Choice and Competition in American Education.

• Author: Merrifield, John
• Position: Book review

Choice and Competition in American Education

Edited by Paul Peterson

Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006.

Pp. vii, 274. $21.95 paperback.

Paul Peterson's Choice and Competition in American Education, a collection of twenty-three Education Next essays, provides a good overview of the limited choice and rivalry present in some U.S. K-12 school systems. Several chapters also discuss the woeful state of U.S. K-12 education and the barriers to reform, and several others describe efforts to tweak political accountability by contracting out some school services and by changing administrator training, teacher pay, and credentialing.

The first two chapters, as well as chapter 20, attempt to extract useful information from the experience with contracting out school inputs, including private management of public-school campuses. Some of the contracting-out issues are interesting, but the implied relevance of competition to choice and competition in education is misleading. Such contracting yields no additional choice or competition in the delivery of K-12 instruction. Henry Levin's chapter raises interesting questions about space shortages in elite private schools and about equity concerns. New schools apparently cannot easily deliver what many affluent parents seek in a private school--perhaps the reputation and status of admission to a school with a long, noble history--but that claim bears investigation.

On the basis of those persistent shortages, very limited evidence from contracting out services, the characteristics of existing private schools, and Chile's voucher program, Levin rejects well-established economic theory regarding the likely effects of true competition. Because the alleged evidence is of dubious relevance, however, that rejection is at best premature. Chilean schools have little opportunity to compete; they all are regulated in such great detail that the voucher program amounts to little more than public-school choice. Even the effects of contracting out school management cannot tell us much about the effects of choice and competition. Privatizing management under contract just converts a government-run monopoly into a privately run but nevertheless government-owned and regulated monopoly. The much-touted characteristics of existing U.S. private schools are the direct result of the near impossibility of making a profit while competing against "free" public schools.

Like Levin, Mary Diez argues that regulation is necessary to...