This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, April 29th, 2008.

I'm Caleb Brown.

School choice advocates use terms like Education Marketplace, but should they?

It's not entirely clear that a real market for education services exists at the

K-12 level.

So says John Merrifield, a professor of economics at the University of Texas, he's also

editor of the Journal of School Choice.

Merrifield argues in a new policy analysis at the Cato Institute that a true marketplace

for K-12 education is simply yet to be tried, but researchers draw conclusions as if it has.

He says it's as if researchers wanted to learn about apples by studying lemons.

You think there's a danger of school choice advocates selling markets the way they have

when many of the mechanisms that you hope exist in any market simply aren't there?

Absolutely.

That seems to be my life's work so far

in the school choice movement is telling people

that what they think is evidence is not.

I rolled my eyes a couple of times today

at the presentation because people were citing Milwaukee

in Cleveland, and not Cleveland by name per se,

but citing voucher programs. And well well we've tried choice and it

hasn't reformed the system much and talking about market reforms and there aren't any

market reforms there's been some choice reforms but markets contain certain essential elements, and none of those

...