Access to Education

Access to education is one of the few policy questions where conservative and progressive rhetoric sounds identical and the substance diverges completely. Both sides want every child taught. The disagreement is about what access means. Progressives read it as access to institutions and to funding, measured by enrolment, spending per pupil and participation rates. Conservatives read it as access to instruction, measured by whether a child can read, calculate and reason at the end of it, and they argue that the two measures have come apart badly since the 1970s.

The conservative case rests on a prior claim about authority: education belongs first to parents, and the state’s role is to assist families in discharging a duty that is theirs, not to substitute for them.

Key Takeaways

• Massachusetts passed the first American compulsory attendance law in 1852; England’s Elementary Education Act arrived in 1870 and the Butler Act in 1944.
• Milton Friedman proposed education vouchers in a 1955 essay, separating the financing of schooling from its provision.
• Conservatives distinguish access to schooling from access to learning, and point to literacy and numeracy results that have stagnated while spending rose.
• Thomas Sowell’s historical work on high-achieving segregated schools argues that resources explain less about outcomes than culture and expectations do.
• Subsidiarity holds that decisions belong at the lowest competent level, which places curriculum and discipline nearer the parent than the ministry.

History And Context

State schooling is younger than most people assume and was rarely built for the reasons now given. Frederick William I ordered compulsory attendance in Prussia in 1717, the Generallandschulreglement of 1763 gave the order practical force, and the Allgemeines Landrecht of 1794 made schools institutions of the state. The model that spread through nineteenth-century Europe and America was explicitly about producing reliable soldiers, officials and subjects. Horace Mann, secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education from 1837, campaigned for common schools on the grounds that a republic required a literate and morally trained citizenry, and Massachusetts enacted compulsory attendance in 1852.

England legislated later and more reluctantly. The Forster Act of 1870 filled gaps in a system already dominated by church and voluntary schools rather than replacing it. The economist E. G. West argued in Education and the State in 1965 that literacy in England had already reached high levels through private, church and working-class subscription schools before the state entered, a finding that unsettled the standard account of 1870 as rescue.²

Expansion accelerated after 1944. Britain’s Butler Act guaranteed free secondary education; the American GI Bill of 1944 sent more than two million veterans to university; Brown v. Board of Education struck down segregated schooling in 1954; the Higher Education Act of 1965 built the American student loan system; and the Robbins Report of 1963 committed Britain to university places for all qualified applicants. Canada, holding education as a provincial power under the 1867 Constitution Act, expanded through provincial systems on a similar timetable.

By the 2020s participation had been transformed and results had not. American federal reading scores for thirteen-year-olds in the early 2020s sat at or below their level in the early 1970s, after decades of real per-pupil spending increases. That gap between input and output is the conservative starting point.

The Conservative Position

Friedman’s 1955 essay “The Role of Government in Education” separates three questions that public debate runs together: whether schooling should be compulsory, whether it should be publicly financed, and whether it should be publicly produced. He accepted the first two on grounds of civic externalities and rejected the third. If the state issues a voucher redeemable at any approved school, poor families acquire the exit option that wealthy families already exercise by moving house or paying fees.¹ The argument is about access in its strict sense: a child assigned by postcode to a failing school has no access at all.

Sowell’s historical work presses a harder point. Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C., a racially segregated school serving black students under Jim Crow, sent graduates to Amherst, Williams and Dartmouth for decades before 1955 while operating on poor funding in inadequate buildings. Whatever produced those results, it was not money. Sowell’s conclusion is that expectations, discipline and family involvement carry more weight than resources, and that policy fixated on spending is looking at the wrong variable.³

Subsidiarity supplies the constitutional principle. Formulated in Catholic social teaching and adopted by conservatives with no particular religious commitment, it holds that a larger body should not absorb functions a smaller one can discharge. Curriculum, discipline and the moral formation of a child sit closer to parents and local boards than to national ministries, and standardisation removes the variety that lets families find a fit.

There is also a credential critique. Charles Murray argued in Real Education in 2008 that pushing a majority of school leavers toward four-year degrees serves institutions rather than students, saddling many with debt and no completed qualification while starving skilled trades of entrants.⁴ Broadening access to university, on this view, has narrowed access to respectable non-academic paths.

Differing Positions

The opposing case is that markets in schooling entrench the advantages they claim to disperse. Vouchers rarely cover full private fees, so the families best placed to use them are those who could already contribute the difference, while transport, information and admissions screening filter out the rest. Chile’s national voucher system, running since 1981, is the longest natural experiment available, and researchers there have documented increased sorting by social class alongside contested effects on achievement.

Defenders of public systems argue that the measured stagnation reflects who is being educated rather than how well: American schools in 2020 enrolled far more children with disabilities, more recent immigrants and more students from disrupted households than in 1970, and holding aggregate scores flat under those conditions is a real achievement. They add that per-pupil funding in many jurisdictions still varies with local property wealth, so the conservative complaint that money does not matter is being tested mainly in places that never received it.

References

1. Milton Friedman, “The Role of Government in Education,” in Robert A. Solo, ed., Economics and the Public Interest (Rutgers University Press, 1955).
2. E. G. West, Education and the State (Institute of Economic Affairs, 1965).
3. Thomas Sowell, Education: Assumptions Versus History (Hoover Institution Press, 1986).
4. Charles Murray, Real Education (Crown Forum, 2008).