School Choice

Historical Background

During the middle decades of the 20th century there was an effort, in a number of Western democracies, to extend the undifferentiated elementary school model into secondary education—comprehensive schools in England and the United States, l'école unique in France, the Gesamtschule in parts of Germany—with what can charitably be called mixed results.

More recently, education reformers have recognized that one size does not fit all in education and that schools with a clear and distinctive focus can in fact be more effective than the “shopping-mall high school.” Policies to promote parental choice of distinctive schools have been adopted in New Zealand, Chile, and Colombia, in England, France, Sweden, and Italy, in the United States and Canada, and in other countries.

Such policies are distinct from the long-standing practice of public funding of independent religious schools as an alternative to government-operated schools, a practice that was well established in the 19th century in Belgium, the Netherlands, England, and Canada, and has been adopted more recently in Australia, Spain, Portugal, Germany, and other countries. This has been generally a response to the role churches play in providing schooling for their members, often adopted after decades of political struggle as a concession to the right of religious freedom.

The various international conventions protecting human rights adopted after World War II included provisions recognizing that, in the words of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), “parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children” (article 26, 3). According to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966),