Chapter 21 presents the case for market accountability in education. Market reforms in education are premised on the idea that public education systems run by large bureaucratic organizations and financed by tax revenues will not provide educational services efficiently because they do not face competition from equally subsidized alternative (private) suppliers. The chapter reviews the underlying theory behind this argument, and provides examples of systems that have implemented market accountability in the form of vouchers and charters, focusing on Chile and Milwaukee. It further analyzes evidence on whether, in practice, market accountability seems to work to produce the more efficient delivery of educational outcomes, either because private provision is more effective and efficient than public schooling or because competition for students between private and public schools increases effectiveness and efficiency of the entire education system. At the end of the chapter, we compare the overall evidence on improving student outcomes of State-driven accountability systems and market accountability systems.

In the spring of 1974, the 31-year-old junior Senator from Delaware, Joseph R. Biden, Jr., published a law review article in which he decried the traditional system of privately financed election campaigns. Private financing, Senator Biden contended, “affords certain wealthy individuals or special interest groups the potential for exerting a disproportionate influence over both the electoral mechanism and the policy-making processes of the government.” Moreover, Biden urged, private funding poses an obstacle to the candidacies of “individuals of moderate means” and so was at odds with the “concept of American democracy [that] presumes that all citizens, regardless of access to wealth, have equal access to the political process.” In addition, he argued that private funding favored incumbents. To address the “Political Darwinism” of private financing, Biden called on Congress to adopt a system of public funding for all federal candidates.

Chapter 2 demonstrates that disaggregating the hidden state into underlying dimensions is theoretically valuable. The rhetorical and policy design dimensions are analytically separable. They occur in different spheres of political activity: policymaker communications and policy design. Combining these two dimensions produces different sorts of politics, with implications for the survival and growth of attenuated policies. I term these phenomena “two dimensions of attenuated governance.” Vouchers – policies which deliver public money to individuals for the purchase of services in private markets that would otherwise be provided by the government direct – are a source of empirical observations of attenuated governance.

This chapter illuminates the many deficiencies of contemporary educational reform movements. Most notable among these movements are “accountability,” privatization, vouchers, and charter schools. All of these impulses prove, under closer examination, to be inimical to the tenets of social constructivism, the vision of the Founders, and the project of democracy. Many of these “reforms” have even tacitly adopted the language and principles of behaviorism. The chapter concludes by proposing social constructivist pedagogy and early childhood intervention as the best way to educate a democratic citizenry.