Free-market principles and snake oil

The always eye-opening Teaching in the 408 blog has an insightful post on the effects of much-touted competition on education.

Competition as the means to improve all our lives, bring everyone and everything to increasingly higher standards. Then why slums? Why 30,000 lay-offs at GM? Do we really believe that when ___ charter school opens next door, actively recruiting the best-prepared students and most-involved families this will increase the educational opportunities for those who remain at their public school of necessity? That the mere presence of that school and all like it will create a frenzy of improvement and reform? No. It will create another gap, another division, another way to define winners and losers. Why is this okay to so many people? Why is it okay to invest all this time, money, thought, and effort to bring intellectually indefensible free-market principles into a public space that is already limping along, badly in need of solutions, and thereby inherently vulnerable to this snake-oil?

— Caroline