In a free and diverse country, parents should be free to choose how to educate their children.
In an essay for The New York Review of Books, Diane Ravitch denounces school choice for its “racist origins” and assails Milton Friedman for allegedly exploiting white supremacy to privatize education. For many decades, she writes, the term “school choice” was “widely and rightly dismissed as racist.” According to Ravitch, whose essay reviews Josh Cowen’s The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers, school-choice programs have harmed poor students and enabled “publicly funded discrimination.”
Ravitch’s essay and her accusations of racism make for interesting reading, but they are hard to defend. And while she is correct that racism was present in the early years of school-choice activism in the Jim Crow era, how relevant is that in understanding school-choice programs today?
(It is worth, if only briefly, juxtaposing the emphasis that Ravitch places on racism and school choice over half a century ago with her strong support of a higher minimum wage, despite the fact that the original federal minimum wage law, the 1931 Davis-Bacon Act, was envisaged by some of its supporters as a way of pricing black non-union workers out of construction jobs.)
Importantly, Milton Friedman’s school-choice advocacy was never tainted with racist intent. Ravitch’s attack on Friedman is based in part on Nancy MacLean’s 2021 paper “How Milton Friedman Exploited White Supremacy to Privatize Education,” but MacLean’s work on this topic has been fiercely refuted.
For example, economist Don Boudreaux pushed back hard when he turned his attention to MacLean’s criticism of an article by historian Phil Magness. MacLean had written that she found it “stunning” that Magness had failed to mention that Friedman “published his case for [school] vouchers at the very moment the South’s archsegregationist officials were threatening public education (in 1955).” Boudreaux wrote:
What’s so stunning? Brown v. Board of Education was decided the year before, thus prompting racists to peddle schemes to maintain segregation. Friedman and other classical liberals then responded by promoting school choice as a means not only of improving the quality of schools, but also of promoting greater integration — which is what Friedman explicitly predicted, and hoped, would be the result of vouchers.
As Phil Magness argued, MacLean and other critics “have their history backward” and “as early as 1955, economists such as Friedman began touting vouchers as a strategy to expedite integration.” Moreover, wrote Magness later:
Rather than engage the economist at his word, Ms. MacLean imputes opportunistic motives to the date of Friedman’s 1955 article on the economic theory of school choice — one year after Brown v. Board of Education. Yet Friedman’s papers at the Hoover Institution confirm that he drafted his paper before the Brown ruling. The timing came about from an ordinary lag in academic publishing, not the conspiratorial designs that Ms. MacLean imagines.
Curiously, Ms. MacLean’s argument becomes inattentive to dates when it suits her case. Her argument repeatedly conflates Virginia’s 1959 tuition grant program with the arch-segregationist “Massive Resistance” laws of 1956-57 that it displaced. This allows her to obfuscate the evidence I present in my op-ed . . . which illustrates how the Virginia Education Association (VEA) allied with segregationists to attack school vouchers after the courts struck down the Massive Resistance statutes in January 1959. Like Friedman, the Virginia teachers union recognized that vouchers would expedite the integration of schools. While Friedman considered this a desirable outcome, the antivoucher activists warned it would lead to the “negro engulfment” of the public schools.
Ravitch is correct that, in decades past, some supporters of school choice were racist. This is hardly a convincing argument against school choice, then and today: If freedom of choice and private schools attracted imperfect followers, the opposite — government monopoly — is worse.
Governments of that day enforced racism, such as through Jim Crow laws, which Milton Friedman opposed. “The government provided for a separation,” as Friedman said. “It was the government that enforced separate areas for blacks and whites, it was the government that enforced the law that the blacks had to sit at the back of buses. Those were all government laws!”
Moving to the present day, what matters is whether school-choice programs have actually done any good. Contrary to Ravitch’s claims that “as the voucher programs grew in scale, the academic results turned sharply negative,” the preponderance of evidence shows school choice improves academic and other outcomes.
For example, a 2024 study by the Progressive Policy Institute concluded cities with school-choice have seen low-income students beginning to catch up to statewide performance levels. Similarly, a major national study conducted at Stanford University concluded “the typical charter school student . . . had reading and math gains that outpaced those of their peers in [traditional public schools] they would have otherwise attended,” with the learning gains particularly strong among blacks, Hispanics, and those in poverty. In 2021, researchers at the University of Arkansas analyzed student achievement and school-choice policies, concluding that “whether more universally available, like in Arizona, or more targeted, like in Florida, significant expansions of education freedom have tended to result in achievement gains for affected students.”
There are many other examples. A literature review by EdChoice surveyed 188 studies done on school choice in America since 1998. Of the 29 studies that examined public-school students’ test scores, 26 found school choice had a positive effect and only two found a negative effect, with the other study showing no visible effect. Of the 17 that examined program participant test scores, eleven showed positive effects and again only two found a negative effect, with four showing no visible effects.
Other studies from the literature review showed positive effects of school choice on fiscal outcomes, parent satisfaction, school safety, and — read carefully, Ravitch and MacLean — racial and ethnic integration. EdChoice’s review found that, of eight studies done on the effects of school-choice programs on integration, seven found positive effects, one found it was neutral, and not one found negative effects.
After making flimsy attacks, Ravitch laments that some parents and organizations promoting school choice have differing views from her as to how public schools should handle discussions of race and sexual identity. “Such groups want to censor what is taught to all children, even those whose parents disagree with them and want their children to learn about race, gender, and sexuality,” she writes. Of course, here she inadvertently makes one of the strongest arguments in favor of school choice. Since parents disagree about what and how their children should be taught, they should have greater freedom to choose a school whose teaching best aligns with their own values — and that applies to left-wing and right-wing parents alike.
Yes, Diane Ravitch may find it unfortunate that many parents in America have different views than her own. But in a free and diverse country, parents should be free to choose how to educate their children, perhaps especially in ways of which she disapproves, given that she disapproves of Nobel Prize-winning economists who advocated policies to improve educational achievement and hasten racial integration.