Freedom of choice, competence and quality: the educational policies of the Community of Madrid

The current article constitutes a part of the broader research project "Endogenous and exogenous dynamics of privatization: the establishment of the quasi-market model in Spain", founded by the Spanish Ministry of Education. One of the main line of research is being developed in the Autonomous region of Madrid, and its main aim is to track and state explicitly endogenous and exogenous privatization dynamics within the home educational system, in order to detect and analyze their educational effects and consequences. The local educational government has as main goal the promotion of families' right to choose the school for their children. The promotion of this right will have as consequence, as the local government argues, the promotion of the competition between schools, which in turn will improve the quality of education. In order to achieve this aim, the local government is carrying out two main approaches: promoting the autonomy of schools and publicizing rankings of schools. This article is based on the analysis of the effectiveness of these policies in relation with the quality of education from three perspectives: the implementation of these policies by the regional government, which constitutes an analysis of internal consistency, the real effectiveness of these policies, what is to say their influence on the quality of the educational system as a whole, and finally, the reception of these policies from the families and from the schools, as they both constitute the offer and the supply of education.