Pro-Privatization Ideologue Rips Privatization of Public Schools

Valerie Strauss goes into some detail about how the person in charge of Stanford’s CREDO institute has concluded that privatization does not work in the public education sector.

Here’s the money quote from Margarte Raymond, the head of CREDO, who happens to be married to Eric Hanushek, who jump-started the Value-Added Measurement syndrome in education:

This is one of the big insights for me. I actually am kind of a pro-market kinda girl. But it doesn’t seem to work in a choice environment for education. I’ve studied competitive markets for much of my career. That’s my academic focus for my work. And it’s [education] the only industry/sector where the market mechanism just doesn’t work. I think it’s not helpful to expect parents to be the agents of quality assurance throughout the state. I think there are other supports that are needed. Frankly parents have not been really well educated in the mechanisms of choice.… I think the policy environment really needs to focus on creating much more information and transparency about performance than we’ve had for the 20 years of the charter school movement. I think we need to have a greater degree of oversight of charter schools, but I also think we have to have some oversight of the overseers.