Milton Friedman's Vision

Economist Milton Friedman's vision for education in the U.S. has guided many of the reformsters and privatizers of the past few decades, so it's worth taking a look at, and an extraordinary interview from 2002 provides a clear view of what that vision was. The interview is worth a look both because Friedman so accurately predicted where things were headed, and also because it shows some of the striking gaps in his thinking. Also, the 2002 date means that this interview comes before some of the nice rhetorical packages that his followers have learned to use since.

This interview is over twenty years old, but it does a better job than almost anything from 2002 in predicting the future of the choice movement. 

So let's dive in and try to understand what he was saying as a way to better understand where his heirs think they want to take us. This is long, but if you want to get a handle on what exactly Friedman was pushing, I've got you covered.

The interview is from November of 2002; he's being interviewed by Pearl Rock Kane, most associated with Teachers College at Columbia University. 

Government funding of education and ahistoric nostalgia

Kane starts by calling back to Friedman's chapter about schools in Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman's 1962 opus on how one cannot have freedom without capitalism. 

In that work, Friedman argued that because a child's education benefits everyone, government should finance schools, but it should not operate them and all education should be provided through private enterprise. Kane calls back to that chapter, but forty years later, Friedman is ready to revise his idea:

But today, I would argue that there’s no case even for government financing it, except for the indigent, for those who cannot pay for themselves.

How large a fraction of students would attend school if the government did not finance them? Because if it's "most of them," and government financing would only move that needle a bit, why bother. Friedman will back this reasoning up with the first of his many jaw-dropping pieces of imaginary history. 

We have good evidence on that because that was a situation until the middle of the 19th century. There were something like 80, 90, 95 percent of children in schools at that time, without government financing, and we had higher literacy than we do now.

This is so not correct.

The census bureau started asking how many students were in school. They figured in 1850, 4 million students were in school; there were 16 million under the age of thirty. The National Center for  Education Statistics (NCES) figures that in 1850 fewer than 60% of white 5-to-19 year olds were enrolled, and non-white children the figure is closer to Almost None. We don't even get close to that 80% figure until the 1930s. And while comparing literacy across 150 years is tricky, given the complex and changing nature and measures used, NCES and other sources agree that literacy has been steadily improving. The mere fact that enslaved Blacks were forbidden to learn reading and writing in the "middle of the 19th century" suggests that the notion that we are somehow less literate as a nation  today is bizarre.

This is not some tiny ahistoric digression. A key part of Friedman's argument, one that he will return to frequently, is that Back In The Day schools worked great without government involvement, so why shouldn't we go back to that? The spine of his argument is made of ahistoric nostalgia for a past that never was. 

The magic marketplace

And in that imaginary ideal, education is just one more commodity. Here's his stated ideal:

And that in the ideal society, parents would be responsible for schooling their children, just as they’re responsible for feeding them, for clothing them, for housing them. And the government would enter in to finance, only as it would enter in for other problems, to help people who are in serious situations, to provide the safety net to make sure that youngsters whose parents are unable or unwilling to provide them with school, get schooling.

In 2002, if Friedman was fuzzy on the past, he had a good bead on the future:

There are a number of private, for-profit enterprises that are emerging to provide different kinds of education. Some of them are running charter schools. Some of them are providing supplementary education, supplementary schooling, or tutoring after school. And some of them are setting up private schools. In every other area of society we have had progress through competition.

 And then he provides an example that proves the opposite. Friedman cites the United States Postal Service, pointing out that FedEx and UPS have taken a large part of the business.

The only reason the post office is still able to exist is because it has a monopoly, a government-granted monopoly on first-class mail.

Nope. As a person in a rural area, what I can tell you is that FedEx and UPS (and now Amazon) have grabbed the profitable part of the business, both by charging more and by avoiding the less profitable part of the business. When someone hires FedEx to deliver a package to Uncle Billy who lives way back in the holler, you know what FedEx does? They hire the United States Postal Service to do the job for them. 

Mail delivery is actually a perfect analogy. It makes sense to replace USPS with private operators only if you want to replace a service with a business, only if you want to jettison the idea of mail delivery to everyone everywhere and replace it with a delivery service only for people who can afford it for only places the business chooses to deliver. 

Friedman says it doesn't have to just be for-profits. It can be anyone. Even parochial schools. "Let parents choose." And he pulls out the usual anti-union arguments. The union is opposed to market-based education because they're afraid of competition, because "they know they're not doing a very good job" and "they know they're running schools for the benefit of their members, not for the benefit of their members." It's the same insulting baloney we've been hearing for decades. Yes, teachers go into teaching to avoid doing the work, because the union gets them those big fat contracts that are making them all rich. 

And the magic marketplace would compete on school quality. And certain students and entire communities would not be left behind just because they were an unattractive market.

Friedman also argues for unbundling, what he calls "partial vouchers" that would let students assemble an education in bits and pieces. "Why should schooling have to be in one building?" Swell idea if your parent has the resources to ferry you about all day.

No matter. Friedman's faith in the magical market is boundless. "Neither you nor I," he tells Kane, "are imaginative enough to dream of what real competition, a real free market, could produce, what kind of educational innovations would emerge." Friedman is correct in diagnosing his own failure of imagination, since he fails to imagine any dangers, abuses, or threats beyond the power of individual parents to address. The market isn't just magical, but it's a fluffy magic with no hard edges and no dangerous dragons.

Shared values and social goods

Friedman somehow channels a certain disgraced term from the future while invoking another magical power of the free market.

It is desirable to have a common core of basic ideas, values, and knowledge. But I think that will develop without really any effort.

Based on what? The way that segregation academies and public schools in post-Brown America just sort of shared values? He says just look at home schoolers--they teach pretty much the "same kinds of things that are taught in schools." Okay, it was 2002, so I don't expect him to have known about the "beautiful Nazi" home school network, but by 2002 a vast number of homeschoolers were home schooling precisely so they could teach different things, like their personal religious views. 

But Friedman thinks homeschool kids have "a better sense of basic values, of honesty, of trustworthiness, of discipline." I guess when you're a world-famous acclaimed economist you can just make stuff up or just treat your own anecdotal experience as indicative of the whole world? And he's not done yet. He notes that those awful school shootings only happen in a big school, "not been a single such episode in a private school that I am aware of." 

More Back In My Day:

When I graduated from high school -- it was a long, long time ago, in 1928 -- there were 150,000 school districts in the United States. The population was half its present size. Today, there are fewer than 15,000 school districts. And that came about because of the aggrandizement and bureaucratization of the school district -- assembling mammoth high schools -- some of them with 1,500, 3,000, 5,000 students. 

The school district numbers are roughly accurate, though the big collapse in numbers came in the fifties, followed by a smaller but significant consolidation in the sixties, and it's been nudging downward since. Is this because of the "aggrandizement and bureaucratization of the school district"? Maybe. But I'd bet that it was mostly because folks figured it was cheaper and more efficient to combine districts than to run a whole bunch of little ones, and the rise of dependable school bus transportation made it possible. 

The market will fix segregation

Friedman has famously resisted any concerns that his voucherfied world might tend to be segregated. He was doing it right after Brown v. Board and he's still at it here. He claims that "every study" that has looked at private schools finds they're more integrated than "government schools" (Yes, he uses that term). I'm not sure what that research might be. There's a 1999 study in which Jay Greene and Nicole Mellow decided that actually looking at integration numbers would be hard, so they scanned school cafeterias to see if Black and White kids sat together or not (by this metric, the 19 private schools beat the 19 publics). But current research suggests that while public schools are bad, choice systems are worse.

But Friedman has faith:

In the private world, you’ll have much less segregation, Why? Are the customers of Chevrolet segregated by race? If you have a free market, customers will buy the product they want. Now, there may be some people who want to send their children to a racially segregated school, but in the main, most customers will be looking for other qualities. They’ll be looking for qualities of good schooling, and they will determine what’s produced. The people who manufacture automobiles do not decide what automobiles are produced. It’s the customers who decide what they’ll produce. If they produce a model that nobody wants to buy, it’ll stop being produced. In the same way, the question is, what is it that parents, in the main, in the United States, as in other countries, want when they go into the market to purchase schooling for their children? They don’t want violence. They don’t want prejudice. What they want is a good education for their children, in safe, decent quarters.

It's a version of the argument he's made before--the free market will not favor segregation. I do not know how an intelligent person who lived in America for most of the 20th century can believe this is true. It is also clear, again, that he views education as a manufactured good and not a human service. There are so many problems with that, but let's pick just one--a manufactured good like a car is presented to customers in its complete form, for them to accept or reject, and there are no switching costs if they simply keep walking around the showroom or on to the next dealer. Education is an ongoing long term process with huge switching costs and no chance to view the completed process until it's over. 

But the market will fix class distinctions as well

Not to mention that the car market is divided into levels, and what you can have depends on how wealthy you are. Friedman remarks that "automobiles are universally available," but that's only half the story. They are available to differing levels of quality, and for folks at the bottom of the scale, they aren't available at all.

Kane asks him if he's concerned that families with more financial; and social capital might take up all the space in the best schools and "other families’ children would have to attend inferior schools."

Nah, he says. If that happened, it would just mean more "best schools produced." After all, when automobiles were first produced, only the wealthy could buy them, but over time "the well-to-do provide, as it were, the experimental funds to develop an industry." The industry grows, develops better techniques, becomes cheaper and therefor more widely available. And that's why everyone drives a Lexus today! Oops, no, just kidding. He does not follow that line of thought all the way to the end, where we find luxury goods for the well-to-do and cheap shit for the not-so-well-to-do (and nothing at all for the poor). 

Also, and I cannot say this hard enough, an education is not a product like a car or a toaster. But he's not done yet.

His next analogy is to compare us to an emperor of Rome. His point seems to be that from then till now, things haven't gotten all that much better for people at the top (minus medical care and transportation), but the poors have been doing great. But outside of medical care and transportation, says Friedman, "almost all other benefits have gone to low-income people." I will concede he has a part of a point in there--being poor in ancient Rome was arguably way worse than being poor today. But his conclusion is silly:

What would happen in a free market world would be that what before was a preserve of the rich will become available to everybody.

I doubt it, though I suppose one might make the case that this is why elites oppose a true free market. But mostly this reminds me of one of the great Libertarian fallacies. The dream is of a world in which everyone does well or not in the race of life because everyone has a free and equal shot. But you can't get there from here. If a Libertarian paradise were established tomorrow, people would start from where they are right now, which means in the race of life some would have a five mile head start while driving a Ferrarri, while others would be back behind the starting line on a pair of busted roller skates.

Even if Friedman's free market paradise were implemented tomorrow, poor people would still not get to buy a Lexus.

Right now, the rich are much more privileged. They can afford to send their children to Exeter and to Andover and to the high-class schools, while the ordinary person cannot do so.

There is no universe in which vouchers change that. Friedman does not account for the fact that the ordinary person has to be accepted into Exeter or Andover. Nor did he account for the unsurprising development that vouchers are leading to raised tuition costs. 

Public or private?

In a weird little digression that once again presages reformster talking points, Friedman argues that all schools are public schools because they are funded largely with public money. He prefers to distinguish between private schools and government schools. 

He talks about this on his way to arguing that private schools do affect the public sector. Partly because "since about 1965, when the National Education Association turned itself into a trade union," public schools have been governed by different interests than private schools. Which I guess is his way of slamming both the NEA and trade unions. 

He offers a diagnosis of the private-public issue that I find illuminating. Not that it offers a true insight into what's happening, but it clarifies what these folks think is happening. Edison didn't fail because they were offering an inferior product, but because "they were trying to sell something at full cost when somebody else was giving it away free." Which reminds me of every charter operator plugging the notion that their school is free. 

He sketches out the idea of vouchers and the notion that with parents carrying that money, new and better Edisons would spring up. In practice, what springs up are subprime schools, low quality schools that exist just long enough to grab some money. This is where that automobile analogy fails some more. Since the car is a finished product, you can determine that it's a lemon five minutes after you drive it off the lot and (thanks to naughty government rules) get a refund and a new car that works. But with an education, a huge amount of a student's time can be wasted before parents realize they're in trouble--and there's no getting that time back. 

Friedman, attempting to show that even if vouchers aren't enough money to jump schools, it's still better for the poors--well, he throws in another unfortunate comparison.

The low-income families in the worst inner cities, in Watts or in Harlem, are these as badly off, with respect to food as they are with schools?

World famous economist Milton Friedman has not heard of food desserts? And possibly believes that all communities have a Whole Foods or a Wegman's? 

Making equity appear and money tricks

Kane asks a good question--how do we get for-profit providers to want to educate children who are more expensive to educate? This is a question that almost--almost--gets a central point. The idea here is that high needs children will cut into profit margins. The problem is that ALL students cut into profit margins, and the interests of the business will ALWAYS conflict with those of the students. 

Friedman's answer (to the question she actually asks) is maybe we have vouchers of different amounts depending on need, but it probably wouldn't fly politically, but "the people you’re concerned about are probably worse off with the current system than any other system one could conceive." Really? They're better off than in a system in which they are not accepted by any private providers and so have to either settle for some subprime grift or else stay in a public school that has been stripped of resources?

Also, this economic insight-- "whatever government does costs twice as much to do as what private enterprise does"-- a statement so absurd that even Friedman followers don't try to use it. He attributes it to the old saw that nobody spends somebody else's money as carefully as they spend their own money--except that what is a school voucher except giving parents the power to spend somebody else's money. Anyway, somehow that's why he thinks private enterprise can provide a better education than government school for half the cost.

That does lead him to predict that there will be plenty of scandals around people who set up charter schools "for the purpose of dipping into that excess." Which I would all an entirely predictable feature of pure free marketry.

Friedman asserts that in public schools, "less than half the money they spend goes into the classroom." That could only be true if somehow you counted money spent on teacher salaries as not going into classrooms. Otherwise this is baloney. He blames consultants and administrative costs, and I guess in 2002 he couldn't foresee that charters would spend way more on administration that public schools. 

At any rate, he'd like to see less government spending on charters, which would be fine because they're so efficient.

Also, good suburban schools are actually tax shelters, because if they were private and parents paid tuition, that wouldn't be deductible from income tax. Economists. They're so wacky.

The leveled playing field

She's still trying to get at the point that low-income areas would not be attractive investments, and his response goes back to food as well as tough shittery.

Is it true that there are no restaurants in those lower-income areas? You couldn’t sell in those lower-income areas a school as expensive as the schools in high-income areas. But the cost of the schools will be adjusted to the market, to what people can pay. In the inner city, there are restaurants, even though there may not be Twenty-Ones, or whatever the most fancy restaurant in New York is. There are supermarkets; there are grocery stores; there are shops; they’re all available, although they are not usually of the same quality as those in Scarsdale.

I'm not even sure what his point is. Yes, poor people will get crappy schools, but them's the breaks? The market does not want the poors to have nice things? Food desserts are not a thing?

But aren't government schools about leveling that playing field, she asks? 

Not at all, he says. Government schools happened (at least in New York) because teachers wanted pay so they agitated for the government to take over. But doesn't democratic ideology call for equity in schooling, she asks.

That's not historical fact, he says. And he tells another version of his story. Once upon a time there were 150,000 school districts and they were great, and local control really meant something and parents had a say. But that was "before the teachers union had arrive." Then school districts consolidated, making local control weaker, and then bureaucrats and state governments became stronger, and then "the final blow" in the 1960s, when the NEA became a union. But government schooling is relatively new. Which I guess somehow proves that the whole democratic ideal thing is not real.

Again, Friedman waves away the idea that a free market system would enshrine economic inequity by waving away the notion that public education was ever supposed to give every child am equityable chance to get ahead.

Kane, God bless her, tries another tack. So who went to school when schools were all private? And he again trots out the idea that way back something like 90% of children were in school, and this time she calls him on it, and he doesn't care:

PRK: In 1890, in the United States, only about 10% of the eligible high school population was in school.

MF: Well, that may be, in high school. At that time, they learned to read and write in elementary school. Now, they don’t learn it in high school... Unless I am mistaken, literacy was higher in 1890 in the United States than it is today. Today, I guess the estimate is that 20% of the population is illiterate.

According to NCES in 1979 the percent of illiterate Americans over the age of 14 was 0.6%. So, again, a foundational point of his argument is dead wrong, and he just doesn't care. 

Those damned unions and democrats

The opposition to improving schools is those unions. Them and "the bureaucracy, the administrative apparatus, the state officials and the like." Friedman doesn't like the practice of giving teachers a day off for official union duties. He really dislikes automatic deductions of dues from paychecks (pointing the way for all those "paycheck protection acts"). 

He's puzzled that Dems don't support vouchers, because he main beneficiaries of vouchers would be poor people (in 2002, he doesn't yet know that the main beneficiaries of vouchers are wealthy people who already have their kids in private schools). He invokes, as choicers are wont to do, Polly Williams, a major driving force behind vouchers in Milwaukee; as choicers are wont to do, he skips the part of her story where she walks away from vouchers, disillusioned by how the issue has been co-opted by other interests. 

"There is widespread public support for vouchers," he claims, citing a handful of politicians like Jeb Bush. Kane points out that maybe not, because in Milwaukee lots of people who are eligible haven't applied. It will be a few more years before we can really clearly see that voters given the chance, always vote vouchers down. 

He gets in a mention of his new foundation, then four years old, and today known as EdChoice. 

What we’re doing is providing educational material on vouchers, trying to coordinate the effort of the various groups, serving as a sort of liaison because this is the only foundation which is devoted 100%, to this one issue of choice.

Some more predictions

If I’m right, 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. And it’s a big industry. Total expenditures of elementary and secondary education in the United States are in the neighborhood of three hundred billion dollars. That’s as much as the worldwide industry of computer chips.

Sigh. Yes, manufacturing education is an industry.

He also predicts that this new expansion will give teachers more satisfaction because they will be "serving customers instead of serving the bureaucrats who run our government schools," so I guess he hadn't yet met choice school operators like Eva Moscowitz who require teachers to do the job exactly as they are told, almost as if they are there to serve Eva. But he is sure the magic of the market will make everything better.

He throws in the idea that schools of education have the lowest-achieving students,

Moreover, there’s so much emphasis on teaching technique and so little on subject matter that, as you know, a great many of the teachers in government schools teach subject matter in which they have no competence.

That appears in the same paragraph as this:

One of the benefits from a private system is that you wouldn’t have all these rules about who can get licensed.

And that would lead to teachers with subject matter competence how, exactly? He uses the example that Edward Teller can't teach high school physics in a government school, imagining that voucher schools would fork over the money to hire Edward Teller and not try to save money by hiring Edward Teller's neighbor's plumber's college dropout kid. 

"I would not be allowed to teach economics in a public school," Friedman says, as if this is self-evidently wrong, because he's a smart guy, so doesn't that mean he's fully qualified to get a roomful of teenagers interested in the history of free market economics? Can't any really smart person be a great teacher? 

Wrapping up

Are you still here? God bless you--that's the interview, in capsule form. The bottom line of Friedman's view is simple enough:

Once upon a time, schools were private and they did an awesome job of educating everyone, but then the government took over, and then the union took over even more, and now schools are terrible. But if we instituted a free market voucher system, everything would get better and no bad things would happen at all. Yeah, there would be a lot of inequity, but the whole notion that public schools support democratic ideals was always a lie. 

It's a fairy tale resting on a series of false premises, but it continues to energize a whole se3ctor of the choicer movement. Friedman died in 2006, but his ideas are still alive and kicking public education.