1) I think path dependency plays a role in education (as in many other things) and the fact that we had high private school enrolment prior to state aid suggests that this would have been maintained. For example, more than 60% of people who themselves went to private schools send their oldest child to a private school, suggesting that ideas about appropriate schooling are shaped by the school experience of parents.

2) Even if your assumption is correct, that $$$ number mayoverstate the savings, since the kids who would stay in private schools without any government subsidy are disproportionately likely to be in schools that receive relatively low government funding now.

You still have to say no to someone. How do you decide?

First come, first served. The catholic school system operates that way with their non-catholic places and it works OK for them.

After school care has a big effect on communities – if you aren’t regularly and informally seeing the parents of the local school, you can’t tap into the information about the school. The pick-ups from after school care are too spread out to foster any kind of regular stand-around group who are waiting for a bell to ring and the kiddies to pour out. Car based communities are crap for maintaining local ties – and a school system where everybody drives different directions to take kids to school is a recipe for further isolationism and alienation of families from their own streets and suburb, not to mention the extra issues of increased obesity levels of kids who aren’t walking.
Don’t discount the value of gossip – the most efficient way of finding a good tradesman isn’t the yellow pages, it’s asking the neighbour.

What is missing from the debate about schooling and quality is that sense of community that enables the kind of information flow that allows parents to make reasonable choices. My town is relatively small and has lots of schools – they don’t tend to insist on geographical boundaries as cutoffs for school choice to anywhere near the extent that happens in large cities: it allows parents to choose their school. If you live outside of town, none of the notional boundaries apply in any way. If you live in town, the boundaries are treated as rough guides and are not hard and fast.

I’d like to see that flexibility extended to more parents. The idea that merely ponying up the cash to choose a school will solve difficult problems of incomplete information doesn’t apply very well to schools. The prices do not change quickly enough (and parents to not get to choose often enough) for the prices to reflect quality in the way you might expect of a consumer good. Perhaps if they regularly auctioned places at the end of each term (disruption to the kids would be horrible, but hey, efficiency must always be job #1 for libertarians, right?)

Andrew Leigh’s paper indicates that there is a potentially serious problem with the quality (not the quantity) of available teachers which may be addressed indirectly in a fully private system, but where exactly will the pressure come from? The “best” schools are rarely chosen on academic performance – more what your wife hears outside the school or down at Woolies.

There is possibly one very simple way to fix the issues with (say) the ability for Principals to pick their own teachers and assign performance pay as many are agitating for: abandon schooling in regional areas. I’m not sure how many Australians are willing to make that trade off.

With state education, the agitators you value as marginal agents choose with their feet or their wallets, relocating to suburbs with better schools or scrimping to send their children to private schools. This also results in poorer suburbs, since socio-economic diversity decreases as aspirational families cloister themselves off in better suburbs, denying the poorer suburbs of the active marginal agents. Family and community ties become weaker as people foresake them for better opportunities for their kids.

With a fully private system, although location will still have an impact, the need to relocate to send your children to a better government school will disappear. Private schools don’t care where you live, so long as you can pay. Parents who previously couldn’t afford expensive private schools, nor move to get into a better school catchment, will have freedom to move their children between schools that cater to their budget, putting competitive pressure on the schools.

Under state schooling, all they could do is agitate at a single school, they had no choice, since the state system must divide up access to resources somehow, and by geographic region is the way the schooling system has developed. There really is no other way other than some sort of lottery perhaps.

Saying that all schools should be equal denies the complexities inherent in organising any activity. Just compare the quality of fast food restaurants between richer and poorer suburbs. Now McDonalds pride themselves on uniformity, but even they can’t make a restaurant in Red Fern a more pleasant experience than one in Paddington.