Customer Reviews

Privatizing Education: Can The School Marketplace Deliver Freedom Of Choice, Efficiency, Equity, And Social Cohesion?

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This book reviews the evidence about so-called "choice" models of education or "free market" models and their impact on education. In the end the evidence shows nothing, but it doesn't refute anything either. What Levin shows us pretty convincingly is that, at the moment anyway, this is a debate driven by ideology rather than by evidence. No matter on which side one falls, one can interpret the evidence based upon their perspective, since the evidence is inconclusive. Like so many other debates in our society we have to move beyond the "classroom effects" and investigate what the proponents or opponents really have as their agenda. This is an excellent book simply because it is one of the first systemic reviews of the evidence as opposed to the ideological journalism with which we are most often confronted. No matter one's perspective, this book is worth reading, because it will alternately challenge and support one's views.

Levin seems to fall just slightly against the "market" ideas for education, but by exploring the evidence in a domestic and international context we learn the ways in which our ideas are uniquely American and driven by an American ideology that really is not based upon education per se, but an all-pervasive notion of economy.