The Trouble with Monopoly Schooling

In education markets, parents evaluate schools across a whole range of criteria, including such output quality measures as the fraction of their students that go on to good jobs or good colleges.

In the abscence of that broad-based parental evaluation, monopoly school systems have to make do with rating schools and teachers based on test-scores -- if they bother rating them at all. When the evaluation criteria are that narrow, it becomes feasible to game the system by artificially inflating students scores. It isn't just feasible, it's actually done.

Houston Independent School District just "fired six teachers, demoted two principals, and an assistant principal, and reprimanded several other district employees," according to a recent story at Agape Press. They might never have even noticed the cheating, let alone done anything about it, if suspect test scores hadn't been brought embarassingly to their attention in the pages of the Dallas Morning News.