The Relationship of Competition and Choice to Innovation in Education Markets: A Review of Research on Four Cases (Occasional Paper 26

Abstract –This paper looks at innovation in school choice programs-appraising this presumed causal relationship between market mechanisms and innovation in two ways. First, the analysis reviews market-oriented school reforms in four systems (New Zealand, Chile, England and Wales, and North America), examining how competition and choice foster innovation in education. These systems include publicly funded and privately administered schools, schools run by corporations, newly autonomous established schools, and new schools created to be free of bureaucratic constraints in order to develop innovative practices. This review indicates that, despite widely held assumptions about the power of markets, hypothetical predictions about competition and choice are largely unfulfilled in practice. In fact, interventions by public bureaucracies have often succeeded in encouraging classroom innovations, while market mechanisms appear to contribute to standardization. Second, this paper engages in an interpretive exploration of the logic of markets-particularly as they are applied to education. Insofar as reformers refer to markets for consumer goods as appropriate models for education, this paper examines the logic of such markets, as well as the logic of quasi-markets in education. In fact, while competitive environments often serve as catalysts for innovative practices, competition and choice can also lead toward emulation and standardization-trends that are missed in simplistic portrayals of markets. A more complex view o