Category Archives: Vouchers

Free to Choose by Milton Friedman: Episode “What is wrong with our schools?” (Part 1 of transcript and video)

October 5, 2011 – 10:31 am

Here is the video clip and transcript of the film series FREE TO CHOOSE episode “What is wrong with our schools?” Part 1 of 6.

 
Volume 6 – What’s Wrong with our Schools
Transcript:
Friedman: These youngsters are beginning another day at one of America’s public schools, Hyde Park High School in Boston. What happens when they pass through those doors is a vivid illustration of some of the problems facing America’s schools.
They have to pass through metal detectors. They are faced by security guards looking for hidden weapons. They are watched over by armed police. Isn’t that awful. What a way for kids to have to go to school, through metal detectors and to be searched. What can they conceivably learn under such circumstances. Nobody is happy with this kind of education. The taxpayers surely aren’t. This isn’t cheap education. After all, those uniformed policemen, those metal detectors have to be paid for.
What about the broken windows, the torn school books, and the smashed school equipment. The teachers who teach here don’t like this kind of situation. The students don’t like to come here to go to school, and most of all, the parents __ they are the ones who get the worst deal __ they pay taxes like the rest of us and they are just as concerned about the kind of education that their kids get as the rest of us are. They know their kids are getting a bad education but they feel trapped. Many of them can see no alternative but to continue sending their kids to schools like this.
To go back to the beginning, it all started with the fine idea that every child should have a chance to learn his three R’s. Sometimes in June when it gets hot, the kids come out in the yard to do their lessons, all 15 of them, ages 5 to 13, along with their teacher. This is the last one-room schoolhouse still operating in the state of Vermont. That is the way it used to be. Parental control, parents choosing the teacher, parents monitoring the schooling, parents even getting together and chipping in to paint the schoolhouse as they did here just a few weeks ago. Parental concern is still here as much in the slums of the big cities as in Bucolic, Vermont. But control by parents over the schooling of their children is today the exception, not the rule.
Increasingly, schools have come under the control of centralized administration, professional educators deciding what shall be taught, who shall do the teaching, and even what children shall go to what school. The people who lose most from this system are the poor and the disadvantaged in the large cities. They are simply stuck. They have no alternative.
Of course, if you are well off you do have a choice. You can send your child to a private school or you can move to an area where the public schools are excellent, as the parents of many of these students have done. These students are graduating from Weston High School in one of Boston’s wealthier suburbs. Their parents pay taxes instead of tuition and they certainly get better value for their money than do the parents in Hyde Park. That is partly because they have kept a good deal of control over the local schools, and in the process, they have managed to retain many of the virtues of the one-room schoolhouse.
Students here, like Barbara King, get the equivalent of a private education. They have excellent recreational facilities. They have a teaching staff that is dedicated and responsive to parents and students. There is an atmosphere which encourages learning, yet the cost per pupil here is no higher than in many of our inner city schools. The difference is that at Weston, it all goes for education that the parents still retain a good deal of control.
Unfortunately, most parents have lost control over how their tax money in spent. Avabelle goes to Hyde Park High. Her parents too want her to have a good education, but many of the students here are not interested in schooling, and the teachers, however dedicated, soon lose heart in an atmosphere like this. Avabelle’s parents are certainly not getting value for their tax money.
Caroline Bell, Parent: I think it is a shame, really, that parents are being ripped off like we are. I am talking about parents like me that work every day, scuffle to try to make ends meet. We send our kids to school hoping that they will receive something that will benefit them in the future for when they go out here and compete in the job market. Unfortunately, none of that is taking place at Hyde Park.
Friedman: Children like Ava are being shortchanged by a system that was designed to help. But there are ways to help give parents more say over their children’s schooling.
This is a fundraising evening for a school supported by a voluntary organization, New York’s Inner City Scholarship Fund. The prints that have brought people here have been loaned by wealthy Japanese industrialist. Events like this have helped raise two million dollars to finance Catholic parochial schools in New York. The people here are part of a long American tradition. The results of their private voluntary activities have been remarkable.
This is one of the poorest neighborhoods in New York City: the Bronx. Yet this parochial school, supported by the fund, is a joy to visit. The youngsters here from poor families are at Saint John Christians because their parents have picked this school and their parents are paying some of the costs from their own pockets. The children are well behaved, eager to learn, the teachers are dedicated. The cost per pupil here is far less than in the public schools, yet on the average the children are two grades ahead. That is because teachers and parents are free to choose how the children shall be taught. Private money has replaced the tax money and so control has been taken away from the bureaucrats and put back where it belongs.
This doesn’t work just for younger children. In the 60’s, Harlem was devastated by riots. It was a hot bed of trouble. Many teenagers dropped out of school.
By Everette Hatcher III | Also posted in Milton Friedman | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

99th anniversary of Milton Friedman’s birth (Part 13) Milton Friedman on freedom of choice

October 5, 2011 – 10:27 am

Next year is the 100th anniversary of Milton Friedman’s birth and I get on the computer today and read an article published today on the National Review Online and it quotes Milton Friedman.

I wish we would listen to Milton Friedman more often. This article below quotes Friedman and today I am starting a series on what Friedman had to say about the voucher system for our schools. Parents should be allowed to choose what school their children can go to.

Paternalism and Principle

by Michael D. Tanner

Michael Tanner is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and coauthor of Leviathan on the Right: How Big-Government Conservatism Brought Down the Republican Revolution.

Added to cato.org on October 5, 2011

This article appeared on National Review (Online) on October 5, 20

If you are looking for a single statement that defines the essence of the modern welfare state, look no further than Secretary of Energy Steven Chu’s defense of the administration’s efforts to ban incandescent light bulbs. “We are taking away a choice that continues to let people waste their own money,” Chu said, quite satisfied with government’s efforts to protect Americans from their own choices.

Contrast this with Milton Friedman’s view that

those of us who believe in freedom must believe also in the freedom of individuals to make their own mistakes. If a man knowingly prefers to live for today, to use his resources for current enjoyment, deliberately choosing a penurious old age, by what right do we prevent him from doing so? We may argue with him, seek to persuade him that he is wrong, but are we entitled to use coercion to prevent him from doing what he chooses to do? Is there not always the possibility that he is right and we are wrong? Humility is the distinguishing characteristic of the believer in freedom, arrogance of the paternalist.

For too long, both liberals and too many conservatives have attempted to impose on people the government’s standards of what is best for them rather than leaving them to their own decisions, merely because those decisions may be mistaken. That is the real legacy of the welfare state as expanded by President Obama and as it has been practiced on a bipartisan basis for the last half century or more: We are, quite simply, less free.

Once you accept the paternalistic premise, there is no end to government interference.

In some cases, the restrictions on liberty are tangible and easily seen. As the economy becomes more and more socialized, so too do the consequences of individuals’ behavior. This, in turn, creates an incentive for the state to control that behavior. After all, if individual decisions impose a collective cost, it is only rational for those bearing that cost to demand input on those decisions. Thus, the nanny state seeks to restrict all manner of private consensual activity, whether it is eating fast foods and smoking or having consensual sex or driving without a seat belt. 

But there are other equally important, if less obvious, ways that the welfare state restricts liberty. Government-run health-care systems, for example, impose a minimum amount that you must spend on health care, either through taxes or through insurance mandates, as with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. They determine which medical conditions and eventualities you must insure against, even if you would prefer not to cover such conditions. Thus, they turn individual moral decisions, such as whether to buy insurance that covers abortion, contraception, or drug-abuse treatment, into political questions. And in some government-run systems they deny people the right to purchase the health care they want even with their own money.

By the same token, government-run anti-poverty programs limit your ability to support the charity of your choice. Money you pay in taxes to support government charity is money that you cannot donate to private charity. Yet the charitable activities chosen by the government may not be the ones that you would have chosen, or even the ones most needed. Indeed, the government’s charitable decisions are likely to be driven by politics, favoring those constituencies with the greatest voting power or those causes that capture the public imagination because they are on television or in the newspapers.

Government-run schools automatically pit the values of one group of parents against the values of other groups. How many textbook controversies or debates about what to teach about homosexuality, whether students may pray, or phonics versus whole language could be avoided if parents could choose the school their child attended?

Social Security may or may not be a Ponzi scheme, but it prevents people — especially poor people — from saving and investing for their own retirement in ways that would allow them to build real, inheritable wealth.

Beyond the programs themselves, there is the simple fact that every dollar that the welfare state consumes to pay for itself is one fewer dollar that individuals have to spend the way that they want to, however that may be. As the French economist Frederic Bastiat put it in his parable of the shopkeeper with the broken window, “He would, perhaps, have replaced his old shoes, or added another book to his library.” Or to put it in today’s context, he might have purchased health care, saved for his retirement, or donated to charity. He might have started a business and hired workers. Or he might have spent it entirely on pleasure or frivolities. He might even have bought energy-inefficient light bulbs.

Whatever he might have done, he is now deprived of that choice. He is, in fact, less free.

Once paternalism is accepted in principle, there is no limit to the actions that government may take in controlling our lives and restricting liberty. The ultimate result, as Friedman writes, is “dictatorship, benevolent and maybe majoritarian, but dictatorship nonetheless.”

As we debate the ever-expanding welfare state and all its consequences — joblessness, a crushing debt burden on our children and grandchildren, and the loss of opportunity for the neediest among us — let us not forget the other casualty of big government: freedom.

By Everette Hatcher III | Also posted in Cato Institute, Current Events, Milton Friedman | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

We need more school choice

September 5, 2011 – 12:48 am

Parents need more school choices and this article pushes the idea of tax credits:

 

More Benefits from Credits than Vouchers

by Adam B. Schaeffer

 

This article appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer on September 2, 2011.

Pennsylvania endured a bruising battle over education vouchers in the last legislative session, and the next round seems to be in the offing. But a recent court injunction halting a Colorado program should give pause to voucher promoters in the Keystone State.

Part of the reason Colorado’s voucher program was stopped in its tracks is a state constitutional provision that reads:

“No appropriation shall be made for charitable, industrial, educational, or benevolent purposes to any person, corporation, or community not under the absolute control of the state, nor to any denominational or sectarian institution or association.”

Pennsylvanians shouldn’t roll the dice on vouchers, and they don’t need to.

Pennsylvania’s constitution has a nearly identical provision, though it makes an explicit exception for higher education, stating that:

“No appropriation shall be made for charitable, educational, or benevolent purposes to any person or community nor to any denominational and sectarian institution, corporation, or association: Provided, that appropriations may be made for … loans for higher educational purposes….”

This exception, of course, would not apply to K-12 vouchers. As a result, any voucher program enacted in the commonwealth will face the same daunting legal hurdles that are likely to kill the Colorado program.

A court in Indiana recently denied an injunction against that state’s new voucher law, but the Hoosier State lacks the restrictive constitutional language found in Colorado and Pennsylvania. Unless the Pennsylvania legislature intends to enact a voucher program in Indiana, what happens there is irrelevant.

Fortunately, the existing Education Investment Tax Credit Program (EITC), which opens access to good private schools by allowing businesses to claim a tax credit for donations to scholarship funds for low-income children, has the potential to offer even freer educational choice than a voucher program. The EITC has gone unchallenged for more than a decade, is popular, uncontroversial, and ripe for a huge expansion.

Unlike vouchers, education tax-credit programs have withstood every state and federal challenge advanced against them over the last two decades. Major credit programs in Indiana, Florida, Georgia, and Pennsylvania — to name a few — have yet to be challenged. And for good reason; they are on solid constitutional ground at both the state and federal level.

Why? Vouchers are grants of government funds, while tax credits are private funds. The recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization v. Winn highlights the vital importance of this distinction.

The court held that money spent and claimed as a credit against one’s taxes is private money, not government spending like education vouchers. Other taxpayers aren’t harmed by the choice of those claiming credits because the government isn’t spending collective tax revenue.

As Justice Anthony M. Kennedy explained: “A dissenter whose tax dollars are ‘extracted and spent’ knows that he has in some small measure been made to contribute to an establishment in violation of conscience…. [By contrast] awarding some citizens a tax credit allows other citizens to retain control over their own funds in accordance with their own consciences.”

Adam Schaeffer is an education policy analyst at the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom and author of “They Spend WHAT? The Real Cost of Public Schools.”

More by Adam B. Schaeffer

The challenge to this education tax-credit program failed because only private funds are involved. A taxpayer challenging a voucher program would have standing under this decision. The composition of the U.S. Supreme Court and its precedent on school choice make it unlikely that a voucher program would be overturned on federal constitutional grounds, but at the state level, there are many constitutional threats to voucher programs. Colorado’s court ruling, for instance, identified five separate legal problems with the Douglas County voucher program.

However, the most recent and bracing conclusion comes, again, from Arizona. In 2009, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled in Caine v. Horne that voucher programs for disabled and foster children violated a state constitutional ban on aid to private schools because it was an expenditure of government funds. That same court previously upheld a state tax-credit program on the grounds that the credits did not constitute an expenditure of government funds. The status of vouchers as government funds was key to the decisions overturning Colorado’s earlier voucher program in 2004 and Florida’s in 2006.

Pennsylvanians shouldn’t roll the dice on vouchers, and they don’t need to. Expanding the Education Investment Tax Credit program is the most pragmatic, principled, and certain means of expanding school choice and educational freedom.

By Everette Hatcher III | Comments (0)

Sweden’s Voucher Program Part 10

July 5, 2011 – 12:46 am

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John Stossel, Walter E Williams and Thomas Sowell comment on how market forces can improve education in America. http://www.libertypen.com

I read an excellent article called “School Choice in Sweden: An Interview with Thomas Idergard of Timbro,” (March 8, 2010) by Dan Lips and I wanted to share some of his answers with you below:

DL: What lessons do you think policymakers in the United States and other countries can take from Sweden’s experience with universal school vouchers?
TI: The one and overall lesson is that competition is a key factor in raising educational standards in the future.
Letting the entrepreneurial spirit flow is a necessity for innovation in both products and services. Innovation is required in order to raise standards in every sector of the economy—and society. Education is one of society’s most important services, which means that it is even more urgent to increase innovation and new ideas in education than in most other areas.
But because broad education—at least for the “ordinary men and women,” i.e., low and normal income groups—in most countries and systems is highly monopolized by politicians and bureaucratic public-sector structures, there is little space for entrepreneurship unless the foundations of the systems themselves are changed. School choice programs such as the one in Sweden, which makes freedom of choice the default situation in the education system, encourage competition and, hence, entrepreneurship and innovation.
The success factors behind the Swedish school voucher program are:
  • Equal opportunities to choose, regardless of families’ income and wealth status, and without anyone asking for your economic situation give the ultimate power to the parents and their children, and
  • Equal opportunities for education providers to offer and establish schools—so long as national quality requirements are being met.
Through our universal school choice model, we combine the social dimension (taxpayer money should fund education for all) with the principles of the free market: The clients’ choices decide how the funding should be distributed and providers compete for clients’ satisfaction, which is ultimately materialized in concrete educational results, in order to get their revenues.
This requires that politicians on all levels of government realize and recognize that their roles must change. Without choice they are financiers, regulators, service providers, and supreme quality inspectors—in a mix that is often neither successful nor efficient. With choice, their role is more cultivated and their focus is successively turned into funding, regulating, and overseeing the market. And the public schools will actually be helped by being subject to competition from new ideas, organizations, and methods. In the end, it is a lot about politicians’ courage and willingness not only to talk about change but to make it happen.
Dan Lips is former Senior Policy Analyst in Education in the Domestic Policy Studies Department at The Heritage Foundation.
_____________________________________________
If a monopoly is not good for industries like oil, retail, etc, then why is it good for K-12 education. John Stossel examines how lack of competition in education is hurting our kids, and areas where education is competing and helping. This video presentation will be discussed in the June 28, 2010 edition of Common Sense Capitalism.
By Everette Hatcher III | Comments (0)

Sweden’s Voucher Program Part 8

July 3, 2011 – 12:42 am

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Milton Friedman’s film series “Free to Choose” Episode on Education part 6. It was Friedman’s voucher plan that was put into practice in Sweden in 1993.

I read an excellent article called “School Choice in Sweden: An Interview with Thomas Idergard of Timbro,” (March 8, 2010) by Dan Lips and I wanted to share some of his answers with you below:

DL: Some express concerns that choice and competition would undermine the traditional public or government school system. How have traditional public schools responded to widespread choice?
TI: They have improved because they have been forced to—by competition.
Two major studies—one from the Institute for Future Studies (an NGO) and one from the National Board of Education (the highest governmental education authority)—have examined the public schools’ response to increased competition where independent schools were established. Both showed that public schools in these cities were more efficient and successful—both in using given resources and attaining higher student results—than the national average.
Why? Because they needed to improve in order to compete with the independent schools. Otherwise they would lose students and thus revenues, because the public schools’ funding from the local school boards is also paid as an amount per student.
Sweden’s school voucher program shows that competition truly works!
By Everette Hatcher III | Also posted in Milton Friedman | Comments (0)

Sweden’s Voucher Program Part 7

July 2, 2011 – 12:39 am

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Milton Friedman’s film series “Free to Choose” Episode on Education part 5. It was Friedman’s voucher plan that was put into practice in Sweden in 1993.

I read an excellent article called “School Choice in Sweden: An Interview with Thomas Idergard of Timbro,” (March 8, 2010) by Dan Lips and I wanted to share some of his answers with you below:

DL: What do parents and students think of the voucher system?
TI: On a general level, most parents and students don’t specifically choose between one independent and one public school—people tend to choose the schools that fit their needs and requirements best, regardless of whether they are independent or public. In all cities and municipalities with widespread opportunities to choose, parents and students are more and more active in comparing different schools out of a wide range of quality and personal variables. This was also the main point in establishing an education market: People are different and have different needs and ways to reach their goals.
But when you ask people about their satisfaction with their choice or with their school as a whole, you can see that the independent schools outperform the public schools quite massively.
The latest national survey on parental satisfaction was undertaken in October 2009 and showed that parents with their children in independent schools are much more satisfied than parents with their children in public schools regarding all surveyed areas—such as, for example:
  • The school’s closeness to the parents’ “ideal school” ;
  • The stimulation and support of every single student;
  • The level of resources that are being spent on education, teacher engagement, the quality of teaching materials, information, and cooperation with parents;  and
  • The sense of value of taxpayer money spent on education and trust for school management.
For every surveyed area there is at least a 10 percent higher satisfaction rate among independent school parents!
And regarding the voucher system itself, different surveys show that a majority of people view the right to choose school as almost a “natural” right. Some technical details might still be controversial among politicians (such as aspects of the profit-dividend issue), but among ordinary people, the right to choose is well rooted.
A clear majority of all parents, no matter if their kids go to independent or public schools, agree on that the independent school owners have right to show profits and to dispose of them at their own discretion!
By Everette Hatcher III | Also posted in Milton Friedman | Comments (0)

Milton Friedman’s views on vouchers have not been tried?

June 13, 2011 – 8:30 am

On the Arkansas Times Blog the person using the username “Jake da Snake” noted, “Friedman also railed long and hard for school vouchers to be adopted, to little avail…” (June 11, 2011).

Milton Friedman firmly believed, “competition is a way in which both public and private schools can be required to satisfy their customers.”

Here is what has happened in a small experiment in Milwaukee:

Milton Friedman – School Choice

Professor Friedman spells out his recipe for fixing America’s broken educational system. http://www.LibertyPen.com

 

By Everette Hatcher III | Also posted in Milton Friedman | Comments (0)

DC Voucher program

March 7, 2011 – 5:17 pm

 

I found this video from Reason TV that really tells the truth about the DC Voucher Program:

Barack Obama & the DC School Voucher Program: The president says he wants to do ‘what’s best for kids.’ So why won’t he save a proven program that helps low-income students?”

Mercedes Campbell is one of the 1,700 students in the Washington, D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, a school-voucher program authorized by Congress in 2004. The program gives students up to $7,500 to attend whatever school their parents choose. For kids like Mercedes, who now attends Georgetown Visitation Prep, the DC voucher program is a way out of one of the worst school districts in the country.

“It’s different, now that I go to Visitation,” says Mercedes. “I approach things differently. It’s like a whole new world, basically.”

The program is wildly popular with parents and children—there are four applicants for every available slot—and a recent Department of Education study found that participants do significantly better than their public school peers. Indeed, after three years in private schools, students who entered the program at its inception were 19 months ahead in reading of applicants unlucky enough to still be trapped in D.C.’s public schools.

Yet working with congressional Democrats and despite his pledge to put politics and ideology aside in education, the Obama administration has effectively killed the program through a backdoor legislative move. “[Education] Secretary [Arne] Duncan will use only one test in what ideas to support with your precious tax dollars,” says the president. “It’s not whether it’s liberal or conservative, but whether it works.”

That sort of doublespeak has left many Obama supporters not just puzzled but outraged. Certainly, Mercedes is. “Out of everything else they can shut down or everything else they can advocate for, they want to take this one thing away?” Adds her mother, Ingrid, “We voted for you, we walked, we went to the parade, we stood freezing. Why?…Can you get this tape over to Obama and have him answer our questions? Why, sir, why?”

“Barack Obama and the DC School Voucher Program” is approximately 5.30 minutes long and was produced by Dan Hayes and Nick Gillespie.

By Everette Hatcher III | Also posted in President Obama | Comments (0)

Sweden’s School Voucher Program Part 6

February 25, 2011 – 11:14 am

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Milton Friedman’s film series “Free to Choose” Episode on Education part 4. It was Friedman’s voucher plan that was put into practice in Sweden in 1993.

I am in Florida at a convention center and I got to talking to someone and found out that he graduated at Central in Little Rock in 1977 and he played on the state championship football team in 1975 with Houston Nutt. Actually he told me that Houston was not the only player off that team that played college ball. Robert Farrell (wide receiver, Arkansas), Emmanuel Tolbert (running back, SMU), and Reggie Perry (running back, ?).

Are kids getting a good education today versus 30 years ago? One thing is for sure and that is liberals still oppose competition that the voucher system would bring.

I read an excellent article called “School Choice in Sweden: An Interview with Thomas Idergard of Timbro,” (March 8, 2010) by Dan Lips and I wanted to share some of his answers with you below:

DL: Have students in Sweden improved academically under the voucher system?
TI: The educational results data speak for themselves. On average, the independent schools show better student achievement than the public schools.
Let me just give you a few examples from some very clear indicators. The average “merit value” is actually an average of the grade points (each grade gives a certain amount of points) for all students in all subjects in the ninth grade. This means that every single student has his/her own merit value, but that the average merit value is calculated based on all students that particular year in that particular class, school, city/municipality, country, etc. By the summer of 2008 (the most current information available), the merit value average of the whole compulsory school in Sweden was 209 points (with a maximum possible value of 320, indicating highest grades in all subjects). The public schools averaged 207 points, while the independent schools proved to have 227 points!
This significant difference has been in place for many years. In the last years, with an increased competition from a steadily increasing amount of independent schools, the total merit value average of the whole compulsory school actually has begun to rise. In upper secondary education, the pattern is about the same.
Another way of measuring results is to adjust for socio-economic factors and look at what could be an expected outcome of learning regarding the students’ background. This is called “SALSA value,” a Swedish acronym for The National Board of Education Analysis Tool for Local Correlation Analyses. There is no national summarizing of SALSAs, but if you look into the single cities and municipalities, you often find independent schools getting the best SALSA results. This means that many independent schools educate their students better than expected if students’ socio-economic background is taken into consideration.
If you want to adjust for possible “grade inflation,” you can just look at the results of the national tests that are being carried out for the key subjects of the curriculum and in exactly the same manner all over Sweden in both public and independent schools. The rate of students reaching the two highest grade levels in all key subjects are at least 10 percent higher for independent schools compared to public schools.
By Everette Hatcher III | Also posted in Milton Friedman | Comments (0)

Sweden’s Voucher Program Part 5

February 22, 2011 – 2:11 pm

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Milton Friedman’s film series “Free to Choose” Episode on Education part 3. It was Friedman’s voucher plan that was put into practice in Sweden in 1993.

I am sitting in the St. Louis airport waiting to get on my plane to Orlando on a business trip. Can you imagine, I booked a trip with Southwest Airlines because they have always done such a great job and they sent me from Little Rock to Florida by way of St. Louis.

Liberals  are so critical of the  Little Rock public school system, but they don’t want to offer other choices with vouchers which would cause competition. However, both the public schools and other schools would become more efficient if there were vouchers. That is exactly what has happened in Sweden.

Max Brantley is always critical of charter schools, but I personally prefer to look at the option of a school system that is funded by vouchers.

I read an excellent article called “School Choice in Sweden: An Interview with Thomas Idergard of Timbro,” (March 8, 2010) by Dan Lips and I wanted to share some of his answers with you below:

DL: What has Sweden’s experience been with the universal vouchers program?
TI: People really choose! Before the reform, less than 1 percent of all pupils in compulsory education (and around the same amount for students in upper secondary schools) were enrolled in private schools. Today, 10 percent of the pupils in compulsory education and 20 percent of students in upper secondary education choose independent schools. In certain regions of the country, almost half of all pupils and students are enrolled in independent schools.
The independent schools have gone from being an odd phenomenon in certain cities to an obvious and natural part of the Swedish education system. From a business point of view, the independent schools are developing into what can be considered as a real industry, and they are promoting real innovation.
The small independent schools have often challenged the public schools and forced them to improve. But the large chain companies, which have an estimated one-fourth to one-fifth of all independent school students, have proven to be an important force for innovative progress, regarding both educational methods and, important enough, ways to measure, compare, maintain, and improve results.
This also explains why independent schools, on an average, prove to have a smaller per pupil cost than public schools. Since 2004, the inflation-adjusted cost increase per pupil has been smaller for independent schools than that for the whole Swedish education system. And independent schools are not allowed to choose their students. Detailed analysis of cost items shows that independent schools spend a higher share of their revenues on education and teaching materials and are more efficient in managing other costs.
By Everette Hatcher III | Comments (0)