasive would school choice be in the United States? One piece of empirical evidence in favor of think tanks playing an important role in privatization (though not explicitly school choice) can be found in a recent working paper by Leeson and Ryan (2008). The relationship between school choice and parenting is the subject of the third chapter. Scott Davies and Janice D. Aurini use both quantitative and qualitative methods to argue that school choice is a form of ‘concerted cultivation’, i.e., a style of parenting that involves (mostly middle-and-upper-class) parents playing a larger role in the shaping of their children’s environment in an attempt to cultivate their children’s talents and abilities. The authors provide some really interesting insights into parental opinion regarding choice, especially from their focus group interviews. For example, the parents make a point that I have made elsewhere (Hall 2006), namely the Hayekian point that officials often do not (and often cannot because the knowledge is dispersed and tacit) have the necessary information about local conditions to make the proper pedagogical decisions. In Chapter 4, Martin Forsey used structured interviews of Australian families who had moved from government schools to private schools and vice versa. The descriptions of these conversations are fascinating and lead to other interesting questions. One example occurs in a conversation with Kelly, who used to work at a private school but now works at a government school. Although Kelley’s husband is opposed to private schools, they are considering either moving to a different area or using non-governmental schools to ensure that their daughter has access to a better school than their local government school. Both Kelley and her husband are products of government schools, but state that parents just expect more for their children today. Why do parents expect more today? Is it related to the ‘concerted cultivation’ discussed in Chapter 3? If higher expectations are part of the reason for increased demand for choice, what are the implications? These are just some of the questions this essay raised. School choice in England since the mid-1980s is the subject of Chapter 5. The author, Geoffrey Walford, lays out the history of school choice reforms in England, which primarily involved creating greater parental choice among government schools. The focus of Walford’s article is the effect of this increased choice on student performance and segregation by ethnicity and class. To Walford it is straightforward that if schools develop so that a hierarchy of schools exists, then some students will be in the bottom schools. Chapter 6 is by Izhar Oplatka and focuses on public school choice within the city of Tel Aviv. Using evidence from schools’ marketing materials and interviews with parents, he finds that the reasons parents gave for choosing particular schools were reflective of individualistic and competitive values rather than collective and egalitarian values. While not entirely surprising, it would have been more informative to see how responses differed in situations where families exercised choice in a less overt way, such as through housing markets. I suspect there would be little difference between the two samples, suggesting that people are highly individualistic, regardless of the structure of the education system. One of the most informative chapters in this volume is Chapter 7. The author, Marino Narodowski, is both a professor at Universidad Di Tella in Buenos Aires and the Minister of Education for Buenos Aires City. What is interesting about the Argentinean case is that school choice in Argentina is not the result of a policy change, but rather the outcome of rising income levels and demand for social and geographic stratification. I was shocked to find out that the private school share of student enrollment is over 20 percent for the country as a whole and over 50 percent in some of the largest urban centers! What is most interesting about this chapter is Narodowki’s finding that the exodus of students to private schools has increased the resources available to public schools. Using ethnographic research, Kristin Phillips and Amy Stambach describe educational opportunity in Tanzania in Chapter 8. As the authors note, this chapter is not so much about school choice as it is about how Tanzanian families cultivate relationships into order to take advantage of educational opportunities should they arise. In addition to providing a useful overview of the Tanzanian educational system, the authors show how far removed debates over school choice in the developed world are from the situation in many parts of the developing world. Chapter 9 is on the absence of choice in rural China. The author, Andrew Kipnis, describes the situation in one rural Chinese county. The system is fiercely competitive and some parents are only given choice if local officials need to raise revenue. He argues that this reflects the fact that choice is not valued for its own sake in China, nor is the ideology of freedom. I find this very interesting, as where I teach has a large number of students from China, and they seem to value choice very much. In fact, they will tell you they might have to transfer if you don’t approve their accelerated plan of study! Obviously there is a selection bias there, but I am curious how rising wealth in China’s cities will change this fact in the future. The rise of low-fee primary schools (LFP) in India is the subject of Chapter 10 by Prachi Srivastava. Using semi-structured interviews with parents and family members in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, Srivastava builds on the classification of Tooley (1997) to characterize the growth LFP schooling as an example of ‘choice in the market.’ While Srivastava finds that the emergence of the LFP sectors improves the educational chances for some previously disadvantaged groups, there exists some reason for concern for other disadvantaged groups because of so-called ‘cream-skimming.’ In Chapter 11, Lesley Vidovich and Yap Meen Sheng discuss the establishment of privately- funded international schools in Singapore in 2005. This chapter provides a useful analysis of the policy debate in Singapore surrounding the allowance of privately-funded schools. In addition, the authors correctly note the impact that globalization has played on the debate. The fact that Singapore’s schools are so centralized was surprising to me, considering how much economic freedom the country’s citizens exercise in other areas (Gwartney and Lawson, 2008). Julian Dierkes, a sociologist at the Institute for Japanese Research at the University of British Columbia, concludes the volume with his essay on supplementary education in Japan. While Japan has seen its share of policy changes resulting in increased parental choice recently, Dierkes argues that choice has been a large part of the Japanese education system for over thirty years because of the option of supplemental education. He uses evidence from these supplemental juku schools –private schools that offer lessons on nights and weekends – to examine some of the claims of school choice proponents regarding the impact of school choice on curriculum and pedagogy. For example, he does not find a diversity of educational approaches in juku schools, suggesting that choice does not necessarily lead to a flowering of different educational approaches. Overall, I thought The Globalisation of School Choice is a good resource for anyone thinking about employing a comparative approach to school choice. My one complaint is that I wish the editors had done a better job in the introduction of tying together themes from the different chapters. For example, many of the chapters seemed to describe parental behavior consistent with ‘concerted cultivation’ and it would have been useful to have that highlighted and placed in a larger context. Giving historically rising worldwide incomes and declining birth rates, this is likely to be an ongoing phenomenon. This quibble aside, anyone interested in school choice can benefit from reading this book. References Gwartney, J., and R. Lawson (2008). Economic Freedom of the World: 2008 Report. Vancouver: Fraser Institute. Hall, J. (2006) The dilemma of school finance reform. Journal of Social, Political, and Economic Studies, 31(2), 175-190. Leeson, P.T., and M. Ryan. (2008). Think Tanks. Morgantown, WV: Mimeo. Tooley, J. (1997). Choice and diversity in education: A defence. Oxford Review of Education. 23(1), 103-116. About the Reviewer Joshua Hall is an Assistant Professor of Economics & Management at Beloit College and, during the summer of 2009, a Visiting Scholar at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center at Bowling Green State University. His research interests include the economics of education, in particular where school finance and school choice intersect.