Public Funding for “Private” Education: The Equity Challenge of Enhanced Choice

The past two decades have generated numerous and varied experiments with the use of public resources to support “private” schools, which, in any case, become and behave more like public schools in proportion to their dependence on the public purse. From an equity point of view, however, no compelling moral necessity exists to use public funds to support private schools. In fact, the best available evidence suggests that, in general and on average, private schools are no more efficient or effective in fostering valued and measurable student outcomes than public schools. The most common methods proposed to channel public funds to private schools are unethical because they exclude society’s most vulnerable members, children from poor families, from any possibility of benefit—and furthermore, in nearly all jurisdictions they are, or would be, paid for from a revenue base that includes consumption taxes that all, even the poorest, must pay. Nonetheless, serious problems exist with equity of access to and benefit from public sector education. The most promising policy solution to the current perversely disequalizing tendencies of public education lies in public sector choice, however, not in public funding of private or quasi‐private schools.