The Daily Signal - Expanding School Choice in Virginia: Craig DiSesa on the Future of Education Options

Episode Date: September 3, 2025

On Saturday September 6th, a special statewide education summit will be held in Richmond. The hosts are the Virginia Education Opportunity Alliance, which includes the Middle Resolution, Virginia Institute for Public Policy, the Heritage Foundation and leaders in the homeschooling and micro-school movements and the day-long event will look at all of the options open to Virginia Families and discuss greater possibilities in the future. We sat down with the VEOA director Craig DiSesa to look at those opportunities now and in the future at the State Policy Network Annual Meeting where the growth of school choice was a large portion of the program. Keep Up With The Daily Signal   Sign up for our email newsletters:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.dailysignal.com/email⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠     Subscribe to our other shows:    The Tony Kinnett Cast: ⁠https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL2284199939⁠ The Signal Sitdown: ⁠https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL2026390376⁠   Problematic Women:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL7765680741⁠   Victor Davis Hanson: ⁠https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL9809784327⁠     Follow The Daily Signal:    X:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠https://x.com/intent/user?screen_name=DailySignal⁠ Instagram:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.instagram.com/thedailysignal/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  Facebook:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.facebook.com/TheDailySignalNews/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  Truth Social:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://truthsocial.com/@DailySignal⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  YouTube:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/dailysignal?sub_confirmation=1⁠    Subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and never miss an episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Thanks for listening to this bonus episode of the Daily Signal podcast. I'm your host, Joe Thomas, Virginia correspondent for The Daily Signal. Before we dive into today's interview, I want to thank you for tuning in today. If you're a first-time listener, The Daily Signal, brings you fact-based reporting and conservative commentary on politics, policy, and culture. And I hope you join our band of regular listeners to our podcast. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and also take it. a moment to rate and review us wherever you get your podcast.

You can find additional content at DailySignal.com. Now, let's get started with today's conversation right after this. Live at the State Policy Network annual meeting here in the French Quarter of New Orleans, as Craig DeSessa sits down from the Virginia Education Opportunity Alliance and the Middle Resolution Group, because I happen to mention that it seems like the two big conference agenda items are the housing issue, fixing that, and fixing the education issue. And you said they go together. How are you doing, first off? Are you having to go to you?

I'm doing great, Joe, and thank you for having me. Yeah, this is always every year they have this big, huge event. I'd say a couple thousand folks from different policy groups around the country, you know, coming together, They're talking about the solutions that they have in their different states, and how do we advance those solutions in a way to help those people in the housing industry and in the housing areas that have challenges and also in our challenges that we have in education. And we were talking to Dr. Ed Cornegade from the Illinois Policy Group, but also runs a group called the Center for Poverty Solutions,

and they were talking about going into Chicago, rolling up their sleeves, into the poorest areas of Chicago and flipping like block by block in these neighborhoods and we were talking about education as a core to that as I grew up in the busing era when if you grew up in a poor area well don't worry we're going to put you on a bus and take you to a nicer area

implicitly the messages get the hell out of the neighborhood you grew up in rather than saying hey you're smart let's roll up our sleeves and fix it is that what you mean that the two go together Well, absolutely. I mean, especially in your low-income communities where you have tremendous poverty, you've got really poor living conditions, you have Section 8 housing, and then you have really bad schools. Okay? It goes hand in hand. And that goes, I don't care where you are in the country. I think it's probably very true around the world. So how do you fix that problem? Well, in many ways, there's a lot of solutions that I think go hand in hand. One is, how do you How do you help children get an education that allows them to escape poverty? And that's really key in my mind. If you can help them get a good job, and it doesn't have to go off to college,

it can be some sort of a career pathway into tech or into electrical trades, the trades. So how do we do that? And then they can then have a sustainable income, which allows them to either leave the community they're in or let's incentivize them to stay in their community and help renovate a home or renovate an apartment or do something in that community that helps them bring in more income into that community. It incentivize businesses to come into that community.

One of the things that we're looking to do in Virginia is introduce legislation that many people have heard about education savings accounts, tax credit scholarships, those kind of things. Most of those pieces of legislation are most often are based on eligibility, which is based on your income level, right, individual income level. And so you see, for example, in Virginia, we have a very small tax credit program that only helps kids that are 300% are below the poverty line. What we would like to do is help people that live in that community. So everybody in that community qualifies for it, whether they have a stable income,

or a low income. What does that do? And incentivize those people with stable incomes, let's say middle income families, young families with kids that are getting into school age, and they can get a scholarship, a tax credit, which allows them to write off whatever their expenses are on their education if they want to send their kid to a micro-school

or they want a homeschool or maybe to a private school in the community. But what that does is they don't leave the community. They stay in the community. There's a reason that young couples, I see it all the time. Move to the inner city. They move to a community where they want to be part of it and they want to help. But then when their kid gets to be five or six years old, they go, oh, my gosh, I can't send my kid to this public school.

It's dangerous. It doesn't produce good education. So we've got to understand that we need to tie education and housing together. And I think you can solve both problems at the same time. It's so well thought out. And I was thinking about what we were talking about with Dr. Cornegay because he's, He was talking about getting into the schools and helping the kids, you know, as they work block by block, helping kids and young adults who grew up never even being inspired to figure out what they were gifted to do. And he and I agreed, you know, everyone is gifted to do something.

So you figure out what that is and then find a way to apply it. He said, you know, these kids are on fire because they want to do these things in their communities. and that starts the fire of wanting to learn, starts the fire of wanting to achieve, because once you figure out why it is you feel like you're not fulfilling something, now you're Johnny off to the races. So is it a matter of writing policy to get people out of the way? Because, you know, it's so often we write new legislation that just piles on top of the old legislation. I have a metaphor.

I said it's like a legislative black hole. We've created a legislative system that's so dense justice itself can't escape anymore. You know, or do we have to get in there and start peeling back some of the layers? Well, it's a multiple. You've got a lot of layers that you've got to deal with. One, policy is important. Funding's really important because if you don't have the funding, you can't help these families. Actually, you know, I'm going to interrupt myself here. I'm interrupting my question because

your answer there just triggered a thought. Is the Dillon rule getting in the way of this kind of innovation where we have to wait for Richmond to say, here's how your schools are going to work, and Charlottesville schools can't operate the way they want, which may be different than with county schools? So that's a different question, but that's an excellent question. One of the questions that we've been asked by school boards around the state is, can I have an education, can we create our own education savings account or our own tax credit program? Can we do that? And we've been trying to get the Attorney General's office to answer that question, write an opinion, and say, and we haven't been able to get that yet. So one of the things I'm telling school board

members that ask this question is try it, see what happens, okay? You know, you have a better Attorney General right now than you might. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. But, you know, so the Dillon Rule can get in a way. But on a tax credit, what I was just talking about earlier, what we call a refundable tax credit, the Dillon Rule does not, now, you've got to get the legislature to put that in the code.

It's got to go in the budget because a tax credit costs the state money. So that's, you have to get that passed. And your fiscal hawks will be, you know, fighting you. and if it's got any kind of sort of a tone of this is school choice, you're going to get a lot of people there are just going to oppose it because they just have this unfortunate partisan attitude towards school choice. It's unfortunate because I don't think people realize, and we spent a good bit, we talked to Corey DeAngelis,

from, he's with a new group now and all of a sudden I'm spacing out there, but everyone knows Corey DeAngelis, and he has been such a thorn in the side of the teachers' unions. And we watched, and I, you know, I'm not going to tell you who to vote for for governor, but there's going to be one that's going to be much more pro letting unions into Virginia. And if you don't, if you think the teachers unions had an undue effect on the 2021 election and Terry McCullough's inability to say, hey, I may have misspoken, wait till we become a non-right-to-work state and the teachers' unions are in every school. So that being said, you know, that's, I think, where some of this school choice narrative comes from.

And if there's a common theme about the school choice, you and I have talked about this, Craig DeSessa, is on with us from the Middle Resolution of the Virginia Education Opportunity Alliance. Got to have enough plugs. It's like Christmas time. is that it's actually to the detriment of teachers to continue the status quo because they get paid bad, the working conditions are bad, and they don't like it, yet they seem to get in line behind it. And I wish more teachers would feel the courage to speak out against this teacher's union that seems to be the one that's driving this narrative that you were talking about.

Well, and they're being lied to in so many cases. and they have fear, right? The cancel culture fear of teachers. I know a lot of teachers who will tell you. In fact, I don't know many teachers that won't say big huge problem is safety and discipline in the schools. They're not allowed to discipline. I mean, so you can't have a good-sized classroom.

You have to have small classrooms because the teacher can't have 25 kids, never mind 35 kids. I went to school. It was almost 40 kids. And when I ask them, would you be interested in teaching in an environment where you didn't have this situation?

You had smaller classrooms, right? And they always say, yes, of course. And I said, well, that's the micro school movement right there. And if you're interested in this, we'd love to help you explore that a little more. So we've created the Virginia Microschool Network in Virginia, and what we're doing is helping people who are interested in starting a small micro school, which is basically an extension of homeschooling. So basically what a homeschooling parent would do is drop their child off for a day,

two days, three days, and they pay a certain tuition fee for how many days they want to drop them off. They work closely with the parents on what education they want their child to have. And what's fascinating about this is what I'm seeing is that they are catering to lower-income children. They're catering to children that have certain, the new phrase is neurodivergent, right, special needs, basically. But they love using this term neurodivergent. Everyone's got a new umbrella. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, but they are.

And these founders are amazingly passionate. They're entrepreneurs because they're running a small business. So that's another area that we're doing. We're doing a lot of work of trying to help teachers understand that there's other ways to teach. You don't necessarily have to be in the public school. And that's so important because, you know, again, you're not just a cog in the machine. You're actually working with the parents. The parents are the customers.

And you're working as a partnership as opposed to almost a confrontational relationship in the public school model, it seems like, Craig. How big is the micro-school movement in Virginia? That's a great question because we don't know the answer to that question yet. We are trying to get that data. There's a lot of microschools that are kind of off in the western part of the state. We have no idea that they're there. And they may not even know that they're actually a micro-school. You know, they just

It's a bunch of It's a bunch of homeschool parents saying, Hey, I'm no good at math. Can you teach my kid math? I'll do the English. That's very much like a co-op. And now what they're doing is they're saying, okay, wait a minute,

we can help the parent have some free time because co-ops, and I homeschooled, a co-op is usually there with the child. But if you can drop your child off for three or four hours a day for two days a week, well, that gives that parent all kinds of opportunity

to go do whatever they want to do. second job, deal with the other kids in the house, that kind of a thing. And so we don't know the answer to that question, and we may never know the exact number, but we're getting closer and closer because we do focus groups. We do a lot of online meetings with founders, and then we learn more about other founders because they tell us about them, because they've met them. And we're really trying to help them network so they can learn best practices, provide them with resources, and so forth.

Craig DeSse of Virginia Education Opportunity Alliance, Middle Resolution. Thank you so much for everything you do. But I think, you know, this is, I feel like, and I've been wrong before, I feel like we're right at the edge. I think we were talking with Paige Lambermont about the grid. And she brought up the expression. It's not the beginning of the end, but it's certainly the end of the beginning. So maybe we're getting there.

We're making progress. Yeah, we are. and I do think we're on the cusp of a major reform in education in general. And I know the public schools don't think this is a good thing, but this is a huge opportunity for them. We were just talking about that earlier today. There's going to be so many opportunities for them to take advantage of the microschools, to take advantage of all the different resources that are being developed

as a result of the demand from microschools. And they're going to have to adjust. I liken it to the horse and buggy industry. when Henry Ford said, you know what, we're going to start making these cars, these horseless carriages. And I'm sure the Horse and Buggy Association, National Association was like,

no, no, this is terrible. Protect our jobs. Oh my gosh, climate change. There was, I forget the company, but they used to make all the chassis for General Motors cars. And they had been a horse and buggy company, and General Motors said, well, make the bodies for these horseless cars.

And they just picked up and they had the little logo inside the doorframe. Somebody will text me to remind me of what it was. But they made the horse and buggies and they just transit. That's exactly what I'm talking about. Public schools are going to learn to adapt. They have to. They don't have a choice if they don't want to be extinct. Would that be school choice?

Excellent, Joe. That kid, Greg. Thank you so much for your time. That'll do it for today's show. Don't forget to hit that. subscribe button so you never miss out on new episodes from The Daily Signal. Every weekday, you can catch top news in 10 to keep up with the day's top headlines in just 10 minutes, and every weekday afternoon catch Victor Davis Hansen's thoughtful analysis for The Daily Signal.

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