School Choice: An Overview

Abstract

The facility for parents and pupils to choose their secondary schools free from government constraint appears to make manifest, in some as yet ill-defined way, the spirit of twenty-first century socio-economic freedom. This zeitgeist is increasingly popular in a growing number of developed countries, though it has not been proved beyond doubt to raise pupil achievement (OECD, 1994; Glenn & De Groof, 2002; Holmes et al., 2003). In the United States, the growing number of Charter Schools being founded by socially advantaged parents is creating a public school system ipso facto more responsive to parental demands (Wells et al., 1999; Gill et al., 2001), and in the United Kingdom, most education legislation enacted since 1988 has been similarly geared.