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| alt.politics.economics | "Its the economy, stupid" | 345,374 messages |
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| 06 Apr 23 10:09:43 |
From: lessgovt@gmail.com Milton Friedman’s School Choice Revolution By William McGurn, April 3, 2023, WSJ It’s been a good year for Milton Friedman. The Nobel Prize-winning economist has been dead for nearly two decades. But the moment has come for the idea that may prove his greatest legacy: Parents should decide where the public funds for educating their children go. Already this year, four states have adopted school choice for everyone—and it’s only April. The most recent is Florida, which just extended school choice to every child in the Sunshine State. When signing the bill into law a week ago, Gov. Ron DeSantis rightly called it a “monumental day in Florida history.” State education dollars will follow the student instead of simply going to the public schools. Florida is the most populous state to embrace full school choice. It follows Iowa, Utah and Arkansas, which passed their own legislation this year. These were preceded by West Virginia in 2021 and Arizona in 2022. More may be coming. Four other states—Oklahoma, Ohio, Wyoming and Texas—have legislation pending. Nebraska, South Carolina, Kansas and Pennsylvania are working on more limited versions of school choice. In Georgia Republicans in the state House just helped defeat a choice bill, but it may come back in 2024. Corey DeAngelis, a senior fellow with the American Federation for Children, says the mood has shifted. In the November state legislative elections, he notes, AFC-backed candidates challenged 69 incumbents—and took out 40 of them. “There wasn’t a red wave or a blue wave in the 2022 midterms,” he says. “But there was a school choice wave.” That didn’t appear likely in 1955, when Friedman introduced the idea of vouchers in an essay titled “The Role of Government in Education”: “Governments could require a minimum level of education which they could finance by giving parents vouchers redeemable for a specified maximum sum per child per year if spent on ‘approved’ educational services.” It took years to catch on, probably because at the time most people were satisfied with their public schools. When school-choice measures were later passed in some areas, they were almost always targeted at poor children in urban districts. The rationale was that these kids needed help to escape rotten public schools that condemned them to life on the margins of the American Dream. That changed with Covid. During the pandemic, parents saw their public schools put students last by shutting down and staying closed. When angry moms and dads showed up to complain, the National School Boards Association asked the Biden White House to treat them as domestic terrorists. Attorney General Merrick Garland then sicced the FBI on them. These parents didn’t start out demanding school choice. Many aren’t even Republican. Most had modest demands. Asra Nomani is one of them. A single mom and former reporter, she was one of the leaders of the parent revolt in Northern Virginia that contributed to Glenn Youngkin’s upset win in the 2021 governor’s race. She says that the more parents discover what their public schools are doing (from lowering standards in the name of equity to keeping families in the dark about children who want to change genders), the more Friedman makes sense. “For three years, school boards, activist educators and the teachers union machine have treated parents like dirt,” she says. “Now an entire swath of parents—immigrants, Democrats, single moms, military families, parents with kids with learning disabilities—are championing this idea they cared little about before: school choice.” Friedman was primarily concerned with education. But choice in education turns out to have far-reaching consequences for politics, where teachers unions hold great power. Look at the Chicago Teachers Union, which is now trying to elect a former CTU organizer as mayor. No one is more aware of the threat the Friedman Revolution spells for politics as usual than Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. In a speech last Tuesday at the National Press Club, she warned that this year 29 states are considering school-choice measures. As the vampire fears garlic, teachers unions fear giving parents any say in public education. In spring 2020, when Mr. Biden was still in his Wilmington, Del., basement, he boasted to Politico that he would have more leeway as president because “Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore.” Probably Mr. Biden was referring to his spending plans. But the famous economist is now having the last laugh, and not just on inflation. Friedman’s ideas about education are likely to remain strong long after Mr. Biden’s promise of a Green New Deal is regarded with the same skepticism as government promises of shovel-ready” infrastructure projects. “I wish Milton Friedman were alive today to see his ideas finally come to fruition,” Mr. DeAngelis says. “The dominos are falling and there’s nothing Randi Weingarten and the teachers unions can do about it.” https://www.wsj.com/articles/milton-friedmans-revolution-school- hoice-education-vouchers-public-schools-unions-parents-virginia-c43e8ee9 --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05 * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2) |
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