ABSTRACT
Despite the educational rhetoric, a major motive behind private school voucher plans, for-profit management of public schools, and, to some extent, charter schools is to fend off the traditional role of the public schools in helping to redistribute power and economic opportunity. Market-oriented school reform proposals are part of a general unwillingness to directly confront the profound economic inequality in the United States and its social implications. In Edward Luttwak's view, the market that cuts prices by eliminating service and jobs does not provide such a bargain after all. Autonomous district legislation would almost certainly provide a legal mechanism for wealthy neighborhoods to secede from less affluent neighborhoods in the same school district. Market-oriented school reforms provide a simple unifying idea; however, they will never improve the distribution of educational resources. The challenge facing American society and its children is not how to find ever more ingenious ways to speed the market on its way.
