In response to my recent Washington Post piece criticizing government-imposed curricula and standards, an ed prof. just wrote to say: “Yes, but.…”

His objection was that he did not see the need for market forces to drive excellence in education, citing a consortium of public schools in the Chicago suburbs as an example of high quality within the current monopoly system.

This not only misses my point, it inadvertently proves it.

My point is not that pockets of quality and thrift are impossible within a monopoly system, but that those pockets generally remain isolated and transitory. Monopolies lack a mechanism by which excellence is automatically and routinely encouraged, identified, disseminated and perpetuated. That mechanism is what markets provide, and is why, as I wrote in the WaPo piece, iPods have gone from 5 to 80 gigabytes, and televisions from 4″ black and white tubes to 4′ color panels.

While a monopoly school system can certainly have bright spots, they tend to be isolated and transitory. Brilliant government school teachers are at best given a plaque, and at worst driven out of the system (as happened to Jaime Escalante). Pointing to isolated public school successes from decades past — successes that were not replicated elsewhere, not expanded, and usually not even sustained for more than a generation — is proof that our government monopoly lacks the market’s excellence engine.

In education markets, like the Asian tutoring industry, top teachers are superstars who get to design curricula for thousands or even millions of students and train scores or hundreds of other teachers to use their effective methods. Quality providers expand and are emulated by competitors, and there is a powerful incentive for meaningful innovation.

One teacher in Korea’s private tutoring sector made $2 million last year because his web-based employer has profit sharing and he’s brilliant at what he does, so he gets tons of students. That’s what should have happened to Escalante. That’s the sort of success that should greet excellence in education at all levels. It doesn’t because we don’t have a market.