It doesn’t reduce your waistline or your tax bill, but will almost certainly reduce your checkbook balance if you exercise this choice. What is it? It’s parents going to the market to purchase the education they prefer for their children.

As long as there are legal market options outside of the public system, parents can pursue market choices in education. In a market setting, whether for dining room tables or for schooling, choice is synonymous with cost—you forego one use of your resources as soon as you commit them to another use or course of action. We call it “opportunity cost,” and as some Wake County parents have demonstrated recently, they are willing to weigh the opportunity costs of staying, with the opportunity costs of leaving public schools. Parents must pay the same taxes whether they stay in the public schools or not, so the monetary costs of opting out are the lifestyle sacrifices they will have to make to get something other than the state-created offering.

Why is this significant in the market for education? Education operates very much like other areas in which there are both public and private providers. Parents have a range of options in the public schools. But these options will be limited, just as public transportation options will always be more limited than the private market for transportation.

If you have been a happy patron of public transportation in the past, for example, but find that it no longer serves your needs because you cannot travel to a specific destination, the taxes you pay to support the system will not change, but your opportunity costs will have risen significantly. Since you can’t get where you are going, it is now “too expensive” to be a customer of the public transport system.

The opportunity cost of inadequate services is a large part of what drives people into the private market for goods that government also provides. Therefore, people will purchase and drive cars, even when public transport is “cheap,” and do likewise with education—enter the marketplace and seek out what works for them. The freedom of exercising choice is costly, but the publicly-provided alternative, for some families, is even more costly. If a student can’t perform basic skills with proficiency after 12 years, for example, he has received the most expensive schooling possible.

Luckily, in a market economy, publicly funded enterprises do not need to be all things to all people. There are services and entrepreneurs that cater to specific needs. That is exactly what church-run, private, and corporate-operated schools, at all levels and prices, seek to provide: a product niche that more exactly “fits” their clients than public options can.

Are market choices in education the exclusive province of “the rich,” as some argue? Plenty of families exercise what Robert Enlow, Executive Director of the Rose and Milton Friedman Educational Foundation, refers to as “checkbook choice.” Since money is fungible, lifestyle choices—homes, cars, wardrobes, and other amenities—are by implication also educational choices. Meaning: if you can’t have it all, what you choose to have reveals your priorities. The “need” to acquire a luxury car in the automobile market may well preclude your simultaneous purchase of schooling in the education market—that’s “checkbook choice.”

What about taxes you are paying for a product you don’t use, if you choose the private alternative? These taxes include misappropriated resources. Obviously, some taxpayers had a better use for them, though they didn’t get to spend them on those uses. When parents spend on private education in spite of the taxes foregone, we know they are appropriating funds in ways they view as worthwhile. That’s also “checkbook choice.”

In 2003, the John Locke Foundation found that statewide 10 percent of eligible students had opted out of state schools in favor of home and private education. In Wake County, parents have been choosing market alternatives at an even faster rate. The number of children enrolled in public schools in 2003 in Wake was down to 83 percent of all eligible school children in the county that year.

Call it market choice or checkbook choice, it’s the same thing.