Education policy is very important to me, so I was quite interested to see how Friedman handled education in a capitalist framework. In my experience, hardcore conservatives/capitalists often ignore tough realities in the field of education, but he surprised me at first by seeming open to the idea of the government standardizing and compelling some level of education — at least insofar as that learning advances “citizenship or leadership” (Friedman 88) (Friedman believes that “training which increases the economic productivity of the student” (Friedman 88) should be viewed as an investment in human capital and is thus a transaction best left to the private sphere). Once I read into his plan for basic education, which outlines a voucher system, I found that reality-bereft conservatism I had originally expected.
As we read in Friedman’s book, a voucher system means parents may purchase as much education for their kids as they (1) desire and (2) can afford. This seems contrary to Friedman’s initial assertion that “[a] stable and democratic society is impossible without a minimum degree of literacy and knowledge on the part of most citizens” (Friedman 86) because many parents may desire, or more likely only be able to afford, less than this minimum threshold. Even with a robust (albeit often mismanaged) public education system in the U.S., we are flirting with destabilizing mass incompetence. A 2009 USA today headline read “1 in 7 U.S. adults are unable to read this story,” citing a federal study. As the world modernizes, and literacy, mathematical and analytic skills become increasingly important (as opposed to labor-based skills), the poor are being left further and further behind. “The achievement gap between children from high- and low-income families is roughly 30-40 percent larger among children born in 2011 than among those born twenty-five years earlier.” (Reardon 1) Low-income children are growing up increasingly incapable of fully functioning in their society.
There is an abundance of data and studies supporting the hypothesis that higher parental income and/or educational attainment is closely correlated with higher academic success and educational attainment among children. Further, higher educational attainment is closely linked to higher income. (If you don’t believe me check out the graphs below; one is from BLS, the other is from data from D.C. schools. The latter is especially dramatic because D.C. is a city highly segregated by income, but the same pattern holds true throughout the country.) Put these two factors together, and it’s easy to see how the pattern is cyclical: Rich/well-educated parents have kids who grow up to be rich/well-educated (and so on for the next generation), while poor persons suffer the opposing cycle of under-education and poverty.
Recently, studies have begun to show that the correlation between parental income and education to educational achievement among children is explained by parenting style. Essentially, richer and better educated people are better parents (if you’re into numbers, charts and regressions, here’s a cool study that makes that rather intuitive point with math: http://www.mikemcmahon.info/ParentEducationIncome.pdf). Since parenting starts from birth, and school doesn’t start until several years into life, poor kids are behind from the start: One study found that “[b]y age 3, children whose parents were professionals had vocabularies of about 1,100 words, and children whose parents were on welfare had vocabularies of about 525 words... The average I.Q. among the professional children was 117, and the welfare children had an average I.Q. of 79. (Tough, 2006)
Somehow, Friedman and other voucher proponents believe that these kids — who start social participation 38 I.Q. points behind many of their peers, and 21 points below average — must accountable for their parents’ failures. Are we really going to throw poor kids into the capitalist game when they reach maturity and tell them it’s their fault when they lose? Isn’t a personal responsibility a fundamental tenet of capitalism?
There’s a lot of proposed strategies on how to educate poor children to compensate for subpar parenting, most of which include more classroom time, a longer school year, and all of which require increased funding; the “typical resources provided to a public-school teacher, would find it near impossible to educate an average classroom of poor minority students up to the level of their middle-class peers.” (Tough, 2006) Poor kids need more help if they are ever to be competitive market participants.
The bottom line is this: If we are to have a society built on personal accountability and decision-making (e.g. capitalism) then we must have an educational system which favors the poor to compensate them for their upbringing. A voucher system which by default would allocate more education to the wealthy than the poor is antithetical to this goal.
Here’s a GREAT article on the achievement gap, if this is a subject that interests you:
“What It Takes To Make a Student”
By Paul Tough.
The New York Times
November 26, 2006
(You can find it on Lexis Nexis)
Sources:
“What It Takes To Make a Student”
By Paul Tough.
The New York Times
November 26, 2006
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