The best way to transform the
education monopoly is to create
competition.
"On international math, science and reading exams, the United States lags behind countries such as Canada, New Zealand, South Korea and Australia despite the fact we spend far more to educate our children than every other industrialized nation. This failure in education translates into less human capital and innovation, fewer jobs, greater debt, and a growing gap between rich and poor.
But what would happen to learning if children stopped being assigned to schools based on where they live or how much their family earns?
My contention, which is supported by evidence and common sense, is that education would dramatically improve. And that is exactly what Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman said in 1955 when he first proposed separating the government funding of education from the government management of schools.
Instead of running schools, Friedman said, government should allot parents a sum of money so their sons and daughters could apply towards any private, parochial, or public school, leaving it up to parents to choose what schools their children attended. The result, Friedman said, would be a fairer and more effective system of schools.
As the founder and chairman of Overstock.com, I understand how consumers think. They want choices. Some want the newest model. Some want a brand name. All want good value.
That is not what happens in K-12 education, which is the least innovative major industry in America today. Unless you are wealthy enough to move or can afford tuition in a private school, your children are assigned to a school based on their address and taught the same way as 150 years ago. That is, after all, the purpose of a monopoly: to sell an inferior product at high price while resisting innovation. Just because this particular monopoly happens to be owned and managed by government does not change this dynamic.
That’s why Friedman’s idea of school vouchers is so important today. The best way to transform the education monopoly is to create competition. And the only route to competition is to offer parents a choice of schools through vouchers.
When parents have more choice, kids benefit, taxpayers come out ahead, and the best teachers are freed to teach. Parents win because they can pick a school that meets their child’s needs. Taxpayers win because vouchers cost far less than government schools, leaving more capacity and funding for the children who choose to remain in government schools. And teachers win because under a voucher system, a market evolves for the hard-working and talented teachers.
The best news is that we are finally starting to see Friedman’s idea become a reality across America. The Wall Street Journal labeled 2011 the Year of School Choice. Since January, 13 states and localities have enacted 19 programs so parents can select a school that is best for their child. Eleven of these programs expand or improve existing school choice programs, and eight create brand new programs.
This includes the nation’s most expansive school voucher program in Indiana, which in less than two months has become the fastest-growing voucher program ever. More than 3,300 Indiana parents have raced to sign up their children to attend private schools. A whopping 85 percent of them are low-income, proving Friedman right again when he predicted that a universal voucher program would bring the most benefit to the poorest among us.
The simple fact is that Milton Friedman was correct in 1955 when he wrote that vouchers would create “a great widening in the educational opportunities open to our children.” These opportunities are now becoming available throughout this country as parents demand – and get – more school choice."
This is a reprint of an article by Patrick M. Byrne is Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, the legacy foundation of Nobel laureate Milton Friedman and his wife Rose. He is also Chairman and CEO of Overstock.com.
His combative conservatism is a welcome challenge to Bush-era compromises with Democrats.
By Frederick M. Hess
Frederick
M. Hess is director of education policy studies at the American
Enterprise Institute and author of “The Same Thing Over and Over: How
School Reformers Get Stuck in Yesterday’s Ideas” (Harvard University
Press 2010).
No one knew for sure back in November 2010 what
the Tea Party tide that swamped state legislatures and swept
rock-ribbed conservatives into governor’s mansions from Tallahassee to
Madison would yield. It’s now clear that one of its legacies is the
return of principled conservatism to K-12 school reform. And that first
became evident in Wisconsin.
State leaders wrestling with gaping budget
shortfalls have abandoned a decade-long willingness to embrace me-too
education reform, in which the entire playbook amounted to new dollars,
more testing, and kind words about charter schools.
Instead, Tea Party-backed officials have
challenged collective bargaining, demanded that schools find new
efficiencies and insisted that educators be held accountable for their
job performance. Wisconsin, thanks to Gov. Scott Walker’s get-tough
proposals, became the epicenter of this shift.
Unlike Democratic reformers, who have
duck-walked around collective bargaining and teacher benefits, Walker
directly challenged the teachers unions. Absent such direct
challengers, the unions grew comfortable — and shameless. In his new
Brookings Institution volume, “Special Interest: Teachers Unions and
America’s Public Schools,” for instance, Stanford University professor
Terry Moe points out that the Michigan Education Association has
distributed a 40-page instructional manual to its members entitled
“Electing Your Own Employer, It’s As Easy As 1, 2, 3.”
What made the Wisconsin standoff so significant?
For a decade, Republican thinking on education was dominated by the
Bush administration’s big-government conservatism, with its affinity
for federally mandated testing, race-based accountability, new
spending, and intrusive interventions in “failing” schools.
The Bush agenda made it remarkably easy to reach
common ground with school-reform Democrats and progressive groups like
The Education Trust. The price was that conservative thought offered
little of substance when it came to challenging teachers unions,
out-of-control school spending or federal overreach.
The result: The education arena was celebrated by Washington tastemakers as a rare case of healthy bipartisanship.
What this meant, in practice, was that
conservatives agreed to sing from the progressive hymnal — pumping more
dollars into schools, sidestepping the enormous costs represented by
teacher benefits and remaining so intent on closing achievement gaps
that they had nothing to say about how to improve schools serving the
vast majority of the nation’s children.
For instance, per pupil K-12 spending increased
from $7,380 in 2000-01, the first year of the Bush presidency, to
$9,683 in 2006-07, the most recent year for which the National Center
for Education Statistics has data. That’s a 31% increase in just six
years. From 2001 to 2008, federal spending on K-12 schooling rose from
$42 billion to $59 billion.
The resurgence of principled small-government
conservatism has swept away the Bush-era conventions like so much
driftwood. How much have things changed?
House Republicans are concerned not with
reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act but with cutting federal
education spending and seeing how many programs they can zero out.
Left-leaning and right-leaning reformers no
longer appear to be interchangeable when it comes to collective
bargaining, school vouchers or the federal role. The new, combative
conservatism is bemoaned as mean-spirited by pundits and CNN anchors
who want everyone to sit down and hug it out.
Of course, it was also played as big news that Walker’s efforts would hurt his political opponents. The New York Times editorial page thundered that the governor was seeking to “crush unions” and engage in “destructive game playing.”
Such hand-wringing would be more convincing if
these voices had expressed similar concerns when President Obama
famously reminded Republicans that “elections have consequences” while
promoting health-care and financial legislation that benefited
Democratic constituencies and weakened Republican ones.
The winning side always promotes policies that
reflect its preferences — and those, not surprisingly, tend to
advantage its supporters and disadvantage its opponents. Nothing is new
here. Democrats, for example, were pleased and fully aware that
passing Medicare would help tame the once virulently anti-D.C. American
Medical Association.
The only real question is whether Walker’s
proposals are sound, sensible and good for Wisconsin. For critics to
dodge that question by suggesting that policies conferring political
benefit are illegitimate is disingenuous at best. Yet by failing to
talk bluntly about this reality or about the fact that curtailing
collective bargaining is not geared to the short-term fiscal situation
but to putting the state on firmer footing going forward, Walker
managed to make it look like he was the one engaging in doubletalk.
The Democrats For Education Reform, or DFER,
spent the spring crying crocodile tears about the overreaching by
uncouth Republican governors. DFER is an organization founded by
reform-minded Democrats who wanted to challenge both their party’s
spineless orthodoxy and the teacher unions on education reform.
The thing is, DFER’s leaders are serious about
school reform but, first and foremost, they are Democrats. So, when
Republican reformers like Walker went after collective bargaining and
state spending with guns blazing, DFER couldn’t resist a priceless
opportunity to steal a page from the old Clinton playbook and
triangulate like mad. DFER president Joe Williams penned a very public
letter that touched all the bases: decrying wild-eyed Republicans,
defending unions and positioning DFER as the voice of wisdom and
pragmatism.
Williams wrote, “How do we [at DFER] keep the
political focus on providing a quality education for all students at a
time when some Republican leaders appear to be primarily salivating at
the chance to whack a significant political opponent?” He took pains to
point out that, unlike the evil Republicans, “We believe that teacher
unions have a crucial voice that should be heard in education debates.”
In fact, “we’re kind of creeped out by some of what we are seeing and
hearing these days in the Heartland.”
So much for the vaunted bipartisanship of
education reform. Turns out that DFER is all for bipartisanship on
things like teacher evaluation and pay, so long as Republicans support
new spending, don’t mess with the unions and take care to respect
progressive priorities. Indeed, Williams bemoans the Wisconsin dispute
as a distraction from talk about teacher evaluation and school
improvement.
It’s not that the DFER stance is unreasonable.
It’s a sensible stance for progressives interested in both school
reform and Democratic electoral prospects. What’s peculiar is the
befuddlement that conservative reformers might disagree with the DFER
party line when it comes to collective bargaining or government
spending.
The public debate in the past decade has been
impoverished by the dearth of tough-minded conservatives willing to
talk bluntly about public sector reform. It’s healthy to have those
folks back in the mix, and unfortunate that DFER is so eager to score
political points rather than seek common ground on school reform.
It’s not yet clear who emerged victorious from
the sparring over Walker’s proposals this spring, though it’s clear
that Democratic reformers were thrilled by the chance to do a little
fence-mending with the teacher unions. The long-term winner, though, is
the American people — who get to trade the stale, banal orthodoxies of
the Bush years for a bracing debate about how to organize the public
sector in the 21st century.
It’s hard to think of a debate that’s more urgent, or more relevant to reforming our nation’s public schools.
On average, America spends $13,000 annually per child.
A Picture Is Worth $300 Billion
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