The Daily Signal - Corey DeAngelis: School Choice and the 'Parent Revolution'

Episode Date: May 17, 2024

There’s a war being waged for America’s elementary, middle, and high school students. But the leftist agenda-driven campaign that began behind the closed doors of teachers unions and government-run schools is now out in the open and has led to a “parent revolution,” says Corey DeAngelis.  The "teachers unions overplayed their hand and awakened a sleeping giant, which happens to be parents who want more of a say in their kids' education," says DeAngelis, author of “The Parent Revolution: Rescuing Your Kids from the Radicals Ruining Our Schools.”   DeAngelis—sometimes referred to as the "school choice evangelist"—dedicated his new book to "Randi Weingarten [president of the American Federation of Teachers] and the teachers unions for inadvertently doing more to advance school choice and homeschooling than anyone could have ever imagined." School choice programs, which give parents the opportunity to use their tax dollars to send their children to a private school or even to homeschool them, are restoring parents' power over their children’s education. Already, states across America are embracing school choice.  "We now have 11 states with universal school choice," DeAngelis says, adding the programs are a fulfillment of the late Nobel Prize-winning economist "Milton Friedman's vision for all families" to have choice over their children's education. DeAngelis, a senior fellow at the American Federation for Children and a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and Jason Bedrick, a research fellow in the Center for Education Policy at The Heritage Foundation, join “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss why school choice programs are a rising tide that will lift all of America’s education system. (Heritage founded the Daily Signal in 2014.) Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Friday, May 17th. I'm Virginia Allen. There is currently a parent revolution happening in government schools across America. As more and more parents are waking up to what is happening within the school systems, they are opting into school choice programs, pulling their kids out, and choosing to use their tax dollars to put them in private education or even to homeschool them. Corey DeAngelis has been called a school choice of evangelist, and he is author of the brand new book, The Parent Revolution, rescuing your kids from the radicals ruining our schools. He's joining me on the show today to discuss the new book and this trend of more and more

parents opting out of government education. Also joining us for that conversation is Jason Bedrick. He serves as a research fellow in the Center for Education Policy here at the Heritage Foundation. Stay tuned for our conversation on education and these incredible shifts that are happening as more and more Americans wake up to the benefit of school choice. The Heritage Foundation is the most effective conservative policy organization in the country. Every semester, our interns are a vital part of that mission. We pay competitively. We develop talent.

And we give our interns access to some of the sharpest minds in the country. We're going on offense. Join us. To learn more about the Young Leaders Program here at the Heritage Foundation, please go to heritage.org slash intern. Well, it is my distinct honor and privilege to have in studio with us, Corey DeAngelis and Jason Bedrick. Corey is a senior fellow at the American Federation for Children and a visiting fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institute. He has been labeled the School Choice Evangelist and called the most effective school choice advocate since Milton Friedman.

Corey is the author of the brand new book, The Parent Revolution, rescuing your kids from the radicals ruining our schools. And Jason Bedrick serves as a research fellow in the Center for Education Policy here at the Heritage Foundation. Gentlemen, thank you so much for being with us. Thank you. Well, Corey, congratulations on the new book, The Parent Revolution. It's out now. It is available for ordering. What is the Parent Revolution? Tell us.

It talks about the story about how the teachers unions overplayed their hand and awakened a sleeping giant, which happens to be parents who want more of a say in their kids' education. I actually dedicated the book to Randy Weingarten and the teachers' unions for inadvertently doing more to advance school choice and homeschooling than anyone could have ever imagined. We've had a mass exodus from the government school system, million students about left the public schools, and then homeschooling is basically doubled since pre-pandemic levels. But the reason is because the teachers unions wanted to keep the schools closed at all costs. They did everything they could. They were lobbying the CDC to make it more difficult to reopen schools. They were threatening strikes in 2020.

Randy Weingarten called Trump's plan for reopening schools, reckless, callous, and cruel. They were fearmongering every step of the way. Here in D.C., they were putting fake body bags outside the public school office buildings because they were implying that if you wanted to make them go back to work, that you were actually trying to kill them. You had so much hypocrisy on full display. You had the Chicago Teachers Union. They deleted a tweet that said the push to reopen schools is rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny. They threw every lefty buzzword at the wall to see what would stick.

They even had a board member vacationing in Puerto Rico while railing against going back to work. It was nonstop fearmongering. They were using fake caskets and tombstones in Jason's home state of Arizona. They were instructing their members to send fake over. obituaries to Governor Doug Ducey and fake epitaphs. It was just ridiculous fearmongering, but the good news is we're now in the middle of what I call a school choice or a parent revolution where parents have banned together and they're pushing back against the teachers unions. There's a new union in town, one for their kids, and they're called parents. And I want you to be optimistic when you read this book because I talk about a lot of the wins.

We're racking up Ws in state after state after state. We now have 11 states with universal school choice, Milton Friedman's vision for all families, regardless of income, no more picking winners and losers, can now take their kids' education dollars to the school that works best for them. That could be the government school. If you like your government school, you can keep your government school. But for real, this time, unlike with your doctor. But if not, you can take that money, like in Arizona, where Jason lives, in the form of a scholarship. You can put an education savings account that funding can follow your child to a private school, a homeschooling option, a micro school, any approved education provider. And now the teachers unions, they've been so drunk on power for so long, they don't know what to do with it.

They are freaking out. In fact, there was a Wisconsin Teacher's Union executive board member who actually called to burn my book. The same Yahoo's that are saying that conservatives are banning books for wanting appropriate content in young children's public school library. Those same people are the ones calling to burn the book that they haven't even read yet. And so if you want to take Ted Cruz's advice, Senator from Texas, he wrote on the back, you can ruin Randy Weingarten's Day by reading this book because it really goes to show them that they overplayed their hand. This is their fault. I mean, a lot of people give me and Jason credit for being very good at making the case for

school choice. But I think the real school choice MVP is Randy Weingarten. She deserves a trophy for doing more inadvertently for the school choice movement than anyone could have ever imagined. And one more thing. In the past three years, we've seen more on the school choice front in terms of victories than we had in the preceding three decades. It's hard to overstate how much winning we're doing.

We're winning so much. I'm almost getting tired of winning. Almost. We're not done yet. We're going to get to the blue states, and we'll talk about that in a second, about how we can expand these red state victories into other areas. So you said there's 11 states, right, that have fully embraced school choice. These are all red states controlled by Republican legislatures.

The only one that didn't have a Republican governor at the time, I believe, was North Carolina. And North Carolina had a hypocrite governor, Roy Cooper, who actually called for a state of emergency over school choice. Talk about an abuse of emergency powers. She's a total hypocrite. He sent his own kid to private school. And this is documented in the book. He had a special shout out for his theatrics in fighting against school choice and his hysteria. And the problem is the Democrat Party has become a basically a part of the teacher union, a wholly owned subsidiary of the teachers union.

If you think about Randy Weingarten's union, 99.97% of their campaign contributions with the Democrats in 2022. And so it's this weird, incestuous relationship between the teachers' unions and the Democrat Party where Democrat voters support the concept, but when you get into elected office, the politicians care more about money and power than they do about logic and morality. And so the good news is some Democrats are starting to defect on the issue. I talk about in that in the book a little bit, and it's probably because something that I've talked about in terms of the Red State strategy where the more that the GOP leans into parental rights as a political winner. Think Terry McColliffe in Virginia who said, I don't think parents should

be telling schools what they should teach. He even had Randy Weingarten, the school closer, as his campaign closer, stumping for him the night before the election. Glenn Yonkin, the Republican, won on the issue of education by six points, and that was the number two issue in the election. And so the more that the Republicans do that and follow the Glenn Yonkin blueprint for political success, the more it becomes a form of political suicide for Democrats, to oppose parents. And so parents are the new special interest group in town. They're not going away anytime soon.

They've woken up. They're never going back to sleep because they can't unsee what they saw in 2020. They saw that the kids were divided based on race, based on other immutable characteristics. They saw the inappropriate content in the classroom through remote learning, which we really should just call remotely learning. There wasn't a lot of learning going on. But families have awakened like a sleeping giant and vote. Cody Bacom said it best, we cannot continue to send our children to Caesar for their education

and be surprised when they come home as Romans. The good news is parents are not surprised anymore. They're pissed off. And when the school boards try to cut off their mic, when the school boards try to label them as a domestic terrorist threat, there was an FBI threat tag, actually specifically created for parents protesting at school board meetings because of a letter that was sent by the National School Boards Association to Biden. implying that under the Patriot Act, parents should be investigated for, quote, unquote, domestic terrorism. Their plan backfired, too. 26 states have left the NSBA. You might as well call them the Regional School Board Association at this time because families fought back.

And that's another optimistic story, how if parents want to make a change, they can. So I want people to be inspired by this book. There's a lot of things to be upset about, but you can channel that energy to solutions that work. When the school board doesn't want to listen to you, you can have more leverage by taking that money with you. And so you might not even have to leave if the school district starts to listen to your desires and starts to focus more on the basics, starts to educate kids as opposed to indoctrinating them. And so school choice is a win-win solution. It should provide competitive pressures for the public schools to do a better job too.

Yeah. Jason, I want to get your thoughts on something that Corey mentioned, and that is teachers' unions. How did we get to a place where teachers' unions are so powerful that they're actually determining what is happening within America's public schools? Yeah, it's a matter of concentrated benefits and diffuse costs, right? So the concentrated benefits are the teachers' unions are negotiating with the government for their salary, for their, benefits and for the rules. And so it is very important for them to win in school board elections, whereas the cost to the general public are diffuse. They're spread out. And so most people don't think about it, right? If the teachers' union gets a raise or something like that,

it's a huge benefit for them, but only pennies out of everybody else's pocket. And it's not just those issues. It's also, you know, the issues of what's taught in the classroom, right? There's a whole left-wing agenda that the unions are part of this left-wing coalition. And so this is why you're seeing, as Corey described, all sorts of inappropriate materials entering the classroom, things that are very politically charged entering the classroom. The teachers unions have off-cycle, sorry, the public school boards have off-cycle elections. So the teachers unions are able to capitalize on that because these are very low voter turnout elections. Often they're officially nonpartisan, so it's hard for people to even know who it is that they're voting for, but the unions are very organized,

so they're essentially able to capture this. And this is what they were doing, you know, with COVID. When Corey says they were overplaying their hand and they wanted to keep the schools closed, well, why? Because they were essentially holding children hostage to achieve political goals. And they were very clear about this. You know, in California, the teachers' unions' list of demands, it didn't just include things like, you know, we want to make sure that the classroom is safe before we return, right? They wanted a massive tax hike on the wealthy. They wanted universal health care.

Basically, it was the whole, you know, left-wing wish list of policies that they wanted to have enacted before they were willing to turn to the classroom. And so because it was so nakedly partisan, parents woke up and they realized, you know what, these teachers, you know, I think of teachers as, you know, this is, you know, Mrs. Craboppel, my third grade daughter's teacher. She's a wonderful person. But they don't realize that the union is different than the teachers in the classroom, right? The union is an explicitly political organization with different goals, and it is not usually representative of your average teacher.

It is representing the interest of its own institution. You can see where the teacher's unions actually even do things that undermine teachers because they don't actually fight for pay wages. Page wage increases. this teacher union, the teachers' salaries have been flat for decades after you adjust for inflation. Because it's in the interest of the union not to have better paid teachers. It's actually in their interest to have more teachers because a teacher that gets more money is not paying more dues. But if you get another teacher, they're paying more dues.

So they fight for, they argue that, well, what we need is smaller classes. What they really mean is we need more dues-paying members. So if the state has the money to do it, they're going to put. push for more dues paying members. And they always throw more money at the problem, but they do just hire more people and have more administrators. Randy Weingarten makes over $500,000 a year. And if you look at the trend over time, we've increased per student education funding

in the U.S. government school since 1970 by about 170% after adjusting for inflation. So this, it's not a money problem. It's the definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results, we now spend about $20,000 per student per year in the government school system in America, according to the National Center for Education Statistics back in 2021. That's the latest data. It's probably even higher now. But something that Jason touched on is what I want to touch on as well, is that the problem is twofold. You have the teachers unions that want a monopoly on the funding associated with your kid. They want you to have to send your child to their school.

They want the $20,000 associated with that child, and they don't want to have to compete. The thing is, when they do compete, they do actually up their game in response to that competition. There's been 29 studies on this subject, 26th and positive, finding that school choice is a positive rising tide that lifts all boats. But the problem is even more insidious. The second part of the issue is that the teachers union want a monopoly on the minds of other people's children. It's amazing. The left almost doesn't even have to have their own kids. They can use the government school system to raise other people's children for them in their leftist socialist worldview.

And they can shape the direction of this country without even having to have a child of their own because there are about 40 to 50 million kids that churned through that government school system every year for 13 years of their lives, for seven hours a day. There's no fighting back against that behemoth. I mean, you think about Hollywood and its impact on culture. This is much bigger. It's a much bigger problem because these are young and impressionable minds and families are sending their kids to these institutions for a long time. But the good news is that families, you know, one, you can't just have more kids and expect to win this war.

You need to take back the schools or not or these are not mutually exclusive. At the same time, you also need to have the right to take your money somewhere else to a school that's aligned with your values that isn't captured by radical leftists, and that focuses more on education as opposed to indoctrination. And if it's going to be a school that does inculcate values, it should be aligned with your own, not the radical progressives who want to turn this country into a socialist utopia. And so even if you don't care about education policy, this book is important for you, too, even if you don't have kids of your own, this book is important for you too, because if you care about the direction of this country, if you want to stop the leftward

drift, you need to strike the problem at the root. And that's in the school system. And most people don't think about this all that much because they might think, it's not happening in my school. It's happening in that other school. It's only happening in California. We've had videos come out of red states that have banned CRT, for example, critical race theory, Marxist ideology in the classroom where the public school officials are on video admitting they're still doing it anyway. They're just calling it something else. They change the goalpost. They call it social emotional learning. Maybe the next year they'll call it student mental health services and they've admitted these things on video.

So the top down policy reforms of banning certain concepts I think is a step into right direction because look, it could shape the direction of that school and set an example of what's allowable. But since it's not very enforceable, you'll have these rogue teachers still doing what they want. And even if it's not explicitly in the curriculum, they can teach through a CRT lens. If you've seen the math problems where they're ingraining CRT into math problem, I mean, it's just ridiculous how far they'll go. But it's a never-ending game of whack-a-mole to try to determine what this one-size-fits-all system should look like.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't try. We should try to get conservative values in the school system. The left's already doing it, so you might as well retaliate. But at the same time, if they don't listen and if they keep moving the goalpost, you need to be able to vote with your feet. And then also the counterintuitive result is that if you have the power to leave, you should be less likely to need to leave because then the school district will know that you have leverage in that conversation. They won't try to bully and silence you into submission. They won't look at you as a nuisance anymore. They won't call you a domestic terrorist.

They'll have a much stronger incentive to view you as a customer, as a partner in the relationship. And once they do that, they won't have to worry as much about a mass exodus from the same. the school system because if they're doing a good job, people aren't going to leave. So in other words, the highest form of accountability is bottom up. It's when the schools are not accountable to bureaucrats and politicians, but they are directly accountable to informed families, which is why transparency in school choice is really the one-to punch, right? Transparency that means the families need to know what the schools are teaching their children and how their children are performing, and then they need to be empowered through education savings accounts or

tax credit scholarships or vouchers to choose the learning environment that aligns with their values and best meets their kids' needs. That provides an immediate escape hatch if the school is doing something they don't like, but also, as Corey says, it fundamentally changes the dynamic between the parents and the schools. They're no longer a captive audience. The schools now know that if those families are dissatisfied because there's radicalism in the classroom or biological males in the girls' locker rooms or anything like that, you know,

like that, those families can take their money and leave so they had better find a way to make everybody happy so they can stay. You all work so much with parents. You talk to parents all the time because of the work that you do. When you're talking to parents and you're laying this out and you're saying school choice is great for everyone, what are the reasons that you will hear of the still hesitation, the I know I should take my kid out of the public schools? That's probably a really good idea, but what comes after the class?

A lot of it's economic, right? They just might say, I don't want to pay twice. Look, I'm paying through the property tax system for this free public school. We shouldn't call them public schools, by the way. They're government schools. They're run by the government. They're regulated by the government. They're assigned by the government.

They're compelled by the government. They're funded by the government or at least the taxpayer. And they're not public in any meaningful sense of the word. Families have gone to jail for lying about their address to get into better so-called public schools. It's not like a public park where anybody could access the best institutions. No, these are discriminatory institutions on the basis of zip code. And we should not cede our language to the left on this issue. They're not a public good if you look at the economic definition.

And they're not accountable to the public, as we saw with them labeling parents as domestic terrorist when we tried to show up at school board meetings. And Corey has a whole chapter in this book on it. The whole chapter on why we should call them government schools. But families might not know how school choice works. So they'll say, hey, I don't want to pay twice. Why? I'm paying, you know, $20,000 a year for the public school on average in America. So, you know, it costs, you know, $12,000 on average for private school tuition and fees,

much less than what we're spending in the government schools. But even then, that's still an additional out-of-pocket expense. But once they learn that, well, like the proposal in Texas last year, you can get $10,000 to take your student to a school that works best for them. they're much more on board once they see it's a more feasible reality. The other issue is, you know, it's a pain to transfer schools, right? You might have a peer group that's working. And at the end of the day, I'm not trying to sit here and tell all families that they all must find the private school as the best solution.

It's just, hey, if there's a public school that's working for your family and if most families want to go there, I have no problem with that. If you like your public school, you can keep your public school, government school. But for real, unlike with your doctor. But if you ask families what they want, Ed Choices, done surveys on this, other organizations as well, where they'll say, what type of school are you in now and where would you like to send your child if money weren't a big issue? And consistently those surveys find that although 80 or 90 percent of kids are in government-run

schools today, only about 30 or 40 percent, less than half, actually want their children there. And so a lot of people will come back and say, oh, well, a lot of families say they like their public school. I think it's a form of Stockholm syndrome, where if you think that you can't access something else, you don't want to mentally admit that you're sending your child to an institution that's hurting them. And so your incentive is to say, no, things are fine or to turn a blind eye to all the problems.

But when you know you can have real power and choice, well, families will change their tune and be more likely to say, hey, actually, I think I do want to go to another institution. So at the end of the day, I'm not taking a side on public versus private or government versus private. It should be the family making that decision, especially because parents care and know their children's educational needs more than bureaucrats sitting in offices hundreds of miles away. And guess what? They know more than I do about what's best for their kids.

Yeah. On the topic of school choice, I have heard the argument that school choice is dangerous because eventually the government will figure out how to get its hands involved and control what kids are learning. And if a family accepts the dollars that comes with a school choice program, then they will be subject to having to follow X curriculum as laid out by the government. Yada, yada, yada. What's your response to that point? This is making perfect the enemy of the good. We got to take the L, we got to take the W unless we want to. to be stuck with the L. And guess what? Randy Weingarten's also made the same argument. Is she some

anti-government libertarian type that really cares about the autonomy of private institutions? No, she's a big government socialist. And if you're on Randy Weingarten side and not our side and not the Heritage Foundation side, you're probably on the wrong side. But this is a step in the right direction. All of these programs are voluntary. Families can make the cost-benefit decision for their own families, whether to accept the funding or not. And guess what? The government can already regulate private and home education today. And they have historically. In Oregon, the government actually outlawed private education altogether back in 1922. Thankfully, three years later at the Supreme Court in Pierce v. Society of Sisters, the court famously ruled that the child is not the mere

creature of the state. Some people like Joe Biden would be wise to remember that line today, but it wasn't because of a school choice program. You look at New York State today. They had the worst homeschooling laws on the books, and they have no private school choice programs. But if you empower families, politics is all about organized interest, fighting for what they want. The teachers unions do it all the time. With school choice, you allow more families who are benefiting from private home education to benefit from it and to fight back together, to form a coalition, hold politicians accountable, so if any authoritarian in office want to clamp down on education freedom,

will have a better fighting chance at reducing the likelihood of that happening in the future. But let's not miss the forest for the trees. We're actually winning on this issue. And at the same time, not all school choice bills are created equal. And we should look at the bills in what's included. And I've never seen a school choice program mandate that you teach CRT, for example. We would fight against that every step of the way if that was the case. But you can amend bills to make them better.

and our model legislation actually has specific anti-regulation language in the statute, including like the one in Arizona where Jason lives, that if you accept the money, one, you're not a government actor, two, the state can't tell you to take any type of test. Three, they can't tell you what type of curriculum you have to have. And there are other provisions in the statute as well, but there's a lot of protections you can put in against that government overreach. And look, at the end of the day, this is a all voluntary, the money's being spent anyway. In the current status quo, we're just saying, the government is saying that you must spend that $20,000 at the government school. All we're saying is that, well, family should be able to choose and say, hey, let's continue sending it there if we want, but if not, maybe I should be able to go somewhere else. The choice isn't between Libertopia where there is no government involvement in education and everyone is, you know, choosing for themselves, and there's no government funding or oversight or anything. It's not the choice between that or school choice, right?

The choice is between a system where 90% of kids are in government-run schools that the left has captured, and they're filling our kids' heads with all sorts of woke nonsense and, you know, left-wing ideology, or a system where families get to choose the schools that align with their values and the money follows the child. That's really the choice that is before us. And I know that there are those who say, well, with government shackles come government shackles. The reality is, yeah, you have places that have shackles and no shackles and places with shackles and no shackles, right? So you've got places like Arizona and Florida, you know, and in Georgia where they respect

homeschoolers and where there is a very, very light touch when it comes to the regulations involved in the school choice program. And then you've got places like New York or Massachusetts, right, where they don't have school choice, but they have lots of government oversight in the private schools, and they've got lots of regulations on homeschoolers. So as Corey was saying, when you have a school choice program, you shift a lot of people that otherwise, you know, they're already paying. They're already paying taxes.

But now they're actually able to use those taxes in the schools that they, tax dollars in the schools that they want to and learning environments that they want to. That moves more people out of the government system into schools that are chosen schools. and those families will fight to preserve the autonomy of their chosen schools. The book is The Parent Revolution. It is out and available. Now pick up a copy. Thank you both so much for joining. Corey, Jason, tell us how can we keep up with your work, follow what you guys are doing.

You can follow us on Twitter or X. I'm at DeAngelis, Corey. You're at... At Jason Bedrick or at the Heritage Foundation's website, Heritage.org. And if you want to get the book, you can find it basically anywhere. Just look up the Parent Revolution, and it should be the first book that pops up anywhere any bookstore you like. It's also in local bookstores, books a million, Barnes and Noble, and other bookstores in stores as well. So check it out, The Parent Revolution. It's a blueprint for success going forward and also reminds everybody what happened during the COVID era. Don't let

the teacher unions rewrite history. We got the facts. We got the receipts on our side and take Ted Cruz's advice. Ruin Randy Weingarten's Day by reading this book. Cordangeles, Jason Bedrick. Thank you both for your time. Really appreciate it. Thank you. With that, that's going to do it for today's episode. Thank you so much for being with us here on the Daily Signal podcast. Make sure you hit that subscribe button so you never miss out on new shows. And if you would, take a minute to leave us a five-star rating and review. We will see you right back here around 5 o'clock today for our top news edition. Every weekday, we bring you the top news of the day. These are the headlines you don't want to miss. And remember that on Friday right now, we are bringing you a special movie review segment. So make sure to tune in around 5 o'clock today. today, both for the news of the day and a little bit of movie fun. We'll see you around five. The Daily Signal podcast is made possible because of listeners like you. Executive producers are Rob Bluey and Kate Trinko. Hosts are Virginia Allen, Brian Gottstein, Mary Margaret O'Lehan,

and Tyler O'Neill. Sound designed by Lauren Evans, Mark Geinney, and John Pop. To learn more or support our work, please visitdailySignal.com.