They’re close to passing legislation doing just that:

(Axcess News) Salt Lake City, UT - The Utah House of Representatives narrowly passed a School Voucher program in a 38 to 37 vote today, which would provide every child in the state with a school voucher worth between $500 and $3,000. If approved by the Senate the bill will become America’s first universal statewide voucher program.

“The significance of this bill cannot be overestimated,” said Andrew J. Coulson, Director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom based in Washington DC.  “If passed, it will be an unprecedented step forward for educational freedom in America.”

Caulson cautioned, however, that dramatic results should not be expected overnight. “In other nations that have adopted similar school choice programs, it has taken five or ten years for large numbers of new schools to be created, and for the good ones to be weeded out from the bad.  Competition and consumer choice work wonderfully well in education, but their effects are not instantaneous.” He added that “part of the reason for that lag is that potential school founders have to be convinced that a newly passed school choice law is on firm legal and political ground, and not likely to be overturned by the courts or repealed by a subsequent legislature.”

Coulson also observed that the maximum value of Utah’s school vouchers would be only $3,000, only about half of what Utah spends per pupil in its public schools. “Bill 148 would still leave private schools at a considerable financial disadvantage compared to their state-run counterparts, and that would inhibit competition between the public and private sectors and retard innovation.”

Those caveats aside, Coulson said, “This is a momentous day not just for Utah families, but for our entire nation. What Utah’s legislature has figured out is that school choice is a much better way of fulfilling the promise of public education than is the government-run factory school system we inherited from the 19th century.”

Indeed.

Somewhere I expect that Milton Friedman is smiling that goofy smile of his.  I hope this passes and is given a chance to succeed, not only for the sake of Utah’s students but also so that this country has a shining example of how individual freedom to choose, applied in this instance to education, can make everything better.  A program of parental school choice instituted down in Florida met with resounding success, especially among minority children, even though it was much more limited in its scope than Utah’s system will be.  It met with that success, that is, until it was ironically shot down by a lawsuit from the teacher’s unions and civil rights groups.