Milton and Rose Friedman on Educational Choice
Posted by
John LaPlante on Thursday, July 28th 2011
Though Milton Friedman won a Nobel Prize in economics, his most significant long-lasting effect may in the world of K-12 education. Specifically, the fate of American education may lie in how quickly and fully we implement his vision of parental choice in education.
In Capitalism & Freedom (1962), Milton and Rose Friedman addressed public education. The ideal, they said, would be for parents to pay for their own childrens’ education. But they allowed that due to “neighborhood effects” (the benefits that other non-parents receive from seeing to it that children learn), a citizenry may decide that it is important to underwrite education through tax funds. They offered several reasons why that might not be a good idea (for one thing, it subsidizes the wealthy). But in conceding that “a minimum degree of literacy” is needed in a functioning democracy, they agreed, and turned toward the question of how to spend the money.
Just because government collects money for a purpose does not mean that it has to be the party to spend the money. The Friedmans advocated a voucher system for schooling. In that system, government collects money for schooling, and then awards a check to parents, which they can redeem only at a school, for the purpose of educating their children. Parents, in turn, can use that check to subsidize their children’s schooling. (The voucher might pay for the entire tuition amount, or parents could pay a supplement.)
The Friedmans suggested several benefits to that arrangement, including greater diversity in educational offerings and greater efficiency in spending.
In their later book, Free to Choose (1980), the Friedmans expand on the theme of school choice in a chapter titled, “What’s wrong with our schools?” It offers a quick review of the history of American education, from Puritan schools through the factory model of schooling used to educate millions of immigrant children in the 19th and early 20th centuries and then to the nascent school choice movement of the early 1990s.
The historical trend has been towards the centralization of decisions and finances regarding schooling. Schooling was at first voluntary. Then state governments started to require it, and later, finance it. The impetus, the Friedmans say, was not dissatisfied parents, but (quoting another scholar), “teachers and government officials.”
Hyper-local control in the political sphere, while it lasted, served as a weak substitute for the positive effects of parental control in the economic/market sphere to keep schools relatively cheap and effective. But the trend has been towards professionalization, consolidation of school districts, and bureaucratization of education. All of that has brought about a fall in productivity, as the growth of public education employees has outstripped the growth of student enrollment. As government involvement went up, productivity went down.
[Today, education is even more centralized, with politicians dueling over who will be "the education president," No Child Left Behind shaping local decisions, and "core curriculum" for the entire nation coming to a public school near you." This is on top of soaring expenses, flat-lining performance, controversies over social questions such as sexuality and American history, "drop-out factories," wide physical assaults in schools in some schools, and other ills that were present even at the time Free to Choose went to print.]
Increasingly large organizations can be beneficial in industry, so why not education? “The difference is not between schooling and other activities but between arrangements in which the consumer is free to choose and arrangements under which the producer is in the saddle so the consumer has little to say.”
“One way to achieve a major improvement,” the Friedmans wrote, “to bring learning back to the classroom, especially for the currently most disadvantaged, is to give all parents greater control over their children’s schooling.” They called not only for a voucher plan, but for requiring public schools to charge tuition (which would then of course be made affordable via vouchers).
They called a voucher a “partial solution,” since they favored lessening the role of government in financing education. They also favored ending compulsory attendance laws, a reversal from their position in Capitalism & Freedom. While still holding that “a minimum degree of literacy and knowledge on the part of most citizens” is necessary to a stable democratic society,” the Friedmans conclude that research since that time has shown “that compulsory attendance at schools is not necessary.”
The rest of the chapter discusses various objections to school choice: Does it increase racial and economic segregation? What about fraud? Does school choice harm public schools?
Since the publication Free to Choose, the Friedman’s vision has been coming to life in fits and starts. The couple founded the Foundation for Educational Choice in 1996, and the foundation has been an important resource on the question of school choice.
More important than the development of a useful organization, however, has been the growth of school choice, which has come about through a variety of means, including vouchers and tax credits. Just this year, 12 states have enacted some form of school choice legislation. Some choice programs are available only within one or two cities of a state; others are open statewide. Some are open only to disabled students, while others are open to (nearly) everyone. (Most choice programs, bowing to political concerns, limit their benefits to high-income families.) Indiana, just this year, has enacted perhaps the most widely sweeping school choice legislation this year, combining it with reforms to public schools. (See this post for more.)
Academics and policy experts continue to survey the effectiveness of school choice, both on students who directly benefit from choice as well as on students to keep attending public schools.
When government controls the supply and distribution of a service–education today, health care tomorrow–people with higher incomes are in a better spot. This ironic, given that the increased socialization of the service is sold in the name of “helping the downtrodden,” whether immigrant families of the 19th century or the uninsured today. After government increases its control, higher-income people are better positioned than everyone else to exert political influence within the system, or to buy their way out of it.
Fortunately, the Friedmans’ prescription for educational excellence and equity–de-emphasize government as a provider of schooling, re-emphasize the role of parents and competition among schools for enrollment–is being acted on every year. Progress has been painfully slow, but it’s coming.
Though this might seem a good idea to gain the proper education a parent deems necessary for his child, I believe that this can foster inequality in the system where more concerned parents with the time and money can ensure the best for his own and those impoverished will be left to their own failures.