When competing businesses come together for a big, group hug to share ideas and lobbyists and workshop about how to underpay columnists and other powerless drones; and how they can all work together for a better tomorrow; the meeting represents either a boisterous trade association meeting – or a sinister violation of the antitrust laws.

Yes, yes, businesses have considerable First Amendment rights to engage in free speech with whomever and about whatever they want. And they are free to associate with each other until the bar closes for the night. But the antitrust dogs still sniff around, just in case the boys are engaged in some sort of monopoly-creating, evil constraint on the sanctity of the free market.

The details are understood only by a tiny oligopoly (which is sort of like a monopoly, but different) of antitrust lawyers, but the general principles are clear enough. We appreciate relatively free and robust markets – they make the competitors dress pretty and discipline their prices and serve us in the manner to which we are accustomed, lest we walk across the street to a competitor.

Even public education, the Dead Sea of market competition, has come alive a bit. There’s a growing call for voucher experiments that allow families (aka, consumers) to pick and choose among public and private school, clutching a government voucher in their sweaty paws to close the deal.

More common is the growth of “charter” schools, a murky hybrid of a beast that is still “public,” but free of some of the constraints and idiosyncrasies of the regular public schools with which they compete.

Oops. Did I say “compete”? The rules of the game are a bit more fuzzy than that in the charter/public marketplace.

Competing Interests

The charters tend to be treated with varying degrees of hostility in the local marketplaces, as the charters dip their toes in the competitive waters without necessarily delivering an overt message that you should rescue your kids from the hideous public school alternative and come on over for charter heaven.

By the nature of the beast, the charters are quietly whispering a marketing message that they are alluring, desirable, flexible and viable, blessed by whatever state or local licensing authority granted them their charters. But in most cases, an unofficial peace treaty limits the size and numbers and funding of the charters – and frowns on aggressive marketing by the upstarts.

The traditional public schools complain (often, without much evidence) that charter schools cherry-pick the best, most motivated kids – which, in a real marketplace, wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, even if it were true.

Yes, yes, it is not a perfect market – but it has begun to hint at a competitive environment that is healthy for families and public education.

But wait. Who is that ominous figure up there on the mountaintop, crying out, “enough, enough – enough competition; we must bring traditional and charter together as one, to stamp out this unpleasant competitive environment?”

It’s Bill Gates, of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which issues checks that never bounce. Gates wanders the nation, enticing school districts to “cooperate” and share good ideas among the traditional and charter schools.

Boston is the latest community to grab the bait. The Boston School Committee and 14 city charter schools have agreed (for a price, of course) to “implement” the anti-competitive conspiracy. Instead, they promise to send out the message that, eventually, the charters and the traditional schools will be as one – which is to say, don’t you worry your pretty little heads about which schools are “better.”

It all sounds so warm and fuzzy. As Vicki Phillips, the education guru for the Gates Foundation, wrote in Education Week earlier this year, “district public schools and public charter schools can learn a lot from each other, if they commit to listening to each other.”

Or, as they say in the real world, if the competition starts to kick your butt, make yourself even better, which is good for you and good for the consumers, too.

The Gates intervention risks doing damage to the promising competition that the evolving charter/traditional school marketplace offers.