A Hundred-Year War for School Reform?(Brief Article)

Nobel economist Milton Friedman once said new ideas in public policy typically take 20 years to become reality. If that's true, one of his own ideas--breaking the government's monopoly in elementary and secondary education--is overdue.

"Government has appropriately financed general education for citizenship, Friedman wrote in 1955, but it has also, unjustifiably, come "to administer most of the schools that provide such education."

Friedman's idea that the principles of competition and choice should be brought into education was radical in its day, and only in the past few years has it been seriously tried. After some initial progress, the movement has lately suffered terrible losses. Last November, voters in California and Michigan overwhelmingly defeated measures that would have given parents state-funded tuition vouchers redeemable at public and private schools. In Philadelphia, the school board just rejected 22 of 25 applications for "charter" schools, which are nearly autonomous institutions within the public system.

Worst of all, in March, the nation's largest for-profit company serving elementary and secondary students endured a humiliating defeat in a New York City special election. The city had decided Edison Schools, which runs 113 schools in 45 cities, could manage five public schools in poor areas of Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Harlem--but only if a majority of the schools' parents consented.

So an unprecedented election was set up. Edison had a lot going for it: Floyd Flake, an African-American minister in New York and former congressman, heads the company's Charter Schools division; Ramon Cortines, chancellor of New York City schools from 1993-95, is on the board of directors; and Benno Schmidt, former president of Yale and currently Edison's chairman, is a close ally of Mayor Rudy Guiliani. Edison even had the backing of the New York Times: "We hope the parents in New York vote for the Edison proposal. It offers at least some hope for improvement in five schools whose performance has been abysmal."

But on March 30, most parents in the affected districts didn't bother to vote. Of those who did, only 453 (less than 10 percent of those eligible) voted for Edison, 1,833 against.

Part of the problem was that Edison's opponents--the city's powerful teachers' union, in league with left-wing groups like ACORN--distorted the facts, leading many parents to believe Edison would charge tuition and kick non-performing kids out of school. Other parents opposed