Nancy MacLean is an esteemed historian at Duke University, where she is the William H. Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy. She specializes in the study of race, gender, labor history and social movements in the United States. Her book Democracy in Chains: The Deep History ofthe Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America is must reading.
In this important paper, she examines the role of economist Milton Friedman in promoting school choice, segregation, and privatization.
The abstract:
This paper traces the origins of today’s campaigns for school vouchers and other modes of public funding for private education to efforts by Milton Friedman beginning in 1955. It reveals that the endgame of the “school choice” enterprise for libertarians was not then— and is not now–to enhance education for all children; it was a strategy, ultimately, to offload the full cost of schooling onto parents as part of a larger quest to privatize public services and resources. Based on extensive original archival research, this paper shows how Friedman’s case for vouchers to promote “educational freedom” buttressed the case of Southern advocates of the policy of massive resistance to Brown v. Board of Education. His approach—supported by many other Mont Pelerin Society members and leading libertarians of the day –taught white supremacists a more sophisticated, and for more than a decade, court-proof way to preserve Jim Crow. All they had to do was cease overt focus on race and instead deploy a neoliberal language of personal liberty, government failure and the need for market competition in the provision of public education.
She describes the spread of ”school choice” legislation and writes:
A well-funded, laser-focused and integrated long game helped achieve these legislative triumphs. Indeed, it is difficult to find an institution on the American right that has not advocated “school choice.” Think tanks such as the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation, along with affiliates of the State Policy Network, make the case for it. Engines of legal and judicial change such as the Federalist Society and the Institute for Justice workshop the constitutional issues and litigate for it. The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) produces templates of “model laws” for its overwhelmingly Republican members to introduce it in state legislatures. Fox News broadcasts the talking points. Organizing efforts including Americans for Prosperity drive calls and letters to elected officials. Deep-pocketed donors underwrite the work. The campaigners employ a common language of personal liberty and anti-government, pro-market catch phrases. They tout the benefits of parents gaining the “freedom to choose” to send their children to private schools. And they claim that breaking up the “government monopoly” will promote “competition” that will improve the overall quality of education.2
“School choice” sounds like it offers options. But as I will show, the whole concept, as first implemented in the U.S. South in the mid-1950s, aimed to deny the choice of equal, integrated education to Black families. Further, Milton Friedman, soon to become the best-known neoliberal economist in the world, abetted the push for private schooling that southern states used to evade the reach of Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court’s unanimous 1954 ruling that the segregation of public education violated the constitutional right of Black children to equal protection of the laws. So, too, did other libertarians of the day, among them leading pioneers of the cause that today avidly pushes private schooling.3
Perhaps most tellingly, though, the ultimate purpose was not really to benefit parents and children, even the white ones who patronized the new segregation academies. For Friedman and the libertarians, school choice was and is a strategy to ultimately offload the burden of paying for education onto parents, thus harming the educational prospects of most youth. As we will see, Friedman himself hoped it would discourage low-income parents from having children in a form of economic social engineering reminiscent of eugenics. He predicted that once they had to pay the entire cost of schooling from their own earnings, they would make different reproductive decisions.4
Please read this thoughtful, well-researched and alarming study to understand the dark history of “school choice.” This is a case where history illuminates the future.
No doubt that “keeping Blacks in their place” is a part of the process.
However, the more pertinent aspect is the SES component. Can’t be having my little Tootsie and Tommy be going to school with the wretched of the earth.
Is it not hypocritical for one who complains about acronyms to use them? Thankfully Google cleared up my inability to decipher the obvious.
Hipacronymical: hypocritical for one who complains about acronyms to use them
HAM?
Nah, laziness. I figured all here would know what SES means. I dun figured wrong!
Duane, I support you. I don’t understand most of the acronyms of our age, but SES is common knowledge.
Obviously, I need some SES education.
SES: Sasquatch Elementary School, Silly Educational Systems, Sylvester Educates Sheboygan, Simulation Elucidation Sh**storm, etc., ad nauseam.
lol
Everyone knows Sasquatch Elementary School is just a hoax.
We need another word here. It’s not Privatization in the Friedman or any other real sense.
It’s not really Privatization in the sense of parents paying the full cost of their own and only their own children’s education. That would be the Free Market Way. But there’s no Free Choice here. If society at large funds the educational system through compulsory taxes then the educational system is responsible to society at large.
This is a private industry stealing public funds through the bribery and corruption of public office-holders, people who are supposed to represent the public interest but who pander to the greed of their biggest campaign and under the table funders.
We already have that model elsewhere, the Paragon being the Pentagon.
It’s piratization
Piratization
Piratization
Steal from the kitty
Steal from the nation
Steal without pity
Bury the treasure
Offshore on the isle
Use at your leisure
Living in style
It’s hard to pick favorites, but this one is pretty good!
Piratization
Perfect, SomeDAM!
I agree. It has long baffled me advocates get caught in the weeds of political strategy and policy making when trying to engage the public in the big issue of public education. But I guess that’s the nature of those with a liberal bent, politics and policy is about details.
We have never had a p.r./political strategy of equating public education with the military as an essential national priority with simple messages.
NAR (Nation At Risk)
A truly “free” market would quickly be taken over by those with the means and willingness to use force to simply steal what they want.
A truly free market actually can’t exist. Regulation and enforcement are always necessary to prevent the inevitable theft.
Free market Fantasy
Milton Friedman’s fantasy
Of a market that is “free”
Free from any regulation
Free from any exhortation
Such a market can’t exist
Will degrade to rule by fist
Oh the irony of calling a system that shuts most people out a “free” market. Gotta love the “free” market in America right now for housing and food, much less Hermes scarves and Island Packet yachts.
Just after the 2007-2008 financial crisis, Blackwater spent a couple billion in the “free market” for housing in Southern Florida caused by hundreds of thousands of ordinary people suddenly being made free to be kicked out of their homes, and right now, apartment rents in Tampa have increased 30 percent this last year, enabling people to live on the street, which is also free.
So, let’s have a “free” market in schools. You will be free to give half your education tax dollar over to the profits of the folks who run private and charter schools, just as you are now free to give half your healthcare expenditures over to the private profits of the owners and C-level managers of insurance companies, hospital chains, pharmaceutical companies, elder care chains, etc.
Let’s play Monopoly. Only I start with $3,000, and you start with $20. Oh, and I get to roll three times for each time you roll. Then, we will “freely” buy properties in the “free” market for them on the board.
“free market”–a term that puts the moron in oxymoron
cx Blackstone
So difficult to keep the names of all these predators straight
Oh, and when those people who got kicked out of their houses “bought” them in the first place, they took out “loans” for them–mortgages. Here’s how those work: The bank that issues the loan has to have in deposits only 10 percent of the money it “loans.” So, most of the money it “loans” is imaginary. But in exchange for this imaginary money, it gets to charge interest on top of the principal that amounts, over the course of the loan, to THREE TIMES the principal. All this transfers the value of the labor of the person who took the loan to the owners of the bank.
The “free” market. Isn’t it a beautiful thing!
cx:
All this transfers, over the course of a lifetime, MOST of the value of the labor of the person who took the loan to the owners of the bank.
Thank goodness we have a political party that represents ordinary people, that the Democrats, under Obama, were in charge when the financial crisis occurred. Oh, wait. The Obama administration structured the bailout so that it bailed out the banks, not the underwater home”owners.”
No, the Dems are not as bad as the Repugnicans are, but often, they run the same cruel playbook.
War is peace.
Slavery is freedom.
Ignorance is strength.
Thought control is liberty.
Markets (that rich people can participate in) are free.
Debt slavery is home ownership.
Economic segregation of schools is choice.
Best explanation and best analogy.
And From Today’s Washington Post/ Jay Matthews (Jay Mathews is an education columnist for The Washington Post, his employer for nearly 50 years. He is the author of nine books, including five about high schools. His 2009 book “Work Hard. Be Nice.” about the birth and growth of the KIPP charter school network was a New York Times bestseller.)
Why has New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy’s chief education official told seven high-performing public charter schools, including one of the best in the country, that they cannot expand their enrollments?
Murphy is a Democrat who says he supports charters, although his party is influenced by teachers unions that don’t like the fact that most charters are not unionized. Teachers unions have called charters a financial drain on regular public schools. I don’t understand that argument since parents seem to me entitled to send their kids to charters their taxes help pay for.
That “BEST” charter school is the North Star Academy in Newark, the first of what are now 57 nonprofit charters in the Uncommon Schools network where they specializes in raising achievement for low-income Black and Hispanic students. It works to make sure its alumni not only go to college but also graduate. North Star serves kindergarten to 12th-grade students across 14 campuses. North Star’s high school classes are among the wonders of the education world.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/02/20/new-jersey-governor-murphy-charter/
Charter schools are imposed on school systems that are doing just fine, thank you very much. Charter schools can off-load the kids who are too troublesome and unruly to the real public schools. Why set up a parallel school system with its own administrators and which is independent of the duly elected school boards? It is redundancy and it is wasteful.
I wonder if Mathews understands the concept of stranded costs that public schools are left paying after charters have siphoned off the best and brightest. Public schools handle the neediest and most expensive to educate, but they often lack funds when charter drain explodes.
I wonder if Mathews understands that the imposed inefficiency from so-called choice either results in a property tax increase or a slashing of services and choices of public school students. We cannot finance quality public education and endless choice for the same dollar. This is a fact that has nothing to do with the teachers union, the popular scapegoat of those that seek to privatize public schools.
Maybe Murphy understands that New Jersey depends on public education to attract families to the state, and too much choice undermines a key public asset, public education.
The ultimate purpose was not really
to benefit parents and children…
BINGO
If the ultimate fealty was to
enlighten the masses, the
mind-control regime of
marketing and propaganda
would be negated.
Effective marketing and
propaganda begins where
enlightenment ends…
How much more room is there for the American school system to become even more deficient???
This is a thoughtful analysis of the history of school choice. This article should be mandatory reading for all Democratic legislators. If some of the black legislators like Booker or Obama understood that school choice is “tax subsidized racism,” they would have a hard time justifying their support for school choice. Free market enthusiasts have “no scruples exploiting the social implications of educational segregation.” School choice is not about improving education; it is a manipulative way to socially engineer segregation. Since the end game is to turn fiscal responsibility over to parents, it would deepen the divide among various social classes. Public education has the opposite impact, It brings diverse young people together to reduce social and economic divisions. Robert Solo, someone most of us have never heard of, understood this back in the early days of misanthropic libertarian movement.
cx:in the early day of the misanthropic libertarian movement.
We’re going to privatize a system that serves 50 milion children with no discussion or debate on any POSSIBLE downside or risk of that, and the entire “debate” will be conducted within an ed reform echo chamber who are enthusiastic cheerleaders for ANY charter or ANY voucher program of any kind.
It isn’t even a question if this ends badly. It will. Ed reformers don’t even contemplate or discuss or debate the risk or downside of privatizing K-12 systems. None. The discussion is approached, always, as if privatizing is 100% upside wth no risk at all. That isn’t true. It isn’t true now and it still won’t be true when they succeed in their goal.
We’ll only discover the downside risk or privatization- the problems- after it is too late to turn back.
I could draft a state law that says each parent gets 5k to purchase “services” instead of a universal system of public education and no one in the echo chamber would question that at all – instead there would be 15 full time paid ed reformers promoting it as “innovation” the rest would parrot the first 15 and they’d introduce it in 5 other states within 6 weeks. This isn’t a “debate” – it’s an echo chamber pushing an agenda- it always moves in the same direction- always toward privatization and away from public schools.
Milton Friedman said that a corporation’s only obligation is to its stockholders. Not to its employees, not to its community, not to the environment, not to its customers, not to the nation.
Apply that thinking to charters and other corporate schools and the result becomes obvious.
Milton Friedman was a creepy little troll, the court singer for rapacious fat cats.
Uncle Miltie, (paraphrased): Sure I gave economic advice to a bloodthirsty fascist dictator, you have a problem with that. Somebody would have done it anyhow, so there.
Maybe we also could keep in mind that, regardless of what’s really “wrong with the democrats,” and so even if/when democrats are/were without fault AT ALL, the Right would find “reasons” and ways to sound plausible in their criticism and to feed the ears of their followers . . . the louder and longer, the better.
Blaming democrats and ourselves for even REAL faults and oversights, just feeds into their machine mentality. One of our faults? We keep thinking the Right is well-meaning and thinking from a stance of basic honest, reasonability, and integrity. We should self-criticize as always; but don’t let THAT be the Right’s endless source of propaganda. CBK
The GOP strategy is all about about generating fear and loathing in their base. They also tend to paint all Democrats with the same broad brush, both the corporate and progressive types. According to the GOP campaigns, all Democrats are “radical left wing socialists.”
The term “Puritan” originated as an insult. Those insulted adopted it with pride. And a few years later, the Puritans got their revolution (the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688).
I suggest the same for the term “Socialist.”
The Puritan revolution was not the same as the Glorious (of 1688). That one happened in the 1640s and was very nasty. Meanwhile the 1688 revolution was not nearly as glorious as the historians said it was.
Thanks for the correction, Roy. You are absolutely right about this.
I should not have made that elementary error, Roy, given that I am the author of this definitive history of England:
And the closer those that worship at the altar of Milton Friedman Greed is god, Greed is great, MAGA so Caucasians will rule the world forever, the further behind the United States will fall as it becomes a dystopian 3rd world country, and China, a culture and country that values education, rises to the top, replacing the United States as the most educated and most economical powerful country on the planet.
If this comes to pass, what country will explore the solar system, colonize planets/moons, and reach out to explore the stars and colonize them, too? China… unless the mad hatters in the United States don’t start a nuclear war to destroy global civilization and maybe even our species.
Superb work from Dr. MacLean!!!!
School choice is “tax-subsidized racism with a color-blind façade.”
Exactly
Thank you, Dr. MacLean, for this great, detailed work. Outstanding!
Back in the day there would generally be a column by Milton Friedman or Paul Samuelson. Obviously we were being manipulated by a liberal press
In Newsweek, I meant
As I’ve noted more than once preciously, the Founders were advocates of PUBLIC education as the means to promote the common good, and democratic citizenship. It – the idea that public schools should teach democratic citizenship – stretches back to Aristotle:
In Book 8 of Politics, Aristotle explained the importance of public education to democratic governance. He points out the different foundational ethos of governments:
“the legislator should direct his attention above all to the education of youth; for the neglect of education does harm to the constitution The citizen should be molded to suit the form of government under which he lives. For each government has a peculiar character which originally formed and which continues to preserve it. The character of democracy creates democracy, and the character of oligarchy creates oligarchy; and always the better the character, the better the government.”
It’s worth repeating: “…the better the character, the better the government.”
What occurred from January 20, 2017 until January 20, 2021 was a steep and marked absence of democratic character in the Oval Office and the halls of Congress.
In fact, the Founders created the constitutional structure for a democratic society “in which the common good was the chief end of government.” They adopted John Locke’s view that the main purpose of government –– the reason people CREATE government –– is to protect their persons through, as historian R. Freeman Butts put it, a social contract that placed “the public good above private desires.”
The goal, then, was “a commonwealth, a democratic corporate society in which the common good was the chief end of government.” Public education was part and parcel of social contract, helping to develop and maintain the common good.
It’s precisely because of the importance of public schooling to civic education and democratic citizenship that Aristotle concluded this:
“education should be one and the same for all, and that it should be public, and not private- not as at present, when every one looks after his own children separately, and gives them separate instruction of the sort which he thinks best; the training in things which are of common interest should be the same for all. Neither must we suppose that any one of the citizens belongs to himself, for they all belong to the state, and are each of them a part of the state, and the care of each part is inseparable from the care of the whole.”
That’s worth repeating too: “…the care of each part is inseparable from the care of the whole.”
The democratic social contract – the guts of the American Republic – was under continued assault from January 20, 2017 until January 20, 2021, and was under DIRECT attack on January 6, 2021. Republican elected officials of all stripes, and Republican voters, were responsible. They refuse to take any personal responsibility; they try to evade and avoid accountability; and they redirected their efforts to undermine democratic values.
The current proxy is public schooling. At its core, the offensive against public education is an assault on democratic character and values, on the rule of law, and on equality and “liberty and justice for all.” And at its core, it relies on an ugly racism that casts whites as “the victims.”
The attack on public schools is NOT some spontaneous “parent rights” outburst. It’s orchestrated. It’s being funded and set into motion by right-wing “Christians” at the Council for National Policy, a far-right group that had tremendous influence with the Trump administration. Richard DeVos, husband of Betsy, has been president of CNP, twice. Ed Meese, who helped Reagan cover up the Iran-Contra scandal, has been president of CNP. So has Pat Robertson. And Tim LaHaye.
Current and former CNP members include Cleta Mitchell, the Trump lawyer who was on that call to the Georgia Secretary of State demanding that he find Trump more than 11,780 votes, and Charlie Kirk, head of Turning Point USA who bragged about bussing tens of thousands of people to the January 6th ‘Stop the Steal’ rally and insurrection. Two of the top people at the Federalist Society, Eugene Meyer and Leonard Leo, are also CNP members. Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, is a member.
You can read about Ginni Thomas here:
“The claim that the Justices’ opinions are politically neutral is becoming increasingly hard to accept, especially from Thomas, whose wife, Virginia (Ginni) Thomas, is a vocal right-wing activist. She has declared that America is in existential danger because of the ‘deep state’ and the ‘fascist left’… on January 6, 2021 she cheered on the supporters of Donald Trump who had gathered to overturn Biden’s election…”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/01/31/is-ginni-thomas-a-threat-to-the-supreme-court
You can read about Betsy DeVos here:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/betsy-devos-and-the-plan-to-break-public-schools
Right-winger Milton Friedman argued for returning to a pre-Aristotle era of schooling, saying, “In my ideal world, government would not be responsible for providing education.”
That’s what Republicans are dedicated to; destroying public schools, and stealing their funding.
** previously…
maybe “preciously” too…lol.
Democracy- you are correct. A major threat to public education comes from the two major religions in the nation who formed an alliance.
The Conservative Partnership Institute posted a letter on Oct. 25, 2017 demanding that Vought be appointed as Deputy Director of the OMB. The letter claimed that Vought’s Christian religion was the reason that his confirmation wasn’t being approved. The letter’s signees included Ginni Thomas, Ken Cuccinelli, Kelly Shackleford, reps from CNP, the Susan B.Anthony List, March for Life Action, Infowars, Family Research Council, the Weyrich Lunch,…. Weyrich proposed parallel schools to destroy public education. He was Catholic and a co-founder of the religious right. His training manual is posted at Theocracy Watch.
In the past few years, Harvard added a Leadership Institute for Faith and Education. The person who heads it was formerly an exec. at the Gates Foundation.
The Institute wants faith, in some way, to be added added to public education.
I have always had a respect for the link between religion and government because I have long believed in the theoretical lessons of ethics religious teachings can provide. I’ve recently come to the conclusion, by reading an interpretation of Greek mythology no less, that I’ve had it wrong all my life. The author concludes with an explanation of the importance of the amiable god of blacksmiths, Hephaestus, “Any god of blacksmiths that the collective culture imagined, therefore, would be likely to reflect the human archetype they already know. Gods of this kind are created in man’s image, not the other way around.” Reading mythology is a great reminder that all formal religions are human, not divine, constructs. Ethics is a human construct.
I’ve concluded that there is no role whatsoever for formal religious influences in a democratic-republic. Religions are based on “truths.” True democrat-republicans understand that there there are no “truths” in politics and government. Those that are are negotiated among citizens to create public policy. The framers understood the implications of not separating church and state far better than we do. At least theoretically.
Amen!
God’s law over man’s is a foundation from which despots operate.
At the micro level, the Bureau of Prison’s research found the religious commit more crimes than those who are not religious. God’s Bible gives license to his followers to break the 10 commandments in the rhetoric about penance.
Russell Vought referenced above in a comment said, “Muslims do not simply have a deficient theology. They do not know God because they have rejected Jesus Christ his son and they stand condemned.”
It’s a short step to a pogrom of those who don’t adhere to the authoritarians like Vought and their interpretation of the only true faith.
Here’s something I threw together for a young friend that stakes out my political position. It’s very rough, but I thought I would share it, as it deals with topics discussed in this thread:
In other news:
R.I.P. Paul Farmer. Many, many more like you in our future, I hope!
Religion is the only explanation for John Eastman and William Barr subverting U.S. principles/laws, for them to advance a Pres. like Trump and, for them to willingly risk their reputations.
Eastman told Pence the illegal process that would enable the insurrection’s success.
There are enough Christian policy footprints around the Koch network to provide evidence that Jefferson was correct. In every age, in every country, the priest aligns with the despot.
“Schools will be fracked,
will be squeezed until
profits ooze out,
but can the imaginations
of childhood be wrung dry
for corporate greed?”
from “No Child Race to the Top”