How Milton Friedman Exploited White Supremacy to Privatize Education

This paper traces the origins of today’s campaigns for school vouchers and other modes of public funding for private education to efforts by Milton Friedman beginning in 1955. It reveals that the endgame of the “school choice” enterprise for libertarians was not then—and is not now--to enhance education for all children; it was a strategy, ultimately, to offload the full cost of schooling onto parents as part of a larger quest to privatize public services and resources. Based on extensive original archival research, this paper shows how Friedman’s case for vouchers to promote “educational freedom” buttressed the case of Southern advocates of the policy of massive resistance to Brown v. Board of Education. His approach—supported by many other Mont Pelerin Society members and leading libertarians of the day --taught white supremacists a more sophisticated, and for more than a decade, court-proof way to preserve Jim Crow. All they had to do was cease overt focus on race and instead deploy a neoliberal language of personal liberty, government failure and the need for market competition in the provision of public education.

The long-term effect of competition on public school achievement: Evidence from the Indiana choice scholarship program

Despite a vast literature on school vouchers, less is known about their long-term competitive effects on public schools. The current paper examines the competitive effect of the Indiana Choice Scholarship Program, the largest single voucher program in the US, on math and ELA proficiency rates in public schools in the last eight years. Exploiting school vouchers' market share as the primary measure of competition, I use two-way fixed effects regression and event study framework to examine the competitive effect. Results indicate that, although competition has a positive effect in the earlier years, it is detrimental in the long term, suggesting that the program created a “voucher shock” that led to an improvement in the short term. However, in the long term, the proficiency rates in public schools that faced higher competition fell and never increased again. The trend of voucher recipients who have prior public-school attendance revealed that the worsening proficiency rates in the public schools that face higher competition were driven by the departure of relatively high achieving students, suggesting that school vouchers inspire sorting. The results are robust to alternative specifications that use the variation in the interaction between the market share of vouchers and geospatial measures of private school density.

School Choice as Community Disempowerment: Racial Rhetoric about Voucher Policy in Urban America

Depictions of school choice offering greater individual and local autonomy are widespread, yet they sit uneasily with portrayals of such policies within African-American political discourse. This article analyses the ways in which opposition to publicly funded private school vouchers has been used as a cue to signal solidaristic ties to the African-American electorate. School choice is highly racialized. Black politicians have been known to campaign against school choice policies by presenting them as tools of White outsiders to break up and divide the Black community. Although opinion polls have indicated that a majority of African-American voters support education vouchers, in a campaign context school choice policies can be framed through the prisms of racial authenticity and community control. Using data drawn from interviews with political operatives and archival research in Newark, New Jersey, this article demonstrates that school choice can paradoxically be rendered as a policy of community disempowerment.

Experimentally Estimated Impacts of School Vouchers on Educational Attainments of Moderately and Severely Disadvantaged Students

For decades, social theorists have posited—and descriptive accounts have shown—that students isolated by both social class and ethnicity suffer extreme deprivations that limit the effectiveness of equal-opportunity interventions. Even educational programs that yield positive results for moderately disadvantaged students may not prove beneficial for those who possess less of the economic, social, and cultural capital that play a critical role in improving educational outcomes. Yet evaluations of school choice and other educational interventions seldom estimate programmatic effects on severely disadvantaged students who are isolated by both ethnicity and social class. We experimentally estimate differential effects of a 1997 New York City school voucher intervention on college attainment for minority students by household income and mother’s education. Postsecondary outcomes as of 2017 come from the National Student Clearinghouse. The severely deprived did not benefit from the intervention despite substantial positive effects on college enrollments and degree attainment for the moderately disadvantaged. School choice programs and other interventions or public policies may need to pay greater attention to ensuring that families possess the requisite forms of capital—human, economic, social, and cultural—to realize their intended benefits.

Teacher labor markets, school vouchers, and student cognitive achievement: Evidence from Chile

I use administrative and survey data from Chile and a structural model to evaluate teacher policies in a market‐based school system. The model accommodates equilibrium effects on parental sorting across school sectors (public or private), on the self‐selection of individuals into teaching and across school sectors, and on teacher wages in private schools. I use the estimated model to simulate a reform that is planned to be implemented in Chile in 2023. Tying public school teacher wages to teacher skills and introducing minimum competency requirements for teaching is predicted to increase student test scores by 0.30 standard deviations and decrease the achievement gap between the poorest and richest 25% of students by a third. These impacts are ten times as large as the impact of a flat wage increase in public schools, and over twice as large as the impact of only introducing minimum competency requirements. The key driver of policy outcomes is an improvement in the pool of teachers, amplified by equilibrium effects on teacher wages in private schools. The equilibrium effects are large, accounting for 70% of estimated policy impacts.

Deal or No Deal? The Effects of Deregulation on Public School Leaders’ Support for Private School Choice in California

Public school leaders might be more likely to support private school voucher programs if they are enacted alongside public school deregulations. We use a survey experiment to examine the effects of public school deregulations on actual public school leaders’ support for a hypothetical private school voucher program in California. We do not find evidence to suggest that public school deregulations affect public school leaders’ support for private school vouchers overall. However, we unexpectedly find that deregulations related to teacher certification and administration of standardized tests further decrease support for private school choice for leaders of large public schools. This unexpected result may be explained by expected adjustment costs or regulatory capture.