Controlling the Social Cost of Local School Markets?

Education policy is evidently in a state of change across industrialised countries. The fragmentation of modernity has manifested in a local government reforms, privatisation and agencification, whilst the core executive’s capacity to steer has eroded. In toto, a wide variety of endeavours to move away from the firm idea of state-funded, state-controlled and state-provided compulsory education have emerged. Along that trajectory the Finnish compulsory education system shifted during the 1990s from one of the most centralised to one of the most decentralised. Consequently, segregation between municipalities, residential areas and families has emerged also in Finland, and the variation between schools, measured by PISA scores, has recently increased.

Our aim is to elaborate the Finnish local spaces for school choice, and the ways in which the negative outcomes of school choice and overall diversification are governed by contrasting three distinctive local contexts. By analysing administrative statistical and documentary data, we aim to model how local authorities respond to novel, local inequalities, and the demands of freedom to choose and equality of opportunity, simultaneously.

Our analysis models three different sets of policies in the municipalities in Metropolitan Area of Helsinki (approx. 1 million inhabitants). First (the municipality of Espoo), the local institutional space for school choice is constructed in favour for choice, without any current policies for positive discrimination. Second (Vantaa), school choice is more restricted, the policy is to prevent segregation by emphasising the uniformity of schools. Third model is ‘very pro-choice’ (Helsinki), where the policies to prevent segregation have included actions in regional policy and direct positive discrimination to schools located in sub-standard socioeconomic status neighbourhoods. By revealing the diversified policies concerning positive discrimination and other forms of control of negative externalities, we discuss about the formations and estimations of social cost for school choice.