Vouchers Would Bring School Choice to Quebec

Economic Note showing that having funding follow the student can satisfy a significant parental demand and exert positive pressure on the entire school system

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This Economic Note was prepared by Gabriel Giguère, Senior Policy Analyst at the MEI. The MEI’s Education Series aims to explore the extent to which greater institutional autonomy and freedom of choice for students and parents lead to improvements in the quality of educational services.

Quebec parents want to provide their children with the schooling that best suits their needs. Yet, geographical and financial constraints still limit their choices, fuelling the idea of a three-tier school system. More than twenty years after the publication of an MEI Research Paper on school choice for all,(1) this study revisits that school voucher proposal in order to update its empirical foundations and examine how it could expand school choice in Quebec today.

School Vouchers as an Alternative to Current Educational Funding

A school voucher system connects funding directly to students rather than to schools. Essentially, the government makes a certain amount of money—for example, the average cost per student—available to parents, who can use it to pay for the school of their choice.(2) In this way, schools receive the amounts allocated to parents.(3)

Even though there are subsidized private schools in Quebec—making them more accessible than in most other provinces—tuition fees remain a barrier for many parents. In addition, parents have difficulty in the current system registering their children to attend schools outside their school zone. In other words, parents generally have to send their children to the public school in their area, regardless of its quality.(4)

Simply put, under the current funding method, the government pays out a subsidy to schools (through school service centres or school boards) based in part on number of students.(5) Other factors are also taken into account, such as the number of students with special needs requiring additional resources.(6)

School vouchers work differently, and would provide an advantage over Quebec’s current system. This approach would allow parents and students to choose the school they consider best suited to them, whether public or private, circumventing the constraints of the existing funding system.

An Essential Element of Competition

School vouchers as a funding method introduce a key economic mechanism, competition, which has a clear advantage over the current funding system. It functions through the choices of parents to send their children to the schools that suit them best, using the money made available to them by the government. To attract students, schools therefore need to demonstrate the quality of teaching they provide and other relevant aspects of their educational offerings in order to differentiate themselves.

School administrators and staff members thus have an incentive to provide students with a high quality service. If the staff is unable to provide a quality education and fails to live up to parents’ expectations, the school will attract fewer students. Funding will drop, and the school will have to do things differently in order to remain competitive with other schools. Behind this reduced attractiveness hides an essential message: parents are less satisfied with this school.

School vouchers would allow parents and students to choose the school they consider best suited to them.

In contrast, the best-performing schools providing a high quality service that meets parents’ expectations will see their financial resources increase in proportion to the number of students they manage to recruit. The competitive mechanism thus establishes a strong incentive for schools to continually improve. This shows the importance of returning the power of choice to the parents of Quebec students.

Quebec’s current school system provides a certain amount of choice and competition between schools and programs, and certain options are very popular, such as the enriched language program, the international studies program, and subsidized private schools. Indeed, the creation of specific programs around the early 2000s was a specific response to the attractiveness of private schools.(7) The Quebec government should double down on this mechanism of competition, with its multiple advantages, by establishing funding by school vouchers in order to facilitate access for all.

The Benefits of Freedom of Choice for Students

By establishing competition between schools, freedom of choice regarding attendance entails a number of positive effects for students. EdChoice, a nonprofit organization that conducts research on educational freedom, reviewed the literature on school vouchers in the United States.(8) It found evidence of several positive effects related to academic results, parental satisfaction, the fiscal situation, school safety, and civic values, among others (see Table 1).

Students in a private school choice program—a school voucher system or related mechanism—in the United States saw improved test scores in 59% of studies reviewed, with 23% of studies finding no visible effect and just 18% finding negative effects. Educational attainment, defined as being more likely to graduate from high school, more likely to enroll in college and/or more likely to persist in college, was positively affected by private school choice program participation in 75% of cases, with no negative effects.

These programs for children who attend private schools also entail positive effects on the results of public school students in 90% of the studies reviewed, due to improvements stemming from competition. In schools eligible for school voucher programs, these students were notably more likely to go to college and to obtain a bachelor’s degree, with particularly significant effects among students from low-income families.(9)

By establishing competition between schools, freedom of choice regarding attendance entails a number of positive effects for students.

Non-cognitive benefits of school choice have also been observed as a consequence of school choice.(10) One of these non-cognitive effects that is important to parents and students is school safety. Parents of students benefiting from school vouchers report higher satisfaction when it comes to the safety of their children. This category includes bullying, fighting, and drugs, among other issues. Competition between schools due to school voucher funding provides an incentive for school staff to keep a close eye on the physical and psychological safety of students. If bullying affects many children in a given school, parents may choose to move their children to another school, which will inevitably reduce funding for schools where safety is neglected by staff.(11)

Many studies also highlight the positive fiscal effects of funding education through school vouchers. Fully 87% of the studies reviewed by EdChoice found such positive fiscal effects on taxpayers, state budgets, and public school districts, versus just 7% that found negative effects.

The Attractiveness of Independent Schools in Sweden

Sweden is one of the countries that has most developed school choice, outside of the United States. Up until the end of the 1980s, its educational system was among the most centralized in the OECD.(12) Students were generally assigned to the public school closest to their home, and fewer than 1% attended independent schools.(13) The rigidity of this model, however, led to growing discontent: many parents thought they had too little influence on their children’s schooling and wanted access to schools that offered different approaches.(14)

In 1992, the Swedish government thus introduced a universal school voucher program for elementary and lower-secondary schools, and then extended it to upper-secondary schools in 1994.(15) Public funding thereafter followed the student to the school selected, whether municipal or independent. The stated goal was to increase the freedom of families and to encourage more diverse schooling options. Independent schools nonetheless had to be approved by the government, follow the national program, and submit to public inspections.

The evolution of the distribution of students testifies to the attractiveness of these schools. By the end of the 1990s, fewer than 5% of students attended an independent school. At the upper-secondary level, this proportion topped 20% in 2009, and continued to climb thereafter reaching nearly one-third, according to Sweden’s official statistics(16) (see Figure 1). At the elementary and lower-secondary level, attendance of independent schools reached 16.4% in 2025-2026.

While this growing attendance does not in itself constitute a proof of superior performance, it does show a persistent demand from families for more diversified schooling options.

This growth remains largely concentrated in urban centres. In 2019, independent schools welcomed around 21% of elementary school students in metropolitan regions, versus just 8% in small towns and rural regions. At the upper-secondary level, the gap was even more pronounced: 42% in metropolitan regions versus 13% in rural areas.(17) The model therefore expands options, even though these remain more numerous in urban settings where the density of students allows many schools to operate, thus benefiting more from competition.

Municipalities where the share of students registered in these schools has increased the most show better academic results. Positive effects are also seen in terms of the likelihood of going to college.(18) The Swedish experience also suggests that the benefits of choice can extend beyond the specific students who attend an independent school.(19)

Having funding follow the student can satisfy a significant parental demand and exert positive pressure on the entire school system.

The bulk of these gains seem to come once again from the effects of competition. The presence of independent schools pushes public schools to better respond to families’ needs, since the loss of students also entails a loss of funding. Students who remain in the municipal system could therefore also benefit from the pressure exerted by the option to change schools.

Another study arrives at a similar conclusion by examining the Swedish system and educational competition in several OECD countries. It is estimated that competition has likely mitigated Sweden’s decline in international assessments rather than exacerbating it. According to these estimates, without the growth of independent schools, Swedish results on the 2011 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study test would have been some seven points lower.(20)

The lesson from Sweden is not that all independent schools are better. It shows rather that having funding follow the student can satisfy a significant parental demand and exert positive pressure on the entire school system.

Conclusion

The data accumulated since the publication of the MEI’s 2003 paper reinforce the initial proposal: when funding is guided more by parental choices, the benefits can affect not only students who change schools but also those who remain in the public system. Such a reform of Quebec’s educational system would better respect freedom of choice and the needs of each student.