 Aaron Powell And joining us today is our colleague, Jason Bedrick. He's a policy analyst with the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom. Welcome to Freethoughts. Jason Bedrick Thank you for having me. Pleasure to be here. Aaron Powell We're going to talk about school choice today. But before we talk about school choice, let's talk about what it's responding to or what it's attempting to solve, which is namely the problem with our current tried and true public educational system that has some problems, but I mean, I'm a product of the public schools. I turned out mostly okay. So what's wrong with the way that we give people education in the country right now? Jason Bedrick Right. So Milton Friedman didn't invent the idea of a school voucher, but he was certainly the one to popularize it and he was the one who made the strongest early case for it about 50 years ago. And his view was that public institutions don't have a feedback mechanism like a market does and so they're inherently inefficient. He noted that there was a strong case economically, there was a strong case to have public financing of education because of the spillover effects. If you have an educated populace, that's sort of something that we think is necessary for representative government and if you have an uneducated populace, there's all sorts of problems, not just in terms of civics, but also in terms of crime and just low economic output and things like that. So since there are low-income families that couldn't afford a quality education for their kids, again, according to Friedman, therefore there is an economic case for intervening and the government providing the financing. But his next move was to say, but it does not therefore follow that there's also a case for the government to actually run the system. And you can think of this in terms of, let's say, medicine, right? For all its flaws, Medicare and Medicaid are superior to the county hospital system or for that matter, the VA system where the government is actually providing the service and you've got these long wait lines and veterans are literally dying while they're waiting to get care or, for example, in housing. It's much better for somebody to have a Section 8 housing voucher and go out into the market and purchase housing than it was to have these government-run projects which ended up becoming decrepit or in food, much better to have a food stamp where somebody goes and they shop at the same grocery store as everybody else than waiting in line to get the notoriously inedible government cheese. So that was essentially Friedman's case that you would have a much more efficient system if you had multiple options and there was competition among the providers of education. But I think the question still that lingers in my mind is, well, like Aaron, I had a pretty good public school education, went to high school up in New Jersey and seemed to serve me pretty well. And why can't the response be, well, why not just mimic what good schools are doing right everywhere else? And we might have the argument that, you know, there's not enough competition, but when something works, why not just go with that? Yeah, well, I mean, we don't know that there's this one best way of education. You know, I also, for eight years, was in a public school system and I'm happy my parents were able to afford to live in a town that had a good public school system, but we see that there's a large disparity among public schools and that those people who are more low income that can't afford to live in a community with larger, more expensive houses that has a higher performing district school or can't afford private school tuition end up stuck in communities where their zoned school is not high performing. And so it would be much better for those students to get a voucher or a tax grant scholarship or an education savings account and be able to go out into the market and purchase the same sort of education that people in other communities are more fortunate to be able to afford in their own. Is the difference between, say, the public school that Matthew attended and the public schools that a poor rural community has access to, is it money? Is that what is causing his school to be better and so we could alternatively pump up funding for education or is there something else going on that prevents those public schools from being as good as the ones in Princeton? Right. There's nothing else going on because in many cases the schools that are lower income are getting more money than some of the higher performing schools. For example, in Washington, D.C., a few years ago, it turned out that the schools were getting about $30,000 per pupil per year, which is more than double the national average and yet these schools were the worst in the nation on the NAPE, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is sort of, you know, it's called the Nation's Report Card. So if resources automatically determined or if there was a very strong link, let's say, between resources and outcomes, then you would expect the Washington, D.C. schools to be far outperforming instead of being in last place when compared to all 50 states. Even internationally, there's what's called the PISA, which is this international exam. So if you look at their math exam, the United States comes in around 30th place out of all the industrialized nations. But if you were to map out performance on the PISA on one axis and on the other axis you were to look at their spending per pupil, you would find that almost all of the industrialized nations are spending less per pupil and outperforming the United States. So I'm not going to say resources have no role to play. They do, but the evidence suggests that it's not really resources that are the determining factor. When I hear these cross-country comparisons like the European countries and the Scandinavian countries, you know, are way outperforming us, are we comparing, so their average, they're much more homogenous societies than we are and... Less so than they used to be, but... And we have this big spread. And so are we comparing kind of the average to the average? How do the parts of the U.S. that socioeconomically look like those countries compared to those countries? Yeah. So Harvard put together a really nice map where they actually broke out all of the states. And you know, Massachusetts does pretty well. I mean, Massachusetts is the state that performs the highest, and it's a rather homogenous state. Lots of colleges there, so lots of professors, you know, that's probably the most educated, you know, in terms of higher-end state in the nation. They do quite well, but they're still, you know, like, I forget the number, but they were, you know, between 10 and 20, you know, they were not close to the top. You know, and Canada is also a large and rather diverse nation. They outperform us as well. So it's not just this ethnic homogenization. That's not the defining factor either. Well, let me play devil's advocate a little bit, because when I see results like this, the international comparisons, the cynic in me thinks... But a lot of these countries in Western Europe and other developed countries have less school choice than the United States. And someone might say, when you look at the United States, a lot of the motivating factor behind school choice and behind homeschooling are religious people who are perhaps skeptical of some sort of science. So is there an argument to be made that school choice encourages poor education? Well, certainly a lot of those countries have less school choice, and a lot of them have more school choice, particularly a number of the Scandinavian countries, even in Canada and in Britain, where they're, you know, directly subsidizing certain private schools. But what you really want to do, if you want to hone in on this argument, and there are other arguments for school choice besides this efficiency and, you know, increasing test scores, but if you want to hone in on this, what you want to do is have a randomized control trial. Right? Unfortunately, we've had about 20 of them. There was a study, a meta-analysis, a study of studies that was released last week that compiled all of the random assignment studies. The random assignment is the gold standard in the social science research, right? It's sort of like what we do in medicine, where you take a group of people, you randomly divide them into two, half you give the treatment, half you don't, and then you compare the outcomes. And the only difference between these two groups is random chance and the treatment, and therefore, you know, you can reasonably conclude that the treatment is what caused any difference in these two groups. So when you have a voucher program, a number of voucher programs, if there's oversubscription, then there's a lottery. And so you can compare the people that applied for and got the voucher and the people that applied for and didn't get the voucher. So you have an apples-to-apples comparison, and then you look at their outcomes years later. So the great thing about this study, this meta-analysis from the University of Arkansas that came out last week is it looks at 19 different randomized control trials in the United States and elsewhere, and finds positive effects for both reading and math exams. So I mean, there's very strong evidence that these programs are actually improving student outcomes. And there's a lot of other research, you know, some randomized control trials as well, that show that students are more likely to graduate from high school, they're more likely to enroll in college. So there's a lot of evidence out there that these programs do actually improve student outcomes. What is the best argument against school choice that you've come across? That's a good question. I mean, there is a concern that if you had school choice, then, you know, given the status quo, that what you're going to see is people fleeing the public schools, and the people that are going to leave first are the people that are the most well-informed, and that have the, you know, if the voucher doesn't cover all of tuition, it's going to be the people that can make up that difference. So even if they're, you know, not wealthy, because wealthy people already have that choice, but middle-income families as opposed to low-income families, and the parents that are most interested in education and the money's going to follow them, so what you're going to do is you're going to leave the least well-off left in the public school system, which now has fewer resources, has lost a lot of its best students, and this is just going to be the perfect storm that's going to leave the least well-off even worse off. And that's, I think, that would be a legitimate concern. Again, we've got more than 20 studies that have looked at the effect of competition on public schools, and all of them find either neutral or positive effects, which is to say that when students leave the public school system, these public schools are responding in some way to that competition, and that student outcomes actually increase after a school choice program is enacted. In particular, some of these studies measure differences among schools, so if, you know, how close is the nearest private school that is competing with the school, how many private schools are, you know, in a five-mile or 10-mile radius of this public school, and find that the greater amount of competition there is, the more improvement that those students see. Particularly what you see is these schools are responding to competition, so even the students that don't actually exercise the choice end up benefiting because they have access to that choice, and the school knows that they have access to that choice as well. When these schools improve because of the competition, even if the students are leaving them, how are they improving? I mean, are we talking like they're saying, oh, no, people are leaving, so we're going to actually get serious about this and fire bad teachers and hire better ones, or are the individual teachers working harder, are they changing the curriculum, but curriculum is often set at like a district level, and so the teachers don't have a lot of wiggle room there. So what are they doing in response? That's a good question. I mean, unfortunately, when the types of journals that are publishing these studies tend only to look at the quantitative analysis, and you don't have in, you know, just the policy world, you don't have a lot of journals that are publishing things that combine qualitative research with quantitative research. So we've got a lot of research that shows this is what's happening, and then the authors speculate exactly the sort of things that you were saying, but we don't have yet, and I would really like to see people that go into the schools in these areas and conduct surveys, conduct interviews, and say, what did you do differently in the last few years? I mean, anecdotally, we do know that those sorts of things are happening. I mean, I can tell you a personal example, when I was in grad school, you know, for public policy, we had a seminar where we had to have an outside client, and there was a woman in my class whose outside client was a public school, and there was a charter school that had opened up nearby a few years ago, and a lot of the public school students had left and gone over to the charter school, and so the public school had lost money. Now, that school wanted to know why, because the charter school's test scores were no better. So why were all these parents leaving? And what she found in her research interviewing parents was they said, when we would come into the public school, we had a problem that we wanted addressed. We couldn't get ahold of anybody, you know, they would tell us, they would get back to us, they wouldn't, they would send us over to some other person who also didn't have an answer to our question, and they just weren't responsive to us. And when the charter school opened up in town, you know, I got a flyer in my mailbox telling me to show up. I came to the school, the principal gave me a tour, gave me her cell phone number, you know, anytime I go in with an issue, they immediately address it, and I knew that they cared about my kid and they cared about, you know, us as a family, and so really it was like a customer service issue, right? I mean, they were, the charter school knew that if we weren't taking care of this family, they were going to go somewhere else. The public school, up until that point, knew that their families didn't really have anywhere else to go. And so once the public school realized, OK, we're now in competition with those people down the street, we now need to be more responsive. We need to make sure that there's a receptionist at the front. We need to make sure that if a parent calls, we get back to them. But, you know, she didn't address what actually goes on in the classroom. But, I mean, you can imagine that, you know, if there's fat to cut and suddenly you're in competition, you're going to say, OK, we're going to start focusing on the essentials and we're going to, you know, we're not going to, you know, if I have a choice between spending more money on some administrator or spending more money on, you know, another teacher, maybe I'm going to hire that other teacher. And actually, that is a very serious problem because we see in, you know, the last 40 years, there's the number of teachers have, the increase in the number of teachers has outpaced significantly the increase in the number of students. But the increase in the number of administrators is like eight times the increase in the number of students in the last 40 years. So we're spending a lot more outside the classroom than we are inside the classroom in terms of, you know, new dollars. That was my wife taught at two different private elementary schools when I met her through when we moved out here to D.C. And the really striking thing about those private schools was the number of administrators, like the number of people who were above her as a classroom teacher at each one, you could count on one hand. And I think in one of the cases it was two people. And it worked very well. And it was just its night and day compared to the public schools. Right. I mean, I recently did a review of a book called The Prize by Dale Russikoff, which was about the New Work, New Jersey school system. And again, I mean, these are some of the war schools in the country and they were spending north of $20,000 per pupil. And they said that she was pointing out how the corruption in the central office and how even clerks had clerks and just how much incredible waste there was there. And unfortunately, I mean, Mark Zuckerberg poured $100 million into the system and there was $100 million in matching grants and it got entirely eaten up by the system and there was almost no change whatsoever. I mean, if he had just spent that money providing scholarships to students to go to the school of their choice and the system had more competition, maybe you would have seen more improvement than what ended up happening, which was more than half of the money went to back pay for teacher raises that they claim they should have gotten that they didn't get and most of the money just was sucked up by the system and didn't actually change anything, unfortunately. So we've mentioned or you mentioned, I should say, that DC were looking at $30,000 a year and Newark, New Jersey, it sounds like $20,000. And my ignorant question is, well, how much should it cost? I mean, how much should it cost? Because my bird's eye view of this is it sounds like a lot, but what's the reasonable price that we should be paying? And in these voucher systems, what is a normal voucher figure that we can look at? So what should it cost? I have no idea. I mean, that's the beautiful thing about a price system is nobody can know in advance what something should cost, you know, and prices themselves provide information. And unfortunately, we have a system that doesn't do that. I can tell you that the national average is, you know, a little over $12,000 per pupil at the public schools. But, you know, as far as how much the vouchers give, I mean, that varies considerably from state to state. So in some cases, it's about half of what the public schools are getting. In other cases, it can be even less in some, you know, several states do something like 80 to 90 percent of what the state kicks in. But then the state portion varies from like one-third to two-third in some of its local. So it's really hard to say. But I would say that, you know, vouchers tend to be in the range of like $4,000 to $8,000. And then, you know, special needs vouchers can be much higher. For example, the education savings account in Arizona, it's 90 percent of the state portion that you get. But students with special needs, they can be getting, I mean, let's say a typical student is going to get somewhere in the range of about $4,000 to $5,000. But a student with special needs could be getting around 20, depending on what they have. And a lot of them are getting between 10 and 20. We've got, we've talked about vouchers, but vouchers are not the only way that we advance school choice. So there's some other terms that get thrown around other programs. So there's charter schools. And so there's, are those a form of school choice? Yeah, I mean, they're school choice in that, you know, you have to opt into them. But the charter schools are public schools. They're entirely publicly financed. And they have a lot of, you know, they have fewer rules and regulations than the traditional district schools. But they, for example, they can't have a religious affiliation. They can't have their own admission standards. They have to accept every child that shows up and have a lottery if there's oversubscription. And they have to usually give the state test. So there's, and sometimes, you know, in some states they say, well, you know, 50% of your teachers have to be traditionally certified, even though a report from the Brookings Institution a couple of years ago showed that there was no difference in effectiveness between traditionally certified, alternatively certified, or even non-certified teachers. It's just sort of, you know, like licensing. It's just a barrier to entry that doesn't actually end up, you know, at least in this case, having any impact in terms of outcomes. So, but they're a form of school choice, but I would say they're pretty weak tea. Then what about, we've got, so what, education tax credits and also education savings accounts? Yes, so the education tax credits or tuition tax credits, tax credit scholarships, they've got a bunch of different names. There's really two forms of those. There's the personal use education tax credit, where, you know, you would get a credit on your taxes for every dollar that you spend on your child's tuition up to a certain amount. Those are usually capped. And then there's the scholarship tax credit, where individuals and corporations donate to a non-profit scholarship organization and they get a tax credit. Anywhere, usually from 50 to 100% of their donation, they just reduce their tax burden by that amount. And those non-profit scholarship organizations then give a scholarship to usually low or low and middle income students to attend the school of their choice. So functionally, they work very similar to a voucher, but they are privately financed. And this is actually an important constitutional distinction. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled more than a decade ago that vouchers don't violate the First Amendment because the ACLU and other groups had sued a voucher program in Cleveland because they said that if these students were using it at, let's say, a Catholic school, then this is public subsidizing of religion and that this shouldn't be allowed. And what the Supreme Court said is, no, it has a legitimate secular purpose and the only entanglement with religion is indirect and incidental to the choices of parents. So we give money to the parents and say, go buy your kid an education. You're not gonna send your kid to the public school and instead we're gonna give you a lesser amount of money to go somewhere else. And if they choose a Catholic school, that's their choice. I mean, just like if somebody takes their food stamps and goes and has Passover dinner, that doesn't violate the First Amendment. But a lot of states have what's called the Blaine Amendment. Give a brief background on that. In the late 1800s, when the nativist movement was very prominent before the resurgent nativists today, there was a lot of anti-Catholic sentiment and public schools in those days were de facto non-denominational Protestant schools. So they would teach the Bible and they would have school prayer but in a way that any Baptist or Episcopalian or Congregationalist would be satisfied but not Catholics, to a lesser extent, not Lutherans as well. So Catholics started coming to this country, a lot of German, French, Irish immigrants, Romanism and rebellion, right? There was this fear that they started to ask for their own schools. They said, look, you were paying taxes to your Protestant school, like we should also have our Catholic schools be publicly subsidized. And the Protestant establishment said, no, no, no. You, we are running common schools for everybody. You're running parochial schools. And so they tried, the senator from Maine named James Blaine tried to pass an amendment to the US Constitution. It failed but almost every state constitution, about 40 states ended up adopting the Blaine Amendment which says that public loans can't be used at religious schools. And the tax credit programs, because you're dealing with private funds, I mean, the donation is entirely voluntary. It goes from a private citizen to a private charity to, you know, private parents to give their kids education at a private school. It has been consistently upheld against Blaine Amendments around the country. And so that's one option. And then the education savings account usually publicly funded, it doesn't have to be, but usually it's the government, if you choose not to send your child to a public school which means a district or a charter, then you will get a savings account worth about 90% of what the state would have kicked in. And you can use it not just like a voucher, which is a coupon that you use entirely in one place at one time. They give you a savings account that you can use in multiple places. So not just for private school tuition, but also for tutors, textbooks, homeschool curriculum, online learning, and you can even save it from year to year for later expenses, later expenses including college. So it sort of works like health savings accounts in that sense. So those are sort of the three main types of school choice. The main advantages of the educational savings accounts are that you're moving from school choice to educational choice, right? We're recognizing that not all education takes place in a traditional classroom. So you've got a wider variety of options and parents can really customize their child's education. And two, there is this fear that vouchers, first they create a price floor, right? If you have a $5,000 voucher, nobody's gonna provide tuition that's less than $5,000 and can also fuel tuition inflation like we've seen the Pell Grant has done in higher ed, Pell Voucher for that matter. But with the education savings account because you can spend it in multiple places and roll it over from year to year, you don't create a price floor and you've got some more downward pressure on price. So your discussion on the religious side of this reminded me of a question I had when I was thinking about this podcast, which is some people might say against school choice that there's a social cohesion argument here, which is what we're just going to allow people to segregate themselves so that people in different religious communities and people who don't value athletics or some people that do value languages and some people who don't really care about science will be able to segregate themselves and children will be educated in an environment amongst people who just agree with their parents, basically. Is this a concern that's legitimate? Is there any reason to think that the proliferation of school choice will lead to a more segregated society? Yeah, we haven't really seen that in other societies from Canada and England and the Scandinavia nations and Chile and whatnot. We haven't really seen that that has been a problem. I mean, the alternative is, well, one of the reasons that the Protestant establishment didn't want the Catholics to have their own schools was precisely for this reason, because we want them to send their children to our schools and we are going to Protestantize essentially, right? So the alternative to having a diverse system is to have this melting pot system of assimilation and you come in and we're going to teach you our values. So I think any libertarian or any liberal who values pluralism should find that to be very problematic. But the interesting thing is actually has been a lot of research on this question and not just that, but civic values and things like that which you're more likely to learn in a public school is the theory. Patrick Wolf from the University of Arkansas had a literature review a few years ago called the civics exam and he looked at all of the research on these questions and found that actually private schools and school choice systems tend to outperform the public schools when it came to civic knowledge, civic values, and even respect for pluralism. So actually one of the interesting studies that they've replicated multiple times is they ask students if they give them a list of different groups and they say, which of these groups is your least favored group? You'll be happy to know that the KKK is the highest ranked, the least favored group out of all these groups. But among Hispanic students, the least favored group was LGBT activists. And so they ask a bunch of questions like, would you think our system should allow somebody who's in this disfavor group of yours to have freedom of speech? Should they be allowed to have a march or a parade? Should they be allowed to run for office? Should they be allowed to be a teacher? And what's interesting is that students that attended private schools were statistically more likely to say yes to those questions than students that attended public schools. And even among the Hispanic students, those who attended Catholic schools, which you might think, given the Catholic Church's teachings, you might think that they would be less likely to give political freedoms to LGBT activists. The opposite was true. If a Hispanic student went to a Catholic school, they were more likely to express tolerance toward this disfavored group than if they had gone to a public school. So I mean, if we value pluralism and we value freedom, we should have a school system that reflects and respects that pluralism and that freedom. And the public school system, I mean, yes, we live in a very diverse society and the public school system, it's political control. It's a zero sum game, right? So if you have several different groups that have differing values and you put them in a system where only one of those values is really gonna be reflected in the school, then you are forcing them into conflict. I mean, then there's a long history of this. I think Neil McCluskey came on this podcast a while back and was talking to you guys about the Philadelphia Bible riots where there was literally bloodshed in the streets over how the Bible was going to be taught in class. It's a much more peaceful system to let parents send their children to schools that reflect their values. And I respect that you send your kids to that school that reflects your values. I'm gonna send my kids to the school that reflects my values. And then we can live together instead of fighting over whose values are going to be expressed. Can we take that too far though? So with a voucher, there's the concern that gets raised. They could use this money on really religious schools that are teaching stuff that we as a society think isn't quite right. But still they're like, you have to give it to a school. But like the education savings account, if I think that buying the best way to educate my kids is to buy them all of the Star Wars novels and read them. So we have a real solid understanding of the fall of the Old Republic which is important stuff to know about. I agree. Is there anything that can stop me from doing that? Like there's still, who gets to draw that line of what counts as education spending or not? Yeah, and so you're right, the line has to be drawn somewhere. I don't believe in the current systems that the Star Wars novels would count. Usually textbooks are in- I'm gonna agree to disagree on this. So they, well, I mean, it might be educational but it wouldn't count for the, as an approved expenditure, right? So there's textbooks count but your average run of the mill novel is not going to count. I mean, you can certainly buy it and use it as an educational tool but not with education savings account money, right? And there is an accountability mechanism in these programs where in some states you have to submit your receipts but in others they give you a debit card and you can only use it for approved purchases. You can't just like go to a casino and use it. It's a restricted use debit card. But yeah, I mean, the lines do get blurry at the edges and I would prefer to have more freedom than not but even without the education savings account you could have parents homeschooling and doing the exact same thing. I mean, I guess the question is, do we, there's no perfect system, right? Nobody is promising utopia. The real question is not comparing school choice to some, or educational choice I should say to some imagined ideal that probably we can never achieve but to compare to all of the reasonable alternatives. And so when government bureaucrats make a mistake that affects tons of children, right? I mean, when a state decades ago adopted whole language as opposed to phonics you can talk to teachers and high school English teachers and they can tell you the year that the kids who switched over from phonics to whole language got to their classroom because there was a market decline and their ability to spell and put together sentences and things like that. So if a parent makes a choice like that and chooses poorly, it affects their children and that's a terrible thing but the question is who is more likely to make choices in the best interest of their children is it the parents that are the more likely ones to make those decisions wisely or are bureaucrats whose own children aren't necessarily subject to the system more likely to make wise decisions. And I think that we should, for the most part, trust parents. They're gonna make mistakes sometime but I would much rather put my faith in parents than in a political system. Is there a concern though that if school choice or educational choice shifts a lot more than the decision making to the parents that the benefits that come with it are going to flow disproportionately to those parents who maybe themselves have the education to better make those decisions or have the time to better make those decisions or don't face language barriers or whatever else and so we're not gonna see as much help for the poor uneducated parents who can't make those good decisions. I think it's actually the opposite. I think those parents are already in the current system advantaged but that a lot of the low income families that aren't as active in their school or seem to be as interested in education, it's a rational ignorance because there is, they don't have other options, right? But again, going back to Patrick Wolff, he had a book, The School Choice Journey which looked at the Washington DC system and it was a qualitative study where actually went in and did interview a whole bunch of families and whatnot and found that when these families were in the public school system, they were not doing a lot of interacting because they couldn't make any changes or anything like that but once they were given options, these same families were going and doing tours at multiple schools and they were reading up and asking friends, what do you think about this school or that school, right? They were getting in touch with their social network to figure out which school is best for their kid and they were even becoming more politically engaged when the Obama administration tried to cut funding for the DC voucher program. They came out in force and they were rallying and they were writing to their congressperson, their pseudo congressperson who doesn't have a vote and writing to the president and actually becoming more politically engaged as well so we see that, yes, there's this image that low income families are not as engaged but I think, again, the reason that they're not engaged is because in the current system, it doesn't make sense to be engaged because they can't change anything but if you give them choice, then there's a reason for them to be engaged and they actually do. I was wondering if you could speak a little bit about the competition among syllabi or curriculum in the educational choice movement because I think a lot of people might think, well, this will be a nightmare because there will be tens of thousands, not hundreds of thousands of different schools or teachers who will be arguing for different books to be read and different textbooks to be used but then I intuitively think, and I could be wrong about this, that there must be competition among curriculum and there must be competition amongst syllabi and textbooks and do you see that in people who have chosen to opt out of the state education system? I mean, there are definitely more options out there. I mean, one of the issues with our current system, we had like 50 states that each sort of had their own system and the major textbook companies were trying to appeal to them so most of them either appealed to Texas or California because those are the largest markets and then they would make minor tweaks if some state had some idiosyncratic thing and then some of the big textbook companies fell in love with Common Core because they were like, well, I can just call my book Common Core approved and then every state almost is going to, this is gonna appeal to them which I think is highly problematic as well because we don't know that there's one best way to teach students so I'd actually like to see a diversity of options and we don't know, some methods might work better for some kids and some methods might work better for others, right? But there are definitely options. I mean, just in math, I mean, you go out there and you find there's Saxon math, there's Singapore math, there's Japanese math, there's all different, people saying our system is better or our system is better, I think that's great and parents can go, select one, if it works for their kid, fantastic, stick with it. If they find it's not working for their kid, they can go with something else which again is another reason for school choice. I mean, earlier we were talking about, this efficiency argument, but even at a school that on average is very high performing, right? For some kids that are assigned to that school, it just might not be the best fit. So let them go somewhere else where they have, instead of a traditional classroom, it's a more Montessori style or they're able to work online and go at their own pace. So more choice the better. You mentioned the online learning and the Montessori and that raises question I had about how much a real market in education would change the way that we get education and think about education because we do have a lot of private schools in this country, but by and large, they look like, structurally they look like public schools. It's the same sort of show up in grades and yeah. And so is, why is that? And are we, is that because that's the system that actually works or is there something that's preventing all of these really out there models from establishing themselves? It's a good question and I can't answer it. I mean, we have to see what the market would produce. We have no idea. Maybe this would be the system. I think a lot of the, one of the main reasons that the alternatives looked a lot like the public schools were that the main alternatives for a century were essentially the Catholic schools and some Lutheran schools. And the argument that they were making was, hey, we are going to provide the same exact education as you're going to get in the public school system. So we're going to look just like them. The difference is we're also going to be teaching you about the Catholic faith and that's what parents wanted. So I mean, now you have more and more parents are saying, well, I want something else. I want a heavier emphasis on STEM or in the opposite direction. I want a heavier emphasis on arts and drama and literature or I want great books. So if we had a, right now, the school choice programs that we have by and large are very small. They're dealing with sometimes less than 2% of the population, maybe up to 5% to 10% max. And excluding charter schools and that, which basically look for the most part like public schools. But if we were to adopt a system of school choice, we have no idea how that is going to develop over time. You know, that's one of the beautiful things about the market. I just look at the iPhone, for example. The iPhone is a platform for innovation and there are tens of thousands of apps on there that Steve Jobs never could have imagined. You know, same thing with the education savings accounts. I know some of the people who were involved in creating the first education savings account in Arizona. And they will tell you that they were surprised at how some families were using it, especially when it came to special ed. For example, educational therapy is one of the approved categories of expenses and the state approved equine therapy for students with cerebral palsy. Something I had never heard of, but apparently students with cerebral palsy have difficulty with their motor skills, even basic tasks like walking, especially things like, you know, playing on a playground. And, but if they are trained to ride a horse, their brain sort of rewires itself and then they're able to walk much better than they were before, even, even again, playing on a playground. And there's a video, I think the American Federation for Children put out where there are parents of a child with cerebral palsy in tears describing how this worked for their child and they wouldn't have had it without the system. So, I mean, that's just one example of the special needs child, but we have no idea how what the market is going to create to fill the needs that parents have. In countries that have more school choice than we do, do we see a wider range of educational styles? Well, none have adopted the education savings account yet. I mean, that was an American invention. So most of the other systems either are directly subsidizing private schools like they do in Britain and Canada or they have a voucher system. But like in Chile, for example, their voucher system mandates the national curriculum and there are lots of regulations that go along with it. And so, yes, there's choice, but I mean, you know, you can choose among all of the McDonald's in the world, but you have to choose the McDonald's, right? And, you know, the private McDonald's might produce a better or more consistent hamburger than the publicly run McDonald's, but you're essentially, you don't have that much choice. But, you know, so, yeah, that's nice. It's helpful. It's an improvement over the status quo, but we would like to go much further. I mean, the Milton Friedman gold standard idea of a voucher was a system that didn't have controls over price that the government wasn't dictating what the curriculum was going to be. It wasn't dictating, you know, what type of test that the students would have to take. To that, we haven't tried yet. What stands in the way of public choice then? Is it, we often blame the teachers unions. Is that accurate? Are they the biggest hurdle in moving us in this direction? They're definitely one of the bigger ones. I mean, there's a number of lawsuits around the country and they're involved in most of them. Either directly or, you know, this is basically front groups that are trying to block school choice and legislatively the unions, but also the sort of the public school establishment, you know, the superintendent's association, things like that, are the ones that are usually fighting it in the legislature. But that doesn't explain fully why we don't have school choice yet. I mean, depending on how you ask the question, you're gonna get, you know, if you ask, do you support sending students to private school at public expense, then you're gonna get in the mid to high 40s. And then if you ask, you know, should we give students more options or something like that, or should we give students, you know, should the state provide students with a scholarship to go to the school of their choice, then you're gonna get, you know, north of 50%. But I think a lot of people, you know, they're used to the system that they grew up in. It worked pretty well for them. And so anything that might be considered threatening to that, they're not going to like. But one of the more recent studies by the Friedman Foundation surveys broke it down by age cohort. And the interesting thing was that younger Americans, like between 18 and 35, it was, you know, north of 65% support, whereas in their survey, Americans that were over age 65 were, you know, just about 50% support for school of choice options. So why is that? Why are younger people more likely to support choice? Well, it could be, you know, if you were to ask them, would you like to raise taxes to increase funding for your local public school? You might see a similar dynamic. Those, you know, people who are in the age cohort that have children in the school system are more likely to say, yes, I want more money for the public schools. Those whose kids already raised would say no. But I think that doesn't explain it fully. I think a lot of it is that the younger generation has grown up with the, you know, things like the iPhone, right, they're used to customizing every single aspect of their life. But there's this one area where you're assigned to something based on the home that you can afford. And so when you say, well, do you think that you should be able to customize things? They say yes. I mean, even talk to like your typical Bernie Sanders supporter, they're using Uber and they're using Lyft. And this is, you know, they don't see that as a political statement. They don't see that as yes, I support the market over the establishment and the taxicab union or whatever. I'm a pro-market person. They just, no, this isn't about the market. This is about choice and customization in my own life. So to wrap up our chat here, I give us an idea about the state of affairs and where we're going as far as school choice goes and if you're optimistic about the future. I am very optimistic about the future. Right now there are 31 states to have some sort of private school choice program. So again, scholarship tax credits, education savings counts, vouchers. I'm not including charter schools on that. But again, most of them are very, very small but maybe it is the camel's nose under the tent. I mean, the idea is that hopefully people are going to experience some small amount of the population and are going to send their child to the school of their choice or use ESAs to customize education for their child. And their neighbors are going to say, well, hey, why don't I have that? And the answer is like in Maryland, they just passed a program. Great, it's the first voucher program that Maryland has ever had and people didn't expect that Maryland would get it for a while but it's limited to like 1,000 students. So I mean, that's less than 1% of the population. That's not going to create a dynamic market for school choice. It's going to fill some empty seats at some existing private schools. But over time, as these programs grow in terms of popularity, then they're also going to grow in terms of the number of students that are participating. Some of them even have automatic increases year after year like in Florida, where next year there's going to be over 100,000 students that are participating in school choice programs in Florida. More and more people are going to say, hey, I want that choice for myself. I mean, it's like if you were to go into a city and say, okay, only 10% of the population is going to have access to Uber. Other people might very soon be clamoring for access to Uber as well. And politics is downstream from culture. When people decide, hey, we want choice in our life, including how we educate our children, the politicians are going to come around. The interesting thing is in states like Florida, for example, where there was vociferous opposition, especially on the left, which the unions are a very important part of their coalition. So that's understandable. Once the school choice programs are enacted, you actually see that the politicians start to come around. For example, they had a rally right after Martin Luther King Jr. Day this year with Martin Luther King III leading about 10,000 mostly black and brown people in a rally for school choice because the teachers union is suing the state. There's over 70,000 students participating in the program right now. And the teachers union wants to eliminate it. They took it to court. And the message of the rally was drop the suit. And the NAACP is actually a party to the lawsuit, but former NAACP presidents and a number of leaders of black churches have been pressuring the NAACP to drop out because they're saying, hey, most of the participants in this program are our people and they're benefiting from it. And we want to give these kids a better future and they're getting that at the school that they've chosen as opposed to the school that they were resumed to. And so I think we're already seeing on the left that there is a breakup in their coalition, right? So low income minorities recognize the benefit of choice for them in a very visceral sense. And over time, I think that's gonna overpower the vested interest of the teachers unions. And we will see within probably 20 years, I think we're gonna see a large percentage of the population are participating in school choice programs. Thank you for listening. Free Thoughts is produced by Evan Banks and Mark McDaniel. To learn more, find us on the web at www.libertarianism.org.