WASHINGTON -- Andrew J. Coulson, a Seattle-based researcher in education policy, says public schools can only improve if they face competition like all other businesses.

To make his case, his new book, Market Education (Transaction Publishers, $54.95), reviews 2,500 years of formal education in civilizations worldwide to argue that the best schools were ones in which families paid directly for schooling, rather than obtaining schools from governments. He's releasing the book today in a speech at the National Press Club.

Coulson says the history of education has been almost completely ignored in today's debate over schooling, but he insists it is the best hope for finding solutions to chronic educational woes.

The book takes a history tour of civilizations both ancient and modern, ranging from classical Athens and ancient Rome, through the Islamic world of the Middle Ages, to 19th century England and contemporary America.

One example he cites involves a prominent lawyer in the Roman Empire, early in the first century, who decided to create a high school. Rather than fully endow the school, Pliny the Younger paid only a third of the necessary costs.

The reason he gave was ''that someday my gift might be abused for someone's selfish purposes, as I see happen in many places where teachers' salaries are paid from public funds.'' He added: ''People who may be careless about another person's money are sure to be careful about their own.''

Coulson also compared Athens in the late fifth century B.C., where the government played no role in schools, with Sparta's state-run school system. He says Athenians' intellectual achievements were remarkable for the time.

Coulson, a senior research associate for the Social Philosophy Policy Center at Ohio's Bowling Green State University, elaborates on his thoughts about free-market forces in education in an interview with USA TODAY.

Q: What do you want parents, educators and policymakers to get from your book?

A: Well, I guess if I had to distill the lessons of history down to one sentence, it would probably be that public education and public schooling are not the same thing. Public education has enormous support in this country, overwhelming support. Public education is not so much a set of buildings. It's an ideal.

And that ideal is that all children will have access to schools that will prepare them for both success in private life and also for being taught how to build strong and cohesive communities. These are ideals that virtually everyone in this country supports. But public schools, the mechanism we've chosen to try and advance those ideals, have turned out -- based on my research -- to not be a good tool for advancing those ideals.

Q: You say in your book that the last three requirements for educational excellence are ''freedom, competition, and the profit motive for schools.'' Why do you see market forces working for education?

A: One thing that I was trying to avoid doing was to say ''find a good system that worked, maybe in the Middle Ages or in ancient times'' and just suggest that we copy it. I was worried that, for instance, there might be cultural factors that would affect its success that didn't have anything to do with the school system.

So what I did was try to find the common elements of the best systems across all of history, tried to find the systems that worked well, irrespective of the kind of political setting they were in or the economics.

What I found is that the systems that gave parents complete choice over their children's education, that made sure parents had financial responsibility directly, systems that gave a lot of freedom to educators and also market incentives to educators, consistently did a better job than school systems that didn't have those factors. Typically, state-run systems don't allow market incentives to operate.

Q: When you say parents should bear some financial responsibility for their children's education, you're talking about more than paying taxes?

A: Exactly. Paying taxes, actually, it turns out, is the worst way of funding education because it gives no one any kind of direct control over how that money is spent. It is sort of put into an amorphous pot and doled out as a result of a very complex series of regulations that no one is really on top of. It doesn't relate to the day-to-day experiences of individual families.

When parents are writing a check every couple of months for their children's schooling, they have a very good idea how much that schooling is costing them and what their children are getting out of it. That sort of clarity of vision when you see how much money is going towards your children's education really forces parents to think about whether they are getting their money's worth.

Q: You favor charter schools -- regulation-free public schools developed and operated by parents, teachers and others -- but you like free and competitive markets more. Is that because parents don't pay directly for charter schools?

A: Exactly. There are a couple of other problems with charter schools as well. One problem is that they lack any incentive for schools to keep costs under control or to lower costs, specifically. For instance, in a market, if you have a school that's a competent school, that's very efficiently run but not especially innovative, they are not going to be able to attract parents by saying, ''We have the best new teaching methods or we have very high-tech facilities.''

They might be able to attract parents by saying, ''Well, we charge much less than the other schools.'' Therefore, you'll be able to save money on your children's education in tuition and potentially spend that on other things, like buying a home computer.

In a competitive market, a school has an incentive to lower the amount of money that it is charging. In charter schools, the parents are not the ones who would get any refund if a charter school decided of its own volition to charge the government less.

Q: Vouchers, tax-supported tickets used to send low-income children to private schools, are one way of helping create a free and competitive educational market, right?

A: Basically. The problem now is that you couldn't simply privatize our existing educational system without providing some sort of financial assistance to middle- and low-income families. That to me is the real issue now. I consider the evidence favoring markets to be virtually overwhelming, but I still haven't seen any particular school-choice policy proposal today that's perfect in every respect.

Vouchers are good in many ways because they do give power to the parents. Low-income families historically have always made better educational decisions for their own children than appointed experts have made for them. In 19th century England, for instance, the schools that poor parents chose for their own kids did a better job of promoting literacy than the schools that were subsidized by the state.

It's possible for schools to have incentive to inflate their enrollments when reporting to the government to try and draw extra vouchers. It's possible that there will be just as much of a lobby group lobbying the state to increase the size of the vouchers as there is now to increase spending on public schooling.

Q: What alternative to vouchers do you favor?

A: A kind of tax credit that has been proposed to go on the ballot in Michigan. This tax credit is a simple idea that basically says that anyone who pays for a child's tuition can claim a tax credit. It's probably means-tested and would apply only to middle- and low-income families. It would make it much easier for you to choose from a wide range of schools, public or private. If you don't have children, you can donate money to a private scholarship granting organization and get the tax break. That organization distributes vouchers to children.

Q: Why do school-choice measures such as vouchers fail to win widespread public support?

A: People's fears, very legitimate fears, over what might result. I think many of those fears would be allayed by this massive wealth of evidence that I've tried to compile in Market Education, showing that not only do markets do a good job of the things we expect they would do a good job of.

Not only do they have the ability to make schools more responsive to parents, but they also tend to do the things that we most commonly associate with public schools -- fostering harmonious communities and avoiding a lot of the conflicts that public schools actually cause.

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