Welcome to Carolina Journal Online’s Friday Interview. Today, John Locke Foundation President John Hood discusses the parental choice movement in education with Robert Enlow, executive director of the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice. The interview aired on Carolina Journal Radio (click here to find the station near you).
Hood: Milton Friedman, in some of his early writings in the 1950s, talked about the idea of expanding parental options in education, a voucher-type system.
Enlow: Fifty years ago this year, he came out with the article. It was 1955 in a journal called Economics in the Public Interest. He said that in order to have a more equitable — i.e., fair for everyone, a better society — and to create a more stable society, and to create a better quality system, it would be better to separate the funding of education, which we all believe in, from the administration of schooling. People have come to call that vouchers. I frankly don’t care what you call it. The fact is, you are giving parents the ability to control the funds that we all believe should be set aside for education, and letting them choose which provider to send their kids to.
Hood: And we do, in fact, see the term voucher used and sometimes abused. We talk about housing vouchers. We talk about daycare vouchers here in North Carolina and other states. There is a program with federal and state dollars. In North Carolina there is a tuition supplement program, which is essentially a voucher for higher education. So if you are a preschool child in North Carolina, you can attend a religious institution for preschool services with a state subsidy and you can do the same at the college level. What we are talking about is this intermediate step of elementary and secondary education.
Enlow: You are absolutely right. The GI Bill and the Pell Grants for higher education and pre-K vouchers — we know these exist. But also, don’t forget there is a lot of public money going to private and religious schools already in the K-12 arena. Transportation services — a lot of private schools and private religious schools will take some of the hard-to-educate children that the city and states can’t handle.
Hood: I’ve been reading about education for the disabled population, not only in the United States, but around the world, which is often delivered at private institutions with taxpayer dollars.
Enlow: The issue is not necessarily public or private. The issue is publicly funded services, publicly funded goods. We have taxpayer dollars given to parents, and parental choice. That is the key issue: giving parents back the power they once had in fee-paying. They used to pay fees. Remember, our system of schooling didn’t really start until the 1860s or 1870s. It wasn’t started with American democracy. What was started with American democracy was a system of privately run, fee-paying schools for parents. What we are talking about is the public believes in supporting education through funding, and parents should have the freedom to choose wherever they send their kids to school.
Hood: Give us a status report. Where are we on educational choice and freedom around the country? We’ve seen some promising experiments created and a few states taking action. Other states have defeated referenda initiatives on school choice. Where are we right now?
Enlow: We are in what I call a controlled burn phase. When we started in 1996 as a foundation, there were five school-choice programs in the country: two in Maine and Vermont, which were very old. One in Milwaukee — a low-income voucher. One in Cleveland — a low-income voucher. And, a tax credit in Iowa. Since 1996, we’ve increased the number of programs. Actually there are 17. There are 12 new programs since ’96. We know that we’ve seen some movement. Has it gone far enough? No, of course not. It hasn’t really given all parents — regardless of income status, or race, or any other reason — total freedom to choose. So, we’re not all the way there yet, but we’ve made a lot of progress. If you look at this year, there have been more bills around the country. Thirty-three states debated school vouchers, tax credits, or some version of choice in over 60 bills. These 33 states had over 60 bills. We know that movement is happening.
Hood: It is worth taking a moment to explain a little bit about these different potential tools for choice, and the difference between a voucher, or a scholarship, or a direct cash amount that parents can take to schools of their choice, versus some kind of tax relief — either a tuition tax credit or a tax credit for giving charitable contributions to a school choice program, or a tax deduction. Minnesota and a few other states have that. Are there pros and cons to these different options?
Enlow: There are tons of pros and cons. In fact, you can go to our website, www.friedmanfoundation.org, to find out the pros and cons. But I want to make sure you know that, whatever mechanism you choose, it is about giving parents the freedom to have control of the dollars. In a voucher system, it is a direct payment to a parent from the government. In a direct tax credit system — where an individual will pay and the government will then refund that money — it is a direct credit, but it gets paid the following April when you pay your taxes. Scholarship tax credits allow individuals and corporations to give monies to nonprofits. They then give out vouchers. Whatever mechanism you want to use, it is still all the same thing: giving parents more freedom.
Hood: It is worth pointing out that all of these tools are distinguishable from some of the school choice programs in Europe, where the government gives direct cash subsidies to churches or religious institutions to deliver education. That is not what is being proposed here at all.
Enlow: If you look at Europe, the irony of Europe is that one of the most socialist countries — Sweden — has a universal voucher program. There is no intermediary of the government paying parents. It goes straight to schools, private and religious. So a socialist country, not just a democratic country, but a socialist country, has a universal school choice program. In America, we haven’t even gotten near that yet.
Hood: What is the Friedman Foundation doing? Give us a sense of the programs of the Friedman Foundation.
Enlow: The programs of the Friedman Foundation are very simple. We are dedicated only to school choice. We are dedicated to making sure this movement goes to every state in America. All 50 states need to have a new organization built that promotes this issue. We then go into states where we think there is a real chance of success in the next year. We call those advancing states. And, we will actually do lobbying as well. We will try to make sure that the public knows about the issue and that the legislators know that it matters. When we pass a bill, we don’t leave the state. We’ve got to make sure that these things are continued and education continues — people understand who is using the voucher, who is using the tax credit, and how much benefit they are getting. It is an education process all the way through, from the beginning of a program at the state level, to the end of the program in the state.
Hood: North Carolina is on the radar screen, but not necessarily the advancing state at this point?
Enlow: All states are on the radar screen because we’re entrepreneurial in nature. But, North Carolina we see as a great opportunity to build and create a new infrastructure and a new way to go forward in this state.