Milton Friedman – The Way to Improve Schools

Professor Friedman's recipe for better schools. “What do we really need in schools? We need competition. What we have is a monopoly. And like every monopoly, it is producing a low quality product at a very high cost. The way to improve that is to have competition. To make it possible for parents to have the choice of the schools their children attend.”

Source: LibertyPen YouTube channel.

Transcript:

Milton Friedman:

What do we really need in schools? We need competition. What we have is a monopoly. And like every monopoly, it is producing a low quality product at a very high cost. The way to improve that is to have competition. To make it possible for parents to have the choice of the schools their children attend. All high income people have that choice now. They can choose their residence for a place with good schools or they can send their children to private schools – pay twice for schooling, once in taxes once in tuition. But the lower income classes can't.

They are stuck.

Milton, didn't public schools used to work?

Milton Friedman:

Yes. When I graduated from high-school in 1928 there were 150,000 school districts in this country. Today there are 15,000 and the population is twice as great. In the early days you had local control of schools, and there was effective competition between a large number of local areas. But school districts got consolidated. They got run not by local people but the professional educators. And the most important of all, in the 1960s you began to have the emergence of teachers' unions taking control of schools. And since 1960s, since teachers' unions started emerging, you have had a on the whole a rather steady decline of the schooling.

If you want to improve automobiles, do you have government step in and tell people what brakes to put on and so on? Or do you rely on the fact that General Motors is going to try beat Ford, is going to try beat Toyota? Competition is the most effective way to improve quality. Whether in computers, in automobiles, in suits, or in schooling.