 Okay hello everybody I am Nick Gillespie and this is the reason live stream thank you for joining we are going to be joined today by Connor Boyack the president of the Libertas Institute and Corey DeAngelis who is up here now hello guys can I can both say hello please hello please all right it's good to see you they are most recently the co-authors of mediocrity 40 ways that government schools are failing today students and we're going to talk about that book and a bunch of other stuff so I guess what I want to do I'm going to play a couple of slides here that include and I just want to I'm going to ask our my backstage manager best buyers if you could make sure that we're recording this correctly all right all right great okay so I want to start with a slide this is from a nation at risk mediocrity your new book starts with you know it's citing a 1983 report that was put together by a commission on education excellence a federal panel that made this bold statement and in many ways this a nation at risk kind of started one of the latest kind of you know spurts in education reform although if we're being honest education reform has been a constant concern since the colonial period of America but here we have a nation at risk which jump started a lot of discussion of education reform in 1983 40 years ago if an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today we might have well viewed it as an act of war as it stands we've allowed this to happen to ourselves we have even squandered the gains and student achievement made in the wake of the Sputnik challenge a Sputnik launched in the late 50s moreover we have dismantled essential support systems which help make those gains possible we have an effect been committing an un an act of unthinking unilateral education disarmament Connor why don't we start with you what you know what was the context for a nation at risk and how does that kind of undergird continuing or contemporary interest in school reform Nick as you point out education reform has been a longstanding concern certainly in the decades preceding this report there had been in the press in the years prior to the report being issued a large number of you know op-eds and complaints and people criticizing the poor performance of the education system and so this group the National Commission on Excellence in Education was formed in large part to address those concerns and bring attention to the the plight of the problem the pleas of so many who were saying hey we got to do something to fix it they spent 18 months going across the country on basically a listening tour talking to teachers and administrators and students and others reviewing curriculum and standards and the report that you just read an excerpt from is the culmination of that 18 month study they called it an open letter to the American people and it did use strong language such as the excerpt that you just read in part to try and galvanize the public into realizing that this was a slow slide into mediocrity this slowly rising tide that an actual rising tide often catches people if it's a rip tide you know swimmers are often unaware and it's you know then too late for them to to do anything about it the purpose of the report was to kind of be the warning sign on the beach to say hey be careful there's a slowly emerging tide here you should you know act accordingly and this was also you know the Department of Education as a cabinet level agency had only been created in the late 70s under Jimmy Carter and then Ronald Reagan originally ran on on saying he was going to get rid of it but he kept it and this nation at risk really helped galvanize his you know attempts in the 80s both under Reagan and then under George HW Bush you know kind of the need for school reform Corey can you talk a little bit about what what were the emphases on school reform or educational reform starting in the in the 1980s into the early 90s yeah a lot of this was accountability mechanisms and mostly focused on standardized tests but what I want to say is that the the failures have changed and have become much beyond much further beyond what can be captured by a standardized test score and what we're seeing more recently is and what we highlight in the book is a lot of the non-academic failures of the school system too such as them being controlled by the teachers unions and indoctrination that's happening in the schools as well and just having a one-size-fits-all system that doesn't will never meet the individual needs of families who disagree about how they want their kids raised and I think that's what we've seen a lot over the past couple of years and we've seen some pushes from the top down to control the curriculum from one side and we've seen other reformers such as myself pushing from the bottom up to create more about thousands flowers blooming approach a free market approach let's talk about that in a second I want to add let's see if I can get this working here okay so I just happen to be as I was reading your book I happen to be reading a book called great expectations which is a study of the baby boom generation that was published in 1980 and just as a kind of backdrop this in leading into the nation at risk one of the big concerns was that test scores had been going down for almost the entirety of the baby boom so you know that's part of what you know when a nation at risk came out it was addressing how crappy public schools had gotten or education in general and these are just SAT scores for college bound seniors in 1963 6873 and 78 so kind of the years before that and you see declines consistently through that more recently because I want to get to you know that's 40 years ago the SAT of course and if you either are younger or you have kids of you know high school age or whatever you know that the SAT gets changed every once in a while it gets re-centered and since 2017 the old quantitative and verb and verbal sections had been supplemented by a critical or rather a writing section those have been merged again and these are the most recent scores which have been going down but basically what we're looking at if you take a nation of risk and mediocrity we're essentially looking at 80 years of kind of collapse so and I guess the other thing that I wanted to just talk about as a kind of stage as a scene setter is as Corey you were talking about in the 80s in particular particularly under people I think like William Bennett secretary of education there was a a desire for standardized testing to kind of show what was going on and there seemed also to be an emphasis on the idea of a curriculum that would kind of fit everybody that the guy that the country should be aspiring to as opposed to this kind of individualized personalized you know approach that seems to be more what contemporary school choice advocates are talking about and I guess Connor let me go to you just to ask you know in the 90s is when the idea of charter schools became you know a policy priority and can you talk a little bit about charter schools and how that push kind of reflects a desire less for one type of curriculum that we all know is the best and will work all the time and work for everybody and getting more into kind of dispersing or decentralizing educational curriculum well the push for charter schools as you point out in the 90s I think is best contextualized as coming on the coattails of the reforms in the 80s with homeschooling homeschooling was was effectively illegal in most states until a lot of court battles throughout the 80s that really sparked a wave of kind of parental rights and educational reform and interest in saying hey we need alternatives there had been a large underground homeschooling movement of course but this was kind of brought above board in part with the supportive groups like the homeschool legal defense association that went and fought and knocked down a lot of these state laws leading leading us to the 90s as you point out with the charter school movement this idea that rather than a one size fits all approach rather than you know we do it this way in this school and here's the conveyor belt what if we could create some flexibility within the system they weren't questioning the system overall they weren't saying let's have educations you know savings accounts or vouchers or whatever but hey could we have schools that look a little bit differently that operate a little bit differently I'm ultimately not a big fan of charter schools just because I don't think that they lived up to the vision of their original proponents a lot of times they devolve into kind of lipstick on a pig in the sense that they have superficial differences and some marginal differences but fundamentally they're all following the same curriculum standards and required to do things largely the same way that happens in the public schools but you can do you can certainly see in the early stages of those battles again on the coattails of the homeschooling reforms an increased desire which now is is substantially larger for parents to say we need something different because the status quo isn't working yeah let's look at a slide here if I apologize for my technical difficulties here we go okay so just to kind of talk a little bit more about backdrop as well Corey this is a piece that you wrote in 2020 inflation adjusted K through 12 education spending per student has increased by 280% since 1960 you know so on average the US spends over 15 grand a year per student where has that money gone because that you know and this is inflation adjusted so it's you know it's not simply because everything is more expensive than in 1960 what are what are the main components of per pupil spending yeah look and that is from June of 2020 so that the spending is a lot higher now even than it was in 2020 because of all the so-called COVID relief I think we've pumped a hundred and ninety billion dollars in so-called COVID relief into the K through 12 school system since March of 2020 which is over three or four thousand dollars per student so we spend a lot more now than we did then and even then if you just look between 1970 and 2019 with the latest federal data that we have nationwide per student we've increased first first student education expenditures by a hundred and fifty two percent over that period and teacher salaries since 1970 have increased only by about eight percent so it's not going towards the teachers in the classroom it's going more towards staffing surges and administrative blow if you look at a report by Ben Scaffidy back to the staffing surge he looks at different periods of time finding that the number of support staff in particular re raises exponentially in different locations where student enrollment and teachers in this in the buildings is pretty stagnant and I think that's because the current school system is a one-size-fits-all monopoly that has no incentive to spend additional dollars wisely so they put it towards more people because more employees means more dues paying members for the teachers unions which means more money for people like Randy Weingarten who make over five hundred thousand dollars a year so even even but it's not even going to teachers it's going to staff who then end up joining unions that's right and if you look between I took there's a been a image that goes around on Twitter pretty pretty often that I was the first one to create it I didn't put my name on it I probably should have but it's a graph between 2000 and 2019 using federal data sources finding that the number of students in the system increased by about seven percent the number of teachers in the system similar about seven or eight percent but then the number of administrative staff increased by about eighty percent so looking at different periods we find the same what are what are those people doing what are what are the support staff what are the non instructional staff doing well they a whole host of different things so in Los Angeles for example since 2019 they had a plan to what to do with the additional 69% of spending that was going into Los Angeles public schools and the latest report that I saw showed it an increase of counselors by about 80% and an increase in teaching staff by much lower lower number while student enrollment over the same period was projected to decrease by about six percent so in what other industry do you lose your customers lose six percent of your customers and then start hiring more and more people with Los Angeles public schools now spending in the latest budget I believe over twenty five thousand dollars per student so they're just a whole host of different you know they're trying to make the schools and they can they can they can lay out arguments as to why it might be a good idea to have more counselors because while we close the schools and we hurt the kids mentally so now we got to fix the problems that we created by hiring more counselors yeah and so they just yeah they'll throw everything at the wall see what sticks and and hire as many people as they can in any position yeah go ahead I was just going to add briefly and tie us back to your slide with the SAT scores what's especially compelling about the data that Corey is describing is that if you look at the test scores across the same period of time whatever chunks of time you want to look at the test scores are flat now Corey and I you know our we don't believe that standardized testing is the you know summum bonum of educational attainment but it is an effective way to try and at least assess lightly what the performance looks like and test scores have not gone up so the increases in investment in the administrative class of these schools may have its perks may have its stated purposes but it's not trickling down to improving the education of the students and that I think is what's most compelling about the problem is that we're chasing you know putting bad money into a system that isn't ultimately serving the ideal customer for which it purportedly exists and so we say we say in the book ultimately that why do schools exist now it's not to educate students it's a jobs program for adults and the unions defending that is ultimately its core value proposition at this point so let me throw up another slide here because I you know this is to me I mean one of you know the most stunning cases for school reform is simply whether it's 1960 or 1970 you know wherever you want to start the clock running expenses per student are way way up and test scores as you're saying they're flat in some cases slightly declining in some cases slightly up and regardless of whether you know we think oh the the only thing that matters is how people do on standardized tests you know that's like it's it's clearly like unless we just want to say kids are dumber now there's something wrong when you're spending so much more money to get the same result you got you know 20 or 50 years ago or 60 years ago and yet and I guess this moves into our next phase when you look at parental satisfaction of schools this is kind of mind boggling to me and I'm wondering you know if you guys could comment on this a little bit this is satisfaction rates for you know if you have a kid attending school whether you're very satisfied satisfied dissatisfied very dissatisfied and this charts your private school parents choice district parents so that's people who are in a district that offers choice whether or not you take advantage of it assigned district school parents so that's people whose kids just go to traditional residential assignment schools wherever the district says your kids going here you go with that or charter school parents who have some and what's amazing is when you look at the red numbers there's not as much variance as you would expect right like wouldn't I and I guess my question for you and Corey why don't you start you know why aren't if schools are spending so much money and doing such a mediocre job why aren't parents you know burning down the schools well this isn't capture all of the parents who are pushing back at the school board meetings who are dissatisfied with their schools so yeah this is one of the polls but there's also another one from I believe Pew Research finding that support among the public school system among Republicans is at an all-time low I believe is pure research so you know there's other polls but you know who you gonna believe this this graphic or my lying eyes yeah I don't know back and yeah I think things have changed over time as well especially more recently with the school closures and parents getting to see another dimension of school quality that's more important than test scores like a lot of families might have had their kids in a rated schools and thought hey my school is good there's nothing there's not a problem with my kid's school but now that they've seen something else going on where well maybe they're not just focusing on academics they're focusing on these other things that I disagree with and I think that's also why we've seen a more recent surge in support for school choice because families started to see that school quality is multi-dimensional and their kids are not being raised in ways that are aligned with their values yeah I mean I know Corey you and I have talked about this at various points over the years that you know the COVID experience if if the Vietnam War was the living room war because it was the first war that you know was shown on in people's television you know in their family rooms their living rooms like it was in the house COVID was somewhat analogous in that people parents started to see what their kids were actually learning during the day you know because of Zoom classes and things like that which were you know clearly a catastrophe for everybody on every level involved and you know there's no question that poor or low income students in low-income households suffered worse but if you know nobody was happy with that and it's kind of like if this is what I'm paying for I'm gonna be kind of pissed and one other thing there's a lot of polls that we've shown over time even before COVID and the closures and Ed Choice does a lot of these and I know there's other groups that do that these polls as well but nationwide just asking a different question where do you send your kid and where would you send your kid if money weren't an issue and overwhelmingly those polls typically find that again you know 90% of kids are in public schools but if they had a real choice to make it more economically feasible to send them to a private or religious or charter or or homeschool option only about half of that amount respond that they would still have their kid in the public school so I think that's more of a revealing statistic. Conard you had mentioned earlier that sorry about doing a sorry I am not as technically adept as I once thought I was best if you could hmm we don't want that I want to bring Connor into the main frame thank you Connor you you suggested I mean you're not enamored of charter schools because they're essentially a version of public schools I mean they're you know lipstick on a pig in many ways private schools are like that as well I mean that or you know that they I mean most schools tend to do something similar you know and they do a better or worse and that's partly dependent on the the facility it's partly dependent on the faculty of a school it's also partly dependent on the the family of the kids who are going a lot of educational achievement it tracks with parental education levels and socioeconomic status and things like that just as a that's a backdrop to the question of you know what what does what is education for what is K through 12 education for in your model what you know because I think part of when I think about school reform and about the impediments to it part of it is that we assume that what what education is for is to create kids who know a lot and are good thinkers and are critical thinkers and know a bit about the past something about the future and then have the skills to kind of create learning going forward but what if you know from a kind of quasi public choice libertarian or Marxist angle what if the function of education is it really has very little to do with you know giving your kids you know skills or knowledge and it's more to just kind of replicate or continue the status quo you know can you speak to that and then kind of lay out what what is your vision of what K through 12 education should be aspiring to do sure the provocative set of questions I think the answers depend on on the content so do we want to look at this through the lens of the architects of the modern public education system what their purposes and the tent word were they really trying to create critical thinkers independent-minded rugged individualists who you know in an iron-ran fashion had self-ownership and and can rationally think and build a freer future well now quite the opposite when you look at Horace Mann and John Dewey and all these guys these were secular humanist socialists they were collectivist fundamentally they literally talked openly and freak me about how they wanted to socially engineer the rising generation to better conform to their vision future and so that's why when we hear parents saying all the school system is broken we say well is it because if you go back to its early architects a lot of what we see today and there's kind of a right-wing version of that too right in the you know and I'm thinking my parents were born in the 20s they were the children of immigrants so they needed to be American eyes and they were one of you have one of them went to a Catholic school during the depression in New York the other went to a public school they weren't being taught to be independent thinkers they were being taught on some level to be good Americans and that meant you know they could say the Pledge of Allegiance but also that they would be good workers that they would show up and follow orders and be more or less productive right so there's a kind of national association of manufacturers version of what education is for there very much is there's this kind of economic overlay over the system where for a century plus it's been perceived that it's a feeding system a feeder into the economy which is why what we call today public schools Corey and I use the term government schools in the book because we think that's more accurate but they used to be called factory schools for a long time they were literally called factory schools why they were training kids to sit at the desk follow orders do their little task be a cog in a machine raise their hand if they need to go to the bathroom and it was widely perceived in a very positive way that this was going to help prepare kids for having good jobs we see this today even though we have a totally different economy though we have the same education system from a century ago that was for a different economy but we see it today with things like Common Core and No Child Left Behind and other emphases that are focusing on what are called college and career readiness so the purported purpose today of the K-12 system is to basically prepare children for higher education and for for the economy what's fascinating I unfortunately don't recall off the top of my head who did the poll we cited in the book but just a few months ago this huge poll came out and they did a really interesting had an interesting methodology they were asking parents their own perspective of how they prioritize K-12 education in other words why do you think K-12 education is important for your child but then they also asked them how they perceive others rank that type of perception so college and career readiness right parents for their own children prioritize that very low on the spectrum of priorities they deemphasize that they didn't think it was that important however when they were asked what they perceive society and their peers prioritize it it was very high because everyone thinks that that's why we educate kids that's why we put them through all the misery of you know all these years of schooling is so that they'll have a good is so that they'll be prepared for the future what ranked at the top for parents two things practical skill development not these abstract ideas of you know getting you ready for a future career but very practical skills financial management everything else and number two is critical thinking and and if you were to assess the modern education system based on those things I think it ranks very poorly your final question yeah so what yeah what what for you what is the vision of you know what what is what is you know education for in two minutes or less here we go okay so you know the root word of education when you look at the etymology it is to draw out the modern school system is trying to fill in cram kids full of knowledge just in case they ever needed 30 years from now and need to remember that the mitochondrion is the powerhouse of the cell I think by contrast true education is trying to draw out it is a Socratic method it is trying to challenge kids and adults to think critically about their own ideas to identify where they can find that information from so I think what we ultimately need is educational entrepreneurship is why I'm so bullish on micro schools because what you're finding is a lot of teachers who are fed up with the bureaucracy they make way more money and have total freedom starting their own school and then they can cobble together curriculum and activities and projects from a variety of sources my own kids go to an act in academy I'm a huge fan of acting academies they're all over the country and you're explaining what that is yeah yeah they're kind of a Montessori like private school typically they're micro schools these are small schools but they're very Socratic in nature it's project-based learning it's self-guided there are no teachers the kids are in charge of their own education the adults are what are called guides so they're there to help when needed but they provide all these resources to kids they provide them the time and the educational freedom to follow their curiosities and figure out what they want to do they have a peer community there to kind of debate and challenge ideas and work together on projects and it provides the children not only a lot more self ownership to direct their own education but the freedom to do so the biggest thing that we stifled for kids that was stifled for me as a graduate of what I call the public full system was that I had no education freedom I would be curious about things I would raise my hand hey why are we learning this I'll put your hand down it'll be on the test so fundamentally Corey mentioned this earlier it's a pseudo monopoly fundamentally what I believe the school system needs is competition we know that that's how things improve and prices go down I'm not so I'm not a central planner I'm not gonna say we should re-architect all of K-12 education based on this I think those systematically what we need is to introduce competition to the system and unleash education entrepreneurship to find a diversity of approaches and curriculum options that can best resonate with each unique individual experience we don't really have that we have a small amount but with all these states passing education savings accounts and other reforms I think I'm increasingly hopeful about the future that we're gonna have more of a marketplace of educational approaches to help kids in the future I you know one of the things as you were talking it was fascinating to me you know we we talked about horseshoe theory of you know on the right and the left of how extremes come together in a way many of the kind of pedagogical you know kind of orientation that you were talking about reminded me of Paola Freira the you know the the Marxist Brazilian kind of vet noir of a lot of right-wing conservatives because he opposed what he called the banking theory of education that you know you put kids in a classroom and then you fill them with information your depositing knowledge and whatnot and his whole idea from a hard left position was that now we need to be creating kids who are critical thinkers who will interrogate this the structures of the society that of which they're apart that's kind of fascinating I guess Corey does you know how does this let the version of things that you guys are talking about is radically dispersed radically decentralized highly individualized how does that play among kind of right-wing school reformers who oftentimes seem to be talking about we know you know there is this one best way to teach things and we know what that is and we need to kind of be pushing that through the system yeah I mean we've seen two different types of reforms being pushed to fix the curriculum disagreements in the government school system and one has been from the top down to ban CRT for example or their concepts that are divisive concepts which one doesn't actually work because it's a basically a form of playing whack-a-mole where you're trying to hit the mold and the mold doesn't actually go down it doesn't work it's unenforceable we have videos from all these states from Texas from Idaho from Tennessee from Iowa and others where you have undercover journalists going there from accuracy in media and getting the public school officials to admit that yeah we banned it here but we still do it we just call it social emotional learning or we call it student mental health so they just move the goalposts and it's totally unenforceable for the most part and the better solution in my view is from the bottom up with school choice it's like if you're just not going to listen to what the law says anyway and if it's really hard to if we can't even agree on what critical race theory even means and it means different things to different parents they parents know like the specific things that they want and what they do not want top and the better way is to just give the money to the parents in the form of an education savings account and let them choose the school that best aligns with their values I think this is the only way forward through freedom as opposed to force so that families can choose the schools that that align with their values and meet their needs in other ways the whole government school system is inherently in conflict with our view of what education should look like which is parents raising kids in ways that that they want to you can't do that what they one size fits all government school monopoly it is by definition never going to work you're always going to have one group of parents forcing their views on another group of parents it's typically a majority or in some cases a special interest minority inflicting their views on other groups and that is a problem and the only way out is is through allowing parents to choose and things like what Connor was talking about with micro schools might be one of the best ways I find I mean I find that vision that sadly my kids are already my younger son is about to graduate college so it's all too late for him but I find that vision that you guys are kind of articulating of a radical dispersion of power and of money and of you know allowing a thousand flowers to bloom in terms of curriculum just you know really bracing and exciting let's talk if we can have that slide back up best thank you you know one of us so you know Connor I'm curious how do you your book you have a blurb from Chris Rufo the Manhattan Institute scholar who has really kind of pushed the the demonization of critical race theory and a variety of other kinds of left-wing educational you know priorities that he says are throughout the K through 12 system he also we've talked to him on reason and elsewhere also says he's a fan of school choice one and he's tight with Ron DeSantis he was at the signing of one at least one of the kind of education reform bills that DeSantis did DeSantis the governor of Florida leading you know candidate possibly for the Republican nomination for president is a kind of fascinating case study Florida has a robust school choice program that he has been adding to it existed before him but he has added it but he's also going hammer and tong after certain specific aspects not just of the K through 12 education but has also tried to do that at the at the college and or post-secondary level how do you how do you feel about somebody like a DeSantis something similar I guess is going on in a place like Texas with Greg Abbott where Texas you know oddly has not been a leader in school choice despite you know being a conservative state but you know what do you make of somebody like a DeSantis is is this you know is this just an internal contradiction that will have to explode or you know what do you what do you have to say about somebody like a DeSantis I think that the example Corey used earlier of political whack-a-mole is instructive here right when you're a hammer everything looks like a nail when you're a big you know mallet everything looks like a mole in a whack-a-mole game and someone like DeSantis who is seeking higher office and trying to illustrate his kind of distinctions from Trump and other candidates on the the field is leaning into this moment when as Corey pointed out a lot of these parents are upset they're going to school board meetings they're trying to to fight back so I think it's politically strategic on his part to be kind of the tip of the spear in fighting some of this through the political process where others are just trying to show up to school board meetings and pressure elected officials he is one and he has a bully pulpit and he can do something about it you know Chris has done yeoman's work with CRT and other issues trying to raise the warning voice trying to make clear that these are problems fundamentally that's the purpose of the book that Corey and I have out is to be a warning voice and say here's all these problems happening but at the end of the day what DeSantis is doing and other efforts like this through the political process to to restrict teachers to modify curriculum to tie the hands of local educators in the teachers unions number one it's only going to go so far as Corey pointed out they're going to wiggle around it and find a way around it so it looks good superficially for DeSantis to enact these controls or others like him but when the rubber meets the road are we really having the substantive changes that were you know purported to happen when the law was passed or the executive order was signed fundamentally I think of the Henry David Thoreau quote that there are for every thousand hacking at the at the branches there's only one striking at the route and we've been here before we've been here with Common Core we've been here with social emotional learning we've been here at critical race theory and now all this you know gender wars and many other things in the decades preceding the examples I listed and where has that gotten us where have the substantive reforms been nothing is going to happen until we strike the route the route as I perceive it and I think Corey agrees is the monopoly is the guaranteed consumer pipeline to the government school system and until we introduced substantial competitive forces to induce enough market pressure on these institutions to reform none of these topical marginal efforts are going to have substantive change they might make us feel good in the moment will all applaud at a press conference when the new reform is announced but you know months later when the dust settles and people's attention moves on to the next topic and everyone forgets about it all the people who are still there all the teachers union members all the administrators are going to be continuing to do what they want to do and and we're just going to further slide into mediocrity so we fundamentally need competition and that's why the school choice movement I think is exploding is because so many parents as you point out Nick with zoom school and during COVID so many more parents have an appetite now for alternatives what in the tea yeah go ahead the teachers union knows that school choice is the bigger threat to their monopoly than these top-down reforms if you look at some elections for example in Georgia it was an interesting general election for their superintendent these the Republican was against CRT and was forced CRT bands but was against school choice and the Democrat was actually for school choice and so the teachers union did not endorse the Democrat in that race I believe they endorsed the Republican instead despite his opposition to CRT and that just goes to show you they're more afraid of bottom-up reform because that actually threatens their power so you guys are both proponents of educational savings or education savings accounts which would divert a fair amount of not all but a fair amount of school funding typically at the state level to directly to parents to use kind of however they see fit in order to increase the education or direct the education of their kids Arizona is really kind of blazing a trail there as well as a couple of other places let me ask for you know if we're talking about you know giving parents $7,000 $9,000 $10,000 you know not not the full average amount of per pupil spending but essentially a voucher to use towards whatever kind of educational experiences you want to pay for for your kids and Connor why don't you go first what are the limits on that you know if it's tax funded money it's going you know it is going directly to the parents so in that sense it's like a Pell Grant and I don't think we need to worry or get into questions of whether or not Senate using that send your kid to a religious school is a problem it shouldn't be any more than it is to use a Pell Grant to go to a religious college but are there limits on what we should you know we should expect tax dollars to fund when it comes to education for K through 12 students so I run a think tank in Utah Libertas Institute and 15 years ago in in Utah we were leaders in the school choice movement and passing a innovative voucher law into place it would give each child each student about three to four thousand dollars but as with a typical voucher program that money would entirely go to a private school of the family's choosing so the funding was flowing directly to the institution creating a nexus for potential and likely regulations I was never really a fan of the voucher model of course the teachers unions were far less of a fan they the NEA invested two million dollars to overturn that Utah law because they saw that this would kind of trickle down and go elsewhere they were successful in overturning it and so until this year when we passed a universal ESA program in Utah there hadn't really been school choice because everyone was terrified of the teachers unions until this post COVID moment where you know parental interest in choice has skyrocketed and so I think this is kind of the moment that we're in where the political landscape is changing and so many more people are demanding reforms which is why you see a lot more ESAs passing and I think it is structurally a better little for the reason you're asking in that the money is going to the family and they could spend a little bit on Amazon a little bit on the museum for a field trip a little bit on you know Tuttle Twins books for example a lot of ladies do and and what you see a kind of a desensitization of the finances which means that that regulatory nexus that the the temptation for bureaucrats to attach the strings is severely weakened I'm not going to say it's eliminated because you know enterprise and bureaucrats do what they do but as we were working on our on Utah really putting in a lot of intentional language to tie the hands of bureaucrats to really impede their ability to step in and try to regulate it but it is I mean I guess my one of my questions is you know on food stamps or on snap benefits you know you can buy you know I don't know you know you can't buy cigarettes and whiskey right with with snap benefits you can't buy certain types of food certain types of candy and things like that is there are there limits I guess what I'm asking is like in an ESA you know should you know you can set you can spend the money on Amazon books but not on all books or like and and I'm not asking I guess what I'm asking is conceptually not politically are there limits like how do we you know how do we know that this isn't just going to the parents car or something yeah that okay that's a great question and I'm glad you gave it a little bit more focus so this is going to depend state to state and how they structure their laws but the answer is yes there are limits and typically what states are doing what we did in Utah is there will be a select a range of pre approved materials courses programs curriculum and so forth that the administrators have pre vetted and so that makes easy but then you can also then request one-off approvals and say hey we're interested in doing this we just need someone to acknowledge that that works fundamentally this treats these expenses more as an auditable thing rather than a regulatory thing in the sense that you're not going to have regulators like with food stamps no one steps and says I'm going to tell you how to raise your children now that you're you know getting food stamps if anything it's just a simple audit process to see if the expenses were authorized or not and so most states have a pre determined set of expenses that are qualified in the statute to give guidance then to the regulators and administrators to say anything falling under this umbrella and most of those umbrellas are fairly broad so yes it could be books on amazon as long as you can that substantiate that there's an educational benefit for the students using them the devil's in the details but most programs that i've seen and certainly ours in utah is written broadly enough that parents will be able to fairly easily justify things that actually have an educational benefit right there and the default you know not gonna yeah but well or maybe right i mean but the default setting is the default setting is you know you know the parents unless something really raises a red flag we're not gonna worry about it it strikes me and i a fundamental difference with a section 529 plan which is the you know tax advantage savings for college but you can pretty much spend your section 529 money on anything related to your kid you might get audited but it's kind of loose that way obviously it's different because of your money although you know you get a tax break on it but yeah that i mean it's it's interesting because i guess part of it is the politics of selling school choice you know who who are the main constituents i mean there is there's a reformer class and you guys are exemplars of this there you know but then who else what what kinds of parents are calling for a radical choice uh agenda kind of want to choose or yeah according to cori cori go ahead it's all i mean it's all sorts of parents you have uh home schoolers who might want to use this for homeschooling expenses or micro schoolers it'd be families who want to send their kids to private school to pay for tuition fees it could be families who are in uh failing government schools i mean you look at a lot of the up and the the programs that have been running for years and the average income of the florida tax credit scholarship program for example before they expanded it uh this this past year was about 40 000 per household in dc uh where i'm actually at right now in the hotel but um their voucher program that started in i want to say 2003 or 2005 their average household income for that program is about uh 30 000 per household and so these are low income so they have this for a highly motivated a lot of them have been special needs families too uh what about religious i mean religious people are definitely interested in this a lot right because they often have most the most beef with a kind of public school agenda what about in the suburbs because you know a plurality of americans live in suburban settings um you know school districts and i mean this is spurious but it's deeply deeply held that the quality of your schools reflect very much in the value of your house and you move to a you know if you have kids you move to a town with good schools which generally means it's a little bit more you know a higher income um or if you don't have kids and most people don't have kids right most households don't have k through 12 students uh they don't want to do anything that's going to mess up the property values right um how do you how do you address that and you know how do you activate people like that well if you like your public school you can keep your public school unlike with your doctor it's it's actually true and when school choices expanded the public schools if anything get better because of competition so right and there is actually a lot of research to suggest i mean going back decades that whether it's catholic schools or charter schools or whatever the you know when there's more types of schools the public schools actually traditional public schools up their game but yeah it's a rising tide that lifts all boats 26 to 29 of the studies on the topic are are positive so overwhelmingly positive evidence on that so school choices and destroy the public schools it makes them better and in fact during the pandemic period michael hartney and leslie finger did a study that's peer reviewed now finding that in places that had more catholic schools nearby which were open over the pandemic for the most part um the public schools were more likely to open too in person so that suggested a competitive effect too even during uh the coba era even when it just came to whether you opened your opened your school or not so this is why defenders of the status quo the teachers unions they try to label people like connor and i as as as those who want to destroy the public school system because they know some people they like their public schools um but a lot of those people who did like their public schools pre-pandemic who thought that they had they bought themselves into a fantastic public school district because of the rating by the state started to see there's something else going on here too so um that story is a little bit let me add a quick exclamation point on that so going back to the polling data you shared about the high satisfaction rate that parents have um i think you know tying that to what quarry is saying my my perspective is that the existing system is being destroyed that we are dumbing down our education that we are sliding as a society into intellectual mediocrity all the while parents are quote unquote satisfied it's kind of like the frog in the the proverbial pot of boiling water right so many of these families i would argue don't realize the depth and the breadth of the problem they think well i went to public school i turned out fine so you know i like my kids teachers and the football team is great what does it mean to be satisfied right so when you ask as quarry point out when you ask the question a different way and when you you know do things differently that you get different results but i do feel like the ardent defenders of the status quo are the ones actually trying to protect the subtle and slow destruction of the education system and so they malign people like quarry and i who are out there trying to push some competition against them and improve the quality they claim that we're the ones destroying it when fundamentally we're actually trying to increase and improve educational attainment recognizing that the status quo is is quite the opposite and one more thing on that on that chart is that people don't like to admit that they're sending their kid to an institution that is failing their child for 13 years so if you give everybody options even if they don't have them today if you provide that option in the form of an education savings account i feel like those numbers would change as well we're looking at kind of a static model as opposed to a dynamic model if there was true choice then people would be more likely to to say that maybe i want that choice too i want to introduce a quote from robert punditio who's at a ai as they wrote this for the fortum institute but it's provocative and i want to get your your reaction to this punditio who we had a back during school choice week zach weisner and i talked to him for a lively hour one of his critiques and he's taught he taught in the south bronx in a low income educationally challenged school and one of his big things is that you know we're not teaching basic reading and everything kind of flows from that he's both an advocate an absolute advocate of school choice but also believes in certain kind of core pedagogical conceits as well but he writes there is an idea especially prevalent among libertarians and some conservatives that school choice is the answer to the problems of social justice activism and political indoctrination in schools because it allows parents to pull their children out of schools where woke etiology is infuse the curriculum and school culture the idea is not just wrong or simplistic it's dangerous my question because you've touched on this about how you know a lot of you know the attempts of some of this stuff are is whack-a-mole but i guess my question for you guys is the issue of kind of community one of the things that seems to be you know a front and center concern in contemporary america is the idea that for a variety of reasons and some people paint this more positively somewhere negatively but we are able to individualize our life experience more you know across a wide variety of boundaries certainly in the 90s and early 2000s at reason we celebrated the mass individualization and the mass personalization of culture of lifestyle of economic service and you know and matt welch my colleague and i wrote a book called the declaration of independence where he said you know like the places where this isn't happening are places like education retirement and and health care because they're overwhelmingly dominated by governments at various levels but i guess my question with that pondicio quote where where does common culture go in this debate because it seems like america is desperate for some kind of commonality but school choice which i certainly support exactly in the way you guys are talking about it would lead in a different direction more of a of a kind of vulcanized experience uh connor do you want to yeah go ahead yeah i'll go ahead i think uh so we don't have we don't have it we have nine out of ten kids in public schools today and we have a extremely divided country today in politically polarized country so the you know there's kind of this fairytale um theory of the democratic uh public schools yeah that the public schools were the crucible yeah i mean milton freedman used to talk about this it was a product of public schools in the 1920s and 30s and he would often talk about that uh that goes back to that a kind of americanization model which may or may not have worked um but it certainly is not where we're at now i don't think it works when you have a monopolistic school system and you know who gets to decide what that common culture is going to look like it's typically a a certain group and what we've seen how the political process works it's usually a minority special interests inflicting their views on other people's kids and uh we have a ton of evidence on this in the school choice literature as well i did one of them a peer reviewed review of the evidence called do self-interested schooling selections um improve society or whatever i called the type whatever it was and patrick wolf at university of arkansas did one called civics exam and education next and finding and also in my my co-edited book with neil mccluskie from kato institute patrick wolf updated his his uh made analysis of this literature in one of the chapters in that book and overwhelmingly the studies find that private school choice in particular leads to more better civic outcomes including tolerance of others views which i think is a really important one more political participation uh and other uh civic outcomes as well so the evidence doesn't bear out the theories that are laid out by the government school defenders no uh yeah so i i recently had the opportunity to go uh back to my old stomping grounds where i went to high school i grew up in san diego and uh and i went to the high school and it was a very sad experience what before was an open set of uh buildings and free flowing student body was under lock and key there were gates everywhere cameras metal detectors and all the rest and and that school is not an anomaly especially with all the school shootings so many people want to further turn into prison like institutions so to your question about community and culture i question whether a status institution such as government schools is really going to enhance our community build community enhance the culture build the social fabric i think quite the opposite i think the state is on one end of the spectrum and true society is on the other we need voluntary relationships and so forth to be able to rebuild that and as a longtime homeschooling dad i only put my kids in that micro school this past fall we've been homeschooling them for a decade and of course early on we would get the critiques like you sometimes hear oh your kids aren't going to be socialized they're you know they're not going to be part of the community and then i look at what how kids on on you know with all the bull like on in the government schools the bullying the toxicity pornography drugs cheating and all the rest and i'm like that's not how i want my kids to be socialized when my kids are out doing field trips in the middle of the day while all their public school peers are sitting in a box in a brick and mortar cage my kids are out there connecting with adults shopping at businesses going through museums connecting with other families there's very strong community and i think that through this kind of decentralized educational marketplace if we can continue to grow and sustain it we're going to have a far richer and more tightly interwoven social fabric of true community than we do right now with everyone just sitting in these factory schools across the country being propagandized by leftist public school teachers yeah if i may uh i i went to catholic grammar school in high school in middletown new jersey at my high school uh which is an indicator of how bad it was despite being you know private catholic it was parochial school actually went out of business a couple years ago and for me uh that was uh you know that was a happy day to know that you know children were were no longer going to be softly imprisoned in that particular space is another moment of kind of horseshoe theory of you know people like michelle foucault who i you know is not in good uh standing among many uh among many uh right wing school reformers but he often likened as that people like thomas saw's you know mandatory schooling is a kind of minimum security prison so it's it's very interesting to hear you discuss it in those terms connor and certainly the lockdowns you know in the intensification of kind of literal gate keeping on school grounds for you know a variety of mostly overhyped but understandable concerns is kind of fascinating i want to um we're going to to wrap up we're going to i'm going to ask you to talk about the uh kind of direction and velocity of school choice but before we do that i'd like i'd like to just do a short kind of biographical moment with each of you quarry um talk a little bit about your current position and also your uh you have a uh phd in um education can you talk a little bit about you know what you're doing now and how you got there yeah i really got into this as a researcher i did my phd at the university of arkansas and their department of education reform and my first study linked the milwaukee parental choice program which started in 1990 to by the way if i i'm sorry to inter interrupt on that there's a fantastic a couple of stories and interviews with poly williams one of the uh backers of that a state legislator in milwaukee who and again to show just this fascinating fascinating kind of crossing of political wires had been a member of the black panther party in the 60s and 70s and then helped usher in you know the really the first i believe it was the first publicly funded voucher program in at least in a major city but yeah and we get some democrats along with us today too it's not as many as we would like right in nebraska they had three cosponsors on their bill this year giving us the filibuster proof majority it's they're about to pass their their bill for the third time um but but yeah i saw i just started by looking at student level data from the milwaukee program with patrick wolf at university of arkansas we found huge reductions in the likelihood of crime in wisconsin if you have first name last name and date of birth you can look up anybody's criminal records which as a libertarian i didn't like that idea very much but as a researcher it was great because everybody else is looking at test scores we're looking at really important lifelong outcomes and since then there have been six studies on the topic all peer reviewed i've done two of them finding school more school choice uh less crime later on in life um and then so i kind of thought about going into academia for a while then i started to realize that my peers in the peer review process were my enemies not so much my friends or my peers um and i although fighting that uphill battle i've i've published over 30 or 40 peer reviewed journal articles in just you know a handful of years um so i've done a lot of work in in the academic space but then also i started to realize that i'm spending all this time writing 50 60 page articles and nobody's really reading them some of them you make a big splash with like the crime study and people uh want to learn about that but um i started to figure i could have more of an impact uh in other ways and so i started went through the think tank route where i had my first think tank role was at the kato institute where i'd be rewarded for my ideas as opposed to being punished in the university system where uh you know people didn't like i had one peer reviewer on that that milwaukee study for example saying that i i believe it's causal i i i i i get it what the methods are legit but why are you asking this question you are problematizing the situation by saying that even asking that school choice could reduce crime so it's just it was a total disaster and so now i'm at the american federation for children i'm a senior fellow i do a lot of communications work but i do still i i do studies from time to time as well my most recent one being during the pandemic period with christos micrides we found that places that had stronger teachers unions were more likely to keep the schools closed longer for us that was kind of a no-brainer finding but it was good to put it down on paper and write about it all right and of course you did a stint at a reason foundation as well but um thank you for that and connor i talk a little bit about the libertas institute as well as the tuttle twin series so i come from more of a activist background i hated school and took me a while to learn to love learning and once i did i started you know binge reading and and self teaching a lot of what i now do started libertas institute in 2011 as a state-based think tank in utah my new adopted state since then we've expanded our work across the country to work on policies and gosh two dozen plus states so far we've changed over a hundred laws on a wide range of topics civil forfeiture drug policy property rights criminal justice reform education policy and more so we're more kind of the less of a think tank perhaps a traditional thing take more of a do tank i was hoping you wouldn't say that that's one of you know that's kind of like a trigger for me the do tank versus the think tank i even hate that term i'm trying to come out with a better term for a co-tank i don't know drunk tank whatever my point was that while cori and others can dig in and do the research we'll leverage and work with people like that and then we'll we'll be kind of the boots on the ground a good work with elected officials right along the way i've got a couple of kids and they started asking me what i do for work all day and i struggled to know how to teach them or talk to them about these ideas that literally went on amazon trying to find like books that talk about free markets or property rights there was nothing so with my partner elijah who's our illustrator we launched the title twins in 2014 we've now sold five million copies of these books that teach the rising generation about things like individualism free markets property rights and the ideas of human flourishing so i'm i'm because i had such a poor schooling experience and as a father uh education is a huge uh issue and focus for us because i feel like we're not going to save our country at the capital we're not going to save our country at the courtroom we're going to save our country at the dinner table with families learning and talking and debating some of these ideas together rebuilding the community and the social fabric that we're talking about that's how we save our country not the government not the nation but but our country as a people and as a community so i i dedicate a lot of my time to try and raise the warning voice cori and i are in particular with this book but then also offer up solutions and help families learn about the ideas of freedom um what uh can you talk a little bit about what what was it like homeschooling kids because um you know that's you know that's a it's a a lot of time to spend with your kids for them to spend with you and you're working in things like that just you know kind of what was the emotional experience or the day-to-day experience of that um well i i think it was it is a an investment of time it is a sacrifice uh typically works best in a two parent household where you can juggle schedules or if you have a stay at home uh mom type of situation but what we are huge fans of and what are exploding across the country are homeschool co-ops effectively they're kind of micro schools but rather than a teacher or a few teachers who are being paid it's the parents coming together so for example i did classes for the teens on public speaking persuasive writing uh history critical thinking and and other topics as well you might have a mom who was a biology major in college who can do a little science class for the kids and so parents again community coming together to pool their resources and their knowledge and then educate you know dozens of kids all at the same time uh those are exploding all over the place they create create bonding opportunities for the parents especially the moms where they can go do you know mom's nights out and social events and so forth um and so that is kind of homeschooling 2.0 it's the traditional sit-at-home and your kids are just you know being taught by mom now it's getting out with other families uh going to the park uh playing together learning together and that i think provides the social element provides the peer element but then you get exposure not just to mom or dad teaching you but to a variety of adults and so that that's something we leaned into heavily and a lot of families across the country who homeschool are doing co-ops right now as well yeah um let's uh just to kind of wrap up uh cori why don't we start with you can you uh talk a little bit about uh what do you know what's the what's the direction of school choice what what is happening now that is most exciting to you and uh you know when when are we going to see a change that is uh you know that gets us out of 90 9 out of 10 kids going to uh public schools yes uh school choice has reached escape velocity we're seeing a universal school choice revolution that is ignited right before our eyes mostly in red states right now but we're freeing families from the clutches of randy wine garden and the teachers unions once and for all and there's not a dang thing that they can do about it I think from what I what I see going forward is more of the red state domino dominoes will fall we've had six go all in in just two years uh arkansas um arizona west virginia iowa utah and most recently florida that's over 10 of states going all in which means all families eligible uh whereas previous proposals have been more incremental um victories when you say all in explain what that means like in iowa what does that mean all families eligible being able to take their kid state funded education dollars to the public private charter or home based education option of their choosing so that's a that's a lot of momentum in a very short amount of time and i don't think it's going to stop and we're seeing a lot of red state competition so there's nebraska that's past uh that's still moving the ball down the field we have uh texas uh where i live now uh their senate passed the bill it's kind of moving through the house right now and the governor is pushing it harder than i've ever seen before so i think once more red states fall some blue states are going to have to come along as well democrats if they keep opposing parental rights and education they're either going to lose their elections or they're going to start to read the tea leaves and say maybe we should support this too and i think the more that the g.o.p leans into parental rights as a political winner in the short run the more that in the long run will become a bipartisan issue and we're seeing some trickles of this happening already that and look melton freeman said it best that it's not about putting the right people into office it's about creating a climate of public opinion where it becomes politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing and we're seeing some democrat defections josh Shapiro in pennsylvania right before the election he was up double digits in the polls but he still felt compelled to put education savings account accounts in his education plan right before the election jb pritzker in illinois a similar situation he was up by a lot right right before the election he responded to a candidate survey supporting a private school choice program out there that he had previously vowed to get rid of it back in 2017 and 2018 so we're seeing them either reading the tea leaves or perhaps some democrats are having a true change of heart which i wish that would be the case but it doesn't really matter at the end of the day whatever the reason is it's going to be good news for parents going forward and perhaps we'll have some victories in blue states too yeah connor what about you what's most exciting to you in terms of school choice i'll answer with a brief story right after we conclude here i'm going to be picking up my phone and ordering lunch using door dash i'm going to get what i want how i want it when i want it and where i want it to answer your question then what most excites me is the individualism that we're going to see flourish as a result of this kind of changing world that we're in i think individualism like door dash uber eats uber and lift right rather than going to have to wait on a bus's schedule and sit there at the bus station and then get on the bus and have to stop along the way hey i can have an uber pick me up where i want to take me to where i want to go and i think that becomes very addicting for people who get used to doing things their own way we start to increasingly question a system that requires us to conform to it and that's that's the downside of the modern education system the government schools require kids to conform to it rather than being flexible and adapting to the differing desires and circumstances of kids so especially as the economy increasingly moves in a more individualized customized direction i think that's going to have a huge trickle down benefit to parental styles and approaches and education especially as we see micro schools and these other systems flourish in part incentivized by the laws that kori and i have been talking about and pushing for so i i and as a libertarian i love that too because i think that has kind of fringe benefits of helping people understand at a more conceptual level that the economic aspects or the educational aspects of individualism have political ramifications as well so i think directionally that that's what most excites me right now is there anything uh connor that um you know what what is the thing that will derail school choice if if you've got momentum uh you know that the uber eats the lift cars they're leaving the station they're going to pick up people what i don't i don't want to say the train is leaving the station because the train is a centralized conveyance which runs on its own schedule so what might derail this if anything the thing that worries me having just gotten a esa law passed in our state what keeps me up at night and what i think it will could derail this is uh low demand in other words we have a lot of paper successes right now we've you know utah and half a dozen other states so far have passed esa laws great right those exist on paper um now it's time to show there's actually parental demand now it's time to attract the attention of many of these families and so as these programs come online as they have been in arizona west virginia and others i think the narrative is very important especially given the historical dominance of the teachers unions and others and the attacks on school choice we need a strong narrative we need a kind of moral high ground and an army of people saying want this we love it we're going to defend it and if we don't have that army if our opponents can look and say oh look all of that money and all that effort for you know 10 000 families big whoop i'm i'm most worried about uh you know the paper success not how do you how do you how do you uh grow that demand how do you or how do you have is it advertising is it marketing uh what you know what what do you do to increase that demand um you know i think a lot of it is word of mouth when uh moms and facebook groups are saying oh my gosh i just got 8 000 bucks for my kids to go to this awesome new micro school that opened up i think that has a strong component what we're planning on for example throughout the summer and fall uh in our state is a lot of kind of town halls especially in lower income communities handing out leaflets saying hey come learn how your kids can go to a high quality private school online ads and really just trying to build the the email list in the community so that when the program launches we've got a ton of people waiting at the gate to say hey let me in i want to apply and then that will create its own trickle down narrative with the urn media attention and others to say oh wow like the computer crash i mean i think in arizona cori yeah but yeah they launched their computer's crash yeah yeah cori what about you what is uh finish that story and then what what are you worried about in terms of yeah they went from 10 000 people using the program last year to right when they opened the floodgates and went fully universal and they now have over 51 000 people signed up and just you know less than a year and that's students or households or what that's uh students and so i believe that's almost five percent of the the school age population in arizona so that's that's a pretty significant shift in a short amount of time and that the program opened up the expansion opened up to everybody after the school year started uh last year so if it was if it was timed out better i would expect there would be even more people that would have signed up um so i i think connor's right getting people signed up for the program is important i'm more and you know i don't really care like if if everybody is eligible and um you know not everybody signs up i'm okay with that i don't i don't have like a goal as to how many people should sign up but there is a benefit to signing people up in that you create a new voting block for when uh if if if someone in power tries to take that away well if there's no one using the program yet it's easier for them to take away but if you have a new constituency it's really hard for them to um to come out and rip those scholarships out of the hands of parents so um that's a that's a huge benefit and as far as derailing i don't think there's any derailing there's going to be forces that try to derail it the teachers unions are going to try to do it um but the more that we keep knocking down the dominoes and more people start to use it we can show that this doesn't destroy the public schools that the in the fear mongering will will go have to go away they'll still try they'll still try to make that case that this will you know if we do it here i know it didn't happen in these other states it's going to destroy our public schools for x y or z reason it's going to become less and less of a compelling narrative um and so yeah i i don't see any real threats um i'm very confident that we'll continue to win and one of the reasons i'm super confident is that school choice it's always been the logical winner it is now a political winner too and um you know afc's 76 of the candidates that were supported by afc and our affiliates won their races in 22 2022 so there wasn't a red wave or a blue wave but there was a school choice wave and i think that's going to continue because this is ultimately a battle about parental rights and uh the side who wants to say that i don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach the side that's going to say that the kids and the money meant for educating them belong to the government schools they're going to ultimately lose because parents they want the most the most safe for their own children they they're in the best position to make those decisions for their kids and so i think we continue this momentum um despite the best efforts of the unions and there will be some people fear mongering from the right too and we've seen some of that recently but i don't think anyone really takes them seriously and um the the bills have taken their considerations seriously by putting in explicit provisions against regulations against government control of of private education so at the end of the day when you weigh all the costs and benefits most people are going to see that school choice is an incremental step in the right direction well i hope you're right you know the big loser of course will be uh you know all of the people who write novels movies make record albums like Pink Floyd's The Wall you know what what will we do when we no longer have you know a warehouse of awful memories from k through 12 education uh to produce content about um it's uh you know it'll it'll be a sad day i suppose but one that i'm looking forward to i want to thank my guest today uh cori d angeles and counter boyack the authors most recently of mediocrity 40 ways government schools are failing today's students uh check out you you'll find links to everything they do in the show notes and things like that but uh cori connor thanks so much for talking to reason thank you thank you nick and okay i'm in