This frustration is at the heart of the school choice debate. School choice advocates experience this feeling of helpless and think something has to change. They want an option beyond appealing to the tuned-out gate agent. They want to be able to clearly and cleanly signal disapproval by leaving one school or system for another. The more thoughtful advocates remind us that the real promise of markets is not in providing miracle solutions, but in allowing better providers to emerge and worse ones to gradually get squeezed out. Those who embrace charter schooling and private school choice see them as ways to break up big, impersonal systems in favor of smaller, more human-sized ones.
Choice critics think that supporters are misdiagnosing the problem. They read my American experience and observe that American is a for-profit company operating in a marketplace, and that airline passengers already have choice. Clearly, they argue, there’s no magic in markets. They argue that choice and markets don’t speak to the core issues of professional acumen, while a profit-seeking focus on the bottom line helps drain the humanity and responsiveness from an organization. They note that I still had to wind up on American, that I’ll probably fly American next week (due to limited options), and that my vaunted choice didn’t seem to yield much responsiveness.