Vouchers Milton Friedman

7/29/2019 Vouchers Milton Friedman

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Three Educational Innovations

Private School Choice: Vouchers

Public School Choice: Charter Schools Standards and Standardized Testing


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Questions to Ask About These

Educational Movements:1) Who promotes this intervention? What are the

ideas that shape this intervention?

2) What is the impact of the intervention on theissue of meritocracy? Are some of the structural

problems weve discussed mitigated by this

intervention?


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A Definition of Vouchers

Education vouchers are tuition certificatesthat are issued by the government and are

redeemable at the school of the studentschoice. Their aim is to make the educationsystem operate as much like a free marketas possible.

--Laura Hersh Salganik, The Fall and Rise ofEducation Vouchers, Teachers CollegeRecord(1981) 83:2.


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What are the ideas that gave riseto this educational reform?


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Milton Friedman

A neo-liberal economist(who graduated from

Rutgers University, 1932)

First proposed vouchers in

an article, The Role ofGovernment in Education,

1955.

Government has a

monopoly over educationand this is inappropriate in a

free enterprise system


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Neo-Liberal Philosophy

Private enterprise is likely to be far more

efficient---producing the most or the best at

the lowest cost---than government-run

enterprises, under competitive market

conditions (Friedman 1955, p.129)

People, as rational, self-interested actors,

will spend their money at the business

where they get the best product for the

smallest cost.


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Education:

For Public Good or Private Gain?Friedman differentiates between education forprivate gain and for public good, but recognizesthe difficulty of doing so, p. 125

Where do you stand? What are your reasons?

Education is a public good Education is for private gain

_______________________________


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What should governments role in

education be?1) For basic education that serves the public,

government should fund and regulate education,but not provide that education, p. 127

2) Because the market under-invests in humancapital, government should help capitalize

individuals education in the form of loans, to bepaid back against future income, p. 140


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Where do you stand?

What are your reasons?

Who would benefit and who would lose?

Would this increase social reproduction or

meritocracy?

Government should

fund and regulate

education, but not

administer it

Government should

fund, regulate, and

administer education

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The push for school vouchers has created

some strange bedfellows. Free marketers

not known for their sensitivity to theplight of the poor find themselves allied

with disadvantaged urban parents and

community organizations that are simply

fed up with the abysmal quality of theschools their children must attend. For

[urban parents], vouchers loom as offering

an escape hatch for at least some of their

children.--Edward Fiske and Helen Ladd, After Zelman: The Need

to Focus on the Core Education Issues, Teachers College

Record(2002).


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Black Ministers Council backs school

vouchers, Courier Post, 11 February 2005 The Black Ministers

Council of New Jersey

supported vouchers because

of dissatisfaction with thelocal public school systems

Opportunity Scholarship

Act: to give corporations

tax credits if they donated toa school voucher program;

died in legislature in July

2011 due to Democratic

opposition

Rev. Reginald Jackson

Executive Director of the Black Ministers

Council of New Jersey


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The Results Even in programs serving low-income students, those who

use vouchers tend to be the most advantaged of thedisadvantaged: those with higher parental educationallevels and fewer special needs.

Only 1/3 of voucher students in Milwaukee and 1/4 inCleveland came from public schools.

For low-income families, because of tuition costs and theamount of the scholarship (generally under $3,000 peryear), the only private schools available to them werereligious.

Vouchers seem neutral in terms of student achievement,

with no significant differences between voucher studentsand those who remain in public schools (from studies doneof Cleveland, Dayton, Washington DC, New York City,Chile, and New Zealand voucher systems).


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Zelman vs. Simmons-Harris (2002)

In a 5-4 decision, onJune 27, 2002, the USSupreme Court heldthat neutral

educational assistanceprograms that. . . offeraid directly to a broadclass of individual

recipients definedwithout regard toreligion areconstitutional.

Outside the Supreme Court


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No Child Left Behind (2001) Although the Republicans

are generally for vouchers,they could not implementa voucher program nation-wide because of the needto craft a compromise that

would pass Congress.They did pass one in DC.

NCLB did createprovisions for public

funds to be used forprivate tutoring services incases where a publicschool was failing.

Parents at an information forum

about vouchers in DC


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Other Forms of Privatization

Private enrichment of public schools through

PTAs, such as paying for arts and music education

or an extra teacher to reduce class size (as you saw

in Kozol 2005). Private managers (university, neighborhood

organizations, and for-profit companies) were

given contracts to run 52 public schools, generally

those with poor test scores, in Philadelphia (out ofa total of 268 schools). The evidence is mixed

about whether private management has produced

better results than public management.


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Other Forms of Privatization

Home-schooling: privately funded, privatelyprovided, and almost completely privatelyregulated (about 1.5 million children aged 5-17, or2.9%, in 2007).

Tuition tax credit for private school tuition(currently about $1,000 in six states).

These measures are not necessarily making theeducational market more competitive orequal, in Friedmans terms.

Vouchers Milton Friedman

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