Former Washington, D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray thinks education reform efforts in the city over the past decade or so have worked, crediting competition between schools for improving student achievement.

“One of the reasons for that is the fact that we have created a competitive environment,” Gray said Thursday at an event hosted by the Progressive Policy Institute. “We have assumed over all these years that a regulated approach to public education would make it better. And if it made it better somewhere else, it certainly didn’t make it better in the District of Columbia, because we had tremendous decline. There was complacency that set in, and there was a view that whatever you did was kind of okay. … I honestly think that one of the principal reasons for the improvements we’re seeing is the feeling that if you don’t get better, you’re going to go out of business.”