529. How Competition Will Save Public Schools | Corey DeAngelis
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So there's a geographic monopoly and there's a state mandated monopoly because you have to send your kids to school. And then there's a teacher certification monopoly. And that trickles down from the university level into the K-12 system. The findings were less pregnancy, less crime and higher probability of graduating.

I'd also say on the teenage pregnancy thing, 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. Another separate study in New York City was a charter school experiment. They found that winning a lottery to go to a charter school in New York City decreased the likelihood of crime for male students by 100%.

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. Everything else, as far as I'm concerned, it's blowing in the wind. And if Democrats are smart, the way that we can get towards bipartisanship on school choice is through...

Hello, everybody. I'm speaking today to Dr. Corey D'Angelo.

He has a PhD in education policy, which under normal circumstances wouldn't necessarily be a good thing. But he graduated from the Department of Educational Reform at the University of Arkansas, and that's one of the rare schools, maybe the singular schools, that isn't

terribly bloody Marxist in its fundamental orientation, with a smattering of incompetence thrown in there just for good measure. I've been following Dr. DeAngelis, Corey, on X for a good long time. He's one of these one-man wrecking balls, one-person wrecking balls, like Layla Micklewaite, who's fighting the good fight against Pornhub, and Robbie Starbuck, who's a complete bloody army guy

in relationship to calling corporations out for their foolishness of their DEI policies. And Cori's been distributing the word in relationship to school choice. And school choice is a matter that's bigger than you might think, even though it has become quite a hot political issue.

because the school system, the public school system, is a failure in many ways. It's extraordinarily expensive, it's expansive, and it does an absolutely dismal job of what it should be doing, which is educating children, at least teaching them to read, let's say, a bare minimal standard of literacy. And although it turns out to be quite effective as a propaganda machine,

There's a variety of reasons that it's rotten to the core, but the fact that it's a monopoly is definitely one of them. And we delved into that topic in great detail. If you're a parent and

and you're concerned about your children's future, if you're concerned about your rights as a parent, if you want to have the option to find an educational institution of high quality so that you can give your children the start they need in life, and also to protect them against a substantial amount of ideological warping, then the issue of school choice should be something that's paramount in your attention, as it has become for many people in the United States.

In any case, we delved into the rationale for school choice from the free market and libertarian perspective, but also from the perspective of parents' rights. I suppose a cardinal question of our time is, well, just whose children are they? And I think the right answer to that question is,

Children should be watched over by those who have their best interests most firmly at heart, and that's inevitably going to be parents. And so it's in the service of children that parents have the right to determine the educational pathway that they can pursue. And even though parents might not be able to do that on their own,

because educating children is a difficult job, they're certainly in the best position to make intelligent choices about the direction to take if those choices are available to them. And so Corey's been working very hard on making that possibility a reality for parents. And so that's what we talked about today.

Well, Dr. DeAngelis, hey, I got to make sure I'm pronouncing that exactly right. Am I pronouncing that exactly right? Yeah, DeAngelis like Los Angeles, but I'm not a real doctor. I'm more like a Jill Biden doctor. Got a PhD in education policy.

Oh, yes. Where from? University of Arkansas. I see. When did you get that? Pretty recently, actually. Well, I'm getting older now. It's 2018 or so. I got the PhD. And I studied school choice policies. How come you didn't get brainwashed? I didn't. It was actually the Department of Education Reform. So,

So 99% of education PhDs are Marxist institutions. Yes. This one was housed in the College of Education, but not a lot of people liked us there because it was the Department of Education Reform. Just the very name of the department implied that we're trying to shake things up to try to improve the education. You said 99% of education PhDs are Marxists? I think it's higher than that. 99.5%. Yeah, definitely. The rest of them are socialists.

Yeah, yeah. Okay, and so how did that institution come to exist, and why does it still exist? I think it originally was funded by a grant from the Walton Family Foundation, and it still exists. There's professors there. My advisor is named Patrick Wolfe.

The Journal of School Choice is actually housed in that department. Patrick Wolf did a lot of the early evaluations of voucher programs, like in DC, for example. They were able to use random lottery to determine the different outcomes for kids in the public schools versus the private schools.

Much like a medical trial, you do the placebo for the kids who lose the lottery, which is the public school system business as usual. If you win the lottery to get a voucher to go to a private school, Wolf's evaluation, for example, in 2013 found about a 30 percent increase in the likelihood of graduating from high school from getting more educational opportunities through the voucher. And you can say it's – That was random? Yeah.

Yeah, randomized control trial. So you can say with a big enough sample with certainty that this is not because of the family characteristic of the student. It's not because of the student's racial background or their income. It's because of them getting a better opportunity to go to a better school. And so I did that kind of research when I started. My first study was actually with Dr. Wolfe.

And we found that the Milwaukee voucher program that started in 1990, we found a huge reduction in crime later on in life. So shouldn't be very surprising. You're more likely to graduate high school. - Independent of graduation rates? - We didn't control for graduation, but it's probably closely linked. If you're more likely to graduate, you're probably gonna be more likely to get a job, less likely to be involved with the criminal justice system. - Yeah. Oh, well, okay. Let's back up and do a big picture overview.

you should perhaps let everybody know. Well, two things. You've authored or co-authored two relatively recent books, right? One of these, this is The Parent Revolution. And that's this year's? 2024. 2024. Wow. So essentially this year. Pretty recent. Yeah. And then there was another one that you co-authored. What's the title of that? Mediocrity, right? Right. 40 Ways Government Schools Are Failing Today's Students. And it was on the 40th anniversary of the Nation at Risk Report.

which came out which basically said that look our outcomes are horrendous and things haven't gotten any better since then in some cases they've gotten worse and we spend a lot more money than we did back then well that's better at least people who are the unions we spend about 20 000 per student per year now which is about 52 higher than average private school tuition in this country that spending in the government schools has increased by about 164 percent inflation adjusted

since 1970. Have the outcomes gotten 164% better? No, obviously not. But it's because they're not focusing on math and reading. They're focusing on gender ideology and critical race theory in the schools. And if you're focusing on those things and teaching kids to hate your country, it shouldn't surprise us that the academic outcomes aren't getting any better. Yeah, so...

Why don't you explain exactly what problem you are attempting to address? How would you characterize your... Because there's...

You're an interesting person because lots of people are focusing on the dismal plight of the schools, let's say, and their dreadful expensiveness. You know, 50% of U.S. state budgets are spent on K-12 education, right? 50%. So that means essentially that the teachers unions have a hammerlock on 50% of the state budgets. And it's worse than that. It means that the faculties of education, we can talk about them in some detail, but

Because they have a monopoly on teacher certification, basically have their, what would you say, their status is subsidized by half the money that Americans spend at the state level. Yeah. Right. And it's the only way they can survive because I don't know if there's a more dismal faculty than the faculties of education. Social work might...

compete. They have the lowest scores on all the SATs and other academic credentials. And they also have a monopoly, a geographic monopoly when it comes to the K-12 government school system, where in most places in America, you live where you live.

and you're assigned to a school just based on your address, which gives them no incentive to spend additional dollars wisely. I mean, just imagine if you had to shop at a government grocery store that you were assigned to based on where you live and they had empty shelves, no food. And when they did have food, imagine if you got food poisoning where it was expired. And if you wanted to go somewhere else, they'd tell you to go complain to the grocery board who wouldn't listen to you and would try to cut off your mic, which is what happens with the school boards right now.

And if you had to just move houses to get access to a better grocery store, that would make zero sense. Or if you had to pay twice, basically once through taxes for the government grocery store you're not using, and then again out of pocket for a grocery store that actually provided you with healthy food, that's what we have with the government school system today.

You cannot go somewhere else unless you pay twice, essentially. And low-income families are basically just screwed in the worst failure factories that we call public schools today. In places like Chicago, they have like 33 public schools with 0% math proficiency rates. And they spend about $30,000 per kid. And guess what? Their teacher's union boss, Stacey Davis Gates, she sends her own kid to a private school. She knows better than anybody else that their schools are not working for kids. And-

That's the main problem that I see, and everything else trickles out from that monopoly issue. They don't have an incentive. There's a number of different monopolies operating that you just described. There's geographic monopoly, right? And that's a good analogy. Yeah.

So there's no competition. The problem with no competition is that when there's no choice, there's no real incentive to do the hard work that produces improvement. And there's actually no possibility even for comparison between different systems, right? So without competition, you don't have any possibility of really head-to-head evaluation, right? And no competition.

no necessary incentive for innovation. So there's a geographic monopoly, which you just described. You send your kids to the school that's in your location and that's that.

And then there's a state-mandated monopoly because you have to send your kids to school. And then there's a teacher certification monopoly. So we actually... And that trickles down from the university level into the K-12 system. Right, right. Okay. And now, so you've fundamentally concentrated, and does this include your doctoral research? You fundamentally concentrated on the issue of choice per se? Yes.

And were you interested in choice as an economist might be interested in choice or why were you interested in choice? Yeah, I did my bachelor's and master's in economics. Oh, yeah. And I had a professor there. John Merrifield was his name. He's now a retired professor. But he was probably the only free market professor at the University of Texas, San Antonio that I knew of. And I had him – I took all of his classes. He was my advisor. He was affiliated with the Friedman Foundation at the time, which is now called EdChoice, which is a school choice advocacy group.

And he was the one who directed me or suggested to me at least three different times, "Hey, you should probably do this PhD program." And I ultimately took his advice and I'm glad that I did.

And that's how I look at the school system. I see it as one of the most socialist institutions that we have in America today where the government operates the means of production, the schools that you have, whether you want to call it the local, state, or federal government, they all have their hands into the government school system. And taxpayers have to fund it.

And there's a monopoly. There's no competition. There's also kickbacks. What's the percentage of Democrat financial support from teachers' unions across the U.S.? It's in the high 90s, if I remember correctly. 99.9% of Randy Weingarten's union. She's the head of the American Federation of Teachers. She lobbied the CDC to make it more difficult to reopen schools during COVID. That's another story altogether. They knew they could hold children's education hostage.

to get billions of dollars in ransom payments and so-called COVID relief that started in 2020 because they knew if they were closed, they could say, we need more money because we're closed. It's the same story as we see with the test scores. They say, we're failing because we need more money. It's the definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. They're not doing the same thing because they keep ramping up the mounted costs.

Yeah. Right. So it's worse than the same thing. Their same thing is always give us more money and it never improves anything. Smaller classes, more money. Yes. And in every other industry, if you think about what smaller class sizes actually means, that means lower units of production output for the same inputs. Yeah. Yeah.

Everywhere else, you increase your production over time with more technology. Well, in principle, you'd assume that much of the heavy lifting could have been done by computational technology. I think that's particularly true if it was applied properly for

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You know, when you're teaching children basic skills, likely reading is the best example of this. So when children learn to read, contrary to the whole word theorists who are also a product of the faculties of education and devastated literacy in their theoretical stupidity. So English obviously is a phonetic language and the way you learn to read is that you learn to associate sounds with letters.

and that's actually a rather dull process there's nothing intrinsically not there's little that's intrinsically interesting about that some kids will treat it like a puzzle some children can associate letters with sounds very rapidly and some take much more practice that's IQ dependent fundamentally although it's

There are other contributing factors. You can have high IQ kids with dyslexia, but it's basically an IQ phenomenon. But what you want to do with little kids is continual exposure and practice because they need to

produce little neural circuits that recognize each letter and that use the conjunction between the visual system and the auditory system in the brain to tag each letter with a sound. Letters first, two-letter combinations, three letters, small words. Then as you develop expertise, phrases, you get in a single glance and maybe even sentences if you start to become stunningly proficient.

Right. Computers are unbelievably good at the first part of that. Right. Because they're they're incredibly patient and they can give you immediate feedback. And so at least in principle, it would be possible to augment teachers with appropriate technology and increase their efficiency. And we've seen none of that. Right. None of that.

And the reason that we see so many of people in the Democratic Party fighting against things like school choice where families can take their money somewhere else other than the government-run school is because of that money laundering operation that we just addressed where the teachers unions send

almost all of their money, 99.9% to one party, the Democrat Party. And so even though Democrat voters want a better education for their kid and they want choice as well, the teachers unions influence those elected officials. It's special interest politics at its worst. They also influence them to close the schools as long as possible. You had the Chicago Teachers Union tweet out during COVID that the push to reopen schools is rooted in sexism, racism. Hook.

And misogyny. Yeah, but everything is rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny. They threw every buzzword at the wall. Yeah, every buzzword. And genderism, you know. And I'm glad that that's not working anymore. And I think that unions...

actually stepped on a rake. They overplayed their hand during the COVID era, and that showed families what the heck was happening in the classroom. We wouldn't have known a lot of this Marxism was in the government-run schools. Maybe some families saw it here and there, but for the first time ever as a country, we were able to, at large scale, get a peek into some of the far-left lunatics who are running the government-run school system through remote learning, which, let's be real, we should have just called it remotely learning. There wasn't a lot of learning going on

but families have been mobilized more than they've ever been before. And since COVID-19,

We've had 14 states now, all controlled by Republican legislatures, go all in on school choice. Arizona is one of them, one of the first, actually, to allow families to take that money that would have gone to their government school to a private or charter school or home school. Okay, so let's take apart this issue of choice because it would be easy to assume that you're an advocate of something approximating parental freedom, right? That parents have the right to choose, let's say, the value set of

that defines the education of their children. But it sounds to me more that your primary concern wasn't so much the freedom of parents to choose as it was your observation of the fact that

In the absence of competition, so in the presence of a monopoly, particularly a government-run monopoly, the probability of low quality is 100%. It's both of those things. I think it's actually more so than the outcomes. It's more so about parental rights and who gets to direct the upbringing of their children. I got into this as a libertarian.

a limited government. Okay. So you're making two arguments. One is, it's an outcome based and also yeah. Values as well. And whose children are they? They're not the government's kids. They're not the teachers unions kids, even though they just posted recently right before we came here that we got to protect our kids. They always use language of ownership of it. It's a communist ideology. And I think that's what woke up so many people with recent elections too. You look at the Trump versus Harris election, uh,

Republicans typically don't do well on education because they don't throw more money at the problem. But right before the election, there were two nationally representative surveys by Atlas Intel, which was the most accurate pollster in 2020, and they correctly predicted Trump winning all the swing states in 2024.

They both found that Trump was beating Kamala Harris on education. And I think that's because it's changed from a conversation about who's going to throw more money at the problem to who's going to respect my right as a parent. And Trump won the parent vote by nine points, too. All right. So back to the issue of, let's see, we've covered school choice on an economic grounds. We've covered school choice on a parent's right ground.

The next issue might be, let's talk a little bit about the Marxist element. Okay, so I'd like to focus for a moment on the faculties of education. As I intimated earlier, I don't think there is a more corrupt and intellectually bankrupt faculty than the faculties of education.

My experience with faculties of education as a psychologist is that the worst of all psychological theories are always picked up and amplified, magnified, publicized by educational psychologists. Okay, so let's take that apart a little bit. Whole word learning is a good example, right? So whole word learning was predicated on the idea that

expert readers read words at a glance. They don't sound them out, or phrases even. 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. Now, that presumes that experts read when they learn to read the same way they read as experts, which is a completely preposterous idea neurologically, but that didn't seem to occur to any of the people who were pushing it.

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. Okay, so whole word learning has been a complete bloody disaster, but it's still often utilized. And then there's the self-esteem training. There's another terrible idea from psychology. First of all, the idea that there is such a thing as self-esteem.

So you can model self-esteem with extroversion and neuroticism. So people with high self-esteem are low in neuroticism. That's the primary issue. So they are less likely to feel negative emotion, and that's a temperamental trait. Maybe there's some environmental contribution, but not a lot. And then they're more likely to be extroverted because that's positive emotion. And so...

If you're low in self-esteem, you tend to feel a lot of negative emotion. Particularly in women, negative emotion is self-directed. So women with high negative emotion have a lot of bodily concerns, for example. They're self-conscious.

Right? And that's not an attitude. It's not a cognitive set. It's a temperamental feature. 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, there's reasonable evidence to presume that teaching children to concentrate on their emotional experience actually makes them worse. So...

The psychologists who laid out the big five personality template using statistics to begin with, the most common measure is the NEO-PIR, and its measure of neuroticism, negative emotion, has facets. One facet is literally self-consciousness. So,

Thinking about yourself and being miserable are so tightly associated that you can't distinguish them statistically. So if you get children to dwell on their negative emotional experiences, then you tend to exacerbate the problem. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so...

So anyways, you can't use self-esteem training to... So when we started seeing the videos from Libs of TikTok and other words, otherwise, of critical race theory in the classroom and teachers bragging about how they were injecting gender ideology into the schools, a lot of people would ask me, how prevalent is this stuff anyway? 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. And they had their mics cut off.

But there was a nationally representative survey that just came out earlier this year in January that found that 36 percent of kids in high school reported that their teacher often or almost daily said that,

America is a fundamentally racist country. And there were a lot of other findings in that survey as well. It's by Education Next. And that was the first that I saw that this is actually a wide-scale phenomenon. My first reaction- It's the norm. Yeah. When people would, like, I didn't have like a data point to point to. And I had the sense- When was this? When did you figure this out? This survey was January of this year. This just happened. Oh, oh, oh. So you didn't realize how widespread it was until that survey. You know, because I get asked this all the time, like,

Corey, is it really a big problem? And I'd say, well, we're hearing about it all the time. If it's a big problem for this parent, then this is a big enough deal for us to change something, right? If that parent is unhappy, they should have a choice to go somewhere else, even if it's only 1% of the time. Well, now we know it's not just 1% of the time. It's all the time. It's everywhere. 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. That's just not the case. The entire education system, and this is a consequence of the operation of the faculties of education, is radically different

resentfully leftist at its core. The aberration is any learning that happens outside of that philosophy. And so I want to tell you about a study we did because this is relevant to the faculties of education. So I did this study with a student of mine, Christine Brophy.

master's student. We were going to follow up on it, but my academic career exploded shortly thereafter. But it was a good study. The first thing we wanted to do was to assess how political beliefs clump together. You can do that statistically by looking at the path. You can say, imagine you ask a large number of people a large number of questions. You can see

across people whether answering one question in a given direction predicts answering another question in a given direction. So then you can clump the questions and so you can analyze how belief statements aggregate. So the first question we wanted to answer was,

was there a coherent set of politically correct political beliefs? 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 it absurd, but it still needed to be demonstrated. We actually found that there was two forms of politically correct belief systems.

One was more like classic left-wing liberalism, right? But there was a smaller group of left-wing totalitarians, authoritarians. And so those were people who adopted progressive policies, so-called progressive policies, but were also willing to implement them with force, essentially. So there's a tyrannical aspect to it. Okay, so once you establish that these groups of beliefs exist,

you can look at the correlates or the predictors, right? So there's a standard set of features that you would look for in a psychological study. You know this, undoubtedly. 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. And temperament, big five temperament, and then sex, and then

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The best predictor of being a politically correct authoritarian, that's radical left-wing authoritarian attitude, was low verbal IQ. Right. So you can imagine that people will default to a particular kind of simple-minded worldview if they can't think critically very well. It was a very powerful predictor. It was the major predictor by a lot. It was a better predictor than the relationship between

general cognitive ability and grades. So you're less likely to tolerate others' beliefs and think of them as a person. No, I don't think it's tolerance. No, it's not tolerance. I think what it is is preference for a maximally simple explanation.

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. Well, you also can't, like America is a racist society. All inequalities are a consequence of systemic oppression. Well, that's one sentence. It's one sentence and now you have an explanation for the whole world. Well, that's attractive. Like we like belief. People like belief systems that collapse into something simple. Okay, there are other predictors.

Okay. Being female. Yep.

having a feminine temperament. That was an additional predictor over and above being female. And that was after controlling for... High agreeableness, this is controlling for intelligence and being female. The next was having a feminine temperament, agreeableness in particular, trait agreeableness, empathy, essentially. And the next predictor was ever having taken even one politically correct course. Okay, so now why am I telling you this? Well, partly because it's a useful thing to know.

But the other reason is that the students in faculties of education, as you said, have the lowest SAT scores. Okay, now the SAT purveyors don't like to describe the test as an intelligence test.

But it's an intelligence test. Yeah, it's correlated at like 0.9. It's an IQ test. It's just not corrected for age. So I wonder if why there's selection into the education academia based on these predictors. Is it because...

going into the school system is seen as an easier job with pretty good benefits. Well, that's a good question. Well, I think, first of all, the admission criteria are low to absent, right? So you can get in. 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. And then the other potential problem, and I don't know of any research bearing on this specifically, is that the

the security and the holidays, my suspicions are attracts people who are lower in conscientiousness. 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.

Now, and conscientiousness also predicts conservative political leaning, not liberal political leaning. Right. So you have kind of a perfect storm in the faculties of education is that their academic standards are very low for admission, which really matters, right? And then...

They tilt radically to the left, which is also something that would be attractive to people who have decreased cognitive ability. They select against conscientiousness because of the work hours and the security. I mean, these are all things. I had also seen a study that selection into education degrees was associated with risk aversion too.

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. 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 was that a 10-year period was it a one-year period i don't recall okay well the fundamentals yeah it's very low very low right right right there's virtually no assessment of teachers for effectiveness right you need no merit pay so the best teachers leave the best teachers say to heck with this

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. They reward years of service, not much. I mentioned earlier that spending has gone up by 164% in real terms since 1970. Teacher salaries on average have actually only increased by about 3%.

Right. So where's the bulk of the money going? So I think it's also going to pensions and other benefits too, but it's going towards administrative. Yeah. So the same thing that happened at the universities fundamentally. Same in healthcare. Yeah. Since 2000, we have data on this in the US. And we've seen that enrollment for students has increased in this public school system by about 5% since 2000.

The number of teachers in the system has increased about twice that rate, by about 10%. Administrators have increased by about 95%. Yeah, right. So it's exactly the same pattern as in higher education. Yeah, it's become a jobs program for administrators. Yeah, well, it's a weird thing. 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. 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. And what that implies is that there's no limit to the number of potential administrative contributions, right? And then the question is, well, what would limit the growth of the administration? And

in a competitive environment, free market principles essentially limit because you run out of money, right? So you can only hire as many people as you can afford to hire. This isn't a problem with

administrative bureaucracies that have an unlimited source of funding. So they're just going to continue to grow it. I don't know what it is, 5% to 7% a year or something like that. And there's actually been four studies on this. Not a lot, but it's what we have. It's a really niche area of research that the more private and charter school competition in the area, all else equal after the control for all the usual demographic characteristics,

the public school teacher salaries slightly go up. 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, it's for the kids. But all that aside...

Because there's also competition, they start to allocate those additional dollars instead of towards administrators, they start to allocate them towards the classroom, towards the teachers, so the teachers who remain actually end up better off. Is that to stop the teachers moving into the private realm? 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. Monopsy is a monopoly in the labor market.

With the government school system, you want to be a teacher, you basically got to take what they give you. 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 got to treat the teachers better too. So –

Some teachers are underpaid, some teachers are overpaid. We try to treat everything as one size fits all in our current system. 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. In Florida, there's 11 academic studies on this topic. 10 of them find positive effects of competition on the outcomes in the public schools.

It's been a rising tide that lifts all boats. Just over time, you can see it work out in Florida too. A couple of decades ago, they were at the bottom of the pack on what we call the nation's report card, the math and reading scores. Now, US News and World Report has ranked Florida number one on education. They're at the top of the rankings for the nation's report card. It's not because they pump more money into the system. They spend 27 percent less than the national average in Florida, but they have school choice for everybody. Same here in Arizona, they have school choice for everybody.

If you like your public school, you can keep your public school for real this time, unlike with your doctor. Thanks, Obama, for lying about that. But the public schools in this case actually do get better in response to competition. And we have studies all across the nation. Well, it's funny that you even have to make that case. 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. Like, well, how...

What else would improve quality? Wishful thinking or more money? Well, you can spend an indefinite amount of money stupidly and counterproductively. So, obviously...

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. The peers are your enemies, not your peers. Yeah, that's for sure. I'm amazed you managed that. So I mentioned that first study I did about school choice reducing crime later on in life. It was a very good study, the first of its kind. Long-term data, student-level data, very rigorous study. One of the reviewers –

And one of the first places we sent it was a journal called Urban Education.

One of the reviewers said, you know, we like the methods and we buy that it's a causal relationship, but they said, you called the students urban students. You can't say that. They are students in urban areas. So it was like a politically correct thing. And I looked at their about the journal. The only reason we said that was because they said urban students in their own about the journal, total hypocrites on the issue. Why were they allowed to say it? But I wasn't allowed to say it, but they went further than that. 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. I mean, it's just so ridiculous. But the study I wanted to bring up about competition was actually in my home state of Texas. I did a survey experiment with my co-authors. So I randomly assigned different surveys to public school leaders in Texas. 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. And I was asking them where they were going to put their money next year, like where were they going to allocate resources?

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. Any idea why? Well, because they know that they might have to think about where they're going to spend money if they have a competitor.

because if they waste the money, families are going to go there. But their argument usually is that obviously it's got to be something like more administrators make for a more effective school system. 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. They just thought I'm answering a simple survey question. Right. And they didn't know whether they're the treatment group or not. Right, right. How did you manage to, you said 40 studies? Yes.

Yeah, peer-reviewed. Yeah, well, over what period of time?

the probability that you're going to publish something that challenges the... It's counter to my views. Absolutely, man. So the fact that this is exactly what I'm asking you. It's like, over how many years did you publish 40 studies? 2016, I want to say, was my first. So what is this, nine or so years? So you've published four, five studies a year. 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. I thought it mattered. It did matter. But...

And I was very serious on the job market, but I applied to like three schools and most people will apply to like 100 if you're serious. 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 lessons. You mean when you were on the job market? When I was on the job market, my first think tank was called the Cato Institute. It's a libertarian think tank.

And I moved to D.C. while I was finishing my Ph.D. like two and a half years into the program. I ended up finishing it. And I've slowed down publications since then. But, you know, some of these lefty departments didn't even give me a call. But I had like nearly a dozen peer-reviewed publications a few years into my Ph.D. program. How do you do that? So just for everybody watching and listening, so you can draw a rough equivalent

between number of publications and a given degree. So, for example, with one publication, you have a master's degree, essentially, although most master's students don't even have one publication. With three, you have a PhD, and you have 40.

Right, and you said you had a dozen of them two and a half years into your PhD. And some of the far-lefty departments wouldn't even call me because they select based on ideology. They don't select based on productivity or intelligence or anything like that. But peer review articles are not the same thing as intelligence, I'll say that. But –

I found out really quickly that, and I'm glad, I had a fork in the road. I did have an offer from one academic institution. It was Kennesaw State University in Georgia. And I think they had like a free market center there, so they were friendly. So how many publications, sorry, how many publications did you have when you entered the job market?

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supplementation or prescription treatments. And with a remarkable 4.9 out of five rating on Trustpilot, you know you're in great hands. The best part is you can get 10% off your order today. Just head to MerrickHealth.com and use code Peterson at checkout. That's MerrickHealth.com, code Peterson for 10% off. Stop guessing and start optimizing your health today with Merrick Health because your best life starts with your best health. Approximately. Nearly a dozen. A dozen. Okay, so in principle...

you should have been a very hot prospect because a dozen publications in most institutions would give you pretty serious... I didn't publish in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. It wasn't like the... Yeah, still, dozens a lot.

You know, a dozen's a lot. And that would give you serious consideration for promotion to associate professor at many educational institutions. So they should have been lining up at your door. But I also didn't do it seriously. Like three, you know, applying to three schools just to put my feet in the water to see what would happen is not the same thing as what most people do with, you know, they're applying to 100 different schools. True, true. And so, you know. Okay, so you didn't have a full test of whether. Yeah, so it might have.

Not that it might have been, I might have gotten more of a fair shake if I actually did a real. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Fair enough. All right. So another mystery about you, I would say is you've had a lot of impact. How old are you? 33. Okay. Okay. So you're pretty early on in what would be an academic career, let's say. And you've had a lot of impact. Yeah.

on public policy, but more on public consciousness. And so not only have you produced a remarkable body of research, but you're very good at public communication. That's a rare combination of skills. So I guess the first thing I'd like to know is, I mean, I know about you. I'm probably more prone to follow, find and follow people like you. Tell me about

how you understand your public influence. Like, how broad an influence do you have? How well are your books selling? And what are your other major dimensions of communication? So this one hit the national bestseller list, USA Today. The New York Times didn't put me on their list for some reason. But Trump endorsed the book. 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."

So there's that, but I also went to government schools all through K through 12, so I don't know how I did any of this. You can just check out my handwriting in the beginning. It's very horrible. I blame it on my government school education. It's to you, Jordan. I'm going to give it to you right after the recording. But I think the way that I really started to change the narrative when it came to school choice was talking about it differently and

These days we can just say school choice and you and I know what we're talking about. But when I first entered the think tank world, I made a deliberate shift to talk about funding students, not systems.

And it's a linguistic thing. Is that your phrase? That's my phrase I came up with. It's good to have a phrase. 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. 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 supporting.

Well, yeah, you should never let the side that you're opposing define the terms of engagement. Conservatives are very bad at that. They're always on the... I'll give you an example. 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...

All five of them were picked by the left, right? So one of them, for example, I think- Playing on their turf already. Well, 40% of the debate was about climate change, right? So as soon as you debate that, you lose, right? Because the fact that you're even talking about it means that it's one of your priorities. And so, yeah, you got to get the question right. So you said, tell me your phrase again. Funding students, not systems. So it's more transparent. People know like this is the concept that the money is following the child. Well, and they are the consumer.

Yep. 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. Think about it. When we have grocery stores, which I mentioned earlier, we have food stamps. We don't say the food stamps must be spent at a signed Walmart or an assigned- That's a good analogy. And so we also do this with higher ed. It's not just that we do this with other industries. We do this with education too, higher ed. We have Pell Grants in the US. We have-

The GI Bill. These are taxpayer dollars that can be used at private universities if you want, and it follows the decision of the student. So it's the equivalent of money, essentially, although a little more narrowly targeted. Yeah, because the status quo would always say we need public money for public schools. And my quick response was, well, you support public taxpayer dollars for private everything else when it comes to higher ed. You support Pell Grants that go to private religious schools.

You support vouchers when it comes to hospitals. We have Medicaid vouchers. You can take that to a religiously affiliated hospital if you want. We do this with pre-K. We have the Head Start programs. All the Democrats support it. It's a pre-K program where the money follows your decision to a private provider of pre-K, even a religious one. Has that helped Head Start? Do you know?

Has it improved its quality? Head Start evaluations are horrible. They find that it spends a lot of money, and they don't improve outcomes. Most of the results are null results. They improve some outcomes. People are more likely to graduate, and they're less likely to be thrown in prison or get pregnant. But they don't improve cognitive outcomes.

I don't think that was the RCT, though. I think that was more of like a regression with controls, which is still something. Could be. Well, the crucial issue is there's no evidence that Head Start improves academic performance. And that's a consequence of multiple reviews. And it's really a catastrophe that it's the case. And the latest podcast.

pre-K evaluation statewide was in Tennessee. - Yeah, when was that? - That was a few years ago. They followed them through sixth grade. - Oh yeah. - And it was a randomized control trial. They found that those who won the lottery were worse off academically and behaviorally by the end of sixth grade. - Okay, won the lottery meaning? - 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.

So they were worse behaviorally as well. Maybe because the parents have an advantage at raising their own kids. Maybe they're better at disciplining the kids at home. I did a very programmatic review of Head Start in the 80s. So that's quite a long time ago, but the programs had been operating for a very long time. And there were, I think, five major reviews. And at that time, the findings were that

accelerated cognitive performance, so test scores, for a year or two following the interventions, but that by grade six, there was no effect, but that the longer-term effects seemed to be behavioral. And so reduced crime. No, no, they were positive. Oh, those were positive. They were positive. Less pregnancy, less crime, and higher probability of graduating. So, and the...

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. But you're saying that the more recent –

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. - Yeah, yeah. - 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.

And we also had a – there is an RCT. That was with Choice.

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. They found that winning a lottery to go to a charter school in New York City –

decreased the likelihood of crime for male students, because we're the ones causing all the trouble, by 100%. It was a complete elimination for lottery winners through the study period. I don't remember how long they covered. It might not have lasted forever. 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%. 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. I'm saying if we're going to spend the money, we might as well fund the people as opposed to the buildings. Yeah, yeah, no, no, I understand. Well, I sidetracked a little bit into Head Start because doing that review for me was actually very disheartening. Because the thing about Head Start...

and this can allow us to talk about political issues more broadly or conceptual issues, nobody liked the fact that poverty tended to persist multi-generationally. 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? 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. 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. And that was a catastrophe for the right and the left politically, as far as I was concerned, because it was a disaster.

reasonably motivated endeavor. 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. 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.

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. 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. Yeah, it can't get any worse, right? Yeah, well, maybe you... 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. Right, but you were convinced that the Tennessee data, that's, I don't know the study. That's the latest experiment and it's peer-reviewed, published. Oh, that's really too bad. And the head starts that I've seen as far as the RCTs,

Yeah, randomized control trials.

saying these things, using left-leaning arguments to advance school choice, which I think they're all good arguments. It's true that the lowest income are in the worst schools, that they would benefit the most. School choice is an equalizer. But there's also right-leaning arguments you can make about choosing schools that align with your values. The public schools are Marxist. We don't want gender ideology. We want schools that teach you that America is a great country, not a horrible country. And so you can make all these different types of arguments.

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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. And then the Democrats, they're controlled by the teachers' unions anyway, so you're not going to make much ground with them anyway.

regardless of the argument you're making, they respond to power, not logic. 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. But now it's become more of a GOP litmus test issue. Voters have gone to the ballot box and held Republicans accountable for being against school choice.

In Texas, my home state, we failed on school choice last year because we had 21 Republicans join all the Democrats in the House to kill school choice. And they came up with their arguments about how they were in rural areas and they didn't need to vote for this. But after the primaries, now 14 of them are gone. That was a political earthquake. And now for the first time in Texas history, the House has 76 co-sponsors to pass a school choice bill, which is a lot of money.

which has never happened and you need 76 votes to pass a school choice. - What did you have to do with what happened in Virginia? - Well, in Virginia, we had Mr. Terry, I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach, McAuliffe on the debate stage. He was the former governor of Virginia. And he said that at the final debate, he was up in the polls by a lot. It flipped right after that because parents were pissed. Virginia closed their schools just about more than any other state. They were as bad as California when it came to reopening the schools in Virginia.

And Glenn Youngkin turned that into an opportunity. He laid out a blueprint for success for Republicans going forward. And 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. Voters, they rank jobs, the economy, crime at the top.

Education was number two, and a Republican won on that issue. Well, given that 50% of the bloody state budgets go to K-12 education, it should be like number one or number two all the time. You would think, but I think for a long time, people thought things were fine, right? 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 kids coming home with A's on their report card, they get into great universities that are good on paper. Well, they're also for a long time. Like when I went to school as a kid, like I hated school. It bored me to death. But I have to say that my teachers didn't teach me insane things, right? And so we don't just have a feeling. I don't know when that flip happened either. Somewhere around mid-2000s.

somewhere around 2010, things really went sideways. They went sideways in the universities too. Like, I saw that blip of political correctness in the 1990s when I was teaching in Boston. But it was mostly outliers. You know, it was the radical fringe, although a lot of them were in the educational psychology departments. But they weren't

they didn't have the upper hand. And somewhere around 2010, that flipped hard. And I think that sort of thing flips partly to, you said, you talked about good teachers leaving. 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, they all leave. Right? And then, well, then you're just left with the worst of the worst, right? And then they hire people who are even worse than they are and the whole thing's, you know, gone off its railings. 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. And then people started to notice. And it was likely the gender issue that did that. 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 to...

want to change other people's children's views in that direction to select. Oh, yeah. So it's almost like it's a reinforced, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. I've spoken to Republican governors about this on multiple occasions. I think I met you at RGA, by the way. Yes, yes, that's right. That's right. 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, and if they continue to spend half the state's money on K-12 education, essentially that's dominated by progressive Marxists. Like, everything else that is happening is, as far as I'm concerned, it's blowing in the wind. And so I want to challenge you on a couple of things, because I'd like your opinion. See...

I can understand the rationale, the logic for your choice approach. And I can see it from the free market perspective. So let's say the libertarian perspective. I can see it from the parents' right perspective. And I appreciate the data that you've described here.

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. Great, all of that makes sense. 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

Right.

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. We need alternative certification. So, yeah, I think you're right that we have to have a multi-pronged approach. School choice isn't the silver bullet for everything. And neither is alternative certification. We should fight the battle on multiple fronts.

And some people do set up this false dichotomy. They'll say, oh, you're saying school choice will cure everything. Well, not exactly. We should also reform the public school system. You should still go to your school board and try to change things because a lot of kids are still going to go to the public schools, whether you have school choice or not. But we also need an escape valve. I mean, for example, if you only try to –

change the system from the top down, which is what we've done partially in my home state of Texas. Some good tweaks. They've banned critical race theory. They're talking about banning DEI in public schools this year as well. We have Trump with his executive orders helping out as well. But we have undercover video from a group

called Accuracy in Media. 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. Sure, of course they are. And they're proud about it. They're like, yeah, we're still doing CRT, but we're just going to call it something else. How do you ban ideas? Behind closed doors, they continue to do what they want.

Well, you see this in the universities too. It's like, well, we're going to scrap our DEI programs. It's like, they're not scrapping them, they're just renaming them. They move, they just retitle this person and they continue to do exactly the same thing. And you can camouflage what you're doing with words, no problem. It'll take people years to figure it out. And so this is another part. Okay, so- 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, 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. I'm sending my kids somewhere else. And I think that would give a pressure for the public schools to say, let's knock it off. I don't want to irritate anybody on the left or the right. I'm going to focus on the basics, math, reading and writing, and then

You're not gonna have all of them. And so you might say, well, what about the private schools? Some of them, they also operate in this kind of small market right now already when you don't have choice. 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. Especially right now, we're pushing something called education savings accounts.

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. They were calling them pandemic pods during the COVID era where five to 10 children were getting together in a household, kind of like the one-room schoolhouse idea.

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. And this has happened in Arizona too. So you think the diversity of school proliferation will eventually solve the ideological problem? 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? I'd say that's still better than the status quo where you have zero choices, but at least now you can take the funding. Hey, if you want to just homeschool your own kids and use it for the curriculum or private tutors, that's –

that is a step in the right direction, even if it's not perfect. Are many or most of the school choice programs set up so that you could set up a micro school and educate your own children, for example? Most of them now are. And Arizona has an education savings account. They've had one for over a decade. They just went all in in 2022, making it available to everybody. They actually crashed the government website in Arizona because so many families signed up right when they opened up the floodgates. It's an interesting...

uh twist on paying women to have children because in some sense that's what you're saying you're setting up right well yeah yeah because which is what the public school system is already right yeah right it's subsidy for but it's a failing system that not a lot of people don't see it as well if it's twenty thousand dollars a year per child and the typical family has two children the woman has to make forty thousand dollars a year to justify the subsidy and so

That's after expenses. And so that's a very – it's very unlikely. Think about a classroom of –

30 kids, that's $600,000. I know. Where's all the money going? If the teachers are only making $60,000 a year on average, where's the rest? Yeah, well, you could figure, what, 60 for overhead in terms of physical plant, something like that. So that's $120,000. You know, a lot of them make more than the president of the United States. We have a half a dozen or so who make over $400,000 a year. So where does... Well, so tell me, where does the...

Where does the – so you said – A lot of buildings. They love building new schools and stadiums. Yeah. 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. So maybe that improves the self-esteem of the kids or whatever the teachers are trying to do these days. But –

It's just frivolous things. And you see this at the university level, too. They have these extravagant water parks and tuitions going up to cover these things and also subsidies from the government, too. But

These micro schools are really shaking things up. The whole factory model itself is frightened because of this. In fact, when Crenda Micro Schools in Arizona was reporting just huge increases in enrollment during COVID because the government schools were closed. So families were figuring it out. And a lot of them went to these micro schools.

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. They put out an opposition research sheet on Prenda Microschools and their founder, Kelly Smith, because they were so afraid of them –

Of them basically providing something that they weren't providing to students. They knew they were going to lose funding because public schools are funded based on enrollment counts. And so if you lose some students, you're going to lose some money, whether you have a school choice program or not. And in Arizona, you can use those education savings accounts to pay for Prenda micro schools and other ones too. Define micro school.

It's a miniature school, and there's a lot of different definitions for it, but basically a miniature private school. And during COVID era, it was basically five to ten children getting together in households to economize on homeschooling. 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 as the teacher. - Which you could do if it's $20,000 per. So what is the amount of the typical voucher if student expenditure? - Less. - Yeah, why? - So it saves taxpayer money, and most of these bills are passed at the state level. In the US, we're funded,

in the public school system in every state by the federal level, which should not exist at all. The word education is not in our constitution. It's an unconstitutional waste of time and money. But that's only about 8% of the total spending, 8 to 10%. The other 45, 45 are state and local dollars.

These bills are typically passed in state legislatures, so it's about half of the total that follows the students. So let's say on average 10,000 versus the 20,000 that's spent in the government schools. Is any of that happening locally as well to pull in the rest of that money? There have been some local vouchers that have passed in Colorado, a blue state. There was Douglas County had at once a couple decades ago passed a voucher program. It got nixed in the court by a lefty judge.

And that program is no longer on the books. New Hampshire, which passed a state-level program, also proposed a bill a year or two ago in their legislature to also allow the local districts to have the money to follow the child if they opted in as well. That bill got tabled. That was one that was really exciting. I think that's the next step in the revolution.

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? I think it should be equal across sectors. If we're going to spend the money, I think the state and local should follow the student, not just the state. But the reality is it's mostly students.

basically everywhere at this point. 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. You know, you could imagine five kids together, that's $50,000 a year. That's a pretty good supplement for a given parent's income. So, okay. So let's talk about, let's see, where should we go now? Yeah, okay. Um,

So I want to talk a little bit more about your means of communication. You've been working for these think tanks, but your work has received broad public attention. Okay, so now you also said that that was in part because you were in the right place at the right time. Yeah, yeah, that makes a difference. And you've done the background research, right? So you had a message that was saleable given the...

state of the zeitgeist, let's say. Okay, well, that's crucially important, right? But it's also important to be able to capitalize on that. Okay, so how would you characterize the consequences of your work so far? What have you seen shifting that you would attribute, at least in part, to the message that you've been disseminating?

- Yeah, changing the way people talk about school choice in terms of the money following the child. There's been a lot of legislators on the House floor, Senate floor,

talking about funding students, not systems. So they've developed my arguments. And I think a lot of them follow me on social media. And politicians, again, they want to get reelected. They want to look good. 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. And so I think they've adopted some of the language and arguments and studies that I've

conducted and also cited myself. Is X your most effective? It is for sure. Yeah. I have Facebook and Instagram, but they're not nearly, I have over 200,000 followers on X. It's not like crazy, but it's, it's ballooned in a, in a short amount of time. And it's, it follows you. Like, do you follow me? Yes, I certainly do. Um,

Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, Vivek Ramaswamy. There's a lot of influential people who follow me. Libs of TikTok, a lot of big accounts. Donald Trump doesn't follow me. Maybe after he sees this episode, he'll jump on the headwagon. Yeah, state governors, state treasurers. 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. He's no longer the governor, he's now Katie Hobbs in Arizona, who's a hypocrite on school choice. She went to Catholic school and now she opposes school choice for other families. 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. He often uses the analogy of when the first person broke the four minute mile. Before the first person did it, I don't remember his name,

People thought it was impossible for a human being to run below a four-minute mile. But once the first person did it, you had just this cascade effect of tons of people. Now, with school choice, no one thought that any state could do it where it's every family – because for a long time, there was an incremental approach on the school choice front. It was –

decades we're hitting our head against the wall. It was small incremental wins where maybe the lowest income families here, maybe just in this city they're gonna do it, maybe just for special needs kids,

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. One, because it allows for more competition, allows for a bigger supply side response, more of a market response. But also we're paying for public schools for high and low income families. They should be able to benefit from school choice as well. We don't discriminate based on income for the public schools. We shouldn't discriminate based on income for school choice either.

And politics, again, is all about organized interest pushing for what they want. 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. Yeah, so let me ask you about that. I've discussed school choice with some of my more intelligent liberal friends, 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 –

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. But then there'll be the children whose parents can't or won't involve themselves, and they're going to default to the vouchers.

public school system 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? You already have that inequality baked into the government school system. You have Baltimore. They have 40% of their high schools have 0% math proficiency rate. You see the same thing in places like Chicago

And so they shouldn't make perfect the enemy of the good. And this fear-mongering hasn't happened with school choice. The public schools, if anything, have gotten better. I cited Florida, but we also have nationwide data on this. 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. Even enemies of school choice who are in academia, who have any form of honesty at all, they admit that

that the studies on the competitive effects are positive. So the main argument that the unions put forward is the worst argument in terms of it being supported by the evidence. But a lot of people respond to fear-mongering, and so they do that. Well, it's a reasonable hypothesis, but the fact that the studies have already been done indicating that the— 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. Doesn't seem like a surprising finding to me, probably not. If you have choice now, you can exercise it. You're going to look

The point is school choice increases parental involvement by definition. Yes, there'll 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. So they're going to look and they're going to exercise that choice. Well, it's definitely the case too. 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. 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? And so most parents, for example, regardless of their own literacy levels, would like to have children who are literate and well-educated. And they might not know how to do it, but

They know their kids better than anybody else. Yeah, well, they actually care. That's right. They care as much as they care about anything, and they care far more about their kids than anyone else is likely to. Right, okay. 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. Yeah, they're rigorous studies. You can't randomly assign competition, but it's as good as you can get.

I've cited all the studies on that topic. Okay, okay, okay. So let's end with this. Let's end this portion of the discussion. I think what we'll do— I wanted to hit one more thing. Yeah, well, this is what I want to give you the opportunity to do that. So if there's anything else you'd like to bring up, do it now, and then we'll turn to the Daily Wire side. 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. So they had the most to benefit, most to gain from having more options in their kids' education. In D.C., they have a voucher program, which I think Obama was against, even though he sent his own kids to Sidwell Friends, a private school. School choice for me, but not for me. Hypocrisy again. Strikes again. It's everywhere. 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. And I believe about 95 percent of the kids were black or Hispanic. 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.

In Florida as well, there's a really interesting story about how DeSantis actually won in 2018. He actually barely won the governor's race in 2018. And the headline in the Wall Street Journal the next day was that school choice moms tipped the governor's race for DeSantis. 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. And those kids were disproportionately low income and non-white kids. So this is another way that, one, Republicans can make inroads with groups that they hadn't reached out to before.

And it's also, it shows you that this shouldn't be a partisan issue. 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. And this is something I point out in the book that the way that we can get towards bipartisanship on school choice is

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 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. Well, it isn't an obviously partisan issue. It shouldn't be. Well, it's like cost-cutting in government. 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? Because then at least in principle, more money could be spent on things that actually work. Yeah, exactly. 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. 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... admired in poverty, often multi-generationally. And I don't see any way out of that than the multiplication of supply. And it's also the case that the money of a poor person is just as good as the money of a rich person. 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. Right, right, right. All right. So I think we'll turn to the Daily Wire side now. And I think I'll talk to you about a couple of things. I'd like to know about your future plans, strategic and conceptual. Where do you go next? 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. And I'd like to talk to you more about any pitfalls you see emerging on the school choice side. So we'll talk about the future, we'll talk about strategy, we'll talk about the new administration, 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. So we'll turn to that on the Daily Wire side. Everybody watching and listening, you're more than welcome to join us for an additional half an hour behind the Daily Wire paywall. Thank you very much for coming. Thank you so much. Yeah, yeah. It's really good to have you here and appreciate it. 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? That eats up half the resources at the state level, right? It's really something. It's really something to see. So, all right, everybody, you can join us there.