Friedman on Education

After my previous post on the Department of Education's desire for more centralized oversight of colleges, readers might enjoy hearing from Milton Friedman about what's wrong with our system of elementary and secondary schools:

“The schooling system was in much better shape 50 years ago than it is now,” says Friedman, his voice as confident as reinforced concrete....Friedman puts much of the blame on centralization.

“When I went to elementary school, a long, long time ago in the 1920s, there were about 150,000 school districts in the United States,” he says. “Today there are fewer than 15,000, and the population is more than twice as large.”

Centralization was caused by urbanization and in turn caused bureaucratization.

From the LA Times. The whole article is worth reading.