The father of modern school reform: fifty years ago, Milton Friedman introduced the idea of school vouchers. Now he looks back on his legacy.

• Author: Gillespie, Nick
• Position: Interview

In 1955 future Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman kick-started modern education reform with an article titled "The Role of Government in Education." Bucking the "general trend in our times toward increasing intervention by the state" in virtually all economic and social activities, Friedman argued that universal vouchers for elementary and secondary schools would usher in an age of educational innovation and experimentation, not only widening the range of options for students and parents but increasing all sorts of positive outcomes.

"Government," wrote Friedman, "preferably local governmental units, would give each child, through his parents, a specified sum to be used solely in paying for his general education; the parents would be free to spend this sum at a school of their own choice, provided it met certain minimum standards laid down by the appropriate governmental unit. Such schools would be conducted under a variety of auspices: by private enterprises operated for profit, non-profit institutions established by private endowment, religious bodies, and some even by governmental units."

Among other things, Friedman prophesied that an education system based on vouchers would minimize inefficient government spending while giving low-income Americans, who are traditionally stuck in the very worst public schools, a better chance at receiving a good education. Vouchers "would bring a healthy increase in the variety of educational institutions available and in competition among them. Private initiative and enterprise would quicken the pace of progress in this area as it has in so many others. Government would serve its proper function of improving the operation of the invisible hand without substituting the dead hand of bureaucracy."

Fifty years after Friedman's article appeared in the collection Economics and the Public Interest, proposals for education reform take many shapes: legally mandated performance assessments at the state and federal levels, means-tested vouchers, charter schools, homeschooling, and calls for universal vouchers or for the complete separation of school and state, to name just a few. Despite their many differences, what all proponents of radical and systemic change have in common is an emphasis on choice and competition as a means of increasing educational performance and parental and student satisfaction. As in so many other areas of economic and social thought, Milton Friedman's ideas have carried the...