Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 279 | The Corruption of Public Education & the Need for School Choice | Guest: Corey A. DeAngelis

Episode Date: July 24, 2020

It's no wonder that parents are sending their children to charter schools and homeschooling in hordes. Public schools are indoctrinating our children. They are receiving more and more funding, but teachers still have to pay for their own supplies. Their unions are in the political pocketbook. Every parent should have the right to send their children to the best school for them,  and Corey DeAngelis is here to speak on how we can make this happen. Today's Link: https://reason.org/author/corey-deangelis/

Hey guys, welcome to Relatable. Happy Friday. So we are having another mind-blowing conversation today with Corey DeAngelis. He is going to talk to us. He's an expert in school choice. And so he's going to talk to us about the public school system, the importance of school choice, why it predominantly affects vulnerable Americans and why it is so important for matters of justice, for matters of equity and equality for us to care about, know about, and support. school choice. I learned so much from this conversation and I'm really excited for you to as well. Without further ado, here is Corey DeAngelis. Corey, thank you so much for joining me. Hey, thank you so much for having me. Can you tell everyone who you are and what you do? Yeah, I'm Corey DeAngelis. I'm the director of school choice at the Reason Foundation. I'm also affiliated with the Cato Institute as an adjunct scholar. So I do a lot of research on school choice programs, whether that's, you know, charter schools or private school voucher programs or even things like education savings accounts, which we could talk about in a little bit what each of those are.

But I do research on these. I debate the topic with others and do a lot of myth busting because there's a lot of myths in the school choice debate. Actually, I have a co-edited book coming out with Cato Institute's Neil McCluskey called School Choice myths, where we tackle 12 of the biggest myths in the debate. So that's essentially my background. I have a PhD in education policy where I started all this recent. And I particularly like to look at non-test score outcomes because people when they're using these programs are choosing schools, private schools in particular, for a lot of different reasons. One is academics, but it's also safety, character skill development.

And, you know, I've actually looked at things like reductions in crimes and teen pregnancies as a result of these types of programs. This might be difficult to do because it's such a big subject. And you kind of just did it just then. But for people who have no idea what we're talking about when we say school, choice. Can you kind of concisely summarize what the idea of school choice is? Yeah, the most concise way I can summarize

it is anything that allows the family to escape the residentially assigned government-run monopoly system, or another way to think about it is to allow the money to follow the child to wherever that are receiving an education. That's the most basic way to think about it. So that could be a charter school,

which is a public school that's independently operated. It could be a magnet school, which is another government-run option but that you're not residentially assigned to. It can be the voucher idea where if you aren't satisfied with your residentially assigned school, you can take some of those dollars in the form

of a voucher and use it to pay for private school tuition and fees. This is the idea that Milton Friedman discussed in his 195 essay, the role of government and education. And then there's also things called education savings accounts, which I like to refer to as universal

basic education income or UBEI, where instead of that money coming in the form of a voucher, it goes into a savings account that families can use those dollars for different providers of educational services. So you can use it for homeschooling expenses, micro schooling, these pandemic pods that people are talking about right now. You can use it for that. You can use it for private school tuition and fees if you want, but it really takes us from school choice to education choice since it allows for a whole bunch of different options to be leveraged. And where there aren't these school choice programs and options, can

kids are simply assigned to a public school based on their zip code, correct? And if there's no option for school choice, that's where they have to go, even if the school has terrible teachers and they're not having a good experience there. Is that correct? Yes, Allie, and that's what I chalk up a lot of the problems of the public education system, too. It's this problem of residential assignment. In most places, if you don't have these school choice options, the default is you live in a

particular zip code. You live in a particular residence and you're residentially assigned to a particular public school. And if you want, if you're not satisfied with that school for whatever reason, you don't have a lot of options. And each option that you have is extremely costly. You can move to another house that's residentially assigned to another government run school or you can pay out a pocket, which is essentially the equivalent of paying twice, paying for two schools, one through tuition and fees than the other through the property tax system. Just imagine if you didn't like your nearest neighborhood grocery store and you had to move houses to get to get to access to another one. That would be extremely costly. And that grocery store that you live next to wouldn't have

any meaningful incentive to do a really good job. And this is another reason why I think there's so much contentious debate around schools reopening right now because, again, the funding goes to the system, the school instead of the family. And so just imagine again if your neighborhood Walmart got your money each week, regardless of whether they really. reopened and regardless of whether they even provided you with groceries each week, they would have very little incentive to reopen in a timely or effective matter. And so I think that's one of the big problems with the K-12 education system, that the money goes to the schools instead of the individual students. And so the families don't have a lot of power in this relationship. And they're kind of

getting left out of the conversation with the reopening debate. How did this system start where we said that kids are assigned to a particular school based on their zip code and that the money money goes to the school rather than the child. And why has no one changed that in so many years? Well, our compulsory education system, the first compulsory education law in United States was in Massachusetts in 1852, and it was advocated for by Horace Mann. He's the quote-unquote father of American public education. And the argument was to make people more alike, to make people more uniform. And this actually came and was adopted from the Prussian education system. which is in current day, modern day Germany, which was to create for, which was created for

the explicit purpose to make obedient soldiers and then, you know, clerks for industry to create people who could be managed. So that's where we got our education system. And it was, you know, if you look at all the rhetoric from Horace Mann and others in the 18, in the 1800s, it was about, you know, making those Catholics more Protestant, making the immigrants more, quote, unquote American, whatever they meant by that at the time. And so we still have that system in place today. And obviously, there are special interest involved that keep things from changing, because if you have a monopoly on any type of good or service, you have a strong incentive to keep it that way. So with this residential assignment and compulsory funding through the

property tax system, you create a huge monopoly system that doesn't really have to respond to the needs of their customers, and that is the government-run school system that we have today. If your customers have to pay you and they're compelled to use your service and they're residentially assigned to you, you don't really have a strong incentive to listen to them. And that's good for the producer, but it's not so good for the families. Just imagine if you had to pay Walmart again. If you had to pay Walmart each week or let's just take another taxpayer-funded initiative, like food stamps.

Let's say in order for a family to use food stamps, you had to use it at your nearest residentially assigned Walmart. Walmart would like that, and they would probably, you know, some producers would probably fight for, to keep things that way. So that's probably why we have that special interests involved in the school system as well. For the people who say that the reason why some public schools are failing isn't because they're basically not incentivized at all. They don't have any incentives to have more competent teachers or have higher standards for their administration or whatever

is because they are lacking funding because they might be in areas, in a poor area. And so the property taxes that are funding, that school are going to be a lot lower than they would be in a rich area. So people who use that argument to say, well, that's why schools are failing, not because of this lack of incentive that is inherent in a kind of system where the money has to unconditionally go to the institution instead of the students. What do you say to that?

Yeah, money doesn't matter if you don't have an incentive to spend that money wisely. You can spend a billion dollars per student and get the same results if you're just allocating it to administrative blow and just hiring more people instead of allocating those dollars into the classroom towards the student. So I would argue the incentives are more important. And look, we spend a lot of money in the United States since 1960 in real terms after adjusting for inflation. We've increased real education spending per child in public schools by 280%. Since 1990, we've increased it in real terms by around 40%. So each decade, we've increased spending in public schools year after year. Our results are about the same over the time since the last half century. So look, again, money doesn't matter. if you don't have any incentive to spend that money wisely. And just think about it from a recent report by Kennesaw State University's Ben Scaffity.

He looked at funding from 1992 to 2014, and he found that real education expenditures per pupil increased by about 27%. But he actually also found that real teacher salaries dropped by 2%. And so we're pouring more and more money into the system, but it's going into just putting more people into the system and increasing administrative, trade of bloke and bureaucracy. And so, look, I mean, again, this isn't benefiting the teachers either, the current system. And we've also found with studies of school choice programs, I think there's about five studies

on this that I've seen, when there's school choice competition involved, more dollars start to get allocated to the classroom and the teachers start to get higher salaries because the producer starts to see that, well, if we don't spend our money wisely in the classroom on the teachers for the students, we're going to lose our customers. And so competition works in education just like it does in any other industry. And I want to point out that, you know, in other taxpayer-funded systems, the money does go to the family. It doesn't go to the system.

And here's some examples really quickly because I forgot to mention them earlier. One is the food stamps, which I kind of mentioned earlier. The money doesn't go to the Walmart that you're residentially assigned to or even a government-run grocery store. It goes to the family. and the family has a choice in the matter where to allocate those dollars. They can take it to Walmart, but they can also take it to Trader Joe's or Whole Foods or Safeway or Harris-Deter or wherever they want to get those grocery services. But we see this in other industries as well, including education, with Pell Grants at the higher education level.

With Pell Grants, the money doesn't go to your nearest community college and the government doesn't say you better spend those dollars at the community college or you're going to lose them. No, it goes to the student. The student can choose to spend them at the community college, but they can also go to the state university. and they can even go to a religious private university. You can take it to Notre Dame, for example, or other universities as well. We have the GI Bill for Veterans, the same thing. The money goes to the individual student. You can spend it at private or public universities if you're choosing.

Pre-K programs as well. A lot of people on the left support pre-K programs in Pell Grants, but they don't support K-12 vouchers, which is, again, the same kind of idea here. If they support these other initiatives, they should certainly support K-12 vouchers. But with pre-K programs, the money goes to the family. You can choose a public provider of the pre-K or you can choose a private provider of the pre-K. The difference is the power is in the hands of the families when you're funding the students directly, not the system. And so the only argument that I'm making when it comes to school choice is we should just do it the same way.

If we're going to have a certain amount of taxpayer funding for whatever initiative it is, it should go to the people. It shouldn't go to the system. And the ones that are standing in the way of that, I know you talked about, of course, if you have a monopoly on something, you're going to want it to stay the way it is. But you mentioned that the system, how it is now, yes, more money is going to the institution to the public school, but actually teacher salaries are going down. I had assumed it would be the teachers unions who are trying to keep the system the way it is so that the money doesn't follow the child. But if teacher's salaries, salaries are going down, now I'm kind of confused. Who is standing in the way of more school choice? Yeah, so this is one thing that is good to clarify because being, you know, skeptical of the influence of teachers unions, is it the same thing as being anti-teacher? They have two different incentive structures. So the teachers union, think about the data that I showed you or talked about earlier, 1992 to 2014, increase in spending for people by 27 percent, decrease in teacher salaries by 2

percent that benefits the teachers unions because what they spent the money won was increasing the number of people in the system. So they increased the number of support staff by a ton. I think it was by about 700 percent or some huge number. I'd have to pull up the report. And so that money is allocated to hiring more people and putting them to the system. What does that do for teachers unions? That increases the amount of teachers union dues and revenues that goes to the union bosses. So that's beneficial for the unions. It's not beneficial. for the individual teachers, but it also benefits the unions in that it gives them more political power by having a bigger voting block. Yes, as well. Yeah, that's exactly it. So that's, so yeah, I mean, the teachers unions can keep saying that they're helping teachers in X, Y, or Z way, and that they're doing these things. But when you look at the actual data, the money isn't going into the pockets of the teachers. And that's why you have so many teachers complaining nowadays that, look, they're having to pay for their own supplies out of pocket. We spend over 15,000, $400 per child per year in the United States in our public school system. And we still have

teachers having to pay out of pocket for supplies. It's because the teachers unions aren't advocating for the right policies. And it's because the monopoly system doesn't have the right incentives in place. And so they spend it on administrative bloat instead of on the classroom. What we hear is that especially in the conversation surrounding a lot of the, a lot of a lot of the talk of systemic racism and disparities and things like that recently. We've heard a lot of Democratic politicians say, okay, while we're giving too many funds to the police, we're giving too much to the police, but we've been defunding education for years. I've heard this line over and over again. We've been defunding the education system for years. And every time we hear

this, what I think is a very sad story of a teacher saying, I have to pay out of my pocket for markers and paper and workbooks and all of this stuff, the assumption behind a lot of those stories and accusations is that it's just America. Our priorities aren't in the right place. And our government doesn't prioritize our teachers. Our government doesn't prioritize our school system. But it seems like those Democratic politicians, when they're making those assertions, they never point to the teachers unions that are standing in the way of some of these teachers getting the money that they need so they don't have to pay out of pocket. So like where's the where's the disconnect happening? Yeah, I just want to point out really quickly on this conversation about

defunding the police versus the education budgets. I looked at this data. It's available by the Urban Institute actually, which is I think a more of a left-leaning institution. And they found state and local governments allocate about 4% of their budgets towards policing. And for education, they allocate about 30, about a third, I think 31% of their budget. are allocated towards education. So this whole idea that we're spending more money on police than we are on education just isn't factually true. It's a talking point that sounds good, but it's just not factually correct. Yeah. And as far as defunding education, it depends on what you mean by that. If you, if you mean that, you know, we have decreased per people spending, that's just not true.

You look at the data. I actually got the Washington Post to correct a statement on this just a few months ago was actually the dean of the University of Virginia's Curry School of Education actually made the argument that we have decreased funding per pupil in real terms since the late 1980s. There's no way that you can slice the data to even torture the data to make it say that. Federal, local, state, total, whatever, however you look at the data, it's not true. So the Washington Post had to make this embarrassing correction of a dean at the UVA's Curry School of Education for saying this. But yet we still have people like Joy Behar on the view repeating this claim. just a couple of weeks ago.

So people should stop saying that. But I think what they mean is they're talking about how these teachers are having to pay out of pocket for supplies. So sure, maybe we're defunding education in the sense that we're not spending the money wisely. But if you're going to call to add more money into that same system, why are you going to think that it's going to be allocated any more efficiently if we don't change the incentive structure inherent in that system? So I would argue the best way to do that, again, is to advocate for school choice options and allow the money to follow the child to a charter school or a private school.

If you look at charter schools, for example, they get about three quarters of the amount that the traditional public schools get, and they get about the same or better outcomes. So it's not about money, right? They're using, they use a lot less money and they get about the same or better outcomes. And in D.C., here where I'm located, they have the D.C. voucher program that's targeted to very disadvantaged students. I think the average household income, even being in here in D.C., it's about 27,000. the students that are using this program. That's their average household income. I think

95% of the students are black or Hispanic using this program. And the most recent random assignment evaluation of that program found that although the students using the voucher only get about $9,500 per pupil, whereas the public schools get about $30,000 per pupil, they get about the same math and reading outcomes, but they get much higher satisfaction, reports of safety, and they're more likely to show up to class each day. So they're doing about the same academically for a third of the cost as the traditional public school system. And this is a random assignment evaluation, so we can be pretty confident that it's the effect of the program and not the background characteristics of the students. It's not, there's no selection bias problems to be worried about

with this kind of evaluation. So look, it's not the money. It's the incentive structure. Right. And I do want to point out that you pointed out some Democratic politicians are more likely to oppose school choice initiatives. Joe Biden's Biden Sanders, quote-unquote unity task force laid out some recommendations recently. And they actually called to end this DC voucher program here. Wow. That's serving 95% black and Hispanic students and students from households that are earning only around $26,000, $27,000 per household. And that's here in D.C. where we have a high cost of living. And so it's serving very disadvantaged families that are really enjoying having this empowerment to be able to choose their schools to get a better education for their children,

yet we have the Biden Unity Sanders Unity Task Force actually calling to take these options away from these families. And Biden actually voted against this very program back in 1997 when he was a senator. He called to end the funding for the program. And I also want to point out for the listeners real quick, it may seem like this is an additional program that costs taxpayers extra money but it actually saves taxpayers money because, look, you're spending a lot less than you would have spent on the same child in the public school system. And so whenever a child uses this kind of program, it actually saves taxpayer money. I just want to clarify that for the listeners as well. So it's literally a win-win on every front when it comes to school choice. You're saving taxpayers'

money, and then you're also empowering families to have more options, just like the more advantaged families already have in different locations. So for people like Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders and really a lot of people on the Democratic side who talk very often about economic disparities, particularly between different ethnicities in the United States when it comes to education, when it comes to graduation rates and then going to college and income rates, all of that. They talk about the disparities very often. Well, we know that one of the possible solutions to those disparities are these charter schools, are the ability for these families to be able to take money from a voucher program and to be able to go somewhere like a charter school. So they are in charge of their child's education. And if you're against the disparities or you want to try to close those outcome gaps, why in the world? Why in the world would you oppose programs like this?

I mean, what is there at least stated justification for saying we're doing away with charter schools and attempting to do away with school choice? Yeah, I mean, they lay out a lot of different arguments here, but I just want to point out that it's logically inconsistent for you to support school choice when it comes to pre-K and higher education when it comes to pre-K programs and Pell Grants. Those allow families to choose. So there's some type of disconnect, and I think it has a lot to do with power dynamics. You have much more of an entrenched interest in the K-12 system with the teachers' unions and other interests that want to keep it that way.

Whereas when it comes to Pell Grants and pre-K programs, you don't have the same kind of power dynamic because relative to the status quo, giving more choice to lower-income families for pre-K and Pell Grants doesn't destroy any monopoly or, you know, reduce the power of monopoly. whereas at the K to 12 level, since the status quo is this huge behemoth government monopoly, allowing people to leave that monopoly creates a lot of problems for these special interest groups, and they want to prevent that from happening. So that's why there's this disconnect. But they'll lay out some arguments. They'll say, I mean, some people will say that, you know, parents aren't education experts and that, you know, they shouldn't be able to choose because of this.

But look, Advantage families are already choosing their schools for their kids. They choose by their residents. and they choose through, you know, private schools or other means. So why has it become such a big deal when low-income families are trying to choose schools for their children? I would say that, you know, low-income families have a lot of information about how to make good decisions. And the evidence supports that when you give families the opportunity to choose their schools for their children. They look up a lot of information about these alternatives, and they do make good choices for their kids if you look at the evidence on these school choice programs. So it's kind of an elitist argument that, you know, for some reason, people who are just not

fortunate enough to be able to afford a private school, they argue might not be able to make those choices, which I think most people find ridiculous and an elitist argument to make. And look, families have a lot more at stake here. They have a much more interest in getting the decision right when it comes to their own children than a bureaucrat sitting in Washington hundreds and hundreds of miles away. And they just have more information on the ground about what their children are. need. These legislators and bureaucrats don't even know what the child's name is. The family knows much more about the needs of their children and they have a stronger incentive to get it

right. It doesn't mean that the bureaucrats don't care about the children. They're just not in the right position to be able to make these choices for everyone else. And so I will also point out just real quickly that school choice is an equalizer too. So the left, the right, everybody should be supportive of school choice. It should not be a partisan issue. And when it started in Milwaukee, you know, three decades ago, it wasn't a partisan issue. The left and the right came together to support school choice because they saw that it was an equalizer. Rich people already have school choice.

They can already afford to live near the best public schools in the best neighborhoods, the most well-funded public schools. They're much more likely to be able to do that than low-income families. And they're more likely to be able to afford private schooling. And then also we're seeing, you know, these things called pandemic pods where families are coming together almost organically, spontaneously, to find alternatives to the school system because a lot of schools just aren't reopening right now. And families are coming together in Washington Post and Good Morning America recently argued that this could lead to inequities. And that's true,

but they're somehow missing the obvious solution to allow the funding to follow the child so that less advantaged families can seek out these alternatives as well. Just think about it. We spend about over $15,000 per child per year. If you got 10 students together in a household and in this kind of pandemic pod kind of homeschool, quasi-homschool, quasi-private school initiative that we're seeing throughout the United States in big numbers, that would be $150,000 in revenues for that one 10 student microschool. And let's say only two-thirds of that went directly to the teacher. That's still $100,000 going directly to the teacher, whereas in the traditional school system, you see, teachers making far less than that, and they also have class sizes that are much higher than that,

about 20 to 30 students in the traditional system. So you can have more autonomy for teachers in this system. You can have more funding for teachers in the system. And you can have smaller class sizes, about a half or third of the size with these pandemic pods ideas. And you can have more equity by allowing low-income families to have the means to afford these alternatives that advantage families are already going around and forming for their students. This might be a... Sorry, go ahead. And I was going to say another argument, I think we're transitioning a little bit to miss a little bit that the other side makes about the school choice idea. And they'll argue that school choice defunds public schools.

They'll argue that school choice siphons away money from the public school. Exactly what I was about to ask. So go for it. And so here's my response to that. The reality is that the public school system is what defunds and siphons away money from families. School choice just returns that money into the hands of the rightful. The money doesn't belong to the school system. The money belongs to the child. The money is meant for educating the child. So school choice, as I said, returns the money into the hands of the rightful owners. And then I have another response to that, which is if your public schools are doing such a

great job and they're providing the meaningful education that you say to the students, then the families wouldn't leave. And they want to take their money elsewhere to a private school or some type of pandemic pod, microschool environment or to a homeschool environment. So, You know, a lot of people in the school choice debate will try to say two things at once. The defenders of the public school system will try to say two things at once that are logically inconsistent to say at the same time. It's kind of like the two button meme. I'll bring that up if you haven't seen the two button meme. But they try to say two things at once.

They'll try to say, our public schools are great. We don't need school choice. We don't need other options. But then they also try to say, oh, school choice will defund the public education system and destroy public education. Well, which one is it? If your public schools are doing a good job, there wouldn't be any change. Families wouldn't voluntarily leave your school system if they're satisfied with the services that they're provided. I think the reality is, though, that they understand that a lot of families are not happy about the services that they're being provided in the public education system.

And I have another response to that, which is public schools are funded based on enrollment counts in the United States. So if you have more students, you get more money. But they're not completely funded based on enrollment counts. I think it's about 60 to 80 percent of the funding is tied to students. So mathematically, if you lose some students to school choice programs, you actually end up with more money per child left behind. Public schools actually benefit from losing students to school choice programs. And most people don't want you to know this. Most people don't talk about this.

But let's say, you know, in Texas, 66% of the funding is tied to the student. So what does that mean mathematically? When a student leaves using a voucher program to a private school, the public school gets to keep 33% of the funding. So on a per-pupil basis, they actually end up with more money. per child left behind. Just imagine if that worked out that way with food stamps. If I went from Walmart to Trader Joe's with my food stamps each week, and what if Walmart had to keep 33% of my food grocery bill each week? They would be super happy about that. It's not really a good thing for families because they don't get all of their money, but the public schools should similarly be happy about

that, forgetting to keep 33% of the funding, or however much it is in your state, for not having to educate those children. Why should the public schools get to keep money that is meant for children when the child is no longer there. And same thing with food stamps. You get to take 100% of that funding elsewhere. We should be able to do that with school choice programs, but the reality is how it plays out on the ground politically is that the public schools get to keep a lot of the money when students leave.

So they financially benefit. They should be happy about that. The problem is they're not happy about that is because they don't want just 20 to 30% of the funding. They want 100% of the funding for students who are no longer there, which just doesn't make any sense. it's, the money should follow the child. And they won 100% of the funding, not necessarily so they can increase teacher salaries or they can make the schools better, but so they can either hire more personnel so that the

union itself has more voting power and has, you know, more people power in general. So maybe they can get higher salaries. It's not, they don't want 100% of the funding necessarily for the benefit of the students, which is what, which is what they argue, that we need more funding for, of these low-income students because if you take money away from our schools and the people that are left, the poor kids that are left are going to be negatively impacted because we don't have as much money. But that's just not true because that money is not going to the benefit of the students in the first place, correct? Well, Ann, if they're arguing to increase per people spending,

that's what school choice does. They end up with more money on a per-people basis in the public school. So they should be embracing school choice if it's really all about the money and having more money per pupil. But then also, yeah, they make a related claim where they'll say, you know, the least advantage students may not take advantage of the school choice program. I argue it's probably the opposite that one, school choice programs are targeted to the least advantage populations. But then also the least advantaged students who are not being served by the public school system have the strongest incentive to get out because they're not being served by the system. If you're already doing a good job in your public school, why go through the,

the trouble of switching schools. You already have like, you know, a peer group that you've established and, you know, switching is just a highly costly endeavor, even if you have funding following the child. So the people who are most likely to be motivated to leave are the least advantaged students. But look, there's 28 studies on this topic about what happens to the children who don't exercise school choice programs who remain in the public schools for whatever reason. 26 of the 28 studies that exist on this topic, and I can send you the link for the show notes if you would like. 26 to 28 find statistically significant positive effects of school choice competition on the students who are left behind or who remain in the public schools. So you can benefit from school choice programs without actually even using the programs because of these competitive pressures.

And again, it's because the public schools start to realize like, well, wait, we might lose some money if we lose our students. So we better shape up and up our game so that we don't lose students. And that's what we see in the literature, 26 to 28 studies positive. the remaining two studies are not statistically significant effects. So none of the studies find negative effects on the students who are, quote-unquote, left behind in the public school system as a result of school choice competition. Most of the literature suggests that these kids are better off as well. And just think about the logic behind this. It's not very thorough or legitimate to prevent people from choosing schools based on what happens in the public school system.

So let's just imagine the studies were negative. If they're not, they're overwhelmingly positive on this question of what happens to the children in the public school system. But let's say when I choose to take my student to another school, let's say the competitive response isn't positive by the public school system and maybe the outcomes get a little worse. But that's not a legitimate argument to take my freedom away from me and my families, particularly if it's a low-income family from being able to exit that school system to go to a private school that's working better for their children. This doesn't stop advantage folks from leaving the traditional public school system. They're allowed to leave and choose elsewhere for their children. Why is it only a big problem when low-income families are making these choices for their children? So this evidence, you know, our freedom to choose our children's schools should not hinge on these, quote-unquote, scientific studies in relation to this question of the competitor.

My freedom to choose my child's school should not hinge on the competitive response of a government-run school system. Same thing. Let's use an example for the listeners to make it clear with the food stamps. If I took my food stamps from Walmart to Trader Joe's and for whatever reason we found that there was a negative impact on the shoppers at Walmart because of less funding in Walmart, that would not be a legitimate argument to prevent families from taking their food stamps to Trader Joe's. Joe's. The government should not be able to say, oh, look, we did this study and we found that Walmart didn't respond positively. And, you know, since Walmart may serve more lower income families, we're going to force you to take your money back to Walmart. That would be absolutely outrageous. Same thing with Pell Grants. If we moved from our community college to a private university,

and we found that the community college was less well funded, and we found that, you know, the community college students started to do worse. That would not be a legitimate argument to force low from students using Pell Grants back into the community college system. And so similarly, this isn't even a good argument at the K-12 level, but aside from that, the evidence is positive. So, you know, you can't really make that argument. Theoretically, it's not a good argument. It's not a legitimate argument.

But then when you look at the preponderance of the evidence, it's overwhelmingly positive that the children who don't even use school choice programs benefit from competitive pressures. And just to reiterate this again, I remember I was reading a few years ago when I was learning about these school choice programs, I read a Washington Post article, which is actually really hard to find. I'm not going to state a conspiracy theory and say that it's purposeful that it's hard to find, but it's a little bit hard to find. It's a Washington Post article. I think it was written in 2017 that talked about how the Obama administration spent millions and millions of dollars on failing public schools chose, I think, the worst performing public schools,

maybe specifically in Chicago it was. And what they found was that their was no positive results, like test scores for student satisfaction, for the performance and satisfaction of these students at all, there was no positive result after millions and millions of dollars being pumped into these schools. So I just want to reiterate again that I think busts so many myths about the so-called dangers of school choice is that it's not necessarily a lack of funding. That is not why would you say the majority of schools are are failing, if any schools at all. It's about incentive structures. It's about power dynamics. It's about really the efficiency and effectiveness of the spending of the money that they do have,

correct? Yeah, that's absolutely right. And Eric Kanyashek, a Stanford University-based economist did a meta-analysis, and this was from a couple decades ago. So it's kind of outdated. But he looked at 400 studies on the topic relating, you know, increases in spending in the public school system to outcomes, and he found no significant relationship between the spending and the outcomes. So it looks like, you know, from Eric Hanysheck's work published in educational evaluation policy analysis journal, that there isn't a significant relationship between funding and outcomes. And look, we shouldn't even need studies to realize this, right? If you don't have a strong incentive to spend money wisely, you're not going to spend it wisely.

and if you don't, people should be able to leave. And look, if they were spending the money so wisely in the public school system, families want to voluntarily opt out when given the option. I mean, you look at the wait list in charter schools. That's evidence of, you know, families really wanting something else. And I think in 2014, there was an estimate of about a million student names on these wait lists, trying to get out of the traditional public school system. And look, if you're spending the money wisely, then why are so many families wanting to leave

to schools that receive a lot less funding, per child in the charter school sector. If money was so important, why are families voluntarily selecting into schools that get a lot less money? And same thing with the voucher programs. Here in D.C., they get a third of the funding that the public schools get. Public schools get over $31,000 per child. The D.C. Voucher program only gets around $9,500 per child. So why are they voluntarily leaving in large numbers to only get a third of the education funding for their child? It's probably because the public schools aren't spending the money as wisely. Right. I mean, these are just...

just free market principles. When you create competition between multiple entities, then the best is going to rise to the top. They're going to do whatever it takes in order to get the business that they need and get the money that they need. When there is a monopoly, people get swindled. People are negatively affected by that because there is no incentive by the monopoly to make their clients and customers happy. And so that is one of the principles behind school choice. Now, this is a big question that I have to ask you, in an ideal world, it's like if you could come up with Corey DeAngelis, you decided this is what the school system in America is going to look like. Here's how schools are going to be funded and here's how it's going to work, how parents get to choose their schools. How would you

describe the ideal school system in the United States? Yeah. So if we started from scratch is essentially your question, correct? Yes. I would structure it like the food stamp funding system where government doesn't run any grocery stores or runs very few grocery stores, and we can still provide families with the means to purchase an education, just like we do with groceries with the food stamp system. But we don't fund it for 100% of families. We only fund it for the very least advantaged. So just like what we do with food stamps,

we target it to the very least advantage to give them some money. We don't have the government run all the grocery stores, and we don't residentially assign people to grocery stores. We give some people some money who could otherwise not afford it, and we allow them to shop with that money. Same thing with the education system. We can structure in a way where all the schools are private. Maybe there are some public schools that arise that are government run.

But there's no reason why the government needs to run any schools, just like there's no reason why government needs to run any grocery stores. And we can put the money into the hands of families directly, particularly the least-advanted families, and we can let them choose between different private providers of the service, just like what we do with groceries and the food stamp system. But I know that's not going to happen anytime soon, right? We're not just going to restart the education system overall.

And so what I argue for is something I like to call universal basic education income or education savings accounts or education scholarship accounts, whatever you want to call it. But the basic idea is to take the existing funding system that we already have, no need to uproot everything that's never going to happen. So like property taxes? Well, yeah. So we already have the funding allocated on a per pupil basis in the United States to different students. Take that existing funding, don't change it, and just tie it to the student instead of the school system. And we can allow the families to send all that money back to the public school system if they think that's doing a good job and they can enroll their children in the public schools. But they should also be able to choose a charter school.

They should also be able to use that money to attend a private school. They should also be able to form these micro-pandemic pods or micro-schools and be able to use the, that money that way or they should also be able to use online virtual education or they should also be able to use it for home-based education and homeschooling if they would like. So again, I think the politically feasible thing to do, which is not to uproot the entire school system and to restructure the entire thing, but just have the money followed families. Same money that already exists in the system. Another way to do it, and you kind of alluded to property taxes, is to not charge people in the first place if they opt out of the public education system.

And so you can still have them kind of subsidize other families, but you can still think of a system to where you give them kind of a top property tax rebate. So let's say I'm homeschooling my child or I'm paying for a private school out of pocket. And let's say you're charging me X amount for the property tax system. And you could just not take my money away in the first place if I opt out of the public education service. Maybe not take 100% of the, you know, maybe not reduce my property. property taxes by 100%, but maybe you reduce it by 80% or something to help families that way. So that's another way of doing it.

But I still think the best way to do it that would cause the least resistance politically would be just keep the system the same, keep the funding the same, and just change the dynamic of instead of funding systems funding the students directly instead. It's a very easy way to change the system pretty drastically. If we saw a more sinister motivation behind politicians and maybe people and teachers unions to keep the existing structure as is and actually ban charter schools and try to diminish school choice as much as possible, that motivation may be that it is much harder to control what students learn if they are free to go wherever they want to. if they're free to go to a charter school, if they're free to go to this micro school. And I'm not saying that's the motivation of all of the people who are against school choice. They have their different political reasons.

But I think one of the issues that a lot of parents have with public schools is not necessarily just the quality of teachers, but actually what they're learning as far as sex education goes, even as far as history goes, civics, things like that. They're worried about their child being indoctrinated. And it makes it a lot more difficult for a child to be indoctrinated if their parents are the ones who have authority and control to send them to certain schools. Is that a concern that you see a lot? Yeah, I mean, look, I don't like to question the motives of anyone. But if you look at the history of the education system, that was the explicit purpose of the common school system in the United States. You look at the words from Horace Mann and others, Benjamin Rush and others.

And I can provide you with lots of quotes. outside of the interview, and I'll send them to you. But it was created for the explicit purpose of controlling the masses and making them more obedient and making them more a uniform population. And a lot of it was anti-Catholic sentiment, that they wanted the Catholics to be more like Protestant Americans, and they wanted the immigrants to be more what they thought would be proper Americans. So it was of all about controlling the views and the backgrounds of Americans.

citizens. And Horace Mann himself was reportedly homeschooled his own children and kept his own children out of the public school system. So it's kind of strange. And it's always about everybody else's children and what we believe that, you know, we elites believe that they, that they should learn. And look, you saw some of this pushback recently by Harvard Law School professor Elizabeth Bartholet who called to ban homeschooling in the United States. And it was, it came at a time when everybody was essentially homeschooling during the lockdown. So it was kind of a, you know, a strange time to launch this all-out attack on homeschooling. But she called for a ban on homeschooling. She calls it a presumptive ban. But what she does is change the definition of homeschooling because she says that

even if you're deemed worthy of homeschooling your children by the elites, well, we're still going to require you to send your children to the public schools for a couple of classes each day. I would call that an outright ban. But she always backtracks and says, I'm not calling for a ban altogether. You can still homeschool your children, but you're still going to have to send them to the public schools, which most homeschoolers would call that an outright man on homeschooling. And she argued explicitly that it's a big problem, she thinks, that a lot of Christians and conservatives are homeschooling their children. And she thinks that they're being, quote, unquote, in private schools too, isolated from, quote,

unquote, public values, which are reflected in the public education system. But we've seen over and over again that there's a lot of leftward-leaning bias in the public education system. The Educational Freedom Institute, where I'm executive director as well, we started something recently called the political indoctrination map. So you can hover over your state and see instances of political indoctrination happening in the classroom in different states. So that's something interesting that we're starting to track as well. And that's one of the reasons why people are really wanting alternative options to the public education system because a lot of families, particularly conservative families that have seen through social media channels,

are saying that they feel like their children are being indoctrinated politically in the public education system, which a lot of these families don't want to be forced to pay for that, and they certainly don't want to be forced, particularly for lower income families, to send their children to these schools where they feel like they're being politically indoctrinated. So that's another huge issue, and it's another big reason why families are starting to open their eyes to the idea of school choice so that they can have alternatives. And Elizabeth Bartholette, we were talking about motives. I don't don't even have to suppose what her motives are. And you touched on this, but she talked about how parents who homeschool their children, how it's unfair and almost frightening that they get

authoritarian control to indoctrinate their children from kindergarten and 12th grade. That's what she said about homeschooling. Well, kids are going to be under some sort of so-called authoritarian control. It's just, is it going to be the parents if they want to homeschool? Or is it going to be teachers who do care about them in a sense, but can't ever care about them in the same way that their parents do and the same individual sense that their parents do. So the question isn't whether or not kids are going to be under some sort of authoritarian control or whether or not they're going to be indoctrinated. Kids are going to be so-called indoctrinated, whether it's by their parents or by the teachers that their parents choose if they have school

choice or if they have the income to be able to send their kid to a private school or they're going to be forced into a certain kind of indoctrination because of the public school. system that their parents might not agree with. So it's not a matter of which is authoritarian. It's which values do you want your kid to be instilled with? And should a parent of a child who will love that child more than, it's just how it is, more than any other person, any other teacher ever will, should a parent of that child get to choose which values their child is being instilled with on a day-to-day basis, or does the government get to choose that? Right now, where there's a not school choice. The government gets to choose not just what kind of teachers your kid has,

but what kind of moral values and worldview your child is being taught on a day-to-day basis. And the government is basically saying Joe Biden and that unity plan of saying there's not going to be charter schools is basically saying, we know what's best for your child. You as a parent, you don't get the choice. And I'm just afraid I've even heard a professor in this conversation about homeschooling. I heard a professor say that, you know, this, this idea that the that the parent has primary authority over their child, well, that's not real. That basically just exists because the state has conferred that relationship upon them. But that's not real.

And so I see, I see that worldview exhibited in the attack on school choice, that it's much bigger than just teachers unions or education dollars or anything like that. It seems like it's an entire worldview that's starting to dominate the education system that is pushing the parents out and trying to create a stronger bond between the state and the child than between the parent and the child. And that scares the heck out of me. And I think it scares the heck out of a lot of people listening to this. Do you agree that that's yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's a different mindset that instead of the families, you know, being the primary decision maker for families, you have people like James Dwyer, who you were quoting a second ago at William and Mary College.

I think he's also affiliated with Harvard University who said that the state. confers legal parenthood. And it's this idea that your children essentially belong to the government, not to you and not to the families, which is totally ludicrous. And I think most people think that's ridiculous. A little fun fact on James Dwyer is in 2014, I believe you wrote a paper that's on Social Science Research Network. I think it's the Alabama Law Review it's published in. But he actually made a crazy argument, in my view, it's crazy, that if families are in a quote-unquote unsafe neighborhood, he argues that the state should be able to come in and take their children away from them. And if they want to keep their children, well, then they have to move to a safe neighborhood

that they define as a safe neighborhood. So who's this going to, you know, most likely negatively affect? And it's essentially, you know, the government, it's a way for the government to come in and take children away from disadvantaged families because the elites can say, oh, well, this doesn't seem like a safe neighborhood to me. We're going to take your child away, literally was proposed in this 2014 Alabama Law Review paper by James Dwyer. And I also want to point out something by, well, look, the statement by Elizabeth Bartholette that, you know, homeschooling is quote unquote authoritarian is just beyond parity because her proposal to ban homeschooling using government force is the very definition of authoritarianism. It's using government power to take away our individual

liberties, our rights that do not come from the government. They're inherent. They pre-exist the government. So that is the definition of authoritarianism. And if you look at, historically speaking, a lot of authoritarian regimes actually had similar proposals to ban homeschooling. In Germany, in 1938, the Nazi regime actually did ban homeschooling for families. And also, you had groups like the KKK in the United States in 1922 pushed to ban private education altogether. And they did so successfully until the Supreme Court.

thankfully came down in 1925 in the case, Pierce versus Society of Sisters, where the leading justice famously said that the child is not the mere creature of the state. More people should realize that that is the case today, that the child does not belong to the government. They're not the mere creature of the state. And look, so we've seen some pretty negative groups pushing to outlaw homeschooling before. And in Germany, they still have that law in the books. Families are not allowed to homeschool. So I think we're lucky in the United States that we don't have oppressive governments like that, taking away that right away from our children. I will say Elizabeth Bartholet actually did an extraordinary self-own, if you compare two of her videos together, because she calls

to ban homeschooling for a lot of different reasons. One thing is about the Christians and conservatives homeschooling their children and her quote-unquote indoctrination that she's talking about. But another argument she tries to use is that, well, we've seen some cases of abuse in the home. And so since there are some rare cases of abuse, we should punish 100% of families, regardless of whether they're doing a good job or not or abusing their children or not. And so she argues essentially that we should, everybody should be guilty until proven innocent and that we should punish everybody for the bad actions of a few negative actors. So she uses these rare cases of abuse to take away the rights of 100% of the population. So that's what she says today. That's what she argues today.

But back in 2014, she was caught, or I caught her, I found this video, on Russia Today is the interviewer, the live interview she did with, and it was about international adoption. And the interviewer from Russia today was arguing that she was arguing against international adoption. She said, we shouldn't do this because, look, there's these rare cases of abuse that we found in this study and this household here and there. And so we shouldn't allow anybody to adopt children because sometimes there's abuse. Elizabeth Bartholet correctly responded that we shouldn't use the exception to prove the rule.

We shouldn't use these rare cases of abuse to ban international adoption for everyone. Interesting. And she even got so upset that the interviewer was using this rhetoric, using the, you know, kind of generalizing from extreme cases of abuse to where she threatened the interviewer and said, I'm going to leave the interview if you continue using these rare cases to try to justify your policy position. but that's exactly what she's doing today. So when you show those two video clips right next to each other, it's an extraordinary self-owned by 2014 Elizabeth Barthlet,

owning the logic, quote-unquote, logic of 2020 Barthlet. Yeah, I just want to reiterate for people, too, everything that we're talking about, the importance of school choice, the importance of allowing parents to have authority, rightful, responsible authority over their children, whether they want to homeschool their kids or maybe they want to send their kids to the public school in their area, whatever. Everything that we're talking about disproportionately affects

people who are in low-income groups, vulnerable families. A lot of people, it's weird how school choice has been associated with, at least on the left, they try to associate school choice with elitism and not really caring about poor students. And so for all the people who are listening to this, who talk about, you know, caring for what the Bible calls the least of these, caring for the disparities that are happening, who care about so-called racial and social justice, which I have my own problem with those terms. But if those are things that you care about, and you want to try to even the playing field, and you want to try to narrow those gaps of outcomes that are unfortunately are very wide among the ethnicities and among the socioeconomic

classes, then school choice is one of the ways. not the only way, but one of the ways to do that. And if you have believed that it's associated with elitism, quite frankly, you've been duped. This is a so-called social justice issue that people who say that they care about social justice, they don't, they don't advocate for. And so I just want people to be clear on that. Yeah.

And look, and the best way to make this, to highlight this is to ask them if they think families should be residentially assigned to government-run grocery stores if they're using food stamps. Most of them would say no, that families should be able to have the options. And if you, yeah, push against the other side and say, well, how can you support Pell grants and pre-K programs, which are essentially education vouchers for pre-K and higher education, why are you against funding families directly when it comes to K-12? And there's no good argument against that. There's no reason except for this entrenched interest of protecting the status quo,

monopoly system in the K-12 education sector that we have today. So that's the difference. And I think most people, what's really elitism is not allowing disadvantaged families to choose private schools for their children and not allow disadvantaged families to afford these micro-school or pandemic pod options. That's true elitism in preventing families from having these options. And instead, prioritizing the protectionism of an establishment, monopoly system ahead of the interest of the students. That's true elitism. Yes, absolutely. Do you know any Democrat, any significant Democrat who is for school choice? I know Republicans, some Republicans who are against school choice. Do you know any Democrats

who are for school choice? I know, I know there are some, but I will say Republicans are much more likely to support school choice today, particularly when it comes to private school choice options and expanding options to charter schools. I don't have a name off the top of my head. You know, Biden does not support private school choice options. He calls to ban for-profit charter schools. And in the Biden Sanders Union Task Force, they also call to highly regulate even regular charter schools as well. So I wouldn't call that a pro-school choice position. So, yeah, I mean, I'm hard-pressed to think of a prominent Democratic politician that does support school choice. But I know, and I've heard that some of them actually do support, you know, freedom of choice for disadvantaged families.

Well, they definitely support freedom of choice for their own kids because a lot of these Democrats in Washington, D.C.'s and their kids to private schools. So that's interesting. What would you say people who are fired up about this? because I'm fired up about this. It really makes me mad that there are people standing in the way of low-income families to get the best education for their child. And by the way, it's not just about education. Sometimes a child might have special needs.

They're not getting the correct instruction or the attention that they need. So they want to go to another school. Sometimes their child is being bullied. And so they want to go to another school. The prevention of school choice or the powers that be that try to inhibit school choice are also inhibiting victims of bullying, special needs, from getting the kind of education and alleviation from bullying or whatever it is that they need. And so just think about all the people that are listening to this, all of the vulnerable people

that would benefit from school choice programs. So can you tell people who are learning about this for the first time, who want to get involved, who are just like, oh my gosh, okay, what do I do? I'm overwhelmed. What are some action steps that people can take? Yeah, I want to point out, first of all, that, a lot of families are definitely choosing school choice for safety reasons and to get their children away from, you know, gaining activities or bullying.

Right. And so the idea of trapping families into these schools, I would argue, is unethical and immoral because preventing families from having these options is forcing them into dangerous situations. And so that's endangering students by not allowing them to have these choices. So if you just kind of flip the conversation around a little bit, preventing families from having options is arguably immoral and unethical. And also, yeah, Biden, I just want to point out real quick that Joe Biden does, did send his children to private schools and he did attend private

schools themselves. Yet today he fights to or votes against private school voucher program for low-income families here in D.C. and the Biden Sanders Unity Task Force calls to defund that program altogether. So that's extremely hypocritical to exercise school choice options for your own families and then try to prevent other families, primarily less advantaged families from exercising those options as well. So I just wanted to point that out really quickly. But yeah, there's a lot of things that families can do. You can support, you know, my work by sharing it on social media if you want. You can follow me at DeAngelis Corey on Twitter. I know you do a lot of sharing my stuff, so thank you so much. But then also there are school choice programs in different states already

existing. So if you want to find access to those options, there's one good website that I would recommend. It's edchoice.org. Edtroise.org, you can find a map of all the states in different school choice programs that are available and you can look at how other states are doing it. And you could ask people in your state to expand these types of options in your state as well if one doesn't exist at the moment. And you can call to expand these school choice options that are already existing in some states. I think 45 states already have charter school laws on the books plus the district of Columbia. So you can find a list of those at the Education Commission of the States, I believe it's named. If you just type in charter school

laws on Google and Education Commission of the States, you'll find if your state actually already does have access to charter schools in your area. So that's another way to do it. And then also there's this extremely grassroots movement going on where families are seeing that their schools aren't reopening all across the United States. And they are getting really upset about this because the funding is still going to the school buildings and they're still trying to scramble to try to figure out how to get an education for their children. So a lot of families, I think at least 1,000 now have contacted from 22 or up to, I think I heard 30 different states, have contacted ACLJ, Jordan Seculo is the executive director out there. And they've contacted him to try to find a legal

remedy to get their children's education dollars back if their schools aren't going to reopen. And so then they would have real, you know, you want to have to go through the legislature to get your education dollars back. And, you know, I would argue that going to the legislature is a good way to do it. But here's another avenue that parents can take to contact ACLJ to try to get represented, to try to get your children's education dollars back so that you can afford these other alternatives if your school isn't going to reopen. So I would recommend taking that route as well. Because look, all 50 states, have education in their state-level constitutions. And it's kind of hard for the state to make an argument

that they're providing education if they're not even going to reopen their schools in the fall. So I think ACLJ and parents will have a strong legal argument to make primarily this fall as well. So I would say to go check out all those resources. I think that a lot of people, hopefully their eyes are kind of being opened right now when you have teachers unions in places like L.A. saying, we're not going to go back to school in the fall, even though, you know, the rate of infection and especially the death rate for these children is very, very low. And even for most teachers will be low. But they're saying that we'll go back to school if you agree to Medicare for all, if you

agree to all of these leftist policy prescriptions. Well, if it were really about the children's health, that it wouldn't matter whether or not you get your leftist agenda checked off. And so I hope people are starting to see that a lot of these teachers unions, I can't speak for, you know, every single person in teachers union, but a lot of these teachers unions are set up to preserve power, not to preserve a good education for your children, and certainly not to give you your money back if you're not giving the education that you deserve. And yeah, that same teachers unions didn't just call for Medicare for all. They also called for defunding the police. So they included all these things that didn't really seem related to education. But then most importantly, they called to

close all the charter schools in the Los Angeles area in order for them to reopen, which if you're talking about safety, that's the backwards thing to do, because if you have more schools open, you have more square footage, you can set, you can spread children out more and have more safety that way. So if you're calling to close down a lot of the school buildings, close down your competition, that actually is more harmful for students. So that that just makes it totally clear that some of these things is about preserving power and not so much about serving families. Yes, it's so crazy. Well, thank you so much for this enlightening conversation. I know people are going to learn so much from it. And you said everyone can follow you on Twitter. Anywhere else you want to direct people? Yeah, I mean, you can also look up my work at the Reason Foundation. If you just Google Corey DeAngelis Reason, R-E-A-S-O-N, you'll find my pages there and you'll find my longer form articles as well, which I also share on Twitter. But if you want to directly access those, it'll be at the Reason Foundation website. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk.

Thank you so much, Allie.