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By Milton Friedman
Wall Street Journal
December 5, 2005
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Most New Orleans schools are in ruins, as are the homes of the children who
have attended them. The children are now scattered all over the country.
This is a tragedy. It is also an opportunity to radically reform the
educational system.
The schools that were destroyed were not serving their students well. As
Chris Kinnan writes, "The New Orleans public-school system has been failing
its kids for years. Fully 73 of its more than 120 schools are considered to
be 'failing' according to the state's educational accountability standards."
("Vouchers for New Orleans," National Review Online, Sept. 15, 2005.)
New Orleans schools were failing for the same reason that schools are
failing in other large cities, because the schools are owned and operated by
the government. Government decides what is to be produced and who is to
consume its products, generally assigning students to schools by their
residence. The only recourse of dissatisfied parents is to change their
residence or give up the government subsidy and pay for their children's
schooling twice, once in taxes and once in tuition. This top-down
organization works no better in the U.S. than it did in the Soviet Union or
East Germany.
Rather than simply rebuild the destroyed schools, Louisiana, which has taken
over the New Orleans school system, should take this opportunity to empower
the consumers, i.e., the students, by providing parents with vouchers of
substantial size, say three-quarters of per-pupil spending in government
schools, usable only for educational expenses. Parents would then be free to
choose the schooling they considered best for their children. This would
introduce competition, which is missing from the present system. It would be
a move to a bottom-up organization, which has proved so successful in the
rest of our society.
To make competition effective, Louisiana should provide a favorable climate
for new entrants, whether they be parochial, non-profit or for-profit. As
part of doing so it should make clear that the vouchers are not an emergency
expedient that will be terminated once the emergency is over, but are a
permanent reform.
Such permanent reform would also meet the emergency needs. Vouchers would be
usable by the students who are scattered all over the country to purchase
educational services wherever they are. So far as New Orleans itself is
concerned, they would enable the private schools that survived the
hurricanes to expand and accommodate returning children. More important, the
vouchers would encourage private enterprise to provide schooling. Is there
any doubt that the private market would provide schooling for children
returning to New Orleans faster than the state?
Whatever the promise of vouchers for the education of New Orleans children,
the reform will be opposed by the teachers unions and the educational
administrators. They now control a monopoly school system. They are
determined to preserve that control, and will go to almost any lengths to do
so.
Unions to the contrary, the reform would achieve the purposes of Louisiana
far better than the present system. The state's objective is the education
of its children, not the construction of buildings or the running of
schools. Those are means not ends. The state's objective would be better
served by a competitive educational market than by a government monopoly.
Producers of educational services would compete to attract students.
Parents, empowered by the voucher, would have a wide range to choose from.
As in other industries, such a competitive free market would lead to
improvements in quality and reductions in cost.
If, by a political miracle, Louisiana could overcome the opposition of the
unions and enact universal vouchers, it would not only serve itself, it
would also render a service to the rest of the country by providing a large
scale example of what the market can do for education when permitted to
operate.
Mr. Friedman, the 1976 Nobel Laureate in economics, is a senior research
fellow at the Hoover Institution. |
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