In this article, the authors comment on Andrew Coulson's "Comparing Public, Private, and Market Schools: The International Evidence." The authors believe that Coulson's paper is a very interesting review of the literature on the ability of market-produced education to outperform government-produced education. Coulson's response on this commentary…

While Merrifield is correct in his basic argument that so-called "market reforms" in el/sec schooling are far from being pure market, he is incorrect to suggest that purer market projects are needed together with simulations of pure market reforms. There are two fundamental problems in that thesis. First, it is not clear that school choice in…

Recent state and national policy has both reflected and helped to further an image of localities as parochial, reactionary, ineffective, and appropriately marginalized in the enterprise of school reform. Growing state and national roles (on one hand) and growing market and private sector inroads (on another) have the potential to undermine…

Studies of existing best practices cannot determine whether the current "best" schooling practices could be even better, less costly, or more effective and/or improve at a faster rate, but we can discover a cost effective menu of schooling options and each item's minimum cost through market accountability experiments. This paper describes…