Michael J. Petrilli's editorial, "What if competition doesn't work?" garnered some response:
From John Merrifield, Professor of Economics, University of Texas at San Antonio
I'm stunned! Petrilli maintains that tiny, narrowly targeted voucher programs with participation caps, and charters (with all their restrictions) have provided us enough evidence to give up on competition lifting all boats? We haven't begun to scratch the surface of the dynamic effects of a truly competitive marketplace. The conditions of the automobile industry differ greatly from even the most "competitive" K-12 setting. Why can't we support vouchers and charters as a limited end by themselves, AND still aim for a choice program structured to actually fully harness market forces? No existing program is structured that way. Voucher programs have been deliberately designed to prevent much shrinkage of district market share. Charters, even relatively unrestricted versions such as those in Arizona, suffer from major limitations, the most important of which is price control. Market-determined price change is critical!
Private schools have over 30 percent of the market in some metro areas, but they are still at a huge funding disadvantage. They can survive against free competition only because the competition is awful. Entry barriers remain high. Private school tuition is not formally capped, but is suppressed by the zero price of public schooling, and the bite of the taxes to fund it.
The price control issue is huge, and sadly almost totally neglected. The dynamism and rapid improvement characteristics of the marketplace come from the combination of easy entry/exit (level playing field) and market-determined price change. Both are critical, and both are generally absent in every K-12 region. Price flexibility should be a non-negotiable element of school choice pretending to be a reform catalyst.
Perhaps your piece will, in a roundabout way, precipitate the much needed discussion of the need to introduce a functioning price system into K-12 education. I hope so!
From Ted Kolderie, Education/Evolving
Your editorial is sensible about the limited effect of competition. Whether competition works depends on whether the established enterprise responds. Whether or not district schools change when chartering appears, for example, depends on what the district does. Chartered schools don't change district schools: Only districts change district schools.
If districts don't respond this might be because they aren't able to respond. I haven't yet heard anyone refute Clayton Christensen's analysis about the very limited ability of existing organizations-in any field-to change in more than incremental ways. Nobody, really, seems to know how to transform existing schools. We're hearing a lot of 'hoping' but getting little solid evidence that kids who haven't succeeded in conventional school are suddenly going to start succeeding in conventional school just because somebody now tells 'em how important it is to learn. Milo Cutter, still heading the country's first chartered school here in Saint Paul, says it pretty simply: "These kids are not into consequential behavior".
So if schooling does now need to change in fairly radical ways, the process of change will be mainly the process of creating different schools. We'll need to keep building, enlarging, and improving the open sector. Chartering is a good way to do this in the early stages . . . because, as enabling legislation, it offers the widest opportunity for trying-things and as a result the greatest likelihood of generating breakthrough innovations. But as the really good new school models appear the open sector can be developed also by replicating the quality new models. It's time for more discussion about a new-schools effort along that line.