The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 529. How Trump Will Save the School System ｜ Corey DeAngelis

00:00:00.000 So there's a geographic monopoly and there's a state mandated monopoly because you have to send

00:00:05.320 your kids to school and then there's a teacher certification monopoly. And that trickles down

00:00:10.340 from the university level into the K-12 system. The findings were less pregnancy, less crime and

00:00:15.840 higher probability of graduating. I'd also say on the teenage pregnancy thing we found a reduction

00:00:20.560 in crime but also a 38% reduction in paternity disputes which could be caused by out of wedlock

00:00:26.360 births or teenage pregnancies. Another separate study in New York City was a charter school

00:00:31.120 experiment. They found that winning a lottery to go to a charter school in New York City

00:00:35.120 decreased the likelihood of crime for male students by 100%. Republicans don't have a

00:00:41.300 hope in hell of ever winning the culture war if they allow faculties of education to maintain

00:00:46.480 their hammerlock on teacher certification. Everything else as far as I'm concerned it's

00:00:50.620 blowing in the wind. And if Democrats are smart the way that we can get towards bipartisanship

00:00:55.580 on school choice is through

00:00:57.440 Hello everybody. I'm speaking today to Dr. Corey D'Angelis. He has a PhD in education policy

00:01:23.380 which under normal circumstances wouldn't necessarily be a good thing. But he graduated

00:01:29.440 from the Department of Educational Reform at the University of Arkansas and that's one

00:01:34.180 of the rare schools, maybe singular schools, that isn't terribly bloody Marxist in its fundamental

00:01:41.700 orientation with a smattering of incompetence thrown in there just for good measure.

00:01:47.720 I've been following Dr. D'Angelis, Corey, on X for a good long time. He's one of these one-man

00:01:56.660 wrecking balls, one-person wrecking balls like Leila Micklewaite who's fighting the good fight 1.00

00:02:01.940 against Pornhub and Robbie Starbuck who's a complete bloody army in relationship to calling corporations 0.98

00:02:10.020 out for their foolishness of their DEI policies. And Corey's been distributing the word in relationship

00:02:19.680 to school choice. And school choice is a matter that's bigger than you might think even though

00:02:26.760 it has become quite a hot political issue because the school system, the public school system is a

00:02:33.840 failure in many ways. It's extraordinarily expensive, it's expansive, and it does an

00:02:40.460 absolutely dismal job of what it should be doing, which is educating children, at least teaching them 0.70

00:02:45.700 to read, let's say, a bare minimal standard of literacy. And although it turns out to be quite

00:02:51.940 effective as a propaganda machine, there's a variety of reasons that it's rotten to the core, but the fact

00:02:58.000 that it's a monopoly is definitely one of them. And we delved into that topic in great detail. If you're

00:03:05.000 a parent and you're concerned about your children's future, if you're concerned about your rights as a

00:03:10.000 parent, if you want to have the option to find an educational institution of high quality so that you

00:03:16.420 can give your children the start they need in life and also to protect them against a substantial amount

00:03:22.620 of ideological warping, then the issue of school choice should be something that's paramount in

00:03:28.680 your attention, as it has become for many people in the United States. In any case, we delved into the

00:03:37.340 rationale for school choice from the free market and libertarian perspective, but also from the

00:03:44.300 perspective of parents' rights. I suppose a cardinal question of our time is, well, just whose children

00:03:50.840 are they? And I think the right answer to that question is, children should be watched over by

00:03:57.860 those who have their best interests most firmly at heart, and that's inevitably going to be parents.

00:04:05.280 And so it's in this service of children that parents have the right to determine the educational

00:04:11.680 pathway that they can pursue. And even though parents might not be able to do that on their own,

00:04:17.780 because educating children is a difficult job, they're certainly in the best position to make

00:04:23.020 intelligent choices about the direction to take if those choices are available to them. And so

00:04:28.620 Corey's been working very hard on making that possibility a reality for parents. And so that's

00:04:36.220 what we talked about today. Well, Dr. D'Angelis, hey, I got to make sure I'm pronouncing that exactly

00:04:42.620 right. Am I pronouncing that exactly right? Yeah, D'Angelis like Los Angeles, but I'm not a real

00:04:46.980 doctor. I'm more like a Jill Biden doctor. Got a PhD in education policy. Oh, yes. Where from?

00:04:53.360 University of Arkansas. I see. When did you get that? Pretty recently, actually. Well, I'm getting

00:04:58.840 older now. It's 2018 or so. I got the PhD. And I studied school choice policy. How come you didn't get

00:05:03.900 brainwashed? I didn't. It was actually the Department of Education Reform. So 99% of education PhDs are

00:05:11.460 Marxist institutions. Yes. This one was housed in the College of Education, but not a lot of people

00:05:16.460 liked us there because it was the Department of Education Reform. Just the very name of the

00:05:21.880 department imply that we're trying to shake things up to try to improve the education. You said 99%

00:05:27.100 of education PhDs are Marxists. I think it's higher than that. 99.5%. Yeah, definitely. And the rest

00:05:33.860 of them are socialists. Yeah, yeah. Okay. And so how did that institution come to exist? And why does

00:05:39.860 it still exist? I think it originally was funded by a grant from the Walton Family Foundation.

00:05:46.260 And it still exists. There's professors there. My advisor is named Patrick Wolfe. And the Journal of

00:05:54.080 School Choice is actually housed in that department. And Patrick Wolfe did a lot of the early evaluations

00:05:59.440 of voucher programs. Like in D.C., for example, they were able to use random lottery to determine

00:06:04.900 the different outcomes for kids in the public schools versus the private schools. Much like a

00:06:10.380 medical trial, you do the placebo for the kids who lose the lottery, which is the public school system

00:06:16.120 business as usual. If you win the lottery to get a voucher to go to a private school, Wolfe's evaluation,

00:06:21.300 for example, in 2013 found about a 30% increase in the likelihood of graduating from high school from

00:06:27.120 getting more educational opportunities through the voucher. And you can say-

00:06:30.620 That was random?

00:06:31.740 Yeah, randomized control trial. So you can say with a big enough sample with certainty that this is not

00:06:36.840 because of the family characteristic of the students, not because of the student's racial

00:06:40.460 background or their income. It's because of them getting a better opportunity to go to a better

00:06:46.580 school. And so I did that kind of research when I started. My first study was actually with

00:06:51.060 Dr. Wolfe, and we found that the Milwaukee voucher program that started in 1990, we found a huge

00:06:58.440 reduction in crime later on in life. So it shouldn't be very surprising. You're more likely to graduate

00:07:04.700 high school.

00:07:04.720 Independent of graduation rates?

00:07:05.840 We didn't control for graduation, but it's probably closely linked. If you're more likely to

00:07:09.900 graduate, you're probably going to be more likely to get a job, less likely to be involved with the

00:07:14.300 criminal justice system.

00:07:15.360 Yeah. Oh, well, okay. Let's back up and do a big picture overview. You should perhaps let

00:07:22.060 everybody know. Well, two things. You've authored or co-authored two relatively recent books, right?

00:07:28.860 One of these, this is The Parent Revolution, and that's this year's 20-

00:07:33.240 2024.

00:07:34.040 2024. Wow. So essentially this year.

00:07:36.460 Pretty recent.

00:07:37.120 Yeah. And then there was another one that you co-authored. What's the title of that?

00:07:40.840 Mediocrity, right?

00:07:41.920 Right.

00:07:42.140 40 ways government schools are failing today's students. And it was on the 40th anniversary of

00:07:46.840 the Nation at Risk report, which came out, which basically said that, look, our outcomes are

00:07:52.860 horrendous and things haven't gotten any better since then. In some cases, they've gotten worse

00:07:56.320 and we spend a lot more money than we did back then.

00:07:58.920 Well, that's better, at least for the people who are getting the money.

00:08:01.940 We spend about $20,000 per student per year now, which is about 52% higher than average private

00:08:09.360 school tuition in this country. That spending in the government schools has increased by

00:08:13.640 about 164% inflation adjusted since 1970. Have the outcomes gotten 164% better? No, obviously

00:08:21.740 not. But it's because they're not focusing on math and reading. They're focusing on gender

00:08:26.440 ideology and critical race theory in the schools. And if you're focusing on those things and teaching

00:08:32.060 kids to hate your country, it shouldn't surprise us that the academic outcomes aren't getting

00:08:37.240 any better.

00:08:37.960 Yeah. So why don't you explain exactly what problem you are attempting to address? How would you

00:08:46.920 characterize your... Because you're an interesting person because lots of people are focusing on

00:08:53.360 the dismal plight of the schools, let's say, and their dreadful expensiveness. You know, 50% of

00:08:59.380 US state budgets are spent on K-312 education, right? 50%. So that means essentially that the

00:09:07.460 teachers unions have a hammerlock on 50% of the state budgets. And it's worse than that. It means

00:09:14.040 that the faculties of education, we can talk about them in some detail, because they have a monopoly

00:09:20.580 on teacher certification, basically have their, what would you say, their status is subsidized by half

00:09:27.240 the money that Americans spend at the state level, right? And it's the only way they can survive,

00:09:32.560 because I don't know if there's a more dismal faculty than the faculties of education.

00:09:38.140 Social work might compete.

00:09:39.900 They have the lowest scores on all the SATs and other academic credentials. And they also have a

00:09:46.680 monopoly, a geographic monopoly when it comes to the K-12 government school system, where in most

00:09:53.180 places in America, you live where you live, and you're assigned to a school just based on your

00:09:57.960 address, which gives them no incentive to spend additional dollars wisely. I mean, just imagine if

00:10:03.540 you had to shop at a government grocery store that you were assigned to based on where you live,

00:10:07.780 and they had empty shelves, no food. And when they did have food, imagine if you got food poisoning

00:10:12.260 where it was expired. And if you wanted to go somewhere else, they'd tell you to go complain to

00:10:16.340 the grocery board who wouldn't listen to you and would try to cut off your mic, which is what happens

00:10:20.820 with the school boards right now. And if you had to just move houses to get access to a better

00:10:26.000 grocery store, that would make zero sense. Or if you had to pay twice, basically once through taxes

00:10:31.480 for the government grocery store you're not using, and then again, out of pocket for a grocery store

00:10:36.220 that actually provided you with healthy food, that's what we have with the government school

00:10:40.440 system today. You cannot go somewhere else unless you pay twice, essentially. And low-income families

00:10:46.040 are basically just screwed. And the worst failure factories that we call public schools today

00:10:50.700 in places like Chicago, they have like 33 public schools with 0% math proficiency rates.

00:10:57.900 And they spend about $30,000 per kid. And guess what? Their teacher's union boss,

00:11:02.980 Stacey Davis Gates, she sends her own kid to a private school. She knows better than anybody else 1.00

00:11:06.860 that their schools are not working for kids. And that's the main problem that I see. And everything

00:11:12.860 else trickles out from that monopoly issue. They don't have an incentive.

00:11:18.440 There's a number of different monopolies operating that you just described. There's

00:11:22.360 geographic monopoly, right? And that's a good analogy. So there's no competition.

00:11:28.640 The problem with no competition is that when there's no choice, there's no real incentive

00:11:34.020 to do the hard work that produces improvement. And there's actually no possibility even for

00:11:39.560 comparison between different systems, right? So without competition, you don't have any possibility

00:11:45.040 of really head-to-head evaluation, right? And no necessary incentive for innovation. So there's a

00:11:53.720 geographic monopoly, which you just described. You send your kids to the school that's in your 0.93

00:11:58.560 location and that's that. And then there's a state-mandated monopoly because you have to send

00:12:04.380 your kids to school. And then there's a teacher certification monopoly. So we actually...

00:12:09.280 And that trickles down from the university level into the K-12 system.

00:12:13.020 Right, right. Okay. And now, so you've fundamentally concentrated, and does this include your doctoral

00:12:19.160 research, you've fundamentally concentrated on the issue of choice per se? And were you interested in

00:12:25.420 choice as an economist might be interested in choice? Or why were you interested in choice?

00:12:31.120 I did my bachelor's and master's in economics. And I had a professor there, John Merrifield was his

00:12:36.400 name. He's now a retired professor, but he was probably the only free market professor at the

00:12:40.560 University of Texas, San Antonio that I knew of. And I had him, I took all of his classes. He was my

00:12:44.700 advisor. He was affiliated with the Friedman Foundation at the time, which is now called EdChoice,

00:12:49.580 which is a school choice advocacy group. And he was the one who directed me or suggested to me at

00:12:54.860 least three different times, hey, you should probably do this PhD program. And I ultimately

00:13:00.280 took his advice, and I'm glad that I did. And that's how I look at the school system. I see it

00:13:05.980 as one of the most socialist institutions that we have in America today, where the government operates

00:13:11.320 the means of production, the schools that you have, whether you want to call it the local state or

00:13:15.760 federal government, they all have their hands into the government school system. And taxpayers have to

00:13:21.560 fund it. And there's a monopoly. There's also kickbacks. What's the percentage of Democrat

00:13:27.920 financial support from teachers unions across the U.S.? It's something that's in the high 90s,

00:13:33.660 if I remember correctly. 99.9% of Randy Weingarten's union. She's the head of the American Federation of

00:13:39.280 Teachers. She lobbied the CDC to make it more difficult to reopen schools during COVID. That's 0.78

00:13:44.100 another story altogether. They knew they could hold children's education hostage to get billions of

00:13:49.600 dollars in ransom payments and so-called COVID relief that started in 2020 because they knew

00:13:55.400 if they were closed, they could say, we need more money because we're closed. It's the same story

00:13:59.280 as we see with the test scores. They say, we're failing because we need more money. It's the

00:14:03.720 definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results.

00:14:08.900 They're not doing the same thing because they keep ramping up the mounted costs.

00:14:13.120 Yeah.

00:14:13.340 Right. So it's worse than the same thing.

00:14:15.300 Their same thing is always give us more money and it never improves anything.

00:14:20.280 Smaller classes, more money.

00:14:21.840 Yes. And in every other industry, if you think about what smaller class sizes actually means,

00:14:26.780 that means lower units of production output for the same inputs.

00:14:31.740 Yeah.

00:14:32.560 Everywhere else, you increase your production over time with more technology.

00:14:35.840 Well, in principle, you'd assume that much of the heavy lifting could have been done

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00:15:49.560 You know, when you're teaching children basic skills, likely reading is the best example of this.

00:15:56.980 So when children learn to read, contrary to the whole word theorists who are also a product of the 0.99

00:16:03.380 faculties of education and devastated literacy in their theoretical stupidity. 0.98

00:16:08.500 So English obviously is a phonetic language and the way you learn to read is that you learn to 0.99

00:16:15.860 associate sounds with letters. And that's actually a rather dull process. There's nothing intrinsically,

00:16:24.480 not, there's little that's intrinsically interesting about that. Some kids will treat it like a puzzle.

00:16:28.580 Some children can associate letters with sounds very rapidly and some take much more practice.

00:16:37.300 That's IQ dependent fundamentally, although there are other contributing factors. You can have high

00:16:42.800 IQ kids with dyslexia, but it's basically an IQ phenomenon. But what you want to do with little

00:16:49.140 kids is continual exposure and practice because they need to produce little neural circuits that recognize each

00:16:58.000 letter and that use the conjunction between the visual system and the auditory system in the brain to tag each

00:17:04.300 letter with the sound. Letters first, two letter combinations, three letters, small words. Then as you develop

00:17:11.040 expertise, phrases, you get in a single glance and maybe even sentences if you start to become stunningly

00:17:17.060 proficient, right? Computers are unbelievably good at the first part of that, right? Because they're

00:17:23.160 incredibly patient and they can give you immediate feedback. And so, at least in principle, it would be

00:17:28.920 possible to augment teachers with appropriate technology and increase their efficiency. And we've seen none of

00:17:35.120 that, right? None of that. And the reason that we see so many of people in the Democratic Party

00:17:41.360 fighting against things like school choice where families can take their money somewhere else other

00:17:45.880 than the government-run school is because of that money laundering operation that we just addressed, where

00:17:51.240 the teachers unions send almost all of their money, 99.9%, to one party, the Democrat Party. And so, even

00:17:59.980 though Democrat voters want a better education for their kid and they want choice as well, the

00:18:04.800 teachers unions influence those elected officials. It's special interest politics at its worst.

00:18:09.860 They also influence them to close the schools as long as possible. You had the Chicago Teachers

00:18:14.340 Union tweet out during COVID that the push to reopen schools is rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny.

00:18:22.420 Yeah, but everything is rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny, you know?

00:18:26.640 They threw every buzzword at the wall.

00:18:28.800 Yeah, every buzzword.

00:18:29.540 And genderism, you know. 1.00

00:18:31.180 And I'm glad that that's not working anymore. And I think the unions actually stepped on a rake.

00:18:37.260 They overplayed their hand during the COVID era, and that showed families what the heck was

00:18:41.760 happening in the classroom. We wouldn't have known a lot of this Marxism was in the government-run

00:18:45.520 schools. Maybe some families saw it here and there. But for the first time ever as a country,

00:18:49.900 we were able to, at large scale, get a peek into some of the far-left lunatics who are running the

00:18:56.740 government-run school system through remote learning, which, let's be real, we should have

00:19:01.200 just called it remotely learning. There wasn't a lot of learning going on. But families have been

00:19:05.880 mobilized more than they've ever been before. And since COVID, we've had 14 states now, all controlled

00:19:13.340 by Republican legislatures, go all in on school choice. Arizona is one of them, one of the first

00:19:18.500 actually, to allow families to take that money that would have gone to their government school

00:19:23.160 to a private or charter school or homeschool.

00:19:25.300 Okay, so let's take apart this issue of choice, because it would be easy to assume that you're

00:19:30.660 an advocate of something approximating parental freedom, right? That parents have the right to

00:19:37.220 choose, let's say, the value set that defines the education of their children. But it sounds to me

00:19:44.180 more that your primary concern wasn't so much the freedom of parents to choose as it was your

00:19:51.620 observation of the fact that in the absence of competition, so in the presence of a monopoly,

00:19:58.000 particularly a government-run monopoly, the probability of low quality is 100%. Is that...

00:20:03.340 It's both of those things. I think it's actually more so than the outcomes.

00:20:07.020 It's more so about parental rights and who gets to direct the upbringing of their children. I got 0.51

00:20:11.900 into this as a libertarian, a limited government person.

00:20:16.140 Okay, so you're making two arguments. One is...

00:20:18.360 It's an outcome-based and also values as well.

00:20:21.740 Values as well.

00:20:22.540 Whose children are they? They're not the government's kids. They're not the teachers' union's kids,

00:20:26.820 even though they just posted recently, right before we came here, that we've got to protect our

00:20:31.960 kids. They always use language of ownership. It's a communist ideology.

00:20:36.040 And I think that's what woke up so many people with recent elections, too. You look at the Trump

00:20:40.680 versus Harris election, Republicans typically don't do well on education because they don't

00:20:45.820 throw more money at the problem. But right before the election, there were two nationally representative

00:20:52.920 surveys by Atlas Intel, which was the most accurate pollster in 2020. And they correctly predicted

00:20:58.380 Trump winning all the swing states in 2024. They both found that Trump was beating Kamala Harris on

00:21:04.100 education. And I think that's because it's changed from a conversation about who's going to throw more

00:21:08.980 money at the problem to who's going to respect my right as a parent. And Trump won the parent vote

00:21:13.400 by nine points, too.

00:21:15.140 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. All right. So back to the issue of...

00:21:21.520 Let's see. We've covered

00:21:22.740 We've covered school choice on an economic grounds. We've covered school choice on a parent's right

00:21:29.180 ground. The next issue might be, let's talk a little bit about the Marxist element. Okay. So

00:21:37.180 I'd like to focus for a moment on the faculties of education. Okay. As I intimated earlier,

00:21:45.220 I don't think there is a more corrupt and intellectually bankrupt faculty than the faculties

00:21:52.620 of education. My experience with faculties of education as a psychologist is that the worst

00:21:59.560 of all psychological theories are always picked up and amplified, magnified, publicized by

00:22:05.560 educational psychologists. Okay. So let's take that apart a little bit. Whole word learning is a good

00:22:11.640 example, right? So whole word learning was predicated on the idea that expert readers read words at a

00:22:19.920 glance. They don't sound them out or phrases even. And so since the experts do it that way, it would

00:22:26.860 be reasonable to teach children to do it that way right from the beginning. Now, that presumes that

00:22:33.280 experts read when they learn to read the same way they learn, they read as experts, which is a

00:22:41.300 completely preposterous idea neurologically, but that didn't seem to occur to any of the people who

00:22:45.300 are pushing it. And the introduction of whole word reading, if I remember correctly, into the

00:22:50.160 California school system, knocked California from number one in childhood literacy to number 50,

00:22:56.220 if I remember that correctly. Okay. So whole word learning has been a complete bloody disaster,

00:23:00.460 but it's still often utilized. And then there's the self-esteem training. There's another terrible idea

00:23:06.360 from psychology. First of all, the idea that there is such a thing as self-esteem. So you can model

00:23:11.940 self-esteem with extroversion and neuroticism. So people with high self-esteem are low in neuroticism.

00:23:20.360 That's the primary issue. So they are less likely to feel negative emotion and that's temperamental

00:23:25.140 trait. Maybe there's some environmental contribution, but not a lot. And then they're more likely to be

00:23:30.480 extroverted because that's positive emotion. And so if you're low in self-esteem, you tend to feel a lot

00:23:36.520 of negative emotion, particularly in women, negative emotion is self-directed. So women with high negative 0.94

00:23:42.600 emotion have a lot of bodily concerns, for example, they're self-conscious, right? And that's, that's not,

00:23:49.700 it's not an attitude. It's not a cognitive set. It's a temperamental feature. And the evidence that you

00:23:56.440 can do something about that with something like self-esteem training, well, not only is it thin to

00:24:02.360 say the least, there's reasonable evidence to presume that teaching children to concentrate on

00:24:08.280 their emotional experience actually makes them worse. So the psychologists who laid out the big five

00:24:15.340 personality template using statistics to begin with, the most common measure is the Neo-PIR.

00:24:24.360 and its measure of neuroticism, negative emotion has facets. One facet is literally

00:24:32.980 self-consciousness. So thinking about yourself and being miserable are so tightly associated that you

00:24:41.820 can't distinguish them statistically. So if you get children to dwell on their negative emotional

00:24:47.160 experiences, then, then you tend to exacerbate the problem. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So, so anyways,

00:24:56.780 you can't, you can't use self-esteem training to. So when we started seeing the videos from Libs of

00:25:02.420 TikTok and other were otherwise with of critical race theory in the classroom and teachers bragging

00:25:07.780 about how they were injecting gender ideology into the schools, a lot of people would ask me how

00:25:12.820 prevalent is this stuff anyway. And, you know, it's like, I'm seeing it all the time and parents are

00:25:17.180 complaining about it at the school boards where they were later labeled as domestic terrorists for

00:25:22.200 doing so. And they had their mics cut off. But there was a nationally representative survey that

00:25:27.300 just came out earlier this year in January that found that 36% of kids in high school reported

00:25:36.080 that their teacher often or almost daily said that America is a fundamentally racist country.

00:25:44.940 And there were a lot of other findings in that survey as well. It's by Education Next. And that

00:25:49.340 was the first that I saw that this is actually a wide scale phenomenon. My first reaction-

00:25:53.400 It's the norm.

00:25:54.760 Yeah. When, when people would like, I didn't have like a data point to point to. And I, I had the sense-

00:25:59.360 When was this? When did you figure this out?

00:26:01.060 This survey was January this year. This just happened.

00:26:02.880 Oh, oh, oh. So you didn't realize how widespread it was until that survey.

00:26:06.740 And so I saw, you know, because I'd get asked this all the time, like,

00:26:09.760 Corey, is it really a big problem? And I'd say, well, we're hearing about it all the time. If,

00:26:13.740 if, if it's a big problem for this parent, then this is a big enough deal for, for us to change

00:26:18.340 something, right? If that parent is unhappy, they should have a choice to go somewhere else,

00:26:22.360 even if it's only 1% of the time. Well, now we know it's not just 1% of the time. It's-

00:26:27.520 It's all the time.

00:26:28.320 It's, it's, it's, it's everywhere. And, um-

00:26:30.680 Yeah. Well, conceptualizing it as a problem in some sense is misleading because a problem

00:26:36.420 implies that there's a normal course of events and some aberrations. That's just not the case.

00:26:43.500 Because the, the, the entire education system, and this is a consequence of the operation of the faculties

00:26:49.200 of education, is radically, resentfully left as, at its core, the aberration is any learning that happens

00:26:59.880 outside of that philosophy. And so I want to tell you about a study we did, because this is relevant to

00:27:05.240 the faculties of education. So I did this study with a student of mine, um, Christine Brophy,

00:27:13.920 master's student. We were going to follow up on it, but my academic career exploded, uh, shortly

00:27:19.060 thereafter. But it was a good study. The first thing we wanted to do was to assess how political

00:27:24.640 beliefs clump together. You can do that statistically by looking at the, you can say, imagine you ask a

00:27:31.880 large number of people, a large number of questions. You can see across people, whether

00:27:39.520 answering one question predicts in a given direction, predicts answering another question

00:27:43.780 in a given direction. So then you can clump the questions. And so you can, you can analyze how

00:27:48.620 belief statements aggregate. So the first question we wanted to ask, answer, was it, was there a coherent

00:27:57.900 set of politically correct political beliefs? Because back in 2015, the idea of political

00:28:04.520 correctness, that there was a coherent body of beliefs was parodied or pilloried as a right-wing

00:28:10.700 conspiracy theory, which, you know, was on the face of an absurd, but it still needed to be

00:28:15.640 demonstrated. We actually found that there was two forms of politically correct belief systems.

00:28:20.920 One was more like classic left-wing liberalism, right? But there was a smaller group of left-wing

00:28:29.880 totalitarians, authoritarians. And so those were people who adopted progressive policies,

00:28:36.220 so-called progressive policies, but were also willing to implement them with force, essentially. So

00:28:41.460 there's a tyrannical aspect to it. Okay, so once you establish that these groups of beliefs exist,

00:28:48.100 you can look at the correlates or the predictors, right? So, and there's a standard set of features

00:28:55.280 that you would look for in a psychological study. You know this, undoubtedly. If you're trying to

00:29:00.420 predict behavior, one of them would be general cognitive ability, so, which is essentially IQ,

00:29:05.420 which is essentially something like rate of learning, and temperament, big five temperament,

00:29:11.740 and then sex, and then...

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00:30:27.560 Environmental history.

00:30:32.060 And so we used those variables and we found that the best predictor of being a politically correct authoritarian,

00:30:39.640 that's radical left-wing authoritarian attitude, was low verbal IQ.

00:30:46.000 Right. So you can imagine that people will default to a particular kind of simple-minded worldview if they can't think critically very well.

00:30:55.920 It was a very powerful predictor. It was the major predictor by a lot.

00:31:00.300 It was a better predictor than the relationship between general cognitive ability and grades.

00:31:05.380 So you're less likely to tolerate others' beliefs and think of them as a person.

00:31:10.980 No, I don't think it's tolerance. No, I don't think it's that.

00:31:13.820 I think what it is is preference for a maximally simple explanation.

00:31:18.500 Yeah, 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.

00:31:24.820 Well, you also can't, you can't, like, America is a racist society. All inequalities are a consequence of systemic oppression.

00:31:33.620 Well, that's one sentence. It's one sentence.

00:31:36.420 Yes, they can't think beyond that.

00:31:37.720 And 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.

00:31:45.340 Okay, there were other predictors. Okay, being female. 1.00

00:31:49.180 Yep.

00:31:50.120 Having a feminine temperament. That was an additional predictor over and above being female. 1.00

00:31:54.800 High agreeableness. This is controlling for intelligence and being female. 1.00

00:32:00.260 The next was having a feminine temperament. Agreeableness in particular. Trait agreeableness. Empathy, essentially.

00:32:06.540 And the next predictor was ever having taken even one politically correct course.

00:32:12.280 Okay, so now, why am I telling you this?

00:32:14.120 Well, partly because it's a useful thing to know.

00:32:16.760 But the other reason is, is that the students in faculties of education, as you said, have the lowest SAT scores.

00:32:26.100 Okay, now, the SAT purveyors don't like to describe the test as an intelligence test, but it's an intelligence test.

00:32:34.360 Yeah, it's correlated at like 0.9. It's an IQ test. It's just not corrected for age.

00:32:40.360 So, I wonder if why there's selection into the education and academia based on these predictors.

00:32:47.520 Is it because going into the school system is seen as an easier job with pretty good benefits?

00:32:53.200 Well, that's a good question.

00:32:55.120 That could be it.

00:32:55.980 Well, I think, first of all, the admission criteria are low to absent, right?

00:33:00.540 So, you can get in.

00:33:01.900 That barrier to entry.

00:33:02.720 Right. 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.

00:33:10.420 And 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.

00:33:24.900 And 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.

00:33:34.380 Now, and conscientiousness also predicts conservative political leaning, not liberal political leaning.

00:33:40.420 Right. 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?

00:33:51.580 And then, they tilt radically to the left, which is also something that would be attractive to people who have decreased cognitive ability.

00:34:00.120 They select against conscientiousness because of the work hours and the security.

00:34:04.920 I mean, these are all things.

00:34:05.920 I had also seen a study that selection into education, you know, degrees was associated with risk aversion, too.

00:34:13.880 So, 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.

00:34:29.760 Right. 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?

00:34:47.580 Was that a 10-year period? Was it a one-year period?

00:34:50.180 I don't recall.

00:34:50.760 Okay, well, the fundamentals reality is that—

00:34:52.760 Yeah, it's very low, very low.

00:34:54.080 Right, right, right.

00:34:56.320 There's virtually no assessment of teachers for effectiveness, right?

00:35:00.580 You need—

00:35:01.360 No merit pay.

00:35:02.240 So, the best teachers leave.

00:35:03.340 The best teachers say, to heck with this.

00:35:05.520 We're not—this 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.

00:35:14.180 They reward years of service, not much, and I mean, I mentioned earlier that spending has gone up by 164% in real terms since 1970.

00:35:24.060 Teacher salaries, on average, have actually only increased by about 3% in real terms.

00:35:28.460 Right, so where's the bulk of the money going?

00:35:29.840 So, I think it's also going to pensions and other benefits, too, but it's going towards administrative low.

00:35:34.140 Yeah, yeah. So, the same thing that happened at the universities, fundamentally.

00:35:37.180 Same in healthcare.

00:35:38.560 Yeah.

00:35:38.800 Since 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.

00:35:49.360 The number of teachers in the system has increased about twice that rate, by about 10%.

00:35:53.480 Yeah.

00:35:54.500 Administrators have increased by about 95%.

00:35:57.640 Yeah, right. So, it's exactly the same pattern as in higher education.

00:36:00.760 Yeah, it's become a jobs program for administrators.

00:36:02.580 Yeah, well, it's a weird thing.

00:36:03.340 The 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.

00:36:17.840 You 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.

00:36:26.840 And what that implies is that there's no limit to the number of potential administrative contributions, right?

00:36:34.080 And then the question is, well, what would limit the growth of the administration?

00:36:39.440 And in a competitive environment, free market principles essentially limit because you run out of money, right?

00:36:46.660 So, you can only hire as many people as you can afford to hire.

00:36:49.700 This isn't a problem with administrative bureaucracies that have an unlimited source of funding.

00:36:56.720 So, 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.

00:37:02.600 And there's actually been four studies on this.

00:37:05.140 Not a lot, but it's what we have.

00:37:07.040 It'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.

00:37:19.840 And 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.

00:37:26.420 It'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.

00:37:41.040 So, the teachers who remain actually end up better off.

00:37:44.020 Is that to stop the teachers moving into the private realm?

00:37:45.840 Stop them from going to the private sector, stop the kids from going to the private sector because now if you have – there's a monopsony situation and a monopoly situation.

00:37:55.180 Monopsony is a monopoly in the labor market.

00:37:57.520 With the government school system, you want to be a teacher, you basically got to take what they give you.

00:38:01.220 But 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.

00:38:13.680 So, some teachers are underpaid, some teachers are overpaid.

00:38:16.900 It depends on – we try to treat everything as one size fits all in our current system.

00:38:21.160 But that's an interesting finding that actually benefits teachers, but also we found in places like Florida, there is a control group of – you mentioned earlier about how do we compare systems.

00:38:34.960 In Florida, there's 11 academic studies on this topic.

00:38:37.780 Ten of them find positive effects of competition on the outcomes in the public schools.

00:38:42.400 It's been a rising tide that lifts all boats, and just over time you can see it work out in Florida too.

00:38:47.040 So, 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.

00:38:53.860 Now, U.S. News & World Report has ranked Florida number one on education.

00:38:58.360 They'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.

00:39:03.260 They spend 27 percent less than the national average in Florida, but they have school choice for everybody.

00:39:08.620 Same here in Arizona.

00:39:09.560 They have school choice for everybody.

00:39:10.820 If you like your public school, you can keep your public school for real this time, unlike with your doctor.

00:39:17.500 Thanks, Obama, for lying about that.

00:39:19.160 But the public schools in this case actually do get better in response to competition, and we have –

00:39:24.220 It's funny that you even have to make –

00:39:26.040 Well, it's funny that you even have to make that case.

00:39:28.340 I 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.

00:39:37.820 Like, well, how – what else would improve quality?

00:39:41.680 What, wishful thinking or more money? 0.98

00:39:44.400 Well, you can spend an indefinite amount of money stupidly and counterproductively. 0.98

00:39:50.620 So, obviously.

00:39:52.060 I 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.

00:40:04.120 The peers are your enemies, not your peers.

00:40:05.820 Yeah, that's for sure.

00:40:06.540 I'm amazed you managed that.

00:40:07.960 So, I mentioned that first study I did about school choice reducing crime later on in life.

00:40:12.240 It was a very good study, the first of its kind.

00:40:14.700 Long-term data, student-level data, very rigorous study.

00:40:18.020 One of the reviewers – and one of the first places we sent it was a journal called Urban Education.

00:40:23.340 One 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.

00:40:32.000 You can't say that.

00:40:33.000 They are students in urban areas.

00:40:34.900 So, it was like a politically correct thing.

00:40:36.300 And I looked at their about the journal.

00:40:38.280 The only reason we said that was because they said urban students in their own about the journal. 0.97

00:40:43.040 Total hypocrites on the issue. 0.63

00:40:44.720 Why were they allowed to say it? 0.99

00:40:45.980 But I wasn't allowed to say it.

00:40:47.260 But they went further than that.

00:40:48.760 They also said that we have to reject this because you didn't talk about how the results relate to whiteness, structural oppression, and power. 0.98

00:40:58.180 I mean, it's just so ridiculous.

00:40:59.320 But the study I wanted to bring up about competition was actually in my home state of Texas.

00:41:03.400 I did a survey experiment with my co-authors.

00:41:06.280 So, I randomly assigned different surveys to public school leaders in Texas.

00:41:10.900 And 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.

00:41:23.080 And I was asking them where they were going to put their money next year.

00:41:26.580 Like, where were they going to allocate resources?

00:41:28.880 And 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.

00:41:39.440 Any idea why?

00:41:40.340 Well, because they know that they might have to think about where they're going to spend money if they have a competitor.

00:41:46.960 Because if they waste the money, families are going to go there.

00:41:49.720 But their argument usually is that, obviously, it's got to be something like more administrators make for a more effective school system.

00:41:56.200 That's what they tell you publicly, but privately they know that's all BS, which is what that study – because they didn't know what the study was doing.

00:42:03.460 They just thought, I'm answering a simple survey question.

00:42:07.680 Right, right.

00:42:08.240 And they didn't know whether the treatment group or not.

00:42:11.640 Right, right.

00:42:12.520 How did you manage to – you said 40 studies?

00:42:15.660 Yeah, peer-reviewed.

00:42:16.980 Yeah, well, over what period of time?

00:42:18.300 Other ones that weren't peer-reviewed.

00:42:19.540 But I almost think peer-review is a negative indicator at this point because of the peers that are looking at your study.

00:42:24.940 Oh, there, yes.

00:42:25.920 Yeah, but in your case, that's probably not the truth because the probability that you're going to publish something that challenges the –

00:42:35.620 It's counter to my views.

00:42:36.120 Absolutely, man.

00:42:37.540 So the fact that – this is exactly what I'm asking you.

00:42:40.060 It's like how many – over how many years did you publish 40 studies?

00:42:44.300 2016, I want to say, was my first.

00:42:46.040 So what is this, nine or so years.

00:42:48.140 So you've published four, five studies a year.

00:42:50.980 Yeah, and a lot of them were at the very beginning when I was in grad school

00:42:53.860 because I thought that that mattered for getting an academic job.

00:42:56.880 Well, it did.

00:42:57.280 I thought it mattered.

00:42:58.020 It did matter.

00:42:59.120 But – and I wasn't very serious on the job market.

00:43:03.060 But I applied to like three schools, and most people will apply to like 100 if you're serious.

00:43:06.860 But I knew I was probably going to go into a think tank where I'd be rewarded for my ideas as opposed to being punished with all the –

00:43:12.120 You mean when you were on the job market.

00:43:13.540 When I was on the job market, my first think tank was called the Cato Institute.

00:43:16.820 It's a libertarian think tank.

00:43:17.860 And I moved to D.C. while I was finishing my Ph.D. like two and a half years into the program.

00:43:22.740 I ended up finishing it.

00:43:24.300 And I've slowed down publications since then.

00:43:27.340 But, you know, some of these lefty departments didn't even give me a call.

00:43:31.040 But I had like nearly a dozen peer-reviewed publications a few years into my Ph.D. program.

00:43:38.580 How do you do that?

00:43:39.560 So, just for everybody watching and listening, so you can draw a rough equivalent between number of publications and a given degree.

00:43:50.960 So, for example, with one publication, you have a master's degree essentially, although most master's students don't even have one publication.

00:43:59.420 With three, you have a Ph.D.

00:44:01.780 And you have 40.

00:44:03.600 Yeah.

00:44:03.880 Right.

00:44:04.140 And you said you had a dozen of them two and a half years into your Ph.D.?

00:44:08.760 Okay, so that's—

00:44:09.540 And some of the far-lefty departments wouldn't even call me because they select based on ideology.

00:44:14.500 They don't select based on productivity or intelligence or anything like that.

00:44:20.300 But peer-reviewed articles are not the same thing as intelligence.

00:44:23.260 I'll say that.

00:44:23.820 But I found out really quickly that—and I'm glad.

00:44:28.660 I had a fork in the road.

00:44:29.560 I did have an offer from one academic institution.

00:44:32.360 It was Kennesaw State University in Georgia.

00:44:35.240 Uh-huh.

00:44:36.260 And I think they had like a free market center there, so they were friendly.

00:44:39.460 So, how many publications—sorry, how many publications did you have when you entered the job market?

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00:46:00.240 Nearly a dozen.

00:46:01.780 A dozen.

00:46:02.700 Okay, so in principle, you should have been a very hot prospect because a dozen publications in most institutions would get you pretty serious.

00:46:12.220 No, I didn't publish in the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

00:46:14.720 It wasn't like the, you know.

00:46:16.300 Yeah, still, a dozen's a lot.

00:46:18.560 You know, a dozen's a lot.

00:46:19.920 And that would give you serious consideration for promotion to associate professor at many educational institutions.

00:46:27.480 So they should have been lining up at your door.

00:46:29.980 Okay, so.

00:46:30.360 But I also didn't do it seriously.

00:46:31.980 Like three, you know, applying to three schools just to put my feet in the water to see what would happen.

00:46:36.720 Right.

00:46:36.920 It's not the same thing as what most people do with, you know, they're applying to a hundred different schools.

00:46:41.620 True, true.

00:46:42.400 And so, you know.

00:46:43.300 Okay, so you didn't have a full test of whether.

00:46:45.280 Yeah, so it might have not.

00:46:47.940 It might have been.

00:46:49.620 I might have gotten more of a fair shake if I actually did a real.

00:46:52.400 Yeah, okay, okay, okay.

00:46:54.260 Okay, fair enough.

00:46:55.160 All right, so another mystery about you, I would say, is you've had a lot of impact.

00:47:04.420 How old are you?

00:47:05.460 33.

00:47:06.380 Okay, okay.

00:47:07.100 So you're pretty early on in what would be an academic career, let's say.

00:47:11.100 And you've had a lot of impact on public policy, but more on public consciousness.

00:47:17.980 And so not only have you produced a remarkable body of research, but you're very good at public communication.

00:47:28.140 That's a rare combination of skills.

00:47:29.920 So I guess the first thing I'd like to know is, I mean, I know about you.

00:47:34.580 I'm probably more prone to follow, find and follow people like you.

00:47:38.700 Tell me about how you understand your public influence.

00:47:42.480 Like how broad an influence do you have?

00:47:44.420 How well are your books selling, and what are your other major dimensions of communication?

00:47:49.640 So this one hit the national bestseller list, USA Today.

00:47:52.580 The New York Times, they didn't put me on their list for some reason.

00:47:55.480 But Trump endorsed the book, Vivek Ramaswamy, Pete Hegseth, Ted Cruz, my senator from Texas.

00:48:02.240 He actually says on the back, you can ruin Randy Weingarten's day by reading this book.

00:48:07.560 So there's that.

00:48:08.980 But I also went to government schools all through K through 12, so I don't know how I did any of this.

00:48:13.440 You can just check out my handwriting in the beginning.

00:48:17.040 It's very horrible.

00:48:17.940 I blame it on my government school education.

00:48:19.860 It's to you, Jordan.

00:48:20.720 I'm going to give it to you right after the recording.

00:48:23.300 But I think the way that I really started to change the narrative when it came to school choice was talking about it differently.

00:48:31.380 You know, these days we can just say school choice, and you and I know what we're talking about.

00:48:34.700 But when I first entered the think tank world, I made a deliberate shift to talk about funding students, not systems.

00:48:43.300 And it's a linguistic thing.

00:48:44.000 Oh, is that your phrase?

00:48:45.040 That's my phrase I came up with.

00:48:46.340 It's good to have a phrase.

00:48:47.680 It 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.

00:48:54.500 So 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.

00:49:06.760 Well, yeah, you should never let the side that you're opposing define the terms of engagement.

00:49:13.160 Conservatives are very bad at that.

00:49:14.820 They're always on the—I'll give you an example.

00:49:17.360 So in the last Canadian federal election, I think there were—in the debate, the leaders' debate, I think there were five topics that were debated.

00:49:27.100 All five of them were picked by the left, right?

00:49:29.700 So one of them, for example, I think—

00:49:31.540 Playing on their turf already.

00:49:32.180 Well, 40% of the debate was about climate change, right?

00:49:35.180 So as soon as you debate that, you lose, right?

00:49:38.320 Because the fact that you're even talking about it means that it's one of your priorities.

00:49:42.600 And so, yeah, you've got to get the question right.

00:49:44.460 So you said—tell me your phrase again.

00:49:46.820 Funding students, not systems.

00:49:48.940 So it's more transparent.

00:49:50.220 People know, like, this is the concept of the money following the child.

00:49:52.040 Well, and they are the consumer.

00:49:54.020 Yep.

00:49:54.420 Yeah.

00:49:54.880 And 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,

00:50:03.400 not 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, 0.99

00:50:11.440 will support programs where the money follows the individual.

00:50:15.340 Think about it.

00:50:15.840 When we have grocery stores, which I mentioned earlier, we have food stamps.

00:50:19.080 Yeah.

00:50:19.360 We don't say the food stamps must be spent at a signed Walmart or an assigned grocery store.

00:50:23.140 That's a good analogy.

00:50:24.500 And so we also do this with higher ed.

00:50:26.200 It's not just that we do this with other industries.

00:50:28.780 We do this with education, too.

00:50:30.140 Higher ed.

00:50:30.500 We have Pell Grants in the U.S.

00:50:32.380 We have the GI Bill.

00:50:35.720 These are taxpayer dollars that can be used at private universities, if you want, and it follows the decision of a student.

00:50:42.560 So it's the equivalent of money, essentially, although a little more narrowly targeted.

00:50:47.340 Yeah, because the status quo would always say we need public money for public schools. 0.67

00:50:51.140 And my quick response was, well, you support public taxpayer dollars for private everything else when it comes to higher ed.

00:50:57.960 You support Pell Grants that go to private religious universities.

00:51:02.280 You support vouchers when it comes to hospitals.

00:51:05.320 We have Medicaid vouchers.

00:51:06.720 You can take that to a religiously affiliated hospital if you want.

00:51:10.380 We do this with pre-K.

00:51:11.560 We have the Head Start programs.

00:51:12.760 All the Democrats support it.

00:51:13.900 It's a pre-K program where the money follows your decision to a private provider of pre-K, even a religious one.

00:51:22.740 Has that helped Head Start?

00:51:25.200 Do you know?

00:51:26.280 Has it improved its quality?

00:51:27.980 Head Start evaluations are horrible.

00:51:31.100 They find that it spends a lot of money, and they don't improve outcomes.

00:51:35.320 Most of the results are null results.

00:51:36.980 They improve some outcomes.

00:51:38.800 People are more likely to graduate, and they're less likely to be thrown in prison or get pregnant.

00:51:44.040 But they don't improve cognitive performance.

00:51:45.800 I don't think that was the RCT, though.

00:51:47.660 I think that was more of like a regression with controls, which is still something.

00:51:53.200 Could be.

00:51:53.440 Well, the crucial issue is there's no evidence that Head Start improves academic performance.

00:51:58.860 And that's a consequence of multiple reviews.

00:52:01.040 And it's really a catastrophe that it's the case.

00:52:03.360 And the latest pre-K evaluation statewide was in Tennessee.

00:52:07.040 Yeah.

00:52:07.600 When was that?

00:52:08.420 That was a few years ago.

00:52:09.780 They followed them through sixth grade.

00:52:11.260 Oh, yeah.

00:52:11.960 And it was a randomized control trial.

00:52:13.820 They found that those who won the lottery were worse off academically and behaviorally by the end of sixth grade.

00:52:20.620 Okay, won the lottery meaning?

00:52:22.300 You won a lottery to get a scholarship to go to pre-K relative to the families who lost the lottery and stayed with their parents.

00:52:29.600 So they were worse behaviorally as well.

00:52:31.680 Maybe because the parents have an advantage at raising their own kids.

00:52:36.640 Maybe they're better at disciplining the kids at home.

00:52:39.440 I did a very programmatic review of Head Start in the 80s.

00:52:44.940 So that's quite a long time ago.

00:52:46.220 But the programs had been operating for a very long time.

00:52:49.200 And there were, I think, five major reviews.

00:52:51.420 And at that time, the findings were that Head Start accelerated cognitive performance, so test scores, for a year or two following the interventions.

00:53:02.920 But that by grade six, there was no effect.

00:53:06.680 But that the longer term effects seemed to be behavioral.

00:53:10.020 The more recent Tennessee experiment, which is the latest one, RCT, negative effects on academics and behavior through sixth grade.

00:53:39.240 Which is the last year of the study.

00:53:41.520 And 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.

00:53:49.600 Yeah, yeah.

00:53:50.240 We 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.

00:54:00.480 And we also had a – there is an RCT.

00:54:02.500 That was with choice.

00:54:03.720 That was with a voucher program in Milwaukee.

00:54:05.640 Uh-huh.

00:54:06.320 That one was not an RCT.

00:54:07.980 We did the best we could with – we even controlled for neighborhood and single-parent households and religiosity.

00:54:14.060 All the – all – like as many demographics as you could get to control for. 0.69

00:54:18.660 But 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.

00:54:28.460 They 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%.

00:54:40.440 It was a complete elimination for lottery winners through the study period.

00:54:44.780 I don't remember how long they covered.

00:54:46.100 It might not have lasted forever.

00:54:48.560 But through the study period, it was like 5% were incarcerated for the control group in the public schools.

00:54:54.780 Lottery winners who got into the charter schools, 0%.

00:54:57.460 So all this to say on the Head Start thing, I don't bring up these analogies to say that we should – I'm not saying that I support Head Start or Pell Grants or food stamps.

00:55:10.520 I'm saying if we're going to spend the money, we might as well fund the people as opposed to –

00:55:16.040 Yeah, yeah.

00:55:16.260 No, no.

00:55:16.580 I understand.

00:55:17.200 Well, I sidetracked a little bit into Head Start because doing that review for me was actually very disheartening.

00:55:27.600 Because the thing about Head Start – and this can allow us to talk about political issues more broadly or conceptual issues –

00:55:35.200 Nobody liked the fact that poverty tended to persist multi-generationally.

00:55:42.320 And there were reasons to assume that if you gave so-called disadvantaged kids a Head Start, that A, that might work. 0.99

00:55:51.060 But B, that it might even have self-reinforcing consequences, right?

00:55:56.360 Because the idea was, well, you take the disadvantaged kids, you give them a bit of an academic boost when they're three or four.

00:56:03.640 And the consequence of that compounds with time.

00:56:08.300 And so they're actually farther ahead of their peers by grade six because they got this Head Start.

00:56:13.320 You know, and that didn't happen.

00:56:17.140 And that was a catastrophe for the right and the left politically as far as I was concerned because it was a reasonably motivated endeavor.

00:56:26.820 Now, 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.

00:56:39.020 And the answer is virtually none.

00:56:41.180 And also, the Head Start programs were also used as employment programs.

00:56:48.020 So the probability that a given Head Start teacher had any qualification was extremely low.

00:56:54.480 You know, when you're dealing with three- and four-year-olds, let's say, it's very hard to – especially in groups – it's very hard to spend time teaching them anything because just taking care of three- and four-year-olds is such –

00:57:06.000 Basically just a daycare program.

00:57:06.500 Well, exactly.

00:57:07.640 And often not a good one.

00:57:08.980 Now, 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.

00:57:22.280 But for kids in absolutely wretched conditions –

00:57:24.700 Yeah, it can't get any worse, right?

00:57:26.000 Yeah.

00:57:26.100 Yeah.

00:57:26.280 Well, maybe you –

00:57:27.640 Whereas 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.

00:57:34.380 Right.

00:57:34.680 So – but you were convinced that the Tennessee data, that's – I don't know the study.

00:57:38.360 That's the latest experiment.

00:57:39.020 Yeah.

00:57:39.180 And it's peer-reviewed published.

00:57:40.000 Oh, that's really too bad.

00:57:41.120 And the Head Starts that I've seen as far as the RCTs –

00:57:44.180 RCTs, yeah, randomized control trial.

00:57:46.200 Had the fade-outs.

00:57:46.960 Yeah.

00:57:47.640 But one more thing that I think that I added that was really important to the conversation about school choice – I mean, one thing is – it's not all me, right?

00:57:55.200 It was COVID that helped open the eyes of parents.

00:57:57.220 I was just there with the right ideas laying around at the time, as Milton Friedman famously put it.

00:58:01.780 Yeah.

00:58:01.980 Is 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.

00:58:11.040 We still have elected officials saying these things using left-leaning arguments to advance school choice, which I think they're all good arguments.

00:58:17.380 It's true that the lowest income are in the worst schools, that they would benefit the most.

00:58:21.380 School choice is an equalizer.

00:58:23.380 But there's also right-leaning arguments you make about choosing schools that align with your values.

00:58:27.800 The public schools are Marxist.

00:58:29.140 We don't want gender ideology.

00:58:30.360 We want schools that teach you that America is a great country, not a horrible country.

00:58:35.200 And so you can make all these different types of arguments.

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00:59:41.160 But 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.

00:59:54.840 So, you know, I'm not going to lead on it.

00:59:56.500 And then the Democrats, they're controlled by the teachers' unions anyway.

00:59:59.360 So you're not going to make much ground with them regardless of the argument you're making.

01:00:03.720 They respond to power, not logic.

01:00:05.300 And then if you alienate the Republicans, we weren't really getting school choice passed in blue states or red states in a meaningful way.

01:00:12.560 But now it's become more of a GOP litmus test issue.

01:00:17.580 Voters have gone to the ballot box and held Republicans accountable for being against school choice in Texas, my home state.

01:00:26.400 We failed on school choice last year because we had 21 Republicans join all the Democrats in the House to kill school choice.

01:00:33.040 And they came up with their arguments about how they were in rural areas and they didn't need to vote for this.

01:00:38.020 But after the primaries, now 14 of them are gone.

01:00:41.300 That was a political earthquake.

01:00:43.220 And now for the first time in Texas history, the House has 76 co-sponsors to pass a school choice bill, which has never happened.

01:00:52.480 And you need 76 votes to pass a school choice bill.

01:00:55.380 What did you have to do with what happened in Virginia?

01:00:57.700 Well, in Virginia, we had Mr. Terry – I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach – McAuliffe on the debate stage.

01:01:04.520 He was the former governor of Virginia, and he said that at the final debate.

01:01:08.580 He was up in the polls by a lot.

01:01:10.500 It flipped right after that because parents were pissed.

01:01:13.220 Virginia closed their schools just about more than any other state.

01:01:16.540 They were as bad as California when it came to reopening the schools in Virginia.

01:01:19.820 And Glenn Youngkin turned that into an opportunity.

01:01:23.800 He laid out a blueprint for success for Republicans going forward.

01:01:27.740 And Glenn Youngkin ended up winning that election by six points with education voters.

01:01:33.180 And that was the number two issue in that election, which is a big deal because education is usually at the bottom.

01:01:37.960 Voters, they rank jobs, the economy, crime at the top.

01:01:42.100 Education was number two.

01:01:43.900 And a Republican won on that issue.

01:01:45.580 Well, given that 50 percent of the bloody state budgets go to K-12 education, it should be like number one or number two all the time.

01:01:53.760 You would think.

01:01:55.040 But I think for a long time, people thought things were fine, right?

01:01:58.220 Before they saw – 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.

01:02:12.100 So for a long time, like when I went to school as a kid, like I hated school.

01:02:17.420 It bored me to death.

01:02:19.920 But I have to say that my teachers didn't teach me insane things, right?

01:02:25.960 And so we don't just have a failure.

01:02:28.140 I don't know when that blip happened either.

01:02:28.740 Somewhere around mid – somewhere around 2010, things really went sideways.

01:02:34.200 They went sideways in the universities too.

01:02:35.820 Like I saw that blip of political correctness in the 1990s when I was teaching in Boston.

01:02:40.920 But it was mostly outliers.

01:02:42.880 You know, it was the radical fringe, although a lot of them were in the educational psychology departments.

01:02:48.400 But they weren't – they didn't have the upper hand.

01:02:51.000 And somewhere around 2010, that flipped hard.

01:02:53.660 And I think that those – that sort of thing flips partly too.

01:02:57.360 You said – you talked about good teachers leaving.

01:02:59.820 Well, 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.

01:03:12.640 They all leave, right?

01:03:14.080 And then – well, then you're just left with the worst of the worst, right?

01:03:17.840 And then they hire people who are even worse than they are and the whole thing's, you know, gone off its railings.

01:03:23.400 And so I guess part of the reason that this has become an issue is because the student – the schools moved from merely like traditional incompetence, traditional socialist incompetence, let's say, to absolute bloody insanity.

01:03:38.500 And then people started to notice.

01:03:40.040 And it was likely the gender issue that did that. 0.95

01:03:42.380 The 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.

01:03:56.900 So it's almost like it's a – it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

01:04:01.740 I've spoken to Republican governors about this on multiple occasions.

01:04:05.580 I think I met you at RGA, by the way.

01:04:07.180 Yes, that's right.

01:04:08.960 That's right.

01:04:09.480 You 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.

01:04:23.620 And if they continue to spend half the state's money on K-12 education, essentially, that's dominated by progressive Marxists.

01:04:31.540 Like, everything else that is happening is, as far as I'm concerned, it's blowing in the wind.

01:04:36.420 And so I want to challenge you on a couple of things because I'd like your opinion.

01:04:41.280 See, I can understand the rationale, the logic for your choice approach, and I can see it from the free market perspective.

01:04:49.800 So let's say the libertarian perspective.

01:04:51.340 I can see it from the parents' right perspective.

01:04:53.320 And 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.

01:05:08.460 Great.

01:05:08.960 All of that makes sense.

01:05:10.160 But 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.

01:05:32.080 So, 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?

01:05:39.820 The Catholic schools are full of woke teachers.

01:05:41.900 Like, it's a pervasive problem.

01:05:43.840 And 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.

01:05:55.420 Yeah, we need alternative certification.

01:05:56.080 So 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.

01:06:07.500 And some people do set up this false dichotomy. They'll say, oh, you're saying school choice will cure everything. Well, not exactly.

01:06:14.280 We 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.

01:06:23.420 But 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.

01:06:34.680 They've banned critical race theory. They're talking about banning DEI in public schools this year as well.

01:06:39.680 We have Trump with his executive orders helping out as well. But we have undercover video from a group called Accuracy in Media.

01:06:46.100 They'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.

01:06:57.620 Sure, of course they are.

01:06:58.640 And they're proud about it. They're like, yeah, we're still doing CRT, but we're just going to call it something else.

01:07:03.680 How do you ban ideas?

01:07:05.900 Behind closed doors, they continue to do what they want.

01:07:08.320 Well, you see this in the universities too. It's like, well, we're going to scrap our DEI programs.

01:07:14.840 It's like, they're not scrapping them.

01:07:16.000 They're just renaming them.

01:07:17.720 They move, they just retitled this person and they continue to do exactly the same thing.

01:07:22.180 And you can camouflage what you're doing with words, no problem.

01:07:25.580 It'll take people years to figure it out.

01:07:27.640 And so this is another part.

01:07:29.240 So I'm not saying that we shouldn't try because it isn't perfect enforcement, but we should have both of these.

01:07:36.280 We need top-down accountability, but also bottom-up for if you're a parent, you get a whiff of these things happening.

01:07:42.120 Even if you can't prove it before a judge and change the school system that way, you need to be able to say, you know what, screw this.

01:07:48.920 I'm sending my kids somewhere else.

01:07:50.640 And I think that would give a pressure for the public schools to say, let's knock it off.

01:07:54.620 I don't want to irritate anybody on the left or the right.

01:07:57.220 I'm going to focus on the basics, math, reading, and writing.

01:08:00.760 And then, you know, you're not going to have all of them.

01:08:04.000 And so you might say, well, what about the private schools?

01:08:05.680 Some of them, they also operate in this kind of small market right now already when you don't have choice.

01:08:11.060 But when you unleash the market and families can vote with their feet, you'll have a different supply of private schools pop up as well.

01:08:18.800 Especially right now, we're pushing something called education savings accounts.

01:08:22.500 It's kind of like a voucher where you can use it for a private school, but you can also use it for homeschooling, micro-schooling.

01:08:29.420 They were calling them pandemic pods during the COVID era where five to ten children were getting together in a household.

01:08:35.180 It's kind of like the one-room schoolhouse idea.

01:08:38.060 Those are more likely to sprout up and you're more likely to have a thousand flowers blooming if you have these low-cost options.

01:08:44.640 And this has happened in Arizona too.

01:08:46.180 So you think the diversity of school proliferation will eventually solve the ideological problem?

01:08:52.180 Yeah, 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?

01:08:58.760 I'd say that's still better than the status quo where you have zero choices.

01:09:03.120 But at least now you can take the funding.

01:09:06.280 Hey, 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.

01:09:15.760 That'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.

01:09:22.080 Most of them now are.

01:09:23.460 And Arizona has an education savings account.

01:09:26.420 They've had one for over a decade.

01:09:27.840 They just went all in in 2022, making it available to everybody.

01:09:31.940 They actually crashed the government website in Arizona because so many families signed up right when they opened up the floodgates.

01:09:38.120 It's an interesting twist on paying women to have children because in some sense that's what you're setting up, right? 0.99

01:09:47.700 Well, yeah, yeah, because a lot of-

01:09:49.900 Which is what the public school system is already, right?

01:09:52.400 Yeah, right.

01:09:52.980 It's subsidy for-

01:09:54.120 But it's a failing system that not a lot of people don't see it as benefit.

01:09:56.860 But if it's $20,000 a year per child and the typical family has two children, the woman has to make $40,000 a year to justify the subsidy. 1.00

01:10:07.920 And so that's after expenses.

01:10:11.140 And so that's a very, it's very unlikely.

01:10:13.520 If you think about a classroom of, you know, 30 kids at $600,000, where's all the money going?

01:10:19.200 If the teachers are only making $60,000 a year on average, where's the rest?

01:10:23.000 Yeah, well, you could figure, what, $60,000 for overhead in terms of physical plant, something like that.

01:10:28.520 So that's only $120,000.

01:10:29.820 The superintendents in Texas, you know, a lot of them make more than the president of the United States.

01:10:32.820 We have a half a dozen or so who make over $400,000 a year.

01:10:38.040 So where does, well, so tell me, where does the, where does the, so you said-

01:10:43.100 A lot of buildings, they love building new schools and stadiums.

01:10:45.660 Yeah.

01:10:46.300 So 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.

01:10:56.540 So maybe that improves, you know, the self-esteem of the kids or whatever the teachers are trying to do these days.

01:11:02.200 But it's just frivolous things.

01:11:05.680 And you see this at the university level too, right?

01:11:07.400 They have these extravagant water parks and tuition is going up to cover these things and also subsidies from the government too.

01:11:16.220 But these micro schools are really shaking things up. 0.99

01:11:21.120 The whole, the whole factory model itself is, is frightened because of this.

01:11:24.460 In fact, when Crenda micro schools in Arizona was reporting just huge increases in enrollment during COVID because the government schools were closed.

01:11:33.560 So families were figuring it out and they, a lot of them went to these micro schools.

01:11:39.980 The NEA, which is the largest labor union in the country, the National Education Association, they also lobbied the CDC to close the schools longer.

01:11:47.380 They 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.

01:12:02.620 They knew they were going to lose funding because public schools are funded based on enrollment counts.

01:12:05.880 And so if you lose some students, you're going to lose some money, whether you have a school choice program or not.

01:12:11.040 And in Arizona, you can use those education savings accounts to pay for Prenda micro schools and other ones too.

01:12:18.500 Define micro school.

01:12:20.140 It's a miniature school.

01:12:21.620 And some people, there's a lot of different definitions for it, but basically a miniature private school.

01:12:26.160 And during COVID era, it was basically five to 10 children getting together in households to economize on homeschooling.

01:12:33.440 And 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.

01:12:40.920 Which you could do if it's $20,000 per.

01:12:43.640 So what's, what is the amount of the typical voucher?

01:12:46.720 If, if school, if student expenditure, yeah, why?

01:12:49.380 So it saves taxpayer money and most of these bills are passed at the state level.

01:12:52.840 In the U.S., we're funded in the public school system in every state by the federal level, which should not exist at all.

01:12:59.200 The word education is not in our constitution.

01:13:01.320 It's an unconstitutional waste of time and money.

01:13:04.260 But that's only about 8% of the total spending, 8 to 10%.

01:13:07.360 The other 45, 45 are state and local dollars.

01:13:11.500 These bills are typically passed in state legislatures.

01:13:14.120 So it's about half of the total that follows the students.

01:13:16.940 So let's say on average, 10,000 versus the 20,000 that's spent in the government schools.

01:13:21.240 So is any of that happening locally as well to, to pull in the rest of that money?

01:13:25.600 There have been some local vouchers that have passed in, in, in Colorado, a blue state.

01:13:30.000 There was Douglas County had at once a couple of decades ago passed the voucher program.

01:13:34.540 It got nixed in the court by a, by a lefty judge.

01:13:38.280 And that program is no longer on the books.

01:13:41.100 New Hampshire, which passed a state level program, also proposed the bill a year or two ago in their legislature

01:13:47.480 to also allow the local, local districts to have the money follow the child if they opted in as well.

01:13:53.300 That bill got tabled.

01:13:54.900 That was one that I was really excited.

01:13:56.580 So that revolution has no curve yet.

01:13:57.220 I think that's the next step in the revolution.

01:14:00.440 But at the same time, if the private schools are doing it for less,

01:14:05.300 and if the micro schools are doing a good job for less,

01:14:08.300 do we want all of the dollars following the student?

01:14:10.760 I think it should be equal across sectors.

01:14:12.760 If we're going to spend the money, I think the state and local should follow the student, not just the state.

01:14:17.060 But the reality is it's mostly basically everywhere at this point.

01:14:21.640 Well, and also the reality is, as you pointed out,

01:14:24.180 that there's enough money at the state level to produce economic incentive for the micro schools, for example.

01:14:30.620 You know, you could imagine five kids together, that's $50,000 a year.

01:14:35.220 That's a pretty good supplement for a given parent's income.

01:14:38.300 And so, okay, so let's talk about, let's see, where should we go now?

01:14:46.200 Yeah, okay, effects.

01:14:49.460 So I want to talk a little bit more about your means of communication.

01:14:53.580 You've been working for these think tanks, but your work has received broad public attention.

01:14:59.420 Okay, so now you also said that that was in part because you were in the right place at the right time.

01:15:04.100 Yeah, yeah, that makes a difference.

01:15:05.460 And you've done the background research, right?

01:15:07.300 So you had a message that was saleable given the state of the zeitgeist, let's say.

01:15:14.200 Okay, well, that's crucially important, right?

01:15:16.400 But it's also important to be able to capitalize on that.

01:15:19.200 Okay, so how would you characterize the consequences of your work so far?

01:15:24.580 What have you seen shifting that you would attribute, at least in part, to the message that you've been disseminating?

01:15:32.520 Yeah, changing the way people talk about school choice in terms of the money following the child.

01:15:36.140 There have been a lot of legislators on the House floor, Senate floor, talking about funding students, not systems.

01:15:43.920 So they've developed my arguments, and I think a lot of them follow me on social media.

01:15:48.760 And politicians, again, they want to get reelected.

01:15:51.640 They want to look good.

01:15:52.960 And 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.

01:16:02.380 And so I think they've adopted some of the language and arguments and studies that I've conducted and also cited myself.

01:16:09.940 Is X your most effective?

01:16:11.760 It is, for sure.

01:16:12.740 Yeah, I have Facebook and Instagram, but they're not nearly – I have over 200,000 followers on X.

01:16:17.620 It's not like crazy, but it's ballooned in a short amount of time.

01:16:22.900 Who follows you?

01:16:24.160 Do you follow me?

01:16:25.300 Yes, I certainly do.

01:16:26.280 Yeah, yeah.

01:16:27.920 Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, a lot of the – Vivek Ramaswamy.

01:16:31.300 There's a lot of influential people who follow me.

01:16:34.000 Libs at TikTok, a lot of big accounts.

01:16:36.660 Donald Trump doesn't follow me.

01:16:37.820 Maybe after he sees this episode, he'll jump on the bandwagon.

01:16:42.220 Yeah, state governors, state treasurers.

01:16:43.920 Yeah, so Doug Ducey, who's here in Arizona, he was the first state to go all in on school choice.

01:16:50.420 And I have a good relationship with him.

01:16:53.340 He's no longer the governor. 0.98

01:16:54.300 There's now Katie Hobbs in Arizona, who's a hypocrite on school choice. 1.00

01:16:57.160 She went to Catholic school, and now she opposes school choice for other families. 0.85

01:17:01.220 But Doug Ducey was a leader, and you needed one state to do it first to show the rest of the states they could do it.

01:17:08.600 He often uses the analogy of when the first person broke the four-minute mile.

01:17:14.540 Before he – the first person did it, I don't remember his name.

01:17:17.800 People thought it was impossible for a human being to run below a four-minute mile.

01:17:21.840 But once the first person did it, you had just this cascade effect of tons of people breaking.

01:17:26.860 Yeah, yeah.

01:17:27.060 Now, with school choice, no one thought that any state could do it where it's every family being – because for a long time, there was an incremental approach on the school choice front.

01:17:37.120 It was decades.

01:17:38.300 We were hitting our head against the wall.

01:17:39.800 It 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.

01:17:47.660 But 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.

01:17:57.120 One, because it allows for more competition, allows for a bigger supply-side response, more of a market response.

01:18:05.300 But also we're paying for public schools for high- and low-income families.

01:18:08.880 They should be able to benefit from school choice as well.

01:18:10.840 We don't discriminate based on income for the public schools.

01:18:13.120 We shouldn't discriminate based on income for school choice either.

01:18:17.900 And politics, again, is all about organized interest pushing for what they want.

01:18:22.380 If 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.

01:18:36.140 Yeah, so let me ask you about that.

01:18:39.100 I've discussed school choice with some of my more intelligent liberal friends.

01:18:44.920 And one of their objections has been that the – I think you'll be able to address this given what you already said, but I'm going to lay it out anyways.

01:18:54.560 Parents 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.

01:19:12.360 But 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.

01:19:22.780 And 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.

01:19:40.860 You already have that inequality baked into the government school system. 1.00

01:19:43.820 You have Baltimore.

01:19:44.640 They have 40 percent of their high schools have zero percent math proficiency rate.

01:19:48.140 You see the same thing in places like Chicago.

01:19:50.740 And so they shouldn't make perfect the enemy of the good.

01:19:54.080 And this fear-mongering hasn't happened with school choice.

01:19:56.960 The public schools, if anything, have gotten better.

01:19:58.840 I cited Florida, but we also have nationwide data on this.

01:20:02.240 26 of the 29 studies on this nationwide find statistically significant positive effects of private school choice competition on the outcomes in the public schools.

01:20:12.220 Even 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.

01:20:22.720 So the main argument that the unions put forward is the worst argument in terms of it being supported by the evidence.

01:20:29.640 But a lot of people respond to fear-mongering.

01:20:31.900 And so they do that.

01:20:32.840 Well, it's a reasonable hypothesis.

01:20:35.000 But the fact that the studies have already been done indicating that the—

01:20:38.560 There's one other study on this topic that I think is really important.

01:20:42.200 And it was done by Cornell researchers, published in 2018.

01:20:45.660 And 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.

01:20:59.500 Doesn't seem like a surprising finding to me.

01:21:01.680 Probably not.

01:21:02.200 If you have choice now, you can exercise it.

01:21:03.920 You're going to look.

01:21:05.160 The point is school choice increases parental involvement by definition.

01:21:10.100 Yes, 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.

01:21:19.460 Now, all of a sudden, you give them $10,000 to seek out a better option.

01:21:24.020 They're not going to be depressed by looking at the private school.

01:21:26.780 So they're going to look and they're going to exercise that choice.

01:21:28.900 Well, it's definitely the case, too.

01:21:30.080 Like 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.

01:21:42.180 And 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?

01:21:49.840 And so most parents, for example, regardless of their own literacy levels, would like to have children who are literate and well-educated.

01:22:00.040 And they might not know how to do it, but they want it.

01:22:02.620 They know their kids better than anybody else.

01:22:04.480 Yeah, well, they actually care.

01:22:06.120 That's right.

01:22:06.420 Yeah, well, they care as much as they care about anything, and they care far more about their kids than anyone else is likely to.

01:22:13.260 Right.

01:22:13.620 Okay.

01:22:13.860 But 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.

01:22:25.740 Yeah, they're rigorous studies.

01:22:27.540 You can't randomly assign competition, but it's as good as you can get.

01:22:32.480 And I've cited all the studies on that topic.

01:22:35.080 Okay, okay, okay.

01:22:36.020 So let's end with this.

01:22:37.160 Let's end this portion of the discussion.

01:22:40.940 I think what we'll do—

01:22:41.720 I wanted to hit one more thing.

01:22:42.720 Yeah, well, this is what I want to give you, the opportunity to do that.

01:22:45.400 So if there's anything else you'd like to bring up, do it now, and then we'll turn to the Delaware side.

01:22:50.160 On 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.

01:22:56.640 So they had the most to benefit, most to gain from having more options in their kids' education.

01:23:02.000 In 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.

01:23:08.260 School choice for me, but not for the hypocrisy again.

01:23:10.800 It strikes again.

01:23:11.820 It's everywhere.

01:23:13.480 But 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.

01:23:29.900 And I believe about 95 percent of the kids were black or Hispanic.

01:23:34.820 So this goes completely counter to the narrative that the left is saying about how this is only for rich white kids using the program.

01:23:42.480 In Florida as well, there's a really interesting story about how DeSantis actually won in 2018.

01:23:48.240 He actually barely won the governor's race in 2018.

01:23:50.800 And the headline in the Wall Street Journal the next day was that school choice moms tipped the governor's race for DeSantis.

01:23:57.860 So 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.

01:24:17.940 And those kids were disproportionately low-income and non-white kids.

01:24:22.040 So this is another way that, one, Republicans can make inroads with groups that they hadn't reached out to before.

01:24:28.420 And it's also – it shows you that this shouldn't be a partisan issue.

01:24:32.520 And 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.

01:24:40.340 And 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.

01:24:56.760 And 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.

01:25:03.440 Well, it isn't an obviously partisan issue.

01:25:06.280 It shouldn't be.

01:25:07.040 Well, it's like cost-cutting in government.

01:25:09.220 It 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?

01:25:21.160 Because then, at least in principle, more money could be spent on things that actually work.

01:25:26.520 Yeah, exactly.

01:25:27.460 And this seems to be – I mean, you can make a perfectly cogent case, as you have, I would say, for how broadening choice –

01:25:36.220 it might even preferentially benefit people who are poor and dispossessed.

01:25:40.440 That 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 – 1.00

01:25:48.160 mired in poverty, often multi-generationally.

01:25:51.840 And I don't see any way out of that than the multiplication of supply.

01:25:58.140 And it's also the case that the money of a poor person is just as good as the money of a rich person.

01:26:03.740 And 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.

01:26:11.680 Right, right, right.

01:26:12.700 All right, so I think we'll turn to the Daily Wire side now, and I think I'll talk to you about a couple of things.

01:26:20.140 I'd like to know about your future plans, strategic and conceptual.

01:26:24.540 Where do you go next?

01:26:26.040 I'd like to know what it's been like for you to deal with the new administration federally and particularly on the federal level.

01:26:37.300 And I'd like to talk to you more about any pitfalls you see emerging on the school choice side.

01:26:46.340 So, we'll talk about the future.

01:26:49.280 We'll talk about strategy.

01:26:50.500 We'll talk about the new administration.

01:26:51.820 We'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.

01:27:03.600 So, we'll turn to that on the Daily Wire side.

01:27:05.560 And everybody watching and listening, you're more than welcome to join us for an additional half an hour behind the Daily Wire paywall.

01:27:12.440 Thank you very much for coming in today.

01:27:13.540 Thank you so much, John.

01:27:14.200 Yeah, yeah.

01:27:14.760 It's really good to have you here and appreciate it.

01:27:17.060 And, 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.

01:27:31.780 Right, that eats up half the resources at the state level. 0.81

01:27:37.600 Right.

01:27:38.080 It's really something.

01:27:39.540 It's really something to see.

01:27:41.620 So, all right, everybody, you can join us there.

01:27:44.000 We'll see you there.

01:27:58.560 We'll see you there.

01:28:03.000 Bye.

01:28:03.280 Bye.

01:28:03.780 Bye.

01:28:04.880 Bye.

01:28:05.360 Bye.

01:28:05.980 Bye.

01:28:06.280 Bye.

01:28:06.840 Bye.

01:28:07.280 Bye.

01:28:08.340 Bye.

01:28:08.420 Bye.

01:28:09.360 Bye.

01:28:09.840 Bye.

01:28:10.940 Bye.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - March 13, 2025

529. How Trump Will Save the School System ｜ Corey DeAngelis

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