Editor's note: Shortly before the start of National School Choice Week, which runs through this weekend, a group of school choice researchers, advocates and practitioners met in Fort Lauderdale for the Fourth International Conference on School Choice and Reform. We provided some coverage of the proceedings, but didn't really capture the global scope of the event. As Americans celebrate school choice, Judith S. Stein, known as "Grandma Choice" and one of the organizers of the conference, writes that the event should serve as a reminder that school choice is practiced, studied and debated all over the world.
Stein
Rodrigo Sanchez Queiroz e Melo is a teacher at a private school in Portugal. His organization is the (get ready) Associacao de Estabelecimentos de Ensino Particular e Cooperativo (an organization for cooperation among private schools). Every year he packs his “school choice scarf”—Portugal-style — and heads across the ocean to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida for an event which happens a week or so before the more-famous National School Choice Week.
Liesbeth Van Welie, a former schools inspector from the Netherlands, comes to Florida to listen to the presenters after serving as an astute reviewer of the research proposals which come in every year from all over the world. Zdenko Kodelja, of an Educational Research Institute in Slovenia, prepares to speak on “the right to a freely chosen education.” His country, which a generation ago was under Soviet domination, is now offering the freedom of education to its children.
The annual International Conference on School Choice and Reform presents policy studies and intellectual heft that can inform school choice advocacy: How is it working? How could it work better? The event's global perspective belies the idea that school choice is a political football which has more to do with politics than with students and schools.
Attendees from Estonia, Brazil, Sweden, Belgium, France, Spain, Italy, Hungary, South Africa, Canada and the United States come each year to present their findings on school choice. These countries and many others have school choice programs where the government funds school choice for parents and children—some through tax credits, some through direct public funding, and in many countries, also supporting religious schools.
Every year since 2012, Nova Southeastern University’s Abraham S. Fischler School of Education has hosted the conference, with the goal of bringing together American and internationally renowned thinkers in primary, secondary and higher education to explore future collaborative research and current education trends.
The conference provides a forum for assessing evidence on the effects of different forms of educational choice in K-12 education, including magnet and charter public schools, controlled choice and inter-district transfer programs, vouchers, tuition tax credits, homeschooling, online education and the direct public funding of private schools provided in many countries.
This year, over 155 participants came to listen, learn and network with like-minded thinkers from across the globe. There were presenters from 21 different countries. Led by Charles Glenn of Boston University and Priscilla Wohlstetter of Columbia University, the conference saw few speeches and no keynote speakers, encouraging academics to engage in discussions with people from governments, think tanks and the educational, legal and advocacy organizations that I like to call "do tanks."
The conference began as an offshoot of the Journal of School Choice, which sponsors the event along with a number of well-known education organizations. The event is hosted by the National Institute for Educational Options at Nova Southeastern University, in cooperation with the European Association for Education Law and Policy.
The conference is designed to air the kind of peer-reviewed school choice research that we publish in the journal, and mix the academics’ perspectives with those of practitioners and policy wonks.
As people around the United States take part in ballyhooed celebrations of school choice, I would like to urge them to consider the approach that has guided the development of our international conference: consult diverse perspectives, learn from empirical research, and look beyond your own borders. One thing that has become clear after four years of international conferences in Fort Lauderdale is that school choice is a global issue.
