The Right's "School Choice" Scheme
By Rachel Tabachnick
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| Former Florida governor Jeb Bush, left, makes a point as Kathleen Oropeza, the Orlando mother who helped create the Fund Education Now group, listens during the Florida Forward education reform forum, hosted by the Orlando Sentinel, Tuesday, September 20, 2011, in downtown Orlando, Florida. Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel/MCT via Getty Images. |
In June 1995, the economist Milton Friedman wrote an article for the Washington Post promoting the use of public education funds for private schools as a way to transfer the nation’s public school systems to the private sector. "Vouchers," he wrote, "are not an end in themselves; they are a means to make a transition from a government to a market system." The article was republished by "free market" think tanks, including the Cato Institute and the Hoover Institution, with the title "Public Schools: Make Them Private."1
While Friedman has promoted vouchers for decades, most famously in his masterwork Free to Choose, the story of how public funds are actually being transferred to private, often religious, schools is a study in the ability of a few wealthy families, along with a network of right-wing think tanks, to create