Milton Friedman on school vouchers

16 passages for “school vouchers”, 12 checked against the source. Page 1 of 2.

Full topic page: Schools and vouchers

1. “Re vouchers—and I’m now speaking of schooling vouchers—schooling is, next only to national defense, the largest socialist enterprise in the United States. And it is clearly as much of a failure as the socialist enterprises in Poland or Hungary or Czechoslovakia or East Germany.”

2. “Is this due to bureaucratic organization? As some evidence, the number of school districts went down by 10 per cent, continuing a trend toward greater centralization and bureaucratization of education that has been going on now for decades.”

3. “A clearer example for the U.S. is schooling, which is predominantly governmental, as health care is in Britain, and where the law of bureaucratic displacement has been proceeding apace.”

4. “By this line of reasoning, the corner grocer and the A&P are “recipient institutions” because some of their customers receive social-security checks. The New York Times and The Chicago Tribune are Federal contractors because welfare recipients buy papers. How silly can you get?”

5. “With respect to teachers' salaries … . Poor teachers are grossly overpaid and good teachers grossly underpaid. Salary schedules tend to be uniform and determined far more by seniority.”

6. “Most colleges and universities have accepted—and lobbied extensively for—Federal funds, and their receipt of Federal funds is the legal justification for HEW jurisdiction over their hiring and other practices. They are hoist on their own petard when they now complain that he who pays the piper is calling the tune.”

7. “The threat to public schools arises from their defects, not their accomplishments. In small, closely knit communities where public schools, particularly elementary schools, are now reasonably satisfactory, not even the most comprehensive voucher plan would have much effect. The public schools would remain dominant, perhaps somewhat improved by the threat of potential competition. But elsewhere, and particularly in the urban slums where the public schools are doing such a poor job, most parents would undoubtedly try to send their children to nonpublic schools.”

8. “In one sense, it is poetic justice that my colleagues and I at colleges and universities should now be suffering under the bureaucratic lash. For we have done more than any other group to produce a climate of opinion favorable to big government. So long as affirmative-action programs were directed at greedy businesses and grasping trade unions, academia for the most part cheered. And even now that its own ox is being gored, the typical reaction is that the academic world is “different.””

9. “There was nothing in these views to repel a student; or to make Keynes attractive. Keynes had nothing to offer those of us who had sat at the feet of Simons, Mints, Knight, and Viner.”

10. “The free market has been around for thousands and thousands of years. The theory of the free market in a systematic, organized way dates back to Adam Smith in 1776, but the free market doesn’t.”