Milton Friedman – Public Schools / Voucher System

Published on May 9, 2012 by BasicEconomics

Salter: It’s time for Texas to embrace school choice

School choice is a transformative policy that helps parents get a top-notch education for their children. By allowing funding to follow students, families can pick the options that best fit their unique circumstances. Vouchers and education savings accounts (ESAs) are good examples. Vouchers cover tuition at approved schools. ESAs are broader: The money can be used for a host of education-related expenses, such as tutoring and counseling. Either would be a welcome support for Texas families.

Direct student funding is not a new idea. Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century, popularized school choice in the 1980s. Despite its potential, for a long time there was only limited experimentation with vouchers and other choice-enhancing projects, such as charter schools. Special interest groups, such as teachers’ unions, strongly opposed school choice. Good policy isn’t always good politics.

The coronavirus pandemic changed everything. Across the country, schools canceled in-person learning, placing huge burdens on children and working parents. Students suffered from diminished learning and social isolation. The remote lessons, which parents saw up-close for the first time, focused too much on cultural politics and not enough on core skills in reading, writing, and math. When families tried to voice their disapproval at school board meetings, they were often ridiculed. Small wonder they’re fed up with status-quo schooling.

In Virginia, Glenn Younkin unexpectedly won the governorship largely due to his opponent’s hostility to parents. Even in hyper-progressive San Francisco, three school board members were recalled by frustrated families. Everywhere the school choice movement picked up momentum. Flash forward to today: School choice is a winning issue for politicians, both right-wing and left-wing, who support a pro-family agenda.

School choice fits nicely with Texans’ support for educational equality. The Texas Constitution requires the government to provide free schooling, but not to build and run the schools itself. No less an authority than the Texas Supreme Court holds that the government satisfies its constitutional obligation by providing the necessary resources. Give parents the funds they need and all Texas schoolchildren can have a great education.

School choice is a fine idea in theory. But does it work in practice? The evidence is clear: It does. Researchers have published many studies on school choice over the years. When addressing policy-relevant questions, it’s important to consider the entire body of evidence, not just one or two papers in isolation. Anyone can cherry-pick studies to find results they like. What matters is the overall picture. And for school choice, the overall picture looks pretty good. Out of 17 important studies, 11 found school choice increased some or all students’ math and reading scores. Only two found a negative effect.

Educational achievement isn’t the only benefit of school choice. It also improves academic outcomes in existing public schools, saves taxpayers money, reduces crime, and bolsters racial integration. Each of these findings is supported by a preponderance of the evidence in a well-established scholarly literature.

Texans, don’t let the school choice movement pass us by. We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to make sure all students get the education they deserve. The system we have now is discriminatory: the rich, who can afford private-school tuition, already have school choice, while the poor are trapped in underperforming schools. We can fix this by funding students directly. Here’s hoping legislators make school choice happen in 2023.

Alexander William Salter is the Georgie G. Snyder Associate Professor of Economics in the Rawls College of Business at Texas Tech University, the Comparative Economics Research Fellow at TTU’s Free Market Institute, and a community member of the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal’s editorial board. The views in this piece are solely his own.

The School Choice Revolution

The Machine: The Truth Behind Teachers Unions

Published on Sep 4, 2012 by ReasonTV

No one did more to advance the cause of school vouchers than Milton and Rose Friedman. Friedman made it clear in his film series “Free to Choose” how sad he was that young people who live in the inner cities did not have good education opportunities available to them.

I have posted often about the voucher system and how it would solve our education problems. What we are doing now is not working. Milton Friedman’s idea of implementing school vouchers was hatched about 50 years ago.

Poor families are most affected by this lack of choice. As Friedman noted, “There is no respect in which inhabitants of a low-income neighborhood are so disadvantaged as in the kind of schooling they can get for their children.” It is a sad statement quantified by data on low levels of academic achievement and attainment. Take a look at this article below.

SAT scores among the nation’s test-takers are at a 40-year low.

As The Washington Post reports:

Reading scores on the SAT for the high school class of 2012 reached a four-decade low, putting a punctuation mark on a gradual decline in the ability of college-bound teens to read passages and answer questions about sentence structure, vocabulary and meaning on the college entrance exam.

The decline over the decades has been significant. The average reading (verbal) score is down 34 points since 1972. Sadly, the historically low SAT scores are only the latest marker of decline. Graduation rates have been stagnant since the 1970s, reading and math achievement has been virtually flat over the same time period, and American students still rank in the middle of the pack compared to their international peers.

On the heels of the news about the SAT score decline, President Obama filmed a segment with NBC’s Education Nation earlier today. The President notably praised the concept of charter schools and pay for performance for teachers.

But those grains of reform were dwarfed by his support of the status quo. During the course of the interview, President Obama suggested hiring 100,000 new math and science teachers and spending more money on preschool. He also stated that No Child Left Behind had good intentions but was “under-resourced.”

Efforts by the federal government to intervene in preschool, most notably through Head Start, have failed—despite a $160 billion in spending on the program since 1965. And No Child Left Behind is far from “under-resourced.” The $25 billion, 600-page law has been on the receiving end of significant new spending every decade since the original law was first passed nearly half a century ago.

President Obama was also pressed on the issue of education unions by host Savannah Guthrie:

Some people think, President Obama gets so much support from the teachers’ unions, he can’t possibly have an honest conversation about what they’re doing right or wrong. Can you really say that teachers’ unions aren’t slowing the pace of reform?

President Obama responded: “You know, I just really get frustrated when I hear teacher-bashing as evidence of reform.”

Criticizing education unions for standing in the way of reform should not be conflated with criticizing teachers, as the President does in the interview. The unions have blocked reforms such as performance pay and charter schools (which the President supports), have opposed alternative teacher certification that would help mid-career professionals enter the classroom, and have consistently fought the implementation of school choice options for children.

If we ever hope to move the needle on student achievement—or see SAT scores turn in the right direction again—we’ll need to implement many of those exact reforms, particularly school choice.

And as he has in the past, President Obama stated that his Administration wants to “use evidenced-based approaches and find out what works.” We know what works: giving families choices when it comes to finding schools that best meet their children’s needs. Instead of continuing to call for more spending and more Washington intervention in education, let’s try something new: choice and freedom.

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