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The Dutch example demonstrates that open educational choice that includes the public subsidy of religious schools can exist without weakening civic cohesion. Indeed, there is much to suggest that choice can be part of a system that strengthens it. Evidence from parental preferences and student attitudes, for example, indicates that religious schools can do at least as well as public schools in promoting strong civic values, perhaps even better. And the reasons that Dutch parents give for preferring religious schools over state-run schools are more likely to assuage liberal-democratic anxieties about public support for public religious schools than they are to encourage proponents of sectarian religious education. There seem to be many reasons for the success of the Dutch system from a civic perspective, including an already strong civic identity among its citizens and a regulatory scheme that includes needs-based funding and nationwide access to a common core curriculum. However, very recent developments in the Netherlands in the wake of a large influx of Muslim immigrants should serve as an admonition to observers who are too sanguine about the benign effects of publicly supported religious schooling on liberal-democratic political culture. Both the sources of the Netherlands’s successful system of choice and the nature of the recent challenges to it hold important lessons for policymakers. 368 A Regulated Market Model: Considering School Choice in the Netherlands as a Model for the United States charles venegoni and david j. ferrero 16 Special thanks to Keely Merrigan, research associate at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation , for research support on this chapter. 16 9516-5 ch16.qxd 8/2/2004 9:56 AM Page 368 a regulated market model 369 Parents’ motivations for choosing religious schools in themselves help explain the success of the Dutch system from a civic perspective. In the Netherlands, where nearly two-thirds of students attend publicly supported private schools, the majority of which are religious schools, only a minority (about 30 percent, depending on the local situation) of parents give religious reasons for choosing religious schools.1 Instead, as Anne Bert Dijkstra, Jaap Dronkers, and Sjoerd Karsten note in their chapter in this volume, parents choose religious schools because “the values-oriented character of religious schools leads them to stress secular, nonreligious values (for instance, tolerance of homosexuality) as a significant aspect of schooling in the broader sense.”2 The authors cite studies revealing that Dutch parents are interested in having their children learn about differing world views in the course of providing them with a strong ethical orientation that reflects Dutch public values—that is, they choose religious schools for largely secular ethical reasons that reinforce critical elements of the political culture, such as tolerance and fairness. Broadly construed ethical values and not religion per se attract the Dutch to religious schools. Given the large number of citizens who are educated in religious schools and the toleration and civic mindedness of the Dutch, it is hard to believe that the educational system has proven an impediment to civic values. Even as Islamic populations demand their own schools and resist assimilation into Dutch public culture and values, they continue to prefer religious schools to state-run public schools because of the greater sensitivity of Catholic and Protestant schools for Islamic beliefs and values. At worst, inquiry into the relationship between civic values and education suggests that “noncognitive behavior” related to civic values is not greatly influenced by a school’s religious affiliation, although Catholic schools appear to excel in affective categories that are less directly related to civic concerns.3 Indeed, the Dutch experience gives the United States even more reasons to consider opening the door to school choice, and some of them are corroborated by the American experience with religious schools, specifically, Catholic schools. American studies routinely find Catholic schools to be superior academically to their public counterparts. This is especially and less controversially true in urban areas, where less affluent students are in the majority.4 Dijkstra, Dronkers, and Karsten’s analysis of studies of “cognitive effectiveness ” in Dutch schools, after adjusting for socioeconomic and other externalities , finds that Catholic schools are the most effective in producing cognitive outcomes. Nonorthodox Protestant schools rank next, followed by public schools. The lowest cognitive outcomes are associated with the smallest but fastest-growing of the sectors: orthodox Protestant and (nonreligious) private 16 9516-5 ch16.qxd 8/2/2004 9:56 AM Page 369 [3.144.84.155] Project MUSE (2024-04-20 04...

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