Public Education Is Superior and Must Be Protected from Competition. Opponents of School Choice Can’t Make Up Their Minds.

FEE reports:

Defenders of public education often point to data showing public schools to be as good as or better than private alternatives. A recent book celebrating such data is The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools.

Public schools, according to the authors, tend to outperform private rivals on a variety of metrics. Such groups as the National Education Association teachers’ union have used this research to make a case against “privatization.” (The book’s research has been criticized in some quarters for using flawed research methods, and other data show that private schools tend to outperform public ones.)


But when school choice proposals make legislative headway and threaten public school systems, this confidence seems to evaporate. People start fulminating about how school choice programs would effectively crush the public education system.

Public education: one big confidence game with costly pensions.