Schools of thought - school choice movement - includes related article on Separation of School & State Alliance

Reason, Jan, 1997 by Rick Henderson

From the start, Friedman has argued that the government's monopoly on schooling could be challenged only by "the rapid establishment of an industry [in private schools] that's large enough to have clout." He invented vouchers as a mechanism to generate funding for the creation of this alternative market, which might include for-profit schools as well as religious or secular schools operated by nonprofit organizations.

Friedman says he got part of his inspiration for vouchers from fellow Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek, "who taught me that every major advance in society originated from the top down rather than the bottom up." This doesn't mean central planning. Rather, from the automobile to television to the personal computer, new products with a widespread impact must first be tested by "early adopters" - those individuals with enough money or technical skills to try something new and see if it might appeal to a larger group of consumers. These early adopters both supply the initial market test, and they finance the development and learning that enable producers to create things more cheaply, making it possible to bring these innovations to people of more modest incomes.

The "early adopter" phenomenon is one reason Friedman has promoted universal vouchers over those targeted specifically at low-income students. "The key," he says, "is to provide an incentive for private entrepreneurs to fight the education establishment." He predicts that the first commercial education efforts will result in high-tuition, for-profit "Rolls Royce schools," primarily targeted at wealthy parents, where innovations in curricula, teaching, and technology will be tested.

Friedman acknowledges that we can't predict what shape a competitive education market would take. "We know from the experience of every other industry how imaginative free enterprise can be, what new products and services can be introduced, how driven it is to satisfy the customers - that is what we need in education," he wrote in a Washington Post column. But he does have a vision: He believes that vouchers would stimulate demand for "Rolls Royce" schools. "We know that 37 percent of parents in the top income brackets in California educate their children privately," he says. "With a real [universal] voucher in place, that number could easily reach 50 percent." And these new schools would differ from today's exclusive academies because they would be commercial enterprises as well as centers of learning - and because the prospect of a universal market would create pressures to replicate successful experiments, and to bring the cost down over time.

Friedman believes those parents who send their children to these high-priced commercial schools will become the early adopters who demand top-notch schools for their children - and that the most innovative features of their schools could eventually be replicated in more modestly priced "McDonald's schools," profitably providing quality education at a price people with lower incomes could afford.