RALEIGH – It’s been half a century since economist Milton Friedman proposed school vouchers as an alternative means of educating the public, and hundreds of years since classical liberal writers and statesmen such as Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson proposed something similar. More recently, a truly grassroots movement demanding greater parental choice and competition has pushed through pioneering scholarship programs, tax credits, and charter-school legislation. And yet, the share of students attending schools run by government monopolies appears to be holding steady if not rising in most jurisdictions.
Is there any room for hope that structural change may come?
I think so. If you are going to be in the ideas business, you have to subscribe to the proposition that ideas matter. You have to be confident that patience, careful study, deft argumentation, and effective communication can result in policy change. There continue to be challenges to initiatives for school choice and competition, both from the public-school establishment and from some free-marketeers themselves, but for the most part I see the intellectual debate as shifting in the right direction. The politics are tricky, the inertia significant.
Two recent stories bode well for eventual success. In Louisiana, reports The Wall Street Journal in its November 16 edition, state school officials have traditionally looked askance at proposals to offer tax credits or scholarships assistance to students attending the state’s extensive Catholic school system. But in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, some of these officials have by necessity become more open-minded on the issue – partly because of the need to repatriate some dislocated students to other parts of the state, where private schools have open slots, and partly because it has become difficult to argue that students of destroyed public schools in New Orleans deserve relief assistance but those of destroyed private schools do not. “Long out-maneuvered,” the Journal observed, “proponents of school choice suddenly have a high-profile opportunity that could provide leverage in other parts of the country.”
The other hopeful sign, if you’ll pardon the use of the adjective, can be found in the aftermath of the riots in France. The rioters are mostly young men of North African or Middle Eastern background, Muslims though not necessarily orthodox believers and in most cases not Islamist in their politics. According to a report in U.S. News & World Report, some French officials are looking over the channel to Great Britain to find better ways to promote assimilation of young Muslims – and are finding them in part in education policies that remove barriers to Muslims starting schools in their communities.
How could Muslim-oriented education facilitate assimilation and healthier attitudes? Well, it’s foolish to equate Muslim schools with Islamofascist madrassahs. In England, the better of these schools are at the forefront of fashioning an identity that combines Muslim religious values with Western political and economic values. “They do so … by exposing students to the classical Islamic traditions,” U.S. News explains, “whose richness was derived partly from their openness to changing cultural conditions.”
Social strife usually comes from too little freedom and too few choices, not an excess of either. Many of the battles that consume educational boards and policymakers – over sex education, evolution, and school prayer, for example – originate in the one-size-for-all structure of a monopolistic system, not in a conflict over values. The latter is inevitable. The former is not.
Or, at least, let’s hope not.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.