Why Continuous Improvement Is a Poor Substitute for School Choice.

Efforts to introduce school choice have produced pressures on public schools to improve their performance. As a result, many public schools have embraced the total quality management principle of continuous improvement. In this article we explain that while this may be well intentioned, it may have perverse unintended consequences. A likely by-product of adopting this principle is the degradation of school performance because of an asymmetry of incentives that leads to a systematic bias in the evaluation of the efficacy of new innovations. In short, there is pressure to avoid or abandon innovations that educators oppose even if such innovations improve academic performance, while there is pressure to adopt or continue innovations that educators favor even if they do not improve performance. Anecdotal evidence is presented that is consistent with the argument.