School Choice? Or is it Privatization?

an Goldhaber's interesting article on school choice (School Choice: An Examination of Empirical Evidence on Achievement, Parental Decision Making, and Equity, December 1999 Educational Researcher) inadvertently poses arguments for and against choice in a way that may obscure rather than illuminate policy. It is all well and good to define school choice as any policy that is designed to reduce constraints that current school configurations place on and students (p. 16), but, as Goldhaber himself recognizes by end of his article, the bounds of debate have shifted rather dramatically from whether to enhance choice within public system to question of public funding for vouchers that could be used at private schools (p. 22). Given that fact, he should have considered whether school choice arguments, including those that support charter schools, were ever about anything but increasing role of publicly funded, privately delivered education. When choice is about privatization, we need to know much more about how such an educa-