Dr. Corey D'Angelis has a PhD in Education Policy from the Department of Educational Reform at the University of Arkansas, which is one of the few places in America that isn't a Marxist bastion with a smattering of incompetence thrown in for good measure.
00:30:32.060And so we used those variables and we found that the best predictor of being a politically correct authoritarian,
00:30:39.640that's radical left-wing authoritarian attitude, was low verbal IQ.
00:30:46.000Right. So you can imagine that people will default to a particular kind of simple-minded worldview if they can't think critically very well.
00:30:55.920It was a very powerful predictor. It was the major predictor by a lot.
00:31:00.300It was a better predictor than the relationship between general cognitive ability and grades.
00:31:05.380So you're less likely to tolerate others' beliefs and think of them as a person.
00:31:10.980No, I don't think it's tolerance. No, I don't think it's that.
00:31:13.820I think what it is is preference for a maximally simple explanation.
00:31:18.500Yeah, because you can't explain, well, maybe they have good motivations behind what they're thinking because they can't come up with those alternative theories.
00:31:24.820Well, you also can't, you can't, like, America is a racist society. All inequalities are a consequence of systemic oppression.
00:31:33.620Well, that's one sentence. It's one sentence.
00:31:37.720And now you have an explanation for the whole world. Well, that's attractive. Like, we like belief. People like belief systems that collapse into something simple.
00:31:45.340Okay, there were other predictors. Okay, being female.
00:33:02.720Right. And it's very frequently the case that if you don't know what you could do, that's a degree that will more or less guarantee you a job.
00:33:10.420And then, the other potential problem, and I don't know of any research bearing on this specifically, is that the security and the holidays, my suspicions are, attracts people who are lower in conscientiousness.
00:33:24.900And one of the best predictors, by the way, of teaching ability, apart from general cognitive ability, right, because hopefully you'd have smart teachers, is conscientiousness.
00:33:34.380Now, and conscientiousness also predicts conservative political leaning, not liberal political leaning.
00:33:40.420Right. So, you have kind of a perfect storm in the faculties of education, is that their academic standards are very low for admission, which really matters, right?
00:33:51.580And then, they tilt radically to the left, which is also something that would be attractive to people who have decreased cognitive ability.
00:34:00.120They select against conscientiousness because of the work hours and the security.
00:34:05.920I had also seen a study that selection into education, you know, degrees was associated with risk aversion, too.
00:34:13.880So, if you know you have a union protecting you, you have job security, even if it's not the highest pay, you're going to have a pension when you retire, you can't get fired if you do a bad job, you're not going to get paid any less if you're not doing as well as the person across the hallway.
00:34:29.760Right. You said, I believe, I think it was in the parent revolution, I read both of your books in the last week, and I don't, so I don't remember where this stat came from, but you said that the New York State dispensed with a dozen teachers over what, do you remember the period of time?
00:34:47.580Was that a 10-year period? Was it a one-year period?
00:35:03.340The best teachers say, to heck with this.
00:35:05.520We're notβthis person across the hall is showing videos all day, and they're getting paid the same, or more than me, just because they've been around the system longer.
00:35:14.180They reward years of service, not much, and I mean, I mentioned earlier that spending has gone up by 164% in real terms since 1970.
00:35:24.060Teacher salaries, on average, have actually only increased by about 3% in real terms.
00:35:28.460Right, so where's the bulk of the money going?
00:35:29.840So, I think it's also going to pensions and other benefits, too, but it's going towards administrative low.
00:35:34.140Yeah, yeah. So, the same thing that happened at the universities, fundamentally.
00:35:38.800Since 2000, we have data on this in the U.S., and we've seen that enrollment for students has increased in this public school system by about 5% since 2000.
00:35:49.360The number of teachers in the system has increased about twice that rate, by about 10%.
00:36:03.340The administrative issue is a very complicated one because the problem with the managerial strata, let's say, is that it's very difficult to parameterize the demand.
00:36:17.840You know, if you're in a complex system, you can always see that more could be done regardless of the direction you happen to be moving in.
00:36:26.840And what that implies is that there's no limit to the number of potential administrative contributions, right?
00:36:34.080And then the question is, well, what would limit the growth of the administration?
00:36:39.440And in a competitive environment, free market principles essentially limit because you run out of money, right?
00:36:46.660So, you can only hire as many people as you can afford to hire.
00:36:49.700This isn't a problem with administrative bureaucracies that have an unlimited source of funding.
00:36:56.720So, they're just going to continue to grow at, I don't know what it is, 5% to 7% a year or something like that.
00:37:02.600And there's actually been four studies on this.
00:37:07.040It's a really niche area of research that the more private and charter school competition in the area, all else equal after they control for all the usual demographic characteristics, the public school teacher salaries slightly go up.
00:37:19.840And now a lot of people say, oh, that's counterintuitive because it's stealing money from the public schools, they say, which the money doesn't belong to the schools.
00:37:26.420It's for the kids, but all that aside, because there's also competition, they start to allocate those additional dollars instead of towards administrators, they start to allocate them towards the classroom, towards the teachers.
00:37:41.040So, the teachers who remain actually end up better off.
00:37:44.020Is that to stop the teachers moving into the private realm?
00:37:45.840Stop them from going to the private sector, stop the kids from going to the private sector because now if you have β there's a monopsony situation and a monopoly situation.
00:37:55.180Monopsony is a monopoly in the labor market.
00:37:57.520With the government school system, you want to be a teacher, you basically got to take what they give you.
00:38:01.220But now if you have more competition in the labor market too, competing for your excellence if you're doing a good job, then the public schools have to say, you know what, we've got to treat the teachers better too.
00:38:13.680So, some teachers are underpaid, some teachers are overpaid.
00:38:16.900It depends on β we try to treat everything as one size fits all in our current system.
00:38:21.160But that's an interesting finding that actually benefits teachers, but also we found in places like Florida, there is a control group of β you mentioned earlier about how do we compare systems.
00:38:34.960In Florida, there's 11 academic studies on this topic.
00:38:37.780Ten of them find positive effects of competition on the outcomes in the public schools.
00:38:42.400It's been a rising tide that lifts all boats, and just over time you can see it work out in Florida too.
00:38:47.040So, a couple decades ago, they were at the bottom of the pack on what we call the nation's report card, the math and reading scores.
00:38:53.860Now, U.S. News & World Report has ranked Florida number one on education.
00:38:58.360They're at the top of the rankings for the nation's report card, and it's not because they pump more money into the system.
00:39:03.260They spend 27 percent less than the national average in Florida, but they have school choice for everybody.
00:39:19.160But the public schools in this case actually do get better in response to competition, and we have β
00:39:24.220It's funny that you even have to make β
00:39:26.040Well, it's funny that you even have to make that case.
00:39:28.340I mean, it's so absurd that we have to sit here and discuss whether having more provider of a given mandatory service is going to improve quality.
00:39:37.820Like, well, how β what else would improve quality?
00:39:52.060I also did one more study on this issue, and I haven't brought it up in a long time because I've done like 40 peer-reviewed articles on school choice, which is really tough in the academia for education.
00:40:04.120The peers are your enemies, not your peers.
00:40:07.960So, I mentioned that first study I did about school choice reducing crime later on in life.
00:40:12.240It was a very good study, the first of its kind.
00:40:14.700Long-term data, student-level data, very rigorous study.
00:40:18.020One of the reviewers β and one of the first places we sent it was a journal called Urban Education.
00:40:23.340One of the reviewers said, you know, we like the methods and we buy that it's a causal relationship, but they said you called the students urban students.
00:40:48.760They also said that we have to reject this because you didn't talk about how the results relate to whiteness, structural oppression, and power.
00:40:59.320But the study I wanted to bring up about competition was actually in my home state of Texas.
00:41:03.400I did a survey experiment with my co-authors.
00:41:06.280So, I randomly assigned different surveys to public school leaders in Texas.
00:41:10.900And one of the treatment group had a randomized note that said on one of the questions, you're going to have a new charter school that's expected to open nearby.
00:41:23.080And I was asking them where they were going to put their money next year.
00:41:26.580Like, where were they going to allocate resources?
00:41:28.880And the treatment of having a charter school competing with you had the effect of reducing administrative allocations and having more of that money going to the classroom.
00:41:40.340Well, because they know that they might have to think about where they're going to spend money if they have a competitor.
00:41:46.960Because if they waste the money, families are going to go there.
00:41:49.720But their argument usually is that, obviously, it's got to be something like more administrators make for a more effective school system.
00:41:56.200That's what they tell you publicly, but privately they know that's all BS, which is what that study β because they didn't know what the study was doing.
00:42:03.460They just thought, I'm answering a simple survey question.
00:42:25.920Yeah, but in your case, that's probably not the truth because the probability that you're going to publish something that challenges the β
00:43:39.560So, just for everybody watching and listening, so you can draw a rough equivalent between number of publications and a given degree.
00:43:50.960So, for example, with one publication, you have a master's degree essentially, although most master's students don't even have one publication.
00:44:36.260And I think they had like a free market center there, so they were friendly.
00:44:39.460So, how many publicationsβsorry, how many publications did you have when you entered the job market?
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00:46:02.700Okay, so in principle, you should have been a very hot prospect because a dozen publications in most institutions would get you pretty serious.
00:46:12.220No, I didn't publish in the Quarterly Journal of Economics.
00:48:47.680It puts the other side on defense because now, if you want to argue with me, you have to say why we should fund the system and not the student.
00:48:54.500So it changes the burden of proof to be on them, whereas the school choice supporters for a long time have been trying to explain ourselves as to why families should have a choice as opposed to the other side explaining why we should.
00:49:06.760Well, yeah, you should never let the side that you're opposing define the terms of engagement.
00:49:14.820They're always on theβI'll give you an example.
00:49:17.360So in the last Canadian federal election, I think there wereβin the debate, the leaders' debate, I think there were five topics that were debated.
00:49:27.100All five of them were picked by the left, right?
00:49:29.700So one of them, for example, I thinkβ
00:49:54.880And the other thing that is very useful in how I changed talking about this was that it really pointed out the hypocrisy of a lot of the Democrats,
00:50:03.400not just because they send their own kids to private school, but also because Democrats and other people who are supported by the teachers' union, some of the rhinos,
00:50:11.440will support programs where the money follows the individual.
00:52:46.220But the programs had been operating for a very long time.
00:52:49.200And there were, I think, five major reviews.
00:52:51.420And at that time, the findings were that Head Start accelerated cognitive performance, so test scores, for a year or two following the interventions.
00:53:02.920But that by grade six, there was no effect.
00:53:06.680But that the longer term effects seemed to be behavioral.
00:53:10.020The more recent Tennessee experiment, which is the latest one, RCT, negative effects on academics and behavior through sixth grade.
00:53:41.520And I'd also say on the teenage pregnancy thing, that's another important outcome that we looked at in our follow-up crime study that was published in the Journal of Private Enterprise.
00:53:50.240We found a reduction in crime, but also a 38% reduction in paternity disputes, which could be caused by out-of-wedlock births or teenage pregnancies.
00:54:00.480And we also had a β there is an RCT.
00:54:07.980We did the best we could with β we even controlled for neighborhood and single-parent households and religiosity.
00:54:14.060All the β all β like as many demographics as you could get to control for.
00:54:18.660But another separate study in New York City was a charter school experiment by Roland Fryer and his co-author published in the Journal of Political Economy, I believe, in 2015.
00:54:28.460They found that winning a lottery to go to a charter school in New York City decreased the likelihood of crime for male students because we're the ones causing all the trouble by 100%.
00:54:40.440It was a complete elimination for lottery winners through the study period.
00:54:44.780I don't remember how long they covered.
00:54:48.560But through the study period, it was like 5% were incarcerated for the control group in the public schools.
00:54:54.780Lottery winners who got into the charter schools, 0%.
00:54:57.460So all this to say on the Head Start thing, I don't bring up these analogies to say that we should β I'm not saying that I support Head Start or Pell Grants or food stamps.
00:55:10.520I'm saying if we're going to spend the money, we might as well fund the people as opposed to β
00:56:17.140And that was a catastrophe for the right and the left politically as far as I was concerned because it was a reasonably motivated endeavor.
00:56:26.820Now, I did some arithmetic calculations with regards to Head Start to try to figure out how many adult minutes a Head Start program actually bought a given child.
00:56:41.180And also, the Head Start programs were also used as employment programs.
00:56:48.020So the probability that a given Head Start teacher had any qualification was extremely low.
00:56:54.480You know, when you're dealing with three- and four-year-olds, let's say, it's very hard to β especially in groups β it's very hard to spend time teaching them anything because just taking care of three- and four-year-olds is such β
00:57:08.980Now, when I was looking at the positive results, say, in the 1980s, the hypothesis was Head Start might not have been good for most kids and probably not good at all for kids who had decent families.
00:57:22.280But for kids in absolutely wretched conditions β
00:57:27.640Whereas if you're taking them away from parents that are already doing a good job and you're kind of nudging them in that direction, they're going to be worse off.
00:57:47.640But one more thing that I think that I added that was really important to the conversation about school choice β I mean, one thing is β it's not all me, right?
00:57:55.200It was COVID that helped open the eyes of parents.
00:57:57.220I was just there with the right ideas laying around at the time, as Milton Friedman famously put it.
00:58:01.980Is that we were taking a bipartisan strategy for a long time to get school choice, and I'm sure you've heard this before where people say, like, school choice is the civil rights issue of our time.
00:58:11.040We still have elected officials saying these things using left-leaning arguments to advance school choice, which I think they're all good arguments.
00:58:17.380It's true that the lowest income are in the worst schools, that they would benefit the most.
00:58:30.360We want schools that teach you that America is a great country, not a horrible country.
00:58:35.200And so you can make all these different types of arguments.
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00:59:41.160But when you go into a red state making blue state arguments, these lefty arguments, you might alienate some of the Republican legislators who might say, this isn't my issue.
00:59:54.840So, you know, I'm not going to lead on it.
00:59:56.500And then the Democrats, they're controlled by the teachers' unions anyway.
00:59:59.360So you're not going to make much ground with them regardless of the argument you're making.
01:00:43.220And now for the first time in Texas history, the House has 76 co-sponsors to pass a school choice bill, which has never happened.
01:00:52.480And you need 76 votes to pass a school choice bill.
01:00:55.380What did you have to do with what happened in Virginia?
01:00:57.700Well, in Virginia, we had Mr. Terry β I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach β McAuliffe on the debate stage.
01:01:04.520He was the former governor of Virginia, and he said that at the final debate.
01:01:55.040But I think for a long time, people thought things were fine, right?
01:01:58.220Before they saw β I mean, if you're a high-income parent and you're sending your kid to the assigned public school and it's consistently getting A ratings, your kid's coming home with A's on their report card, they get into great universities that are good on paper.
01:02:12.100So for a long time, like when I went to school as a kid, like I hated school.
01:02:42.880You know, it was the radical fringe, although a lot of them were in the educational psychology departments.
01:02:48.400But they weren't β they didn't have the upper hand.
01:02:51.000And somewhere around 2010, that flipped hard.
01:02:53.660And I think that those β that sort of thing flips partly too.
01:02:57.360You said β you talked about good teachers leaving.
01:02:59.820Well, one of the things that does happen as an enterprise disintegrates is that it'll hit a point of no return where it becomes so unbearable for anyone competent to be in the system.
01:03:14.080And then β well, then you're just left with the worst of the worst, right?
01:03:17.840And then they hire people who are even worse than they are and the whole thing's, you know, gone off its railings.
01:03:23.400And so I guess part of the reason that this has become an issue is because the student β the schools moved from merely like traditional incompetence, traditional socialist incompetence, let's say, to absolute bloody insanity.
01:03:40.040And it was likely the gender issue that did that.
01:03:42.380The more that we talk about and see that there's a lot of left-leaning bias in the schools, that might attract more people who want to change other people's children's views in that direction to select individuals.
01:03:56.900So it's almost like it's a β it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
01:04:01.740I've spoken to Republican governors about this on multiple occasions.
01:04:09.480You know, and I've been beating the drum on this issue not very successfully, I would say, is that Republicans don't have a hope in hell of ever winning the culture war if they allow faculties of education to maintain their hammerlock on teacher certification.
01:04:23.620And if they continue to spend half the state's money on K-12 education, essentially, that's dominated by progressive Marxists.
01:04:31.540Like, everything else that is happening is, as far as I'm concerned, it's blowing in the wind.
01:04:36.420And so I want to challenge you on a couple of things because I'd like your opinion.
01:04:41.280See, I can understand the rationale, the logic for your choice approach, and I can see it from the free market perspective.
01:04:49.800So let's say the libertarian perspective.
01:04:51.340I can see it from the parents' right perspective.
01:04:53.320And I appreciate the data that you've described in terms of demonstrating that when you do open the market up to competition, you get an increment in quality, even on the public side, and a decrease in administrative spending.
01:05:10.160But I am wondering if you've hit the nail squarely on the head because I'm, and I genuinely want your opinion on this, it seems to me that the fundamental weakness in the system is still that faculties of education have a hammerlock on teacher certification.
01:05:32.080So, because, you know, I know people who are sending their kids to private schools, but the private schools are full of woke teachers too, right?
01:05:39.820The Catholic schools are full of woke teachers.
01:05:43.840And so I want to know your thoughts on the teacher certification issue because I think what the Republicans should do is just, they should just take the monopoly away from the faculty of education.
01:05:55.420Yeah, we need alternative certification.
01:05:56.080So I think you're right that we have to have a multi-pronged approach. School choice isn't the silver bullet for everything, and neither is alternative certification. We should fight the battle on multiple fronts.
01:06:07.500And some people do set up this false dichotomy. They'll say, oh, you're saying school choice will cure everything. Well, not exactly.
01:06:14.280We should also reform the public school system. You should still go to your school board and try to change things because a lot of kids are still going to go to the public schools, whether you have school choice or not.
01:06:23.420But we also need an escape valve. I mean, for example, if you only try to change the system from the top down, which is what we've done partially in my home state of Texas, some good tweaks.
01:06:34.680They've banned critical race theory. They're talking about banning DEI in public schools this year as well.
01:06:39.680We have Trump with his executive orders helping out as well. But we have undercover video from a group called Accuracy in Media.
01:06:46.100They've gone into all these public school districts in red states like my home state of Texas, where they've gotten these administrators to admit on undercover video that they're still teaching things that are banned.
01:08:46.180So you think the diversity of school proliferation will eventually solve the ideological problem?
01:08:52.180Yeah, because if you only have a couple elite private schools and they're captured by the left, it's kind of like, okay, what can I do now?
01:08:58.760I'd say that's still better than the status quo where you have zero choices.
01:09:03.120But at least now you can take the funding.
01:09:06.280Hey, if you want to just homeschool your own kids and use it for the curriculum or private tutors, that is a step in the right direction even if it's not perfect.
01:09:15.760That's where most of the school choice programs set up so that you could set up a micro-school and educate your own children, for example.
01:10:46.300So one of the school districts in Texas, La Jolla ISD, made headlines recently because they had a big, like a big water park at their campus.
01:10:56.540So maybe that improves, you know, the self-esteem of the kids or whatever the teachers are trying to do these days.
01:11:05.680And you see this at the university level too, right?
01:11:07.400They have these extravagant water parks and tuition is going up to cover these things and also subsidies from the government too.
01:11:16.220But these micro schools are really shaking things up.
01:11:21.120The whole, the whole factory model itself is, is frightened because of this.
01:11:24.460In fact, when Crenda micro schools in Arizona was reporting just huge increases in enrollment during COVID because the government schools were closed.
01:11:33.560So families were figuring it out and they, a lot of them went to these micro schools.
01:11:39.980The NEA, which is the largest labor union in the country, the National Education Association, they also lobbied the CDC to close the schools longer.
01:11:47.380They put out an opposition research sheet on Prenda micro schools and their founder, Kelly Smith, because they were so afraid of them, of them basically providing something that they weren't providing to students.
01:12:02.620They knew they were going to lose funding because public schools are funded based on enrollment counts.
01:12:05.880And so if you lose some students, you're going to lose some money, whether you have a school choice program or not.
01:12:11.040And in Arizona, you can use those education savings accounts to pay for Prenda micro schools and other ones too.
01:12:21.620And some people, there's a lot of different definitions for it, but basically a miniature private school.
01:12:26.160And during COVID era, it was basically five to 10 children getting together in households to economize on homeschooling.
01:12:33.440And you can either do it with one of the parents, you can take turns with the parents doing different subjects, or you can even hire a private tutor to do it.
01:12:40.920Which you could do if it's $20,000 per.
01:12:43.640So what's, what is the amount of the typical voucher?
01:12:46.720If, if school, if student expenditure, yeah, why?
01:12:49.380So it saves taxpayer money and most of these bills are passed at the state level.
01:12:52.840In the U.S., we're funded in the public school system in every state by the federal level, which should not exist at all.
01:12:59.200The word education is not in our constitution.
01:13:01.320It's an unconstitutional waste of time and money.
01:13:04.260But that's only about 8% of the total spending, 8 to 10%.
01:13:07.360The other 45, 45 are state and local dollars.
01:13:11.500These bills are typically passed in state legislatures.
01:13:14.120So it's about half of the total that follows the students.
01:13:16.940So let's say on average, 10,000 versus the 20,000 that's spent in the government schools.
01:13:21.240So is any of that happening locally as well to, to pull in the rest of that money?
01:13:25.600There have been some local vouchers that have passed in, in, in Colorado, a blue state.
01:13:30.000There was Douglas County had at once a couple of decades ago passed the voucher program.
01:13:34.540It got nixed in the court by a, by a lefty judge.
01:13:38.280And that program is no longer on the books.
01:13:41.100New Hampshire, which passed a state level program, also proposed the bill a year or two ago in their legislature
01:13:47.480to also allow the local, local districts to have the money follow the child if they opted in as well.
01:15:52.960And so when they're following different influencers on social media, they want to look good in the public eye when they're debating the issue against the Democrats on the House and Senate floor.
01:16:02.380And so I think they've adopted some of the language and arguments and studies that I've conducted and also cited myself.
01:17:27.060Now, with school choice, no one thought that any state could do it where it's every family being β because for a long time, there was an incremental approach on the school choice front.
01:17:38.300We were hitting our head against the wall.
01:17:39.800It was small incremental wins where maybe the lowest-income families here, maybe just in this city they're going to do it, maybe just for special needs kids.
01:17:47.660But now the barometer of success is do you have a universal program, meaning for everybody regardless of income, which these are the types of programs I support.
01:17:57.120One, because it allows for more competition, allows for a bigger supply-side response, more of a market response.
01:18:05.300But also we're paying for public schools for high- and low-income families.
01:18:08.880They should be able to benefit from school choice as well.
01:18:10.840We don't discriminate based on income for the public schools.
01:18:13.120We shouldn't discriminate based on income for school choice either.
01:18:17.900And politics, again, is all about organized interest pushing for what they want.
01:18:22.380If you have a small program that not a lot of people are benefiting from, well, the problem there is if Democrats get in charge, they're going to be more likely to be able to take it away because low-income families are not as politically active.
01:18:39.100I've discussed school choice with some of my more intelligent liberal friends.
01:18:44.920And one of their objections has been that the β I think you'll be able to address this given what you already said, but I'm going to lay it out anyways.
01:18:54.560Parents who are involved in their children's future, in their children's educational options, given the vouchers, are going to do the research, and they're going to find the best school to suit their children.
01:19:12.360But then they'll be the children whose parents can't or won't involve themselves, and they're going to default to the public school system.
01:19:22.780And if it collapses as a consequence or degenerates as a consequence of funding being distributed widely, then don't we risk setting up a group of kids who are already suffering because their parents aren't involved to fail even worse because they're going to exist within the confines of a degenerating public school system.
01:19:40.860You already have that inequality baked into the government school system.
01:19:44.640They have 40 percent of their high schools have zero percent math proficiency rate.
01:19:48.140You see the same thing in places like Chicago.
01:19:50.740And so they shouldn't make perfect the enemy of the good.
01:19:54.080And this fear-mongering hasn't happened with school choice.
01:19:56.960The public schools, if anything, have gotten better.
01:19:58.840I cited Florida, but we also have nationwide data on this.
01:20:02.24026 of the 29 studies on this nationwide find statistically significant positive effects of private school choice competition on the outcomes in the public schools.
01:20:12.220Even enemies of school choice who are in academia who have any form of honesty at all, they admit that the studies on the competitive effects are positive.
01:20:22.720So the main argument that the unions put forward is the worst argument in terms of it being supported by the evidence.
01:20:29.640But a lot of people respond to fear-mongering.
01:20:35.000But the fact that the studies have already been done indicating that theβ
01:20:38.560There's one other study on this topic that I think is really important.
01:20:42.200And it was done by Cornell researchers, published in 2018.
01:20:45.660And they actually found that when school choice was introduced, peer-reviewed study, when school choice was introduced, the number of searches online for different private education providers spiked.
01:20:59.500Doesn't seem like a surprising finding to me.
01:21:05.160The point is school choice increases parental involvement by definition.
01:21:10.100Yes, there will be the parents who are involved anyway, but on the margins, the parents who just felt like they were depressed being in the school system where they didn't have any other options.
01:21:19.460Now, all of a sudden, you give them $10,000 to seek out a better option.
01:21:24.020They're not going to be depressed by looking at the private school.
01:21:26.780So they're going to look and they're going to exercise that choice.
01:21:30.080Like I remember reviewing studies probably about the same time I was looking at Head Start on attitudes of the underclass towards their children's education.
01:21:42.180And look, if people are going to be motivated by anything, they're going to be motivated by the thoughts that their children might have a better future, right?
01:21:49.840And so most parents, for example, regardless of their own literacy levels, would like to have children who are literate and well-educated.
01:22:00.040And they might not know how to do it, but they want it.
01:22:02.620They know their kids better than anybody else.
01:22:13.860But the critical issue is, as you already pointed out, if these studies, and you think the studies that show a salutary effect on public school quality because of increased competition, you think those are reliable.
01:22:42.720Yeah, well, this is what I want to give you, the opportunity to do that.
01:22:45.400So if there's anything else you'd like to bring up, do it now, and then we'll turn to the Delaware side.
01:22:50.160On the issue of whether low-income families are benefiting from this, I already talked about the theoretical about how they're in the worst schools already.
01:22:56.640So they had the most to benefit, most to gain from having more options in their kids' education.
01:23:02.000In D.C., they have a voucher program, which I think Obama was against it, even though he sent his own kids to Sidwell Friends, a private school.
01:23:08.260School choice for me, but not for the hypocrisy again.
01:23:13.480But we looked at the data most recently in D.C., and the average family, their average household income was about $30,000 per year for the entire household in the District of Columbia, which is a higher cost of living area than the average in the United States.
01:23:29.900And I believe about 95 percent of the kids were black or Hispanic.
01:23:34.820So this goes completely counter to the narrative that the left is saying about how this is only for rich white kids using the program.
01:23:42.480In Florida as well, there's a really interesting story about how DeSantis actually won in 2018.
01:23:48.240He actually barely won the governor's race in 2018.
01:23:50.800And the headline in the Wall Street Journal the next day was that school choice moms tipped the governor's race for DeSantis.
01:23:57.860So they looked at exit polling from CNN, of all places, and they found that black moms in particular came out in force for DeSantis much higher than expected after his opponent, Andrew Gillum, who was a black Democrat, called to get rid of their private school choice program that was already benefiting over 100,000 kids at the time.
01:24:17.940And those kids were disproportionately low-income and non-white kids.
01:24:22.040So this is another way that, one, Republicans can make inroads with groups that they hadn't reached out to before.
01:24:28.420And it's also β it shows you that this shouldn't be a partisan issue.
01:24:32.520And if Democrats are smart, if they're going to bleed votes on this issue to people like Ron DeSantis in Florida, they should come along too.
01:24:40.340And this is something I point out in the book that the way that we can get towards bipartisanship on school choice is through hyper-partisanship in the short run because the more that the Democrats lose on the issue, like we saw with Terry McAuliffe, Andrew Gillum in Florida, the more they're going to scratch their head.
01:24:56.760And you'll have some defectors and say, I'm going to join the kids' union and listen to them, the parents, as opposed to just the teachers' union.
01:25:03.440Well, it isn't an obviously partisan issue.
01:25:07.040Well, it's like cost-cutting in government.
01:25:09.220It isn't obvious at all why that default left-winger would be against getting rid of fraud in the political system and political spending, right?
01:25:21.160Because then, at least in principle, more money could be spent on things that actually work.
01:25:27.460And this seems to be β I mean, you can make a perfectly cogent case, as you have, I would say, for how broadening choice β
01:25:36.220it might even preferentially benefit people who are poor and dispossessed.
01:25:40.440That seems to be highly likely to me because, as you pointed out, the worst schools are the ones that are serving the people who are trapped in the β
01:25:48.160mired in poverty, often multi-generationally.
01:25:51.840And I don't see any way out of that than the multiplication of supply.
01:25:58.140And it's also the case that the money of a poor person is just as good as the money of a rich person.
01:26:03.740And so, if they have that money at hand, their children are more likely to be valued by people who would like to get paid for their efforts.
01:26:50.500We'll talk about the new administration.
01:26:51.820We'll talk about potential risks that you might see maybe in the hyper-partisan approach, but also in the school choice conceptual domain per se.
01:27:03.600So, we'll turn to that on the Daily Wire side.
01:27:05.560And everybody watching and listening, you're more than welcome to join us for an additional half an hour behind the Daily Wire paywall.
01:27:12.440Thank you very much for coming in today.
01:27:14.760It's really good to have you here and appreciate it.
01:27:17.060And, you know, you're spending your time educating people too and letting them know, well, exactly how they should be thinking about the fact that their children are sent to a pathologically unproductive monopoly.
01:27:31.780Right, that eats up half the resources at the state level.