Earlier today in the commentary on why good-to-great teachers may not be fans of performance-based evaluations, your editor mentioned economics editorialist Henry Hazlitt’s point that economic changes (along with technological advances) can explain why companies that were once top-performers or dominant players in their markets are no longer in those prime positions. This axiom can be extended into American public education itself, particularly when it comes to the role of traditional districts in providing instruction and curricula.

One way a firm can find itself in a middling position is by the changes that go on when it comes to technology, particularly in the use of different tools to do the same work once done with the products peddled by that firm. One example of this can be found in the area of computing. For more than three decades, Microsoft Corp., held a near-monopoly on computing, thanks to the Windows operating system, which expanded consumer access to the productivity and social benefits of computer technology and also made it less expensive for companies to move away from paper-based filing and delivery. This near-monopoly became especially potent during the early days of the Internet, thanks to Microsoft’s success in controlling what browsers could be used to access the World Wide Web; the fears of that power was so great that the software giant found itself the subject of lawsuits from federal officials (including the anti-trust action led by future New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein) and governments in Europe.

These days, one can say that Microsoft no longer holds a monopoly on computing. Sure, it is still the biggest player on desktops and laptops. But computing is no longer a matter of using a box attached to a physical keyboard. Starting with Research in Motion, which revolutionized the cellphone in 2001 by merging it with the personal digital assistant technology innovated by the now-defunct Palm, cellphones slowly became super-microcomputers, capable of handling e-mail, word processing, and even Web surfing. Microsoft’s longstanding rival in the computer software field, Apple Computer, took it a step further six years later with the launch of the iPhone, bringing the convenience of touchscreen keyboards, the processing power of late 1980s computers, and the ability to access video, to what we now call smartphones. The launch of the Kindle e-reader by Amazon a few years later would portend the advent of the tablet that started with Apple’s iPad, Barnes and continued with Barnes and Noble’s Nook Tablet.

These days, half of all the computers sold throughout the world are no longer pure computers. We are talking about smartphones, cellphones, tablets, e-readers, portable music players that emerged from Sony’s revolutionary Walkman, and even video game consoles. While Microsoft remains dominant in the desktop and laptop arenas (and is the leading player in video game console sales thanks to the Xbox 360), Apple and Google (through its Android operating system) now dominate the smartphone and tablet markets. This fact (and Microsoft’s failures to either embrace those sectors, or in the case of the smartphone market, in which it was an early leader, innovate upon RIM’s success) explains why it is now rushing to capture share in the tablet market through the new Surface device, and has launched a new version of Windows that can be used on touchscreen devices and traditional computers.

Microsoft’s decline from the predominant player in computing to one of the big three can also be seen in what is happening to the traditional district model. For most of the last 150 years, thanks to the efforts of Horace Mann to impose a Unitarian-tinged civic religion, districts held the near-monopoly on providing education to children and their families. Although Catholic schools were the alternative provider of choice, especially to poor kids of that faith, it has been rare to see a private school or an alternative form of public education within communities.

But these days, the failures of districts to provide high-quality education to children, especially from poor and minority backgrounds, has been crystal clear. With districts such as Detroit graduating far fewer than half of its high school freshmen in four years — especially in an increasingly knowledge-based economic age in which dropouts struggle to gain part-time employment — the model, which is driven more toward scale than toward providing high-quality education, has proven ill-equipped to take on such matters as provide more-personalized forms of learning or even serve ex-dropouts looking to complete their high school diplomas and gain college degrees. The very size of districts (along with the longstanding practices that have plagued American public education) have led to the development of bureaucracies that foster cultures of mediocrity and failure that are difficult to overhaul.

This is where the expansion of school choice, including charter schools, vouchers, Parent Trigger laws, DIY school efforts, and online and blended learning systems, comes in. Such tools can potentially allow for families to seek out school opportunities that can best serve the needs of the children they love (and in the case of Parent Trigger laws, allow them to take over and overhaul schools in their own communities), provide communities with tools to spur renewal of economies and societies, and give talented, entrepreneurial teachers new outlets for using their talents to help children succeed. While education traditionalists and traditional district leaders fight hard to keep the monopoly in place, they struggle to adapt to the new paradigm of school delivery.

Traditional districts in big cities are already losing their monopoly positions in providing education. From New Orleans (where nearly all but a fifth of schools are charters) to Washington, D.C. (where the traditional district educates less than three-fifths of children in its boundaries), families frustrated with systemic failure are moving away from the traditional model. Online and blended learning, which plays off of the disruptive nature of the Internet that Marc Andreessen was prescient about two decades ago after developing the first Web browser, holds even more promise. Some 1 million children took online courses during the 2007-2008 school year, according to Anthony J. Picciano of Hunter College and Jeff Seaman of Babson, a 47 percent increase over the number of kids taking online courses two years earlier; thanks to adults who are taking online college courses, the possibilities of growth are even greater.

Although there are worries that poor and minority kids cannot get their hands on the technologies needed to access blended learning, these worries are countered by the reality that for most households, smartphones are already available for education; as seen in developing countries and in fast-rising countries with rickety infrastructures such as India, mobile technologies can be scaled to an affordable price point that can allow for reformers to work with private firms to offer cheaper tools.

This isn’t to say that the traditional district model’s end is inevitable. As with the rest of the battle over reforming American public education, districts and the education traditionalists whose regard for them borders on the fetishistic, will continue to battle efforts to expand choice, Parent Power, and digital learning. But the very changes that has rendered Microsoft’s traditional operating system near-monopoly not nearly as important in today’s computing world can also help reformers provide all children with the high-quality education they deserve.