School Choice: Past, Present, and Future

The following is based on remarks delivered at the 50th Anniversary Celebration of Citizens for Educational Freedom, on October 20, 2009.

The Past

School choice has been a high priority for Americans since the first settlers arrived here. Schools often were the first buildings erected by the colonials, supported and operated by a variety of religious orders and secular institutions.

This educational system, founded on freedom of choice and competition, worked. Adult literacy in 1795 is estimated to have been 90 percent. And it preserved our religious and political freedoms.

Beginning in the 1850s, that system was undermined and then destroyed. Public funds were withdrawn from all but Protestant schools, and those schools became government schools, with their buildings owned by governments, their teachers working for governments, and their curricula chosen by governments. Parental choice and competition in education, except for a very small private sector of mostly religious schools, came to an end.

The Present

As Peter Brimelow once wrote, “U.S. education [became] in essence a socialized business, the American equivalent of the Soviet Union’s collectivized farms.”

• Government schools gradually crowded out private schools, so that today about 9 of every 10 students attend government schools.

• Unions took over the government schools, bringing with them workplace rules that protect incompetent and even dangerous teachers while making it difficult or impossible to reward the best teachers.

• Curriculum was debased. Teachers and administrators conspire to lower standards in order to avoid being held responsible for falling student achievement.

• Spending exploded, to where today the government schools spend more than $10,000 a year per student, more than twice the amount spent by private schools.

• Nearly half of all students perform below even the basic level of proficiency in national tests, meaning they are functionally illiterate and haven’t mastered even basic arithmetic. A third of students drop out before graduating; 70 percent of those who do graduate aren’t academically qualified to enter college.

The human consequences of this failure are tragic. Dropout rates for many public school systems in large cities exceed 50 percent. Where do those drop-outs go? How do they support themselves? What do they teach their children? How do they decide for whom to vote?

Failing schools increase the gap between poor and wealthy. They increase crime in neighborhoods when schools should be islands of safety and community spirit; increase conflict among racial and income groups; and make it possible for politicians to be demagogues instead of leaders, appealing to myths and envy and resentment instead of what is best in our hearts and what is best for our country.

Does anyone not see this? Do you not see the high crime rates? The high unemployment rate? The growing illiteracy? The rise of demagogues in politics? How much of this is the result of millions of people every year coming into adulthood un-equipped to contribute and prosper, or even to understand what is going on?

The Time Bomb

The failure of government schools is a time bomb that has been ticking for a century and a half. Thomas Jefferson, the nation’s third president, knew what would happen if a nation’s schools failed to educate. He said, “A nation that is both ignorant and free is something that never was and never will be.”

The history of Europe, never mind Asia and Africa, is filled with examples of masses being led like sheep into unnecessary wars, persuaded to attack unpopular minorities in their midst when scapegoats were needed to cover for government failures, and reduced to dependency on government handouts when their savings and income were wiped away by hyper-inflation, nationalization, and other policies.

Mae and Martin Duggan, the founders of Citizens for Educational Freedom, heard that ticking 50 years ago, before most of the country heard it. They devoted their lives to calling it to the attention of others, to trying to defuse that bomb before it went off and destroyed the country.

Education is all that stands between us and the abyss. Ronald Reagan said “freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.” He meant that every generation needs to teach the next generation about the principles and truths that make freedom possible. He was talking about the schools. He could hear the ticking of the time bomb, too.

Unless we defuse this bomb, unless we restore choice and competition to the nation’s schools, ours will be the last generation to experience the freedom and prosperity that America brought to the world. If we let it slip away, if we don’t fix the schools, our children and their children will lose everything that 10 generations of Americans fought for and handed to us.

The Future

The modern school choice movement began in 1955, with the publication of an influential article by Milton and Rose Friedman, and then the founding four years later – and 50 years ago today – of Citizens for Educational Freedom by Mae and Martin Duggan.

The movement that Mae and Martin started has achieved some victories. There are:

• voucher programs for low-income families in Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Washington, DC;

• vouchers for students attending failing government schools in Florida, Louisiana, and Ohio;

• tax credit programs in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island;

• vouchers for children with disabilities in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Ohio, and Utah; and

• vouchers for foster care children in Arizona.

More than a million students attend charter schools, a form of choice that wouldn’t exist except as a compromise offered by the education establishment to voucher advocates.

Political support for vouchers has become increasingly bipartisan. Support is growing for more universal plans rather than programs narrowly tailored to certain groups. Restrictions on the number of charter schools are being lifted in more than a dozen states.

Today, more students are attending schools of choice utilizing vouchers or tax credits than ever before. The movement is growing.

But is it growing fast enough? Will we defuse the bomb before it goes off?

Current voucher and tax credit programs benefit only a few of the students who need help and divert just 1 or 2 percent of public funds away from failing government schools and to successful private schools. Charter schools are still government schools, and as they grow in number, the difference between what they offer and what traditional public schools offer is shrinking.

We need to do more, and we need to do it quickly.

The current occupant of the White House isn’t going to help. He doesn’t hear the ticking.

He has directed $70 billion in “stimulus” spending to government schools and plans to award them more than $9 billion next year. Incredibly, none of that money will go to private schools.

Children attending private schools are once again second-class citizens in America, the way they were when Mae and Martin battled the first Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1959.

Conclusion

In conclusion, and paraphrasing Abraham Lincoln, I ask that we take a moment to rededicate ourselves to the proposition that all parents should be free to choose the schools their children attend.

The world must never forget what Mae and Martin Duggan started. It is up to us to finish the work they began, to stop the bomb from going off, to save the greatest experiment in freedom and democracy the world has ever known.

We must speak out in every forum – newspapers, radio, television, the Internet, civic and business clubs, in conversation with friends and neighbors and coworkers. We must let our elected officials know that school choice is the single most important public policy issue of our time.

And no, we will not shut up, we will not be ignored, and we will not go away.

We few brave souls stand on the front lines in the fight for freedom and prosperity in the twenty-first century. If we fail, if we give up, future generations will pay a harrowing price.

But if we act and succeed, we will have earned – as Mae and Martin Duggan have earned – the gratitude of millions of people, here today and yet to be born.

The future is in our hands.

Joseph Bast (jbast@heartland.org) is president of The Heartland Institute.