How did the Parkland shooter slip through the cracks of the Broward County School District? In a recent piece for City Journal, Max Eden suggests that it was precisely Broward s effort to fight the so-called "school-to-prison pipeline" that may have helped the shooter evade law enforcement.
00:00:00.120How did the Parkland shooter, officially charged today, slip through the cracks of the Broward County School District?
00:00:06.840We have talked a lot about how he got his hands on a gun.
00:00:09.480We've talked very little about the policies and politicians that caused his high school to let him through the door.
00:00:15.820Lefties have long harped on the school-to-prison pipeline and advocated lower and lower disciplinary standards for juvenile delinquents.
00:00:22.760My guest today suggests in a recent piece for City Journal that it was precisely Broward County's effort to fight that so-called school-to-prison pipeline that may have helped the Parkland shooter evade law enforcement.
00:00:33.880He suggests in another piece that Barack Obama's policies may have made our schools less safe.
00:00:39.100We will discuss with education policy scholar, Manhattan Institute senior fellow, and my old pal Max Eden.
00:00:44.540Then we will discuss education policy more broadly, because conservatives never talk about education policy because it isn't as sexy as deregulating the EPA or drilling an ANWR.
00:01:08.680I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
00:01:14.540And before we get to any of that, we have got, we got to keep the lights on in here, and we have to tell you about a wonderful sponsor of this show.
00:01:23.460And I like this because it has an Italian name, so just, just that alone really draws you into it.
00:01:29.900And I have to deal with this a lot, because when you are traveling, you're in a different city, you're away from your office, you're away from your home, you need a place to hold a meeting, you need a place to work.
00:01:39.780Starbucks ain't going to cut it, folks.
00:01:41.080I mean, it's fine, you go to little coffee shops, you go here, you go there to try to make it work.
00:01:44.980It's always too noisy, the internet is a little shoddy.
00:02:07.880I will say in my own life, in politics and in show business, I've tried to hold meetings or tried to do conference calls or whatever from coffee shops or a train station or this or that.
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00:02:45.500You might recall I was in Palm Beach a few weeks ago and I was doing my show from, I don't know, some broom closet in this beautiful estate.
00:02:52.400And I'm doing this show and then halfway through, this woman in sunglasses barges in and says, hey, I need to give something to Dale.
00:04:14.200Do you remember that interview of Sheriff Scott Israel a week or so ago where he said he was doing an amazing job,
00:04:20.420even as he explained that he failed in every single aspect of his job and his cowardly deputies wouldn't even go into the building where the shooting was happening?
00:04:26.600In that interview, there was a largely overlooked part where Jake Tapper presses him on what new law,
00:04:34.440what new lax law enforcement policies played, what role they played in this shooting.
00:05:41.600I know in theory that, I know your theory that you're talking about, but the reality is different.
00:05:45.840The sheriff keeps using words like excellent and amazing, and I don't think those words mean what he thinks those words mean.
00:05:53.860I also love watching that clip because it reminds me of what Jake Tapper can be, what every blue moon Jake Tapper does when he's not being a mean girl shilling for Democrats.
00:06:01.880He actually can be a journalist and be pretty hard-hitting.
00:06:05.920There are these new policies that are at schools across the country, and in particular here in Broward County, that do not punish kids, do not put them into the criminal justice system, try to let them slip through the cracks, and sometimes with tragic results.
00:06:20.320I'm joined now by Max Eden, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
00:06:23.820Before that, Max was program director of the Education Policy Studies Department at the American Enterprise Institute, focusing on early education, school choice, and federal education policy.
00:06:34.500His work has appeared in scholarly and popular outlets, and now here.
00:06:38.340Clearly, he's gone on a downward trajectory.
00:06:39.980Those outlets include the Encyclopedia of Education, Economics, and Finance, National Review, Claremont Institute, U.S. News & World Report, The Washington Post, that's okay, we'll forgive him for that, and The Weekly Standard.
00:06:50.740Before all of that, Max studied history at Yale, where he and I caused a lot of political trouble, and one afternoon actually hung out with Jim Acosta.
00:07:00.420Max, my first question, do you remember that afternoon we hung out with Jim Acosta before he completely morphed into Ron Burgundy from Anchorman?
00:07:09.360So just for context for your friends out there, Michael and I tried to get Mitch Daniels to run for president, because we thought he was the one candidate who could beat Barack Obama, and I still think we were right.
00:07:23.000I remember two things, Michael, or one thing, really, and it's how much we knew and how little we actually knew, right?
00:07:29.740You and I were sitting there thinking we knew what was going to happen next in American politics, and we were ahead of the curve, we saw something that nobody else saw.
00:08:13.560Let's start with what everybody is talking about, which is this high school shooting in Florida.
00:08:18.220What responsibility does the Broward County School District bear for letting this shooter slip through the cracks?
00:08:23.920Yeah, so a little bit later on in that clip that you showed part of, Sheriff Israel says, you know, you can't blame my department for malfeasance, for misfeasance, because we didn't do anything wrong if we weren't told about it.
00:08:37.960But the purpose of the policy that Broward County Schools put in place in partnership with the police department was to not tell him those things.
00:08:45.060It was, we think that because students who get in trouble often go on to drop out of high school or get into worse trouble later, it must be because they're being punished, not because they're behaving poorly.
00:08:58.520So the idea is, let's try to, as much as we can, not suspend, not expel, not refer to law enforcement, really serious things.
00:09:08.320And Sheriff Runcie, he says these dozen offenses, including fighting, including drugs, we're not going to do anything with the police with them anymore.
00:09:22.920There's a reason why we want police records, and that's so that when somebody like this applies for a gun, when the FBI is called, that record shows up.
00:09:32.420But this policy was explicitly designed to not let those things show up.
00:09:35.840So when we're asking, there were so many warning flags, how were all these warning flags missed?
00:09:41.440Well, the policy was to try to not notice them, to try to not process them.
00:09:46.660We can get into specific details, but that's the overarching thing that Broward did.
00:09:51.400And it's a tragic result, but it's out.
00:09:55.440It's amazing to me that this isn't being talked about in these terms, because you see, obviously, there were, what, 30-some-odd, 45 calls to the local police.
00:10:14.060And I've never understood when people shriek about how many Americans are in prison or have criminal records, and, oh, the number is so high.
00:10:21.420That just means America is good at locking up our criminals, right?
00:10:24.180That just means that we're good at tracking people who break the law.
00:10:27.660I'm very glad that we lock up our criminals.
00:10:29.800I would rather our criminals be in prison than here, where they can bother me, and where I, when I walk down the street, I have to worry or something.
00:10:36.440Fox Butterfield had that famous headline in The New York Times in 2004.
00:10:40.900The headline was, more inmates despite drop-in crime.
00:10:44.880So, hmm, I don't know if it's despite or maybe there's some relation there.
00:10:48.540In another piece, not just on Broward County, you say that Barack Obama's administration made schools more dangerous.
00:10:56.140How did this happen at a federal level?
00:10:57.480Yeah, so, you know, we can take Broward County Superintendent Runcie's word for it.
00:11:04.880He joked that it looked like the Obama administration took his policies and made it into federal policy, right?
00:11:12.820So the idea of try to not suspend, to not expel, to not issue arrests for potentially serious things because we think that they're harmful, we want to get these numbers down.
00:11:23.820Broward was a first mover in that, but shortly thereafter, the Obama administration issued a Dear Colleague letter, very much like the Title IX Dear Colleague letter that your viewers are probably a little bit more familiar with, saying to school districts,
00:11:35.180even if your rules are totally fair, even if you administer them totally fairly, we might come after you and investigate you for unlawful discrimination if students of different races break them at different rates.
00:11:46.940So that threat was universal, and the Department of Education investigated hundreds of school districts across the country, major districts, L.A. included, and forced them to change these policies, forced them to try to aggressively lower these rates.
00:12:02.760Now, two really bad things happen when this happens, right?
00:12:05.160If the adults in the room are looking over the shoulder at the statistics rather than the students, the kids know the rules have changed, and if they know that the line is farther away, if they know that there is no line, they'll behave differently.
00:12:28.720The other problem is that things get swept under the rug.
00:12:31.360So how did it all get swept under the rug before?
00:12:36.380I can show you side by side the policies before or after, how it would have been handled differently by the books.
00:12:41.680But what I also see when I read things, when I talk to teachers, when I read not as teacher comments, they say that to get these numbers down, principals tell them, don't report these incidents.
00:12:52.000We'll rip up the papers that you're reporting.
00:12:54.100We'll just simply hide them from the school district.
00:12:56.860In Washington, D.C., they reduce suspensions by 40 percent in two years.
00:13:12.580So between telling kids that there are no consequences for actions and then not telling the people of the chain of command what's actually going on in the schools, that's a recipe for danger.
00:13:22.260This reminds me a lot of gun control, where with gun control, these mass shootings always seem to take place in so-called gun-free zones, in states with a lot of gun control anyway.
00:13:33.860And then they say, well, the answer to that, of course, is we need more gun control.
00:13:37.680There's this tragic shooting that takes place in a county like Broward County, which is leading the way in sweeping these kind of warning signs under the rug.
00:13:53.260How do we change the narrative on that?
00:13:55.160How do we say, you know, maybe we should try a new course?
00:13:58.800Yeah, I mean, so it's easy to see how that's the narrative, right, for a couple of reasons.
00:14:03.620That's obviously what the media wants to go with because it's what they believe.
00:14:07.440It's what they can use to bash the people they don't like.
00:14:10.340It's entirely expected that that's where they want to have the majority of the focus.
00:14:14.160Where they don't want to have the focus is on a policy that they might be sympathetic to, that they might not want to look under the hood on.
00:14:20.900And conservatives do ourselves no favors in education policy, which we can get to later, by just kind of accepting the frame of the debate that's set by the left, right?
00:14:32.300Like, if the left says that the problem is too many guns or, you know, guns, guns, guns, only guns, then what you have the president say is, well, we need more guns.
00:14:45.620There's no real, like, denial of the question or trying to shift the focus to another place.
00:14:50.420So let me offer an alternative emphasis, one that conservatives can't really get their minds around.
00:14:56.820I hope that they will be able to over the next couple of years.
00:14:59.860It's not really about more guns, less guns.
00:15:05.380The real question is, how did the adults in the room not do the right thing here?
00:15:11.920What was it that was influencing their judgment?
00:15:14.920Because given what we've read about him, any responsible, normal, sane, loving teacher, loving principal would have referred to this kid to the cops out of love.
00:15:24.880And the reason they didn't do it was out of fear.
00:15:28.220Because these policies come from the top down.
00:15:42.300Anything and everything can be turned over to the cops.
00:15:44.420It went way too far in that direction because we didn't just trust teachers and principals to do what they think is right.
00:15:51.560We set up these top down incentives that made them act insanely.
00:15:54.780And then, in response to that, we do it right back the other way.
00:15:58.500So, conservatives on education accept all the frames of our friends on the left and then just try to argue within it when they really shouldn't, you know, let the left beg the question like that.
00:16:20.120And, by the way, speaking of love here, speaking of compassion, it seems to me nothing compassionate or fair or loving about treating these kids differently, about saying, well, you know, we've got to get the statistic on this racial group down, so we're not going to process you.
00:16:38.540We have a criminal justice system to apply the law fairly to everybody.
00:16:42.160And yet, now, all of the emphasis coming out of universities, out of education policy, out of criminal justice policy is, oh, we need to informally process.
00:16:51.100Let's treat some people a little differently than other people.
00:16:54.500How, in the end, could that produce a just society?
00:16:57.600How, in the end, could that produce safe outcomes for schools?
00:17:00.440So, just last night, I was talking to a gentleman by the name of Aaron Benner, who was a teacher in St. Paul, and what he has said repeatedly publicly and to me is, there's this mass social experiment whereby we've decided to hold African-American students to lower standards.
00:17:19.260The soft bigotry of low expectations, right, as the Bush administration called it.
00:17:23.200Exactly. We think that by letting things slide, that we wouldn't let slide for white kids, that somehow that's going to help them.
00:17:34.560The liberal mind on this is very interesting, right, because 10 years ago, the idea was, and it's an idea that you and I are sympathetic to, I think I am, certainly, that in urban cities, there are broken families, there's poverty, there's chaos.
00:17:51.140The school needs to be a place where there are no excuses, where there's order, where they can kind of learn values that their community might not necessarily be able to give them.
00:18:00.360That's what it was until about four years ago, when kind of downstream of Black Lives Matter, the narrative became kind of any discipline is punishment.
00:18:15.680And once you go down that road, it's very, very difficult to get out of.
00:18:20.840But once you're there, if that's what you're presenting to children, that we have to hold you to a lower behavioral standard because we're oppressing you, that is what builds the school-to-prison pipeline.
00:18:31.860Oh, and what else could people conclude from that?
00:18:35.020They'll say either, you know, you look at your teacher and you say, oh, this is an oppressive environment, and so there's that conclusion.
00:18:43.400Or you say, what, I'm not good enough?
00:18:45.200I'm not as good as that person, so I need to be handicapped?
00:18:48.340I need to be treated with some kind of policy handicap because I'm naturally more criminal or something?
00:18:57.200And yet this is all we've heard ever since Black Lives Matter.
00:18:59.820Now, speaking of not accepting their premises and giving our own premises, as a matter of federal policy, conservatives don't pay any attention to it on education.
00:19:08.240What does conservative education reform in the bullet points, in the broad overview, what does it look like?
00:19:17.900I can tell you what it should be, but I can tell you that conservatives don't actually know their own principles on this.
00:19:23.700They think, they got very caught up in this accountability movement, right?
00:19:28.040Like, we need to test, we need to measure, we need to, we need to, you know, intervene where the tests and the measurements say we should intervene.
00:19:37.320And you see how it makes sense from a kind of business perspective, very Jeb Bushy, very Chamber of Commerce.
00:20:09.280Because the real conservative premise, right, is, is Hayek, is Burke, is the inability of, of distant bureaucrats to actually regulate affairs correctly, is the utter centrality of letting small groups form their own cultures and inculcate their own values with the freedom and flexibility to do so.
00:20:30.360And so what conservatives should be arguing for at every level is, in a way, what, what teachers unions should be arguing for as well, although they're not for other reasons, which is just, how do we give more freedom and flexibility to teachers?
00:20:45.060What is it that's getting in their way?
00:20:46.660What is it that we have done to schools for our own social engineering purposes that's actually preventing strong cultures from forming?
00:21:14.400More freedom, more fun, more education.
00:21:16.840It's liberal education for a reason, right?
00:21:18.820It's supposed to be the free experience of education.
00:21:21.680And speaking of education freedom, charter schools are some of the only tickets out of poverty for poor black people living in the inner cities, among other groups, but disproportionately racial minorities benefit here.
00:21:34.480Why does the NAACP oppose charter schools?
00:21:42.400One reason is that they have a fair degree of connections with teachers unions.
00:21:51.120There's Jews collecting things going back and forth.
00:21:55.080There are financial interests at play.
00:21:57.640So teachers unions are broadly anti-charter because it's a threat to their monopoly.
00:22:03.540And that means people that they can influence will probably take that stand.
00:22:08.240The other thing is kind of what I was saying earlier, an offshoot of it, is it's this kind of inversion in the way that folks in the left view education, view life, view culture.
00:22:19.560It used to be that these no-excuses charter schools were seen as the way to transmit bourgeois values to students who had broken home backgrounds.
00:22:30.560But it has since become another tool of oppression.
00:22:36.180And if you view – and there are ways in which I'm sympathetic to the case too.
00:22:41.940And this is where kind of small-c conservatives and teachers unions and the constituents of the NAACP, if not the NAACP themselves, could come into line.
00:22:53.780It's that, you know, maybe there is a problem in charter schools – I've certainly argued this – that they're too top-down, that they're too by the books, that they don't really empower the communities, which they were intended to do.
00:23:09.360What I'm less sympathetic to, what I'm more sympathetic to, I'm less sympathetic to the notion that these schools are actually harming these kids.
00:23:15.080This is not what the test scores show.
00:23:18.020So I'm more sympathetic to the notion that charter schooling was supposed to be a means of decentralization, choice, empowerment, and has quite frequently ended up being something that an outside group comes and just layers something else on a group of people that they don't really know, understand, have a connection to.
00:23:35.420And in terms of instilling those values of a former role of the school, now, of course, the culture has lost faith in its own values.
00:23:43.600It's cracked its own premises, and so you end up with moral chaos, for lack of a better term.
00:23:49.640Now, those lefty kids in Parkland, whom CNN has been prostituting for the past several weeks, just walked out on Education Department Secretary Betsy DeVos for whatever reason.
00:24:50.600I think that is the conservative future, but we can discuss that later.
00:24:55.440So she started hobbled in the public sphere, and quite frankly, she started without experience and without experienced hands around her.
00:25:03.580My old boss, Rick Hess, would sometimes—it's not a joke because it's true—say that the center of the education reform world is two standard deviations to the left of America, right?
00:25:15.380So even the people who are kind of on the right of the movement, Trump really, really, really icky to them, didn't want to do it.
00:25:23.800Staffing problems within the White House didn't help either.
00:25:26.080So she hasn't gotten that many good people around her, and she had a very steep learning curve to go through.
00:25:31.220That being said, I think she's coming around to it.
00:25:34.100I think that she is getting closer and closer to articulating a legitimate and powerful conservative vision of the way that schools should go.
00:25:44.120But certainly philosophically, out of anybody they could have picked, I'm most sympathetic to what I understand her opinions to be.
00:25:51.340I think they're the most principled of the set that Trump was considering, and I have some confidence that as time goes on, she'll do the right thing.
00:25:59.500She hasn't done anything on discipline yet, I think broadly because of fear of media backlash, and she still hasn't quite articulated some of the philosophical points or used the bully pulpit the way that I would prefer.
00:26:10.420But I see progress, and I see promise for more.
00:26:13.700When is the higher education bubble going to burst?
00:26:15.640Our own dear alma mater has totally imploded over the last few years.
00:26:20.260Lots of other colleges are having riots and hollowed-out curricula, and tuition is more expensive than ever.
00:26:26.040Am I going to have to sell my organs to send my kids to college?
00:26:39.280It's just it's not actually about efficiently transmitting—a lot of it is not about efficiently transmitting particular skills that will be directly useful to the workforce.
00:26:48.600It's about you and I went to Yale, and the fact that we went to Yale versus a place that's not Yale is what makes a lot of difference.
00:27:02.700And unfortunately, Republicans are not up to the task of doing what they should on this.
00:27:07.840It's like, how much more could we ask college campuses to antagonize everything about America and still have—and yet still have Republicans in the House, Republicans in the Senate not really rein in their funding at all, right?
00:30:13.060If we just say that, there's a good book, you know, a really great entry point into all of this thought by Alistair McIntyre called After Virtue.