Education Policy and Friedmanomics: Free Market Ideology and Its Impact
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After Zelman V. Simmons-Harris, What Next?
Hoover Press : Peterson/School Choice DP0 HPETSCINTR rev2 page 1 Introduction After Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, What Next? PAUL E. PETERSON In the most anticipated decision of its 2002 term, the Supreme Court ruled, in the case of Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, that the school voucher program in Cleveland, Ohio, did not violate the Constitution’s ban on the “establishment” of religion. Opponents of vouchers—that is, the use of public funds to help low-income families pay tuition at private schools, including religious schools—were predictably disappointed, but pledged to Þght on. As Senator Edward M. Kennedy declared, “Vouch- ers may be constitutional,” but “that doesn’t make them good policy.” The policy’s sympathizers, needless to say, saw the ruling in a different light. President George W. Bush used the occa- sion of the Supreme Court’s decision to issue a full-throated endorsement of vouchers. Zelman, he told a gathering in Cleveland, did more than remove a constitutional cloud; it was a “historic” turning point in how Americans think about edu- cation. In 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education, the Court had ruled that the country could not have two sets of schools, “one for African-Americans and one for whites.” Now, the president Hoover Press : Peterson/School Choice DP0 HPETSCINTR rev2 page 2 2 Paul E. Peterson continued, in ruling as it did in the Cleveland case, the Court was afÞrming a similar principle, proclaiming that “our nation will not accept one education system for those who can afford to send their children to a school of their choice and one for those who can’t.” Zelman, according to the President, is Brown all over again. -
After 60 Years, Do the Arguments for K-12 Vouchers Still Hold? 23
After 60 years, do the arguments for K-12 vouchers still hold? 23 After 60 Years, Do The Arguments For K-12 Vouchers Still Hold? Dan Laitsch Simon Fraser University, CA Abstract In 1955, Milton Friedman authored a foundational paper proposing a shift in funding and governance mechanisms for public K -12 schools, suggesting that parents be awarded tuition vouchers that they could use to pay for private sector education services for their children, rather than relying on government provided neighborhood schools. Friedman theorized three cases in which such a system might fail, requiring greater involvement of the government in the education system: the presence of a natural monopoly; substantial neighborhood effects; and a breakdown in free exchange. This article examines these concerns by applying more than 25 years of school choice research in an attempt to answer the question, “ After 60 years, do the arguments for K-12 vouchers still hold?” Findings cited in this article suggest that Friedman was correct to be concerned about possible deleterious effects that may arise from a privatized system. Keywords Neoliberalism, free enterprise system, government role, privatization, public policy, school choice, charter schools Introduction Columbia had some form of publicly funded Tuition voucher programs have been in place in tuition voucher (or tax credit) system in place the United States since the mid-1800s. Both (American Federation for Children, 2013). The Vermont and Maine have programs in place that shift of Congressional control to Republicans as offer families tuition vouchers to use at public or of 2015 has re-energized efforts to expand choice private non-parochial schools, if they live in a programs within those and other states (Sen. -
The Cleveland School Voucher Program Began
A Report from Policy Matters Ohio Cleveland School Vouchers: Where the Students Go Amy Hanauer January, 2002 Cleveland School Vouchers: Where the Students Go The United States Supreme Court is poised to begin hearing oral arguments on the Cleveland school voucher case on February 20th. Arguments will center on the constitutionality of the program in what the Christian Science Monitor called “a potential landmark church-state ruling … that could change the face of American education (and) substantially alter the relationship between government and organized religion in the U.S.1” The Supreme Court will review a U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals' December 2000 ruling, which found that the Cleveland program violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that mandates separation of church and state. Analysts agree that the Supreme Court is likely to be split 5-4 on the issue, with Sandra Day O’Connor the deciding vote. Part of the appeals court’s rationale for striking down the program was that it offered extremely limited choice beyond religious schools. Since the ruling, our analysis shows both the number of non-religious schools in the program and the proportion of students enrolled in non-religious schools declined. As of mid-December 2001, just over half of one percent of voucher students, 25 pupils in all, were attending non-religious schools. This new data bolsters the concerns of constitutional scholars that the program violates the Establishment Clause. Policy Matters Ohio analyzed Cleveland Scholarship and Tutoring Program2 data from December 13th 2001 and previous years on grade-by-grade enrollment of participating students by school. -
Private School Vouchers Don't Help Kids
Private School Vouchers Don’t Help Kids Americans believe deeply in the promise and purpose of public education. Instead of strengthening the public schools that 90 percent of America’s children attend, President Donald Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos continue to promote private school vouchers and backdoor vouchers in the form of tax credits. These market-based education policies are fueled by ideology instead of what is best for kids. Private school vouchers take money away from neighborhood public schools, and research shows that voucher programs either fail to increase student performance or actually hurt student achievement. Private school voucher programs lack accountability, fail to protect kids from discrimination and increase segregation. Voters have soundly rejected efforts to push these programs, including in Michigan, where DeVos spent more than $5 million bankrolling a private voucher ballot measure that voters ultimately rejected by more than a 2-to-1 margin. PRIVATE SCHOOL VOUCHERS OFFER FALSE CHOICES • In Indiana,1 students in private school voucher programs experienced significant losses in achievement in math and saw no improvement in reading. According to a Brookings Institution report, “a student who had entered a private school with a math score at the 50th percentile declined to the 44th percentile after one year.” • In Louisiana,2 students who started in public schools and transferred to private voucher schools dropped from the 50th percentile in math to the 26th percentile in a single year. Harvard professor Martin West called the negative effects on students in Louisiana the largest he’s seen in the history of American education research.3 • In Ohio, a study4 by the Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank, found that “students who use vouchers to attend private schools have fared worse academically” compared with those in public schools. -
Nine Lives of Neoliberalism
A Service of Leibniz-Informationszentrum econstor Wirtschaft Leibniz Information Centre Make Your Publications Visible. zbw for Economics Plehwe, Dieter (Ed.); Slobodian, Quinn (Ed.); Mirowski, Philip (Ed.) Book — Published Version Nine Lives of Neoliberalism Provided in Cooperation with: WZB Berlin Social Science Center Suggested Citation: Plehwe, Dieter (Ed.); Slobodian, Quinn (Ed.); Mirowski, Philip (Ed.) (2020) : Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, ISBN 978-1-78873-255-0, Verso, London, New York, NY, https://www.versobooks.com/books/3075-nine-lives-of-neoliberalism This Version is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/215796 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. personal and scholarly purposes. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle You are not to copy documents for public or commercial Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, If the documents have been made available under an Open gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort Content Licence (especially Creative -
Opening the Door to School Choice in Wisconsin: Is Agostini the Key? Peter M
Marquette Law Review Volume 81 Article 7 Issue 3 Spring 1998 Opening the Door to School Choice in Wisconsin: Is Agostini the Key? Peter M. Kimball Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.law.marquette.edu/mulr Part of the Law Commons Repository Citation Peter M. Kimball, Opening the Door to School Choice in Wisconsin: Is Agostini the Key?, 81 Marq. L. Rev. 843 (1998). Available at: http://scholarship.law.marquette.edu/mulr/vol81/iss3/7 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at Marquette Law Scholarly Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Marquette Law Review by an authorized administrator of Marquette Law Scholarly Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. OPENING THE DOOR TO SCHOOL CHOICE IN WISCONSIN: IS AGOSTINI V. FELTON THE KEY? I. INTRODUCTION In his State of the State Address on January 28, 1997, Wiscon- sin Governor Tommy Thompson shared a vision of educational reform in Wisconsin that would meet the challenges of the next millennium. This reform relied in part on the notion that parents should be empowered with more educational choices for their children In vowing to achieve this goal, the Governor pro- claimed: "I will not give up the fight for the Milwaukee School Choice program. I will take this case to the highest court in the land. It is right and it will prevail."3 With these words Governor Thompson pledged to battle for school choice4 in Wisconsin. While the governor of Wisconsin seeks a successful road to a constitutional school choice program, the United States Supreme Court has progressively dismantled the once rigid wall of separa- tion between church and state. -
Friedman's Monetary Framework
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Research Papers in Economics Friedman’s Monetary Framework: Some Lessons Ben S. Bernanke t is an honor and a pleasure to have this opportunity, on the anniversary of Milton and Rose Friedman’s popular classic, Free to Choose, to speak on I Milton Friedman’s monetary framework and his contributions to the theory and practice of monetary policy. About a year ago, I also had the honor, at a conference at the University of Chicago in honor of Milton’s ninetieth birthday, to discuss the contribution of Friedman’s classic 1963 work with Anna Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United States.1 I mention this earlier talk not only to indicate that I am ready and willing to praise Friedman’s contributions wherever and whenever anyone will give me a venue but also because of the critical influ- ence of A Monetary History on both Friedman’s own thought and on the views of a generation of monetary policymakers. In their Monetary History, Friedman and Schwartz reviewed nearly a cen- tury of American monetary experience in painstaking detail, providing an his- torical analysis that demonstrated the importance of monetary forces in the economy far more convincingly than any purely theoretical or even economet- ric analysis could ever do. Friedman’s close attention to the lessons of history for economic policy is an aspect of his approach to economics that I greatly admire. Milton has never been a big fan of government licensing of profession- als, but maybe he would make an exception in the case of monetary policy- makers. -
School Parents Are More Likely Than Charter and Private School Parents to Be Satisfied with the Communication Around Reopening from Schools
EdChoice GEN POP NATIONAL POLLING PRESENTATION September 2020 EDCHOICE SEPTEMBER Most parents are at least somewhat comfortable sending their children to school, but POLLING PRESENTATION they still prefer virtual learning. Parents generally feel prepared to facilitate virtual learning, especially parents of younger students. Public school parents are more likely than charter and private school parents to be satisfied with the communication around reopening from schools. A slight majority of parents have either joined a learning pod or are looking to form one. Those with younger children, higher incomes, and living in urban areas are more likely to be participating in one. Those that are interested or participating in pods think they will help students stay up to speed and provide a safe environment for socialization. While, those against learning pods think they are unsafe, unnecessary, or too expensive. Over half of school parents are at least somewhat likely to seek out tutoring for their child/children outside of school hours this year. Parents that are very likely to seek out tutoring for their child/children have younger children, higher incomes and are living in urban Key Points areas. 4 School parents' favorability of homeschooling has remained high since the coronavirus outbreak began in March. While many students switched from home school to other school types for this upcoming school year, homeschooling still saw an increase in enrollment. Americans school type preferences have shifted since the outbreak to be more in favor of homeschooling when given the option, especially if cost and transportation are not factors. 5 Americans remain more likely to support school choice policies, including charter schools, once given information, especially non-parents and independents. -
The Increasingly Libertarian Milton Friedman: an Ideological Profile
Discuss this article at Journaltalk: http://journaltalk.net/articles/5820 ECON JOURNAL WATCH 11(1) January 2014: 81-96 The Increasingly Libertarian Milton Friedman: An Ideological Profile Lanny Ebenstein1 LINK TO ABSTRACT That Milton Friedman (1912–2006) grew more consistently, even stridently, libertarian over the course of the last 50 years of his long life has been noticed by several writers. Among these is Brian Doherty (2012), who published a book review whose title I also use for the present article, simply because it says it best.2 The present article is written as something of a follow-up to Dan Hammond’s recent ideological profile of Friedman (Hammond 2013), which I find highly admirable as far as it goes, but which leaves off how Friedman continued to grow more libertarian during the last several decades of his life. The “first Chicago school” and Milton Friedman to the late 1940s Although there are no hard-and-fast definitions, classical liberalism favors free trade among nations and a presumption of liberty in domestic issues. It advo- cates limited and efficient government, and low taxes. It was and has generally remained anti-imperialist, anti-interventionist, and socially tolerant. Such was the larger view of Jacob Viner, Frank Knight, Henry Simons, and other economists at the University of Chicago from the middle 1920s to middle 1940s. It was apparent 1. University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106. 2. Doherty (2013) also speaks of Friedman’s “later, more libertarian years.” VOLUME 11, NUMBER 1, JANUARY 2014 81 EBENSTEIN in this period that the federal government increasingly involved itself in the economy, and during the Great Depression the Chicago economists were almost unanimous in calling for stimulative monetary and fiscal policies and relief pro- grams (Davis 1971). -
Pragmatism As a Pillar of the New Developmentalism Pragmatismo Como Um Pilar Do Novo Desenvolvimentismo
Brazilian Journal of Political Economy, vol 40, nº 2, pp 376-397, April-June/2020 Pragmatism as a pillar of the New Developmentalism Pragmatismo como um pilar do Novo Desenvolvimentismo JOÃO PAIVA-SILVA*,** RESUMO: Os estudiosos do Novo Desenvolvimentismo geraram um corpo substancial de conhecimento sobre a transformação estrutural e as políticas que devem ser adotadas para promover sua conquista. No entanto, como é discutido neste artigo, o Novo Desenvolvi- mentismo, em contraste com o Neoliberalismo, carece de uma base filosófica sólida para legitimar as políticas que favorecem por outros motivos que não a capacidade de gerar prosperidade. Também se argumenta que os novos-desenvolvimentistas deveriam adotar explicitamente uma filosofia pragmática para se tornar uma alternativa mais séria a outras doutrinas da economia política. PALAVRAS-CHAVE: Filosofia econômica; história do pensamento econômico; desenvolvi- mento econômico; Novo Desenvolvimentismo; institucionalismo. ABSTRACT: The scholars of New Developmentalism have generated a substantial body of knowledge regarding structural transformation and the policies that should be adopted to foster its achievement. Nevertheless, as is argued in this paper, New Developmentalism, by contrast with Neoliberalism, lacks a strong philosophical foundation to legitimise the poli- cies it favours on grounds other than their ability to generate prosperity. It is also argued that new-developmentalists should explicitly adopt a pragmatic philosophy in order to be- come a more serious alternative to other political economy doctrines. KEYWORDS: Economic philosophy; history of economic thought; economic development; New Developmentalism; institutionalism. JEL Classification: A13; B5; O10. * Centre for African and Development Studies – Lisbon School of Economics and Management – Uni- versity of Lisbon, Lisboa/Portugal. -
Fiscal Effects of Schools Vouchers
FISCAL EFFECTS OF SCHOOL VOUCHERS Examining the Savings and Costs of America’s Private School Voucher Programs Martin F. Lueken FISCAL EFFECTS OF SCHOOL VOUCHERS 1 ABOUT EDCHOICE EdChoice is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to advancing full and unencumbered educational choice as the best pathway to successful lives and a stronger society. EdChoice believes that families, not bureaucrats, are best equipped to make K–12 schooling decisions for their children. The organization works at the state level to educate diverse audiences, train advocates and engage policymakers on the benefits of high-quality school choice programs. EdChoice is the intellectual legacy of Milton and Rose D. Friedman, who founded the organization in 1996 as the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice. SEPTEMBER 2018 TABLE OF CONTENTS Executive Summary ........................................................................................................................................ 1 Introduction .....................................................................................................................................................5 Literature Review..... .......................................................................................................................................7 Voucher Programs Under Analysis ..............................................................................................................8 Data and Methods ............................................................................................................................................9 -
School Choice: Disproportionately Negative Impact on Vulnerable Students
School Choice: Disproportionately Negative Impact on Vulnerable Students What is school choice? School choice (also known as “parent choice”) is a catch phrase for vouchers, tax credit scholarships, and education savings accounts, all of which funnel taxpayer dollars to private academies to cover the cost of tuition. What’s so bad about that? Public schools are required by law to accept every child, including those who have learning deficits or disabilities. Private schools have no such obligation. The lie of school choice is that it is not parents who do the choosing, but private schools that get to select only the “right” children, those whose parents can afford to pay the cost of tuition and fees beyond that covered by a voucher and those who are a “good fit” culturally, socially, academically, and behaviorally. While public schools are subject to intense scrutiny and held to high standards, private schools have no accountability. Vouchers and other privatization schemes divert scarce taxpayer dollars from public schools that are responsible for educating all children to unaccountable private schools that can pick and choose their students. Meanwhile, public schools are left with fewer resources with which to serve the students most in need, creating a disproportionately negative impact on the most vulnerable students who remain in public school classrooms. And high poverty public schools suffer most, lacking a local tax base that can make up for the funding that is diverted to private academies. Who supports school choice? National organizations that stand to profit from public tax dollars are running aggressive campaigns across the country to privatize public schools.