Magness, the attempted rebuttal bore the title “School Choice’s Antiracist History,” and carried the summary line that “ Vouchers Sped up Integration, While Teachers Unions Fought to Preserve Segregation.” Journal set out to defend Friedman and rebut my INET study. And that efforts to exculpate economists and policy advisers who worked with them would collapse out of sheer shame.īut on October 18 th an author in the Wall St. One would think that today the facts about the long struggle of southern white leaders to preserve segregation are so well known that simple fact-checking would suffice to rule out attempts to whitewash their efforts. For in a twist reminiscent of some eugenics campaigns through the ages, he wrote that if parents were forced to assume the entire burden of paying for the education of their children, poor people would decide to have fewer of them. I also showed that Friedman’s correspondence with an economist colleague who was troubled by his stance revealed that his soothing reassurances that making parents responsible for paying for the education of their children might somehow enhance quality or even reduce segregation in some indefinite long run only scratched the surface of what he really thought. Documenting his take up and work with segregationists makes up the bulk of my paper. But we know for sure that, to promote his views, he decided to exploit the southern campaign. My paper was clear that we do not know exactly how much Milton Friedman knew of these plans when he wrote the 1955 case for vouchers that spawned today’s “school choice” movement. Board of Education decision in 1954 outlawing segregation in public education, southern political leaders began scheming to evade it and maintain racist education systems. Supreme Court handed down its landmark Brown v. The title of my INET Working Paper summed up my findings: “ How Milton Friedman Exploited White Supremacy to Privatize Education.” Drawing on the private papers of Friedman and other primary sources, the paper started with the obvious: that as soon as the U.S.

Not long ago I published the results of my research on the backstory of Milton Friedman’s discussion of education in his Capitalism and Freedom.

M friedman capitalism and freedom