Milton Friedman on Schools and vouchers
A Nation at Risk stimulated much soul-searching and a whole series of major attempts to reform the government educational system. These reforms, however extensive or bold, have, it is widely agreed, had a negligible effect on the quality of the public school system. Although spending per pupil has more than doubled since 1970 after allowing for inflation, U.S. students continue to rank low in international comparisons; dropout rates are high; scores on SATs and the like have fallen and remain flat. Simple literacy, let alone functional literacy, in the United States is almost surely lower at the beginning of the twenty-first century than it was a century earlier—and all this despite a major increase in real spending per student since A Nation at Risk was published.
Context. From an essay written fifty years after his 1955 article “The Role of Government in Education,” in which he first proposed school vouchers. A Nation at Risk, the 1983 report of the National Commission on Excellence in Education, quoted Paul Copperman’s warning that the educational skills of one generation would not equal those of their parents.
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Milton Friedman, “Free to Choose” (The Wall Street Journal, June 9, 2005; reprinted in Hoover Digest 2005 No. 3 under the title “Free to Choose”, 2005). https://miltonfriedman.org/quotes/spending-per-pupil-doubled-literacy-lower-2005
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The good news is that, despite these setbacks, public interest in and support for vouchers and tax credits continue to grow. Legislative proposals to channel government funds directly to students rather than to schools are under consideration in something like 20 states. Sooner or later there will be a breakthrough; we shall get a universal voucher plan in one or more states. When we do, a competitive private educational market serving parents who are free to choose the school they believe best for each child will demonstrate how that market can revolutionize schooling.
Context. From an essay written fifty years after his 1955 article “The Role of Government in Education,” in which he first proposed school vouchers. Just before, he describes two statewide voucher initiatives in California, in 1993 and 2000, both of which led in the polls nine months before the vote and were defeated after a well-financed campaign against them.
Free to ChooseColumn, 2005, The Wall Street Journal, June 9, 2005; reprinted in Hoover Digest 2005 No. 3 under the title “Free to Choose”Checked against the sourceRead the sourceWe spend more per capita on medicine and health care by far than any other country. The major increase has come since 1965. And that’s because in 1965 the United States enacted Medicare and Medicaid. And that was a stimulus to greater spending.
Context. From a November 2005 interview with Peter Robinson, conducted for the World Health Congress and printed in the Hoover Digest as “How to Cure Health Care.” Asked why the share of national income spent on health care rises in every industrial country. He answers that people grow richer and live longer and that medical care is a good people spend more on as they do, but that the rise has been far greater in the United States.
How to Cure Health CareInterview, 2005, Interview by Peter Robinson for the World Health Congress, November 21, 2005; printed in Hoover Digest 2006 No. 4Checked against the sourceRead the transcriptI believe that the only way to make a major improvement in our educational system is through privatization to the point at which a substantial fraction of all educational services are rendered to individuals by private enterprises. Nothing else will destroy or even greatly weaken the power of the current educational establishment—a necessary precondition for radical improvement in our educational system. And nothing else will provide the public schools with the competition that will force them to improve in order to hold their clientele.
Context. From a February 1995 Washington Post article arguing that American elementary and secondary schooling must be radically reconstructed by privatizing much of it, through a universal voucher that lets parents choose their children’s schools, a plan he first proposed in 1955. Earlier in the article he names the school establishment, reinforced by the two national teachers’ unions, as the main obstacle to vouchers.
Public Schools: Make Them PrivateColumn, 1995, The Washington Post, February 19, 1995; reprinted in full in the Congressional Record, Extensions of Remarks, March 28, 1995, pp. 9551 to 9552 (E703 to E704 in the daily edition), inserted by Representative Philip M. Crane., Congressional Record, March 28, 1995, p. 9552
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