It’s been a good year for
Milton Friedman.
The Nobel Prize-winning economist has been dead for nearly two decades. But the moment has come for the idea that may prove his greatest legacy: Parents should decide where the public funds for educating their children go. Already this year, four states have adopted school choice for everyone—and it’s only April.
The most recent is Florida, which just extended school choice to every child in the Sunshine State. When signing the bill into law a week ago, Gov.
Ron DeSantis
rightly called it a “monumental day in Florida history.” State education dollars will follow the student instead of simply going to the public schools.
Florida is the most populous state to embrace full school choice. It follows Iowa, Utah and Arkansas, which passed their own legislation this year. These were preceded by West Virginia in 2021 and Arizona in 2022.
More may be coming. Four other states—Oklahoma, Ohio, Wyoming and Texas—have legislation pending. Nebraska, South Carolina, Kansas and Pennsylvania are working on more limited versions of school choice. In Georgia Republicans in the state House just helped defeat a choice bill, but it may come back in 2024.
Corey DeAngelis,
a senior fellow with the American Federation for Children, says the mood has shifted. In the November state legislative elections, he notes, AFC-backed candidates challenged 69 incumbents—and took out 40 of them.
“There wasn’t a red wave or a blue wave in the 2022 midterms,” he says. “But there was a school choice wave.”
That didn’t appear likely in 1955, when Friedman introduced the idea of vouchers in an essay titled “The Role of Government in Education”:
“Governments could require a minimum level of education which they could finance by giving parents vouchers redeemable for a specified maximum sum per child per year if spent on ‘approved’ educational services.”
It took years to catch on, probably because at the time most people were satisfied with their public schools. When school-choice measures were later passed in some areas, they were almost always targeted at poor children in urban districts. The rationale was that these kids needed help to escape rotten public schools that condemned them to life on the…
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