Expanding School Choice through Open Enrolment: Lessons from British Columbia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Is expanding the scope for parents to choose among competing schools an effective policy lever for improving the quality of education? What lessons can we take from British Columbia’s experience with greater school choice? In 2002, British Columbia implemented a new policy that makes it easier for parents to opt out of their neighbourhood school. Along with the province’s rich administrative and test score data, the introduction of this “open enrolment” policy provides a rare opportunity to estimate the extent to which increased public school choice affects student achievement, concentrates minority students in enclave schools and promotes cream-skimming. Our results support several conclusions about British Columbia’s experience with open enrolment. First, the fact that many more parents succeeded in enrolling their children in out-of-catchment schools demonstrates that the policy had a meaningful impact on the public school choice opportunities available to many families. Second, the evidence suggests that open enrolment contributed to the development of important academic skills, but the magnitude of this impact depended on the geographic concentration of public schools. In the Lower Mainland, 10 to 15 percent of neighbourhoods are dense enough to have generated fairly substantial improvements in academic achievement. The gains in these neighbourhoods were equivalent to reducing class size by between two and three students; compared to class-size reductions, open enrolment is likely to be a fairly cost effective strategy for improving student achievement as measured by test scores. In the remaining neighbourhoods, where school density is lower, the impact of open enrolment on test scores was quite small. Finally, open enrolment did little to either segregate or integrate Lower Mainland students according to their cultural and ethnic backgrounds. There is also little evidence that popular schools engaged in creamskimming high-achieving students. These generally positive results might encourage policymakers in other jurisdictions to give fresh thought to introducing greater school choice into their public education systems.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".