School choice has expanded and diversified over the last 30 years. No longer is it just “public vs. private” or even “district vs. charter vs. private.” Today, it increasingly includes options like education savings accounts (ESAs), microschooling, tax-credit programs, a newly-resurgent homeschooling sector, and more. It is also a movement with international variations throughout the countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), as a new report from The National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE) makes clear.
The report starts with a definition of school choice that’s basic and familiar: Can primary or secondary level students enroll in a school—public or private—outside the school assigned to them based on their residential address? Thirty-seven of the 38 OECD member countries answer yes to this definition in some form, and the one outlier, Greece, seems to have lots of local variety built in to its government-run education system. Not all countries allow choices in every city, province, region, or state—or at every grade level—but the report’s authors consider any choice anywhere in the country as a binary example of “allowing school choice.”
School choice as a general concept is almost universal in the developed world, although the breadth of options varies greatly. Mexico, for example, allows limited public options in certain regions only. The Netherlands, by contrast, has a robust choice infrastructure nationwide, and more than 70 percent of students enroll in private or public schools outside the school assigned to them based on their residential address. Families across Finland have similar options, but only 2 percent of students take advantage of them. The report does not dwell on comparisons of uptake among the various countries, but does note that both supply and demand have been static in most countries over the last decade, with only Australia and the United States seeing an appreciable increase in the share of students utilizing an option not based on residential address, largely due to increases in the supply of options.
Open enrollment in another public school is the most common form of school choice in the OECD, with 36 countries allowing it at some level. This category includes charter schools—defined as “independent public schools that operate under a contract (charter) with an authorizing entity”—if such an option exists in a given country. (Sadly, there are no data provided on which countries allow for such schools.) Thirty-five of those 36 open-enrollment countries also provide government funding to support parents choosing tuition-charging private schools via vouchers or education savings accounts, although three restrict support to non-religious schools only.
The report then goes into a deep dive on four countries—Australia, Chile, The Netherlands, and Sweden—as well as highlighting a number of important facets of education, like curriculum, assessments, and staffing. Among the interesting details: Even in OECD countries that have national curricula, choice schools are often allowed to deviate from the prescribed topics and sequences, though a few require administrative approval for alterations. However, more than half of the OECD members that have national or regional assessments still require all private schools to administer the same exams required of traditional public schools even if their curricula are not the same—a topic still up for debate here in the United States.
The NCEE authors are appreciative of international efforts to deliver educational benefits to students through autonomy, innovation, and competition, even as they express concerns. Among these are making clear and reliable information available to parents on the number, quality, and accessibility of their choices (highlighting Australia’s My School platform as an exemplar) and the potential for school choice to increase racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic segregation. Here, Chile is cited as both troubling case study of a country where such segregation has occurred and as an example of a constructive response to the problem.
The report asserts that NCEE is neither for nor against any aspects of school choice—thus it does not make conclusions or recommendations based on this data snapshot—but that the organization wishes to “inform U.S. leaders, educators, and communities” about the “opportunities and tradeoffs” associated with what are clearly widespread and long-established school choice frameworks in countries around the world, likely because the United States is in a strong growth mode in terms of school choice. In the end, the authors’ attempt to visualize global school choice of the future—such as burgeoning microschools and a new picture of who is homeschooling and why—paints a picture driven most strongly by developments here in the U.S.
SOURCE: “School Choice: A Global Snapshot,” The National Center on Education and the Economy/NCEE (January 2026).
