Why don’t you support the voucher system for the poor people that live in the same town that your town daughters live in? Is that fair that they attend a top quality private school while at the same time you shut down the voucher system that was in place for poor kids in D.C.?
In his latest weekly radio address, President Obama featured what will no doubt be a mainstay of his reelection campaign: the “Buffett Rule,” which says that rich people should pay at least the same tax rate as middle-class folks. It’s named after mega-investor Warren Buffett, who famously declared that he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. President Obama and his supporters have run with that, and are employing it to convince the public that such is the norm for the despised “rich.”
Of course that’s not the norm: Buffett is the rare taxpayer who makes almost all his income through investments, and top earners have much higher tax rates than people earning $200,000 and below. So this is clearly not about fairness — it’s about politics.
Two, though, can play at this game. If the President can engage in class warfare he’s also a fair target of it. So why not implement something called the “Obama Rule,” which demands that lower-income people get at least the same educational options as the President? That only seems fair, right, like the Buffett Rule? Indeed, the President himself noted in his weekly address that “ we…have to pay for investments that will help our economy grow and keep our country safe [such as] education.” So why, then, does the President’s 2013 budget zero-out funding for the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program while his daughters go to Sidwell Friends? Shouldn’t other kids in Washington have access to the same excellent private schools as the President’s daughters?
Class envy is hardly the right reason to demand school choice — the right reasons are freedom, competition, innovation, and specialization – but of course all kids should have the same options as President Obama’s daughters! As the President concluded in his weekly address (though, obviously, he wasn’t talking about school choice): “That’s how we’ll make this country a little fairer, a little more just, and a whole lot stronger.” So let’s invoke the Obama Rule, and give lower-income families the same educational choices as the President! It’s simply the fair thing to do.
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.
_______
You need to take 45 minutes and watch the remainder of this program by Milton Friedman on the voucher system.
Thank you so much for your time. I know how valuable it is. I also appreciate the fine family that you have and your commitment as a father and a husband.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733, lowcostsqueegees@yahoo.com
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 […]
Free to Choose by Milton Friedman: Episode “What is wrong with our schools?” (Part 4 of transcript and video) Here is the video clip and transcript of the film series FREE TO CHOOSE episode “What is wrong with our schools?” Part 4 of 6. Volume 6 – What’s Wrong with our Schools Transcript: It seems to me […]
Free to Choose by Milton Friedman: Episode “What is wrong with our schools?” (Part 3 of transcript and video) Here is the video clip and transcript of the film series FREE TO CHOOSE episode “What is wrong with our schools?” Part 3 of 6. Volume 6 – What’s Wrong with our Schools Transcript: If it doesn’t, they […]
Free to Choose by Milton Friedman: Episode “What is wrong with our schools?” (Part 2 of transcript and video) Here is the video clip and transcript of the film series FREE TO CHOOSE episode “What is wrong with our schools?” Part 2 of 6. Volume 6 – What’s Wrong with our Schools Transcript: Groups of concerned parents […]
Here is the video clip and transcript of the film series FREE TO CHOOSE episode “What is wrong with our schools?” Part 6 of 6. Volume 6 – What’s Wrong with our Schools Transcript: FRIEDMAN: But I personally think it’s a good thing. But I don’t see that any reason whatsoever why I shouldn’t have been required […]
Here is the video clip and transcript of the film series FREE TO CHOOSE episode “What is wrong with our schools?” Part 5 of 6. Volume 6 – What’s Wrong with our Schools Transcript: Are your voucher schools going to accept these tough children? COONS: You bet they are. (Several talking at once.) COONS: May I answer […]
America’s public education system is failing. We’re spending more money on education but not getting better results for our children.
That’s because the machine that runs the K-12 education system isn’t designed to produce better schools. It’s designed to produce more money for unions and more donations for politicians.
For decades, teachers’ unions have been among our nation’s largest political donors. As Reason Foundation’s Lisa Snell has noted, the National Education Association (NEA) alone spent $40 million on the 2010 election cycle (source: http://reason.org/news/printer/big-education-and-big-labor-electio). As the country’s largest teachers union, the NEA is only one cog in the infernal machine that robs parents of their tax dollars and students of their futures.
Students, teachers, parents, and hardworking Americans are all victims of this political machine–a system that takes money out of taxpayers’ wallets and gives it to union bosses, who put it in the pockets of politicians.
If you want to change this nation in a big way then you will at the fact that in the last 40 years we have increased our educational spending every year and our test scores have dropped. The problem is not money but education competition. We don’t need to spend over $29,000 per kid in the Washington D.C. district when we could give vouchers out (under $9000 per kid) and have better results. Take a look at this article from Milton Friedman.
Michelle: you are the grandfather of school vouchers do you feel victorious?
Mr. Friedman: Far from victorious, but very optimistic and hopeful. We are at the beginning of the task because as of the moment vouchers are available to only a very small amount of children. Our goal is to have a system in which every family in the U.S. will be able to choose for itself the school to which its children go we are far from that ultimate result. If we had that a system of free choice we would also have a system of competition, innovation which would change the character of education. You know our educational system is one of the most backwards things in our society in the may we teach people they did 200 years ago there is a person in the front of the room there are children sitting down at the bottom and they are being talked to can you name any other industry in the U.S. which is as technologically backward I can name one and only one..the legislature for the same reason. Both are monopolies the elementary and secondary school system is the single most Socialist industry in the U.S. leaving aside the military, but aside from the military its a major socialist industry, it is centralized and the control comes from the center and the difficulty of having a monopoly in which people cannot choose has been exacerbated by the fact that it has been largely taken over by teachers unions, the national education association and the american federation of teachers and the unions. Understandably I do not blame them but they are interested in the welfare of their members not the welfare of the children and the result is they have introduced a degree of rigidity which makes it impossible to reform the public school system from within. Reform has to come through competition from the outside and the only way you can get competition is by making it possible for parents to have the ability to choose.
Michelle: Give to me a model, an example of how it would work
Mr. Friedman: Very simple, take the extreme the government says we are willing to finance schooling for every child. The government compels children. If you look at the role of government in education there are 3 different levels there is a level of compulsory the government says every child must go to school until such and such and age. That is the equivalent of saying if you are going to drive a car you must have a license. The second stage is funding not only do we require you to have an education but the government is willing to pay for that schooling. That would be equivalent to saying the government is willing to pay for your car that you drive. The third level is running the educational industry that would be the equivalent of the government manufacturing the automobile or to put it in a different image consider food stamps today. Food stamps are funds provided by the government but if that were to be runned like the schools they would say everybody has to use these food stamps at a government grocery and each person with food stamps is assigned to a particular government grocers so the only way you can get your food stamps is by going to that grocer do you think those groceries would be very good? We know what the situation is in schooling people say why now and not 50-75 years ago? Well, when I went to high school t hat was a long time ago in the 1920s there were a 150,000 school districts in the U.S and the population was half what it is now. Today, there are fewer than 15,000 school districts. So it used to be that you really did have competition cause you had small school districts and parents had a good deal of control over those school districts, but increasingly we have shifted to very large school districts, to centralized control, to a system in which the governmental officials in which the educational professionals control it and like every socialist industry it produces a product that is very expensive and of very low quality. Of course it is not uniform there are some very good schools do not misunderstand me, but there are also some very bad ones.
Michelle: I interviewed some folks who are against school vouchers and they say that if you really want to help out a school what you should do is provide high quality early childhood education, small classes, small schools, summer school available to children who want it. Put money to those items which they claim would work.
Mr. Friedman: They don’t, we have been doing that. The amount of money spent per child adjusted for inflation has something like doubled or tripled over the last 20 years. Twenty years ago we had this report A Nation at Risk that pointed out all of the difficulties I just referred to and which pointed out this was a first generation that was going to be less schooled then its parents. We are now in the next generation and will be even less well schooled. We have had every possible effort you could have from reform from within. It is not just in schools it is in any area reform has to come from outside it has to come from competition. Let me illustrate that from within the school system. the united states from all accounts ranks #1 in higher education people from all over the world regard the United States colleges and universities the best and most varied. On the other hand in every other international comparison we rank near the bottom in elementary and secondary education why the difference?…one word..choice. The elementary and secondary education the school picks the child it picks its customer. In higher education the customer picks its school, you have choice that makes all the difference in the world. It means competition forces product. Look over the rest of the economy is there any area in the u.s. in which progress has not required progress from the outside. Look at the telephone industry when it was broken down into the little bells and opened up the competition it started a period of rapid innovation and development the key word is competition and the question is how can you get competition. only by having the customer choosing.
Michelle: There is concern that money is going to religious schools. That the majority of the students in voucher programs that exist use them to attend schools with religious affiliation?
Mr. Friedman: Why? Because the vouchers are so small in some cases. It is true that of the private schools in the u.s the great bulk of them are religious. that is for one simple reason here is someone selling something for nothing somebody down the street is giving away chocolate and you want to get into the business of selling chocolate that is kind of tough isn’t it here at schools children can attend them they are not free they are paying for it in the form of taxes but there is no specific charge for going to that school somebody else is going to offer it. The churches, the religious organizations have had a real advantage in that they were the only ones around who were in a position to subsidize the education and keep the fees down low. If you open it wide the most recent case was Ohio, cleveland case. The voucher that they had had a max value of $2,500 now it is not easy to provide a decent education at $2,500 and make money at it make it pay at the same time the state of Ohio was spending something like over $7,000 per child on schooling if that voucher had been $7,000 instead of $2,500 I have no doubt that there would have been a whole raft of new private, non-profit both profit and non-profit schools. That is what has happened in Milwaukee. Milwaukee has a voucher system and today the fraction of the voucher users in Milwaukee going to religious schools is less than the fraction going to religious schools was before this system started because there have been new schools developed and some of them have been religious but many of them are not. In any event, the Supreme Court has settled that issue they have said that if it is the choice of the parent if there are alternatives available there are government schools, charter schools, private non-denominational schools, private denominational schools so long as the choice is in the hands of the parent that is not a violation of the 1st amendment.
Michelle: You have a friend and an ally in the White House when it comes to vouchers
Mr. Friedman: I should say. Mr. Bush has always been in favor. He is in favor of free choice. Remember vouchers are a means not an end the purpose of vouchers is to enable parents to have free choice and the purpose of having free choice is to provide competition and allow the educational industry to get out of the 17th century and get into the 21st century and have more innovation and more evolvement. There is no reason why you cannot have the same kind of change in the provision of education as you have had in industries like the computer industry, the television industry and other things.
Michelle: Is it refreshing to have a President that, Bill Clinton was firmly against vouchers.
Mr. Friedman: No, it is a case of circumstances when he was Governor of Arkansas he was not against vouchers. He was in favor, but when he became President he came out against vouchers. I should say he did not oppose vouchers as Governor and he did as President and that was for political reasons. People don’t recognize how powerful politically the teachers unions are. Something like a quarter of all the delegates at the democratic national convention are from the teachers union. They are probably the most powerful pressure group in the U.S… very large funds, very large number of people and very active politically.
Michelle: We talk in the office about how President Bush has some very Friedmanesq ideas.
Mr. Friedman: They are not freidmanesq they are just good ideas. I hope that is true anyway. I think very highly of President Bush and I think in these areas don’t misunderstand me that is not a blanket statement there are some things he has done that I disagree with, but taken as a whole he has been moving in the right direction of trying to move toward a smaller more limited government trying to provide more freedom and more initiative in all areas. His philosophy on Medicare is the same as his philosophy in schools.
Michelle: Is that refreshing?
Mr. Friedman: It is an interesting thing, if you look at the facts the one area the area in which the low income people of this country, the blacks and the minority are most disadvantaged is with respect with the kinds of schools they can send their children to. The people who live in Harlem or the slums or the corresponding areas in LA or San Francisco they can go to the same stores, shop in the same stores everybody else can, they can buy the same automobiles, they can go to supermarket but they have very limited choice of schools everybody agrees that the schools in those areas are the worst they are poor. Yet, here you have a Democrat who allege their interest is to help the poor and the low income people here you have to take a different point every poll has shown that the strongest supporters of vouchers are the low income blacks and yet hardly a single black leader has been willing to come out for vouchers there were some exceptions Paul Williams in Milwaukee who was responsible for that…and a few others
Michelle: Why do you think that is?
Mr. Friedman: For obvious reasons, political. It has been to the self interest to the leaders the school system as long as its governmental its a source of power and jobs to hand around and funds to dispose of. If it is privatized that disappears and the other aspect of it is the power of the teachers unions. Right now those of us that are in the upper income classes have freedom of choice for our children in various ways we can decide where to live and we can choose places to live that have good schools or we can afford to pay twice for schooling once by taxes and once by paying tuition at a private school. It seems to me utterly unfair that those opportunities should not be open to everybody at all levels of income. If you had a system the kind I would like to see the government would say we require every child to get a certain number of years of schooling and in order to make that possible we are going to provide for every parent a voucher equal to a certain number of dollars which they can use only for schooling can’t use it for anything else. They can add to it, but they cannot subtract from it. Those will be those can be used in government schools let the government run the school but force them to be in competition so that all government schools charge tuition, but can be paid for by that voucher but that same voucher can also be used in private schools of all kinds and then you would have an open the teachers union complained and they insist they are doing a good job. if they are doing a good job then why are they so afraid of some competition?
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. Remembering Milton Friedman’s School Choice Legacy […]
Everywhere school vouchers have been tried they have been met with great success. Why do you think President Obama got rid of them in Washington D.C.? It was a political disaster for him because the school unions had always opposed them and their success made Obama’s allies look bad. In 1980 when I first sat […]
I ran across this very interesting article about Milton Friedman from 2002: Friedman: Market offers poor better learningBy Tamara Henry, USA TODAY By Doug Mills, AP President Bush honors influential economist Milton Friedman for his 90th birthday earlier this month. About an economist Name:Milton FriedmanAge: 90Background: Winner of the 1976 Nobel Prize for economic science; […]
Milton Friedman and Chile – The Power of Choice Uploaded by FreeToChooseNetwork on May 13, 2011 In this excerpt from Free To Choose Network’s “The Power of Choice (2006)”, we set the record straight on Milton Friedman’s dealings with Chile — including training the Chicago Boys and his meeting with Augusto Pinochet. Was the tremendous […]
The True Cost of Public Education Uploaded by catoinstitutevideo on Mar 5, 2010 What is the true cost of public education? According to a new study by the Cato Institute, some of the nation’s largest public school districts are underreporting the true cost of government-run education programs. http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=11432 Cato Education Analyst Adam B. Schaeffer explains […]
Max Brantley of the Arkansas Times Blog reports today that Mitt Romney is for school vouchers. I am glad to hear that. Over and over we hear that the reason private schools are better is because they don’t have to keep the troubling making kids. It reminds me of this short film that I saw many […]
John Brummett (10-26-11, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette online edition) does not want charter schools to put public schools out of business but he wants them to show public schools how to do it. (Paywall) I seek in these matters a kind of Clintonian third-way finesse: I support charter schools only to the extent that they should be […]
America’s public education system is failing. We’re spending more money on education but not getting better results for our children.
That’s because the machine that runs the K-12 education system isn’t designed to produce better schools. It’s designed to produce more money for unions and more donations for politicians.
For decades, teachers’ unions have been among our nation’s largest political donors. As Reason Foundation’s Lisa Snell has noted, the National Education Association (NEA) alone spent $40 million on the 2010 election cycle (source: http://reason.org/news/printer/big-education-and-big-labor-electio). As the country’s largest teachers union, the NEA is only one cog in the infernal machine that robs parents of their tax dollars and students of their futures.
Students, teachers, parents, and hardworking Americans are all victims of this political machine–a system that takes money out of taxpayers’ wallets and gives it to union bosses, who put it in the pockets of politicians.
If you want to change this nation in a big way then you will at the fact that in the last 40 years we have increased our educational spending every year and our test scores have dropped. The problem is not money but education competition. We don’t need to spend over $29,000 per kid in the Washington D.C. district when we could give vouchers out (under $9000 per kid) and have better results. Take a look at this article from Milton Friedman.
Michelle: you are the grandfather of school vouchers do you feel victorious?
Mr. Friedman: Far from victorious, but very optimistic and hopeful. We are at the beginning of the task because as of the moment vouchers are available to only a very small amount of children. Our goal is to have a system in which every family in the U.S. will be able to choose for itself the school to which its children go we are far from that ultimate result. If we had that a system of free choice we would also have a system of competition, innovation which would change the character of education. You know our educational system is one of the most backwards things in our society in the may we teach people they did 200 years ago there is a person in the front of the room there are children sitting down at the bottom and they are being talked to can you name any other industry in the U.S. which is as technologically backward I can name one and only one..the legislature for the same reason. Both are monopolies the elementary and secondary school system is the single most Socialist industry in the U.S. leaving aside the military, but aside from the military its a major socialist industry, it is centralized and the control comes from the center and the difficulty of having a monopoly in which people cannot choose has been exacerbated by the fact that it has been largely taken over by teachers unions, the national education association and the american federation of teachers and the unions. Understandably I do not blame them but they are interested in the welfare of their members not the welfare of the children and the result is they have introduced a degree of rigidity which makes it impossible to reform the public school system from within. Reform has to come through competition from the outside and the only way you can get competition is by making it possible for parents to have the ability to choose.
Michelle: Give to me a model, an example of how it would work
Mr. Friedman: Very simple, take the extreme the government says we are willing to finance schooling for every child. The government compels children. If you look at the role of government in education there are 3 different levels there is a level of compulsory the government says every child must go to school until such and such and age. That is the equivalent of saying if you are going to drive a car you must have a license. The second stage is funding not only do we require you to have an education but the government is willing to pay for that schooling. That would be equivalent to saying the government is willing to pay for your car that you drive. The third level is running the educational industry that would be the equivalent of the government manufacturing the automobile or to put it in a different image consider food stamps today. Food stamps are funds provided by the government but if that were to be runned like the schools they would say everybody has to use these food stamps at a government grocery and each person with food stamps is assigned to a particular government grocers so the only way you can get your food stamps is by going to that grocer do you think those groceries would be very good? We know what the situation is in schooling people say why now and not 50-75 years ago? Well, when I went to high school t hat was a long time ago in the 1920s there were a 150,000 school districts in the U.S and the population was half what it is now. Today, there are fewer than 15,000 school districts. So it used to be that you really did have competition cause you had small school districts and parents had a good deal of control over those school districts, but increasingly we have shifted to very large school districts, to centralized control, to a system in which the governmental officials in which the educational professionals control it and like every socialist industry it produces a product that is very expensive and of very low quality. Of course it is not uniform there are some very good schools do not misunderstand me, but there are also some very bad ones.
Michelle: I interviewed some folks who are against school vouchers and they say that if you really want to help out a school what you should do is provide high quality early childhood education, small classes, small schools, summer school available to children who want it. Put money to those items which they claim would work.
Mr. Friedman: They don’t, we have been doing that. The amount of money spent per child adjusted for inflation has something like doubled or tripled over the last 20 years. Twenty years ago we had this report A Nation at Risk that pointed out all of the difficulties I just referred to and which pointed out this was a first generation that was going to be less schooled then its parents. We are now in the next generation and will be even less well schooled. We have had every possible effort you could have from reform from within. It is not just in schools it is in any area reform has to come from outside it has to come from competition. Let me illustrate that from within the school system. the united states from all accounts ranks #1 in higher education people from all over the world regard the United States colleges and universities the best and most varied. On the other hand in every other international comparison we rank near the bottom in elementary and secondary education why the difference?…one word..choice. The elementary and secondary education the school picks the child it picks its customer. In higher education the customer picks its school, you have choice that makes all the difference in the world. It means competition forces product. Look over the rest of the economy is there any area in the u.s. in which progress has not required progress from the outside. Look at the telephone industry when it was broken down into the little bells and opened up the competition it started a period of rapid innovation and development the key word is competition and the question is how can you get competition. only by having the customer choosing.
Michelle: There is concern that money is going to religious schools. That the majority of the students in voucher programs that exist use them to attend schools with religious affiliation?
Mr. Friedman: Why? Because the vouchers are so small in some cases. It is true that of the private schools in the u.s the great bulk of them are religious. that is for one simple reason here is someone selling something for nothing somebody down the street is giving away chocolate and you want to get into the business of selling chocolate that is kind of tough isn’t it here at schools children can attend them they are not free they are paying for it in the form of taxes but there is no specific charge for going to that school somebody else is going to offer it. The churches, the religious organizations have had a real advantage in that they were the only ones around who were in a position to subsidize the education and keep the fees down low. If you open it wide the most recent case was Ohio, cleveland case. The voucher that they had had a max value of $2,500 now it is not easy to provide a decent education at $2,500 and make money at it make it pay at the same time the state of Ohio was spending something like over $7,000 per child on schooling if that voucher had been $7,000 instead of $2,500 I have no doubt that there would have been a whole raft of new private, non-profit both profit and non-profit schools. That is what has happened in Milwaukee. Milwaukee has a voucher system and today the fraction of the voucher users in Milwaukee going to religious schools is less than the fraction going to religious schools was before this system started because there have been new schools developed and some of them have been religious but many of them are not. In any event, the Supreme Court has settled that issue they have said that if it is the choice of the parent if there are alternatives available there are government schools, charter schools, private non-denominational schools, private denominational schools so long as the choice is in the hands of the parent that is not a violation of the 1st amendment.
Michelle: You have a friend and an ally in the White House when it comes to vouchers
Mr. Friedman: I should say. Mr. Bush has always been in favor. He is in favor of free choice. Remember vouchers are a means not an end the purpose of vouchers is to enable parents to have free choice and the purpose of having free choice is to provide competition and allow the educational industry to get out of the 17th century and get into the 21st century and have more innovation and more evolvement. There is no reason why you cannot have the same kind of change in the provision of education as you have had in industries like the computer industry, the television industry and other things.
Michelle: Is it refreshing to have a President that, Bill Clinton was firmly against vouchers.
Mr. Friedman: No, it is a case of circumstances when he was Governor of Arkansas he was not against vouchers. He was in favor, but when he became President he came out against vouchers. I should say he did not oppose vouchers as Governor and he did as President and that was for political reasons. People don’t recognize how powerful politically the teachers unions are. Something like a quarter of all the delegates at the democratic national convention are from the teachers union. They are probably the most powerful pressure group in the U.S… very large funds, very large number of people and very active politically.
Michelle: We talk in the office about how President Bush has some very Friedmanesq ideas.
Mr. Friedman: They are not freidmanesq they are just good ideas. I hope that is true anyway. I think very highly of President Bush and I think in these areas don’t misunderstand me that is not a blanket statement there are some things he has done that I disagree with, but taken as a whole he has been moving in the right direction of trying to move toward a smaller more limited government trying to provide more freedom and more initiative in all areas. His philosophy on Medicare is the same as his philosophy in schools.
Michelle: Is that refreshing?
Mr. Friedman: It is an interesting thing, if you look at the facts the one area the area in which the low income people of this country, the blacks and the minority are most disadvantaged is with respect with the kinds of schools they can send their children to. The people who live in Harlem or the slums or the corresponding areas in LA or San Francisco they can go to the same stores, shop in the same stores everybody else can, they can buy the same automobiles, they can go to supermarket but they have very limited choice of schools everybody agrees that the schools in those areas are the worst they are poor. Yet, here you have a Democrat who allege their interest is to help the poor and the low income people here you have to take a different point every poll has shown that the strongest supporters of vouchers are the low income blacks and yet hardly a single black leader has been willing to come out for vouchers there were some exceptions Paul Williams in Milwaukee who was responsible for that…and a few others
Michelle: Why do you think that is?
Mr. Friedman: For obvious reasons, political. It has been to the self interest to the leaders the school system as long as its governmental its a source of power and jobs to hand around and funds to dispose of. If it is privatized that disappears and the other aspect of it is the power of the teachers unions. Right now those of us that are in the upper income classes have freedom of choice for our children in various ways we can decide where to live and we can choose places to live that have good schools or we can afford to pay twice for schooling once by taxes and once by paying tuition at a private school. It seems to me utterly unfair that those opportunities should not be open to everybody at all levels of income. If you had a system the kind I would like to see the government would say we require every child to get a certain number of years of schooling and in order to make that possible we are going to provide for every parent a voucher equal to a certain number of dollars which they can use only for schooling can’t use it for anything else. They can add to it, but they cannot subtract from it. Those will be those can be used in government schools let the government run the school but force them to be in competition so that all government schools charge tuition, but can be paid for by that voucher but that same voucher can also be used in private schools of all kinds and then you would have an open the teachers union complained and they insist they are doing a good job. if they are doing a good job then why are they so afraid of some competition?
Thank you so much for your time. I know how valuable it is. I also appreciate the fine family that you have and your commitment as a father and a husband.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733, lowcostsqueegees@yahoo.com
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. Remembering Milton Friedman’s School Choice Legacy […]
Everywhere school vouchers have been tried they have been met with great success. Why do you think President Obama got rid of them in Washington D.C.? It was a political disaster for him because the school unions had always opposed them and their success made Obama’s allies look bad. In 1980 when I first sat […]
I ran across this very interesting article about Milton Friedman from 2002: Friedman: Market offers poor better learningBy Tamara Henry, USA TODAY By Doug Mills, AP President Bush honors influential economist Milton Friedman for his 90th birthday earlier this month. About an economist Name:Milton FriedmanAge: 90Background: Winner of the 1976 Nobel Prize for economic science; […]
Milton Friedman and Chile – The Power of Choice Uploaded by FreeToChooseNetwork on May 13, 2011 In this excerpt from Free To Choose Network’s “The Power of Choice (2006)”, we set the record straight on Milton Friedman’s dealings with Chile — including training the Chicago Boys and his meeting with Augusto Pinochet. Was the tremendous […]
The True Cost of Public Education Uploaded by catoinstitutevideo on Mar 5, 2010 What is the true cost of public education? According to a new study by the Cato Institute, some of the nation’s largest public school districts are underreporting the true cost of government-run education programs. http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=11432 Cato Education Analyst Adam B. Schaeffer explains […]
Max Brantley of the Arkansas Times Blog reports today that Mitt Romney is for school vouchers. I am glad to hear that. Over and over we hear that the reason private schools are better is because they don’t have to keep the troubling making kids. It reminds me of this short film that I saw many […]
John Brummett (10-26-11, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette online edition) does not want charter schools to put public schools out of business but he wants them to show public schools how to do it. (Paywall) I seek in these matters a kind of Clintonian third-way finesse: I support charter schools only to the extent that they should be […]
America’s public education system is failing. We’re spending more money on education but not getting better results for our children.
That’s because the machine that runs the K-12 education system isn’t designed to produce better schools. It’s designed to produce more money for unions and more donations for politicians.
For decades, teachers’ unions have been among our nation’s largest political donors. As Reason Foundation’s Lisa Snell has noted, the National Education Association (NEA) alone spent $40 million on the 2010 election cycle (source: http://reason.org/news/printer/big-education-and-big-labor-electio). As the country’s largest teachers union, the NEA is only one cog in the infernal machine that robs parents of their tax dollars and students of their futures.
Students, teachers, parents, and hardworking Americans are all victims of this political machine–a system that takes money out of taxpayers’ wallets and gives it to union bosses, who put it in the pockets of politicians.
If you want to change this nation in a big way then you will at the fact that in the last 40 years we have increased our educational spending every year and our test scores have dropped. The problem is not money but education competition. We don’t need to spend over $29,000 per kid in the Washington D.C. district when we could give vouchers out (under $9000 per kid) and have better results. Take a look at this article from Milton Friedman.
Michelle: you are the grandfather of school vouchers do you feel victorious?
Mr. Friedman: Far from victorious, but very optimistic and hopeful. We are at the beginning of the task because as of the moment vouchers are available to only a very small amount of children. Our goal is to have a system in which every family in the U.S. will be able to choose for itself the school to which its children go we are far from that ultimate result. If we had that a system of free choice we would also have a system of competition, innovation which would change the character of education. You know our educational system is one of the most backwards things in our society in the may we teach people they did 200 years ago there is a person in the front of the room there are children sitting down at the bottom and they are being talked to can you name any other industry in the U.S. which is as technologically backward I can name one and only one..the legislature for the same reason. Both are monopolies the elementary and secondary school system is the single most Socialist industry in the U.S. leaving aside the military, but aside from the military its a major socialist industry, it is centralized and the control comes from the center and the difficulty of having a monopoly in which people cannot choose has been exacerbated by the fact that it has been largely taken over by teachers unions, the national education association and the american federation of teachers and the unions. Understandably I do not blame them but they are interested in the welfare of their members not the welfare of the children and the result is they have introduced a degree of rigidity which makes it impossible to reform the public school system from within. Reform has to come through competition from the outside and the only way you can get competition is by making it possible for parents to have the ability to choose.
Michelle: Give to me a model, an example of how it would work
Mr. Friedman: Very simple, take the extreme the government says we are willing to finance schooling for every child. The government compels children. If you look at the role of government in education there are 3 different levels there is a level of compulsory the government says every child must go to school until such and such and age. That is the equivalent of saying if you are going to drive a car you must have a license. The second stage is funding not only do we require you to have an education but the government is willing to pay for that schooling. That would be equivalent to saying the government is willing to pay for your car that you drive. The third level is running the educational industry that would be the equivalent of the government manufacturing the automobile or to put it in a different image consider food stamps today. Food stamps are funds provided by the government but if that were to be runned like the schools they would say everybody has to use these food stamps at a government grocery and each person with food stamps is assigned to a particular government grocers so the only way you can get your food stamps is by going to that grocer do you think those groceries would be very good? We know what the situation is in schooling people say why now and not 50-75 years ago? Well, when I went to high school t hat was a long time ago in the 1920s there were a 150,000 school districts in the U.S and the population was half what it is now. Today, there are fewer than 15,000 school districts. So it used to be that you really did have competition cause you had small school districts and parents had a good deal of control over those school districts, but increasingly we have shifted to very large school districts, to centralized control, to a system in which the governmental officials in which the educational professionals control it and like every socialist industry it produces a product that is very expensive and of very low quality. Of course it is not uniform there are some very good schools do not misunderstand me, but there are also some very bad ones.
Michelle: I interviewed some folks who are against school vouchers and they say that if you really want to help out a school what you should do is provide high quality early childhood education, small classes, small schools, summer school available to children who want it. Put money to those items which they claim would work.
Mr. Friedman: They don’t, we have been doing that. The amount of money spent per child adjusted for inflation has something like doubled or tripled over the last 20 years. Twenty years ago we had this report A Nation at Risk that pointed out all of the difficulties I just referred to and which pointed out this was a first generation that was going to be less schooled then its parents. We are now in the next generation and will be even less well schooled. We have had every possible effort you could have from reform from within. It is not just in schools it is in any area reform has to come from outside it has to come from competition. Let me illustrate that from within the school system. the united states from all accounts ranks #1 in higher education people from all over the world regard the United States colleges and universities the best and most varied. On the other hand in every other international comparison we rank near the bottom in elementary and secondary education why the difference?…one word..choice. The elementary and secondary education the school picks the child it picks its customer. In higher education the customer picks its school, you have choice that makes all the difference in the world. It means competition forces product. Look over the rest of the economy is there any area in the u.s. in which progress has not required progress from the outside. Look at the telephone industry when it was broken down into the little bells and opened up the competition it started a period of rapid innovation and development the key word is competition and the question is how can you get competition. only by having the customer choosing.
Michelle: There is concern that money is going to religious schools. That the majority of the students in voucher programs that exist use them to attend schools with religious affiliation?
Mr. Friedman: Why? Because the vouchers are so small in some cases. It is true that of the private schools in the u.s the great bulk of them are religious. that is for one simple reason here is someone selling something for nothing somebody down the street is giving away chocolate and you want to get into the business of selling chocolate that is kind of tough isn’t it here at schools children can attend them they are not free they are paying for it in the form of taxes but there is no specific charge for going to that school somebody else is going to offer it. The churches, the religious organizations have had a real advantage in that they were the only ones around who were in a position to subsidize the education and keep the fees down low. If you open it wide the most recent case was Ohio, cleveland case. The voucher that they had had a max value of $2,500 now it is not easy to provide a decent education at $2,500 and make money at it make it pay at the same time the state of Ohio was spending something like over $7,000 per child on schooling if that voucher had been $7,000 instead of $2,500 I have no doubt that there would have been a whole raft of new private, non-profit both profit and non-profit schools. That is what has happened in Milwaukee. Milwaukee has a voucher system and today the fraction of the voucher users in Milwaukee going to religious schools is less than the fraction going to religious schools was before this system started because there have been new schools developed and some of them have been religious but many of them are not. In any event, the Supreme Court has settled that issue they have said that if it is the choice of the parent if there are alternatives available there are government schools, charter schools, private non-denominational schools, private denominational schools so long as the choice is in the hands of the parent that is not a violation of the 1st amendment.
Michelle: You have a friend and an ally in the White House when it comes to vouchers
Mr. Friedman: I should say. Mr. Bush has always been in favor. He is in favor of free choice. Remember vouchers are a means not an end the purpose of vouchers is to enable parents to have free choice and the purpose of having free choice is to provide competition and allow the educational industry to get out of the 17th century and get into the 21st century and have more innovation and more evolvement. There is no reason why you cannot have the same kind of change in the provision of education as you have had in industries like the computer industry, the television industry and other things.
Michelle: Is it refreshing to have a President that, Bill Clinton was firmly against vouchers.
Mr. Friedman: No, it is a case of circumstances when he was Governor of Arkansas he was not against vouchers. He was in favor, but when he became President he came out against vouchers. I should say he did not oppose vouchers as Governor and he did as President and that was for political reasons. People don’t recognize how powerful politically the teachers unions are. Something like a quarter of all the delegates at the democratic national convention are from the teachers union. They are probably the most powerful pressure group in the U.S… very large funds, very large number of people and very active politically.
Michelle: We talk in the office about how President Bush has some very Friedmanesq ideas.
Mr. Friedman: They are not freidmanesq they are just good ideas. I hope that is true anyway. I think very highly of President Bush and I think in these areas don’t misunderstand me that is not a blanket statement there are some things he has done that I disagree with, but taken as a whole he has been moving in the right direction of trying to move toward a smaller more limited government trying to provide more freedom and more initiative in all areas. His philosophy on Medicare is the same as his philosophy in schools.
Michelle: Is that refreshing?
Mr. Friedman: It is an interesting thing, if you look at the facts the one area the area in which the low income people of this country, the blacks and the minority are most disadvantaged is with respect with the kinds of schools they can send their children to. The people who live in Harlem or the slums or the corresponding areas in LA or San Francisco they can go to the same stores, shop in the same stores everybody else can, they can buy the same automobiles, they can go to supermarket but they have very limited choice of schools everybody agrees that the schools in those areas are the worst they are poor. Yet, here you have a Democrat who allege their interest is to help the poor and the low income people here you have to take a different point every poll has shown that the strongest supporters of vouchers are the low income blacks and yet hardly a single black leader has been willing to come out for vouchers there were some exceptions Paul Williams in Milwaukee who was responsible for that…and a few others
Michelle: Why do you think that is?
Mr. Friedman: For obvious reasons, political. It has been to the self interest to the leaders the school system as long as its governmental its a source of power and jobs to hand around and funds to dispose of. If it is privatized that disappears and the other aspect of it is the power of the teachers unions. Right now those of us that are in the upper income classes have freedom of choice for our children in various ways we can decide where to live and we can choose places to live that have good schools or we can afford to pay twice for schooling once by taxes and once by paying tuition at a private school. It seems to me utterly unfair that those opportunities should not be open to everybody at all levels of income. If you had a system the kind I would like to see the government would say we require every child to get a certain number of years of schooling and in order to make that possible we are going to provide for every parent a voucher equal to a certain number of dollars which they can use only for schooling can’t use it for anything else. They can add to it, but they cannot subtract from it. Those will be those can be used in government schools let the government run the school but force them to be in competition so that all government schools charge tuition, but can be paid for by that voucher but that same voucher can also be used in private schools of all kinds and then you would have an open the teachers union complained and they insist they are doing a good job. if they are doing a good job then why are they so afraid of some competition?
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. Remembering Milton Friedman’s School Choice Legacy […]
Everywhere school vouchers have been tried they have been met with great success. Why do you think President Obama got rid of them in Washington D.C.? It was a political disaster for him because the school unions had always opposed them and their success made Obama’s allies look bad. In 1980 when I first sat […]
I ran across this very interesting article about Milton Friedman from 2002: Friedman: Market offers poor better learningBy Tamara Henry, USA TODAY By Doug Mills, AP President Bush honors influential economist Milton Friedman for his 90th birthday earlier this month. About an economist Name:Milton FriedmanAge: 90Background: Winner of the 1976 Nobel Prize for economic science; […]
Milton Friedman and Chile – The Power of Choice Uploaded by FreeToChooseNetwork on May 13, 2011 In this excerpt from Free To Choose Network’s “The Power of Choice (2006)”, we set the record straight on Milton Friedman’s dealings with Chile — including training the Chicago Boys and his meeting with Augusto Pinochet. Was the tremendous […]
The True Cost of Public Education Uploaded by catoinstitutevideo on Mar 5, 2010 What is the true cost of public education? According to a new study by the Cato Institute, some of the nation’s largest public school districts are underreporting the true cost of government-run education programs. http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=11432 Cato Education Analyst Adam B. Schaeffer explains […]
Max Brantley of the Arkansas Times Blog reports today that Mitt Romney is for school vouchers. I am glad to hear that. Over and over we hear that the reason private schools are better is because they don’t have to keep the troubling making kids. It reminds me of this short film that I saw many […]
John Brummett (10-26-11, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette online edition) does not want charter schools to put public schools out of business but he wants them to show public schools how to do it. (Paywall) I seek in these matters a kind of Clintonian third-way finesse: I support charter schools only to the extent that they should be […]
At the rate the federal government spends, it runs out of money on July 31. What programs should be cut to balance the budget and fund the government for the remaining five months of the year? Cutting NASA might buy two days; cutting the Navy could buy fifteen. It seems that balancing the budget may require more than just cutting government programs. What should be done?
What’s more realistic: A unicorn, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, or a successful government program?
This isn’t a trick question. Even though I’ve presented both theoretical and empirical arguments against government spending, that doesn’t mean every government program is a failure.
I suppose the answer depends on the definition of success.
Government roads do enable me to get from Virginia to Washington every day. And the Post Office usually gets mail from one side of the country to another. By that standard, many government programs and activities yield positive results.
But if the question is whether government achieves anything in a cost-efficient manner, you’re probably better off searching under your bed for unicorns.
If you pose this question to someone on the left, however, don’t be surprised if they point to Head Start. The conventional wisdom in Washington is that this program gives low-income kids a critical leg up before they start school.
I would like this to be true. I may not be fond of big and bloated government, but the best interests of these kids are more important than my desire for a talking point against the welfare state.
So what does the evidence say?
Here’s what the Washington Examiner wrote about the program, starting with an explanation of what the program is supposed to accomplish.
There are few institutions more sacrosanct in Washington than President Johnson’s Head Start program. The federal government spent more than $7.9 billion on the program in 2012 alone to provide preschool services for nearly 1 million low-income Americans. The program represents everything that is supposedly great about the liberal welfare state. It redistributes resources from wealthy to poor. It uses the power of the federal government to combat inequality by giving poor and minority students an educational boost before they fall behind their wealthier peers. There’s just one problem: It doesn’t work.
Is that an empty assertion? Nope, it’s the evidence from the government’s own research.
The ongoing randomized study of Head Start was based on a nationally representative sample of 5,000 children who applied for the program in 2002. Approximately half of the subjects received Head Start services, while the other half did not. The students were then tested on their language, literacy, math and school performance skills. …the 2010 Head Start Impact Study report notes, “the benefits of access to Head Start at age four are largely absent by 1st grade for the program population as a whole.” Specifically, the language, literacy, math and school performance skills of the Head Start children all failed to improve. …Now, the HHS has finally published a follow-up to its 2010 study that follows the same children through the end of third grade. And again, the HHS has concluded that Head Start is ineffective, concluding that Heat Start resulted in “very few impacts … in any of the four domains of cognitive, social-emotional, health and parenting practices.” And those impacts that were found “did not show a clear pattern of favorable or unfavorable impacts for children.”
So what’s this costing the nation (above and beyond the failure to improve the lives of children)?
Since 1965, the federal government has spent $180 billion on Head Start. …Does that sound like a program you’d want to spend $8 billion on next year?
Now imagine the good things that would have happened if that money was left in the economy’s productive sector.
Or, if you like government, but at least want good results, imagine the good things that would have happened if state and local governments shifted $180 billion from the failed school monopoly into genuine school choice programs.
But let’s close on an optimistic note. As far as I know, there’s no evidence that Head Start actually damages children. It’s just wasted money.
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 […]
Everywhere school vouchers have been tried they have been met with great success. Why do you think President Obama got rid of them in Washington D.C.? It was a political disaster for him because the school unions had always opposed them and their success made Obama’s allies look bad. In 1980 when I first sat […]
The best way to destroy the welfare trap is to put in Milton Friedman’s negative income tax. A Picture of How Redistribution Programs Trap the Less Fortunate in Lives of Dependency I wrote last year about the way in which welfare programs lead to very high implicit marginal tax rates on low-income people. More specifically, they […]
Everywhere school vouchers have been tried they have been met with great success. Why do you think President Obama got rid of them in Washington D.C.? It was a political disaster for him because the school unions had always opposed them and their success made Obama’s allies look bad. In 1980 when I first sat […]
Broun Introduces Balanced Budget Amendment Uploaded by RepPaulBroun on Feb 23, 2010 No description available. _______________ Dear Senator Pryor, Why not pass the Balanced Budget Amendment? As you know that federal deficit is at all time high (1.6 trillion deficit with revenues of 2.2 trillion and spending at 3.8 trillion). On my blog http://www.HaltingArkansasLiberalswithTruth.com I took […]
Everywhere school vouchers have been tried they have been met with great success. Why do you think President Obama got rid of them in Washington D.C.? It was a political disaster for him because the school unions had always opposed them and their success made Obama’s allies look bad. In 1980 when I first sat […]
Everywhere school vouchers have been tried they have been met with great success. Why do you think President Obama got rid of them in Washington D.C.? It was a political disaster for him because the school unions had always opposed them and their success made Obama’s allies look bad.
In 1980 when I first sat down and read the book “Free to Choose” I was involved in Ronald Reagan’s campaign for president and excited about the race. Milton Friedman’s books and film series really helped form my conservative views. Take a look at one of my favorite films of his and this one deals with school vouchers:
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.
“Milton Friedman is a scholar of first rank whose original contributions to economic science have made him one of the greatest thinkers in modern history.” —President Ronald Reagan
“How grateful I have been over the years for the cogency of Friedman’s ideas which have influenced me. Cherishers of freedom will be indebted to him for generations to come.” —Alan Greenspan, former Chairman, Federal Reserve System
“Right at this moment there are people all over the land, I could put dots on the map, who are trying to prove Milton wrong. At some point, somebody else is trying to prove he’s right That’s what I call influence.” —Paul Samuelson, Nobel Laureate in Economic Science
“Friedman’s influence reaches far beyond the academic community and the world of economics. Rather than lock himself in an ivory tower, he has joined the fray to fight for the survival of this great country of ours.” —William E. Simon, former Secretary of the Treasury
“Milton Friedman is the most original social thinker of the era.” —John Kenneth Galbraith, former Professor of Economics, Harvard University
Here is the video clip and transcript of the film series FREE TO CHOOSE episode “What is wrong with our schools?” Part 6 of 6. Volume 6 – What’s Wrong with our Schools Transcript: FRIEDMAN: But I personally think it’s a good thing. But I don’t see that any reason whatsoever why I shouldn’t have been required […]
Here is the video clip and transcript of the film series FREE TO CHOOSE episode “What is wrong with our schools?” Part 5 of 6. Volume 6 – What’s Wrong with our Schools Transcript: Are your voucher schools going to accept these tough children? COONS: You bet they are. (Several talking at once.) COONS: May I answer […]
Friedman Friday” Free to Choose by Milton Friedman: Episode “What is wrong with our schools?” (Part 3 of transcript and video) Here is the video clip and transcript of the film series FREE TO CHOOSE episode “What is wrong with our schools?” Part 3 of 6. Volume 6 – What’s Wrong with our Schools Transcript: If it […]
Here is the video clip and transcript of the film series FREE TO CHOOSE episode “What is wrong with our schools?” Part 2 of 6. Volume 6 – What’s Wrong with our Schools Transcript: Groups of concerned parents and teachers decided to do something about it. They used private funds to take over empty stores and they […]
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 […]
Max Brantley of the Arkansas Times Blog is always critical of the voucher system but has he taken a closer look at what has been going on in the public schools the last few decades with their costs?
Since 1950 the staffing of public schools has skyrocketed but are we getting a good return on our money? We need to turn to the voucher system that Milton Friedman proposed.
The Friedman Foundation has published an excellent report detailing the administrative bloat plaguing our nation’s public schools. The School Staffing Surge: Decades of Employment Growth in America’s Public Schoolsshows dramatic increases in teaching and non-teaching staff over the past five decades despite modest increases in student enrollment.
As we detailed in a recent report on growth in non-teaching positions in public schools across the country, student enrollment has increased just 8 percent since 1970, while the number of teachers has increased 60 percent, and the number of non-teaching administrative and other staff has increased 138 percent. (continues below chart)
The Friedman report, authored by Ben Scafidi, PhD, takes an even longer look, demonstrating that since 1950, public school enrollment has increased 96 percent, while the number of teachers has increased 252 percent and the number of non-teaching personnel (administrators and other staff) has increased an astonishing 702 percent. “Put differently,” Scafidi notes, “the rise in non-teaching staff was more than seven times faster than the increase in students”:
Between 1950 and 2009, the pupil-staff ratio declined to 7.8 students per public school employee from 19.3 students per public school employee. By 2009, there were fewer than eight public school students per adult employed in the public school system. The drop in the pupil-teacher ratio also was large—the pupil-teacher ratio was 27.5 students per teacher in 1950 and only 15.4 in 2009.
Scafidi also shows how this administrative bloat has affected schools on a state-by-state basis (and uses an interactive map to make the point). Of note: “Nine states with declining student populations had significant increases in public school personnel—D.C., Iowa, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, and Vermont.”
The Friedman report notes that the dramatic reduction in class size over the decades has not led to increases in student achievement. Why? As Scafidi reports, an increase in teacher quantity has not produced an increase in teacher quality:
As public schools have reduced class sizes continually since at least 1950, they have had to hire more teachers. And, the evidence is in—the disparity in effectiveness across teachers is considerable. Accordingly, state governments and local public school boards should have been more concerned with improving teacher effectiveness than lowering class sizes.
Continuing a trend of growing staff positions in our nation’s public schools won’t create the types of improvements that the system so desperately needs.
Instead, public school districts should trim bureaucracy and work on long-term reform options for better targeting of taxpayer resources. And decision making should be decentralized, placing staffing and other decisions in the hands of principals, teachers, and parents.
Finally, parents—and teachers—should have options. We’ll never see improvement in our nation’s education system without providing students with a choice about which schools—public, private, virtual, or homeschooling—will best meet their unique learning needs.
Max Brantley of the Arkansas Times Blog reports today that Mitt Romney is for school vouchers. I am glad to hear that. Over and over we hear that the reason private schools are better is because they don’t have to keep the troubling making kids. It reminds me of this short film that I saw many […]
Milton Friedman – Public Schools / Voucher System (Q&A) Part 2 Published on May 7, 2012 by BasicEconomics __________ We need to get competition back again among schools and the voucher system is the best way to do that. D.C. Public Schools Spend Almost $30,000 Per Student Ericka Andersen July 25, 2012 at 10:00 am […]
Milton Friedman – Public Schools / Voucher System (Q&A) Part 1 Published on May 7, 2012 by BasicEconomics ___________ We have to turn to the school voucher system if we want competition between schools and want to lower the cost of education. Chile’s Amazing School Choice Revolution September 29, 2012 by Dan Mitchell I wrote back […]
Johan Norberg – Free or Equal – Free to Choose 30 years later 5/5 Published on Jun 10, 2012 by BasicEconomics In 1980 economist and Nobel laureate Milton Friedman inspired market reform in the West and revolutions in the East with his celebrated television series “Free To Choose.” Thirty years later, in this one-hour documentary, […]
Everywhere school vouchers have been tried they have been met with great success. Why do you think President Obama got rid of them in Washington D.C.? It was a political disaster for him because the school unions had always opposed them and their success made Obama’s allies look bad. In 1980 when I first sat […]
Johan Norberg – Free or Equal – Free to Choose 30 years later 4/5 Published on Jun 10, 2012 by BasicEconomics In 1980 economist and Nobel laureate Milton Friedman inspired market reform in the West and revolutions in the East with his celebrated television series “Free To Choose.” Thirty years later, in this one-hour documentary, […]
Johan Norberg – Free or Equal – Free to Choose 30 years later 3/5 Published on Jun 10, 2012 by BasicEconomics In 1980 economist and Nobel laureate Milton Friedman inspired market reform in the West and revolutions in the East with his celebrated television series “Free To Choose.” Thirty years later, in this one-hour documentary, […]
The Machine: The Truth Behind Teachers Unions Published on Sep 4, 2012 by ReasonTV America’s public education system is failing. We’re spending more money on education but not getting better results for our children. That’s because the machine that runs the K-12 education system isn’t designed to produce better schools. It’s designed to produce more […]
Milton Friedman on Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom” 1994 Interview 2 of 2 Uploaded by PenguinProseMedia on Oct 26, 2011 2nd half of 1994 interview. ________________ I have a lot of respect for the Friedmans.Two Lucky People by Milton and Rose Friedman reviewed by David Frum — October 1998. However, I liked this review below better. It […]
Johan Norberg – Free or Equal – Free to Choose 30 years later 2/5 Published on Jun 10, 2012 by BasicEconomics In 1980 economist and Nobel laureate Milton Friedman inspired market reform in the West and revolutions in the East with his celebrated television series “Free To Choose.” Thirty years later, in this one-hour documentary, […]
Everywhere school vouchers have been tried they have been met with great success. Why do you think President Obama got rid of them in Washington D.C.? It was a political disaster for him because the school unions had always opposed them and their success made Obama’s allies look bad.
In 1980 when I first sat down and read the book “Free to Choose” I was involved in Ronald Reagan’s campaign for president and excited about the race. Milton Friedman’s books and film series really helped form my conservative views. Take a look at one of my favorite films of his and this one deals with school vouchers:
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.
“Milton Friedman is a scholar of first rank whose original contributions to economic science have made him one of the greatest thinkers in modern history.” —President Ronald Reagan
“How grateful I have been over the years for the cogency of Friedman’s ideas which have influenced me. Cherishers of freedom will be indebted to him for generations to come.” —Alan Greenspan, former Chairman, Federal Reserve System
“Right at this moment there are people all over the land, I could put dots on the map, who are trying to prove Milton wrong. At some point, somebody else is trying to prove he’s right That’s what I call influence.” —Paul Samuelson, Nobel Laureate in Economic Science
“Friedman’s influence reaches far beyond the academic community and the world of economics. Rather than lock himself in an ivory tower, he has joined the fray to fight for the survival of this great country of ours.” —William E. Simon, former Secretary of the Treasury
“Milton Friedman is the most original social thinker of the era.” —John Kenneth Galbraith, former Professor of Economics, Harvard University
Here is the video clip and transcript of the film series FREE TO CHOOSE episode “What is wrong with our schools?” Part 6 of 6. Volume 6 – What’s Wrong with our Schools Transcript: FRIEDMAN: But I personally think it’s a good thing. But I don’t see that any reason whatsoever why I shouldn’t have been required […]
Here is the video clip and transcript of the film series FREE TO CHOOSE episode “What is wrong with our schools?” Part 5 of 6. Volume 6 – What’s Wrong with our Schools Transcript: Are your voucher schools going to accept these tough children? COONS: You bet they are. (Several talking at once.) COONS: May I answer […]
Friedman Friday” Free to Choose by Milton Friedman: Episode “What is wrong with our schools?” (Part 3 of transcript and video) Here is the video clip and transcript of the film series FREE TO CHOOSE episode “What is wrong with our schools?” Part 3 of 6. Volume 6 – What’s Wrong with our Schools Transcript: If it […]
Here is the video clip and transcript of the film series FREE TO CHOOSE episode “What is wrong with our schools?” Part 2 of 6. Volume 6 – What’s Wrong with our Schools Transcript: Groups of concerned parents and teachers decided to do something about it. They used private funds to take over empty stores and they […]
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 […]
The public school system in the inner cities in the USA is appauling. Don’t our inner city kids a better chance of going up the economic ladder? Why did you abolish the opportunity for kids in Washington D.C. to get a better education? It was all over the news a few years ago and at the same time you send your kids to private school.
And here’s a powerful video from Reason TV that combines those themes, noting the unholy alliance of teacher unions and the NAACP.
The spiritual leader of the teacher unions?
Fortunately, the statists seem to be losing this issue. Louisiana recently adopted school choice legislation that will give poor children an opportunity to escape failing government schools.
But the left isn’t losing gracefully. In a move that would make George Wallace proud, they are threatening schools that will participate in the new program.
In some parts of the antebellum South, it was illegal to teach blacks how to read. Are teachers unions in Louisiana trying to turn back the clock? Last week, lawyers for the Louisiana Association of Educators, one of the state’s two major teachers unions, threatened private and parochial schools with lawsuits if the schools accept students participating in a new school choice initiative that starts this year. Education reforms signed into law in April by Governor Bobby Jindal include a publicly funded voucher program that allows low-income families to send their children to private or parochial schools. …lawyers representing the unions faxed letters to about 100 of the 119 schools that are participating in the voucher program. “Our clients have directed us to take whatever means necessary,” the letter reads. Unless the school agrees to turn away voucher students, “we will have no alternative other than to institute litigation.” The letter demanded an answer in writing by the next day. Louisiana’s voucher program is adjusted for family income and is intended above all to give a shot at a decent education to underprivileged minorities, who are more likely to be relegated to the worst public schools. …Demand for vouchers has been overwhelming: There were 10,300 applications for 5,600 slots. Despite claims to the contrary by school-choice opponents, low-income parents can and do act rationally when it comes to the education of their children. State officials have rightly slammed the union’s tactics. A spokesman for the Governor said in a statement that union leaders are “stooping to new lows and trying to strong-arm schools to keep our kids from getting a quality education.” State Superintendent John White said it was “shameful” that the unions were “trying to prevent people from doing what’s right for their children.” The unions claim that vouchers don’t benefit students, but we know from school-choice programs in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere that voucher recipients attend safer schools and enjoy higher graduation rates than their peers in public schools.
Regardless of ideology, any decent person will favor reforms that enable poor kids to escape horrible government schools. Lots of liberals are decent people. The ones who oppose school choice, by contrast, are…well, you can fill in the blank.
P.P.S. Not surprisingly, Thomas Sowell nails the issue, as does Walter Williams, with both criticizing the President for sacrificing the interests of minority children to protect the monopoly privileges of teacher unions.
Thank you so much for your time. I know how valuable it is. I also appreciate the fine family that you have and your commitment as a father and a husband.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733, lowcostsqueegees@yahoo.com
Our public school system in the inner cities is a joke. We need an alternative. 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.
Let us imagine we have the power to rebuild our education system from the ground up—an appropriate mental exercise as we remember the late Nobel Prize–winning economist Milton Friedman on his 100th birthday tomorrow.
If we could rebuild our education system from scratch, it’s unlikely we would create a system that assigns children to government-run schools based on their parents’ zip codes. After all, geography and income shouldn’t determine a child’s educational opportunity. If we rebuilt our education system to reflect Friedman’s philosophy, parents would be free to choose an education that best met their children’s needs, with money following the children to any schools of their choice: public, private, charter, virtual, or home school.
Friedman pioneered the idea of educational vouchers, and more than a half century later, that vision is taking hold at a rapid pace. State leaders across the country are making school choice a reality for hundreds of thousands of American families. In 2011 alone, 13 states enacted or expanded school choice programs, prompting The Wall Street Journalto deem 2011 “The Year of School Choice.”
While school choice momentum has been building dramatically in the last two years, most children still attend assigned public schools. For too many families, school choice remains out of reach.
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.
In Denver, just 44 percent of students graduate. In Philadelphia, a mere 46 percent of students complete high school. And in Detroit, just 33 percent of children graduate.
And if they are persistent enough to graduate, what have they learned? Nine percent of Baltimore fourth-graders are proficient in reading. Just 11 percent of their eighth-grade peers can read proficiently. A devastating 7 percent of Cleveland fourth-graders are proficient in reading. In Detroit, just 6 percent can read proficiently.
These low levels of academic achievement and attainment aren’t confined to low-income students or urban school districts. Across the country, for all children, just one-third can read proficiently. Graduation rates have hovered around 74 percent since the 1970s, and math and reading achievement has been virtually flat over the same time period. On international assessments, American students rank in the middle of the pack, outperformed in math by the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Estonia.
Friedman had a strong belief in the power of markets to improve education, and he didn’t mince words about school choice: We will only see improvements in education, he said, “by privatizing a major segment of the educational system—i.e., by enabling a private, for-profit industry to develop that will provide a wide variety of learning opportunities and offer effective competition to public schools.”
That’s certainly going big on school choice. But what exactly did Friedman mean by “privatizing a major segment of the educational system”? Just because we have agreed to the public financing of education does not mean government should be the sole provider of that education and dictate where children go to school.
As we remember Friedman on his 100th birthday, we need to rethink what “public” education means, thinking instead in terms of educating the public, not in terms of government-run schools—that is, as publicly financed but operated by many different providers. If we consider public education in those terms, we can start to think through funding mechanisms at the state level that will bring about widespread school choice.
Today, we have a growing number of innovative school choice options—charters, vouchers, tax credits, online learning, and education savings accounts, to name a few. These options were conceived in the mind of Friedman and are being brought to life by reform-oriented governors and legislators across the country.
While these reforms have been a long time in the making, Friedman would no doubt be proud of the progress that has been made on school choice over the past few years. And thanks to his formational work, children across the country are increasingly gaining access to customized education that meets their unique needs.
____________
Thank you so much for your time. I know how valuable it is. I also appreciate the fine family that you have and your commitment as a father and a husband.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733, lowcostsqueegees@yahoo.com
I ran across this very interesting article about Milton Friedman from 2002: Friedman: Market offers poor better learningBy Tamara Henry, USA TODAY By Doug Mills, AP President Bush honors influential economist Milton Friedman for his 90th birthday earlier this month. About an economist Name:Milton FriedmanAge: 90Background: Winner of the 1976 Nobel Prize for economic science; […]
Milton Friedman videos and transcripts Part 11 On my blog http://www.thedailyhatch.org I have an extensive list of posts that have both videos and transcripts of MiltonFriedman’s interviews and speeches. Here below is just small list of those and more can be accessed by clicking on “Milton Friedman” on the side of this page or searching […]
Milton Friedman videos and transcripts Part 10 On my blog http://www.thedailyhatch.org I have an extensive list of posts that have both videos and transcripts of MiltonFriedman’s interviews and speeches. Here below is just small list of those and more can be accessed by clicking on “Milton Friedman” on the side of this page or searching […]
Milton Friedman videos and transcripts Part 9 On my blog http://www.thedailyhatch.org I have an extensive list of posts that have both videos and transcripts of MiltonFriedman’s interviews and speeches. Here below is just small list of those and more can be accessed by clicking on “Milton Friedman” on the side of this page or searching […]
Biography Part 2 In 1977, when I reached the age of 65, I retired from teaching at the University of Chicago. At the invitation of Glenn Campbell, Director of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, I shifted my scholarly work to Hoover where I remain a Senior Research Fellow. We moved to San Francisco, purchasing […]
Milton Friedman at Hillsdale College 2006 July 2006 Free to Choose: A Conversation with Milton Friedman Milton Friedman Economist Milton Friedman is a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Chicago, where he taught from 1946-1976. Dr. Friedman received the Nobel Memorial […]
Milton Friedman videos and transcripts Part 8 On my blog http://www.thedailyhatch.org I have an extensive list of posts that have both videos and transcripts of MiltonFriedman’s interviews and speeches. Here below is just small list of those and more can be accessed by clicking on “Milton Friedman” on the side of this page or searching […]
Testing Milton Friedman – Preview Uploaded by FreeToChooseNetwork on Feb 21, 2012 2012 is the 100th anniversary of Milton Friedman’s birth. His work and ideas continue to make the world a better place. As part of Milton Friedman’s Century, a revival of the ideas featured in the landmark television series Free To Choose are being […]
Charlie Rose interview of Milton Friedman My favorite economist: Milton Friedman : A Great Champion of Liberty by V. Sundaram Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist who advocated an unfettered free market and had the ear of three US Presidents – Nixon, Ford and Reagan – died last Thursday (16 November, 2006 ) in San Francisco […]
Free or Equal?: Johan Norberg Updates Milton & Rose Friedman’s Free to Choose I got this below from Reason Magazine: Swedish economist Johan Norberg is the host of the new documentary Free or Equal, which retraces and updates the 1980 classic Free to Choose, featuring Milton and Rose Friedman. Like the Friedmans, Norberg travels the globe […]
I must say that I have lots of respect for Reason Magazine and for their admiration of Milton Friedman. However, I do disagree with one phrase below. At the end of this post I will tell you what sentence it is. Uploaded by ReasonTV on Jul 28, 2011 There’s no way to appreciate fully the […]
Milton Friedman on Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom” 1994 Interview 1 of 2 Uploaded by PenguinProseMedia on Oct 25, 2011 Says Federal Reserve should be abolished, criticizes Keynes. One of Friedman’s best interviews, discussion spans Friedman’s career and his view of numerous political figures and public policy issues. ___________________ Two Lucky People by Milton and Rose Friedman […]
What a great man Milton Friedman was. The Legacy of Milton Friedman November 18, 2006 Alexander Tabarrok Great economist by day and crusading public intellectual by night, Milton Friedman was my hero. Friedman’s contributions to economics are profound, the permanent income hypothesis, the resurrection of the quantity theory of money, and his magnum opus with […]
Milton Friedman videos and transcripts Part 7 On my blog http://www.thedailyhatch.org I have an extensive list of posts that have both videos and transcripts of MiltonFriedman’s interviews and speeches. Here below is just small list of those and more can be accessed by clicking on “Milton Friedman” on the side of this page or searching […]
Below is a discussion from Milton Friedman on Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan. February 10, 1999 | Recorded on February 10, 1999 audio, video, and blogs » uncommon knowledge PRESIDENTIAL REPORT CARD: Milton Friedman on the State of the Union with guest Milton Friedman Milton Friedman, Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution and Nobel Laureate in […]
Milton Friedman and Chile – The Power of Choice Uploaded by FreeToChooseNetwork on May 13, 2011 In this excerpt from Free To Choose Network’s “The Power of Choice (2006)”, we set the record straight on Milton Friedman’s dealings with Chile — including training the Chicago Boys and his meeting with Augusto Pinochet. Was the tremendous […]
The Daily Hatch 