Educational Markets and School Choice

Though serious research and scholarly (and political) interest in the topic dates back well over a decade, in the last few years there has been an accelerating rate of production of books and articles on 'school choice'. This may be due largely to the conclusion and reporting of the many research projects that were set up in the late 1980s and early 1990s to enquire into the issue. In a paper written shortly after some of that earlier work had begun to emerge I suggested that much of it was characterised by pressures towards 'premature application' and that this was evident in four features of that work, ethnocentric assumptions, theoretical parochialism, a focus on education politics rather than the politics of education and a problem-solving rather than a critical approach (Dale, 1994). It was with the hope and expectation that I would be able to examine the validity of that critique in respect of a 'second wave' of studies on school choice that I undertook to carry out this review. Unfortunately, even in an era when we are able to hold simultaneous discussions with colleagues across the world, it does not appear