The apparent simplicity of Milton Friedman’s free market model of parental choice is truly appealing. Let the parent decide. Here’s the money. Go choose. This is efficient liberty in its purest form – and so simple.
Or is it?
Is subsidized parental choice analogous to my easy liberty to choose Butter Brickel at Safeway, or a Honda at the car dealer? I fear not. It is, rather, the decisions, not even of the intended consumer, but of an adult authority who imposes a thirteen-year, profoundly formative experience upon another human being, who happens to be his or her own child.
The parent issues the command; the child obeys, as does the school, which is bound by contract to harbor the child and to deliver the chosen brand of education. The arrangement is, thus, a choice of the parent and a form of obedience by the child. This, I suggest, is an odd example of free enterprise; it more resembles the choice of diet for the prisoners by the warden.
Does this observation imply that the market conception of parental choice is irrelevant to the debate? Of course not.
Someone has to choose Susie’s school. The choice by the parent puts the decision in the hand of a knowing, loving, caring, and responsible person who will have to live with the outcome – this instead of a government agent who is a complete stranger to Susie’s hopes and talents. If this isn’t a pure market, it has very similar elements and effects, most of them positive.
The discipline and variety born here of parental choice make the providers of schooling either rise to the challenge of a market, or fail and disappear. “Free enterprise” does work, if in a different form here, as the tool of the commanding authority rather than an ordinary consumer. It is working today in the happy contest for parental preference that has arisen among charter schools. It will, of course, work even more and better as states expand choice among private schools.
But the “market” of would-be suppliers seeking to lure newly empowered parental buyers is not one of a kind with sellers of apples, cars, steel, washing machines or legal services. With school, the intended and most affected consumer of the product – the choiceless child – is himself engaged in the production of the very product (i.e. his ideal self) that has been imagined for him by others. The parent decides upon the school, which by contract agrees to try to get the child to do with himself what the parent imagines for him or her.
In beholding and analyzing the complexity of the roles and relations entailed, the market talk is relevant and helpful. Nevertheless, the usual binary relations between contacting parties – worker and employer, seller and buyer – cannot be taken as sufficient descriptions of the nature of subsidized school choice. It is at best misleading, and in a manner that has been historically damaging to its own chances of adoption by the states.
Since 1978, libertarian enthusiasts for choice in roughly nine states have run thirteen popular initiatives, all hewing to the unregulated model of choice. That is, the schools were to be free to charge what they pleased and – except for race – to admit and exclude whom they pleased.
It was Friedman’s ideal offered to the people. Make it simple; give parents the money, and stand back. Not one of the thirteen plebiscites attracted even 35 percent “yes” voters. Nor has the libertarian crew tried again with the people since 2000. Their modest successes have been legislative, and striking for their generosity, less to the child than to the school, which in most of these systems retains total control over admissions – pure market, then, on both the supply and demand side. Choose what you like, Mother, but don’t expect to get Susie into this school.
The conviction that the school should be entitled to exclude whom it pleases makes subsidized choice an iffy thing for the very families who need it. The teachers union is careful to parade this problem; most of the electorate believes it; and it is perfectly plausible. The libertarian politician has betrayed his own cause in the name of simplicity. This was quite unnecessary.
Imagine an admission regulation requiring the school to set aside 10 percent of its spots for random selection from those applications remaining after 80 percent to 90 percent of all spots in available schools had been selected. The school would also retain its power to dismiss students who either fail scholastically or disrupt the order. Such gentle complications aim to make charter and private schools explicitly a part of the American dream of equal treatment of all families, rich and poor. Such truly modest encouragement (there are various types) would remove from school choice the mainstream’s fear of overheated libertarianism and eliminate its unintended and unnatural alliance with the union.
Simplicity is fine, but it can become a self-delusion that frustrates its very own objectives. If, in this moment, someone is fabricating the terms of an initiative in California, I hope they read this blog.
