Pro-choice: two decades of empirical research has shown that education reform will be the real winner if schools are allowed to compete for students.

• Author: Hood, John
• Position: Free & Clear

Most academics don't reshape their fields until they finish their Ph.Ds. Orris Herfindahl was an exception. While completing his in economics at Columbia University in the late 1940s, he came up with a simple but powerful means of depicting industrial concentration. He squared the market share of each company competing in it, then summed the resulting numbers. Another economist, Albert Hirschman, had devised a similar formula in 1945, but his interest had been measuring the relative economic power of large and small nations. In his 1950 dissertation, Herfindahl broke ground by using the formula to measure consolidation and competition in private industry. The Herfindahl Index--commonly called the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index--became a standard tool in economic analysis, industrial organization and antitrust enforcement.

In the 1990s, a new generation of scholars began using the Herfindahl Index to evaluate public services. In 1992, for example, Melvin Borland and Roy Howsen, economics professors at Western Kentucky University, measured how many elementary and secondary schools parents could choose from. The economists then used a regression equation to explore a potential link between school competition and student outcomes. They found one. Other scholars replicated their findings, which suggested that the more schools competed for students, the better students performed.

In a 2000 follow-up study published in the journal Education Economics, Borland and Howsen compared the effects of school competition with those of popular public-school reforms such as reducing class sizes or paying bonuses to teachers who obtain graduate degrees. They found such reforms "are relatively insignificant in terms of affecting student achievement." Instead, policymakers should focus on institutional changes that promote the creation of schools and facilitate choice among them. They concluded that competition in the educational marketplace is the most important variable "in which increases in student academic achievement are likely."

The reason for this detailed background is that in debates about education reform, personal passions and interest-group politics often displace rational discourse and sober scholarship. The assumption is that if you don't agree with someone else's idea for how to help students succeed in school, college, career and society, you must not care whether they succeed--or even want them to fail. It's a bizarre assumption. Does anyone...