This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, August 7th, 2008. I'm Caleb Brown.

Education of Children in America hasn't been a true market for a very long time, it's long been dominated by state

and local governments.

But what might that market look like?

Andrew Coulson, director of the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom, gathered some evidence from around the world.

It's really very striking if you look for places where education is organized as a real marketplace where parents pay directly

some significant portion of the cost, maybe not all, but some significant portion of the cost of

their own kids education, and the schools are free to teach whatever they want, whenever

they want, they're totally chosen by parents not assigned by a bureaucrat.

Those kinds of market-like education systems out-perform state-run

monopoly systems like we're used to in the United States by a margin of 17 to 1.

Of all the findings I was able to look at, of this kind of comparison, markets

versus monopolies in education, I found 35 findings favoring markets in various outcomes like

academic achievement, efficiency, parental

satisfaction. So that was 35 positive findings from markets. Only two that

were statistically insignificant and sorry only one that was statistically insignificant and, and sorry, only one that was statistically insignificant and

only two that favored monopoly provision.

So that's a ratio of 17 to one in favor of market provision of education.

Now most kids in the United States of course are educated through the public school system but even in

private schools those schools are often heavily subsidized by

churches or other groups?

Well, it's interesting, actually.

...