A Distant Laboratory

By Edward B. Fiske and Helen F. Ladd

Decentralized management. Parental choice. Competition among schools. These are concepts that a wide variety of school reformers, including proponents of charter schools and vouchers, believe can bring about significant improvement in the quality of American schools.

Promising though they may be, these ideas are essentially untested in the United States. The first charter schools did not appear until 1993, and voucher programs are small and even newer. What we need is evidence from an entire school system that has applied these concepts over an extended period of time.

Fortunately, such evidence exists. It comes from New Zealand—a nation whose population is the same as South Carolina's and whose national ministry of education operates as the functional equivalent of a state education department in this country. For the last decade, New Zealand has functioned as a laboratory for the key ideas underlying governance-based school reform movements...