SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

The Trouble with Politics

The Ontario government is wild to lower the province’s high school drop-out rate, and it also really really wants to improve the worryingly-low number of students who pass the provincial tests. To this end, it has already spent a great deal of money on expensive programs like class size reduction and it is now embarking on another massively-expensive program, this time the expansion of all-day kindergarten. Now comes strong evidence from Harvard of a low-cost way to raise test scores, reduce drop-out rates and crime, and increase college attendance. Manna from heaven for the Ontario government, surely? Well, maybe not.

The problem is that the Harvard researchers were analyzing the results of a public school choice program in Charlotte, North Carolina in which students were entered into a lottery to attend the school of their choice. The researchers compared the outcomes of the lottery “winners” with the outcomes of the lottery “losers”, and found that seven years after their random assignment, the lottery winners were doing much better than the lottery losers. 

Unfortunately, it’s very unlikely that the Ontario government would even contemplate the introduction of school choice, as the province’s teachers’ unions are adamantly opposed. Isn’t politics fun?