This Young Superstar Mayor is Fighting to Bring School Choice to his City…and We’re Not Talking about Cory Booker…

We’re talking about Toru Hashimoto, the Mayor of Osaka, Japan. This 43-year-old-mayor is the newest superstar in Japan having started his own national party. Called a “political maverick” by The Economist, Hashimoto, like Cory Booker, is putting off a run for national office because he still has to do work in his own city.

At the top of Hashimoto’s priorities is reforming Japan’s education system. His party, the Japan Restoration Party, believes in creating self-reliant individuals who can support a self-reliant nation. The party aims to dismantle the pyramid model of education by implementing a national voucher system—including at the university level—to promote competition. Hashimoto also believes in allowing local governments to choose their own education systems. Not surprisingly, The Economist notes, Japan’s teachers unions are opposed to Hashimoto’s reforms.

And Hashimoto is not just talking about vouchers, he’s working to bring them to Osaka.

While Japan will look to see where Hashimoto will go and what he will do in the future, education reformers should take a close look at where Japan goes with education reform and what school choice could look like in Japan.

- American Federation for Children | Alliance for School Choice, MSG

Voucher Program in India: Both a Model and an Academic Success

Last year we told you about a small-scale voucher program that helps children from low-income families in India, and thanks to some new research, the program is not only demonstrating academic success, but it’s getting the praise of an unexpected neighbor.

In 2009, the Delhi school voucher project was started as a pilot program to help girls from low-income families attend private schools by covering tuition, fees, books, travel, and uniform costs all for 3,600 rupees—or about $65.  Run by the Centre for Civil Society (CCS), the program has helped more than 400 students in Delhi attend the school of their parents’ choice. 

A new report from the Centre for Media Studies shows voucher recipients as performing better than their counterparts in government schools and on par with students from private schools in all grades.

The study measured 371 voucher participants, 371 students in private schools, and 371 students in government schools in the subjects of math, English, and Hindi. And according to Shantanu Gupta of CCS, more than 50 percent of students would return to government schools—or even stop attending school altogether—if the program is discontinued.

And India isn’t the only nation watching the academic success of this pilot program.  At a private school in north-east Delhi, a group of education activists from India and Pakistan came together to speak about the school voucher program.

Tajamul Hanif, of the National Commission for Human Development in Pakistan, praised the program and the positive effects that vouchers can have in Pakistan.  And while India and Pakistan may not agree on a whole host of other issues, they do seem to come together on the important issue of providing educational options to disadvantaged children.

Small-Scale Voucher Effort in India Could Be Model to Transform Education System

Students take exams outside of a school building in India.

We here at School Choice Now! have tried to give you a look at issues broadly related to school choice, and while our name might indicated otherwise, we're interested in how successful models of educational options abroad can help shape sound policy here at home.

And it looks like we're not the only ones.

In India, officials are looking to voucher programs in the United States and elsewhere to give them insight into how to structure similar programs in the world's second-most populous country. In fact, this has been an ongoing effort -- since 2007, the country's Centre for Civil Society (CCS) has been managing a voucher program that has given scholarships to 408 students in 68 wards in Dehli, India's second-largest metropolitan area.

Voucher amounts are only 3600 rupees (just under $70 here), which might not seem like much, but consider this:  spending is so low in Indian schools that, on average, 59 percent of the schools have no drinking water and 89 percent have no toilets. With that in mind, a 3600-rupee scholarship is a significant amount, and the voucher program is achieving a remarkably large return on that investment.

Academic gains by voucher students are particularly notable for outpacing both students at schools run by the Indiana government as well as students studying at private schools. Check out the details, courtesy the India Education Diary, which interviewed CCS president Dr. Parth J. Shah:

While the government has a constitutional mandate to educate every child, it cannot accomplish this task by building more government schools. It has to remain a sponsor and facilitator, and let edupreneurs execute the task of delivering the service. This will bring choice of schools even to the poor while improving the quality of education delivered through competition.

Sound familiar? If so, it's because it is.

Applying Lessons Learned Abroad at Home

Earlier this week, local news station NY1 profiled a new charter school in Manhattan that applies the ideals of student-driven learning based on the premise that "every student learns differently." But while many choice schools embrace that notion based upon evidence from their community, or with a varied curriculum that has the freedom to more pointedly teach certain kids, "Innovate Manhattan," as it is called, got its inspiration from somewhere else: Sweden.

That's right—while the school has a curriculum, students develop a work plan and specific goals that allow them to work through that curriculum at their own pace. They have specific teacher mentors, known as "coaches," who meet one-on-one with them daily to ascertain how we'll they're working towards meeting those goals.

An unlike the criticism levied at so many other education reform measures, there's no knocking a Swedish model that has proven highly-successful in multiple European countries. (A model that shares some things in common with England's free schools.)

Across the Pond, Parents Take Charge of Kids' Schooling

Part of the fun of interacting with our friends across the pond in Britain is finding the small differences in their use of the English language and ours. For example, our “garbage” is their “rubbish,” and their “jam sandwich” is our “police car (seriously!),” among other gems you can read about here and here.

But did you also know that our “charter schools” are their…“free schools”?

While they don’t have the same process of opening charters as we have here, many of the basics are the same: parents desperate for choices or who yearn for options with specialized learning structures can create their own schools, hence the “free” in their name (which refers to their freedom to specialize). They do it all themselves—securing the building, funding, enrolling children, etc.—and do so at a fraction of the amount it would cost the state to open a new facility, according to Toby Young, an English parent and free school founder. Says Young:

“If [the state] wanted to create a new school, they would do it themselves, and it would cost between 27 and 30 million pounds on average to set up a new secondary school. It will cost between one third and one half of that to set up our school.”

Young’s school is set to open this September, and there are already more interested parents than spaces available. Young and other parents preparing to open schools have taken advantage of the “New Schools Network,” which provides guidance and assistance throughout the process of getting a school up and running. The German international broadcaster Deutsche Welle (the equivalent of our Voice of America) recently aired a segment on the proliferation of free schools in Britain:

We’ll see in the coming months whether these schools succeed at giving kids a better education than their alternative, but we appreciate the fact that British parents are willing to go a different route when it comes to schools for their children. Education reform movements cannot be afraid to try new methods in places where the status quo is not working. And, make no mistake—some of those methods might not work, and if that’s the case, we should stop using them. But we need to give smart and innovative reforms a try before we demonize them.

Click here to read our post discussing school choice in the international community, as well as how one of our programs is characterized abroad.

- American Federation for Children | Alliance for School Choice, MAG

On His 93rd Birthday, We Celebrate a Courageous Champion of Educational Options

Today marks the birthday of one of our generation’s great leaders, a walking embodiment of courage and someone to whom an entire society owes its freedom. Among the remarkable man’s most famous quotes is the following:

“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”

He also said this:

“All children—regardless of where they live—have the right to learn.”

Do you know who uttered those words? It was Nelson Mandela, the former South African president whose 27 years in prison helped destroy the oppressive apartheid regime in his home country. He celebrates his 93rd birthday today.

Nelson Mandela at a 1998 event in Brazil.

Mandela has held a commitment to education since his own early experiences in South Africa, where the educational opportunities he had growing up in the 1930s provided him with the foundation that began his lifelong struggle to spread and fight for the ideals of freedom and democracy.

South Africa shares a number of similarities with the U.S. when it comes to inequity. The end of apartheid in 1994, when Mandela became president, helped integrate South African society but still left wide gaps in the educational options available to children from low-income families. Apartheid’s effects are still being felt, as many of those same inequalities still exist today.

Over the years, Mandela has been a stalwart supporter of giving kids options for a better education. From his time as president up to the present day, he’s done for South Africa what so many in our movement are trying to do halfway across the world: give kids hope. 

We went through some of his inspiring words and discovered a longstanding commitment to giving opportunities to children from impoverished backgrounds. Read those words after the jump.

The View of School Choice From Abroad

While we don't usually chime in about education reform issues outside our 50 states (hence the "American" part of our name), school choice is by no means an idea confined strictly to the U.S. The issue has recently been debated by our friends across the pond, and there are varying levels of successful school choice programs in places like France, Sweden, Canada, and Chile.

From time to time, we'll take a look at their systems—but how do they see ours?

A recent report from Voice of America helps answer that question. Voice of America serves as the official international broadcaster on behalf of the U.S. government, reaching 123 million people each week. They just aired a story about the highly-successful D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which was reauthorized and extended in April.

Take a look at the video below. How do you think American education (and, specifically, school choice) is perceived overseas? Let us know in the comments section.



- American Federation for Children | Alliance for School Choice, MAG