Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Edited by Robert C. Enlow and Lenore F. Ealy

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Liberty & LEARNING

CATO INSTITUTE

Contents

Prologue: A Personal Retrospective Milton Friedman.........................................................................................................viiIntroduction Robert C. Enlow and Lenore T. Ealy............................................................................................................11. The Role of Government in Education: Enduring Principles, New Circumstances, and the Question of "Shelf Life" Guilbert C. Hentschke.....................112. Choice, Religion, Community, and Educational Quality John E. Brandl.....................................................................................253. A Culture of Choice Abigail Thernstrom..................................................................................................................354. Milton Friedman, Vouchers, and Civic Values Jay P. Greene...............................................................................................495. Give Us Liberty and Give Us Depth John E. Coons.........................................................................................................576. Is There Hope for Expanded School Choice? Eric A. Hanushek..............................................................................................677. Free-Market Strategy and Tactics in K-12 Education Myron Lieberman......................................................................................818. A Critique of Pure Friedman: An Empirical Reassessment of "The Role of Government in Education" Andrew Coulson..........................................1039. Discipline Is the Key to Milton Friedman's Gold Standard for Education Reform John Merrifield...........................................................12510. From Universal to Targeted Vouchers: The Relevance of the Friedmans' Proposals for Developing Countries James Tooley...................................139Epilogue: School Vouchers Turn 50, But the Fight Is Just Beginning Milton Friedman.........................................................................155About the Contributors......................................................................................................................................159About the Editors...........................................................................................................................................165Index.......................................................................................................................................................167

Chapter One

Guilbert C. Hentschke

One of the stiffest tests that can be applied to any policy is the test of time. That is particularly true in the field of education where the half-life of most school reforms seems to be only a few years, after which they are rejected or "domesticated" beyond recognition. To seriously reexamine the idea of vouchers proposed by Milton Friedman fully half a century ago is to confront two issues simultaneously: the inherent merits of the idea and the inevitable changes in circumstances and conditions between then and now. It is a twofold test of the inherent worthiness of the idea and its "shelf life," or the degree to which it is more or less compelling today after 50 years of societal evolution. Because so much scholarly attention has already been directed to the merits of the proposal and its specific manifestations, this essay focuses most of its attention on the second, or shelf-life, test.

In "The Role of Government in Education," Friedman constructed in 21 pages an argument on the appropriate roles of governments and families in the support for and provision of kindergarten through 12th grade (K-12) schooling, of which only several of the most fundamental features are summarized here. According to Friedman, government's primary role in a free economy is "to preserve the rules of the game by enforcing contracts, preventing coercion, and keeping markets free." As a result, he concludes that families' educational prerogatives can be justifiably overridden by governments on only three bases: if education can be considered a "natural monopoly," if there are significant "neighborhood effects," or because of what he terms "paternalistic concern for children and other irresponsible individuals."

Those issues, often ambiguously complex and substantially nontrivial, justify some but by no means all of the current involvement of government in education at both the compulsory and the postcompulsory levels. Based largely on the presumptions about education's neighborhood effects, arguments can be made for the state imposing minimum required levels of schooling and financing schooling. But it is difficult to see how neighborhood effects could justify the state's current involvement in "the actual administration of educational institutions by government." In the same paper Friedman also argued against both the financing and the provision of strictly "vocational" education, because of its presumed lack of neighborhood effects, a somewhat separate topic addressed near the end of this essay.

Furthering his basic principles, Friedman posits that the case "that perhaps comes closest to being justified by these considerations ... is a mixed one under which governments would continue to administer some schools, but parents who chose to send their children to other schools would be paid a sum equal to the estimated cost of educating a child in a government school, provided that at least this sum was spent on education in an approved school." "Let the subsidy be made available to parents regardless where they send their children-provided only that it be to schools that satisfy specified minimum standards." Thus, Friedman introduces the modern concept of educational vouchers for K-12 schooling.

At the risk of ignoring important elaborations, qualifications, and conditions of Friedman's proposal, suffice it to say that the central argument was to shift significant portions of government education subsidies from providers on the supply side of schooling to households on the demand side. Suffice it also to say that many of the subsequent arguments about Friedman's proposal (both pro and con) hinged more on assumptions about the likely effects of voucher-like proposals and on the relative merits of specific initiatives than on a reanalysis of the fundamental proposition of the appropriate roles of government and households in schooling.

Changes

Virtually all arguments about both-the proper roles for government and households as well as the likely impacts of specific voucher plans-include assumptions, assertions, and implications about the status and interactions of three topics: the nature of education itself, the proper role of households in pursuing education, and the proper role of government in fostering it. Assertions about those three topics form the three-legged stool of this analysis of Friedman's voucher proposal. Changes in those areas over half a century could well have changed the salience of Friedman's argument, prompting the question addressed in this essay: In what ways, if any, have changes over the last half century in education, households, and governments affected our views of and assumptions about vouchers and choice?

Changes in the Nature of...