Dr. Corey D'Angelis has a PhD in education policy from the Department of Educational Reform at the University of Arkansas and is a leading advocate for school choice. He is also the author of the book, "School Choice: The Case for Parents' Rights to Decide Their Children's Educational Future."
00:22:16.920So let's take that apart a little bit.
00:22:18.860Whole word learning is a good example, right?
00:22:21.400So whole word learning was predicated on the idea that expert readers read words at a glance.
00:22:28.780They don't sound them out, or phrases even.
00:22:31.700And so since the experts do it that way, it would be reasonable to teach children to do it that way right from the beginning.
00:22:39.580Now, that presumes that experts read when they learn to read the same way they learn.
00:22:47.840They 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.
00:22:54.280And 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.
00:24:02.640And 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,
00:24:11.720there's reasonable evidence to presume that teaching children to concentrate on their emotional experience actually makes them worse.
00:24:19.380So the psychologists who laid out the big five personality template using statistics to begin with,
00:24:28.340the most common measure is the neopir, and its measure of neuroticism, negative emotion, has facets.
00:24:39.400One facet is literally self-consciousness.
00:24:43.520So thinking about yourself and being miserable are so tightly associated that you can't distinguish them statistically.
00:24:52.220So if you get children to dwell on their negative emotional experiences, then you tend to exacerbate the problem.
00:25:03.420So anyways, you can't use self-esteem training to...
00:25:08.220So 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,
00:25:19.620a lot of people would ask me, how prevalent is this stuff anyway?
00:25:23.160And 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,
00:25:32.440But 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.
00:25:53.320And there were a lot of other findings in that survey as well.
00:26:39.020Yeah, 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.
00:27:29.800The first thing we wanted to do was to assess how political beliefs clump together.
00:27:34.740You can do that statistically by looking at the...
00:27:38.420You can say, imagine you ask a large number of people a large number of questions.
00:27:42.580You can see across people whether answering one question predicts in a given direction predicts answering another question in a given direction.
00:27:54.860And so you can analyze how belief statements aggregate.
00:27:59.760So the first question we wanted to ask, answer, was there a coherent set of politically correct political beliefs?
00:28:09.280Because 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.
00:28:24.700We actually found that there was two forms of politically correct belief systems.
00:28:29.280One was more like classic left-wing liberalism, right?
00:28:34.980But there was a smaller group of left-wing totalitarians, authoritarians.
00:28:40.040And so those were people who adopted progressive policies, so-called progressive policies, but were also willing to implement them with force, essentially.
00:28:49.700So there was a tyrannical aspect to it.
00:28:51.540Okay, so once you establish that these groups of beliefs exist, you can look at the correlates or the predictors, right?
00:29:00.360So there's a standard set of features that you would look for in a psychological study.
00:29:07.900If 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.
00:29:16.160And temperament, big five temperament, and then sex, and then...
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00:30:40.600And 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.
00:31:22.120I think what it is is preference for a maximally simple explanation.
00:31:25.700Yeah, 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.
00:31:33.620But you also can't, you can't, like, America is a racist society.
00:31:38.180All inequalities are a consequence of systemic oppression.
00:33:11.000And 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.
00:33:19.200And 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.
00:33:33.160And 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.
00:33:42.980Now, and conscientiousness also predicts conservative political leaning, not liberal political leaning, right?
00:33:49.320So, 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?
00:33:59.820And then they tilt radically to the left, which is also something that would be attractive to people who have decreased cognitive ability.
00:34:08.560They select against conscientiousness because of the work hours and the security.
00:34:14.320I had also seen a study that selection into education, you know, degrees was associated with risk aversion, too.
00:34:21.660So, 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.
00:34:38.120Right, 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?
00:34:55.940Was that a 10-year period? Was it a one-year period?
00:35:14.280There'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.
00:35:47.260Since 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.
00:35:56.780The number of teachers in the system has increased about twice that rate, by about 10%.
00:36:11.920The 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.
00:36:26.120You 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.
00:36:35.200And what that implies is that there's no limit to the number of potential administrative contributions, right?
00:36:42.440And then the question is, well, what would limit the growth of the administration?
00:36:47.800And in a competitive environment, free market principles essentially limit because you run out of money, right?
00:36:55.020So, you can only hire as many people as you can afford to hire.
00:36:58.060This isn't a problem with administrative bureaucracies that have an unlimited source of funding.
00:37:05.080So, 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.
00:37:10.960And there's actually been four studies on this.
00:37:15.400It'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.
00:37:28.200And 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.
00:37:34.780It's for the kids, but all that aside, because there's also competition, they start to allocate those additional dollars instead of towards administrators.
00:37:45.880They start to allocate them towards the classroom, towards the teachers.
00:37:49.380So, the teachers who remain actually end up better off.
00:37:52.380Is that to stop the teachers moving into the private realm?
00:37:54.200Stop 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.
00:38:03.540Monopsony is a monopoly in the labor market.
00:38:05.880With the government school system, you want to be a teacher, you basically got to take what they give you.
00:38:09.580But 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.
00:38:22.040So, some teachers are underpaid, some teachers are overpaid.
00:38:25.260It depends on – we try to treat everything as one size fits all in our current system.
00:38:29.520But 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.
00:38:43.320In Florida, there's 11 academic studies on this topic.
00:38:46.140Ten of them find positive effects of competition on the outcomes in the public schools.
00:38:50.760It's been a rising tide that lifts all boats, and just over time you can see it work out in Florida too.
00:38:55.380So, 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.
00:39:02.220Now, U.S. News & World Report has ranked Florida number one on education.
00:39:06.660They'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.
00:39:11.620They spend 27 percent less than the national average in Florida, but they have school choice for everybody.
00:39:27.520But the public schools, in this case, actually do get better in response to competition.
00:39:32.160And we have studies all across the nation.
00:39:34.480Well, it's funny that you even have to make that case.
00:39:36.780I 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.
00:39:45.920Like, well, what else would improve quality?
00:40:01.180I 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.
00:40:12.480The peers are your enemies, not your peers.
00:40:54.340But I wasn't allowed to say it, but they went further than that.
00:40:57.100They also said that we have to reject this because you didn't talk about how the results relate to whiteness, structural oppression, and power.
00:41:07.560But the study I wanted to bring up about competition was actually in my home state of Texas.
00:41:11.180I did a survey experiment with my co-authors.
00:41:14.660So, I randomly assigned different surveys to public school leaders in Texas.
00:41:20.220And 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.
00:41:31.440And I was asking them where they were going to put their money next year.
00:41:34.920Like, where were they going to allocate resources?
00:41:36.620And 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.
00:41:49.160Well, because they know that they might have to think about where they're going to spend money if they have a competitor.
00:41:55.300Because if they waste the money, families are going to go there.
00:41:57.880But their argument usually is that, obviously, it's got to be something like more administrators make for a more effective school system.
00:42:04.560That'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.
00:42:11.820They just thought, I'm answering a simple survey question.
00:42:26.460Other 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.
00:42:34.100Yeah, but in your case, that's probably not the truth because the probability that you're going to publish something that challenges the –
00:42:56.500So you've published four, five studies a year.
00:42:59.340Yeah, 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.
00:43:48.140So just for everybody watching and listening, so you can draw a rough equivalent between number of publications and a given degree.
00:43:59.160So for example, with one publication, you have a master's degree essentially, although most master's students don't even have one publication.
00:44:37.920I did have an offer from one academic institution.
00:44:40.900It was Kennesaw State University in Georgia.
00:44:43.360And I think they had like a free market center there, so they were friendly.
00:44:47.820So how many publications – sorry, how many publications did you have when you entered the job market?
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00:47:55.980Vivek 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.
00:48:45.940It 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.
00:48:53.260So, 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.
00:49:05.240Well, yeah, you should never let the side that you're opposing define the terms of engagement.
00:49:13.360They're always on the – I'll give you an example.
00:49:15.580So, 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.
00:49:25.620All five of them were picked by the left, right?
00:49:28.240So, one of them, for example, I think –
00:49:53.180And 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.
00:51:51.960Well, the crucial issue is there's no evidence that Head Start improves academic performance, and that's a consequence of multiple reviews.
00:51:59.580And it's really a catastrophe that it's the case.
00:52:01.980And the latest pre-K evaluation statewide was in Tennessee.
00:52:20.840You 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.
00:52:28.220So they were worse behaviorally as well.
00:52:30.280Maybe because the parents have an advantage at raising their own kids.
00:52:35.200Maybe they're better at disciplining the kids at home.
00:52:37.880I did a very programmatic review of Head Start in the 80s.
00:52:43.480So that's quite a long time ago, but the programs had been operating for a very long time.
00:52:47.600And there were, I think, five major reviews.
00:52:50.120And at that time, the findings were that Head Start accelerated cognitive performance, so test scores, for a year or two following the interventions.
00:53:01.100But that by grade six, there was no effect.
00:53:05.200But that the longer-term effects seemed to be behavioral.
00:53:14.220Less pregnancy, less crime, and higher probability of graduating.
00:53:17.980So – 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.
00:53:28.660But you're saying that the more recent –
00:53:30.580The 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.
00:53:39.300And 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.
00:53:48.980We 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.
00:53:59.020And we also had a – there is an RCT.
00:54:06.300We 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.
00:54:17.340But 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.
00:54:27.000They 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.
00:54:46.420But 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%.
00:54:56.660So 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.
00:55:08.860I'm saying if we're going to spend the money, we might as well fund the people as opposed to the buildings.
00:55:15.900Well, I sidetracked a little bit into Head Start because doing that review for me was actually very disheartening.
00:55:26.140Because the thing about Head Start – and this can allow us to talk about political issues more broadly or conceptual issues –
00:55:34.100nobody liked the fact that poverty tended to persist multi-generationally.
00:55:40.740And 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?
00:55:54.900Because 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.
00:56:06.840And 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.
00:56:15.280And that was a catastrophe for the right and the left politically, as far as I was concerned, because it was a reasonably motivated endeavor.
00:56:25.360Now, 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.
00:56:37.260And 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.
00:56:53.260You 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.
00:57:05.220Well, 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 –
00:57:26.200Whereas 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.
00:57:32.900Right. So – but you were convinced that the Tennessee data – that's – I don't know the study.
00:57:36.780That's the latest experiment, and it's peer-reviewed, published.
00:57:45.640But 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?
00:57:53.740It was COVID that helped open the eyes of parents.
00:57:55.680I was just there with the right ideas laying around at the time, as Milton Friedman famously put it.
00:58:00.960We 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.
00:58:09.580We still have elected officials saying these things using left-leaning arguments to advance school choice, which I think they're all good arguments.
00:58:15.920It's true that the lowest-income are in the worst schools, that they would benefit the most.
00:58:43.340Can someone please invent a crystal ball?
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00:59:36.860But 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.
00:59:52.000And 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.
01:00:38.760And 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.
01:00:51.100What did you have to do with what happened in Virginia?
01:01:05.940It flipped right after that because parents were pissed.
01:01:08.980Virginia closed their schools just about more than any other state.
01:01:12.280They were as bad as California when it came to reopening the schools in Virginia.
01:01:16.480And Glenn Youngkin turned that into an opportunity.
01:01:19.520He laid out a blueprint for success for Republicans going forward.
01:01:22.820Glenn 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.
01:01:33.660Voters, they rank jobs, the economy, crime at the top.
01:01:37.800Education was number two, and a Republican won on that issue.
01:01:41.300Well, 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.
01:01:50.740But I think for a long time, people thought things were fine, right?
01:01:53.940Before 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.
01:02:05.000They get into great universities that are good on paper.
01:02:38.600You know, it was the radical fringe, although a lot of them were in the educational psychology departments.
01:02:44.120But they weren't – they didn't have the upper hand.
01:02:46.700And somewhere around 2010, that flipped hard.
01:02:49.380And I think that those – that sort of thing flips partly too.
01:02:53.060You said – you talked about good teachers leaving.
01:02:55.540Well, 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.
01:03:09.780And then – well, then you're just left with the worst of the worst, right?
01:03:13.520And then they hire people who are even worse than they are and the whole thing's, you know, going off its railings.
01:03:19.220And 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.
01:03:35.740And it was likely the gender issue that did that.
01:03:38.160And 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 –
01:04:05.420You 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.
01:04:19.620And if they continue to spend half the state's money on K-12 education, essentially, that's dominated by progressive Marxists.
01:04:27.380Like, everything else that is happening is, as far as I'm concerned, it's blowing in the wind.
01:04:32.140And so, I want to challenge you on a couple of things because I'd like your opinion.
01:04:36.920See, I can understand the rationale, the logic for your choice approach, and I can see it from the free market perspective.
01:04:45.500So, let's say the libertarian perspective.
01:04:47.060I can see it from the parent's right perspective.
01:04:49.920And 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.
01:05:06.220But 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.
01:05:27.780So, 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?
01:05:35.540The Catholic schools are full of woke teachers.
01:05:39.540And 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.
01:06:10.020We should also reform the public school system.
01:06:12.300You 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.
01:06:22.420I 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.
01:06:32.160They're talking about banning DEI in public schools this year as well.
01:06:35.400We have Trump with his executive orders helping out as well.
01:06:37.820But we have undercover video from a group called Accuracy in Media.
01:06:41.820They'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.
01:07:13.440They move – they just retitle this person and they continue to do exactly the same thing.
01:07:17.900And you can camouflage what you're doing with words, no problem.
01:07:21.300It'll take people years to figure it out.
01:07:23.360And so this is another part – okay, so –
01:07:25.740So 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.
01:07:37.840Even 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.
01:08:41.900So you think the diversity of school proliferation will eventually solve the ideological problem?
01:08:47.880Yeah, 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?
01:08:54.480I'd say that's still better than the status quo where you have zero choices.
01:08:58.840But at least now you can take the funding.
01:09:01.980Hey, 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.
01:09:11.480That's where most of the school choice programs set up so that you could set up a micro-school and educate your own children, for example.
01:10:41.980So 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.
01:10:52.260So maybe that improves, you know, the self-esteem of the kids or whatever the teachers are trying to do these days.
01:11:01.400And you see this at the university level too, right?
01:11:03.120They had these extravagant water parks and tuition is going up to cover these things and also subsidies from the government too.
01:11:11.940But these micro schools are really shaking things up.
01:11:16.840The whole, the whole factory model itself is, is frightened because of this.
01:11:20.180In fact, when Crenda micro schools in Arizona was reporting just huge increases in enrollment during COVID because the government schools were closed.
01:11:29.260So families were figuring it out and they, a lot of them went to these micro schools.
01:11:35.700The NEA, which is the largest labor union in the country, the National Education Association, they also lobbied the CDC to close the schools longer.
01:11:43.080They 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.
01:11:58.340They knew they were going to lose funding because public schools are funded based on enrollment counts.
01:12:01.600And so if you lose some students, you're going to lose some money, whether you have a school choice program or not.
01:12:06.760And in Arizona, you can use those education savings accounts to pay for Prenda micro schools and other ones too.
01:12:17.340And some people, there's a lot of different definitions for it, but basically a miniature private school.
01:12:21.880And during COVID era, it was basically five to 10 children getting together in households to economize on homeschooling.
01:12:29.160And 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.
01:12:36.640Which you could do if it's $20,000 per.
01:12:39.360So what's, what is the amount of the typical voucher?
01:12:42.420If, if school, if student expenditure.
01:13:18.840Is it likely as well to, to pull in the rest of that money?
01:13:21.120There have been some local vouchers that have passed in, in, in Colorado, a blue state.
01:13:25.700There was Douglas County had at once a couple of decades ago passed the voucher program.
01:13:30.300It got nixed in the court by a, by a lefty judge.
01:13:34.120And that program is no longer on the books.
01:13:36.820New 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.
01:13:47.400If they opted in as well, that bill got tabled.
01:13:50.680That was one that I was really excited.
01:13:52.320But that's, I think that's the next step in the revolution.
01:13:55.480But 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?
01:14:06.480I think it should be equal across sectors.
01:14:08.480If we're going to spend the money, I think the state and local should follow the student, not just the state.
01:14:12.640But the reality is it's mostly basically everywhere at this point.
01:14:17.360Well, 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.
01:14:25.920You know, you could imagine five kids together, that's $50,000 a year.
01:14:30.920That's a pretty good supplement for a given parent's income.
01:14:34.020And so, okay, so let's talk about, let's see, where should we go now?
01:15:48.720And 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.
01:15:58.640And so I think they've adopted some of the language and arguments and studies that I've conducted and also cited myself.
01:17:22.840Now, 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.
01:17:34.020We were hitting our head against the wall.
01:17:35.500It 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.
01:17:43.360But 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.
01:17:52.840One, because it allows for more competition, allows for a bigger supply-side response, more of a market response.
01:18:01.080But also we're paying for public schools for high- and low-income families.
01:18:04.600They should be able to benefit from school choice as well.
01:18:06.560We don't discriminate based on income for the public schools.
01:18:08.840We shouldn't discriminate based on income for school choice either.
01:18:13.360And politics, again, is all about organized interest pushing for what they want.
01:18:18.100If 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.
01:18:31.700Yeah, well, so let me ask you about that.
01:18:35.860I've discussed school choice with some of my more intelligent liberal friends.
01:18:40.620And 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.
01:18:50.280Parents 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.
01:19:08.080But 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.
01:19:18.620And 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.
01:19:36.560You already have that inequality baked into the government school system.
01:19:40.380They have 40 percent of their high schools have zero percent math proficiency rate.
01:19:43.840You see the same thing in places like Chicago.
01:19:46.440And so they shouldn't make perfect the enemy of the good.
01:19:49.780And this fear-mongering hasn't happened with school choice.
01:19:52.680The public schools, if anything, have gotten better.
01:19:54.540I cited Florida, but we also have nationwide data on this.
01:19:57.86026 of the 29 studies on this nationwide find statistically significant positive effects of private school choice competition on the outcomes in the public schools.
01:20:07.800Even 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.
01:20:18.440So the main argument that the unions put forward is the worst argument in terms of it being supported by the evidence.
01:20:25.520But a lot of people respond to fear-mongering, and so they do that.
01:20:28.520Well, it's a reasonable hypothesis, but the fact that the studies have already been done indicating that the—
01:20:34.260There'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.
01:20:55.220Doesn't seem like a surprising finding to me.
01:20:57.920If you have choice now, you can exercise it.
01:20:59.620You're going to look—the point is school choice increases parental involvement by definition.
01:21:05.980Yes, 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.
01:21:22.400So they're going to look, and they're going to exercise that choice.
01:21:25.800Like, 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.
01:21:37.880And 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?
01:21:45.560And so most parents, for example, regardless of their own literacy levels, would like to have children who are literate and well-educated.
01:21:55.740And they might not know how to do it, but they want it.
01:21:58.300They know their kids better than anybody else.
01:22:09.680But 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.
01:22:38.600Yeah, well, this is what I want to give you the opportunity to do that.
01:22:41.100So if there's anything else you'd like to bring up, do it now, and then we'll turn to the Delaware side.
01:22:45.880On 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.
01:22:52.340So they had the most to benefit, most to gain from having more options in their kids' education.
01:22:57.720In 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.
01:23:03.880Well, school choice for me, but not for me, hypocrisy again.
01:23:09.200But 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.
01:23:25.620And I believe about 95 percent of the kids were black or Hispanic.
01:23:30.280So this goes completely counter to the narrative that the left is saying about how this is only for rich white kids using the program.
01:23:38.180In Florida as well, there's a really interesting story about how DeSantis actually won in 2018.
01:23:43.960He actually barely won the governor's race in 2018.
01:23:46.520And the headline in the Wall Street Journal the next day was that school choice moms tipped the governor's race for DeSantis.
01:23:54.280So 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.
01:24:13.660And those kids were disproportionately low-income and non-white kids.
01:24:17.760So this is another way that, one, Republicans can make inroads with groups that they hadn't reached out to before.
01:24:24.140And it's also – it shows you that this shouldn't be a partisan issue.
01:24:28.240And 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.
01:24:36.060And 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.
01:24:52.480And 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.
01:24:59.040Well, it isn't an obviously partisan issue.
01:25:02.760Well, it's like cost-cutting in government.
01:25:05.160It 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?
01:25:16.880Because then, at least in principle, more money could be spent on things that actually work.
01:25:23.160And 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.
01:25:36.080That 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.
01:25:47.560And I don't see any way out of that than the multiplication of supply.
01:25:53.880And it's also the case that the money of a poor person is just as good as the money of a rich person.
01:25:59.480And 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.
01:26:46.240We'll talk about the new administration.
01:26:47.860We'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.
01:26:59.300So, we'll turn to that on the Daily Wire side.
01:27:01.280And everybody watching and listening, you're more than welcome to join us for an additional half an hour behind the Daily Wire paywall.
01:27:08.180Thank you very much for coming in today.
01:27:10.480It's really good to have you here and appreciate it.
01:27:12.780And, 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?
01:27:28.740That eats up half the resources at the state level, right?