Consumers are running amok, shopping almost anywhere, buying goods and services from around the world.

We take some theoretical pleasure in a big, sloppy, self-interested marketplace in which merchants and customers hash out what suits them best – but it is an exhausting, hard-to-forecast morass of incentives and “rational” choices.

The last bastion of resistance to any hint of marketplace messiness was modern public education in the United States, where consumer participation was mandated, choice was severely limited, providers were licensed and credentialed to within an inch of their pampered little lives, and customer satisfaction was irrelevant.

But, grudgingly, things are changing, even in Massachusetts – a union-friendly environment slow to embrace the charms of real competition. While Milwaukee and Cleveland embraced semi-raucous, voucher-driven school choice many years ago; and while Arizona and a handful of other cowboy/Libertarian-style states opened up the marketplace to charter schools many years ago; Massachusetts was slow to respond to the inevitable call of the wild – a system that at least pretended to respond to market signals and consumer choice.

In part to fend off any itch for real “school choice,” in part to at least pretend that school integration was a real option, Massachusetts has created a cautious charter school option that now claims a state-wide enrollment of about 27,000 – still small, but twice the numbers of a decade ago.

The keepers of the monopoly – teachers’ unions and local school officials – continue to grumble about the charter alternatives. The very fact that they exist at all is a signal to parents that there is at least a mediocre marketplace for “public” education; that accidents of birth, location and school district don’t necessarily determine the quality and quantity and style of education a child might receive.

Choices Everywhere

Massachusetts still has far to go to achieve the more rambunctious kinds of options available in other places. In Los Angeles, for instance, the school district just opened 43 campuses to entrepreneurs of all stripes, from traditional public school teachers to nonprofit to regional and national charter operators – as part of a school reform package that will give families a broad, if bewildering, set of educational options.

Where Massachusetts might really stand out in the school-choice experiments would be with a decision to dump its loyalty to the notion that each student can grow up to be President of the United States. Massachusetts has the reasonable size, wealth and sophistication to take a deep breath, pluck kids with identifiable strengths and weaknesses out of the general population – and send them on their way to a future ranging from vocational education to the Ivy League.

One of the new, nonprofit, charter school operators in South Boston suggested in the Boston Globe that if even one student leaves the schools, it would be seen as a “failure.” Bravado is a good sign, but, in truth, some students probably should leave – just as others knock on the door and ask to come in. That’s a marketplace; that’s a good thing.

A new state study found thousands of Massachusetts eighth-graders at risk of dropping out of high school. The traditional “option” has been to spend too many dollars on murky social service programs to return them to the fold. State and federal money sloshes around to “plan” and “implement” all manner of unsuccessful reforms – with the underlying premise that the kids will remain in struggling or miserable schools that can’t cope with either their problems or unusual talents.

One of the joys of the charter schools and other alternatives is the recognition that weird, flexible curriculum experiments can speak to some, but not all, students – escaping from the odd notion that schools (especially urban schools) can be all things to all people.

At the heart of all of this must be a business-oriented recognition that each and every student is a consumer of sorts, who should be given some flexibility when shopping for appropriate educational options. School districts in Idaho have begun transmitting individual student information to a state data base, so that, at least in theory, the kids can be assisted as real, live individual creatures, as opposed to aggregated lumps.

It almost sounds like a customer data base. Imagine that.