A professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Paul E. Peterson, has an article in the September-October issue of Harvard Magazine with some astute observations about education:
As an education-reform strategy, federal regulation is dead. Nor is there much appetite among the states for asserting new accountability rules. The regulated captured the regulators. If reform is to proceed now, it will happen because more competition is being introduced into the American education system....the long-term consequences of greater competition within an industry for consumers and society as a whole can be highly beneficial, as deregulation of the airlines and telecommunications industries has shown. Comparable gains have yet to appear throughout American K-12 education, but to see how it might happen, consider the slow growth of choice and competition—via vouchers and charter schools—that has taken place during the past quarter-century....
careful studies show that voucher students of minority background, even if they do not perform much better on standardized tests than their peers in public school, are more likely to graduate from high school and go on to college...If school reform is to move forward, it will occur via new forms of competition—whether vouchers, charters, home schooling, digital learning, or the transformation of district schools into decentralized, autonomous units.
