Parents need more information to choose the right school

Commentary

Yes, it’s summer. But many parents are already wondering how to find the best school for their children to attend in September. Most students attend their local government public school. Some are enrolled in independent schools, while still others are home-schooled. Students in Alberta also have the option of attending a few public charter schools.

In short, parents have education options to consider, although the number of options largely depends on where they live. For example, parents in Alberta and British Columbia have significantly more choice than parents in Atlantic Canada.

The easiest way to expand school choice is to let the money follow the student to the school their parents choose – public, independent, or charter. This puts the parents in the driver’s seat as they can choose the school that best suits their children. It’s a much better approach than forcing some parents to pay for their children’s education twice — once through their taxes and again through tuition when they choose independent schools that fit their children’s unique needs.

However, offering parents more choice is not enough. Parents also need accurate and reliable information about schools.

It’s like visiting a car dealership. Customers not only have many vehicles to choose from, they also need information about the vehicles they are considering. Otherwise they will not make an informed decision. Just as there are many different makes and models of vehicles, there are also many different types of schools. When it comes to improving student achievement, some schools are more effective than others.

Dr. John Hattie, emeritus laureate professor at the Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne (Australia), is one of the world’s leading researchers in the field of educational effectiveness. His latest bookVisible learning: the next stepsynthesizes thousands of studies to identify the methods that work best in classrooms.

For example, when it comes to learning to read, students benefit most from intentional instruction in sounds. Simply put, students need to learn how to pronounce the words on a page. In contrast, full language/balanced literacy programs, where students can figure out the meaning of words on their own or look at pictures to guess the words, are significantly less effective.

The same goes for basic math skills. Interestingly, Hattie found that there’s a lot of research that shows that explicit instruction (where teachers directly model how to solve specific math questions) is a good way to improve students’ math skills. Therefore, schools should provide this type of instruction to students.

However, when choosing schools for their children, most parents do not have the time or expertise to evaluate the specific curriculum and teaching methods used in each school. Fortunately, there are tools that can provide parents with the necessary information.

The most important tool is the data passing through standardized testing, which are written by all students in a class or course at the same time each year. These tests should be conducted consistently, and the results for each school should be publicly available so that parents can see which schools and teachers are helping students improve academically and which are not. To help parents interpret this data, organizations such as the Fraser Institute publish school reports based on information from standardized tests.

In addition, given the growing number of serious violent incidents in schools, parents also need access to important safety information. For example, the state of Kentucky requires school administrators to record behavioral incidents such as sexual assault and drug use in a state database. This information is then collected and made available to the public.

Parents in Kentucky can visit one website with important information about each school’s academic performance and safety, helping them make informed decisions when choosing the best school for their children.

When students go back to school this fall, parents need to be sure that their children are in the right school. This will only happen if parents are given the choice and the information they need to make good educational decisions.

Michael Zwaagstra is a public high school teacher and a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute.

The views expressed in this article are the views of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.