It’s time for Premier Doug Ford to introduce a school voucher program in Ontario.
For too long, parents across the province who want to send their kids to alternative schools have had to pay tuition twice – once to the school of their choice and a second time through property and provincial income taxes.
It’s a clear inequity in the system that finally must be addressed.
Other provinces, such as Quebec, offer subsidies to parents who want to send their kids to alternative schools. Not so here in Ontario.
That’s where vouchers come in.
A voucher works exactly how it sounds: parents would be given a set amount of money by the province to send their kids to school. But it’s their choice. Want to send them to a local government school? The voucher would cover it. How about an alternative school? The voucher would cover that too, or at least a significant portion of the total cost.
Because of the lack of affordability, parents generally have to send their kids to government-run schools, regardless of the quality of their local school. That’s fundamentally unfair, and ultimately it should be up to parents, not the government, to decide where to send their kids to school.
As Gabriel Giguère of the Montreal Economic Institute puts it in describing the value of vouchers: “School administrators and staff members thus have an incentive to provide students with a high-quality service. If the staff is unable to provide a quality education and fails to live up to parents’ expectations, the school will attract fewer students. Funding will drop, and the school will have to do things differently in order to remain competitive with other schools. Behind this reduced attractiveness hides an essential message: parents are less satisfied with this school.”
By contrast, “the best-performing schools providing a high-quality service that meets parents’ expectations will see their financial resources increase in proportion to the number of students they manage to recruit. The competitive mechanism thus establishes a strong incentive for schools to continually improve.”
This applies equally to both government-run and alternative schools: if any school isn’t living up to parents’ expectations, they can simply enroll their kids somewhere else.
Without proper incentives in place, schools are in some cases lacking the motivation to improve.
Consider the example of Sweden. Like in Canada, students in Sweden used to be predominantly enrolled in government-run schools. But back in 1992, the Swedish government introduced a voucher program for elementary and lower-secondary schools. This was then expanded to upper-secondary schools two years later. This allowed the funding to follow the student.
In the 1980s, just one per cent of students in Sweden were going to alternative schools. Today, that number is 16 per cent for elementary and lower-secondary schools and nearly one-third for students in upper-secondary schools. Clearly, parents and students like the ability to choose. As in Sweden, families in Canada should have that option too.
Importantly, this does not mean that alternative schools are necessarily better than public schools. What it does mean is that families like choice. And, in turn, as Giguère notes, “having funding follow the student can satisfy parental demand and exert positive pressure on the entire school system.”
In Canada, education is an exclusive area of provincial jurisdiction. Ford has both the power and the political capital to make a voucher program a reality in Ontario. He and education minister Paul Calandra should give such an option a serious look as the Ford government looks at ways to improve education outcomes in the province.
Jay Goldberg is the Canadian Affairs Manager at the Consumer Choice Center. He previously served as the Ontario Director at the Canadian Taxpayers Federation and a policy fellow at the Munk School of Public Policy and Global Affairs. Jay holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Toronto.
