Friedman & Sowell: Should Our School System Be Privatized?

the resolution we should move towards privatization including the schools speaking for privatization is foreign mine host William F Buckley Jr Nobel laureate Milton Friedman an economist Thomas Sol both senior research fellows at the Hoover Institute Stanford University speaking against privatization our Albert Shanker president of the American Federation of Teachers Paul Starr Pulitzer Prize winner and professor of sociology at Princeton University and Bill Hoenig superintendent of public schools for the state of California but me one of the one of the benefits is private choice but one of the problems with choice especially in a democracy is that public schools and private schools have always tried to open doors for students to give them something their families might not be able to give them on their own and if you have a system that magnifies or accelerates the differences in this in this society right now which which increases those differences by allowing pure choice which allowing marketing to individual interest where are we going to be assured that somebody is responsible for transmitting some sense of common values or some sense of the glue that holds us together what this democracy is all about how do we assure that they don't just fragment to tell you the truth with Tory I see a lot of hypocrisy in the position about the public schools that is publicly expressed by for instance representatives of the NEA let's let's take our recent examples how are we they always say what religion is something that should be taken care of at home it under the circumstances it has no place in the past then a few weeks months years go by they say now of course let's think of sex education sex education isn't being taken care of at home so we got to take care of it here 60 minutes last Sunday was full of the responsibilities of public education to teach thirteen year olds how not to become pregnant on the grounds it wasn't being taught at home so really what the Philosopher's of public education are saying to us is we want to teach people what we're really interested in we're not interested in lives and we couldn't care less where they get written back home but we aren't in sex education so we'll teach them that I say let us remember that the parents ought to remain dominant in these matters and that it is they who ought to be able to select those schools that transmit those values concerning which they feel those are keys ways let let me let me respond is one educator with the very definite philosophy and that philosophy is that the schools are responsible for transmitting our basic beliefs and values in this country and that that is money let me finish please and that is one of our objectives and the question is how effectively do we do that we think that the role of religion in the creation of this country the biblical district if you all of that should be studied you're telling me that we suffer in America from the notion that there is no academic responsibility to forward values then I welcome your reiteration of the thesis of a book I wrote 35 years ago called the superstitions of academic freedom in which I pointed out that the notion that a teacher shouldn't say that the Declaration of Independence is a superior document to Marxist manifesto because academic freedom takes the position that no positions are finally validated is simply incorrect we live in a plural society and people have the right to search out schools that seek to forward their values and mrs. Sol and I want to make this mechanically possible why we are fighting for I would like to know whether you place any requirements on those private schools that could accept the vouchers of students that is would you commit a school that does not accept some children on the basis of religion at religious schools and they want to keep members of their own religion there you know that's the old Bob Jones business yeah I think that if there is a sect that reads the Bible and comes to conclusions with which I disagree I would yield to their right to interpret their religion in their own way that's not the question whether they interpret their religion the question is whether if they exclude children on the basis of their the child's religious affiliation whether you would commit a voucher to be spent in that school that's sort of a false question of that sense because in most many our Catholic schools in the ghettos I'm not going about those schools that do Excel wait am i make the statement in their own body if you can then you can deny it or combat the fact is that in many Catholic schools across this country the majority of kids attending are Protestants and that's especially true in the ghetto areas but those were not the schools that well alright so you don't want to answer that no no those are your public private goals let me emphasize that those of us who want to privatize who want to have public institutions be controlled by their customers rather than by the politicians we all want public institutions and I insist the real issue is government versus private not public versus private those of us who want the institutions that serve the public to be controlled by the customers are not in any way suggesting that the people who work for government institutions are lazy inefficient bad or anything like that it is not a criticism of the people is the criticism of the system someone came up to me in the intermission and said I'm a I was a postal worker for thirty years I worked hard of course he did the individual postal workers many of them I won't say all of them it not true in private business either that all of them but the great bulk of individual government employees are doing their very best to do their job but the institutional arrangements under which they work make it impossible for them to do a good job it's a system that's at fault not the people you had a dramatic example of this recently in Britain where a government-owned trucking company a transport company that was privatised in this case by giving it by having the workers buy it by a buyer what we call a private buyer that company had been losing heavily before it is now making a very fine profit and the shares in that company of something like quadrupled or quintuple the same people but the incentives were very different in operating so I do not mean to criticize schoolteachers or postal service employees on the contrary what I want to do is to have a system under which they can do their job I have had any number of schoolteachers who have complained that with the kind of administrative guidance I get from mr. Hannigan his fellow civil servants it is very difficult for them to do their job if you look at the record the number of administrators in government schools has been going up much more rapidly than the number of teachers the total amount of money banks the total amount of money being spent on on schools has doubled on government schools has doubled over the past two years per capita twenty years per capita the biggest increase in that has been for administration not for teaching but let's not divert the issue the crucial issue is shall parents especially those in the lower and middle-income classes have the same opportunity to choose the schools to which their children go that we in the upper and middle income classes have that's the crucial question and to that answer it seems to me you must say yes and I believe personally that you must say yes to private and religious schools as well mr. Koenig's raises the question shall the school's transmit values know the values of this country of my country of your country has been formed by the people who occupied it not by school administrators not by educationists not by the we as parents should transmit values to our children and we as parents as citizens of our country should in our political and and ordinary activities one with another jointly former values that's what's made this country great there wasn't any set of values dictated to the original occupants of this country there wasn't any such simple simple set of values dictated to my two people of my generation or my parents generation who are immigrants into this country or first generation children we got our values largely at home at the school and elsewhere schools transmitted tractors but we don't want a monopoly on the transmission of values we don't want any small group of officials to have the power to say what values shall be transmitted and yet that is what is happening now in a monopoly school system and particularly as that school system has gotten more and more centralized it used to be much better when you had local control of schools because then you can have variety diversity but as the control of schools has moved from the local district to the city to from the city to the state and from the state to the federal government increasingly the values that are being dictated are being determined by an increasingly unrepresentative selection of the population the slippery slope in the case of mr. Friedman's proposal would lead toward public abandonment of financing of education he's opposed to continuing that except in hardship cases and I think if we get on that slippery slope we need to see where we're sliding towards there are a variety of other issues I want to take up just finally the question of whether private schools have have superior effects even if there is a private school advantage of the moment it doesn't necessarily follow than an exodus of public school students into private schools would result in overall improvement just think about it if the private school advantage comes from its greater selectivity the greater ability of their selected students or from the peer influence that they have been able to maintain or because of the special to education of the families who now send their kids to private schools that advantage does not necessarily transfer to new students who would be sent to private schools under this system and the fundamental the fundamental assumption of mr. Friedman as he sketches it in his book is that the benefits of education are fully captured by the individuals receiving it in other words that private benefit equals social benefit and hence there's little justification for any governmental subsidy for schooling but this misses a great deal it presumes more perfect information more perfect markets than currently exists and it neglects the significance of the cultural and political benefits that education produces that public schools produce and that are not reflected in economic transactions as a democratic society we require and educated people carrying capable of carrying the responsibilities of self-government as a society knit together from very different threads we need a system of education that helps to instill a sense of our common national identity and that weakens the force of racial and religious divisions that is the reason we have had public schools and it is an ideal worth fighting for one of the interesting things whenever you propose changes that people say you cannot guarantee that this or that will happen you can never guarantee that anything will happen when you change anything and if we really follow the logic of that we would all be living in caves today the argument that this is all a matter there will be no guarantee of improvement as the mix of students going to the private schools changes ignores the fact that the parents will be monitoring all of this and if it we need inaugural and speculate as to what might happen they will have the choice when the time comes I see a complete evasion on the other side here of the question of incentives it's not a question of how we're going to drain the public schools of all its students it's a question of what is going to happen when you have competition not only across public schools but between public and private schools now if you think that the people what happens when let's say you're right and private schools are successful you do get some to come over the incentives have worked what happens the other sixty or seventy percent of the students who are left in the regular schools what what guarantees do you have that the education I thought we dealt with guarantees guarantees and you have again because we have a system right now that educates forty million children because this guarantees nothing except falling scores for years after years which you which they sacrifice this nation and it's not something to take lightly and guarantees are important or at least a good chance that this is Erin Taylor cannot be redeemed is not important I think we do disagree on one basic point I think a society it sets up an educational system that doesn't devote attention to pet transmitting its basic beliefs in democracy in freedom in character is a democracy is a society due to failures its committing cultural suicide I think we can see the results of that system and our question is how that's the remedy and you mean that the you mean that the u.s. committed cultural suicide in the first hundred years of its existence I don't agree with your reading of the first hundred years if you go back and read educational history they did have a very clear vision of what they wanted to transmit to their students they had the McGuffey readers it was a very course but it was a parents who transmit was the school that reinforced it was a school that enhanced it and was a school that brought up these higher ways of looking at democratic issues the issue before us is one of great importance it's not just an issue of ideology it's an issue of the kind of country in society we're going to have when the first person retired on Social Security in this country there were seventeen people in the workforce supporting that person only a few years from now we will come to a different situation one in which for every person on Social Security there will only be three people in the workforce and one of those three will be blackboard if our society does not do a more effective job than it's doing now we'll have two people working one supporting someone on Social Security and one supporting another person who is who is dependent on public funds with the result of course being disastrous for everyone we have had in this country a system which has worked over two hundred years a system in which most people have been proud and which did go astray in the 1960s and which is being turned around at the present time we're now being asked to embark on a great experiment to pull apart this system to have many millions of children leave the public schools and go into private schools as long as they are free to choose if I may coin a phrase there is no reason why if the private school is the worst thing in the world the Paris kids will be any worse off because they can always stay with the system we have

Channel: LibertyPen

Views: 383,603

Keywords: schools, education, vouchers, government, diversity, differences, choice, marketing, responsibility, common values, religion, sex education, parental choice, values, beliefs, objectives, academic, academic freedom, society, private schools, customers, system, politicians, administrators, spending, school choice, bureaucrats, monopoly, central planning, markets, politics, incentives, competition, culture, Social Security, welfare

Id: R6C9ZVr8J28

Length: 16min 20sec (980 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 06 2014