Voices of Freedom - Interview with Robert Enlow

Episode Date: August 24, 2023

Families have more freedom in education than ever before, thanks in part to increased parental demand for K12 opportunities since the pandemic. In state after state, legislation has passed to expand educational options. While there has been significant momentum, the groundwork for reform was laid long ago, starting with the vision of Milton and Rose Friedman. The Friedmans broke the mold of the traditional school model by proposing the concept of school choice in 1955. Nearly 70 years later, their revolutionary idea has become embedded in the education landscape, with more than half of the U.S. now having some form of educational choice. Robert Enlow is our guest on this episode of Voices of Freedom. Since 1996, he has been dedicated to carrying out the Friedmans’ core belief that more education freedom creates greater opportunity for children. Topics Discussed Evolution of education freedom, starting with the Friedmans’ vision  Impact of school choice on underperforming schools Influence of parents on education freedom Legislative landscape of choice: opportunities and obstacles How to effectively implement education freedom legislation once it’s passed U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Espinoza v. Montana  How the Friedmans would view the state of education today Enlow is the president and CEO of EdChoice. Before its formation in 2016, he was an integral part of the Milton and Rose Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, serving as fundraiser, projects coordinator, vice president and executive director, prior to being named president and CEO in 2009.

Hello and welcome to Voices of Freedom, a Bradley Foundation podcast. I'm Rick Graber, President and CEO of the Bradley Foundation. On the podcast, we'll explore issues that affect our freedoms with a focus on free enterprise, free speech, and educational freedom. So let's get started. Rental freedom and education has seen a big groundswell of support in recent times, particularly since the pandemic, and that the tide has turned so swiftly in favor of educational opportunity just has to be due to parents' frustration with curriculum and underperforming schools. I don't know how else you explain it. decades of groundwork previously laid by school choice advocates, many states have been really

well positioned to take advantage of the momentum for educational freedom, which of course in turn opens pathways of opportunity for kids of all backgrounds, which is really exciting. With me today to discuss the state of parental freedom in education, its evolution, and its future is Robert Enloe, President and CEO of EdChoice. EdChoice was previously the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, which Robert helped to launch way back in 1996. Under his leadership, EdChoice has become one of the nation's most respected and successful advocacy organizations for educational choice, working in dozens of states to advance parental freedom in education. Robert, welcome. We are delighted to have you join us

on Voices of Freedom. I'm delighted to be here, and I think about 26 years or 27 years, I'm like, wow, that's a long time. And then I think about Bradley Foundation and how long they've been doing it, which is even longer. Absolutely. And to that point, one could really be forgiven for thinking that educational freedom is a recent phenomenon, given all the momentum, all the publicity, all the action that we've seen in very recent times. But to your point, it's been a decades long movement that started with the vision of Milton and Rose Friedman. Talk to us a little bit about how UB became involved and what at the time was a revolutionary idea, and that is the idea of universal school choice. Yes, so we were very lucky. I was very lucky to join the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation in 1996.

I had just come back from England where I had worked in the voluntary sector social work setting dealing with homeless men and women. I had no idea about educational reform. And I come back to this little foundation in Indiana started by Milton Friedman. And its goal was to try and change the nature of education through universal choice. And in 1996, that seemed a long way off. There were when we started, there were only four school choice programs operating in America. Two that were ancient in Maine and Vermont from the 1860s. And then the new one in Milwaukee that had happened in 1990. And then the new one in Cleveland, so city-based, serving less than 5,000

kids. So you're sitting there talking about a program that doesn't exist, that's an idea in Milton Friedman's head that you've got to make a reality in states across the country. And what you're seeing now, the way I frame it, you're seeing the tip of the iceberg. It's great. Like the iceberg is now broken through the water and people see it and it's amazing and it's big and it's exciting. But really what's underneath that, as you said, is decades of work from groups like the Bradley Foundation, from Ed Choice and Milton Friedman Foundation and many others around the country, many state think tanks. The facts are, though, you had to educate people a long time. I look at it like this. You got to make sure you change their heart and mind. If you can't change their heart and mind, you got to change their vote.

And if you can't change their vote, other people need to work on making sure the right people are in there to make the right decisions for families. And so what you've now seen from four programs in four states to now 78 programs operating in 32 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, and it's growing. So we're really excited, and we've seen steps along the way each way, Rick, and it's amazing to see the progress, and we're excited for it. Just terrific and exciting. You talked about the role of the Bradley Foundation, my employer, and let's talk about that just a little bit. I mean, the foundation indeed did play a role in turning the Freedman's concept into a reality. For

listeners who may not know, in the 1980s, the Bradley Foundation funded the research, which concluded that parental choice truly could be transformative. And in 1992, funded an experimental programs. You know, as I think back to some of those players here in Wisconsin, it included Governor Tommy Thompson fairly early on in his his tenure as governor here, an African-American state legislator by the name of Polly Williams, education entrepreneur Howard Fuller, George and Susan Mitchell, so many other players, but people that were really dedicated to this concept. The foundation also provided support to overcome the inevitable political, legal, regulatory challenges that followed, and they were big hurdles without question. But looking back, I mean, that was a

long time ago. Why do you think it took so long for parental freedom and education to catch on, to take off, especially given the fact that throughout all these years, kids have been stuck in underperforming public schools, often in large urban areas. You would just think that this whole process would have worked more quickly, and it hasn't. No, it hasn't. And like all things, it's complicated, right? It's not just one reason why his choice hasn't taken off. It's many reasons. One of the reasons is our own failure as a movement. We said we wanted universal choice, but we accepted anything, right? And we passed bills that were great for families and were important for low-income families. We care about that very much. But the reality is you don't change systems if you only allow certain people to choose, right?

And you keep the system and the structure that it has, right? So we were promoting policies that were choice for some, not choice for all. And I think that created challenges sort of for the growth of this movement as you look at it over time. Secondly, at that time, and this is what we'll talk about, I hope, next about the pandemic, everyone had sort of a cultural understanding of education. Your mom went to school. My mom went to school. My dad. We all had this understanding of what the institution was, right? And when we were first starting this back in the, if you look at the 1970s, there were around 70,000 school districts. Today, there's 13,000. It's a very different world that we live in now. And people had sort of a cultural understanding of what education

meant. We also underestimated the power of that system to keep and preserve itself, right? So when you have a system that is dedicated to ensuring that it wants to keep its own power and have all the money in that, and as I look at it this way, in Texas, there are 1,100 school districts, which means there are 1,100 lobbyists, which is about 100 lobbyists per senator in the state of Texas. And so there's significant institutional structures that kept us from growing. And then there was a massive need to educate parents on what choice was. And what we'll get to here, I hope, in a moment is choice was also sold as a way to take you out of one school and into another school. It wasn't sold as educational freedom. We weren't talking about like educational freedom, even though that's what it was. We were

saying, oh, it's got to be private versus public or charter versus public. And really, so internally, I think as organizations, as a movement, we sort of focused on choice for some and our message was like, don't, it's choice public versus private. And then externally, the power of the institution that families had had a common cultural understanding of education and the power of the unions and the teachers for a long, not teachers, teachers unions for a long time makes a big difference. And, you know, that's why you're chipping away. These movements are chipping away and they're making progress. And one of the things I will tell you, so in 2000, this started, the dam started breaking in 2011, in my opinion. In 2011, we call it the year of school choice, which was there were

13 states that enacted nine programs. 11 of those were new programs and eight of those were new and 11 were expansions. But the significant one was Indiana, a statewide choice program for middle and upper middle income families. So that was a big deal. It covered 60% of the state. And that growth shifted the movement to begin thinking about universal choice. And in 2021, we call it the year of educational choice, right? You move from saying it's just about a private school to educational savings accounts where people can customize. And so 19 states enacted 29 programs in that year, including the groundbreaking West Virginia, right? West Virginia passed, I mean, you wouldn't think that West Virginia would be groundbreaking, but it is. It passed a nearly universal ESA program, which then led to Arizona passing one.

And now basically this year, you've had seven states topple over. So you've seen momentum grow over time. It's been shifts. But the exciting part here is that we've overcome those challenges we've had and are focusing on choice for all. You may have foreshadowed the answer to my next question. I'm sure the Freedmen's in their thinking assumed that with competition from alternatives, that that would put pressure on public schools and that as a result, the market would work and they would up their game. Hasn't happened. Certainly hasn't happened here in Milwaukee, and I don't think it's happened in other big institutions around the country. Nope, it hasn't happened. Why didn't the market work to improve public schools, which should be arguably part of the equation here?

Well, so a couple of things. One, it has actually worked, but not nearly at scale. So if you look at the data on on how school choice programs have impacted test scores in public schools. Right. There are twenty nine actually studies that have been done on this. Very rigorous studies, gold standard studies. Twenty six have found positive results. One found a neutral and two had found negative results. So overwhelmingly, schools in choice areas do public schools do a little bit better on test scores. The problem with that is they don't do much better. Right. They do slightly better. And so I think the challenge here is we haven't actually encouraged a market. We've encouraged to allow the system to contain itself. So when we do choice

programs, we say it's okay that we have districts. It's okay that we allow assignment to continue. When you actually have a monopoly based on where you live, I mean, Milton used to say it's the three parts of monopoly. It's free at the point of delivery. You have to go, right? And they tell you where to go, right? So you have to go where they tell you. It's free at the point of delivery and you have to go. And until we break that cycle, Rick, I don't think we're going to see a true market. Now, we're beginning to see that with ESAs. In Arizona, the data from Arizona on NAEP scores is amazing because the theory here is there's the largest choice programs like in my state in Indiana is the public to public program. So there are like 90,000 kids going across districts free of charge to other public schools.

There's about 55,000 using vouchers. There's about 50,000 using charters. You now actually have scale of supply and consumers that you can build new supply. So I don't think we actually had a marketplace. When we're passing bills in the first times and they were thinking about those bills, we didn't actually just understand that this monopoly can't be left in place, right? You can't leave a monopoly in place and expect the world to become a market overnight. And third, the scale that we're talking about is institutional schools, which is great. I love private schools. They're wonderful. So are charter schools,

so many public schools. But if we're thinking about markets and competition, like merely buildings, that's a problem, right? Milton used to say, not all learning is schooling and not all schooling is learning. And so this idea that we don't need a building, we've been wedded to buildings and we've been wedded to buildings and we've been wedded to a scale of building buildings. The charter movement's a perfect example of this, right? Whereas you look at the growth in micro schools now, the growth in pods, all this kind of unique energy happening. I think that'll change the way we deliver and provide a much more competitive marketplace. And the results will be like Arizona. They have the highest

NAEP scores for black and brown kids in the country. Interesting, fascinating. I mean, it seems to me one of the difficult and missing ingredients along the way here has been parental involvement. Clearly the pandemic sparked something and maybe it's insights finally into what their kids were learning in school that caused parents to say, enough, we've got to look at something else. But what do you think is going on with parents around the country? And what are the prospects for sustaining that over a long period of time? That's a great question. And I think we're going to see more sustaining than people thought. And at EdChoice, we were lucky enough to, in February of 2020,

we started a monthly polling series with Morning Consult. And we just decided to do this in February of 20. And we had no idea what was going to happen, right? But every month since February of 2020, we have done surveys of parents for the last three years. So through the pandemic, we know what they feel and they think and where they're talking about. And what's been very interesting is the consistency over time of parents during the pandemic and after the pandemic saying, we're okay with having more tutoring. We want more micro schools. We want more pods. We want a much more variety of education. We're actually okay. Six in 10 parents are okay with

having their kids educated at home one day a week, right? So there's this really changing structure of how parents are consuming education and engaging in education. One in 10 black parents tell us that they're already in a micro school. 49% are interested in trying it, right? So there's this amazing change and shift. Now, it did come about from the pandemic in many ways, right? I would argue for a lot of reasons, but the pandemic is a large part of it. And as I said in the first conversation about why it took so long was that culture of education that we understood. Everyone had a sort of cultural understanding of it. The same thing happened in the pandemic. So parents are now looking over their kids' shoulders and going, whoa, what's going on here? What's happening here? And they're starting to see,

they started to have a new common cultural understanding, cultural experience of education in a way they had not had before. You know, overnight, everyone became an educator and they became an educator for a long time. I think that common experience has dramatically changed parents' involvement and how they want to get involved. The school choice movement or the educational choice movement has finally realized what Milton Friedman said, and we've been pushing this for a long time. This isn't about schools. This is about families having freedom. It's about parents having freedom. It's about parents having the money, right? It's not about whether it's a public, private, or charter school. Frankly, I don't care,

right? I want kids to go to great educational environments. I just don't care where they are, right? I want the money to follow them. And I think when you began to share that language is, this isn't about public versus private or charter versus public. It's about helping families get what they need. Legislators took that and ran with it, right? They understand that they are now helping their constituents get what they need. And families are saying, I have a lot of different needs. And you know this. I mean, how many people in the organization that I work for work full-time in an office? Zero. And a lot of people do still work in full-time jobs, nine to five in a building, but a lot of don't, more than half don't. So the changing nature of work is also going to change how families are consuming education. Black homeschooling went

from 3% to 16% during the pandemic. The reasons for that, they know it's happening in their schools, right? And so they saw that they can begin to take control over their kids' education and ESAs are a way for them to do that, even more so than vouchers in some ways, right? So it's exciting to see what's happening because families are getting a new common understanding. There's six in 10 of them want to try something different, right? Just want to try it out of school one day a week, a different hybrid environment. Now there's still a large chunk that wants to go to school, right, full time. But there's a large chunk that doesn't. And so I think if schools continue to provide the same old, same old, Rick, you're going to see more parents rebelling and saying, give me more ESAs and more micro schools and more pods.

You touched on this earlier, and that's the progress that has happened in lots and lots of places since 2020. Dozens of states passing legislation, just lots more opportunities. Let's get into the weeds on that just a little bit and bring our listeners up to date on where that progress is happening and what we can expect coming down the road? Well, there's progress all over, which is great. So the progress that's happened in the last three years, right? So let's just take a look at it. Nevada, let's go from the top of the country to cross country. So New Hampshire passed an ESA program and has expanded it to now almost 45% of the students in their state, right? It's one of the most successful ESA programs out there. You have the growth of North Carolina will

likely in its budget pass a universal educational savings account program. South Carolina even passed an educational savings account program for special needs kids. Florida took its special needs program and made it for everyone, right? And made their Choice Program for everyone. So now every child in the state of Florida is eligible to receive an ESA. West Virginia, same thing. They basically said everyone in the state can get an ESA except those who are in current private school students, but next year they'll be eligible. So you're looking at Ohio, literally just in the last two days, expanded their choice program, their voucher program,

to everyone in the state, regardless of income. Indiana, just this year, expanded its voucher program to basically 97% of everyone in the state, right? Wisconsin, as you know, expanded their program by giving people more money uh you're looking at uh where else are we going tennessee expanded their program georgia failed this year and well we'll talk about that in a minute um arizona as you know expanded it to everyone um oh gosh iowa we've been working in iowa for five years iowa yeah i have a thing here we show, which is like, this is the list of states that we targeted in 2016, right? And had choice to try and educate them and get them. And one of them was Arizona. That passed a universal ESA. Arkansas, that passed a universal

ESA. New Hampshire, that passed an ESA covering 40% of its students. Indiana, that passed a voucher expansion to 97%. Iowa, that was a universal, well, it's essentially, it's an ESA with limited uses. It's a voucher. North Carolina is going to win. Oklahoma passed the first ever refundable tax credit for everyone in the state. That's going to be an amazing program. South Carolina won. West Virginia won. So there's a lot of growth here. Florida, as I talked about. Utah passed a universal ESA program. South Carolina won. West Virginia won. So there's a lot of growth here. Florida, as I talked about. Utah passed a universal ESA program. So there's a lot of states. The states that we're going to see some growth in, we hope, or some changes. Georgia, you got to figure out what's going on in Georgia. Idaho, what's going to happen in Idaho. What's going to happen in

Alabama and Mississippi. Those are states that need to dramatically see increases. How do we figure out how to get into Nevada, right? More purple states, more blue states. How do we think about that? And for the love of goodness, I really hope that Texas can figure themselves out. Texas was the first state of the supported by Ed Choice or Freeman Foundation in 1996.

And they continue to be a bridesmaid. and I hope they'll figure it out this year. That's a lot of states. There's the weeds. I can go into further. Clearly, we have never seen anything like this. I mean, it is transformational. It's exciting and just so critically important to the future of our communities and our country.

Outstanding. But as you know better than anyone, passing legislation isn't the end of the day. There's so much more. What do you see as the big barriers to true implementation of universal school choice? What stands in the way? I mean, here in Wisconsin, certainly funding has been part of it, where people attending anything other than a public school, a traditional public school, just got a whole lot less money, which makes it tough to grow. But what are those barriers?

So that's, of course, if you think about it like a school-based supply. But this question is a great one. Yeah, maybe you're right. In 2011, because I do want to have a conversation about the money, because one of the challenges we have, if we end up as a movement, and I love my friends in the charter sector, but if we end up in the movement basically saying we need the same amount of money as public schools, I kind of think we may have failed. Right? And so I don't know what it costs to educate a child in every instance, nor does any school, right? As far as I can tell. And so, we had to figure out how we fund families and fund kids in a much more sophisticated fashion. That's for a longer term conversation. But in 2000, let me go back about

the implementation. I'll never forget this. Governor Daniels in 2010, when we, when we, 2011, when we passed the Indiana bill was again, the broadest in the country at that time was a big breakthrough, right? And he looks at me, we're having a, we're having a party and he goes, you know, the night of the passage, he goes, Robert, Robert, enjoy your night and then get up tomorrow. Cause you got a lot of work. We got a lot more work to do on implementation. Cause if we don't implement this at all, we're going to ruin it. Right? He's a smart guy. He's a smart guy. And he's right. There are real challenges with implementation. It's a lot easier to implement a voucher. Let's just be clear. Right? So you can go to a private school and the money follows the family to private school. It's a lot harder to implement true educational freedom,

right? Through an education savings account. Perfect example of this. I want to take a woodworking course in Arizona because I think that's part of the degree that I want to get. I want to start getting more technical savvy so that I can become a carpenter. So the woodworking course is covered. Is the saw covered? Does the table saw get paid for by the ESA? These are questions that get asked, right? And so you have to ask yourself questions about what are the barriers? What are the barriers to entry? One, if you basically say that parents don't have the freedom to choose what services they want, that you're going to limit them. For example, if you say, I'm going to have to approve every single service that a parent has before they use it, you're going to make parents angry and you're not going to grow the program.

So you have to think about blacklisting as opposed to whitelisting. You know what I mean? You have to actually say if someone, everyone's in until they prove they're bad. And so there's a freedom aspect of the supply. There's a bureaucratic aspect from the government. So the ESA programs are being implemented in a way where then the government is approving every single transaction. Thousands and thousands, that's just impossible to do. They never do that in any other school setting. So that's number one. Number two, if the programs end up becoming just about

brick and mortar and not more about parental sort of mixtures and hybridization and customization, then it won't be implemented as effectively. In Arizona and Florida, we know that over time, parents take the voucher money or the ESA money from using it for tuition, like at 90%, now to down 78%. And so you're seeing customization over time as parents get more engaged. But the challenges of implementation are who who gets to choose, right? And how can you make it more efficient, right? And how do you get more supply in a lot quicker?

For example, Kumon Math is easy to approve as a vendor, but what about my grandmother who's been teaching math for 50 years, but no longer as a teacher? Is that an approved vendor or not? And how do you identify that, right? So there are a lot of significantly complex questions. Now, technology can solve a lot of this, but if you make it very bureaucratic and make it just like we run a lot of other government

programs, it'll be a problem, right? And so I think the challenge for us in the future of implementation is, A, we have to make sure we're encouraging real entrepreneurship. What does it mean to start a private school, for example? Microschools do not get vouchers in Indiana. Why? Well, they're not accredited, right? So now you have a whole bureaucratic problem you have to figure out. So we have the bureaucratic regulations we have to figure out. We have the government who likes to actually control a lot of things, even when they implement them out. And then we have parents who are going to be demanding a lot of stuff. And if we don't please the parents, my biggest worry is if parents get into these programs and are unhappy and stop using them, that's a problem. So there are significant

challenges ahead of us. What about lack of quality teachers and school administrators? Is that a licensure? I always used to say this. Regulations be relaxed. Milton Friedman couldn't teach economics in our current system. And Barack Obama couldn't teach government. Would those be effective teachers or not? I don't know. My guess is probably.

So this conversation about teaching has a lot more to do with who can teach and what can you teach. I look at this, we have Eli Lilly in Indiana, right? There are chemists all over the city, right? All of them could teach chemistry, right? But they're not allowed to. So I think there's, look, why I think there's a shortage of some teachers in a traditional school system, I don't think there's a shortage of educators if we trust parents. And there's far too many administrators, right? We like to say this. We have a study that Ben Scafidi did for us. Between 1950 and 2015, the increase in enrollment in America was 100%. The increase in the percentage of teachers was 252%. And the increase in non-teaching staff was 709%. So I'm not sure we have a shortage of administrators. I think we have a shortage of

entrepreneurs. You would think the topic of parental freedom and education and families being engaged in this process would not be a controversial topic or issue in this country, yet it is extremely controversial and has become very, very polarized. I think I know the answer to the question, but I'll ask it anyway. Why is the opposition so intense? Why are some in our political world so dead fast against giving parents an opportunity to choose? Yeah, so I think it's very interesting. I don't think the American public or parents are against choice. They love it. In poll after poll after poll, we know they love it. I think elected officials in certain rural areas, for example, or elected official in urban areas have been against it for a long time. And part of it's just the political machinery of education. Right. There is a political machinery that is in place that says we want to keep the

status quo the way it is, right? And that's not a real marketplace. And that's the real challenge, right? I use this analogy all the time. I think I learned it from Milton Friedman. He said, Robert, what would happen if in New York City, all the hot dog vendors on the street corners were the next day, the government was put in charge of them. And the government basically said to everyone in New York City, your hot dog stand is free, but we're going to tell you which one you have to go to, and you're going to have to go to that. He said, what kind of hot dog stands would exist after that implementation? And his argument was, well, very simply, it would only be the kosher hot dog stands and the ones up on the Upper East Side and the Upper West Side. And essentially, that's the market we have right now.

And so what you're beginning to see and what I think the challenge of the opposition is, is they see that the disruption of the traditional system has a pure threat to the way we deliver education in this country. And they like the way it is in some ways. A lot of them like the way it is. Now, look, not everyone is diabolically evil, right? That's not what I'm saying in any way, shape, manner, or form. But some people have legitimate questions, which we should always acknowledge. But the questions of self-interest related to the institutions are ones that should be taken seriously. And I think that the real opposition comes from, you know, in rural areas,

the largest employer is the school districts with the highest salaries typically. Yes. So there's a lot of rural Republicans who don't like school choice or who have challenges with it, right? And the urban areas, there are a lot of urban Democrats who have been supported by powerful interests

for a long time. And even though their constituents love the choice program, they don't because they know who put them in power. Now, that said, I think that's changing. I think they're beginning to see a slow sea change of the next generation of, for example, young black leaders saying, I think we want a little bit different here. So I expect the opposition to continue to evolve over time and get less. As parents more and more experience freedom, and we know this to be true of the younger generation,

they don't care about where they go. They care that they can choose, right? They want to customize, right? So they have grown up with Amazon, everything in the world. So they're going to demand choices and hybridization. That's just what they're going to do. And so I think you're going to see opposition change over time. This is going to be particularly true when you're going to see declining enrollment in almost every state. There's going to be more

and more competition for fewer and fewer seats. So I think some of the challenge of the opposition is going to change over time. But the opposition has been, you know, basically those who have self-interest, right, who are trying to keep the system the way it is. And I have no problem with public schools. I have a problem with the public school system. Yes. Let's talk about your organization for a couple minutes. Talk about the resources that you can provide to grassroots groups,

parents, community leaders who want to see this movement make some progress. So I appreciate that, Rick. So EdChoice, we're very lucky. We do a number of things to advance the idea of educational options, right? So let's just take them in order. We do training and outreach. So we are probably one of the nation's leading trainers for school choice programs. So we train policymakers. We train members of the media. We train advocates on how to talk to members of the media and how to use media to get their stories across. And then we started a bunch of parent training. So if you have a perfect example, we partnered with our groups in Iowa to put on a training for all of the private school leaders in the state of Iowa in advance of

the ESA program after it passed and sort of get them ready for it. As a result of that training with our partners there, they've had 17,000 applications that have been approved in private schools there. So you help train these private school leaders up to how to use these programs and how to change. So another example is we train school leaders in Indiana on how to deal with, if they're going to accept vouchers, most of the children who want vouchers come from low-income backgrounds. This is reality. They want freedom to escape. And so a lot of schools aren't necessarily used to what that change means in their schools. And so we train school leaders on how to understand different cultures. So we do training and outreach. We do legal services. We have a legal department that

basically does review of bills and does a bunch of amicus briefs to try and make sure that we're ahead of the legal challenges. We are without a doubt considered the nation's researcher on school choice. We have all the data on school choice programs going back to their very beginning, even the ones in Maine and Vermont, 1873 and onwards. We have data on how kids are using them, how many schools have been using, what the average voucher has been over time. You can look at this. So we are actually used by almost every organization for our data and research on polling, on fiscal, like if you want to know how much school choice costs, we call it the fiscal Bible. Marty Lucan in our office can tell you exactly how much school choice has saved the

state of Wisconsin in the last 20 years. So retraining, outreach, legal, research, policy, and advocacy. So then we go, look, our view is you've got to go to a state and work with a state. And when you leave, the people will say they've done it themselves. So our job is to go build coalitions, go build local infrastructure, go build capacity for people to do it themselves. So I'm excited that, for example, I'm really excited. I don't have to go to Wisconsin very often anymore, right? And we don't have to be part of it because you have a great infrastructure that does the work already, right? And that's incredible. And we're lucky to have been part of that early stage of continuing that work. So research, training, outreach, legal, policy,

these are the things that we can help states with. And our audiences are primarily parents, think tanks, and policymakers. So important. You and your team have done and continue to do incredible work, and we all appreciate that. A couple more questions, Robert. Thanks, Rick. You were involved in the Espinoza v. Montana case in which the United States Supreme Court ruled that a state-based scholarship program that provides public funds to allow students to attend private schools cannot discriminate against religious schools. Why is that so important? So Espinosa was the first crack, and then Carson was the next crack, right? So now they can't discriminate based on being religious, the status of the school.

And Carson was not just the status, but the use of funds, right? So what it did, in my opinion, is basically say, it doesn't matter where you're educated as long as everyone has the same options, right? And so this is the principle of our First Amendment, right? Congress should make no law regarding the establishment or the free exercise thereof. And so the Carson case, the Espinoza case were essentially free exercise conversations, right? Why should a parent be denied the ability to choose a religious school just because it happens to be religious? Now, you could choose whatever religious school you want, right?

So we believe in a plurality of society. I think this is one of the things that gets lost in this modern debate, Rick, about school choice. It is not an anti-this or a pro-that or an anti-textbook or pro-textbook. It really is a parent freedom movement. And if parents want to go to schools that have some kind of textbook, that's on them, right? But you cannot discriminate based on those things. And so I think what Espinoza did was basically say, you can't discriminate based on the status of the institution. And so what that's going to hopefully do is basically that'll be the final. And actually, we look at it this way.

Carson and Espinoza are the final nails in the federal jurisprudence. They'll be cleanup. But the reality is this now moves to states. I don't think there's a lot of federal legal work to do that much anymore, maybe a little bit. But I think this is all going to be about states and school funding formulas and much more arcane things like that. But Espinoza was super important because it basically broke down those walls finally, right? You had Zellman, you had Espinoza, and now you have Carson. And those are the three legs of a stool that says it doesn't

matter where you go. What matters is that you get the freedom to go. Yes. Terrific. Last question. And this really circles back to where we started our conversation. How do you think Milton and Rose Friedman would view the state of education in America today? Would they be happy? I love this question. I haven't answered this in a while. Thanks for asking this one, Rick. My experience of Milton and Rose Friedman, when we were in board meetings and we would talk and we would pass a bill or there would be a new expansion or something, they're like, great, not good enough. Great, not fast enough. Good job. Get going faster, do more, right? So I think they would say, now we have to ensure a true marketplace because we can't truly see competition work until we see a true marketplace. So I think

they would be happy with the progress. They'd be tremendously disappointed with the academic results of life. I think they would be very disappointed by that. And they would blame that just as much on testing regimes that we've had in curriculum. They understand that, or they would have, I believe. So I think they would say to me in a nutshell, hey, Robert, this has been really great. We're almost there. You got a lot more work to do to make sure markets really work. What a privilege it must have been to have spent time with them. Remarkable people with remarkable insights. Amazing people.

I was very lucky. Rose was amazing, by the way, Rick. Rose was a gem. Was she? Oh, yeah. And obviously Milton was too. But they were together for longer than the average lifespan of a man. And they were inseparable. And they were inseparable,

and they were intellectual equals and compatriots the whole way. Wow, fascinating. Robert Edelman, thanks so much for all of the great work that you do, your passion, the great work that your organization at Choice does. We truly do appreciate it. And yes, indeed, we are making progress.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Voices of Freedom. Join us next month on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts for our next conversation on issues impacting our freedom and America's foundational principles. And make sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode. I'm Rick Graber, and this is a Bradley Foundation podcast.