The Birthday Gift Milton Friedman Would Want

Every July 31, those of us who care about educational freedom have an opportunity to remember Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist who spent decades breaking new ground on how K-12 education should work.

It’s tempting to celebrate his birthday by looking backward, and there is plenty cause for celebration. After all, Milton invented the case for modern school vouchers in his landmark 1955 essay, “The Role of Government in Education,” and his ideas helped inspire a school choice movement that has exploded beyond what many thought possible even just a few years ago.

But if Milton were here today, he probably wouldn’t want another tribute.

He’d want us to finish the work.

“Schools are now run by professional bureaucrats. Monopoly and uniformity have replaced competition and diversity. Consumers of schooling have little to say,” Milton wrote in 1983.

EdChoice polling consistently shows that more than half of parents would choose a school other than a traditional public school if they could, but 80% of parents end up enrolling their children in public school anyway for a myriad of reasons.

Lack of funds in some states and lack of access in others are a major reason for that disconnect.

Milton also said, “a centralized system cannot possibly have that degree of personal concern for each individual child that we have as parents.”

This was a warning about who should make one of life’s most important decisions for America’s children, namely where and how they are educated. To Milton, the answer was obvious — the family closest to the child.

Today, that principle still hasn’t been fully realized.

Yes, educational choice has expanded dramatically. Today, more than 1.5 million students participate in private school choice programs across dozens of states, and universal eligibility is becoming an increasingly common policy goal.

But Milton never measured success simply by counting programs.

Rather, he would want us to ask today whether all parents across the country truly have the power to choose their children’s education.

In 1955, Milton wrote that government could have a legitimate role in financing education because an educated citizenry benefits society as a whole. What he challenged was the assumption that financing education required government to operate schools.

More than seventy years later, education debates in many states still tend to treat these as one and the same.

“Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own,” Milton famously observed.

Parents are best equipped to spend their child’s education dollars because they care the most about the student those dollars are for.

Thirty years ago, Milton founded EdChoice along with his wife, Rose. EdChoice has long worked to carry forward the intellectual legacy of Milton and Rose Friedman by advancing educational freedom for all, not just preserving their ideas in amber.

That means ensuring parents in every state actually know their options. It means fully funding choice programs and implementing them well so families can apply with confidence year after year. It means defending these programs in the courts when opponents launch legal challenges.

We’ve done this work for decades, and we’re not backing down now.

That feels like the birthday gift Milton would want.