Real Markets Don't Eat Quiche

After half a century of debate over school reforms inspired by the free market, are we any closer to a truly competitive marketplace in education? If not, why not? What does it really take to create an effective, universally accessible education market?

I'll be joining a group of education policy colleagues at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday morning to try to answer those questions. You can watch a simulcast of the presentations on the web. (I'll be on around 10:30am ET, in case yer innerested). The official title of the conference is: "Creating a True Marketplace in Education."

My contribution to this event is a Market Education Metric. It's a ranking system for school choice reforms that is designed to predict the quality and scope of the market that a given proposal is likely to create in the medium to long term. You type in a few dozen data points that describe the details of the proposal, and it spits out a number, from 0 to 100, ranking that proposal.

The rough draft of a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet capable of computing the metric, along with my paper explaining it, can be found here.

It is certain to have a few kinks in it, and the weightings and functions that make it up could stand to be refined, but it's a start.