Free to Choose: A Personal Statement by Milton Friedman & Rose Friedman

Author:Milton Friedman & Rose Friedman [Friedman, Milton & Friedman, Rose]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: pol_guide
ISBN: 9780333299395
Google: BUvFlgEACAAJ
Amazon: 0333299396
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 1980-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE OBSTACLES TO A VOUCHER PLAN

Since we first proposed the voucher plan a quarter-century ago as a practical solution to the defects of the public school system, support has grown. A number of national organizations favor it today.''° Since 1968 the Federal Office of Economic Opportunity and then the Federal Institute of Education encouraged and financed studies of voucher plans and offered to help finance experimental voucher plans. In 1978 a constitutional amendment was on the ballot in Michigan to mandate a voucher plan. In 1979 a movement was under way in California to qualify a constitutional amendment mandating a voucher plan for the 1980

ballot. A nonprofit institute has recently been established to explore educational vouchers." t At the federal level, bills providing for a limited credit against taxes for tuition paid to nonpublic schools have several times come close to passing. While they are not a voucher plan proper, they are a partial variant, partial both because of the limit to the size of the credit and because of the difficulty of including persons with no or low tax liability. The perceived self-interest of the educational bureaucracy is the key obstacle to the introduction of market competition in schooling. This interest group, which, as Professor Edwin G. West demonstrated, played a key role in the establishment of public schooling in both the United States and Great Britain, has adamantly opposed every attempt to study, explore, or experiment with voucher plans.

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FREE TO CHOOSE: A Personal Statement

Kenneth B. Clark, a black educator and psychologist, summed up the attitude of the school bureaucracy:

. . . it does not seem likely that the changes necessary for increased efficiency of our urban public schools will come about because they should. . . . What is most important in understanding the ability of the educational establishment to resist change is the fact that public school systems are protected public monopolies with only minimal competition from private and parochial schools. Few critics of the American urban public schools—even severe ones such as myself—

dare to question the givens of the present organization of public education. . . . Nor dare the critics question the relevance of the criteria and standards for selecting superintendents, principals, and teachers, or the relevance of all of these to the objectives of public education—producing a literate and informed public to carry on the business of democracy—and to the goal of producing human beings with social sensitivity and dignity and creativity and a respect for the humanity of others.

A monopoly need not genuinely concern itself with these matters. As long as local school systems can be assured of state aid and increasing federal aid without the accountability which inevitably comes with aggressive competition, it would be sentimental, wishful thinking to expect any significant increase in the efficiency of our public schools. If there are no alternatives to the present system—short of present private and parochial schools, which are approaching their limit of expansion—then the possibilities of improvement in public education are Iimited. 22

The

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