Parents: are you satisfied with the quality of your son’s or daughter’s education? Do you worry about the values they’re being taught in an age of moral relativism? Could your child possibly benefit from a smaller class size or a back-to-basics approach to teaching? If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, you might wish to consider private or religious school options and the free market Fraser Institute could be of assistance.

Established in 2003, the Vancouver-based think tank’s Children First School Choice Fund provides tuition assistance grants to 800 elementary school students in Ontario, based upon financial need. These grants pay 50 per cent of the tuition at any of the nearly 850 independent schools in Ontario, to an annual maximum of $3,500. The program will expand into Alberta later this year. Earlier this month, Children First announced it has begun accepting  applications for education grants for the 2006-2007 school year.

The program will award nearly 250 new grants this April through a lottery process and the grants’ value will increase to 50 per cent of tuition to a maximum of $4,000 per school year. Families within the Children First program are free to choose any school they wish, including religious schools, provided the school is registered with the Ministry of Education.

 As a safety precaution, Children First has a school participation policy that allows it to suspend participation with any school at Children First’s discretion. Speaking to The Interim, the Fraser Institute’s director of education policy, Claudia Hepburn, said her office received a whopping 14,000 applications within the first three years of the program, or between 4,263 and 5,300 per year.

Ever since the Mike Harris government’s Equity in Education tax credit was scrapped by the McGuinty Liberals, Children First grants are the only financial aid available to low-income families for independent schools. Hepburn notes that while the Liberal government and the Ministry of Education have been more or less “neutral” to the program, it has raised the ire of teachers unions, which at one point threatened a boycott of commercial donors to the program, but have since “not paid much attention to it.”

 Asked about the state of public education in Ontario, Hepburn stressed that “public education serves many families well,” adding that most of the program’s participant families say they were motivated by the better academic quality of private schools and by the lack of facilities for special needs students in many public schools. “If you think a little more competition from independent schools would hurt (the public system), I would say you don’t have a very high opinion of the public system,” said Hepburn, a bit provocatively.

Interestingly, even some of Children First’s supporters don’t think the program will accomplish very much. A recent editorial in the Calgary Herald called it a “nice gesture,” but added it would likely be ineffective as the cost of private school tuition is far too much for low-income parents. “The reality, as our program has proven, is quite different,” said Hepburn, pointing out that the average private school in the program costs just $4,400 per child per year. That’s actually less than the over $8,000 spent in taxes per child in the public system.