Why we need no-frills, low-cost private schools

If you ever happen to find yourself teaching an economics class at a private school, here’s a question you could write on the blackboard. Which industry manages to keep pushing up its prices faster than inflation, and expanding its market share at the same time? The answer is the one you’re in: private education. In the last two decades, the British private schools industry has pulled off a trick that most business-school textbooks would tell you is impossible: attracting more business while becoming more and more expensive.

Schools have broken out of what is usually the most rigid of all the dismal science’s iron laws: that as prices rise, demand declines. Parents contemplating the size of the bill for the term that has just begun — with all those must-have extra ski trips and other treats — might care to ask why the market in education has somehow failed to deliver decent schools at affordable prices.