Review concludes that Cato's simple tally of unscreened studies is not a useful way of summarizing research

Contact: Clive Belfield, (718) 997-5448; (email) Belfield@qc.edu
Kevin Welner, (303) 492-8370; (email) kevin.welner@gmail.com

TEMPE, Ariz and BOULDER, Colo. (Sept. 30, 2008) -- A new report from the Cato Institute, Markets vs. Monopolies in Education: A Global Review of the Evidence, purports to show that private schools around the world perform better than public schools and that the United States should embrace a free and competitive education marketplace. A Think Tank Review of the Cato report, however, finds the report's analysis to be faulty and the resulting policy conclusion to be unwarranted.

The Cato report was reviewed for the Think Tank Review Project by Professor Clive Belfield of Queens College/City University of New York, who is also co-director of the Center for Benefit-Cost Studies in Education at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Markets vs. Monopolies, authored by Cato's Andrew Coulson, tallies up the conclusions reached by 55 domestic and international studies. It finds that, by a ratio of 8 to 1, private schools outperform public ones. It then presents the results of a closer look at a subset of studies, representing systems with the greatest market freedom, and finds that private schools again outperform public schools.

From these findings, the report draws a series of broad policy recommendations: that the content of schooling does not need to be overseen by the state; that there should be universal access to minimally regulated education markets; and that parents should directly pay at least some of the cost of their children's education.

Belfield's review strongly criticizes the report's analysis as well as its findings. "Contrary to the basic assertion in the Cato report, there is little warrant for U.S. policymakers to draw policy conclusions from tallying the results of the body of very uneven international evidence. The large and growing body of U.S. evidence about school choice and marketization is more accessible, applicable and useful than figuring out how international evidence applies to the U.S."

Regarding the report's simplistic "vote-counting" to analyze the studies' conclusions, Belfield notes that "not all votes--not all studies--are necessarily equal." Researchers have developed much more careful ways of analyzing and making sense of multiple studies that explore related phenomena. The danger, Belfield explains, is that many of the studies counted in the Cato study are substantially weaker than others, and their value is highly suspect.

The Cato report also omits a number of relevant studies, raising "serious questions about the report's methodological assumptions and about the usefulness of reviewing international evidence instead of relying on U.S. research," Belfield writes.

Other problems noted by Belfield include:
* Nearly half of the research comes from one country, Chile.
* The report's definitions and applications of the terms "monopoly" and "market" fail to account for the great variations within the U.S. and overseas.
* The report inappropriately dismisses "selectivity bias"--that is, factors beyond the control of a study that may influence why parents choose public or private schools.

Finally, even if the report's fundamental findings of the experiences of other countries were accurate, it nonetheless cannot support the policy conclusions. The national systems surveyed are so different from the U.S. as to make comparisons questionable, and the report ignores such questions as the costs vs. benefit of market approaches, both in economic and social terms.

"It is possible that private schools are superior to public schools when all the international evidence is counted," Belfield writes. "We don't know, and this report does little if anything to help answer that question."

But the best studies in the U.S. and abroad, which include rigorous controls for bias, show the purported private school advantage to range from small to non-existent, he concludes. "As such, expanding market forces is unlikely to yield dramatic improvements in the quality of the U.S. education system."

CONTACT:
Clive Belfield, Assistant Professor
Queens College/CUNY
718-997-5448
Belfield@qc.edu

Kevin Welner, Professor and Director
Education and the Public Interest Center
University of Colorado at Boulder
(303) 492-8370
kevin.welner@gmail.com

About the Think Tank Review Project

The Think Tank Review Project (http://thinktankreview.org), a collaborative project of the ASU Education Policy Research Unit (EPRU) and CU-Boulder's Education and the Public Interest Center (EPIC), provides the public, policy makers, and the press with timely, academically sound reviews of selected think tank publications. The project is made possible by funding from the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice.

Kevin Welner, the project co-director, explains that the project is needed because, "despite their garnering of media attention and their influence with many policy makers, reports released by private think tanks vary tremendously in their quality. Many think tank reports are little more than ideological argumentation dressed up as research. Many others include flaws that would likely have been identified and addressed through the peer review process. We believe that the media, policy makers, and the public will greatly benefit from having qualified social scientists provide reviews of these documents in a timely fashion." He adds, "we don't consider our reviews to be the final word, nor is our goal to stop think tanks' contributions to a public dialogue. That dialogue is, in fact, what we value the most. The best ideas come about through rigorous critique and debate."

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The Education and the Public Interest Center (EPIC) at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the Education Policy Research Unit (EPRU) at Arizona State University collaborate to produce policy briefs and think tank reviews. Our goal is to promote well-informed democratic deliberation about education policy by providing academic as well as non-academic audiences with useful information and high quality analyses.

Visit EPIC and EPRU at http://educationanalysis.org

EPIC and EPRU are members of the Education Policy Alliance
(http://educationpolicyalliance.org).

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