Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
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Friday, November 17, 2006
The father of vouchers, charters
(Milton Friedman)
Internationally, Milton Friedman was best known as a groundbreaking thinker on economics. But his ideas also have had a profound impact on education in the U.S. and indirectly helped change the face of public education right here in Dayton.
Milton, who died Thursday, was memorialized in a long front page obituary in the New York Times.
Milton, put simply, was the uber libertarian. He believed democracies should have the smallest possible governments and that markets should shape nearly all facets of life. In a simple essay in 1955 entitled “the Role of Government in Education” he argued the U.S. should abandon government-funded schools and instead give “vouchers” that parents could take to any private school and use to purchase education for their kids.
It was Friedman’s ideas that were picked up by Ronald Reagan, who began pushing for experiments with school vouchers in the 1980s. Dayton native Checker Finn, who worked in the U.S. Department of Education under Reagan, later pushed for expansion of an in-the-system, voucher-like program that became known as “charter” schools.
In both cases, many proponents hoped to bring market forces to the table in education to try to force bureaucratic public systems to innovate and improve performance.
Nowhere in the U.S. have market forces had a greater impact on an urban education system than here in Dayton, where we’ve been a leader in the percentage of kids going to charter schools. This is partly thanks to Finn and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, which was founded here and continues to influence education locally.
And Ohio, of course, became the test case through which the U.S. Supreme Court decided vouchers were permissible under the constitution.
Nobody can argue Friedman’s remarkable influence on the world. Education was just something of a hobby for him, and look at the impact his ideas have had there. Whether his was a good or bad influence on education is still open to debate.
(Image credit: www.ideachannel.com)
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