Friedman, Milton

One of the best-known monetarists and one of the most popular economists of the century, Milton Friedman (1912–) is an ardent free-market advocate. In addition to his writings on the free market, he has also written extensively on public policy, with a primary emphasis on the preservation and extension of individual freedoms. While Friedman is best known for his accomplishments in the area of economics, together he and his wife, Rose Friedman, established the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation to promote parental choice in schools.

Over the years, Friedman has promulgated several theories pertaining to school vouchers and privatizing schools. Foremost is his belief that establishing a voucher system should be a primary educational goal for the twenty-first century. Friedman contends that education is a government monopoly and that the socialistic tenets of monopolies are as unsuccessful for education as they were for the economic structures of Russia and Eastern Europe. Vouchers, according to Friedman, are the stepping-stones to needed privatization.

Friedman believes a voucher system must be universal, available to everyone, and that the dollar amounts offered should be large enough to promote high-quality education. However, he recommends that vouchers not be equal in amount to the money paid by the state to public schools. He posits that the parents should pay some of the educational costs so they acquire an appreciation and interest in the product they are buying.

Friedman believes no conditions should be attached to vouchers, thus allowing each school the opportunity to explore, experiment, and innovate. Friedman conceptualizes that voucher systems will revolutionize education by reducing stratification, building competition, and restoring control to the people most competent to decide on children's education, their parents. Friedman perceives major stumbling blocks to a wellimplemented voucher program to be the continued, and in many areas increased, control by the federal government control over education and the government's trend to centralized bureaucracy (in 1955, there were 55,000 school districts, and in 1992, the number of districts had been reduced to 15,000). Noting that National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers together form the strongest lobbying body in the United States, Friedman cites teacher unions as an additional stumbling block and contends that the increased strength of unions has turned schools from learning institutions into job programs for teachers.

Friedman earned his BA from Rutgers (1932), and he received his MA from the University of Chicago in 1933. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1946. Following receipt of his doctorate, he taught at the University of Chicago, from 1946 to 1976. He has been a Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, since 1977 and has served as a member of the research staff of the National Bureau of Economic Research between 1937 and 1981. In 1976, Friedman won the Nobel Memorial Prize for economic science, and in 1988, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. That same year, he received the National Medal of Science.