Fordham Foundation president Checker Finn notes today that recent upticks on the National Assessment of Educational Progress cannot be reasonably credited to the No Child Left Behind act (hat tip to Bill Evers). The NCLB, President Bush’s signature education initiative, was supposed to improve student achievement through bureaucratic accountability measures.

But after noting that NCLB’s proponents can’t back up their claims that the law is working, Finn suggests that we need an “education-achievement ‘audit agency’ to sort out the claims and counterclaims about student performance.”

Maybe. But Amazon.com didn’t have to be told by a federal product quality audit czar to allow its customers to rate the products it sells. They’ve done it because it’s good business. In fact, no matter what product or service you’re interested in, there are resources on the Web to find out virtually anything you could possibly want to know about it. Reviews by users, professional reviews, criticism from competitors…. As a result, consumers are better informed than ever before.  Except in education, which operates outside the free enterprise system.

Sure, we could add a bureaucratic audit agency and hope that it will make our bureaucratic education accountability law accountable, and that that, in turn, will make our bureaucratic education system efficient and innovative.

Or we could just do what we know already works in every other sector of the economy: let consumers choose, and make it easy for a diversity of public and private schools compete to serve them.