The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

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,

00:00:50.460 it's blowing in the wind. And if Democrats are smart, the way that we can get towards

00:00:54.660 bipartisanship on school choice is through

00:00:57.440 Hello, everybody. I'm speaking today to Dr. Corey D'Angelis.

00:01:18.500 He has a PhD in education policy, which under normal circumstances wouldn't necessarily be

00:01:26.600 a good thing. But he graduated from the Department of Educational Reform at the University of Arkansas

00:01:33.180 and that's one of the rare schools, maybe the singular schools, that isn't terribly bloody

00:01:40.300 Marxist in its fundamental orientation with a smattering of incompetence thrown in there

00:01:45.740 just for good measure. I've been following Dr. D'Angelis, Corey, on X for a good long time.

00:01:55.480 He's one of these one-man wrecking balls, one-person wrecking balls like Leila Micklewaite,

00:02:00.220 who's fighting the good fight against Pornhub, and Robbie Starbuck, who's a complete bloody army

00:02:06.680 in relationship to calling corporations out for their foolishness of their DEI policies.

00:02:12.880 And Corey's been distributing the word in relationship to school choice. And school choice

00:02:22.580 is a matter that's bigger than you might think, even though it has become quite a hot political

00:02:29.020 issue. Because the school system, the public school system, is a failure in many ways. It's

00:02:36.860 extraordinarily expensive. It's expansive. And it does an absolutely dismal job of what it should

00:02:42.740 be doing, which is educating children, at least teaching them to read, let's say, a bare minimal

00:02:47.760 standard of literacy. And although it turns out to be quite effective as a propaganda machine,

00:02:54.020 there's a variety of reasons that it's rotten to the core. But the fact that it's a monopoly

00:02:58.980 is definitely one of them. And we delved into that topic in great detail. If you're a parent

00:03:05.580 and you're concerned about your children's future, if you're concerned about your rights as a parent,

00:03:10.500 if you want to have the option to find an educational institution of high quality so that you can give

00:03:16.880 your children the start they need in life and also to protect them against a substantial amount of

00:03:22.760 ideological warping, then the issue of school choice should be something that's paramount in your

00:03:28.840 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

00:03:50.480 children are they? And I think the right answer to that question is, children should be watched

00:03:57.140 over by those who have their best interests most firmly at heart, and that's inevitably going to be

00:04:04.280 parents. And so it's in this service of children that parents have the right to determine the

00:04:11.100 educational pathway that they can pursue. And even though parents might not be able to do that on their

00:04:17.320 own, 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 Corey's

00:04:29.020 been working very hard on making that possibility a reality for parents. And so that's what we talked

00:04:36.760 about today. Well, Dr. D'Angelis, hey, I got to make sure I'm pronouncing that exactly right. Am I

00:04:43.160 pronouncing that exactly right? Yeah, D'Angelis like Los Angeles, but I'm not a real doctor. I'm more

00:04:47.660 like a Jill Biden doctor. I got a PhD in education policy. Oh, yes. Where from? University of Arkansas.

00:04:54.760 I see. When did you get that? Pretty recently, actually. Well, I'm getting older now. It's 2018 or

00:05:00.700 so. I got the PhD. And I studied school choice policy. How come you didn't get brainwashed?

00:05:05.340 I didn't. It was actually the Department of Education Reform. So 99% of education PhDs are Marxist

00:05:12.060 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 of

00:05:33.980 them are socialists. Yeah, yeah. Okay. And so how did that institution come to exist and why does it

00:05:39.980 still exist? I think it originally was funded by a grant from the Walton Family Foundation.

00:05:46.220 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 the

00:06:05.120 different outcomes for kids in the public schools versus the private schools. Much like a medical

00:06:10.580 trial, you do the placebo for the kids who lose the lottery, which is the public school system,

00:06:16.200 business as usual. If you win the lottery to get a voucher to go to a private school. Wolfe's

00:06:20.480 evaluation, for example, in 2013 found about a 30% increase in the likelihood of graduating from high

00:06:26.620 school from 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

00:06:35.460 that this is not because of the family characteristic of the student. It's not because of the student's

00:06:40.100 racial background or their income. It's because of them getting a better opportunity to go to a

00:06:46.420 better school. And so I did that kind of research when I started. My first study was actually with

00:06:51.080 Dr. Wolfe. And we found that the Milwaukee voucher program that started in 1990,

00:06:56.700 we found a huge reduction in crime later on in life. So it shouldn't be very surprising. You're

00:07:03.860 more likely to graduate 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 graduate,

00:07:10.680 you're probably going to be more likely to get a job, less likely to be involved with the criminal

00:07:14.540 justice system.

00:07:15.640 Yeah. Oh, well, okay. Let's back up and do a big picture overview. You should perhaps let everybody

00:07:22.420 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-

00:07:33.220 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 about

00:08:13.860 164% inflation adjusted since 1970. Have the outcomes gotten 164% better? No, obviously not.

00:08:22.720 But it's because they're not focusing on math and reading. They're focusing on gender ideology and

00:08:27.440 critical race theory in the schools. And if you're focusing on those things and teaching kids to hate

00:08:32.620 your country, it shouldn't surprise us that the academic outcomes aren't getting any better.

00:08:37.980 Yeah. So why don't you explain exactly what problem you are attempting to address? How would

00:08:46.760 you 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

00:08:59.360 US state budgets are spent on K-312 education, right? 50%. So that means essentially that the

00:09:07.460 teacher 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 on

00:09:20.900 teacher certification, basically have their... What would you say? Their status is subsidized by half the

00:09:27.420 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.

00:09:39.880 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 lived, and

00:10:07.860 they had empty shelves, no food. And when they did have food, imagine if you got food poisoning where

00:10:12.480 it was expired. And if you wanted to go somewhere else, they'd tell you to go complain to the grocery

00:10:16.800 board who wouldn't listen to you, and would try to cut off your mic, which is what happens with the

00:10:21.080 school boards right now. And if you had to just move houses to get access to a better grocery store,

00:10:26.680 that would make zero sense. Or if you had to pay twice, basically once through taxes for the

00:10:31.900 government grocery store you're not using, and then again, out of pocket for a grocery store that

00:10:36.360 actually provided you with healthy food, that's what we have with the government school system today.

00:10:41.940 You cannot go somewhere else unless you pay twice, essentially. And low-income families are

00:10:46.180 basically just screwed in the worst failure factories that we call public schools today.

00:10:50.660 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.

00:11:18.300 So there's a number of different monopolies operating that you just described. There's

00:11:22.380 geographic monopoly, right? And that's a good analogy. So there's no competition.

00:11:28.580 The problem with no competition is that when there's no choice, there's no real incentive to

00:11:34.320 do the hard work that produces improvement. And there's actually no possibility even for comparison

00:11:40.080 between different systems, right? So without competition, you don't have any possibility of

00:11:45.580 really head-to-head evaluation, right? And no necessary incentive for innovation.

00:11:53.200 So there's a geographic monopoly, which you just described. You send your kids to the school that's

00:11:58.220 in your 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.

00:12:13.000 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

00:12:25.120 in choice as an economist might be interested in choice? Or why were you interested in the issue of

00:12:31.920 choice? Yeah, I did my bachelor's and master's in economics. Oh, yeah.

00:12:33.820 And I had a professor there. John Merrifield was his name. He's now a retired professor. But he was

00:12:38.800 probably the only free market professor at the University of Texas, San Antonio that I knew of.

00:12:42.620 And I had him, I took all of his classes. He was my advisor. He was affiliated with the Friedman

00:12:46.900 Foundation at the time, which is now called EdChoice, which is a school choice advocacy group.

00:12:51.340 And he was the one who directed me or suggested to me at least three different times,

00:12:56.040 hey, you should probably do this PhD program. And I ultimately took his advice, and I'm glad that I

00:13:02.500 did. And that's how I look at the school system. I see it as one of the most socialist institutions

00:13:07.900 that we have in America today, where the government operates the means of production,

00:13:12.580 the schools that you have, whether you want to call it the local, state, or federal government,

00:13:16.300 but they all have their hands into the government school system. And taxpayers have to fund it.

00:13:22.360 And there's a monopoly. There's no competition.

00:13:24.620 There's also kickbacks. What's the percentage of Democrat financial support from teachers unions

00:13:30.780 across the U.S.? It's something that's in the high 90s, if I remember correctly.

00:13:33.880 99.9% of Randy Weingarten's union. She's the head of the American Federation of Teachers. She lobbied

00:13:40.220 the CDC to make it more difficult to reopen schools during COVID. That's another story altogether.

00:13:45.460 They knew they could hold children's education hostage to get billions of dollars in ransom

00:13:50.380 payments and so-called COVID relief that started in 2020, because they knew if they were closed,

00:13:56.180 they could say, we need more money because we're closed. It's the same story as we see with the

00:14:00.300 test scores. They say, we're failing because we need more money. It's the definition of insanity,

00:14:05.480 doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results.

00:14:08.880 They're not doing the same thing because they keep ramping up the mounted costs.

00:14:13.120 Yeah.

00:14:13.280 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.

00:14:31.720 Yeah.

00:14:32.540 Everywhere else, you increase your production over time with more technology.

00:14:35.860 Well, in principle, you'd assume that much of the heavy lifting could have been done by computational

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00:15:56.920 You know, when you're teaching children basic skills, likely reading is the best example of this.

00:16:05.440 So when children learn to read, contrary to the whole word theorists, who are also a product

00:16:10.940 of the faculties of education and devastated literacy in their theoretical stupidity.

00:16:17.540 So English obviously is a phonetic language, and the way you learn to read is that you learn

00:16:24.020 to associate sounds with letters, and that's actually a rather dull process.

00:16:31.420 There's nothing intrinsically, not, there's little that's intrinsically interesting about that.

00:16:35.540 Some kids will treat it like a puzzle.

00:16:38.080 Some children can associate letters with sounds very rapidly, and some take much more practice.

00:16:45.260 That's IQ dependent fundamentally, although there are other contributing factors.

00:16:50.340 You can have high IQ kids with dyslexia, but it's basically an IQ phenomenon.

00:16:54.920 But what you want to do with little kids is continual exposure and practice, because they need to

00:17:02.940 produce little neural circuits that recognize each letter, and that use the conjunction between

00:17:09.080 the visual system and the auditory system and the brain, to tag each letter with a sound.

00:17:13.940 Letters first, two-letter combinations, three letters, small words.

00:17:18.180 Then as you develop expertise, phrases, you get in a single glance, and maybe even sentences

00:17:23.780 if you start to become stunningly proficient, right?

00:17:27.040 Computers are unbelievably good at the first part of that, right?

00:17:31.000 Because they're incredibly patient, and they can give you immediate feedback.

00:17:34.680 And so, at least in principle, it would be possible to augment teachers with appropriate

00:17:39.820 technology and increase their efficiency, and we've seen none of that, right?

00:17:44.180 None of that.

00:17:45.720 And the reason that we see so many of people in the Democratic Party fighting against things

00:17:51.260 like school choice, where families can take their money somewhere else other than the government-run

00:17:55.080 school, is because of that money laundering operation that we just addressed, where the teachers

00:18:01.180 unions send almost all of their money, 99.9 percent, to one party, the Democrat Party.

00:18:07.580 And so, even though Democrat voters want a better education for their kid, and they want choice

00:18:12.060 as well, the teachers unions influence those elected officials.

00:18:15.980 It's special interest politics at its worst.

00:18:18.220 They also influence them to close the schools as long as possible.

00:18:21.100 You had the Chicago Teachers Union tweet out during COVID that the push to reopen schools

00:18:27.380 is rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny.

00:18:30.780 Yeah, but everything is rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny, you know?

00:18:35.020 They threw every buzzword at the wall.

00:18:37.140 Yeah, every buzzword.

00:18:37.660 And genderism, you know?

00:18:39.480 And I'm glad that that's not working anymore.

00:18:42.380 And I think the unions actually stepped on a rake.

00:18:45.620 They overplayed their hand during the COVID era, and that showed families what the heck was

00:18:50.120 happening in the classroom.

00:18:51.140 We wouldn't have known a lot of this Marxism was in the government-run schools.

00:18:54.220 Maybe some families saw it here and there, but for the first time ever as a country,

00:18:58.260 we were able to, at large scale, get a peek into some of the far-left lunatics who are

00:19:04.620 running the government-run school system through remote learning, which, let's be real, we should

00:19:09.480 have just called it remotely learning.

00:19:11.000 There wasn't a lot of learning going on, but families have been mobilized more than they've

00:19:15.320 ever been before.

00:19:16.780 And since COVID, we've had 14 states now, all controlled by Republican legislatures, go

00:19:23.840 all in on school choice.

00:19:25.260 Arizona is one of them, one of the first, actually, to allow families to take that money

00:19:29.620 that would have gone to their government school to a private or charter school or homeschool.

00:19:33.620 Okay, so let's take apart this issue of choice, because it would be easy to assume that you're

00:19:39.020 an advocate of something approximating parental freedom, right?

00:19:44.040 That parents have the right to choose, let's say, the value set that defines the education

00:19:50.880 of their children.

00:19:51.520 But it sounds to me more that your primary concern wasn't so much the freedom of parents

00:19:57.840 to choose as it was your observation of the fact that in the absence of competition, so

00:20:04.480 in the presence of a monopoly, particularly a government-run monopoly, the probability of

00:20:09.540 low quality is 100%.

00:20:11.120 Is that...

00:20:11.680 It's both of those things.

00:20:12.800 I think it's actually more so than the outcomes.

00:20:15.380 It's more so about parental rights and who gets to direct the upbringing of their children.

00:20:19.900 I got into this as a libertarian, a limited government person.

00:20:24.500 Okay, so you're making two arguments.

00:20:26.240 One is...

00:20:26.720 It's an outcome-based...

00:20:27.760 Values.

00:20:28.520 Yeah, values as well.

00:20:30.080 Values as well.

00:20:30.880 And whose children are they?

00:20:31.760 They're not the government's kids.

00:20:33.460 They're not the teachers' union's kids, even though they just posted recently, right

00:20:37.740 before we came here, that we've got to protect our kids.

00:20:40.760 They always use language of ownership of...

00:20:42.760 It's a communist ideology, and I think that's what woke up so many people with recent elections,

00:20:48.240 too.

00:20:48.380 You look at the Trump versus Harris election, Republicans typically don't do well on education

00:20:53.420 because they don't throw more money at the problem.

00:20:56.960 But right before the election, there were two nationally representative surveys by Atlas

00:21:02.720 Intel, which was the most accurate pollster in 2020, and they correctly predicted Trump winning

00:21:07.400 all the swing states in 2024.

00:21:08.940 They both found that Trump was beating Kamala Harris on education, and I think that's because

00:21:14.260 it's changed from a conversation about who's going to throw more money at the problem to

00:21:18.560 who's going to respect my right as a parent.

00:21:20.500 And Trump won the parent vote by nine points, too.

00:21:23.500 Mm-hmm.

00:21:24.040 Mm-hmm.

00:21:24.880 All right.

00:21:25.680 So back to the issue of...

00:21:29.880 Let's see.

00:21:30.440 We've covered school choice on an economic grounds.

00:21:34.400 We've covered school choice on a parent's right ground.

00:21:38.600 The next issue might be, let's talk a little bit about the Marxist element.

00:21:45.060 Okay.

00:21:45.340 So I'd like to focus for a moment on the faculties of education.

00:21:50.980 Okay.

00:21:51.560 As I intimated earlier, I don't think there is a more corrupt and intellectually bankrupt

00:21:59.020 faculty than the faculties of education.

00:22:01.640 My experience with faculties of education as a psychologist is that the worst of all psychological

00:22:09.060 theories are always picked up and amplified, magnified, publicized by educational psychologists.

00:22:16.680 Okay.

00:22:16.920 So let's take that apart a little bit.

00:22:18.860 Whole word learning is a good example, right?

00:22:21.400 So whole word learning was predicated on the idea that expert readers read words at a glance.

00:22:28.780 They don't sound them out, or phrases even.

00:22:31.700 And so since the experts do it that way, it would be reasonable to teach children to do it that way right from the beginning.

00:22:39.580 Now, that presumes that experts read when they learn to read the same way they learn.

00:22:47.840 They read as experts, which is a completely preposterous idea neurologically, but that didn't seem to occur to any of the people who are pushing it.

00:22:54.280 And the introduction of whole word reading, if I remember correctly, into the California school system, knocked California from number one in childhood literacy to number 50, if I remember that correctly.

00:23:05.940 Okay.

00:23:06.240 So whole word learning has been a complete bloody disaster, but it's still often utilized.

00:23:10.520 And then there's the self-esteem training.

00:23:13.420 There's another terrible idea from psychology.

00:23:15.740 First of all, the idea that there is such a thing as self-esteem.

00:23:18.900 So you can model self-esteem with extroversion and neuroticism.

00:23:23.660 So people with high self-esteem are low in neuroticism.

00:23:28.700 That's the primary issue.

00:23:29.920 So they are less likely to feel negative emotion, and that's a temperamental trait.

00:23:34.180 Maybe there's some environmental contribution, but not a lot.

00:23:37.020 And then they're more likely to be extroverted because that's positive emotion.

00:23:40.660 And so if you're low in self-esteem, you tend to feel a lot of negative emotion, particularly in women.

00:23:47.200 Negative emotion is self-directed.

00:23:49.600 So women with high negative emotion have a lot of bodily concerns, for example.

00:23:53.760 They're self-conscious, right?

00:23:55.980 And that's not an attitude.

00:23:59.460 It's not a cognitive set.

00:24:00.880 It's a temperamental feature.

00:24:02.640 And the evidence that you can do something about that with something like self-esteem training, well, not only is it thin, to say the least,

00:24:11.720 there's reasonable evidence to presume that teaching children to concentrate on their emotional experience actually makes them worse.

00:24:19.380 So the psychologists who laid out the big five personality template using statistics to begin with,

00:24:28.340 the most common measure is the neopir, and its measure of neuroticism, negative emotion, has facets.

00:24:39.400 One facet is literally self-consciousness.

00:24:43.520 So thinking about yourself and being miserable are so tightly associated that you can't distinguish them statistically.

00:24:52.220 So if you get children to dwell on their negative emotional experiences, then you tend to exacerbate the problem.

00:25:02.400 Yeah, exactly.

00:25:03.080 Yeah.

00:25:03.420 So anyways, you can't use self-esteem training to...

00:25:08.220 So when we started seeing the videos from Libs of TikTok and otherwise of critical race theory in the classroom and teachers bragging about how they were injecting gender ideology into the schools,

00:25:19.620 a lot of people would ask me, how prevalent is this stuff anyway?

00:25:23.160 And it's like I'm seeing it all the time, and parents are complaining about it at the school boards where they were later labeled as domestic terrorists for doing so,

00:25:31.280 and they had their mics cut off.

00:25:32.440 But there was a nationally representative survey that just came out earlier this year in January that found that 36% of kids in high school reported that their teacher often or almost daily said that America is a fundamentally racist country.

00:25:53.320 And there were a lot of other findings in that survey as well.

00:25:55.380 It's by Education Next.

00:25:56.880 And that was the first that I saw that this is actually a wide-scale phenomenon.

00:26:00.900 My first reaction...

00:26:01.960 It's the norm.

00:26:03.120 Yeah.

00:26:03.480 When people...

00:26:04.400 Like, I didn't have, like, a data point to point to, and I had the sense...

00:26:07.720 When was this?

00:26:08.400 When did you figure this out?

00:26:09.380 This survey was January this year.

00:26:10.820 This just happened.

00:26:11.240 Oh, oh, oh.

00:26:12.200 So you didn't realize how widespread it was until that survey.

00:26:15.100 Until I saw...

00:26:15.580 You know, because I get asked this all the time, like, Corey, is it really a big problem?

00:26:19.580 And I'd say, well, we're hearing about it all the time.

00:26:21.900 If it's a big problem for this parent, then this is a big enough deal for us to change something, right?

00:26:27.360 If that parent is unhappy, they should have a choice to go somewhere else, even if it's only 1% of the time.

00:26:33.000 Well, now we know it's not just 1% of the time.

00:26:35.680 It's...

00:26:35.860 It's all the time.

00:26:36.700 It's everywhere, and...

00:26:39.020 Yeah, well, conceptualizing it as a problem in some sense is misleading because a problem implies that there's a normal course of events and some aberrations.

00:26:50.080 That's just not the case.

00:26:52.400 The entire education system, and this is a consequence of the operation of the faculties of education, is radically, resentfully leftist.

00:27:03.440 At its core, the aberration is any learning that happens outside of that philosophy.

00:27:09.580 And so I want to tell you about a study we did because this is relevant to the faculties of education.

00:27:14.740 So I did this study with a student of mine, Christine Brophy, master's student.

00:27:23.340 We were going to follow up on it, but my academic career exploded shortly thereafter.

00:27:28.300 But it was a good study.

00:27:29.800 The first thing we wanted to do was to assess how political beliefs clump together.

00:27:34.740 You can do that statistically by looking at the...

00:27:38.420 You can say, imagine you ask a large number of people a large number of questions.

00:27:42.580 You can see across people whether answering one question predicts in a given direction predicts answering another question in a given direction.

00:27:53.220 So then you can clump the questions.

00:27:54.860 And so you can analyze how belief statements aggregate.

00:27:59.760 So the first question we wanted to ask, answer, was there a coherent set of politically correct political beliefs?

00:28:09.280 Because back in 2015, the idea of political correctness, that there was a coherent body of beliefs, was parodied or pilloried as a right-wing conspiracy theory, which was on the face of an absurd, but it still needed to be demonstrated.

00:28:24.700 We actually found that there was two forms of politically correct belief systems.

00:28:29.280 One was more like classic left-wing liberalism, right?

00:28:34.980 But there was a smaller group of left-wing totalitarians, authoritarians.

00:28:40.040 And so those were people who adopted progressive policies, so-called progressive policies, but were also willing to implement them with force, essentially.

00:28:49.700 So there was a tyrannical aspect to it.

00:28:51.540 Okay, so once you establish that these groups of beliefs exist, you can look at the correlates or the predictors, right?

00:29:00.360 So there's a standard set of features that you would look for in a psychological study.

00:29:06.300 You know this, undoubtedly.

00:29:07.900 If you're trying to predict behavior, one of them would be general cognitive ability, which is essentially IQ, which is essentially something like rate of learning.

00:29:16.160 And temperament, big five temperament, and then sex, and then...

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00:30:35.880 Environmental history.

00:30:40.600 And so we used those variables and we found that the best predictor of being a politically correct authoritarian, that's radical left-wing authoritarian attitude, was low verbal IQ.

00:30:54.820 Right.

00:30:55.700 So you can imagine that people will default to a particular kind of simple-minded worldview if they can't think critically very well.

00:31:04.280 It was a very powerful predictor.

00:31:06.140 It was the major predictor by a lot.

00:31:08.640 It was a better predictor than the relationship between general cognitive ability and grades.

00:31:14.120 So you're less likely to tolerate others' beliefs and think of them as a person.

00:31:19.340 No, I don't think it's tolerance.

00:31:21.000 No, it's not tolerance.

00:31:21.500 I think it's that.

00:31:22.120 I think what it is is preference for a maximally simple explanation.

00:31:25.700 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.

00:31:33.620 But you also can't, you can't, like, America is a racist society.

00:31:38.180 All inequalities are a consequence of systemic oppression.

00:31:41.960 Well, that's one sentence.

00:31:43.940 It's one sentence.

00:31:44.760 Yes, they can't think beyond that.

00:31:46.080 And now you have an explanation for the whole world.

00:31:48.020 Well, that's attractive.

00:31:49.100 Like, we like belief.

00:31:50.220 People like belief systems that collapse into something simple.

00:31:53.680 Okay, there were other predictors.

00:31:55.460 Okay, being female. 0.99

00:31:57.540 Yep.

00:31:58.500 Having a feminine temperament.

00:32:00.600 That was an additional predictor over and above being female. 1.00

00:32:03.100 And that was after controlling for...

00:32:04.880 This is controlling for intelligence and being female. 1.00

00:32:08.600 The next was having a feminine temperament. 1.00

00:32:10.320 Agreeableness in particular.

00:32:11.720 Trait agreeableness.

00:32:12.840 Empathy, essentially.

00:32:14.580 And the next predictor was ever having taken even one politically correct course.

00:32:20.660 Okay, so now why am I telling you this?

00:32:22.580 Well, partly because it's a useful thing to know.

00:32:25.120 But the other reason is that the students in faculties of education, as you said, have the lowest SAT scores.

00:32:34.480 Okay, now the SAT purveyors don't like to describe the test as an intelligence test.

00:32:40.660 But it's an intelligence test.

00:32:43.200 Yeah, it's correlated at like 0.9.

00:32:45.800 It's an IQ test.

00:32:47.140 It's just not corrected for age.

00:32:48.720 So, I wonder if why there's selection into the education and academia based on these predictors.

00:32:55.880 Is it because going into the school system is seen as an easier job with pretty good benefits?

00:33:02.120 And so...

00:33:02.420 Well, that's a good question.

00:33:03.700 That could be it.

00:33:04.340 Well, I think, first of all, the admission criteria are low to absent, right?

00:33:08.880 So, you can get in.

00:33:10.260 Not barrier to entry.

00:33:11.000 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.

00:33:19.200 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.

00:33:33.160 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.

00:33:42.980 Now, and conscientiousness also predicts conservative political leaning, not liberal political leaning, right?

00:33:49.320 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?

00:33:59.820 And then they tilt radically to the left, which is also something that would be attractive to people who have decreased cognitive ability.

00:34:08.560 They select against conscientiousness because of the work hours and the security.

00:34:13.280 I mean, these are all things.

00:34:14.320 I had also seen a study that selection into education, you know, degrees was associated with risk aversion, too.

00:34:21.660 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.

00:34:38.120 Right, you said, I believe, I think it was in the parent revolution, I read both of your books in the last week, 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?

00:34:55.940 Was that a 10-year period? Was it a one-year period?

00:34:58.540 I don't recall.

00:34:59.160 Okay, well, the fundamentals.

00:35:00.780 Yeah, it's very low, very low.

00:35:02.440 Right, right, right.

00:35:03.600 Like, there's virtually no assessment of teachers for effectiveness, right?

00:35:08.940 You need...

00:35:09.720 No merit pay.

00:35:10.600 So, the best teachers leave.

00:35:11.720 The best teachers say, to heck with this.

00:35:13.900 We're not...

00:35:14.280 There's a person across the hall showing videos all day, and they're getting paid the same, or more than me, just because they've been around the system longer.

00:35:22.760 They reward years of service.

00:35:25.000 Yeah.

00:35:25.300 Not much.

00:35:25.860 I mean, I mentioned earlier that spending has gone up by 164% in real terms since 1970.

00:35:32.420 Teacher salaries, on average, have actually only increased by about 3% in real terms.

00:35:36.820 Right, so where's the bulk of the money going?

00:35:38.080 So, I think it's also going to pensions and other benefits, too, but it's going towards administrative low.

00:35:42.500 Yeah, yeah.

00:35:43.120 So, the same thing that happened at the universities, fundamentally.

00:35:45.540 Same in healthcare.

00:35:46.920 Yeah.

00:35:47.260 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.

00:35:56.780 The number of teachers in the system has increased about twice that rate, by about 10%.

00:36:01.840 Yeah.

00:36:02.960 Administrators have increased by about 95%.

00:36:06.000 Yeah, right.

00:36:06.480 So, it's exactly the same pattern as in higher education.

00:36:09.120 Yeah, it's become a jobs program for administrators.

00:36:10.940 It's a weird thing.

00:36:11.920 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.

00:36:26.120 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.

00:36:35.200 And what that implies is that there's no limit to the number of potential administrative contributions, right?

00:36:42.440 And then the question is, well, what would limit the growth of the administration?

00:36:47.800 And in a competitive environment, free market principles essentially limit because you run out of money, right?

00:36:55.020 So, you can only hire as many people as you can afford to hire.

00:36:58.060 This isn't a problem with administrative bureaucracies that have an unlimited source of funding.

00:37:05.080 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.

00:37:10.960 And there's actually been four studies on this.

00:37:13.500 Not a lot, but it's what we have.

00:37:15.400 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.

00:37:28.200 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.

00:37:34.780 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.

00:37:45.880 They start to allocate them towards the classroom, towards the teachers.

00:37:49.380 So, the teachers who remain actually end up better off.

00:37:52.380 Is that to stop the teachers moving into the private realm?

00:37:54.200 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.

00:38:03.540 Monopsony is a monopoly in the labor market.

00:38:05.880 With the government school system, you want to be a teacher, you basically got to take what they give you.

00:38:09.580 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.

00:38:22.040 So, some teachers are underpaid, some teachers are overpaid.

00:38:25.260 It depends on – we try to treat everything as one size fits all in our current system.

00:38:29.520 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.

00:38:43.320 In Florida, there's 11 academic studies on this topic.

00:38:46.140 Ten of them find positive effects of competition on the outcomes in the public schools.

00:38:50.760 It's been a rising tide that lifts all boats, and just over time you can see it work out in Florida too.

00:38:55.380 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.

00:39:02.220 Now, U.S. News & World Report has ranked Florida number one on education.

00:39:06.660 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.

00:39:11.620 They spend 27 percent less than the national average in Florida, but they have school choice for everybody.

00:39:16.980 Same here in Arizona.

00:39:17.920 They have school choice for everybody.

00:39:19.960 If you like your public school, you can keep your public school for real this time, unlike with your doctor.

00:39:25.860 Thanks, Obama, for lying about that.

00:39:27.520 But the public schools, in this case, actually do get better in response to competition.

00:39:32.160 And we have studies all across the nation.

00:39:34.480 Well, it's funny that you even have to make that case.

00:39:36.780 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.

00:39:45.920 Like, well, what else would improve quality?

00:39:50.040 What, wishful thinking or more money?

00:39:52.760 Well, you can spend an indefinite amount of money stupidly and counterproductively.

00:39:59.020 So, obviously.

00:40:01.180 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.

00:40:12.480 The peers are your enemies, not your peers.

00:40:14.200 Yeah, that's for sure.

00:40:14.880 I'm amazed you managed that.

00:40:16.240 So, I mentioned that first study I did about school choice reducing crime later on in life.

00:40:20.620 It was a very good study, the first of its kind, long-term data, student-level data, very rigorous study.

00:40:26.480 One of the reviewers, and one of the first places we sent it was a journal called Urban Education.

00:40:31.700 One of the reviewers said, you know, we like the methods and we buy that it's a causal relationship.

00:40:36.640 But they said, you called the students urban students.

00:40:40.360 You can't say that.

00:40:41.280 They are students in urban areas.

00:40:43.180 So, it was like a politically correct thing, and I looked at their about the journal.

00:40:46.640 The only reason we said that was because they said urban students in their own about the journal.

00:40:51.400 Total hypocrites on the issue.

00:40:53.080 Why were they allowed to say it?

00:40:54.340 But I wasn't allowed to say it, but they went further than that.

00:40:57.100 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.

00:41:06.540 I mean, it's just so ridiculous.

00:41:07.560 But the study I wanted to bring up about competition was actually in my home state of Texas.

00:41:11.180 I did a survey experiment with my co-authors.

00:41:14.660 So, I randomly assigned different surveys to public school leaders in Texas.

00:41:20.220 And one of the – 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.

00:41:31.440 And I was asking them where they were going to put their money next year.

00:41:34.920 Like, where were they going to allocate resources?

00:41:36.620 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.

00:41:47.660 Any idea why?

00:41:49.160 Well, because they know that they might have to think about where they're going to spend money if they have a competitor.

00:41:55.300 Because if they waste the money, families are going to go there.

00:41:57.880 But their argument usually is that, obviously, it's got to be something like more administrators make for a more effective school system.

00:42:04.560 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.

00:42:11.820 They just thought, I'm answering a simple survey question.

00:42:16.040 Right.

00:42:16.380 And they didn't know whether the treatment group or not.

00:42:20.000 Right, right.

00:42:20.860 How did you manage to – you said 40 studies?

00:42:24.020 Yeah, peer-reviewed.

00:42:25.220 Yeah, well, over what period of time?

00:42:26.460 Other ones that weren't peer-reviewed, but I almost think peer-review is a negative indicator at this point because of the peers that are looking at your study.

00:42:33.240 We won't go there, yes.

00:42:34.100 Yeah, but in your case, that's probably not the truth because the probability that you're going to publish something that challenges the –

00:42:43.980 It's counter to my views.

00:42:44.420 Absolutely, man.

00:42:45.920 So the fact that – this is exactly what I'm asking you.

00:42:48.420 It's like how many – over how many years did you publish 40 studies?

00:42:52.620 2016, I want to say, was my first.

00:42:54.400 So what is this, nine or so years.

00:42:56.500 So you've published four, five studies a year.

00:42:59.340 Yeah, and a lot of them were at the very beginning when I was in grad school because I thought that that mattered for getting an academic job.

00:43:05.260 I thought it mattered.

00:43:06.380 It did matter.

00:43:07.480 But – and I wasn't very serious on the job market.

00:43:11.440 But I applied to like three schools, and most people will apply to like 100 if you're serious.

00:43:15.220 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 –

00:43:20.460 You mean when you were on the job market?

00:43:21.840 When I was on the job market, my first think tank was called the Cato Institute.

00:43:25.180 It's a libertarian think tank.

00:43:26.900 And I moved to D.C. while I was finishing my Ph.D. like two and a half years into the program.

00:43:31.100 I ended up finishing it.

00:43:32.660 And I've slowed down publications since then.

00:43:35.700 But some of these lefty departments didn't even give me a call.

00:43:38.860 But I had like nearly a dozen peer-reviewed publications a few years into my Ph.D. program.

00:43:46.960 How do you do that?

00:43:48.140 So just for everybody watching and listening, so you can draw a rough equivalent between number of publications and a given degree.

00:43:59.160 So for example, with one publication, you have a master's degree essentially, although most master's students don't even have one publication.

00:44:07.780 With three, you have a Ph.D.

00:44:10.140 And you have 40.

00:44:11.960 Yeah.

00:44:12.240 Right.

00:44:12.640 And you said you had a dozen of them two and a half years into your Ph.D.

00:44:17.060 And some of the far-lefty departments wouldn't even call me because they select based on ideology.

00:44:22.920 They don't select based on productivity or intelligence or anything like that.

00:44:28.880 But peer-reviewed articles are not the same thing as intelligence.

00:44:31.620 I'll say that.

00:44:32.320 But I found out really quickly that – and I'm glad.

00:44:37.000 I had a fork in the road.

00:44:37.920 I did have an offer from one academic institution.

00:44:40.900 It was Kennesaw State University in Georgia.

00:44:43.360 And I think they had like a free market center there, so they were friendly.

00:44:47.820 So how many publications – sorry, how many publications did you have when you entered the job market?

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00:45:55.760 Approximately a dozen.

00:45:59.100 Nearly a dozen.

00:45:59.900 A dozen.

00:46:01.220 Okay.

00:46:01.720 So in principle, you should have been a very hot prospect because a dozen publications in most institutions would give you pretty serious-

00:46:10.760 Yeah, I didn't publish in the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

00:46:13.700 It wasn't like the-

00:46:14.840 Yeah, still, a dozen's a lot.

00:46:17.100 You know, a dozen's a lot.

00:46:18.340 And that would give you serious consideration for promotion to associate professor at many educational institutions.

00:46:26.020 So they should have been lining up at your door.

00:46:28.520 Okay, so-

00:46:28.920 But I also didn't do it seriously.

00:46:30.580 Like three, you know, applying to three schools just to put my feet in the water to see what would happen.

00:46:35.260 Right.

00:46:35.460 It's not the same thing as what most people do with, you know, they're applying to 100 different schools.

00:46:40.160 True, true.

00:46:40.920 And so, you know-

00:46:41.840 Okay, so you didn't have a full test of whether-

00:46:43.880 Yeah, so it might have not-

00:46:46.440 It might have been-

00:46:48.140 I might have gotten more of a fair shake if I actually did a real-

00:46:50.960 Yeah, okay, okay, okay, okay.

00:46:53.120 Fair enough.

00:46:54.200 All right, so another mystery about you, I would say, is you've had a lot of impact.

00:47:02.960 How old are you?

00:47:04.000 33.

00:47:04.400 Okay, okay, so you're pretty early on in what would be an academic career, let's say.

00:47:09.620 And you've had a lot of impact on public policy, but more on public consciousness.

00:47:17.060 And so, not only have you produced a remarkable body of research, but you're very good at public communication.

00:47:26.820 That's a rare combination of skills.

00:47:28.320 So, I guess the first thing I'd like to know is, I mean, I know about you.

00:47:31.960 I'm probably more prone to follow, find and follow people like you.

00:47:36.900 Tell me about how you understand your public influence.

00:47:41.040 Like, how broad an influence do you have?

00:47:43.120 How well are your books selling?

00:47:44.440 And what are your other major dimensions of communication?

00:47:48.180 Yeah.

00:47:48.260 So, this one hit the national bestseller list, USA Today, the New York Times, they didn't put me on their list for some reason.

00:47:54.000 But Trump endorsed the book.

00:47:55.980 Vivek Ramaswamy, Pete Hegseth, Ted Cruz, my senator from Texas, he actually says on the back, you can ruin Randy Weingarten's day by reading this book.

00:48:05.300 So, there's that.

00:48:07.560 But I also went to government schools all through K-12, so I don't know how I did any of this.

00:48:12.360 You can just check out my handwriting in the beginning.

00:48:15.560 It's very horrible.

00:48:16.460 I blame it on my government school education.

00:48:18.400 It's to you, Jordan.

00:48:19.260 I'm going to give it to you right after the recording.

00:48:21.580 But I think the way that I really started to change the narrative when it came to school choice was talking about it differently.

00:48:29.920 You know, these days we can just say school choice, and you and I know what we're talking about.

00:48:33.380 But when I first entered the think tank world, I made a deliberate shift to talk about funding students, not systems.

00:48:41.840 And it's a linguistic thing.

00:48:42.540 Oh, is that your phrase?

00:48:43.540 That's my phrase I came up with.

00:48:44.860 It's good to have a phrase.

00:48:45.940 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.

00:48:53.260 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 shouldn't.

00:49:05.240 Well, yeah, you should never let the side that you're opposing define the terms of engagement.

00:49:11.660 Conservatives are very bad at that.

00:49:13.360 They're always on the – I'll give you an example.

00:49:15.580 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.

00:49:25.620 All five of them were picked by the left, right?

00:49:28.240 So, one of them, for example, I think –

00:49:30.080 Playing on their turf already.

00:49:30.700 Well, 40% of the debate was about climate change, right?

00:49:33.720 So, as soon as you debate that, you lose, right?

00:49:36.860 Because the fact that you're even talking about it means that it's one of your priorities.

00:49:41.140 And so, yeah, you've got to get the question right.

00:49:43.000 So, you said – tell me your phrase again.

00:49:45.280 Funding students, not systems.

00:49:47.480 So, it's more transparent.

00:49:48.740 People know, like, this is the concept of the money following the child.

00:49:50.580 Well, and they are the consumer.

00:49:52.540 Yep.

00:49:52.960 Yeah.

00:49:53.180 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, 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, will support programs where the money follows the individual.

00:50:13.860 Think about it.

00:50:14.360 When we have grocery stores, which I mentioned earlier, we have food stamps.

00:50:17.600 Yeah.

00:50:17.780 We don't say the food stamps must be spent at a signed Walmart or an assigned person.

00:50:21.360 That's a good analogy.

00:50:23.060 And so, we also do this with higher ed.

00:50:24.740 It's not just that we do this with other industries.

00:50:27.320 We do this with education, too.

00:50:28.660 Higher ed.

00:50:29.080 We have Pell Grants in the U.S.

00:50:30.520 We have the GI Bill.

00:50:34.200 These are taxpayer dollars that can be used at private universities, if you want, and it follows the decision of the student.

00:50:41.340 So, it's the equivalent of money, essentially, although a little more narrowly targeted.

00:50:45.860 Yeah, because the status quo would always say we need public money for public schools. 0.67

00:50:49.680 And my quick response was, well, you support public taxpayer dollars for private everything else when it comes to higher ed.

00:50:56.500 You support Pell Grants that go to private religious universities.

00:51:00.820 You support vouchers when it comes to hospitals.

00:51:03.860 We have Medicaid vouchers.

00:51:05.260 You can take that to a religiously affiliated hospital if you want.

00:51:08.920 We do this with pre-K.

00:51:10.080 We have the Head Start programs.

00:51:11.300 All the Democrats support it.

00:51:12.860 It's a pre-K program where the money follows your decision to a private provider of pre-K, even a religious one.

00:51:19.680 Has that helped Head Start?

00:51:23.740 Do you know?

00:51:24.820 Has it improved its quality?

00:51:26.500 Head Start evaluations are horrible.

00:51:29.620 They find that it spends a lot of money, and they don't improve outcomes.

00:51:33.860 Most of the results are null results.

00:51:35.720 They improve some outcomes.

00:51:37.340 People are more likely to graduate, and they're less likely to be thrown in prison or get pregnant.

00:51:42.580 But they don't improve cognitive performance.

00:51:44.620 I don't think that was the RCT, though.

00:51:46.140 I think that was more of like a regression with controls, which it's still something.

00:51:51.740 Could be.

00:51:51.960 Well, the crucial issue is there's no evidence that Head Start improves academic performance, and that's a consequence of multiple reviews.

00:51:59.580 And it's really a catastrophe that it's the case.

00:52:01.980 And the latest pre-K evaluation statewide was in Tennessee.

00:52:05.560 Yeah?

00:52:06.120 When was that?

00:52:06.960 That was a few years ago.

00:52:08.300 They followed them through sixth grade.

00:52:09.800 Oh, yeah.

00:52:10.120 And it was a randomized control trial.

00:52:12.360 They found that those who won the lottery were worse off academically and behaviorally by the end of sixth grade.

00:52:19.160 Okay, won the lottery meaning?

00:52:20.840 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.

00:52:28.220 So they were worse behaviorally as well.

00:52:30.280 Maybe because the parents have an advantage at raising their own kids.

00:52:35.200 Maybe they're better at disciplining the kids at home.

00:52:37.880 I did a very programmatic review of Head Start in the 80s.

00:52:43.480 So that's quite a long time ago, but the programs had been operating for a very long time.

00:52:47.600 And there were, I think, five major reviews.

00:52:50.120 And at that time, the findings were that Head Start accelerated cognitive performance, so test scores, for a year or two following the interventions.

00:53:01.100 But that by grade six, there was no effect.

00:53:05.200 But that the longer-term effects seemed to be behavioral.

00:53:09.300 And so reduced crime.

00:53:11.200 No, no.

00:53:11.800 They were positive.

00:53:12.280 Oh, they were.

00:53:12.740 Those were positive.

00:53:13.300 They were positive.

00:53:14.220 Less pregnancy, less crime, and higher probability of graduating. 0.94

00:53:17.980 So – and the relevant issue with regards to graduation in principle was that because the kids who had gone to Head Start behaved better, they were less likely to be held back.

00:53:28.660 But you're saying that the more recent –

00:53:30.580 The more recent Tennessee experiment, which is the latest one, RCT, negative effects on academics and behavior through sixth grade, which is the last year of the study.

00:53:39.300 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.

00:53:48.440 Yeah, yeah.

00:53:48.980 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.

00:53:59.020 And we also had a – there is an RCT.

00:54:01.040 That was with choice.

00:54:02.260 That was with a voucher program in Milwaukee.

00:54:04.180 Uh-huh.

00:54:04.840 That one was not an RCT.

00:54:06.300 We did the best we could with – we even controlled for neighborhood and single-parent households and religiosity, all the – as many demographics as you could get to control for.

00:54:17.340 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.

00:54:27.000 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.

00:54:37.380 Yeah, yeah.

00:54:37.900 By 100%.

00:54:38.960 It was a complete elimination for lottery winners through the study period.

00:54:43.300 I don't remember how long they covered.

00:54:44.640 It might not have lasted forever.

00:54:46.420 But through the study period, it was like 5% were incarcerated for the control group in the public schools, lottery winners who got into the charter schools, 0%.

00:54:56.660 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.

00:55:08.860 I'm saying if we're going to spend the money, we might as well fund the people as opposed to the buildings.

00:55:14.600 Yeah, yeah.

00:55:14.800 No, no.

00:55:15.140 I understand.

00:55:15.900 Well, I sidetracked a little bit into Head Start because doing that review for me was actually very disheartening.

00:55:26.140 Because the thing about Head Start – and this can allow us to talk about political issues more broadly or conceptual issues –

00:55:34.100 nobody liked the fact that poverty tended to persist multi-generationally.

00:55:40.740 And there were reasons to assume that if you gave so-called disadvantaged kids a Head Start, that A, that might work, but B, that it might even have self-reinforcing consequences, right?

00:55:54.900 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, and the consequence of that compounds with time.

00:56:06.840 And so they're actually farther ahead of their peers by grade six because they got this Head Start, you know, and that didn't happen.

00:56:15.280 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.

00:56:25.360 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.

00:56:37.260 And the answer is virtually none. And also, the Head Start programs were also used as employment programs, so the probability that a given Head Start teacher had any qualification was extremely low.

00:56:53.260 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 a daycare program.

00:57:05.220 Well, exactly, and often not a good one. 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, but for kids in absolutely wretched conditions –

00:57:23.220 Yeah, can't get any worse, right?

00:57:24.580 Yeah, yeah. Well, maybe you –

00:57:26.200 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.

00:57:32.900 Right. So – but you were convinced that the Tennessee data – that's – I don't know the study.

00:57:36.780 That's the latest experiment, and it's peer-reviewed, published.

00:57:38.540 Oh, that's already too bad.

00:57:39.740 And the Head Starts that I've seen as far as the RCTs –

00:57:42.720 RCTs, yeah, randomized control trial.

00:57:44.720 Had the fade-outs.

00:57:45.480 Yeah.

00:57:45.640 But one more thing that I think that I added that was really important to the conversation about school choice – I mean, one thing – it's not all me, right?

00:57:53.740 It was COVID that helped open the eyes of parents.

00:57:55.680 I was just there with the right ideas laying around at the time, as Milton Friedman famously put it.

00:58:00.320 Yeah, yeah.

00:58:00.960 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.

00:58:09.580 We still have elected officials saying these things using left-leaning arguments to advance school choice, which I think they're all good arguments.

00:58:15.920 It's true that the lowest-income are in the worst schools, that they would benefit the most. 0.99

00:58:19.880 School choice is an equalizer.

00:58:21.920 But there's also right-leaning arguments you can make about choosing schools that align with your values.

00:58:26.320 The public schools are Marxist.

00:58:27.660 We don't want gender ideology.

00:58:29.020 We want schools that teach you that America is a great country, not a horrible country.

00:58:33.620 And so you can make all these different types of arguments.

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00:59:36.860 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, so I'm not going to lead on it.

00:59:52.000 And then the Democrats, they're controlled by the teachers' unions anyway, so you're not going to make much ground with them regardless of the argument you're making.

00:59:59.440 They respond to power, not logic.

01:00:01.400 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.

01:00:08.040 But now it's become more of a GOP litmus test issue.

01:00:13.300 Voters have gone to the ballot box and held Republicans accountable for being against school choice in Texas, my home state.

01:00:22.100 We failed on school choice last year because we had 21 Republicans join all the Democrats in the House to kill school choice.

01:00:29.440 And they came up with their arguments about how they were in rural areas and they didn't need to vote for this.

01:00:33.900 But after the primaries, now 14 of them are gone.

01:00:36.860 That was a political earthquake.

01:00:38.760 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, and you need 76 votes to pass a school choice bill.

01:00:51.100 What did you have to do with what happened in Virginia?

01:00:54.140 Well, in Virginia, we had Mr. Terry.

01:00:56.320 I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach, McAuliffe on the debate stage.

01:01:00.200 He was the former governor of Virginia, and he said that at the final debate.

01:01:04.280 He was up in the polls by a lot.

01:01:05.940 It flipped right after that because parents were pissed.

01:01:08.980 Virginia closed their schools just about more than any other state.

01:01:12.280 They were as bad as California when it came to reopening the schools in Virginia.

01:01:16.480 And Glenn Youngkin turned that into an opportunity.

01:01:19.520 He laid out a blueprint for success for Republicans going forward.

01:01:22.820 Glenn Youngkin ended up winning that election by six points with education voters, and that was the number two issue in that election, which is a big deal because education is usually at the bottom.

01:01:33.660 Voters, they rank jobs, the economy, crime at the top.

01:01:37.800 Education was number two, and a Republican won on that issue.

01:01:41.300 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.

01:01:49.480 You would think.

01:01:50.740 But I think for a long time, people thought things were fine, right?

01:01:53.940 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.

01:02:05.000 They get into great universities that are good on paper.

01:02:07.560 Well, they're also for a long time.

01:02:09.140 Like, when I went to school as a kid, like, I hated school.

01:02:13.140 It bored me to death.

01:02:15.560 But I have to say that my teachers didn't teach me insane things, right?

01:02:21.680 And so we don't just have a failure.

01:02:23.840 I don't know when that blip happened either.

01:02:24.440 Somewhere around mid – somewhere around 2010, things really went sideways.

01:02:29.920 They went sideways in the universities too.

01:02:31.520 Like, I saw that blip of political correctness in the 1990s when I was teaching in Boston.

01:02:36.640 But it was mostly outliers.

01:02:38.600 You know, it was the radical fringe, although a lot of them were in the educational psychology departments.

01:02:44.120 But they weren't – they didn't have the upper hand.

01:02:46.700 And somewhere around 2010, that flipped hard.

01:02:49.380 And I think that those – that sort of thing flips partly too.

01:02:53.060 You said – you talked about good teachers leaving.

01:02:55.540 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.

01:03:08.340 They all leave, right?

01:03:09.780 And then – well, then you're just left with the worst of the worst, right?

01:03:13.520 And then they hire people who are even worse than they are and the whole thing's, you know, going off its railings.

01:03:19.220 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.

01:03:33.960 And then people started to notice.

01:03:35.740 And it was likely the gender issue that did that. 0.95

01:03:38.160 And I think 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 –

01:03:51.900 Oh, yeah.

01:03:52.600 So, it's almost like it's a – it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

01:03:57.480 I've spoken to Republican governors about this on multiple occasions.

01:04:01.300 I think I met you at RGA, by the way, briefly.

01:04:03.600 Yes, that's right.

01:04:04.680 That's right.

01:04:05.420 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.

01:04:19.620 And if they continue to spend half the state's money on K-12 education, essentially, that's dominated by progressive Marxists.

01:04:27.380 Like, everything else that is happening is, as far as I'm concerned, it's blowing in the wind.

01:04:32.140 And so, I want to challenge you on a couple of things because I'd like your opinion.

01:04:36.920 See, I can understand the rationale, the logic for your choice approach, and I can see it from the free market perspective.

01:04:45.500 So, let's say the libertarian perspective.

01:04:47.060 I can see it from the parent's right perspective.

01:04:49.920 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.

01:05:03.840 Great. All of that makes sense.

01:05:06.220 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.

01:05:27.780 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?

01:05:35.540 The Catholic schools are full of woke teachers.

01:05:37.600 Like, it's a pervasive problem.

01:05:39.540 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 certification.

01:05:51.120 We need alternative certification.

01:05:52.700 So, I think you're right that we have to have a multi-pronged approach.

01:05:56.000 School choice isn't the silver bullet for everything, and neither is alternative certification.

01:06:00.340 We should fight the battle on multiple fronts.

01:06:03.140 And some people do set up this false dichotomy.

01:06:05.360 They'll say, oh, you're saying school choice will cure everything.

01:06:08.160 Well, not exactly.

01:06:10.020 We should also reform the public school system.

01:06:12.300 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.

01:06:19.140 But we also need an escape valve.

01:06:22.420 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.

01:06:30.400 They've banned critical race theory.

01:06:32.160 They're talking about banning DEI in public schools this year as well.

01:06:35.400 We have Trump with his executive orders helping out as well.

01:06:37.820 But we have undercover video from a group called Accuracy in Media.

01:06:41.820 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.

01:06:53.340 Sure, of course they are.

01:06:54.380 And they're proud about it.

01:06:55.700 They're like, yeah, we're still doing CRT, but we're just going to call it something else.

01:06:59.400 How do you ban ideas?

01:07:01.220 Like this is –

01:07:01.880 Behind closed doors, they continue to do what they want.

01:07:04.020 Well, you see this in the universities too.

01:07:07.240 It's like, well, we're going to scrap our DEI programs.

01:07:10.560 It's like they're not scrapping them.

01:07:11.700 They're just renaming them.

01:07:13.440 They move – they just retitle this person and they continue to do exactly the same thing.

01:07:17.900 And you can camouflage what you're doing with words, no problem.

01:07:21.300 It'll take people years to figure it out.

01:07:23.360 And so this is another part – okay, so –

01:07:25.740 So I'm not saying that we shouldn't try because it isn't perfect enforcement, but we should have both of these – we need top-down accountability but also bottom-up for if you're a parent, you get a whiff of these things happening.

01:07:37.840 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.

01:07:44.640 I'm sending my kids somewhere else.

01:07:45.940 Somewhere else, yeah.

01:07:46.400 And I think that would give a pressure for the public schools to say, let's knock it off.

01:07:50.240 I don't want to irritate anybody on the left or the right.

01:07:52.940 I'm going to focus on the basics, math, reading, and writing, and then you're not going to have all of them.

01:07:59.720 And so you might say, well, what about the private schools?

01:08:01.400 Some of them – they also operate in this kind of small market right now already when you don't have choice.

01:08:06.880 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.

01:08:14.520 Especially right now, we're pushing something called education savings accounts.

01:08:18.220 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.

01:08:25.140 They were calling them pandemic pods during the COVID era where five to ten children were getting together in a household.

01:08:30.900 It's kind of like the one-room schoolhouse idea.

01:08:33.800 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.

01:08:40.360 And this has happened in Arizona too.

01:08:41.900 So you think the diversity of school proliferation will eventually solve the ideological problem?

01:08:47.880 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?

01:08:54.480 I'd say that's still better than the status quo where you have zero choices.

01:08:58.840 But at least now you can take the funding.

01:09:01.980 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.

01:09:11.480 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.

01:09:17.780 Most of them now are.

01:09:19.180 And Arizona has an education savings account.

01:09:22.140 They've had one for over a decade.

01:09:23.560 They just went all in in 2022, making it available to everybody.

01:09:27.920 They actually crashed the government website in Arizona because so many families signed up right when they opened up the floodgates.

01:09:33.900 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

01:09:43.400 Well, yeah, yeah, because a lot of-

01:09:45.700 Which is what the public school system is already, right?

01:09:48.120 Yeah, right.

01:09:48.680 It's subsidy for-

01:09:49.520 But it's a failing system that not a lot of people don't see it as benefit.

01:09:52.580 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

01:10:03.660 And so that's after expenses.

01:10:06.860 And so that's a very, it's very unlikely.

01:10:09.240 If you think about a classroom of, you know, 30 kids at $600,000, where's all the money going?

01:10:14.920 If the teachers are only making $60,000 a year on average, where's the rest?

01:10:18.700 Yeah, well, you could figure, what, $60,000 for overhead in terms of physical plant, something like that.

01:10:24.260 So that's $120,000.

01:10:25.540 The superintendents in Texas, you know, a lot of them make more than the president of the United States.

01:10:28.540 We have a less, a half a dozen or so who make over $400,000 a year.

01:10:33.760 So where does, well, so tell me, where does the, where does the, so you said-

01:10:38.820 A lot of buildings, they love building new schools and stadiums.

01:10:41.380 Yeah.

01:10:41.980 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.

01:10:52.260 So maybe that improves, you know, the self-esteem of the kids or whatever the teachers are trying to do these days.

01:10:57.920 But it's just frivolous things.

01:11:01.400 And you see this at the university level too, right?

01:11:03.120 They had these extravagant water parks and tuition is going up to cover these things and also subsidies from the government too.

01:11:11.940 But these micro schools are really shaking things up. 0.99

01:11:16.840 The whole, the whole factory model itself is, is frightened because of this.

01:11:20.180 In fact, when Crenda micro schools in Arizona was reporting just huge increases in enrollment during COVID because the government schools were closed.

01:11:29.260 So families were figuring it out and they, a lot of them went to these micro schools.

01:11:35.700 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.

01:11:43.080 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.

01:11:58.340 They knew they were going to lose funding because public schools are funded based on enrollment counts.

01:12:01.600 And so if you lose some students, you're going to lose some money, whether you have a school choice program or not.

01:12:06.760 And in Arizona, you can use those education savings accounts to pay for Prenda micro schools and other ones too.

01:12:14.220 Define micro school.

01:12:15.840 It's a miniature school.

01:12:17.340 And some people, there's a lot of different definitions for it, but basically a miniature private school.

01:12:21.880 And during COVID era, it was basically five to 10 children getting together in households to economize on homeschooling.

01:12:29.160 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.

01:12:36.640 Which you could do if it's $20,000 per.

01:12:39.360 So what's, what is the amount of the typical voucher?

01:12:42.420 If, if school, if student expenditure.

01:12:44.720 Yeah.

01:12:45.020 Why?

01:12:45.100 So it saves taxpayer money.

01:12:46.360 And most of these bills are passed at the state level.

01:12:48.700 Yeah.

01:12:48.840 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.

01:12:54.900 We, the word education is not in our constitution.

01:12:56.700 It's an unconstitutional waste of time and money.

01:12:59.960 It's, but that's only about 8% of the total spending, 8 to 10%.

01:13:03.060 Okay.

01:13:03.580 The other 45, 45 are state and local dollars.

01:13:07.200 These bills are typically passed in state legislatures.

01:13:09.840 So it's about half of the total that follows the students.

01:13:12.480 So let's say on average, 10,000 versus the 20,000 that's spent in the government schools.

01:13:17.300 So.

01:13:17.740 Is any of that happening locally?

01:13:18.840 Is it likely as well to, to pull in the rest of that money?

01:13:21.120 There have been some local vouchers that have passed in, in, in Colorado, a blue state.

01:13:25.700 There was Douglas County had at once a couple of decades ago passed the voucher program.

01:13:30.300 It got nixed in the court by a, by a lefty judge.

01:13:34.120 And that program is no longer on the books.

01:13:36.820 New Hampshire, which passed a state level program, also proposed the bill a year or two ago in their legislature to also allow the local, local districts to have the money fall to the child.

01:13:47.400 If they opted in as well, that bill got tabled.

01:13:50.680 That was one that I was really excited.

01:13:52.320 But that's, I think that's the next step in the revolution.

01:13:55.480 But at the same time, if the private schools are doing it for less and if the micro schools are doing a good job for less, do we want all of the dollars following the student? 0.87

01:14:06.480 I think it should be equal across sectors.

01:14:08.480 If we're going to spend the money, I think the state and local should follow the student, not just the state.

01:14:12.640 But the reality is it's mostly basically everywhere at this point.

01:14:17.360 Well, and also the reality is, as you pointed out, that there's enough money at the state level to produce economic incentive for the micro schools, for example.

01:14:25.920 You know, you could imagine five kids together, that's $50,000 a year.

01:14:30.920 That's a pretty good supplement for a given parent's income.

01:14:34.020 And so, okay, so let's talk about, let's see, where should we go now?

01:14:41.920 Yeah, okay, effects.

01:14:45.180 So I want to talk a little bit more about your means of communication.

01:14:49.300 You've been working for these think tanks.

01:14:50.780 But your work has received broad public attention.

01:14:55.140 Okay, so now you also said that that was in part because you were in the right place at the right time.

01:14:59.820 Yeah, yeah, that makes a difference.

01:15:01.180 And you've done the background research, right?

01:15:03.040 So you had a message that was saleable given the state of the zeitgeist, let's say.

01:15:10.000 Okay, well, that's crucially important, right?

01:15:12.100 But it's also important to be able to capitalize on that.

01:15:14.800 Okay, so how would you characterize the consequences of your work so far?

01:15:20.320 What have you seen shifting that you would attribute, at least in part, to the message that you've been disseminating?

01:15:28.220 Yeah, changing the way people talk about school choice in terms of the money following the child.

01:15:32.040 There have been a lot of legislators on the House floor, Senate floor, talking about funding students, not systems.

01:15:39.900 So they've developed my arguments.

01:15:41.980 And I think a lot of them follow me on social media.

01:15:44.480 And politicians, again, they want to get reelected.

01:15:47.360 They want to look good.

01:15:48.720 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.

01:15:58.640 And so I think they've adopted some of the language and arguments and studies that I've conducted and also cited myself.

01:16:05.500 Is X your most effective?

01:16:07.480 It is, for sure.

01:16:08.280 Yeah, I have Facebook and Instagram, but they're not nearly.

01:16:10.940 I have over 200,000 followers on X.

01:16:13.340 It's not like crazy, but it's ballooned in a short amount of time.

01:16:18.580 Who follows you?

01:16:19.920 Do you follow me?

01:16:21.000 Yes, I certainly do.

01:16:23.560 Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, a lot of the – Vivek Ramaswamy.

01:16:27.020 There's a lot of influential people who follow me.

01:16:29.720 Libs at TikTok, a lot of big accounts.

01:16:32.380 Donald Trump doesn't follow me.

01:16:33.540 Maybe after he sees this episode, he'll jump on the headwagon.

01:16:37.920 State governors, state treasurers.

01:16:39.640 Yeah, so Doug Ducey, who's here in Arizona, he was the first state to go all in on school choice, and I have a good relationship with him.

01:16:49.060 He's no longer the governor.

01:16:50.140 He's now Katie Hobbs in Arizona, who's a hypocrite on school choice.

01:16:52.880 She went to Catholic school, and now she opposes school choice for other families.

01:16:56.060 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.

01:17:04.320 He often uses the analogy of when the first person broke the four-minute mile.

01:17:10.240 Before he – the first person did it, I don't remember his name.

01:17:13.520 People thought it was impossible for a human being to run below a four-minute mile.

01:17:17.540 But once the first person did it, you had just this cascade effect of tons of people breaking.

01:17:22.580 Yeah, yeah.

01:17:22.840 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.

01:17:32.840 It was decades.

01:17:34.020 We were hitting our head against the wall.

01:17:35.500 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.

01:17:43.360 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.

01:17:52.840 One, because it allows for more competition, allows for a bigger supply-side response, more of a market response.

01:18:01.080 But also we're paying for public schools for high- and low-income families.

01:18:04.600 They should be able to benefit from school choice as well.

01:18:06.560 We don't discriminate based on income for the public schools.

01:18:08.840 We shouldn't discriminate based on income for school choice either.

01:18:13.360 And politics, again, is all about organized interest pushing for what they want.

01:18:18.100 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.

01:18:31.700 Yeah, well, so let me ask you about that.

01:18:35.860 I've discussed school choice with some of my more intelligent liberal friends.

01:18:40.620 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.

01:18:50.280 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.

01:19:08.080 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.

01:19:18.620 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.

01:19:36.560 You already have that inequality baked into the government school system. 1.00

01:19:39.540 You have Baltimore.

01:19:40.380 They have 40 percent of their high schools have zero percent math proficiency rate.

01:19:43.840 You see the same thing in places like Chicago.

01:19:46.440 And so they shouldn't make perfect the enemy of the good.

01:19:49.780 And this fear-mongering hasn't happened with school choice.

01:19:52.680 The public schools, if anything, have gotten better.

01:19:54.540 I cited Florida, but we also have nationwide data on this.

01:19:57.860 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.

01:20:07.800 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.

01:20:18.440 So the main argument that the unions put forward is the worst argument in terms of it being supported by the evidence.

01:20:25.520 But a lot of people respond to fear-mongering, and so they do that.

01:20:28.520 Well, it's a reasonable hypothesis, but the fact that the studies have already been done indicating that the—

01:20:34.260 There's one other study on this topic that I think is really important, and it was done by Cornell researchers, published in 2018, 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.

01:20:55.220 Doesn't seem like a surprising finding to me.

01:20:57.400 Probably not.

01:20:57.920 If you have choice now, you can exercise it.

01:20:59.620 You're going to look—the point is school choice increases parental involvement by definition.

01:21:05.980 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, now all of a sudden you give them $10,000 to seek out a better option, they're not going to be depressed by looking at the private school.

01:21:22.400 So they're going to look, and they're going to exercise that choice.

01:21:24.620 Well, it's definitely the case, too.

01:21:25.800 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.

01:21:37.880 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?

01:21:45.560 And so most parents, for example, regardless of their own literacy levels, would like to have children who are literate and well-educated.

01:21:55.740 And they might not know how to do it, but they want it.

01:21:58.300 They know their kids better than anybody else.

01:22:00.200 Yeah, well, they actually care.

01:22:01.840 That's right.

01:22:02.140 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.

01:22:08.440 Right, right, okay.

01:22:09.680 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.

01:22:21.460 Yeah, they're rigorous studies.

01:22:23.260 You can't randomly assign competition, but it's as good as you can get.

01:22:28.180 And I've cited all the studies on that topic.

01:22:30.780 Okay, okay, okay.

01:22:31.740 So let's end with this.

01:22:32.880 Let's end this portion of the discussion.

01:22:36.200 I think what we'll do—

01:22:37.560 I wanted to hit one more thing.

01:22:38.600 Yeah, well, this is what I want to give you the opportunity to do that.

01:22:41.100 So if there's anything else you'd like to bring up, do it now, and then we'll turn to the Delaware side.

01:22:45.880 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.

01:22:52.340 So they had the most to benefit, most to gain from having more options in their kids' education.

01:22:57.720 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.

01:23:03.880 Well, school choice for me, but not for me, hypocrisy again.

01:23:06.740 It strikes again.

01:23:07.540 It's everywhere.

01:23:09.200 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.

01:23:25.620 And I believe about 95 percent of the kids were black or Hispanic.

01:23:30.280 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.

01:23:38.180 In Florida as well, there's a really interesting story about how DeSantis actually won in 2018.

01:23:43.960 He actually barely won the governor's race in 2018.

01:23:46.520 And the headline in the Wall Street Journal the next day was that school choice moms tipped the governor's race for DeSantis.

01:23:54.280 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.

01:24:13.660 And those kids were disproportionately low-income and non-white kids.

01:24:17.760 So this is another way that, one, Republicans can make inroads with groups that they hadn't reached out to before.

01:24:24.140 And it's also – it shows you that this shouldn't be a partisan issue.

01:24:28.240 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.

01:24:36.060 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.

01:24:52.480 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.

01:24:59.040 Well, it isn't an obviously partisan issue.

01:25:02.000 It shouldn't be.

01:25:02.760 Well, it's like cost-cutting in government.

01:25:05.160 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?

01:25:16.880 Because then, at least in principle, more money could be spent on things that actually work.

01:25:22.000 Yeah, exactly.

01:25:23.160 And this seems to be, I mean, you can make a perfectly cogent case, as you have, I would say, for how broadening choice, it might even preferentially benefit people who are poor and dispossessed.

01:25:36.080 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, mired in poverty, often multi-generationally.

01:25:47.560 And I don't see any way out of that than the multiplication of supply.

01:25:53.880 And it's also the case that the money of a poor person is just as good as the money of a rich person.

01:25:59.480 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.

01:26:07.500 Right, right, right.

01:26:08.840 All right.

01:26:09.260 So, I think we'll turn to the Daily Wire side now.

01:26:12.840 And I think I'll talk to you about a couple of things.

01:26:15.060 I'd like to know about your future plans, strategic and conceptual.

01:26:20.260 Where do you go next?

01:26:21.760 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.

01:26:33.840 And I'd like to talk to you more about any pitfalls you see emerging on the school choice side.

01:26:41.580 So, we'll talk about the future.

01:26:45.040 We'll talk about strategy.

01:26:46.240 We'll talk about the new administration.

01:26:47.860 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.

01:26:59.300 So, we'll turn to that on the Daily Wire side.

01:27:01.280 And everybody watching and listening, you're more than welcome to join us for an additional half an hour behind the Daily Wire paywall.

01:27:08.180 Thank you very much for coming in today.

01:27:09.260 Thank you so much, John.

01:27:09.920 Yeah, yeah.

01:27:10.480 It's really good to have you here and appreciate it.

01:27:12.780 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, right?

01:27:28.740 That eats up half the resources at the state level, right?

01:27:33.780 It's really something.

01:27:35.220 It's really something to see.

01:27:37.340 So, all right, everybody.

01:27:38.680 You can join us there.

01:27:39.700 We'll be right back.

529. Public Schools and the Battle For Children ｜ Corey DeAngelis

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