Examining the Issues of Parental Rights and School Choice in Education

• In Event: Realizing the Abidjan Principles on the Right to Education: Human Rights, Public Education, and the Role of Private Actors in Education

Proposal

Drawing from the book chapters written by Roman Zinigrad and Joanna Härmä, this presentation discusses one of the very debated questions regarding the role of private actors in education: the parental rights and school choice in education. International law recognises the liberty of parents to choose for their children schools, other than those established by the public authorities, which conform to minimum educational standards established by the State, and to ensure the religious and moral education of their children in conformity with their own convictions. Its scope, meaning, limitations, and articulation with other human rights obligations, was a crucial question the drafters had to address. This presentation will review and analyze the arguments made in these chapters and discuss how they informed the development of the Abidjan Principles.

Zinigrad’s chapter on parental rights in education makes critical contributions in this regard, proposing ways to balance different dimensions of the right to education. He explains that states must respect the liberty of parents but is not obligated to realise it while highlighting that this liberty is important to protect the rights of minority groups, including indigenous peoples”. Situated within the larger education debate about parental “choice,” Zinigrad’s analysis shows that the state must allow for and even facilitate it in some cases, but with strict guidelines about who and how, as reflected in the Abidjan Principles.

Härmä’s chapter explores the notion of school choice from a human rights law perspective, and with a practical, rather than a theoretical, approach, drawing on evidence about countries’ experiences with school choice in its various forms, including market-based systems in which governments outsource education service to private actors. She examines the extent of market-based approaches to education globally, the evidence of their application, and contrasting findings from countries taking a public investment approach. She distinguishes between planned school choice deriving from policy and unplanned, or de facto, school choice, arising when governments fail to fulfill the right to education. The first type includes countries like Sweden and Chile, which have produced highly stratified and segregated schools systems with “disappointing learning outcomes.” In the latter situation, families in many countries in the global south are “choosing” low-fee private schools, although Härmä describes this as “school choice out of desperation – a coerced choice, rather than the positive exercise of a human right,” due to the lack of free, quality public schools.

Härmä also cites the cases of Ontario, Canada and Finland, both of which have used public investment models to create high quality, equitable school systems that come close to fulfilling the obligations outlined in the Abidjan Principles. Härmä’s chapter addresses school choice and profit-making in education both from social science and normative perspectives. Her critical analysis of the limitations of school choice and profit in education helped shaped the use and understanding of the term “commercial” in the Abidjan Principlesas well as the States’ prohibition to fund or support any private instructional educational institution that “is commercial and excessively pursues its own self-interest”.

Author

• Delphine Dorsi, Right to Education Initiative