Public And Private Schools Have Problems; School Choice Matters, Regardless

Not every school is the right fit for every child, and that’s why school choice matters.

Hence the reason why famed economist Milton Friedman was correct when he said that “a student’s education should not be determined by government but by their parents.”

Public schools, Friedman said in this video, operate under deplorable conditions and suffer from problems with discipline. He blamed “the bureaucratization of schools,” which moved away from the control of parents.

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“The more that you centralize authority and bureaucratize it, the more it costs you to produce less and less,” Friedman said.

The parents, Friedman said, have less and less control, and the school administrators have more. He pushed for school vouchers as a means to empower parents. Under a voucher plan, a local city doesn’t have to spend as much taxpayer money to educate a child at a public school. 

“Therefore, the city should say ‘Very well. If you relieve us of the expense of schooling your child, we will give you a voucher, a piece of paper worth a certain sum of money, which you may use for one purpose and one purpose only, to pay the cost of schooling your child in any school you want him to go to,’” Friedman said.

Friedman also believed that private schools provide a better-quality education and at less cost.

Many charter schools seem effective. Parents and students say that vouchers got them out of very bad situations. Some of these kids were low income and had to leave the public schools because they were getting bullied too much and the administration wouldn’t do anything about it. Also, the schools were too violent or had too low overall test averages. 

On the flip side, some charter schools get bad audits. 

Private school students, meanwhile, don’t always have more structured environments and don’t necessarily end up as successful in adulthood than some of their peers who attend public schools. Bullying is just as rampant in certain private schools. 

Public schools, meanwhile, have become politicized. Public school administrators make six-figure salaries. Many of their positions are unnecessary and some of those positions didn’t exist as recently as 30 years ago. There are far more school administrators now than there were in the 1990s. Can anyone say that overall grades and test scores have improved as a result because we have more school administrators?
Of course not. 

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Some public schools are politicized and teach Critical Race Theory and force students to take privilege walks, all to put white students on guilt trips. And that’s to say nothing about public schools holding drag queen story hours or indoctrinating children about pronouns.

Parents who attend school board meetings to speak out are labeled as, at best, instigators or, at worst, terrorists, by the federal government. School board members don’t really care what parents think. Those parents aren’t the ones funding their political campaigns. 

In Williamson County, Tenn., the state’s most conservative county, it is believed that woke corporations and woke Chamber of Commerce interests are school board members’ largest political contributors. That is probably the case in many, many, many other school districts throughout the United States. 

Parents of public school students don’t generally get a say about their child’s education. In private schools, however, they might have a say. 

Public schools aren’t perfect, and neither are private schools. 

But the same way people choose whether to buy a Kenmore or a General Electric as a refrigerator, or a Toyota or a Chrysler as a vehicle, parents should choose what school is the best fit for their child. 

And if a private school has flaws and doesn’t produce the best outcomes, then the consequences are something they live with. 

After all, that’s why we call it school choice.

To believe that the government knows better than us about things that affect our own lives goes against every principle upon which this country was founded.

Special thanks to Warhammer’s Wife for proofreading this story before publication to make certain there were no misspellings, grammatical errors or other embarrassing mistakes and/or typos. Follow Warhammer on Twitter @Real_Warhammer or on Facebook. Read Warhammer’s stories on The Hayride by clicking here.