Fifty Years Closer to Choice

In considering the role government plays in various areas of life in 1955, Milton Friedman cast his discerning eye on education and saw a Six Million Dollar Man. Government-controlled public education was already well on its way to becoming a total wreck. But Friedman, seeing what the G.I. Bill had done for soldiers returning from the recently concluded World War II, envisioned a way to rebuild it--better, stronger, faster. The result was an essay, "On the Role of Government in Education," which proposed a universal voucher system as a way to allow government to continue financing public education while separating it from its administration, establishing a true free-market arena in which choice would be equal for all, competition would be fierce, and only the best schools would survive. In 1962, the essay became a chapter in Friedman's historic book, Capitalism and Freedom. Fifty years after the essay was first written, Friedman's idea has become the ticket to a better education for some 36,000 students in a handful of voucher programs scattered nationwide.

To some education reformers, the numbers cited above read rather pessimistically: A half-century of thought, research, funding, and legislative struggle has given the nation only a half-dozen voucher programs, most operating at the city level. Another two generations of American schoolchildren, those reformers say, will be woefully undereducated before the nation can achieve true freedom of choice for all. And, if they're waiting for the pure, universal voucher system Friedman proposed in 1955, they could be right.

But others--including Friedman himself, recipient of the 1976 Nobel Prize for Economic Science, who is now 93--take a broader view. Though vouchers have been slow to gain a foothold--"distressingly slow," as Friedman wrote in his Nobel Laureate autobiography--the advent of new technologies is beginning to usher in some real free-market competition in the education arena. In addition to voucher programs operating in Milwaukee, Cleveland, Washington DC, Florida, and Utah, more than 3,000 charter schools are now educating about 1 million children across 40 states. Another 1 million students have foregone public education altogether in favor of homeschooling; many of them take advantage of distance-learning programs over the Internet.

In addition, in the sometimes-stressful atmosphere created by the stringent demands of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), for-profit companies are beginning to see vast opportunities, providing supplemental educational materials and tutoring to help schools and students achieve federally mandated goals.

The voucher program Friedman envisioned might have been slow in reaching even its infancy, but the time is ripe, he has said, for true choices to begin to emerge. "If I'm right," he told Education Next in 2000, "the voucher movement is going to expand and grow. There will be a brand new industry: the education industry, a private, for-profit, and non-profit education industry. It will introduce competition in a way that's never existed before. "The dam is breaking, and as it breaks, and I think it will, the water will rise more and more rapidly. I think choice is going to be here. I don't know when, it's been a long time coming, but it's starting to come.".....

In the next 50 years, Chubb thinks American education will come a lot closer to Friedman's vision, as the free-market atmosphere continues to evolve. It won't be long, Chubb said, until charter schools enroll 1 million children, and virtual schools complete with instructors are springing up online. "Even the way public schools work now is more market-oriented--they're much more accountable for results, they can be closed down, parents are being given more choice within systems," he explained. "I would share the skepticism of whether [universal] vouchers will be introduced," Chubb said, "but I think we're already seeing that more choices are being accepted, and in some places, they're quite dominant."

Charter schools provide about 25 percent of the public education in both Washington, DC and Dayton, Ohio. About 1,000 private providers are competing to tutor children in failing schools around the nation, "and that's done by vouchers, whether you call them that or not, because parents can go to any provider they want, public or private. Providers have flooded into that marketplace," Chubb said. Also, schools failing to meet NCLB's Adequate Yearly Progress requirements must restructure, and as a result, for-profit companies such as Edison Schools that can take them over are multiplying as the market grows. "If you look at the role of the market today versus where it was only a few years ago, that's an enormous change, and I think it's likely to continue," Chubb said.

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Public Choices

It's back-to-school time, and many of the adults trying to run American education have a lot to learn. They ought to start by memorizing a simple formula: increased federal funding leads to decreased educational flexibility, producing academic stagnation.

They definitely have not learned that lesson in Connecticut, where last month state Attorney General Richard Blumenthal launched the first-ever state lawsuit against the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), calling the Bush administration's enforcement of the law "rigid, arbitrary and capricious." Connecticut Governor Jodi Rell supports the suit and recently declared to a group of Connecticut teachers that rather than NCLB's strict rules, "we want the leeway to let our schools perform." Connecticut's problem is that it seems to want both more federal money and flexibility. "Our taxpayers are sagging under the crushing costs of local education," Rell commented the day the lawsuit was announced. "What we don't need is a new laundry list of things to do — with no new money to do them."

The day after Connecticut filed its suit the Center for American Progress (CAP), a progressive Washington, D.C., think tank, released a report in which it too decried schools' inflexibility but called for more federal funds. The report, from CAP's National Task Force on Public Education, starts off reasonably, arguing that a lot of our educational trouble can be attributed to the fact that "too much of our education system supports the status quo and a basic 'one size fits all approach.'" Unfortunately, it soon contradicts itself, intoning that "tragically, the commitment to uniformity in expectations and standards for what students should be taught is not reflected in the K-12 education system."

The result of this confused analysis is a proposal for the federal government to provide "leadership" and to spend at least $325 billion over ten years implementing numerous CAP-endorsed initiatives including universal pre-school and a "voluntary" national curriculum tied to expanded "national accountability measures."

What both the Connecticut lawsuit and the CAP report demonstrate is the inability of policymakers to grasp history and understand that more federal money inevitably means more rules, and that neither of those things helps America's schools. Keep in mind that it was only in the last few decades, with passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965, that the federal government became deeply involved in American education. Once it was in, though, its "investment" increased by leaps and bounds. According to the most recent inflation-adjusted data from the National Center for Education Statistics, the federal investment in education ballooned by nearly 400 percent between 1965 and 2003, and by more than 500 percent at the elementary and secondary level.

Federal meddling in education has grown with its funding. Over the last 40 years, despite the presence of a clause prohibiting federal control of education in almost all legislation passed in that time, as the federal government expended more money on the schools it heaped ever greater requirements onto the funds. Today its dictates are so extensive that Washington tells districts whether their teachers are qualified and their reading curriculum is acceptable, and requires schools to provide lessons on the Constitution every September 17, the anniversary of the signing of that once-respected document.

Despite this incredible growth in federal funding and "leadership," academic achievement has largely stagnated. The latest National Assessment of Educational Progress "Trends in Academic Progress" report reveals the sad truth. In 1971 seventeen-year-olds had an average score of 285 out of 500 points on the NAEP reading assessment. In 2004 the average wasn't a single point higher. Nine-year-olds' scores increased the most of any age group in reading, but their average only rose by slightly over 5 percent. Overall the improvements in math were higher, but were also nowhere near commensurate with federal spending increases.

What is critical for policymakers and voters to understand is that, contrary to Connecticut's complaint, the federal government does not simply force states to do as they're told. It buys compliance, attaching any and all requirements it wants schools to follow to the taxpayer money that states "voluntarily" accept. And, of course, the more money it supplies, the more rules and regulations it creates. States aren't going to be able to have it both ways. They can either take federal money and give up on flexibility, or they can demand flexibility by telling Washington to get out of the education business. What they can't do is the impossible: fixing our "one size fits all" schools by demanding ever more federal dollars.

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

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