How Can We Fix Our Public Schools? By Making Them Private

by Milton Friedman


The widening gap between the cognitive elite and unskilled workers is threatening to transform America, in effect dividing the Republic into two nations, one in the first world, the other in the third. How can we prevent such a division? Only by providing good schools for all our children—which in turn means making our public schools private. Nobel laureate and Hoover fellow Milton Friedman explains.


Our elementary and secondary educational system needs to be radically reconstructed. That need arises in the first instance from the defects of our current system. But it has been greatly reinforced by some of the consequences of the technological and political revolutions of the past few decades. Those revolutions promise a major increase in world output, but they also threaten advanced countries with serious social conflict arising from a widening gap between the incomes of the highly skilled, who make up what is sometimes called the cognitive elite, and the unskilled.



A radical reconstruction of the educational system has the potential of staving off social conflict while at the same time strengthening the growth in living standards made possible by the new technology and the increasingly global market. In my view, such a radical reconstruction can be achieved only by privatizing a major segment of the educational system—that is, by enabling a private, for-profit industry to develop that will provide a wide variety of learning opportunities and offer effective competition to public schools. Such a reconstruction cannot come about overnight. It inevitably must be gradual.

Illustration by Taylor Jones for the Hoover Digest.


The most feasible way to bring about a gradual yet substantial transfer from government to private enterprise is to enact in each state a voucher system that enables parents to choose freely the schools their children attend. I first proposed such a voucher system 45 years ago.



Many attempts have been made in the years since to adopt educational vouchers. With notable exceptions in Florida, Cleveland, and Milwaukee, voucher systems have not been adopted, thanks primarily to the political power of the school establishment, reinforced by the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, together the strongest political lobbying body in the United States.

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