What America Can Learn from School Choice in Other Countries.

What America Can Learn from School Choice in Other Countries. David Salisbury and James Tooley, ed. (Cato Institute.)

Only a little, one might conclude, after reflecting on the essays in this collection. Although James Tooley reveals a lively private education sector in the most unlikely of places (see also Tooley's story "Underground Education," p. 22, this issue), school choice is as uneven and limited in other parts of the world as it is in the United States. The disputation over Chile's voucher experiment is vigorous, but even there the constraints on the education marketplace are substantial. And New Zealand's choice system is so narrowly constrained to government-run operations that the innovation would be totally ignored had folks there not had the same political and linguistic ancestry as those populating the United States. Still, even a modicum of school choice and competition can boost student test scores, especially when combined with a comprehensive examination system for high-school graduates, says Ludger Woessmann, whose systematic, sophisticated analyses of international test-score data best summarize what can be learned from abroad. By itself, this lay-friendly summary of Woessmann's more technical studies makes the book worth the price.

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