While the Legislature will soon debate whether to sanction public school choice, thousands of Maine families already choose where to send their children to school.

Maine has one of the oldest — if limited — school choice programs in the country. Roughly 5,000 students and their parents who live in towns without their own high school choose where they will complete their educations. The fact that school choice works well in this rural state has broad-ranging public policy implications for other regions of the country, a University of Maine education professor says.

Professor John Maddaus has devoted much of his research to the state’s school choice program. His latest investigation focuses on whether scores on the Maine Educational Assessment, which are published annually in local newspapers, influence parents’ choice of high schools for their children.

In an article recently published in the Journal of Research in Rural Education, Maddaus and Scott Marion, a professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder, found that test scores do affect parental choice of schools. By reviewing data from three different school years, Maddaus and Marion found that enrollment does increase as a high school’s MEA scores increase.

The authors caution, however, that test scores are just one measure of academic quality that parents use to evaluate schools. Other academic factors parents frequently consider are graduation rates, the availability of programs and the relationship between teachers and parents and students.

In an interview last week, Maddaus said the finding that some parents do consider MEA scores in choosing a high school for their child is particularly noteworthy because it was drawn from rural communities where factors such as transportation, distance and community ties would tend to limit choice. The fact that parents in Maine consider academic factors along with these important social factors is a good indication that school choice can flourish in a more urban environment where transportation issues and distance are less important.

“If it can work here, it can work anywhere,” Maddaus said.

One hundred and eighty-six of the state’s 491 organized municipalities do not have their own high schools. In these cases, the municipality in which the student lives pays tuition to a nearby town where the student attends high school.

By tradition or contract, the majority of such towns send their students to a single high school. However, about 5,000 students and their parents in 75 towns are not bound by contract to a single high school and live close enough to two or more high schools to choose among them. Teen-agers in Greenbush, for example, attend public and private nonsectarian high schools in Old Town, Orono, Howland and Bangor. The town of Glenburn provides bus transportation for its students to public high schools in Hermon, Orono and Bangor as well as John Bapst Memorial High School in Bangor.

The current success of Maine’s school choice program should serve as an example to lawmakers as they consider choice legislation. For example, Maddaus cautions that if towns like Glenburn did not provide transportation, which appears free to parents, but is covered by their property taxes, choice could become limited to only those parents with the capability, financial or otherwise, to get their children to and from school every day.

“Choice should not be limited to just affluent white people,” he said, noting that American Indians on the state’s three reservations also have a choice of high schools.

In addition, Maddaus points out that private schools such as John Bapst, George Stevens Academy in Blue Hill and Foxcroft Academy in Dover-Foxcroft effectively operate as public schools because of the large number of tuitioned students they accept each year.

Any legislation that only provides for choice among public schools, as would a bill that the Education Committee will take up next week, would be very problematic, Maddaus said.

As discussions of school choice are likely to become more heated and frequent, the factors influencing choice will continue to need close examination, Maddaus said.

While his current study found that MEA scores do influence parental choice of a high school, additional research is needed into other assessments of academic quality that are used by parents.

“What is it that parents are looking for and how do they know when they’ve found it?” Maddaus asked.