Competition and Standards: Better Together

Andrew Coulson's WaPo op-ed today is fundamentally flawed because it treats standards and choice/competition/customization in education as mutually exclusive competing policy approaches, rather than what they really are--complements that are both more effective when combined. It's no coincidence that the percentage of children attending publicly-funded schools of choice in the United States has increased significantly in the past 15 years--at just the same time as the standards movement has taken off. Standards, by shifting the focus of public accountability from the inputs schools use and what they do to the outcomes they achieve for students, enable schools to have greater autonomy and flexibility in their operations, allowing greater educational diversity and meaningful options. A focus on outcomes also demands greater educational customization to achieve those outcomes for kids with differing learning styles, interests, and innate abilities. At the same time, some form of standards and public reporting of student and school performance are essential for a well-functioning education market, because they address the principal agent problem and provide parents with useful information to make informed educational choices. Coulson's own examples demonstrate this: For-profit tutoring systems in the U.S. and Japan are independent of government, but they damn well are judged by parents based on the results they produce for students on nationally-administered college and, in the case of Japan, high school entrance exams. Like peanut butter and jelly, choice and standards are just better together.