 2021 was the year of school choice and we're just getting started, says Corey D'Angeles, National Director of Research at the American Federation for Children, Senior Fellow at Reason Foundation, and a leading advocate for school choice. The disruption to K-12 education caused by COVID-19 has created the greatest opportunity for radical reform in American history. Reason talked with D'Angeles about what reforms have already been passed, what fixes are likely to come next, and what barriers need to be smashed in order to deliver on the promise of a quality, individualized education for every kid in the country. Corey D'Angeles, thanks for talking to Reason. Hey, thank you so much for having me. So, you've written that last year 2021 was basically the best year ever for school choice. What happened in concrete terms that made it so good? Yeah, the way that I would put it is that COVID didn't break the government school system in a lot of ways it was all already broken. And the past year and a half, almost two years now, simply shined a spotlight on the main problem with K-12 education all across America, which happens to be a massive, long existing power imbalance between the government school monopoly and individual families. So, it's one thing for the school system to continue receiving your children's education dollars, regardless of how well they do academically from year to year. But it's another conversation altogether for that same institution to continue receiving your children's education dollars, regardless of whether they even open their doors for business. So, the school closure is a huge part of it. But then there was this kind of unintended benefit of remote learning, which we shouldn't even call remote learning. It's remotely learning because there wasn't a lot of learning going on. But families got to see what was going on in the classroom and that sparked an entire new argument for educational freedom, which is that even if you're in a school that has high test scores on math or reading, you might not be aligned with the school's values and how they're teaching. So, families have pushed for more educational freedom that way. And the reason that I call it the year of school choice is because 19 states in 2021 enacted or expanded programs to fund students as opposed to systems. And the number of states with the gold standard of school choice, the or the purest form of funding students directly, the education savings account concept, the number of states with those programs doubled in 2021 from five states to 10 states. And then we also have a lot of polling suggesting surges in support for the concept of school choice as well. For example, the latest real clear opinion research polling finding a 10 percentage point jump in support of school choice between April 2020 and June of 2021 from 64% support in April 2020 to 74% support in June 2021. And that's majority support from all parties. Let's let's talk about some of these reforms in detail. When you talk about the states that have expanded the idea of backpack funding or that money follows the student, it doesn't go to an industrial warehouse somewhere that we've decided to call a school or a decommissioned minimum security prison that we call a school. What's the best state or what state is kind of leading the charge on taking money that would normally go to a traditional residential assignment public school or maybe even a competitive entrance exam public school or specialized school. And it's saying, now, we're not giving it to the school, we're giving it to the kid and their parents and they decide what states the best there. So the biggest victory from 2021 was I would have to argue West Virginia. They didn't have any charter schools in 2020, they didn't have any private school choice programs that allowed the money to follow the child. But in 2021, they enacted the most expansive education savings account program in the country. So any family regardless of their income can take their children's state level education dollars, that's funded by the taxpayer, to any provider of education of their choosing that's approved. They can use it for tutoring, expenses, pandemic pods, microschools, private school tuition and fees. You could use it at the government school if you want. All that money can still go back to the government. So how much money are they getting in an ESA then? I think it's about $4,000 per student. So although the government run schools spend about 15, I want to say 1,000 per student in West Virginia per year, the program in West Virginia is only tied to the state funding that follows the child, which happens to be about a third of what they spend in the government run schools. And most of that, I mean, in most public schools, it's, you know, it's mostly local dollars, then state dollars, and it's about 10%, maybe it's federal funding, right? Yeah, the state differs, but on average, it's about 50, 50, West Virginia, 40, 40, 45, 45 for state and local, and then federal is about 10%. But in West Virginia, they happen to have a lower share that's that's at the state level than at the local level, but what other states are, you know, I mean, that's exciting to hear, you know, West Virginia going from nothing to something pretty robust. What are other states doing that are, you know, where they're funding students rather than schools? Another huge victory was in New Hampshire, the Lyft Free or Dye State, they have something called it's an Education Savings Account, but they branded it as the Education Freedom Account Program, because they love freedom over in New Hampshire. Except for liquor stores, but I get into trouble whenever I've educational freedom, we'll talk about it. But they, their first proposal was actually a universal proposal just like in West Virginia that didn't matter what your income was, all children would get their education dollars, be able to take it wherever they want, as long as it's an approved education provider. New Hampshire started that way, but they ended up scaling it down to get the votes in the Senate. They ended up doing a budget play because I don't think they had the house votes after passing it through the Senate. And so now it's still pretty expansive relative to other programs, but it isn't the 100% universal that they wanted, but it's still a huge step in the right direction that many families are income eligible for this program going forward. And they would like to push that and expand that in the future, which we've seen in other states with some of these other victories in other states, although they didn't get new programs, they've expanded income based eligibility and other types of eligibility. What about charter schools? Charters for a long time kind of emerged, I guess really since the late 90s, kind of emerged as the most plausible, pragmatic form of school choice for a variety of reasons. What happened to charters over the past year? So there was a huge shift in enrollment in charter schools. I wasn't tracking the charter school laws very, very closely. I don't think there was a ton of big changes on that front, but as far as families voting with their feet, the latest data from 42 different states that was put out by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools found that the government-run schools in those states lost about 3.3% of their population or about 1.5 million students. The public charter schools gained about enrollment by about 7.1%. Hundreds of thousands of additional students in charter schools. So families are voting with their feet towards charter schools and homeschooling as well. The Census Bureau estimates that the homeschooling population has at least doubled since pre-pandemic levels. What about more traditional or conventional private schools? There was a time, I guess, up through about the late 60s, Catholic schools or there were more students in private school in 1960 as a percentage than there are now. Most of that was kind of urban based Catholic schools. Those kind of started to disappear as the cities kind of emptied out with families with child or school-aged children. But what was going on in private schools? Were they seeing an uptick, parochial schools or other kinds of private? I mean, I've seen some anecdotal evidence of private school enrollment increasing that we don't have a nationwide database. The private school universe survey isn't out with data yet for post-pandemic numbers. So we'll have to wait a little bit to see the national trend there. But there have been a few studies, including one of my own with Christos McCready's and Clara Piano published at Social Science Research Network, finding that places that had more closed public schools saw upticks in homeschooling and in private school enrollment. And other researchers, Ben Scaffity and his team, published an analysis using survey data at the Journal of School Choice, similarly finding that after controlling for backgrounds and demographics in the area that the private schools that had more nearby closed public schools for in-person instruction, they saw people voting with their feet towards their institutions. I realize it's what there's like 14,000 different school districts around the country. So it's hard to say, okay, this is what's going on. In terms of school closures, where are we? Flint, Michigan got a lot of press recently when they said, okay, we're indefinitely doing virtual learning because they've given up, essentially. But that seems to be an outlier. Most of the people I know who have kids K through 12, the kids are going to school at least part of the week. What's the long-term kind of response to COVID and lockdowns and blah, blah, blah? Yeah. So if you look at the data from Burbio, there's been thousands of schools closed every single week since the new year, a huge uptick relative to the end of last year. And it's all depends on where the teachers unions can get away with it. I mean, Chicago tried to pull some stuff at the beginning of the year where they were doing a sick out or whatever you want to call it. I would call it a strike. They were supposed to show up the work. They weren't showing up to work. They voted not to go to work for a while. And they were continuing to hold children's education hostage two years after two weeks to slow the spread. And it's almost like two weeks to slow the spread has turned into two years to flatten the generation. This should not be happening anymore. We have so much data suggesting that school should be one of the first things to open and the last things to close. Schools have consistently been safe to reopen in person according to the data. And we've had a ton of data also suggesting that there are unintended consequences of keeping the schools closed for in-person instruction. We've seen academic losses. We've seen mental health issues on the rise in students, particularly in places with more school closures. One of these studies that the Journal for the American Medical Association peer reviewed study found that districts that were closed longer, all else equal, had more mental health issues for students. I had a similar study with Christos McCready's and Clara Piano. Again, also finding that parents had additional upticks in mental health issues the longer the schools were closed. We've seen an increase in obesity rates among kids. There's been a 31% uptick in teenage suicide attempts or at least the emergency department visits associated with those attempts. That's for a subset. That's for young girls, right? The girls result was actually around 51% uptick in suicide attempts or at least the emergency department visits associated with those. For boys, the uptick was much, much smaller and the overall average effect was 31%. You mentioned in passing the kind of educational issues that this raises, that school closings over the past two years really, and some of that is understandable certainly in the early stages. What are the actual effects on student outcomes as far as we can tell so far by disrupting school, closing it, opening it up, closing it down, opening it up? What's going on with that? The latest data that I've seen is published at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a working paper. One of the study authors is Professor Emily Oster from Brown University and they found using data from, I want to say, 12 or 13 different states in the US that all else equal after controlling for background characteristics, places that went remote had a math learning loss that was 10.1 percentage points larger and the reading learning loss was about three to four percentage points larger than the in-person districts. Can you translate, what does that mean? So it's 10% on kind of reading or math comprehension scores or something like that? It's based on math proficiency rates, I want to say in that particular study. And so that's just one of the studies. I mean, we've had evidence also from McKinsey and Company, they've been putting out reports from the beginning and giving us updates. The latest one I saw from them was from last month, December 2021, suggesting that it was a study of over 3 million kids across the US and their academic outcomes and finding a three to four month loss in learning still that they haven't So, you know, you talked about how like, you know, what the pandemic did or what the lockdowns did and then, you know, kind of the beaming in of school of education into people's living rooms and, you know, their family rooms and whatever, because the kids were home, that kind of drove home a couple of messages. I think of it, it's like, you know, they used to call the Vietnam War the living room war because it was the first time that a major conflict, you know, everybody watching TV at night could see it in their living room and it was bringing the war home and like, oh my God, the costs of this, you know, in a weird way or in an analogous way, when you are stuck at home with your kids and they're doing the remote learning and their Zoom kind of BS classes, whether it's phys ed or math or something, it's like, holy shit, this is what is not, you know, like there's nothing here there. Is that the primary engine for parents kind of waking up and starting to demand something better? It's hard to tell what the primary engine is. I think it was just a lot of different things. One, just, you know, the schools weren't open and they kind of showed their true colors that they were trying to protect themselves at the expense of families every step of the way. I mean, yet in some states when the schools closed, the teachers unions were actually pushing to make it illegal to switch to virtual charter schools at the worst time possible when families needed options more than ever. In any other year, it would have been fine because they're public charter schools and you could switch to enroll your children in those. And then, yeah, the families were scrambling, trying to find alternatives. Meanwhile, the private schools were a lot more likely to be open in the same towns. And then the public schools were sitting there, continuing to receive your children's education dollars without providing a meaningful education and obviously not an in-person education that is very valuable to a lot of families. And then the curriculum mess with the remote learning was also a problem. Some people say it was critical race theory. Other people are upset with sexualized curriculum. Others may have been just upset about political bias in the classroom, whether it's left leaning or right leaning, whatever, if it didn't align with the values of the families. Others might have seen that the teachers, in some cases, maybe weren't teaching in the right way period, just like the basics math or reading. I remember seeing a video go viral on Twitter at the beginning of all of this where a teacher was trying to explain the electoral college in a public school and they were saying it was just like a secret society of people making backroom doors and it didn't seem like they really understood what they were trying to teach. So I think it's just a lot of those things together. And a lot of parents are going to have different things that they're upset about because parents have a different view of how they want their kids raised. And so the way that I've put it before is that all of these problems that we've seen bubble up over the past almost two years now in the school system are just that. It's a result of a one-size-fits-all government-run school system that everybody is supposed to send their kids to. It's by definition not going to work for everybody. Maybe it's the mask mandates, maybe it's the curriculum, maybe it's just not a right fit academically. There are so many different reasons as to why families might want another choice. You stress and most people in the school choice movement, I think, stress the role of teachers unions. And it sets up an interest in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde kind of scenario. I think I'm actually using this analogy wrongly, but whatever. Because people tend to like their kids' teachers. But then they hate this vast abstraction, the teacher's unions. Is that real? And is that a stumbling block to reform? Because it's one thing when you're a parent and you're ranting against a teacher's union representative, Randy Weingartner, somebody like that who appears on TV. You have no idea who this person is, but they're telling you like no matter how much money you give us, you give us priority on vaccines, on this, on that, and we're going to get combat pay. And we're still not going back to school. You're like, I hate this person. But then when you're shopping in your local supermarket and you bump into your kid's third grade teacher, you're like, oh, I like that person. Is that a problem in actually pushing through school reform? I think some people get confused. They confuse teachers with teachers' unions. And I would argue they have a different set of incentives and they're not the same thing. I mean, if you just look at how money is allocated over time in the government-run school system, a lot of it doesn't go towards teacher salaries. If you look at a report by Ben Scaffidy at Kennesaw State University, for example, he pointed out that between 1992 and 2014, per pupil education expenditures after adjusting for inflation jumped by 27% across the United States. But teacher salaries actually dropped by 2%. So we're throwing more money into the system, but because the monopoly doesn't have strong incentives to allocate those resources into the classroom, the teachers don't see a lot of it. And so when they complain about having to pay for supplies, for example, out of pocket, I kind of feel bad for them. But the problem isn't with their competition. The problem is with their monopolist employer. And also, if you think about it, the teachers' unions have an incentive just to put more people into the buildings because that means more dues-paying members and a larger voting block. But if you're spending more money on putting more people into the buildings, which is what they do, you have less money to spend on the teachers who are already there in the classroom. And I mean, if you look at the studies from, there's five studies that I've seen on the topic, looking at private and charter school choice competition on what happens in the teacher salaries in the public schools, all five of them find statistically significant positive effects of private and charter school competition on the teacher salaries in the public schools. And with this resource allocation problem, we've seen this with COVID as well. Think about Los Angeles public schools. They're losing 6% of the school-age population relative to pre-pandemic levels. It's a lot of students leaving, much more than the national average. And they're getting a lot more money because they were able to hold children's education hostages. They got tons of money in this supposed COVID relief. And the district officials hinted that they were going to increase staffing by increasing the number of teachers in the buildings by 8%, increasing the number of custodial workers in the buildings by 25%, and increasing the number of social workers in the building buildings by about 80%. In one other industry, do you lose 6% of your customer base and then you're thinking about hiring 8% more employees? It's just totally backwards. I was just going to say, and the teachers unions at this point are making the teachers look bad by pushing for policies that hurt kids at the national level, at least being extremely politicized. There's a lot of conservative teachers that are in the school system that may not feel like they're being represented well when you look at the union bosses like Randy Weingarten tweeting against conservatives every single day. And then also a lot of the teachers who might have wanted to go back into the classroom in 2020 and in 2021, even if they wanted to do so, the union bosses had an incentive to keep the schools closed even longer because they understood that they could hold children's education hostage to secure additional ransom payments from the taxpayer. I mean, it worked out for them in the end, but there's just a difference in incentives between the people on the ground, the teachers, and then the union bosses. Yeah. And I know Reason Foundation, Aaron Smith and company there put out a study looking at the cost of per pupil revenue, so the amount of money being raised per kid from around 2002 to 2019. And they found similar to what you're talking about, overall revenue increased by about 24%, but a ton of that was going into support things that really had nothing to do directly with teaching. Teacher salaries were actually flat in most states or slightly down when you adjust for inflation. Benefits are way up, and part of that is going to pay people who are already retired. So in a way, it looks like teachers are making a lot more money in total compensation, but most of that is benefits. And a lot of that is going to people who are not actually active right now. So there's something odd going on with that. And I've always been kind of surprised that school choice advocates don't try to turn teachers against their unions because the teacher's union, it should be an advocate for teachers, and they're really kind of doing a shitty job. Yeah, they are. It's just that the teachers in the systems, they're doing their job, they have a tough job, and they just get pounded with emails from their superintendents who fight as hard as possible against any change to the status quo. So it's kind of hard to battle that misinformation, but you're right. Reformers should make the case more clearly about why school choice could benefit employees as well. And I would recommend for listeners to go check out one of my articles on the topic called School Choice Benefits Teachers 2, where I summarize the evidence suggesting that competition is good for teachers. It's at the Washington Examiner. Yeah. So what's untapped for the coming year? Because obviously, these paroxysms of anger and frustration, revealed failures or annoyances of the K-12 system, these happen every once in a while. The lockdown, the pandemic, the biggest kind of sustained moment of this ever. But the monopoly school bureaucratic system does a really good job of waiting out. And people can't stay angry forever. Their kids age out of the system, etc. They're good at waiting out waves of reform that are going to make them fundamentally transform. What is untapped this year? Because in order to drive home last year's advances, something has to keep happening. What are the big things you're looking at? Yeah. So I think 2021 was the year of school choice, but I think we're just getting started. And 2022 might be a great year for victories as well, because parents are mobilized more than we've seen in a long time. And they're not going to forget what happened in 2020. Parents, many parents at least, felt powerless in 2020 and in 2021. And in some cases, they still feel powerless in 2022. And these mobilized parents are going to fight to make sure they never feel powerless like that ever again going forward. And I think politicians are starting to think a little bit more about listening to this new special interest group in town, these parents who want more of a say in their kids' education. We saw what unfolded in Virginia. Terry McAuliffe really stepped in it when he said, I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach. But instead of backpedaling, Terry McAuliffe took the wrong road of quadrupling on his anti-parent rhetoric. Glenn Yonkin capitalized that and it turned out to be pretty politically profitable for him. And I think other politicians would be wise to learn from this story and to lean into educational freedom going forward and listen to this new mobilized special interest group, essentially, these parents who care about their kids more than anyone else are going to continue to fight for the right to educate their kids as they see fit harder than anyone will ever fight to take that right away from them. So I'm optimistic going forward. Yeah, I mean, this is where teachers do this for 30 years. Parents do it for 12 years, right? Well, let's talk about Virginia a little bit because, on the one hand, and I realize it's way late to litigate Terry McAuliffe. But on a certain level, isn't he correct? Like you don't want, I mean, like it would be a nightmare if every day, you know, like kid comes home and then you get a call as a teacher and somebody's saying, I cannot believe that you said this is the way to use a semicolon. This book, you know, this thing, this, I mean, it is, he's right, right? That I mean, you want teacher, you want, you want parents to be involved in their education and stuff, but you don't want parents every time their kid encounters a difficulty or anything. You don't want them in charge of the curriculum, do you? And so Glenn Yonkin's argument on the debate stage had to do with a bill that Terry McAuliffe vetoed I think in 2016, which was that if a parent, a parent just wants to have transparency about what their kids are learning. And if they object to something, let's say it's a, I think it was about sexually explicit material, then parents would be able to opt out of that curriculum. So they want to control everybody else's kids curriculum. They would just be able to say, well, I don't want my kid reading this particular book because it conflicts with my beliefs. So I think there's been kind of misunderstanding with a lot of people about what the two sides were actually. Although that was also, that revolved around a woman who was active in Republican politics. I mean, there was an ad made and stuff and it was her son in an AP high school class didn't want to read The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, a Nobel Prize winning author. And that book is, you know, it is a harsh look at, you know, child abuse and sexual molestation as well as, you know, it's very racially charged. But it's like, I don't know, you know, and again, I think the parents should have the right to do that. But it's like really like, shouldn't we be having the argument about, you know, do you, you know, do you want your honor student kid not to encounter difficult literature? That's, I don't know. You know, it's like, there's, there's an anti intellectualism that creeps into I think a lot of school choice stuff where it's like, I don't want my kid to be exposed to whatever it is that makes them or me upset. Yeah, so I think the, the problem here is that that kind of curriculum bill is not a perfect solution either, right, because there could be these problems within the school system. The real issue is that we're forcing everybody who it's just going to fundamentally disagree about how they want their kids raised into a one size fits all system. That's why school choice is the best solution for these curriculum disagreements going forward. Because by definition, you have people who disagree about what the curriculum should be. And at the end of the day, when it comes to a one size fits all government run school system, you're going to have people that are upset with with whatever the final product might be. And, you know, one of the reasons I think it's worth talking about young kid a little bit too is that, you know, he did definitely, you know, he he mobilized or he capitalized on the call of saying things that are, you know, like everybody is going to be like, what are you saying man, like if you're saying parents should just shut up, you know, you paid your taxes, you get no input into what your kid is doing. That's obviously a huge, you know, it's a horrible way to talk about education, particularly when it's, you know, mandatory and compulsory. Young can capitalize on that and in a bunch of ways. But, you know, he and he recently signed an anti CRT bill, a critical race theory bill, you have been you have written critically of these bills banning CRT, you know, and the idea that, you know, either the legislature or the governor, you know, can just issue a dictate that is, you know, that's it. What is your what your concern about laws that, you know, that are coming from on top, the legislature, the governor, et cetera, in a particular given state, what's wrong with them saying, no, you cannot teach this or you cannot teach this way or you must teach this or you must teach that way. Yeah, I don't think the government should be making those decisions. I think the market should make those decisions and parents should choose for their own kids. If a family wants to take their kids education dollars to a school that has critical race theory or some other type of whatever you want to call social emotional learning or a type of curriculum that aligns with their values, I think we should be okay with that. I think it's a problem when we start to force everybody into a system where they inherently disagree with how the curriculum or what the curriculum is and how it's being taught. So you would be okay with, you know, with public dollars go ultimately going not not too directly to religious schools, but to parents who then choose to send their kids to religious schools. I agree with that. Can you talk about why that is not a, you know, that does not present any kind of church and state issue? Same reason that Pell Grants don't present a separation of church and state issue. Pell Grants don't violate the establishment clause of the First Amendment because the families are the primary beneficiary or at least the student is the primary beneficiary of the funding and then they can choose between religious and non-religious options. Same thing with K-12 vouchers, the money goes to the family and then they can choose public or private religious or non-religious K-12 providers. Same thing with the federal Head Start program for pre-K. You can take Head Start dollars, public dollars or taxpayer dollars to a religiously affiliated pre-K and that's not a problem. And what's funny about this is that the teacher juniors don't make this argument where the people who side with the teacher juniors don't make this argument about Pell Grants. They don't make this argument about pre-K programs. It's because that doesn't threaten their monopoly, but K-12 education funding following the student threatens the monopoly that they hold because they want to keep that money regardless of the choice of the family and they're going to use whatever argument they can to try to trap kids into their institutions for 13 years without exit options. One more thing on the anti-CRT bills is another problem with those is even if you are a critic of CRT and you don't want it in any of the schools, this isn't likely to get you what you actually want because we don't really know exactly what's going on in the classroom. The teachers could still say, well, I'm not teaching critical race theory, but then teach everything through a critical race theory lens and just call it something else. They could start calling it emotional, social-emotional learning and it really becomes a game of whack-a-mole as well because this is just one of the disagreements that parents might have. Parents fought about common core for a while. Now they're fighting about critical race theories. Some other parents might be upset about sexualized curriculum. They're just so many different things and we can even foresee what the next curriculum battle will be about. Right, and the language and some of the bills that were either passed or came close to passing, I'm thinking of ones in like Wisconsin. They end up, there's this long list of concepts and terms or data points that you're not allowed to talk about and I don't think K through 12 teachers have the same kind of academic freedom that college professors are supposed to have, which is generally something apart from the classroom anyway, but there's something insane when the government is saying like you are not allowed to utter these words or teach these ideas, which is what you have to do. It's really nightmarish. Yeah, I think the better position, even if you're, let's say, my answer is usually always going to be school choice, but a better reform in the current system absent school choice instead of banning an idea is instead having at least a transparency bill, which I think those are moving, making their way through legislatures right now as well. It's more of a defensible position and it's more likely to lead to parents, one, having more information about what their kids are learning, and then two, it's more likely to lead to parents pushing back at school board meetings, which could lead to reform at a more local level than at the state level, and it could lead to parents pushing more for school choice, which is the most local form of control that there is making decisions for your own kids instead of distant bureaucrats deciding what your kids should learn. Let's go back to Junkin for a second, because in his campaign, he was not a particularly strong school choice advocate. His big talking point was that he was going to add 20 charter schools to Virginia. It's a big state. That is meager. Then he was able to mobilize anger about I think as much as CRT, it was just parents were frustrated because schools everywhere were just open and shut, etc. It was very frustrating. Do you worry that a lot of Republican office seekers who will kind of say they're in favor of school choice, but then they don't want, there's a whole host of things they don't want ever to be taught in schools, and they're going to be able to kind of glom on to parental anger and get into office without any real commitment or dedication to truly decentralizing and dispersing power throughout the educational system. That they really are just going to be able to get into office and then kind of control the schools as they see fit. Is that a concern? I think they're going to start to learn that their proposed policies that they're starting with doesn't actually achieve what they want and what parents actually want. We've seen some of these parent bill or rights bills, for example, that says that parents have power when it comes to their kids' education, but when that doesn't actually lead to true empowerment of parents, you're still going to have upset parents. You might have an anti-critical race theory bill on the books, and then parents might still be upset with whatever's happening in the classroom. Maybe it's called something else. Maybe there isn't a strong enforcement arm of banning the concept in the classroom. And I think at that point, you're going to see more pressure from parents pushing for real bottom-up accountability, still being upset about the same thing. You can still be upset about critical race theory, whatever you want to call it, but at the same time, I think more and more people are going to realize that the best solution here is having the money follow the child. And we've seen some of this kind of unfurl in Arizona, for example. Arizona Governor Doug Ducey had a ban on mask mandates, for example, and the public school districts were doing it anyway. And I think this happened in Florida, too. Wait, that means that he says you cannot have mask mandates, and then local districts are saying, no, we're going to continue. And we're seeing this in Virginia right now, right? Yeah. Yonkin's executive order. The best, the ultimate power move is what Governor Doug Ducey did is to say, okay, you want to just not listen to my order? Fine. Well, then I'm going to let families take their children's education dollars elsewhere. And he didn't even need the legislature to do that in Arizona because he used American Rescue Fund, American Rescue Plan funding, and you don't need a legislature to do that. And Florida did something similar. It was approved through their Department of Education, though. They increased the eligibility of their hope scholarship program and said, if you disagree with the COVID policy in your public school, okay, fine. If you're not going to listen to Governor DeSantis, then families are going to be able to take their children's education dollars elsewhere. So I think that's the best move. What's the best thing that a parent, because part of the problem here is that parents are distributed. They're all over the place and each of them has limited purchasing power and limited power within the system. And then there are these globs of power, the teachers, the administrators, like almost everybody else but the students. If you're a parent and you're in a K through 12 system that you dislike, you don't have the means to move to a different district. You don't have the means to do private school. You don't have the means or the time to do homeschooling. What is the best way to kind of get involved to change education policy? I would argue to push for bills in the state legislature that fund the student as opposed to the system. That's the best shot that you're going to have to truly be empowered. And I've started tracking these this year already. There are already about 15 states. There's going to be more little birdies are telling me that there's more bills coming. But there's at least 15 states with bills as of right now that are active in 2022 to fund students as opposed to systems. So if you can get parents either through on social media or local parent groups to push and rally around these bills, you can unleash educational freedom statewide in your state. Other parents are taking another approach and they're voicing their concerns at the school board meetings. But you know what? This whole idea of democratic control for the most part is a fairytale. The only true form of accountability is bottom of accountability. I think if you want to participate in that democratic process and voice your concerns at school board meetings, I think you should do that and feel empowered to do that. It's your right to do so. But I think the energy would be more well spent towards channeling all of that energy with other parents around bills that are in the state houses. You're going to have more success in the long run. If you can go to the state house, then you don't have to go to every individual school district right to effect change. And you're just giving people a right of exit. And things will follow. Good things will follow from that. Are we past the point where people are like, well, we just need more money in the system? Because again, I'm thinking about that Reason Foundation study, which is pretty powerful, but in inflation adjusted dollars, there's just so much more money per student. In New York state where I live, the public schools K-12 on average spend $30,000 per student. It's more than double the average private school tuition throughout the state, etc. Like are people finally understanding that you're not going to fix a broken system by pouring more money into it? Yeah, I think most people have figured that out, especially when you just show them the trends over time and how the outcomes haven't gotten any better. And in particular, starting in 2020, there's been just tons of money allocated towards the government run schools. Since March of 2020, the federal government has sent at least $190 billion to K-12 education nationwide, which turns out, I want to say, to be about $3,000 to $4,000 per student in the public school system. So they have so much money that they don't know what to do with it. And they're using this COVID relief on non-COVID relief stuff. And it was supposed to be about opening the schools. You have some places that even tried to keep the schools closed even longer. Chicago public schools are slated to spend over $27,000 per student per year, or at least in the 2022 school year. And that's an increase of, I want to say, at least 60% over the last couple of years. I mean, they just have so much money. And in some places, I think the Associated Press did a story where they were pointing out that some districts were spending the quote unquote COVID relief on sports stadiums. If you look at the federal data on this, the majority of states have not spent the majority of their COVID relief funding. So they have so much money. And so this argument that school choice is going to defund the public schools, it was always a crappy argument, but it's particularly a weak argument now. I mean, one, the money doesn't belong to the government schools in the first place. It's for the students and their families. It belongs to the families, or at least the taxpayer doesn't belong to the schools. Two, if you think that choice is going to defund you, then you're really telling on yourself. You don't have confidence in your product. Three, the public schools actually financially benefit on a per-people basis when they lose students to their competition, because they're only partially funded based on enrollment counts. And then now I don't want to hear it anymore because you have so much money from COVID relief. Yeah. What would you say, or what's the biggest, or what are the biggest structural impediments to a real radical transformation of the K through 12 publicly funded K through 12 system so that we have true universal accessible choice? Well, it's the teacher's unions. It's all about power dynamics. If you ask people on the ground, if you ask the constituents, Democrats, Republicans, independents, a majority, a strong majority of each support the money following the child. But if you look at the breakdown of the votes in state houses, Democrats are just, you know, sometimes they'll vote for it, but they're just a lot less likely to vote for a school choice policy. And there's a disconnect between the percentage of Democrats in state houses that vote for school choice and their constituents on the ground who supports the concept of the money following the child. And I think the reason for that is because the teacher's unions, one of the strongest lobbies in education and in any industry, the largest labor union in the United States is the National Education Association, the largest teacher's union in the U.S. as well, they disproportionately donate to the Democratic Party. That's just the reality. If you look at the American Federation of Teachers, for example, if you look at Open Secrets website, they track these campaign contributions every election cycle. They started tracking this in 1990. And every single election cycle over the past three decades, since 1990, over 97% of the American Federation of Teachers campaign contributions were given to Democrats as opposed to Republicans or independents. So that's a huge lopsided power imbalance. Can I complicate that argument a little bit? I think you're right. And I think there's a stranglehold on that. And it is a turning back on some of the early proponents of radical school choice. And I'm thinking of people like Howard Fuller or Polly Williams in Milwaukee. And Milwaukee had one of the first actual voucher programs. Polly Williams was a former member of the Black Panther Party. And she was African-American. She wanted African-Americans to be given options to escape a public school system that was harming them. And they were hardcore, like progressive Democrats. So to see Democrats now against school choice, it's really turning their backs on a legacy that they had of being pro-school choice. So that's problematic and that's terrible. But then when, you know, are Republicans actually school choice, pro-school choice? And one question, I guess, is how much of this is not ultimately about the status quo? It's not about political affiliation. It's also about if you're a parent or if you're a homeowner, you've been told that, you know, up to 40% of the household of the value of your house is tied to the public school district. There's, you know, this entire like, you know, archipelago of arguments to keep the status quo in place. And, you know, you don't see, you don't see rich suburban congressional districts. I lived in Ohio for 20 years. I lived in John Boehner's old district. There weren't any, you know, which is a very Republican district. There were no people there saying, you know what, I really want school choice. If anything, you know, they were doing everything they could to keep school funding in such a way that it kept out poorer people from, you know, if you were in a wealthier suburb, you know, and I mean, they were Republican, they were conservative, and they never talked about school choice because it seemed to threaten their status quo, even if they didn't like, you know, the sex add that their kids were getting at, you know, at high school. And so I think that argument would apply more towards things like open enrollment where kids are transferring from the lower quality public schools to the public school that you bought yourself into with your house, essentially. That doesn't really apply as much to education savings accounts where the money is being given to the parents and then you still have the same geographic assignment of school districts, right, that you buy yourself into with your house. This would just allow families to send their kids to private schools or micro schools or other environments. And then as far as like the history of school choice, you know, with certainly some prominent Democrats supporting it a long time. I mean, I can come up with examples of Democrats who stick their neck out against the party and do the right thing right now as well. I mean, one of the best examples is Justin Wayne, a senator in Nebraska, who called out all of his colleagues for being school choice. He's African American, which plays into this. But yeah, you have posted your Twitter feed as a fantastic resource. If anybody needs more outrage in their daily life, they should follow you on Twitter because you're but you posted him talking in Nebraska is, you know, has a unicameral legislature. And he was like, who of you, you know, put your kids into like the schools that, you know, my district has to go to, you know, nobody did it. Yeah. And it was also his there was one of his colleagues by the last name of McKinney, who also represented him. He, Justin Wayne had said that him and McKinney represented about 70% of the African American population, just the two of them in the state of Nebraska. That bill did get a vote. They fell, I want to say five votes short, but they needed a two-thirds majority. They had a majority support, but they needed a two-thirds to overcome a filibuster. And so they didn't have that done. But there's there's another bill in Nebraska that they're going to push for as well for school choice. So it's not over yet in Nebraska. And I'll be watching that state pretty closely. But yeah, I mean, if you just look at the partisan breakdown in state houses and where we saw victories last year, I mean, you just can't overlook the fact that for the most part, it's the Republicans who are passing these kinds of bills, not all of them. There are Republicans that vote against it as well. I mean, think about Kentucky, a overwhelmingly Republican state barely had enough votes to override the veto from Democratic governor Andy Beshear. And it shouldn't it shouldn't be like that. And I think it's becoming more of a form of political suicide for Republicans to vote against school choice going forward with the curriculum debates and everything else that we're seeing with with the schools. It's becoming, I want to say, more of a Republican issue, but Democrats are supporting it too. I mean, does that make it hard, though, to get actual reform? I mean, you know, it typically not always, but most of the time, you know, real transformational reform is done bipartisan, you know, because at a certain point, you know, that the consensus is just so strong that the party that's dragging its heels, a bunch of people give, you know, go to join the other side because they don't want to be left behind. But, you know, if school choice becomes a Republican issue, does that mean it's going to delay, you know, implementation of school choice because it's going to be a partisan battle? No, because I think if you label it in a red state in particular as bipartisan, and then you don't get any Democrats to come along with you. And at the same time, you give the Republicans in either the rural areas a pass because it's not a partisan thing, they don't have to go along with the party, then you just don't get anything at all. But so I think it really depends on what state you're in. If you're in a red state, well, you should probably have Republicans lean into it. And because making it bipartisan when it actually isn't just to make everybody feel good, you get something like Texas, right? You have Texas has had a Republican trifecta for two decades now. They don't have any private school choice programs in Texas. But if they were to make it more of a thing to hold Republicans accountable for, I think you might see more victories in a state like Texas. But yeah, it really depends in a state like Colorado, you don't want to make it a partisan thing. But I think ultimately, we're seeing some Democrats see the writing on the wall when it comes to support of parental rights, you can't come out against parental rights and school choice is one form of embracing educational freedom. And one example I wanted to give was Democratic Governor Roy Cooper in North Carolina has vetoed every single budget since he started this past year in 2021. He signed a budget bill for the first time, and it had a massive expansion of school choice involved, a private school choice, their opportunity scholarship program. And he listed some reasons as to why he signed the bill. He said the good outweighed the bad and he gave examples of good things and bad but he didn't mention school choice at all. Whereas in other years, he said I vetoed this because of the school choice expansion. I think some Democrats are starting to learn that maybe it's a good idea and even politically profitable to listen to this popular issue and to listen to parents who are mobilized right now. Mayor Lori Lightfoot, she put her foot down on school closures. So Eric Adams has come out pretty forceful in opposition to keeping schools closed for a long time. And so I think we're seeing more of this and I think what's going to happen, if it's not happening already, is that Republicans are going to continue leaning into educational freedom and parental rights. And then Democrats are going to start to see that well, maybe this is a good idea and then it won't be a partisan issue anymore once everybody just embraces it. I mean once you have one party completely committed to it and even like maybe 10, 20, 30% of another party coming along for the ride, that's worked in the past. Final question, if and when we talk in 2023, if and when there is a 2023, how will we know that school choice has advanced? What are the metrics that you're holding up to say, if we want a successful year of school choice in 2022, these targets have to be hit? It depends on how many states expand their programs and how massive those expansions are. So like in 2021, there were 19 states that either had new programs or expanded existing ones and the way I would define as expanding an existing program is increasing the eligibility. So the amount of people who can qualify for the program increasing the scholarship amount, maybe it was only 20% what was spent in the public schools, if you rise that to 30 or 40%. That would be an expansion and then also just expanding even expanding the uses of the program. So maybe it's a voucher, you can only use it a brick and mortar private school, expanding it to an ESA to allow it to be used for a micro school or a pandemic pod or a private tutor. I think that would be an expansion of educational freedom too. So we'll have to see how many states pass new or expanded programs and we'll have to see how big those expansions were. West Virginia was a huge one, for example, it was only one state, but that is something to really celebrate because of how expansive that program is going to be. All right, we're going to leave it there. We've been talking with Cordy Angelis. Thanks so much. You know, hopefully the next time we talk, there'll be more school choice. Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me, Nick.