Milton Friedman was perhaps the most important man from Illinois during the twentieth century. Like Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama—so far the most important Illinois men of the 19th and 21st centuries—he wasn’t born here. But the intellectual movement he founded during his thirty years in Illinois, now known commonly as the Chicago School of Economics, and the political discourse that he crafted, have changed public policy and the face of political debate across the world.
Yet in his twilight years, Dr. Friedman’s lament was that his ideas had little transformative impact on public education.
Milton Friedman was always passionate about policies that helped the downtrodden and poor. He was vehement in his scorn for policymakers and bureaucrats who, despite their intentions, made matters worse for the disadvantaged.
When Dr. Friedman moved to Chicago in 1946, the city was vastly changed by the Second World War. Thousands upon thousands of veterans were returning home, and thousands upon thousands of families who had moved to the city for war work were now settling in, looking for future opportunities. Immigrants fleeing depression and war ravaged homelands were flocking to the city.
It was against this backdrop Richard J. Daley would rise to the mayor’s office. And Friedman would form an intellectual movement that has helped make the last fifty years the most prosperous in human history. In 1976, the year that Daley died of a heart attack, still mayor, Milton Friedman won the Nobel Prize for economics.
Daley’s influence is still evident in Chicago. His son has been mayor for more than two decades. Machine politics is alive and well. But Friedman’s influence is apparent, too. He is revered in the financial district along LaSalle and across Wacker, and the University of Chicago has now founded an institute in his honor.
But neither Daley nor Friedman were able to reform inner-city schools. No place more than Chicago has seen greater failure in public schooling. And no one who lived in Chicago during the 1960’s and 70’s worked harder than Friedman to force a fundamental change in how public education is structured.
Chicago and America writ large tell a tale of two urban education systems. In one, the affluent and influential send their children to private schools or move to cozy suburbs or secure a seat in one of the few gold-standard city public schools. In the other, poor and most working-class families must take what the system gives them.
When one had to rely on the government to give them an education, the results were too predictable for Friedman. Graduation rates were abysmal, illiteracy was common and expenses were high. So he proposed something different: an “equal opportunity” for all children to receive a high quality education.
Rather than sending money to central offices and favoring the decisions of bureaucrats, Friedman preferred a system that favored parents. Parents would receive vouchers that would cover the cost of educating their children, and then they could select a school that worked best for them. Everyone would have the same freedom to choose their school.
The idea, then as now, was controversial. Many people doubted the ability of poor, undereducated or immigrant families to make good decisions using thousands of dollars per year of taxpayer money. But Friedman knew better. The global and national prosperity of the post-war years was the collective result of beleaguered and war-weary families freely making individual decisions that were in their best interests. He worked in American higher education, where choice and competition were fierce - and where people flocked from all over the world to receive a college education.
Special interests opposed the idea as well. The public education system employs a lot of people, and no vested interest desires more competition. But healthy competition was what the system needed - and respect was what all families deserved.
Milton Friedman died in 2006, but not before he and his wife created a private foundation to further his dream of choice in education. On July 30, the Foundation for Educational Choice and the Illinois Policy Institute are hosting a breakfast in Chicago in Dr. Friedman’s honor. It is timely, not only because the date is the eve of his birthday. School choice, it appears, is again a lively idea in Chicago.
In late 2009, a South Side pastor and state lawmaker named James Meeks led a charge to give school choice to parents in Chicago’s worst and most overcrowded schools. His bipartisan coalition is growing. Dr. Friedman would have approved, one would think. The program proposed by Rev. Meeks has been tried in other cities. Students who use vouchers to attend new schools have, on balance, benefited and their old public schools have improved as well, thanks to competition—just as Dr. Friedman predicted.
In Chicago, half of all children drop out of high school and only one in five can read at grade level - not altogether different than when Friedman’s own children attended school. We owe it to desperate families to try something new.
Late in his life, Friedman wrote “The true test of any scholar's work is not what his contemporaries say, but what happens to his work in the next 25 or 50 years.” Friedman’s ideas for education are ready to be tested in his onetime home. Data from other cities suggest that his ideas work. If implemented, they could remake education in Chicago, and perhaps Milton Friedman’s ideas could finally, fully benefit the city where they were born.
Collin Hitt is director of education policy at the Illinois Policy Institute.
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