Day 56 of 1000

My friends know I am not a big fan of Steve Jobs.  I am even less of a fan of Wired magazine.  I might write about that someday if I can generate enough enthusiasm to write about boring and tired cliches.  That being said, my buddy Andrew, as is his wont, sent me an amazing article–a Wired interview of Steve Jobs–from 1996.  Steve Jobs hammered the National Education Association for stifling educational innovation and advocated for school vouchers.  I recommend you read the whole thing.  Here is a partial quote from the interview in response to the question, “Could technology help by improving education?”

It’s a political problem. The problems are sociopolitical. The problems are unions. You plot the growth of the NEA [National Education Association] and the dropping of SAT scores, and they’re inversely proportional. The problems are unions in the schools. The problem is bureaucracy. I’m one of these people who believes the best thing we could ever do is go to the full voucher system.

I have a 17-year-old daughter who went to a private school for a few years before high school. This private school is the best school I’ve seen in my life. It was judged one of the 100 best schools in America. It was phenomenal. The tuition was $5,500 a year, which is a lot of money for most parents. But the teachers were paid less than public school teachers – so it’s not about money at the teacher level. I asked the state treasurer that year what California pays on average to send kids to school, and I believe it was $4,400. While there are not many parents who could come up with $5,500 a year, there are many who could come up with $1,000 a year.

If we gave vouchers to parents for $4,400 a year, schools would be starting right and left. People would get out of college and say, “Let’s start a school.” You could have a track at Stanford within the MBA program on how to be the businessperson of a school. And that MBA would get together with somebody else, and they’d start schools. And you’d have these young, idealistic people starting schools, working for pennies.

Nobel Prize winning economist, Milton Friedman, should be credited with the introduction and popularization of the vouchers idea. Here is a Reason magazine article an interview of Friedman by Nick Gillespie from 2005 that describes the idea and some of its history.  Friedman was 93 at the time of the article and is now gone, but the ideas he expressed it first in his 1955 article titled “The Role of Government in Education” are just as fresh today as they were when he first wrote about them.  These ideas are really starting to take hold in states like Washington D.C., Indiana, Arizona, and Wisconsin.  They work.

I have a lot of hope for the future of public education in America.  Our children prospered in homeschool, but we were forced into it by what we considered to be a failed government school system where we lived.  We might never have homeschooled our children had a decent school been available to us.  The less the government is involved in running, managing, overseeing, and monitoring the schools, the faster they are going to get better.  There are two huge impediments to this happening–the teachers unions and the current teacher education system in our universities.  If we get those two huge, self-serving bureaucracies eliminated and/or competing in a free market arena, the kids will be much better served.