Alternatives in other countries

In the mid-to-late 1980s efforts to find effective education alternatives to government-controlled public education systems became a global trend. Parents and educators began to take strides towards individualized education methods and decentralization of decision-making powers. From the 1980s into the late 1990s charter schools, private schools, and home schooling grew in popularity around the globe as countries adopted ideas from one another.

Great Britain

In 1988 the UK implemented an Education Reform Act allowing individual schools to become locally managed. Locally managed schools (LMS) still must teach the national curriculum and follow educational laws outlined at the federal level, but they no longer remain under the Local Education Authority. For that reason, LMS can circumvent regulations limiting the enrolment in popular schools, can establish new types of schools that would otherwise be unavailable, and can delegate budgetary responsibility to the school governing body and head teachers. LMS are also designed to reinforce the right of parents to choose their children's school.³²

New Zealand

New Zealand's federally governed education system took a drastic step in 1989 with the Picot reform. "Layers of intervening bureaucracy between the Centre as founder and policy maker and the schools as site of service delivery,"³³ were destroyed. All schools in New Zealand are currently charter schools and are operated and governed at the school level. Principals are responsible for both local fundraising and education and each school is operated under an advisory committee of parents and teachers. The New Zealand system is based partially on the development of "self-managing schools" in Tasmania in the mid-nineteenth century, which had been introduced into the Australian education system.³⁴

Giving principals, teachers and parents the added responsibility of raising funds to operate schools is reported to be a problem in New Zealand's education reform. Critics argue that the burden of fundraising is increasing stress among school staff, is having negative impacts on children and is causing many parents to leave advisory committees after only a short period of representation.

United States

The United States now has a wide variety of alternative schools. Key principles of the American reform agenda are based on the beliefs that all children can learn, that there should be top-down support for bottom-up reform, and that education should involve the whole community.³⁵ As of the late 1990s there are approximately 1.5 million home schooled children and nearly 250 charter schools across the country, as well as private schools of every type.³⁶