This book examines in detail the experiment in educational performance contracting conducted by the United States Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) during the 1970-71 school year. Major objectives of the OEO project were to find out whether a private educational firm could teach educationally disadvantaged children to read and write better than local public schools could, and to find out how successfully the pecuniary incentive system operates in education. The official finding of the study was that private companies did not seem to teach better than the public schools did, but there has been much controversy over possible methodological and design defects in the experiment. The authors examine each of these arguments as they describe the design and operation of the experiment, in an effort to evaluate the significance of the various criticisms and to suggest how future experiments might avoid similar difficulties. (Author/JG)