As heavily involved as I am in education reform, and as committed as Texas has been to top-down standards and accountability based reform of education, I was struck (but not surprised) by this passage in Forbes magazine from Andrew Coulson of the Cato Institute, with whom I have spent some time discussing education strategies: “…there is a vast body of international academic literature comparing market and bureaucratic school systems, and it favors markets in academic achievement, efficiency, responsiveness to parents’ demands, and even the maintenance of physical facilities. The statistically significant results for achievement and efficiency favor markets by a 10-1 margin. By contrast, there is no evidence that imposing government standards improves the performance of true education markets.”
