Reply by John Merrifield, Author of 'Imagined Evidence and False Imperatives'

In this article, the author answers Mark Holmes's comments on his article "Imagined Evidence and False Imperatives." Certainly, readers can see in Holmes's comment the prevailing disagreement about the importance of existing data sets to an assessment of the effects of competition and other aspects of genuine markets. Holmes acknowledges the limitations of the school and school system settings generating data studied to assess the effects of school system competitiveness but then argues that the findings are generally significant, citing many of them. The author argues that the widely cited findings are only narrowly significant, that small size of programs, or highly prescriptive regulation, or both, preclude observation of effects of anything more than modest rivalry in action, not the competition present in most of the economy. With this in mind, the reader would be well advised to frequently return to the Holmes comment and thereby benefit from enough solid investigative ideas and issues to comprise the life's work of many scholars.