TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #176: Corey DeAngelis

Episode Date: July 3, 2020

Join Marty as he sits down with Corey DeAngelis, Director of School Choice at the Reason Foundation, to discuss: - The push to ban homeschooling from some Harvard professors - Why their reasoning for trying to ban homeschooling is flawed - School choice as a civil liberty - Myths about homeschooling and socialization - Myths about school funding decreasing - much more Follow Corey on Twitter Shoutout to this week's sponsors. Cash App. Start #stackingsats today. Use the promo code: "stackingsats" to receive $10 and contribute $10 to OWLS Lacrosse when you download the app.

What's up freaks, it's your Marty, it's your Marty, it's your boy Marty here to introduce this episode of Tales from the Crypt. I had the immense pleasure of sitting down with Corey DeAngelis, who's the director of school choice at the Reason Foundation. This is an episode that's not really focused on Bitcoin, but the subject of freedom of choice when it comes to educating your children. This is a very interesting subject and I thoroughly enjoyed my conversation with Corey, who has done a ton of research in uh this realm and and is on the front lines combating a push to to ban

certain types of schooling and education predominantly uh homeschooling so i think if you guys are liberty focused liberty minded you're really going to enjoy this episode this episode is brought to you by your good friends at the motherfucking cash app you freaks already know all about them they're helping you stack sats send sats receive sats and sell sats if you so please they're also making sats the standard so you're not stacking fractions of bitcoin anymore you're stacking whole sats feels much better that way when you're stacking whole sats tens of thousands hundreds of thousands sometimes millions to tens of millions of sats at once depending on what your purchase habits are like where your stacking habits are

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this is this is a a a wild story he's running with on the internet right now is that he actually coached a team that i played for again he was that weird guy in the parking lot that would do weird things when we were trying to leave practice when we were entering practice and leave practice I don't know why our coaches didn't take care of it I don't know what what dirt he had on our coaches but he's a dirtbag it's not Al it's Al's lacrosse in Chicago that's Al's lacrosse all right I hope you guys enjoy this episode of Corey DeAngelis I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation if you guys are liking this podcast and you haven't yet subscribed in your local podcasting platform, please do so. Rate, review, share if you guys are liking the content. Spread it around. We're

here trying to help educate people about Bitcoin and liberty in the digital age. Enjoy. you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free if you talk about a fed just gone nuts all all the central banks going nuts so it's all acting like safe haven i believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency bitcoin wins in the world of fiat currencies bitcoin is the victor i mean that's part of the bull case for bitcoin if you're not paying attention you probably should be probably should be what is up freaks welcome back to tales from the crypt at your boy marty bent here on a lovely monday afternoon very excited for this conversation

not really bitcoin related but uh very pertinent to freedom in the digital age i'm sitting down with Director of School Choice at The Reason Foundation, Corey DeAngelis. Corey, welcome to the podcast. Hey, thanks so much for having me. Thank you for taking some time to sit down and chat a little bit. As I was describing to you before we hit record, this podcast focuses on Bitcoin because as freedom lovers, I believe Bitcoin provides leverage to individuals

to maintain some sovereignty and liberty in the digital age. You came across my radar a few months ago when you were commenting on the attempt of some Harvard professors to mandate state-sanctioned schooling on individuals and to put a presumptive ban on homeschooling and seeing your reaction to that and the sense that you talked on that subject specifically, I had to reach out and get you on the podcast. So I think just to get the freaks more acquainted with what you do, explain why you focus on homeschooling and what you're doing at the Reason Foundation. Yeah, I mostly focus on school choice or educational choice or whatever you want to call it. And homeschooling fits into that kind of option set that that's that's outside of the residentially assigned government run school. And just really quick for your listeners, the way I define school choice is just that, anything that gets you away from that residentially assigned government-run monopoly system. In the United States, in most locations, the default is that you live in a certain location or residence, and you're assigned to a particular government-run school, and most of the time you cannot escape that residentially assigned option, which leads to

a lot of monopoly power in the education system overall. And if you want to escape it to get to a private school or homeschooling option, you don't get any of your money back in the forms of property taxes. And so again, that also leads to high transaction costs associated with exiting that residentially assigned option, which leads to horrible quality levels in the government-run schools and not a lot of options for families. So anything that gets you away from that, whether that's charter schools, government-run school choice, or something called open enrollment choice, where you just erase the district boundaries. Private school vouchers, which Milton Friedman talked about starting in 1955, which we actually had private school vouchers

even before then in the United States in Maine and Vermont, which we can talk about in a second if you want to. But that's essentially the idea that you're residentially assigned to a particular school, a government-run school, and if you want to go somewhere else, you can take a fraction of those dollars that would have went to your government-run school and use it to pay for private school tuition and fees. That's the basic idea of the voucher, that you should fund students instead of systems. The money should follow the child to the best school. And then the other type of school choice is an education savings account, which can be used for homeschooling. So it's like the voucher idea where you get some of that money, but instead of just being able to use it for

private school tuition and fees. You can also use it to offset the cost of homeschooling using like private tutoring. And you could use it for a private school tuition if you want, but you don't have to use it for private school tuition. So anything that's broadly defined as an education expenditure. Another way to think about it is kind of like universal basic education income. I like to call it as well to get those who support Andrew Yang to support the idea as well. So, but yeah, we should talk a little bit about the whole controversy and these huge attacks on homeschooling just as everyone started doing it because of the COVID-19 lockdowns of brick and mortar schools. Essentially, we moved from having 3% of the school age population within a couple of weeks

homeschooling in the United States to having essentially everybody homeschooling in one way or another, whether that you define that as, you know, remote learning from your district run school or doing a virtual charter school option or just homeschooling your kids during the pandemic, we saw a lot of attacks from places like Washington Post where they're saying that homeschooling during coronavirus will set back a generation of students, and you saw other attacks. And the most famous one was from a Harvard law professor named Elizabeth Bartholet. She wrote an 80-page Arizona Law Review article calling for what you alluded to, a presumptive

ban on the practice of homeschooling. If you want me to continue, I can explain exactly what she means by a presumptive ban, if you'd like. Yeah, let's dive into that. Yeah. So a presumptive ban, the basic idea is that you put the burden of proof on the parents to prove to the government or other official that you are worthy of educating your children in your own home. In the current scenario, in the current day and age, it's the opposite of that. The burden of proof is what I would argue is correctly on the government to have to prove to society as to why they should be able to take your kids away from you. If you're abusing your kids or if you're not providing them an education, the government then steps in and takes your kids away. But what Elizabeth Bartholet is arguing is the complete turn, completely turning that upside down, essentially, and putting the burden of proof on the families, essentially assuming everyone's guilty until proven innocent.

And our legal system doesn't work like that. Our homeschooling system doesn't work like that today. So that's why there was so much backlash to this. You know, it really started when this article called The Risks of Homeschooling came out in Harvard Magazine, which kind of detailed in short form what she was arguing for in her longer piece that was 80 pages in the Arizona Law Review. So, I mean, the basic argument is that, you know, homeschoolers are just doing this to abuse their children or to not provide them with an education, which is just totally ridiculous of an argument. But it gets even worse than that because how she – just because of how she makes that argument. If you just do a Control-F, you know, for people who are technically savvy with computers, Control-F is just a basic find function in the PDF of her 80-page paper. If you just look for the words some or many, those words combined come up 210 times in her article, and that very much highlights the main problem with her line of reasoning that she just uses fear mongering. She says that some homeschool parents might do this, or many homeschool parents are doing this or that or the other, but she doesn't actually back up her claims with hard statistics or facts, and she doesn't compare the instances of negative occurrences happening in the home to the real-world instances of negative occurrences happening in our government-run schools, which are the realistic counterfactual to what would happen if you had a presumptive ban on the practice of homeschooling. So, for example, a 2008 report from the Department of Education in the United States found that one in every 10 kids, or at least estimated that one in every 10 kids, would experience sexual maltreatment from the educators themselves by the time they reach or finish high school. And that doesn't even count all of the unreported abuse that occurs.

Another 2010 report from the Government Accountability Office has estimated that the sexual misconduct that's going on with the educators, that these educators will pass through three different school districts before it's actually caught and before they're actually held accountable for these actions. So a lot of this goes unreported. And they also estimated that one educator that's, you know, engaging in this type of misconduct can have up to as many as 72 victims during his or her lifetime. So this is rampant problems that happens in the government run system. And if you apply to Elizabeth Bartholet's logic to the entire system overall, if anything, we should have a presumptive ban on government schooling, not a presumptive ban on homeschooling. homeschooling because the evidence overwhelmingly shows that homeschoolers tend to do better educationally and kids tend to be abused at lower rates when they're in their homes than they are in the government-run school system. But she doesn't do that. She doesn't compare between sectors. She just tries to focus on things that may happen. And just think if you apply this

logic to anything else in life. Just imagine if we said, and the logic here is that, well, if you're not doing anything wrong, you should have nothing to hide. The first thing that's wrong with that is that I don't trust the government officials to get it right. They don't get it right with the government school system, right? And they have all sorts of bias that can be introduced. Maybe they don't like Christians or conservatives homeschooling, so maybe they'll have a negative bias towards them. You look at the Harvard Magazine article, you can see all this bias against conservatives and Christians in that article and in Elizabeth Bartholet's longer form article. But then you can see that there could be discrimination against

people who have lower education levels or lower income levels, or there might even be discrimination on the basis of your background, your race that is systemic in the government systems. So I don't trust that to happen. But then also just think about the logic behind that. You could essentially get rid of the Fourth and Fifth Amendment, right? Because if you have nothing to hide, you shouldn't have anything to worry about with the cops coming into your homes unannounced to see if you have drugs that are, because if you don't have drugs, then you should have nothing to hide, right? That's the logic behind getting rid of the Fourth Amendment. And the Fifth Amendment, you know, if you have nothing to hide, well, you should be able to

speak when questioned by officers. And so you shouldn't have a right against self-incrimination either is the logic there. And just think about it. You could say that we want all kids to be healthy, right? We want them to eat healthy things. But that doesn't mean that we should punish 100% of families without any evidence of wrongdoing by having government officials come and eat dinner with you every night. I don't want to pay a government official to do that. And I don't want them to infringe on my liberties and privacy. Because well, if you don't have anything to hide, you should have nothing to worry about having that logic. But it gets even worse than that. And I know I'm going longer than I should in the initial question, but I feel like I need

hit on this, because Elizabeth Bartholet refuted herself on this logic back in 2014 in a Russia Today live video interview. And you can find it on my Twitter. And for the listeners, I can help you and provide a link straight to this conversation, where she was arguing for international adoption. And the person on the other end from Russia was arguing against international adoption. And that person was saying, well, look, there's this one anecdote of this negative event that occurred with international adoption, so we should get rid of it altogether. And Elizabeth Bartholet, the Harvard Law professor, was saying, no, you shouldn't use the exception to prove the rule. You shouldn't make perfect the enemy of the good because overall the evidence suggests that relative to the government institution, allowing families to adopt internationally leads to on net good outcomes. So if you're looking at the preponderance of the evidence, it's actually a good outcome. Yes, there are cases of abuse that could happen, but that doesn't mean we should get rid of it altogether and scrap it altogether.

And so she even threatened to leave the interview because she correctly understood that the Russia Today interviewer was not being fair and that they were using anecdotes and not evidence. But then fast forward six years later to 2020, Elizabeth Bartholet is using that same logic that the Russia Today interviewer was using in saying that we should ban homeschooling for everyone because of these possibilities of rare negative events to occur. So she told the Russia Today interviewer that we should not ban international adoptions based on rare instances of negative events occurring because overwhelmingly it's a good thing. So she should apply that same logic to her homeschooling argument today. But if she did, she would have to argue to not ban homeschooling based on rare cases of negative events. But again, she doesn't really cite statistics to base. It's mostly just this could happen. This might happen.

And I will say it's not just a presumptive ban, because if you look into her other interviews that are more recent, she actually argues that even if families are deemed worthy of educating their children by these benevolent and omniscient bureaucrats, that she still believes that those families should be required to send their kids to the government-run schools for a couple of courses and also extracurricular activities. So for most homeschoolers, we would define that as not homeschooling. we would define that as you still have to send your kid to the government school. That's still a ban on homeschooling. You see the German, you know, some people in Germany do this as well,

because Germany, for the listeners who don't know, have an outright ban on homeschooling. But some Germans will come out and say, no, we don't have a ban on homeschooling because we do allow you to homeschool your kids when they're not at school. You can still educate your kids, you know, at dinnertime. That's still, you know, so they'll say, oh, we don't have a ban on homeschooling, even though they require families to send their kids to a brick-and-mortar school, whether that's a government-run school or private. I would call that a ban on homeschooling, just as I would call Bartholet's idea to ban homeschooling altogether a ban on homeschooling altogether, where you still have to send your kid to the government-run school for a couple of

courses. That's an outright ban. But what she does is, and what some Germans do, is that they'll change the definition of homeschooling so that their proposal doesn't sound as crazy. But look, any homeschooler in this day and age would say that's an outright ban. And I think she would also prefer to ban private schooling as well, because if you look at her 80 page Arizona Law Review article, she devotes one short page to private schooling where she says, hey, private schools have some of the same problems as homeschooling and that you can isolate your kids from public, quote unquote, public values if you send them to a private school. But she doesn't really take it a step further and say that I want to ban homeschooling, too. But she does allude to it, at least. And if she's applying the same logic that she did to homeschooling, I think she's kind of projecting that or hinting, at least, that we should, in her view, ban private schooling altogether as well, which luckily in the United States was found unconstitutional. when Oregon tried to do so in 1922. They banned private schooling altogether. The KKK actually pushed for this in 1922 in Oregon. They succeeded for a couple of years until 1925, the Supreme Court case Pierce versus Society of Sisters, where the leading justice was famously quoted in saying that the child is not the mere creature of the state. And I think some people need to

remember that when it comes to homeschooling as well yeah no that's why i was really drawn to your coverage of this because there seems to be something almost nefarious behind all this on top of what uh elizabeth bartholet was saying you have the the head of the law department at harvard james dwyer coming out and claiming that the reason the parent-child relationships exist is because the state confers legal parenthood which is just crazy to think about As somebody who's a new father, I have a four-month-old son, just that statement alone enrages me. I mean, it essentially means that it's this view that you're not a parent

unless the government says you're allowed to be a parent. So biology be damned. It's just because we tell you that it's okay for you to be a parent. And most people get pretty – there's a pretty rough reaction to this. You know, you've seen it before with MSNBCs. She's not affiliated with them anymore. But Melissa Harris Perry similarly saying the same kind of thing where the chair, you know, there's this private notion that the parent, that the child belongs to the parent. But in reality, she argues that the child belongs to the whole community, which I think some would think of as the government as well. And so there was a lot of pushback then. There was a lot of pushback when James Dwyer said this. I found another interview. He did this. He was actually on a debate, I think, in 2007 with James Sekulow, where he made the same kind of argument that he doesn't think that, you know, the children belong to the family unit, which I can kind of get behind that, too, because the child belongs to themselves, right? But I mean, the child belongs more to the family, I would say, than the government. And I think that's what most people kind of push back on.

But even more recently, I also found that in 2012 or 2014, James Dwyer has an Alabama Law Review article. It's also published on SSRN if you want to see the free version. But he makes the argument that, I don't remember the title of this, but again, I'll send you the link for your listeners, but he actually argues that if you live in a quote-unquote dangerous neighborhood, that he believes that the state should be able to come and take your child away from you unless you forcibly move to another neighborhood. So he argues that if you want to be able to keep your kid, you should be able to do that, but you should only be able to do that if

you move to a neighborhood that I deem safe. So just think about all the inequities that can result from this. I mean, it's essentially a policy that would lead to lower income families not being able to have kids or at least not being able to keep their kids because they want to be able to afford to move into these, quote unquote, safe neighborhoods. And, you know, why should some academic at Harvard be able to tell you where to move and why should they be able to take your children away from you? I think that's an extremely dangerous argument to make and extremely dangerous and authoritarian policy recommendation. And you look, I mean, you can see that kind of bleeding over into this homeschooling debate as well. And I should also

point out that, you know, the point we're bringing up, the reason we're bringing up James Dwyer as well, in addition to Elizabeth Bartholet, is because they were the two co-organizers of a conference that was supposed to happen this month or, you know, in June of this summer of 2020, the complete focus was an anti-homeschooling conference. They didn't invite any pro-homeschooling speakers to come and present their ideas. It was supposed to be held at Harvard Law School until coronavirus came up, and they just completely canceled the conference, at least until next year. But if you look at the event description, you don't just have to look at the people who are invited to speak, but if you look at the event description, it said

something along the lines of the focus of this conference is going to be on the problems of educational maltreatment and child abuse that too often occurs under the guise of homeschooling. So it's an explicitly anti-homeschooling event. And it was also private. If you were a homeschooling parent, you couldn't just come and experience the conference as a listener even. It was completely closed off. And none of the people in my network, I know a lot of homeschooling parents and families and homeschooling supporters. None of them were invited to even be a participant at the conference, but in response to that, Harvard Kennedy School invited six panelists, I believe six or seven panelists. I was lucky enough to be one of them to kind of counter this event, and we made our

event open to the public. It was called the Disinformation Campaign Against Homeschooling. We responded to all the arguments by Elizabeth Bartholet and James Dwyer and the others, and we made it open to the public on on zoom we had a large turnout and people can still see it it's recorded if you want to go check it out but we even explicitly invited elizabeth bartholet to come listen to our views and ask questions if she had any i don't believe she actually listened to our discussion um but if you want to go check it check it out to see our arguments you can as well yeah it's fascinating too because if i understand correctly elizabeth bartholet doesn't have any children and her yeah i think she might have adopted uh some children or something um but

yeah i mean that that is interesting thing to think about too well that i mean just like skin in the game and thinking about uh and thinking about decisions top-down decisions specifically that affect everybody and that's again what we focus on in bitcoin bitcoin is a monetary good that allows individuals to opt in in a grassroots, bottom-up fashion. The market just decides that this is a good money and coalesces on that. And then schooling should be opt-in as well, especially here in America. And the fact that there is at least a school of thought that is trying to stop that is frightening. because as I the way I understand these systems trying to micromanage complex systems like

monetary system or an educational system tends to make everybody worse off in the long run because you can't micromanage complex systems and yeah and yeah it's true it's it's always some top-down rule that's and it's always decisions made by a bunch of people who don't have skin in the game Right. And who's who has more skin in the game than the child's actual parents. Right. So, you know, one of the best arguments for school choice and even just other types of educational freedom like homeschooling is that the parents just have the best incentives to get it right because they get it wrong. You know, well, it's their own children and then they they are pretty much held accountable pretty strongly in the public eye if they do get it wrong and with their families and networks, if they do get it wrong. And they just have the most information available to know what's best for their own individual children's needs when it comes to education and a whole host of other services that are provided to their children. And to your point, there is actually a pretty good interview that came out after all this controversy with Elizabeth Bartholet.

I think it was called the Off the Trail Learning Podcast. If you just want to look it up, Off the Trail Learning Elizabeth Bartholet, you should be able to find it on Google. But one of the first questions that the interviewer asked was, was, you know, do you have any experience with homeschooling? And Bartholet quickly responded, no, I just have the research that that I that I've written recently. And I have it. I didn't homeschool my, you know, any children and I wasn't homeschooled myself. But, you know, so it seems kind of strange that she has this very strong policy recommendation to to have an outright ban that I would I would call it an outright ban on homeschooling for a bunch of other families when she hasn't actually experienced it. herself. That isn't to say that she can't make arguments about homeschooling, but it is kind of telling that it is some additional background that most people didn't know that, you know,

she didn't really have any experience with homeschooling firsthand. She just read a couple of articles and had a couple of theories that there might be some abuse happening with homeschooling, but she doesn't really have any evidence for that. I will say she does cite one study to make the claim that kids are abused at higher rates in homeschooling, which is not true. But she does cherry pick one study that has 28 handpicked cases of abuse from a researcher named Barbara Knox, published in 2014, where she just looks at these 28 cases of extreme abuse and generalizes to the entire population of homeschool families. You can't really say anything about a sample size of 28 students, especially when the authors

themselves say you shouldn't run statistical tests on these on the sample because one it's a small sample but because two we we handpick these students to tell a particular story so they even came out and said that so you can't really say much of anything about that and there is also a more recent review of the literature on this by brian ray published in 2018 that found that most of the studies find no difference in rates of abuse but if you had to call it either way most of the cases find that homeschoolers are abused to actually lower rates than the kids in regular or conventional school settings um so look either cherry picks or use uses studies that you can't really say much of anything about um so yeah that's that's another thing to consider when it

comes to this this debate and the last thing i want to point out on this um in particular is that this came in an especially um odd time when everybody was essentially homeschooling that i alluded to earlier where you know there's this huge war on homeschooling just as everyone was doing it we had coronavirus shut down brick and mortar schools for essentially a hundred percent of students in the united states and uh whether you like it or not families were homeschooling during this time and so there's this all-out war on homeschooling when families essentially didn't have any other option in place uh so it really came off as extremely tone deaf to to launch this attack at this time yeah it seemed like a like a hey hey hey i know you're all doing this right now

but here's why it's bad well yeah and i've almost i've i've kind of theorized that enemies of homeschooling and the government school monopolies came out against homeschooling at this time because they knew that families were homeschooling right they know that it's a threat to their monopoly system and they know that families are figuring out that whoa my schools weren't really providing much meaningful services and look my children are learning a lot right now they're actually happy they're not stressed out from getting bullied all day and they're not stressed out from having to sit in a desk all day and and have to focus on things that they're not really interested in when they're at home they can self-direct their learning you know feel a lot

more confident about themselves and get a lot more learning done and things that they're actually interested in in a fraction of the time and look yeah a lot of parents were reporting at least anecdotally that their that their kids were really uh feeling less anxious less stressed out a lot happier and that's that's a really big deal for a lot of families and we've had a lot of surveys come out, and I'll just cite a couple of them, but there have been a ton that have been showing essentially the same thing, that there's going to be an exodus away from government schools next year. The first one was from EdChoice just a couple months ago when this all started. They found that the majority of families, 52%, reported that they now have a more favorable view of

homeschooling as a direct result of COVID-19, even though this is a watered-down version of homeschooling. When everybody was locked in their homes and they couldn't go to theaters or community services. They couldn't do any homeschool co-op options. So it was like the worst case scenario for homeschooling. And families were still saying in overwhelming numbers that they really liked it. Only half of that proportion, 26%, said they had a less favorable view of homeschooling. Of course, there were some families that would say, I really don't like this. I want to go back to normal. But overwhelmingly, twice that proportion said that they had a more favorable view of homeschooling. USA Today more recently said 60% of families said that they were likely to continue homeschooling or virtual schooling, even if schools opened up in the fall.

And then the most recent survey was from Gallup that happened in June, and they said that families across the United States, 44% said that they didn't want to return to brick-and-mortar schools in the fall, even if the schools reopened. They want some form of part-time or full-time virtual learning in the fall, and they want their children to do so from home. So that's a lot of students, 44%. And also, pretty recently, American Federation for Children did a similar survey. 40% said families in the United States said that they wanted to continue homeschooling or that they were at least likely to continue homeschooling even if schools opened up next year.

There were other polls, but I don't want to get into all of them. But look, there was a bunch of numbers suggesting that there's going to be a big change. And as I've theorized in a Washington Examiner magazine piece that, look, even if only 2% of families switched, we're seeing surveys suggesting a lot more. But let's just imagine only 2% of families switch to homeschooling next year. That would still be, do some quick math on that, 50 million kids around, about 50 million kids are in government-run schools before the closure. that's a million students that could switch to homeschooling. And considering the fact that only around 1.7 million families or children were homeschooling before the pandemic, that's about a 59% relative increase in homeschoolers next year. That's a huge increase relative to that

small base. But it looks like it might even be much bigger than the 2% switch that I was initially theorizing when I wrote this article. And I think that's why a lot of enemies of homeschooling and enemies or at least proponents of protecting the status quo of the government school monopoly are really freaking out right now. Because even if it's true that there's a lot of families that are figuring out that they don't like homeschooling, I don't think that's going to be the case because a lot of them are reporting the opposite. But those families weren't homeschooling in the first place. So the best case scenario for the enemies of homeschooling is that the numbers revert to the long-term trend from before of a 3% proportion of families homeschooling next year.

But they were already doing that. But I think there's going to be some proportion, even if it's only 1%. That's 500,000 more students homeschooling next year. But I think it's going to be bigger than that. And I think that's why there's this big freakout going on right now and big attack on homeschooling. It's because the enemies of homeschooling know that when it comes to the numbers, they have nothing to gain and everything to lose.

Yeah, that's what I thought was so interesting about the points that Elizabeth was harping on again, like anecdotes and really making broad brush assumptions and focusing on abuse instead of quality of education. And somebody who I've done a lot of research on, listened to a lot of his talks when he was still with us, Joseph Gatto, who was head of education in New York State for quite some time. And the way he explains how the Prussian model of schooling

was exported to the United States, and we've just been running with that model for almost a century now, uh and it may not be advantageous for individuals learning it is is more of an indoctrination system than an actual system focused on learning i mean yeah gatto highlights that history very well from prussia and then even in massachusetts when it started in 1852 the first compulsory education law in the united states you look at quotes from benjamin rush horace mann the father of quote-unquote public education in america uh you look at quotes from other leaders during the time and uh and i have a thread of this on on twitter as well going through these arguments but the

explicit arguments were that look we have a lot of immigrants coming in a lot of catholics coming in we want them to be more protestant like we want them to be more american good american citizens as they would you know whatever they thought was at the time and that meant more protestant and um that's why they argued for common schools it was for the explicit purpose of making people more homogenous and to create a more uniform population. So it was about social engineering and social control, which I think a lot of people who like the public education system today would find pretty abhorrent when you hear the rhetoric about, oh, those immigrants are just not good American citizens. I think in today's day and age, people kind of understand that the whole point of

America is to have this kind of, you know, melting pot or, you know, like kind of at least a salad bowl of different cultures kind of, and embracing this idea of pluralism and allowing people to have their own cultures and not forcing them into this particular mold that the majority thinks that everyone else should act like. I think most people kind of understand that today. And so look, that was the argument a long time ago. And I just came out with a study. It just got accepted for publication at Social Science Quarterly on this very question with Angela Dills, a professor at Western Carolina University. And we found that compulsory education laws in the United States, and we use this kind of natural experiment kind of analytic technique because compulsory education

laws were staggered in the United States. Different states had different timing of those laws. And we found that after states adopted these different types of laws, we found reductions in innovation as measured at least by productivity per worker and patents per capita. And the theory there is that switching from home-based education, or at least switching from this kind of private education model to this more compulsory, rigid, structured factory model of schooling crushes creativity and stifles innovation. And that's what we found in our study. It's forthcoming at Social Science Quarterly. The working paper is available at the Reason Foundation if you want to go check it out. I think the title's called, I should know my own title, but I write quite a bit. So I think

it's Does Compulsory Schooling Affect Innovation? I'm pretty sure that's the title if you want to go look it up on Google. But yes, I think you're right. That was the whole point of the compulsory education model today, to stifle innovation, to crush creativity, to create a more uniform populace. And even if that's not the explicit intentions of people today, that's how the system was created. And I still think if you look at certain aspects of the system that we have today, like standardized testing, like memorization on tests, in order to have a uniform curriculum, you saw the push for common core, you see the focus on obedience and, you know, really discipline harsh discipline for students with um uh you know having to raise your hand for every

single uh time you want to talk about things uh if you want to just go to the restroom you have to raise your hand a lot of times the teachers will so it seems a lot about uh more about obedience than actual learning and so we still see aspects of that today yeah and again like the the these are nefarious actor bells are going off in my head specifically with common core Because Common Core blows my mind because that's instituted, and then you create sort of division in the family. The parents can't help these students with their homework, and the students are dependent on the state to tell them how to do this thing. And it further drives them away from a relationship or the ability of the parents to foster their children. Yeah, and what's interesting is a lot of these attacks against homeschooling is people like Elizabeth Bartholet arguing that parents are going to, quote unquote, indoctrinate their children.

And it's like, please, come on, don't act like the government-run schools don't indoctrinate children in a particular type of fashion. It could just be that the people who are arguing against homeschooling like the form or prefer the form of indoctrination that's occurring in the government-run schools today, which might be more of a leftward-leaning form of indoctrination and a more secular form of indoctrination, anti-religious type of indoctrination that they could prefer in the government school system. Whether you like it or not, I mean, it's really hard to have an extremely – even if you're trying to create an unbiased system, there's always going to be a uniform system where you're going to have some actors inflicting their views on the students, whether you like it or not, whether it's intentional or not. That's just how it occurs when you have children in a system for 13 years of their lives where they're sitting there in a classroom with various teachers for seven and a half, eight hours a day for 13 years of their lives. It's just bound to happen. And if you look at Bartholet's articles and her attacks on homeschooling, even in her interviews, some of the biggest things she points out is she tries to appeal to anti-religious bigotry and anti-conservative bigotry. I'm not conservative, I'm not religious myself, but I understand that families have the First Amendment right to freely exercise their own religions and pursue religious educations. But she'll point out things like, oh, well, there's a lot of families that are conservative and Christians who are homeschooling.

And my first response is, who cares? They have the right to do so. Just because they're conservative doesn't mean homeschooling itself is a bad thing and doesn't mean that conservatism is a bad thing. It doesn't mean that religion is a bad thing per se. It doesn't mean that people don't have the right to freely exercise that religious education. but secondly she actually cites a statistic most of the time she doesn't cite statistics as i said she uses the word some or many 210 times in her article but one of the few statistics she cites she doesn't even get it right she says that 90 of families are are doing so for religious reasons or that they are religious homeschoolers if you look at the u.s department of education report on this most recent one i think it was in 2019 they report that the number one and number two

reasons is for safety or academics. Religion isn't the number one reason for homeschooling. It's because they're trying to escape bullying in the traditional system, or it's just because they're just not satisfied with the academic instruction that they're getting in the government school system. I mean, if you look at the most recent Nation Report card that just came out, I think about a month ago, they found that only 15% of students were proficient in U.S. history, and about three out of every four students were not proficient in civics or geography. The more recent results even found that came out before those were for math and reading, finding that, again, about three out of every four students are not proficient in math,

and about two out of every three students are not proficient in reading in the United States. So there's a lot of miseducation going on in the traditional system. So it really seems strange for enemies of homeschooling to try to make the claim that homeschoolers are not getting an adequate education when they're the kids obviously aren't getting an adequate education in the government-run school system uh and then another argument i just want to point out is that people believe that homeschoolers are not being properly socialized and it's like come on uh homeschoolers avoid a lot of negative socialization they avoid a lot of the bullying avoid a lot of the obedience training they avoid a lot of the gang activity

drugs, sexual misconduct going on with the teachers and other students. They avoid a lot of those negative forms of socialization, which is, if that's your definition of socialization, maybe it's a good thing that homeschool families are not, or homeschool students are not kind of being socialized in these ways. But they also have more time to experience positive forms of socialization. You look at a 2019 report published in the Peabody Journal of Education by Professor Daniel Hamlin from the University of Oklahoma, he was a nationally representative sample of students that are, the data are publicly available, I think it was about 15,000 students he looked at, even after controlling it for a bunch of different background characteristics,

such as income levels of the families, the race of the students, and a whole bunch of different characteristics of the families and the students, he found that homeschool students were overwhelmingly much more likely to experience family and community activities than the kids in the government-run schools, even after controlling for differences in the families and the students. So that just goes to show that they have more opportunity. It could be because they're not stuck in government schools for seven and a half, eight hours a day. They have more time to do these community activities, such as going to concerts, going to the museums, these culturally enriching activities with their families. So that's another thing to consider as well in this debate. But

But if you look at that 90 percent claim from Elizabeth Bartholet, that 90 percent of families are doing so for religious or just because they're conservative families, more legitimate evidence coming from Kerry McDonald has cited suggests that only about two-thirds of families are Christians or religious families, which tends to mirror the population. So they're not actually even more representative than the average family in the population. again to go back to my original point it shouldn't really matter if they're conservatives even if it was 90 percent right and and if you go to her footnotes in her paper you try to find that 90 percent number it goes to a blog post that doesn't even uh cite a source for a 90 percent number so

one one if you're like a peer-reviewed journal article why are you publishing uh sources and footnotes that are just going to blog posts that doesn't seem very scientific to me. And again, I do also want to point out when she does contend with evidence, she'll discredit any positive findings in any way she can. And she'll say, look, it's not the whole population of homeschool students. It's just, you know, 20,000 or 10,000 of them. It's not the whole population. But any scientist or social scientist would find that as an over-the-top kind of bar to place on studies, because I don't know of much of any studies that use the entire population. You usually get a sample from that population and you try to draw some conclusions

and you do the best you can with the data that you have. And having, you know, thousands and thousands of observations is actually pretty good for social science. But what's funny is she turns around and says, oh, look, there's not, you know, they're not observing the whole population. But then she turns around the next page and tries to say that homeschoolers are abused at higher rates by citing a study with 28 students come on and then she also commits ad hominem when whenever she does uh contend with evidence she'll attack people like brian ray and just say he's an advocate without actually dealing with the fact that he's using legitimate data that's publicly available and he's citing other people that aren't himself in a literature review of the evidence that

overwhelmingly finds that most of the studies conclude that that homeschool children uh fare better academically and socially than their otherwise similar peers in the government school system. She doesn't deal with that. She goes to the ad hominem attacks. And then she goes and cites a study that, one, only has 28 students that are cherry-picked kind of cases of abuse. And then she cites a study that is authored by Barbara Knox, who was under investigation last year for allegedly pressuring her colleagues to find abuse when abuse actually wasn't there. She actually just stepped down from her $208,000 a year salary job amid that investigation, which isn't an admission of guilt, but it doesn't look very good when you're getting

paid this huge salary. And then during the investigation just last year for pressuring your colleague to, uh, or allegedly pressuring your colleague to find abuse that wasn't actually there, uh, seems pretty fishy. And it just, um, it's just kind of strange that if you're going to attack the positive studies for quote unquote bias and, and, you know, the character, uh, of, of the authors, it seems pretty strange that she doesn't do the same thing when it comes to, uh, the negative homeschooling studies. And what it looks like to me, when you look through this article and you look at the entire 80 pages, it looks like she has the conclusion she wants, which is I want to ban, have a presumptive ban or an outright ban on homeschooling.

And what I'm going to do is I'm going to either ignore all the positive evidence, or I'm going to look at some of the positive evidence and do everything I can to discredit it by making the perfect the enemy of the good when it comes to the sample size. And I'm going to do a character assassination of the authors, but when it comes to the negative studies that exist, I'm going to cherry pick those results, and I'm going to elevate the ones that find negative evidence of homeschooling, even though the authors themselves say that you shouldn't really make any broad conclusions from these results, and then don't attack the characters of those authors. It seems like it's, like there's, like there's some, like there's, I don't like to

question the motives of people, but it just seems strange that there's this imbalance of elevating, elevating, elevating the positive, the negative studies, and then squashing at every chance you can the positive studies of homeschooling. Yeah, it seems very agenda driven. And as somebody who has experienced four different types of schooling, I've been to a Montessori school, I've been to a friend school, I've been to public school, and then a private Catholic school for high school and college. I've seen a range, I've never been homeschooled, but I am thinking about it for my own children in the future uh public school was easily the worst experience out of out of the four and you felt like you were in a prison and um one thing you've

been tweeting a lot about recently i hope i'm getting this correct i don't have any tweets pulled up but a lot of people will uh combat the line that that public school education is has really depreciated significantly over time they'll be like oh but the government's defunding schools and you and you have been pointing out that that's actually not the case per capita is that correct yeah i mean there was a few viral posts that went around i think just one the one you're probably thinking of had over 600 000 likes in a few days 600 000 for your listeners just in case you didn't hear that based on a lie they said something along the lines you know defunding police sounds radical and all until you uh think about the fact that we've been

essentially defunding education for years it was just some random person a coach from california in a high school there kamala harris kamala harris said the same thing in the new york times and they didn't issue a correction even though i called them out on this she said look we've been she said essentially the same thing you know it was it was in the discussion about police and she said well we've been defunding public schools for years or public education for years no we haven't if you look at real inflation-adjusted per-pupil expenditures in the United States since 1960, we've increased them by 280% between 1960 and 2017 in real terms. Yes, that's adjusted for inflation. And if you look every decade, it's increased at the national level. If you're

counting total expenditures per pupil adjusted for inflation, it's not just that I'm choosing a particular base year to get a result that I want. If you look at every single base, 1960 1970 1980 2000 2010 2017 there's consistent increases each decade in real terms and so we haven't been defunding education for years that's just a complete lie i think what people mean is that the money's being wasted which to which i'll respond yeah so that that but that means that we shouldn't pour more money into a system that wastes money we should attach those dollars to the child and attach those dollars to the family unit and let the family decide what the best educational experiences for their child, whether it's a charter school, a private school, a

government school, a district school, a magnet school, whether that's a homeschooling option, it doesn't matter to me. You can choose whatever type of school you want for unschool or homeschool option. But the money should be attached to the child or the individual family unit so that schools have a very strong incentive to actually allocate those dollars effectively. It could be the case that it looks like our schools are being defunded over time, but that's because all the money is going to administrative bloat, increases in staffing, going to water slides and football fields, and not actually going towards the classroom. But if you add a real incentive to allocate those dollars wisely, the increases in funding would actually be spent wisely. And

that doesn't take a lot of thinking to understand, right? If you know that you can waste money over time and your customers don't have a real meaningful exit option, well, you're going to just spend the money on whatever you want. You might not even know what the best thing to spend the money on is because there isn't any bottom up accountability. In any other market, price signals and kind of people voting with their feet are beneficial in two ways. One, it gives you an incentive to spend the money wisely, but it gives you the information on how to spend the money wisely. So you might not even know that you're doing something wrong that your customers don't like until they get the chance to leave. Then you might start to say, oh, crap, what am I doing

wrong? And then you start to have an additional incentive to kind of allocate those dollars efficiently. I think you need that bottom-up accountability because all these top-down measures of accountability are just phony accountability. The only real form of accountability that we have is bottom-up accountability. It's the only way that we're going to see increases in education expenditures actually go to the classroom and go to the most efficient and most effective use of those resources. And I will, I do want to say one more thing on the homeschooling debate is I like to bring up the evidence, right? I like to say like, look, you know, homeschoolers tend to do better. They tend to be abused at lower rates. They tend

to, you know, there's a lot of negative events occurring in the government schools. And I like to use statistics to back up my claims, but I want to make another moral case for this as well, that it shouldn't matter what the evidence says overall on average. We should still have the power and the right to choose the educational setting that works best for our kids. Let's just imagine if the evidence overall said that homeschoolers got a little bit lower test scores on average. That wouldn't be a legitimate argument to take the right of families to choose their children's education away from them. Our rights do not hinge on what academics conclude in their studies based on averages. And our rights do not hinge on what the average says.

I could be really doing a really great job for my child. And let's say this report comes out that says that on average, homeschoolers get lower test scores, but my child may be knocking it out of the water. They may be in the top percentile of students on standardized tests. So why does that average? Why should that average ever be used against me as a family? Why should decisions of other families take away my right to choose to homeschool my own children? It doesn't make any sense. And it's something I need to keep reminding listeners that although I use evidence to back up my claims, and although the evidence is positive for homeschooling, our rights don't hinge on what the evidence or what academics tell us a particular study shows on average. But that isn't to say

that the government should never step in. All I'm saying, and all homeschooling advocates are saying, is that as it currently is today, and is how it should be, that if there is evidence of educational maltreatment in severe cases, or if there is evidence of abuse, then of course the government should step in and take action. We're just saying that Elizabeth Bartholet has it completely backwards, that we shouldn't punish 100% of families for the actions of a few bad actors we should instead have the government come in after the fact and the burden of proof should rightly as it currently is be placed on the government to convince us why we they should be able to uh you know take our children away from us and so that's i think the main point i

want to make here no it's a very important point to make thank you for championing championing this this cause because it is great like i said like bitcoiners we focus on uh taking the control of money out of the state's hands because like you just described the public schooling system is terrible allocating capital and i would argue that central bank and the government that benefits from money printing is bad at allocating capital just in general outside of the schooling system as well and that's why i want to bring you on here you're championing bottom-up solutions to very very hard problems and just heuristically uh these these problems should be solved at a bottom-up fashion via the individual and the

individual family union units and um i know we got to wrap up here uh you got it you got a jet but again thank you for what you're doing do you have any parting notes for the freaks out there any thoughts on bitcoin i know you said you're not really interested in it but just in case i'm interested and i just don't know much about it but yeah i want to say thanks for having me on your show and i do think you're right that it is um and again this is my area of expertise but it does seem like a bottom-up solution to the monopoly kind of uh on on printing of money that we have with the federal reserve right and uh alternatives to the government you know um or at least federal reserve system could incentivize them to do a better job and that's that's the

same argument that i make with with school choice and educational freedom uh that this bottom-up accountability can be a tide that lifts all boats yeah no i agree if you ever uh if you ever want to chat about bitcoin uh off the record uh i'm i'm willing and able to do so and uh yeah keep crushing it man really appreciate it yeah thank you so much for having me uh where can we find out more about you uh as you said i mean you found my stuff off of twitter so if anyone wants to follow me on twitter it's just my last name and then my first name at d'angelis cory i'm sure you'll put it in the notes uh but then also if you want to find my longer form articles you can find it at the reason foundation website so if you just want to even google cory d'angelis reason

foundation you'll find my work on on google at reason.org awesome well cory keep crushing that's all we got this week, freaks. Peace and love. Okay.