Public Dissatisfaction.

As reports of violence and a lack of appreciable rise in achievement scores plagued American schools, parents increasingly looked for options to sending their children to the local public school. School reform advocates, tired of fighting within the system, sought to develop alternatives to the public school system. Still others argued that the best way to hold the public schools accountable for performance was through the tried and true economic method-consumer choice. John Chubb and Terry Moe, in their provocative work, Politics, Markets, and America's Schools (1990), argued for a theory once proposed by Nobel prize winning economist, Milton Friedman: that free enterprise was necessary to force failing institutions out of business. While government could establish standards, a free-market system of private institutions providing education would inevitably use market forces to improve performance. Public debate on the options continued throughout the decade, with...