“Nothing comes amiss, so money comes withal”
— William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew

Whatever The Bard meant, his blurb would stretch nicely over much of today’s literature portraying Milton Friedman’s preferred system for school choice and its fiscal and legal structure. It is hard to stay simple and clear on this subject. (I have failed for 60 years.)

That’s why it was my great pleasure to read two exceptions in the recent exchange between Derrell Bradford, president of choice champion 50CAN, and Michael J. Petrilli, president of the like-motivated Thomas B. Fordham Institute and an executive editor of Education Next. These two school policy pros exchange friendly taps over ideal statutory form(s) for the liberation and practical empowerment of lower-income American parents to escape their subordinate lot and exercise their constitutional right to shop and choose in an open market of (at last) truly public schools.

I found both essays excellent—differing from each other and, in Bradford’s case, from my own views. Petrilli and I prefer that subsidies for education be tailored in size to the need of the individual family. Bradford contends that, where state or local law and politics favor extension of dollars beyond need, the ballot box should be allowed to enlist (buy?) the political verve in all—rich and poor. Despite this difference, each author hopes for positive social and educational blessings from his political charity. Both may be right. The late Steve Sugarman and I often wandered in Bradford’s direction with subsidies to be scaled by wealth—but even a token amount for the top tier. This might prove politically necessary in some states, and—if prudently designed—still be a step in the right direction.

Friedman’s apparent lack of moral qualms about disregarding family need was not, I think, a signal of indifference to the lot of our lower-income classes. Rather, it reflected his intense devotion to the intellectual image of a “free market” (even where subsidized by government and compulsory for consumers) that would make personal wealth of the buyer irrelevant. While the common good requires the state to assure schooling for all, it could do so most efficiently, in Friedman’s view, by spreading subsidies for children of the same age equally to all parents. When dollars go in equal sum to all parents, however, a state has reduced the subsidy for families with authentic need. I have thus never been able to make sense of handouts to comfortable families.

As foreseen by a cadre of 19th-century prophets, such a system of parental choice of “public” school by location of residence offered the upper-income parent the opportunity to protect their child from corruption by classmates from incoming hordes of strange and unpredictable immigrants. The real estate markets quickly took their cue—thus, my own address among others of my class.

The disqualification of children from every school but the one located in their “attendance zone” came to define admissibility in America’s pseudo-public system. Even today the typical impoverished child learns in the company of neighborhood kids of her own social class. The effects are not secret. This “public” sequestration of lower-class kids has proved limiting and socially defining, just as foreseen, even by many of its designers.

The disqualification from every school but that one down the street demanded both the child’s presence and that of local age-mates of the same economic means. His better-off cousin lives more comfortably a zone or two away with parents who could afford a residence that qualifies him for its popular district school. The effects of such individual initiative and our trust of (only) lucky parents are, at best, mixed. It takes no psychiatrist to see the corrupting effects upon child, parent, family, and the social order when students experience schooling only in a community of social peers. Our society keeps it extremely difficult to reform this civil calamity, but minds like Bradford and Petrilli give me hope. Many states seem in the midst of a spasm of reforms, some very promising.

Assuming adequate space in urban buildings of some size, we should consider creating varieties of schools—public, private, and mixed—to offer a diverse and mostly parent-chosen curriculum. For example, imagine Susie enrolled in geography and math at Public School #1, history at nearby Public School #2, and religion and ethics at St. Mary’s 70 feet down the hall—then another jump, whether it be to a school run by Quakers or by Atheists, for literature. The child could witness and experience for herself the varied beliefs and ideas elevated by these schools, with opportunity to engage their believers.

Are the students too young for this? Maybe. The parent who knows the child would decide. The administration of such a program would be constantly tested, but maybe that’s not bad. Any good lawyer would relish the opportunity to design workable models. Given today’s threat to inner-city minds and hearts, we need to try the full spectrum of the plausible. The same would seem true of our approach to the related challenge of inner-city business and public-school vacancies: Civic leaders might provide public, charter, and private schools with the option to rent or buy vacant space for the purpose of testing diverse ideas about what could work for the children of lower-income families, who under the status quo emerge from their “public” school experience as conscripts of disappointment.

Distance will remain the most serious impediment to educational equity, whether measured in terms of wealth or race. Our “public” schools and their enrollment rules have successfully divided us by both criteria. Over time we may chip away at this historical mistake by (1) opening public schools to more than their resident neighbors; (2) reserving a significant but nonthreatening number of seats in all schools—perhaps 20–30 percent—for a lottery among rejected applicants; and, (3) inviting whatever share of private (including religious) schools would wish to participate to join such a market. Would Friedman approve? I suspect that Petrilli and Bradford would.

Our country should cease to cluster families according to their capacity to exercise choice in the real estate market. Bradford and Petrilli would extend America’s trust to all parents; so would I.

John E. Coons is the Robert L. Bridges Professor of Law (emeritus) at Berkeley Law School.