 Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Aaron Ross Powell, editor of Libertarianism.org and a research fellow here at the Cato Institute. And I'm Trevor Burrus, a research fellow at the Cato Institute Center for Constitutional Studies. Our guest today is Neil McCluskey, Associate Director of the Cato Institute Center for Educational Freedom. Before we get into questions of whether the public schools work, if they don't why, what alternatives there are, I guess I want to ask why public schools to begin with? Because there are all these things that we as a society or even our government decides is really important, but then doesn't directly supply itself. So we give food, often health care, you know, we subsidize these things all the time, but we don't set up government run institutions that directly provide them. But we do for schooling. So why and how did we get here? Yeah, well that's a great question. And there are a lot of ways we got to where we are, but I can tell you best probably sort of how it actually developed and then what the rationale was that was given to centralize government control, I guess add more government control and then over time to centralize it. So, you know, if we want to go back to the beginning of this country, you know, there was obviously education outside of the United States or outside of colonial America, but we'll start there because really our idea of public schooling developed contemporaneous with most other countries and we sometimes looked outside to say, well, what were they doing? But you got to really start, you can start in England because this is really the beginning of colonial America. And in England at the time, you know, the 1500, 1600, there's very little expectation that government would have anything to do with education. Every once in a while the king or somebody would exhort people, you know, please educate your children. But this was something that was expected to stay in communities and that the church, depending on which country you're in, which church could be lots of different religious communities, but that was considered their purview because this was something actually that was directly connected to religion, to God, not really to government, although of course there were always interactions with government and religion. But so you get to the first real people who intended to be permanent settlers in the United States. So you're not talking about really Virginia you're talking about in New England. You're talking about the pilgrims, Puritans. And they came here and of course this was, this is actually a already relatively speaking highly educated group of people come over and they want to establish what is essentially a new religious society. But again, they brought these institutions that were still English with them and there was an expectation or no expectation that government would have, let's say, an education. What happened though was, you know, when you were in the old world, you were in these communities that were settled, you had, they were often largely just extended families, so there was lots of people looking out for the children, things like that, trying to inculcate the norm to the community. But when they got to the new world, you had a lot of people physically spreading out, moving to lots of land available. And what the Puritan leaders thought or feared was that they were losing a lot of what made them distinct as Puritans but also that they were going to become susceptible really to Satan because they didn't feel there was enough Bible reading that they may have lost a lot of the religious authority. So we're talking about like right now about around the time of the 1690s, the Salem trials. No, not even there yet. Oh, before that. So I promise this will not take as long as it seems. No, please, this is interesting. But this setup is really kind of crucial. So in 1642, they actually passed a law that said, look, you have to provide your children with some sort of education. Now often that was expected to be apprenticeship but something so that you knew your children could eventually be of, you know, self-sustaining, valuable members of the community. But again, you had this concern about losing the religious character, losing the values. And in 1647, we get what should be something everybody knows about. Every school child should hear this. For no other reason, it's an entertaining title. They passed something called the Old Deluder Satan Act. And that many people point to as the beginning of public schooling. And what that said was if you had 50 to 99 basically households in a town, they had to retain somebody to teach the children and teach them to read as well as Greek and Latin because the idea here was you'd learn to read your Bible and understand what your ministers were telling you. If you had 100 or more families, you had to have somebody to teach and a place in which that occurred. So, you know, that would usually be some sort of common building they already would have had because the reality was people were providing education, all sorts of education was going on. But the leaders thought, well, we've got to make sure that these are, we're forming proper Puritans. Citizens, I think is a good, I mean Puritans and citizens. Well, you see at the time Puritan and citizen were one of the same. You couldn't be considered a good citizen if you weren't a good Puritan. But this is what people point to and they say this is the beginning of public schooling because the government is saying that you've got to have these people to educate in these places where it happens for specific aims. And the aim is really to perpetuate the society. This is going to become a theme, at least among thinkers, about why you have public education. But anyway, so people point to this and they say, see, this is the beginning of public schooling and we've had it since the beginning. But what you have to understand is, first of all, that this of course was a religious community as much as a civil community. Nobody today, I think, would say we should really have essentially theocracies. And so much of this was driven by religion, which people long believe was crucial to education. Education was crucial to that. And the reality was most towns, especially as time went on, didn't follow this because people simply didn't think that education in many cases was valuable to them. Why learn Greek and Latin when what you really need to do is have shelter. You know, you want to earn money. So you want to learn things. And we find they found big private schooling teaching things like double entry bookkeeping and all sorts of practical skills. And a lot of towns didn't enforce this. Now, there are other reasons they didn't do it because, eventually, they also have to defend themselves. You know, they have a lot of problems, not just with eventually conflict with native communities. But of course, there's France. There's Spain. There's all sorts of old world conflicts. And they said it doesn't make sense to spend money on this. And so this was not really maintained in New England. And you didn't see it replicated anywhere else. So when people say this is the beginning of public schooling, that is really cherry picking what happened. That said, this idea of social reproduction is something that becomes big. So that makes education into the public education, not just education, which of course is different than public education. Right. Public education should be those things that all of us should learn and be possibly forced to learn in some way. But this makes it a sort of almost like soul craft if you're doing religious education. Or at least, you know, person crafting in a bigger way, right? I'm struck by how much what you're describing sounds like the debates today over whether we should be teaching kids humanities and the kids going off to get their art history degrees versus we need science, technology, engineering and math. Right. Job training. That is a dispute that's been going on, I think, as long as education has been taking place. Do you want to emphasize practical skills or character development? Maybe do you want to do both. But that is a long standing battle. And so now we can finally move ahead with our history, which really, we won't go back to the colonies ever again. No, yeah, keep going on. This is just a revolution now. Yeah. So you get to, actually we're going to go post-revolution. So fortunately we don't have to go year by year. But this is the next thing that we see is that after the revolution, we still have essentially an education system that's controlled by families and religious communities, very bottom up. There's not a lot of top-down dictation about what's taught, how it's taught, who's teaching it, where it's taught, anything like that. But you have sort of, you know, elites among the founders saying, look, now we have this democratic, to use the term loosely, society where the people are supposed to ultimately control what, how the government works. And they said, what we've got to do is make sure they are sufficiently enlightened that we can trust them with the vote. That seems a little bit like circular, because the people who are being voted in are now instructing them to be sufficiently enlightened. And that is certainly a problem. But you can understand what many of these people, their fear is we don't want a mob that suddenly has power. We want them to be, you know, people who think like we do as the elites. Now, they don't think through a whole lot of the difficulty of this, because, frankly, they don't have much practical experience with it. And the guy who's most cited for wanting to have a public schooling system that's big is Thomas Jefferson, sort of ironically. Although what he was saying is largely we want to have some basic education for essentially three grades in the state of Virginia, so that we could teach people to be very wary of people who are trying to become political leaders and, and, and office holders. But so much of the discussion was we've got to inculcate good values, and, of course, good values were synonymous then, for the most part, with Protestant values among these people. There were some other founders, though, in particular Benjamin Rush, who was the, he was actually best known as the Surgeon General of the Continental Army, but a pretty important guy in Philadelphia. And he said, what we really need is public schools to make everybody the same, homogeneous, and therefore make them easier to govern. So there were some people who say we want them enlightened, others we want them all the same so we won't fight over stuff. That's a very scary concept of public schooling, but in a way that's actually what became the norm. And then you get into Horseman in the 1830s. He talked a lot about we want virtuous citizens who we can trust with the vote, but also the idea of common schooling, and he was the guy who really pushed public schooling, was to make people largely the same, had the same values. And this was actually a problem in Massachusetts where he was the secretary, because you had first, before Catholics came in and really muddied things, big battles between congregationalists who were sort of the inheritors of Puritanism, and Unitarians, which is what Horseman was saying, well, but what values do we teach? And so this is then we get to this idea, well, ultimately we need public schools to shape people. Eventually you also get the idea that, well, we should equip everybody, regardless of their class, with basic education so that they can move up and down the ladder. But you see, especially among theorists, this idea that what's really most important is that we shape citizens, and we teach them to either be the same or sometimes to get along. So you go to the progressives now, and they actually have a big schism. They're progressives who... We're talking about 1910-ish. You're so right, 1880s through 1920s, roughly. Some who say, look, we need a system that actually we apply science to society. We tell people what their jobs are going to be. We use IQ testing and things like that. And then so we sort of engineer society. And many of these are eugenicists, so they're definitely probably into the education system. Yes, there are some unseemly combinations of thought. I'm curious about the rhetoric that was being used because you say things like they thought we needed to make everyone the same so that they could be easier governed. Was that actually the language that was being used? Or was that kind of the underlying message? Or were they saying things more like we need to instill values in these people and they were just assuming that the values that they were instilling, which were ones they held, were uniformly correct? Or were they actually saying things like we need to make everyone believe the same thing? Right. Well, so if you go to Benjamin Rush, he's very explicit in that. He says, look, we need to make people more homogeneous so that they can be more easily governed. That's not the direct quote, but that's a pretty close paraphrasing of it. More often you heard people say we need to establish these shared values largely and sometimes they were explicit saying this means Protestant values. They often said, look, let's not get into the sectarian debates within Protestantism. We've talked about Noah Webster and people talked about this. But there are certain things all Protestants agree on and that's what we'll teach in our schools. It's interesting though you do get into debates among these people even about actually pretty substantial debates about how much religion. So Noah Webster and Benjamin Rush greatly disagreed whether or not to use the Bible as like a textbook because Benjamin Rush thought this was essential whereas Noah Webster thought if you reduce it to a textbook it loses its power with people. Aaron hits on an interesting point though because the rhetoric, I mean, it's not very often that someone comes along and says like, I want to control you. They usually say, they actually use words that you hear politicians using today. You go back and read John Dewey and read other people and what you hear is we need to establish foundations of our shared values to move forward into a brighter future. And of course everyone says yes, yes, absolutely we do. Those happen to be my values. Well you find a lot more of that when you get into Horace Mann and people who are really trying to sell common schooling. But Rush was, I guess to his credit, was very direct in saying look we're going to have people with the ability to vote and freedom. We've got to make sure they're all pretty much the same and that means shaping them early. Otherwise you could get into all sorts of problems. I mean remember they're looking at France and places like that, places with revolutions. Often very concerned that the masses will just use power in ways that are dangerous. And so you could see why they were saying these things. Eventually though, really when you get to the progressives I think they're even more direct about it. They're saying look we have immigrants coming in because now you've got to understand you get to the progressive era. You have people who aren't often western Europeans so you're talking about southern Europeans. People don't, you know the Irish at least they were familiar with. Catholic. Well the Catholic thing is huge and we'll get into the dangers of public schooling I assume. But these are the things that animate it. And so a lot of eventually the 1840s and so a lot of the push for public schooling has to do with immigrants who are largely these Irish. But there's a big problem because nobody wants this or I shouldn't say nobody. There was a lot of disagreement about whether you should incorporate anything Catholic. Whether that is actually Christian, things like that. But it's in the 1880s that things really come to a head because it's not just Catholics but these are Catholics from different parts of Europe than Northern Europeans. So there were Germans, there were Irish but now you're talking about Italians, Hungarians, people like that who seem even more strange. And so there's an even more explicit drive to say these people must go to public schools and they must be assimilated and that is the role of public schools and also a role of public schools is to determine what your future is going to be which not surprisingly was for the most part you're going to work in a factory and prepare people for that sort of life whether that's what they wanted or not. But on the flip side you had Dewey who loved public schools. I mean he wanted to end social engineering but he disagreed with these guys. He said look a school should be run where it's very student driven. What students want to do is what they do. You think kind of like Montessori or something like that. And he thought the value of public schooling was to bring diverse kids together. So yes, you would have to go to a public school but it would be driven by those students not dictated where they'll go and that would teach them all to get along and actually that's part of, we have theories now, we have contact theory which says essentially you bring people together in pursuit of common goals and they'll learn to get along and overcome their differences. So Dewey and these other progressives really differed and then of course you get into the 1920s, you have Pierce v. Society of Sisters which responds to a law that says essentially everybody has to go to a public school and finally Supreme Court says, wait a minute, the state doesn't own you although if you read Benjamin Rush, go back to the 1790s, you said look public schools should teach first and foremost you belong to the state. The Pierce v. Society of Sisters case is really important because it was about the right to go to a Catholic school and not have to go to a Protestant public school out of Oregon which brings up the anti-Catholicism thing. In another case, that Myer v. Nebraska at about the same time was similar to in terms of it had it illegal to teach German and that was another thing, both about sort of creating the right types of people and coming in and saying, no, at least you have a constitutional right to teach your kid German or to send them to a Catholic school. Yeah, it was a lot about really forced homogenization. We didn't want, I shouldn't say we, but a lot of people didn't want communities where people spoke German instead of English. And of course those communities, speaking German was just an essential part of their identity, who they were perpetuating what they thought was important and people from the outside said no, no, we don't want that to be legal. Pierce v. Society of Sisters, of course, now a huge amount of American educational history is about tension and conflict between Roman Catholics and Protestants. And what Roman Catholics did, of course, was eventually withdraw themselves from the public schooling system saying, look, this system that's supposed to assimilate everyone and to include everyone is simply incompatible with our values and we're going to start our own education system. By its peak in the 1960s, I think it was about 11 or 12 or so percent of all school-age kids were in that system. But you also saw, to a lesser extent, but Lutheran schools that developed in the Midwest where you had more Germans. And recently, I'm going to take it to the present, finally, for a long time, of course, a lot of Protestants were happy with the public schools. But when you get to the 60s and people say, look, we don't want our kids, especially now non-religious people or non-Christians saying, you know, we don't want our kids doing the Lord's Prayer or something in school. And so, you know, Supreme Court cases eventually said, look, you can't have religion in your schools. This leads to a whole lot of unhappy, you know, religious people. And so now you then see this increase in homeschooling and evangelical schools and the type schools you didn't see before because these people were saying, look, this is a system that no longer serves us and we have to go outside of it. How much of what we're talking about right now is happening at the state level versus the federal level? So the Constitution doesn't give there's nothing in there about the federal government getting to do education stuff. So is this all of these issues and these conflicts, is this all happening in state-run schools? Because people, I think, now if we think about public education we think about a huge amount of involvement from the federal government setting standards and funding issues and no child left behind and all these things. Was that sort of thing going on then? No, the vast majority of the conflicts we see historically often were at the local level because it's true that public schools for a very long time were held primarily at the local level. Now, a man would have liked to have seen this centralized at the state level, but you really don't see a lot of state-level centralization until the 1960s, mainly. And it actually is at the same time you start to see the federal government becoming involved in education. The federal government had very little to do with education. A lot of people say, no, the federal government always had a role. The federal government had the best ordinance which existed before the Constitution. And of course the Constitution does give the federal government authority over lands that don't belong to states or something like that to dispose of those lands. But really between the enactment of the Constitution and the 1950s you see very little federal involvement in education, especially in K-12 education. You get to the National Defense Education Act, which is a response to Sputnik. And for the first time, the federal government says, look, we're going to spend some money to have more math and science teachers and language teachers. Most of what they did was in higher ed. But that's the first time the federal government really came in and said, look, we have some role in engineering what happens in the education system. The STEM program was to create more STEM degrees, the first one. It's the beginning of the STEM, the STEM mania. Now, of course, the Supreme Court had a different role. The Supreme Court, again, in the 1950s, of course, Brown v. Board of Education said, look, states and districts, you can't discriminate in your provision of education. A totally legitimate role in the 14th Amendment. But this is different from the federal government saying, and now we're going to pass legislation to govern education. And then it's the 1960s with the great society you see then the Higher Education Act, the American Secondary Education Act, you see a head start. And this actually builds state control because what it does is the federal government says, we're going to start all these programs, but we're not going to hire the bureaucrats to run them. You, states, and your state offices will run it. This really balloons the bureaucracy at the state level. And then what you see over time is the federal government first, they're going to be compensatory for low-income districts. But as they give it out over several decades, or two decades really, people finally say, you know, what are we getting for this? And it's true, they're not getting much of anything. At least there's no evidence of it. So in the 1980s and then especially in the 90s and the 2000s, then you see the federal government start to say, okay, now you have to have standards and math and reading and science and you have to have tests and we're going to require, you know, we're going to punish you well. But so it's really only over the last two or three decades that the federal government has much to do with this. And the states only exercise a lot of control when the federal government says you have to execute our programs. And now would you call it hybrid, like truly hybrid in terms of how much influence the federal government is having over, because when was the Department of Education created? Well, so it was Carter, wasn't it? Yeah, it was voted 1979, it was in operation in 1980. And their job was to administer these grants mostly probably and maybe do studies and things like that. But now you have a partnership between the bureaucracies at the state level and the feds are just sort of pumping money and blowing up the bureaucracies at the state level and then they're sort of like, is there just sort of an education complex, sort of like the military industrial complex but now we have an education complex between the two? There's definitely an education complex. And what you see now is that it was a hybrid in the 1990s at some point but they're supposed to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act every few years. And now it's called No Child Left Behind but it's really just the same law. But what we've seen is really starting in the 1990s when it was called the Improving America School Act I think they stopped calling it the Elementary and Secondary Education Act because it's better PR if you're like No Child Left Behind Act and if you're against it you want to leave children behind. But increasingly the federal government started to say first your structure of your education system has to be based on one set of standards one test and assessment of students and schools and teachers based on that test. What they found in No Child Left Behind was if they let states do that themselves of course they set low standards or easy tests because it's easier to push kids over high bars or just put a low bar and everybody walks right over it. So now the federal government is in the business of dictating specific standards and specific tests. Now they don't dictate by saying you will do this. At this point what they've done is they said look we have been working with people who are creating something called the Common Core which is the National Government Association Council of Chief State Schools who created it. But the federal government said look we are going to first of all through race at the top which was part of the stimulus so it's not even education primarily legislation. We're going to say you want part of this money, you have to adopt Common Core. Then they say if you want waivers out of No Child Left Behind because Congress can't agree on how to reauthorize it so the Executive Department said well just kind of write law ourselves. I said if you want waivers out of parts of No Child Left Behind you don't like the things you have to do is sign on to Common Core and use Common Core tests. Will we take Common Core back to the old debates about content? Is this one of the first what sort of citizen do we need? What sort of thing should our children be learning? Are we back to that at a federal level now? Very good question and this is because this becomes an interesting part of the Common Core debate. There's at this point I don't think any question among people who pay attention to this. The federal government is at this point dictating standards. One of the arguments Common Core supporters use to say oh but standards aren't curriculum. They don't tell you what to teach. They just tell you what kids should be able to know and in part I think this is because they learned a political lesson in the 90s. In the 90s the federal government actually contracted the creation of specific standards and reading and math in history and what they found was as soon as anything with some substantial content comes out everybody finds something to disagree about and it all falls apart. Everybody dislikes it. So the Common Core people learning from that have put out Common Core which at one time they say these are very high rigorous standards that will make us competitive with the best countries in the world. At the same time they say there's nothing really in this. It doesn't require any particular reading any particular way to do math so they're trying to thread this needle to say very high standards but nothing anybody could disagree about. Of course ultimately there will be lots to disagree about and a lot of it will be in these tests that the federal government paid for. They selected the test creators. They paid for it but we haven't actually seen the test yet. That's going to fill this in so we're heading to that debate but right now Common Core people are pretty cagey and they said oh no no there's nothing anybody could disagree with. What's wrong with standards though in the abstract? We have problems with the specific content of these tests or how things are administered but this idea that as you said if you let the states set their own tests, their own standards they'll set them low because they want lots of kids to clear them so what's wrong with having the federal government say look we want all of our kids to know how to read and read at a high level and do math at a high level and no science and all these other things so have the federal government say you've got to teach these kids to a high level what is there to like not like about that? Well first thing I'll say there's nothing wrong with standards. I get involved in a lot of Common Core debates and people like well you're just against standards and I'm absolutely not against standards so when I go to buy a car you know the standard is often set by Road and Tracks review of it or these people who actually get paid because they have expertise and they actually make money over evaluating things for me, the guy without expertise so I'm not against standards it on numerous for numerous reasons it doesn't make sense to have the federal government set standards so the first one is lots of people support Common Core say look the reason that states won't set high standards is because it makes the job of the people in those states who have to do the educating harder so administrators and teachers and not surprisingly it's administrator groups and teaching groups who say don't set rigorous accountability for any of this because that makes our job hard and they have disproportionate power because of constraint benefits to diffuse costs they have the most at stake in the system obviously kids have the most at stake but they have they don't have an interest group they're not as well organized as teachers that's right the five year olds just don't do the lobbying they should and so and even parents I mean first of all it's very hard for parents to organize a union but you have kids for a certain number of years 14, 15 years maybe 16, depending on the kids you have but after that you're out of the system the unions, administrators and teachers they're much longer and so they have disproportionate political power to get what they want and because they're just normal people they're neither better nor worse than anybody else their incentives are like mine you know I'd like to get paid as much as I can and not have somebody punish me based on whether I do my job well or not and so we've seen repeatedly at local levels and at state levels but the farther away you go from the people that school is about to serve the worse it gets they defeat this sort of standards and accountability thing there is absolutely no reason to think that moving it to the federal level fixes that because if you I mean you've been in DC lots of people come to visit DC and headquarter building for the American Federation of Teachers the National Education Association the Association of Secondary School Principles and on and on they're still going to have disproportionate power to bend the system to where it's lowest common denominator standard easy bars to get over so we've moved in absolutely the wrong direction if you want to equalize that power you got to go to school choice you enable the people that schools are supposed to serve to execute immediate accountability by saying we're leaving the schools we don't like that's one among many prompts the other two really other major ones the reality is all kids are different you've probably met more than one child and you've noticed that maybe they do different things maybe they have different interests I know that my sister and I were totally different people in school for a long time really care about school my sister cared a great deal about school we had different talents, abilities, desires and it was sort of crazy to think that we should all be doing the exact same thing at the exact same time so that it just doesn't comply with human reality and then the other problem is suppose there could be one best standard the fact of the matter is we don't know what that is we have ideas what standards we think are better than other ones but if you don't let competing standards or different standards compete you don't see what might work better than what we thought was the best this is crucial innovation you know and even within a federal system we talk about laboratories of democracy you want different states to be able to try different things so that one if you try something bad not everybody gets dragged down but that someone tries something good other people other states can replicate so let's go back I think we got a good full circle there federalization why we need choice and now we can go back to libertarians tend to think about these ideas but I think we'd have to go back to two different things that have emerged for goals of public school they may not be separable but I think there are two here one is socialization creating good citizens which we discussed and another one just might be equality I don't really care that much about legislating that they learn this religion or not but everyone needs to have some sort of baseline of equality and make sure that your ability to get an education is independent upon your parents wealth so in terms of that question in terms of school choice how do we fix that is school choice if we don't even have a voucher system is it going to really hurt the poor the worst in the situation are you asking how does school choice deal with equality equality problem it seems like it would deal with it would not have centralized schools to try and make everyone to a citizen but then there would be a lot of schools that are really bad I think the concern is so you give people a voucher or tax credits or something but in some way you give the parents a certain chunk of cash that they can use to pay for education but that may only pay for not very good education which parents can buy a lot more or it may pay for okay but if you've got tons of money then you can get really world class and so we we end up exacerbating this kind of educational disparity between groups and that's one of the things you've actually heard some people say just a little fault there that they don't like private schools because they want everyone to be put into the public school bath or whatever an algae want to use bin and then fight to raise the whole bin as opposed to just get their own kids a better education so I mean I guess they're all a consolation of questions but their quality question is it seems more what we talk about now than the standards right yeah no I think that that's right there's a there's a big a qualitative argument for public schools to say look if you have school choice it gives the rich an advantage and and will cause greater separation based on class for the most part and there first you have to confront the current system and be very clear about it for one thing while schools have an effect most of the outcomes we're going to see on tests and things like that are based on factors outside of schools so I think there are a lot of schools that are inefficient I think there are schools that do a bad job but let's be very clear that much of those disparate outcomes are not because of the schools and I actually think there's a lot of danger when we people on the right the left the middle constantly say we need to fix schools to get better outcomes we have put on blinders to the fact that there are a lot of problems most of the problems are outside of school that lead to these outcomes and we keep thinking well if we just make schools better we can fix this the reality is seems quite clear we can't that said again schools do have some effect and the reality is rich people even with public schools have way more school choice than anybody else because you choose your schools by choosing a house where you're going to live that means essentially your tuition is how nice a house can you afford that gives rich people a much bigger advantage then if everybody were given you know a voucher for $10,000 or something like that now you can talk about you can go to weighted student funding and things like that with kids with greater needs would get a bigger voucher and things and that within school choice would be a way to equalize it but we can't ignore the reality of the current system and act like people don't already have choice it's just incredibly an efficient choice and extremely unfair but choice it is nonetheless and the reality is what we've seen is there's always this fear that well you'll have these low-income parents who are dropped out won't be able to make good choices whatever won't care and what we've seen where we've had school choice programs and studied what parents have done is usually they make very smart choices understanding their situation the first thing they do is they say I want a school that looks safe and of course that makes sense because if your child isn't safe that's a more immediate need than if they're not learning but with any this is based in the D.C. voucher program in particular this research they found by the second year once they found safe schools they started to say what are your test scores things like that and so I think what you'd find and we see the evidence of it within the very limited school choice programs that exist is that people will become educated consumers if you enable them to become educated consumers and if you make it something that makes sense if you don't let people make a choice there's no reason to think that they will be informed if suddenly you do empower them to make a choice and they will become informed then you go back also to the whole thing of road and track or rich people you know when the first DVD players came out there were these gigantic honking things that were $2,000 or whatever see what rich people do is they vet stuff at the beginning and then you see what works and then quickly after they've been vetted you see much better ones much cheaper and that enables everybody to get all sorts of things that raise their standard living and there's no reason to think education wouldn't work the same way so far as school choice goes there's three terms three things that kind of get kicked around a lot that I was hoping you could distinguish for us or tell us in how they play into the kinds of policies you ought to have so the first is charter schools are they a form of public choice of school choice and then the difference between vouchers but then I know we've published things about education tax credits and are those the same thing as vouchers how are they different and is there is one better than the other all right well you've taken us sort of in the spectrum of school choice from the least desirable to the most desirable at least in the opinion of some people at the Kato Institute but so charter schools charter schools are sort of like a public hybrid only legally they are to be treated as public schools so the idea was that some public entity would allow private entities that ask them to run schools that are supposed to be free of many rules and regulations that govern traditional public schools the idea being then you could have innovation and and to some extent competition but it was more based on innovation and so now you have networks like kip schools and things like that but in many cities and states you have kind of one off mom and pop charter schools but the original idea was the accountability came from first you do have to attract students who carry public money with them it could be state money it could be some combination of state and local money it all depends on local laws and things like that but also to get this charter some ostensibly private entity you agree with the public entity to what outcomes you are going to have usually you get a five year charter now I say public entity not to be sort of over broad but it really depends on your state the norm is you have to go to a school district and say I would like to start a charter school in your district may I do it you can see obviously the problems with that I would like to compete with you can I do it in many places you can appeal if the school district doesn't let you to the state and some state can be a charter board of some type lots of different ways you can do it but the state might override that district say sure you can have that charter school there and in some states you can even go to a public college university that says we'll give you a charter and the money could state money could follow you using that the big problems with that is first of all there's lots of public control often those schools are not freed for most rules and regulations and they have to use state standards and state tests because they are public schools so and there's no religion allowed because they're public schools and the reality is lots of people want religion and education they simply can't get it through charter schools so is it better than the status quo yeah because these are kind of autonomous schools that can try different things and they they do to some extent have to respond to the desires of parents because they do need to get students to get money and that's valuable but there are lots of things they can't do that you'd want private education a voucher is essentially the per pupil allocation for a student follows that student to whatever school they want to go to and that widely varies right it's about I think $28,000 for DC per pupil per year at the high end and then maybe down to $5,000 or so on other states yeah and I speak broadly I say it's the money is attached to the kid because in almost no case is it the full amount usually it's just a fraction of what would have been spent in a public school but that's the idea is at least you're taking that money putting on a child instead of directly allocating it to a school which is what Milton Friedman wanted he wanted to decouple the funding of education from the provision of education and the idea is supposed to be you take that money to any school you want and then that school yeah if it's a school a Montessori school a Zoroastrian school you know could be an art space whatever it is you choose it and you agree to do with that school you know what you agree to their curriculum their policies things like that and they have to you know attract you but alas that I think that where you're going next is is what about the Satanist school I mean are we you know there's got to be yes and that's where we get a problem and this is actually a legitimate concern I think a lot of people say but wait I'm a taxpayer money has been taken from me it's gone to the state and the state typically allocates it to somebody and they might take it to a school that you often hear about the Satan school the madrasa it could be Bob Jones elementary school there are lots of different you know groups of people don't like and they said and so I don't want that to be allowed but it's gotten much more general than that Indiana for instance passive voucher program I said but look so all the schools you go to have to have state standards they have to have state tests they have to have these books that you read and so it's become a lot more than just trying to keep out friend to say okay you're going to choose what we tell you to choose and that's a big problem and it's connected mainly the fact that people send their money to the state and they say look don't take my tax money and waste it or use it on something I find abhorrent or I just don't like I don't think it works so tax credits distance the choice from the government even more what the government says is look we're going to give you a tax credit sometimes it's for your own child if you're in private school you get a credit for that so it's not paying twice for education basically but more powerful or if an individual or a corporation donate to a group that provides scholarships they get a tax credit for that donation that greatly eliminates the coercion the money never goes to the state you don't have to choose to donate if you don't want to you just don't take the credit then and depending on how the law is written you can choose the groups to whom you donate so if you only want it to go to a group that you know it's arts based schools you choose that scholarship grant organization so you haven't been compelled to just hand your money over and the person you get it can take it wherever you want you can say these are the sorts of education I will or will not support would that be an adequate replacement for public schools in general because I can the fear I think is great we're going to give some wealthy people and some corporations are going to get to give money to scholarships which means now those people are going to get to control the kinds of education that are available for one but also we have a lot of kids in this country are they all are there going to be enough scholarships available for them because if you know if an education is tens of thousands of dollars a year then even if you're giving a tax credit for a low income family they're still probably not going to be able to afford it right but and this is really crucial because we spend about 12,000 13,000 per pupil per year that the national average national average right but there's no evidence that that's what's required to actually get an education and so you see lots of private schools you know people here private schools I think have said well friends and over in Exeter these places that cost as much as college but most private schools are usually religious schools that educate at a fraction of the amount that the public schools do even when you consider subsidies that come from it could be a diocese it could become from the congregation regardless they get equal or better outcomes usually at a fraction of the cost which means you could go to these scholarship tax credit you could go to vouchers that are a fraction of what we spend and get the same amount of education at much less money so the problem really isn't that there's not sufficient money what is that data we publish a lot this a lot here at Kato but the correlation between spending and outcomes is zero and would you say that this is widely accepted I mean I know that's a big question but I mean I'm sure there's people out there who disagree or the money's not being spent wisely but we've skyrocketed education spending we've skyrocketed bureaucracy and administrative costs and our performance levels are flat if not negative that's the way I see it yeah widely accepted among people who study education I think most would acknowledge that at least across the board there's no question that we spend a lot of money and have gotten much for it there are lots of debates about well but is our children today harder to educate than they used to be or was the money spent poorly that's another answer I see yeah but the people who disagree publicly they don't usually say the money was spent poorly because they say we need more money what they'll say is look the kids are harder educated today we have more immigrants you know there's poverty is higher things like that now there have been studies that showed actually they're not harder to educate now there is a problem of single parent families which does have an impact but you know that's more or less in the aggregate kids don't seem to be harder to educate than they used to be so the funding increase hasn't just been counteracted by kids being tougher to educate it's pretty clear that that funding isn't helping and then people will eventually say yes there have been lots of things that haven't been good that we've spent the money on and there you certainly could get into questions of well we spend more money how much of that is wealthier people spending money on bells and whistles that they don't need there is that problem but even when you break it down by the income level of the districts of the people in the districts there's not much correlation between income and what's spent so it's true though the wealthiest quintile spends just about the most per pupil but the poorest quintile spends almost the exact same amount and then it's the three in the middle that spend much less so the spending most people I think if they really look at say look that's not that we don't spend enough they may say it should be allocated differently but the reality is outside of people study education most people have no idea what's spent and they're constantly surveys saying how much do you think we spend per pupil and people lowball usually by $5,000 or something and then if you ask them well do you think we spend enough after they give you that they say no it's not enough then you tell them the truth and they're like oh I had no idea that's probably enough or maybe we should spend a little less so it's the public really doesn't know what's spent related to this funding question I have another question that may be very difficult to answer but is one that comes up all the time in debates about education which is teacher pay like we're constantly told that our teachers are this suffering underclass who are paid almost nothing and that you know public school teachers are so important to the nation's future that we ought to radically increase their pay I have someone telling me that there was no pay that was too high the argument for it takes the form I think both of you know that they should be paid more because then they'll we'll get better results out of it but also because they should get paid more just out of a sense of fairness that their value to us should be reflected in their pay and it's not currently right so their problems are this on two levels one is what are they actually paid and then the second part is how should they be paid so usually when you hear about teacher pay you just hear well their salary is X and other people have salary of Y no adjustments made for the amount of time worked once you adjust for the amount of time worked which is both you know that there's summer vacation usually but also how many hours in the day when you are working do you work the reality is teachers certainly do a lot of work I mean it's not just what they do in school there's grading at home and things like that but they've done time diary studies they found they don't really work the weeks when they are you know on the job more on a daily basis than most other professionals with similar educational backgrounds and then once you then control or you calculate an hourly wage as opposed to just a salary that's based on far fewer hours you see that they get paid equivalent to accountants and to lots of other similarly credentialed professionals so then that sort of takes care of the question of well are they grossly underpaid if we as a society think well we know what the right amount is for a teacher to get paid but of course that takes us to the second problem it's every teacher identical of course they aren't but when you have a government monopoly system the tendency is to pay them as if they're identical because you it's just easier to have one set way to pay people and that's why again the problem is ultimately the system so there probably are teachers who provide great value that lots of people would be willing to pay a lot but they can't get that pay they can't go to the school that everybody wants that can then charge more because people are willing to pay it because they get better outcomes and then all the teachers get paid better it's you're in the school district you get paid the same as everyone else if you are a math or science major who could command a lot more outside of teaching sorry you have to get paid the same as everyone else so on a very broad average sense teachers are not underpaid if at least you say relative to other professionals but the reality is we shouldn't teach we shouldn't treat teachers as if they're monolithic we need to treat teachers as individuals and the problem is we have a system that simply incapable of doing that so there may be teachers who should get paid $100,000 $200,000 a year you see in Korea people who are tutors who teach kids online who are very effective tutors make tons of money and we need to look at that sort of system rewarding individual teachers based on their performance and the demand for them rather than say well all teachers are overpaid or underpaid because that just doesn't make sense because all teachers are different so a lot of times when I'm talking to particularly teacher friends which I have a few sort of come up with some of these ideas and see what they think about them but a lot of what I hear from them is that the problem is not the administration or the lack of choice or the money the problem is the parents the parents are the problem I get the kids 8 hours a day maybe if you just have one period with them 1 hour a day 5 days a week and they get them for the rest of the time and I'm expected to turn them into a great scholar you know I can't do that so how do we address that problem and address it within a choice system well that's absolutely a crucial point now there are lots of reasons people might say the parents are the problem but we've seen very clearly as close as you can get to a law and social science is that what happens outside of school is going to have way more impact on what happens inside the school if you just think that how important the first 5 years are in your development most of which happens in school not to say we want to put them into government schools because there's no evidence pre-K works either but that's another podcast but in any event it's absolutely true that those influences are much more powerful than what happens in school that said that can be used also as an excuse to say well there's nothing I can do about it doesn't matter what I teach them I shouldn't even try and you know you may have teachers who do that but I think they're saying look it really is difficult to overcome these problems and I think as a society we all tend to assume that schools could ameliorate these problems and they just can't but do we see evidence that teachers can be demonstrably better than other teachers that's one of the things that can be used to say it's like you give this to the best teacher in the world they're still not going to be able to do anything with them but is there evidence that shows that teachers have a lot of quality there is definitely evidence that you can begin to find that some teachers are better than others the problem is it's hard to do it with hard numbers so there's this there's a big debate within education now about something called value added metrics where you're supposed to use test scores and you would take a teacher and say well what's the average gain in test scores for their students the problem is you have to then control for lots of things that happened to the student beforehand and average those things together ultimately this value added metric becomes a very difficult thing to do so lots of people are trying to say well can we also add then observations of teachers and things like that and I think the reality is that intuitively other teachers and principals and things have a pretty good idea of who's good or not but it's hard to just say definitively we are 100% certain based on this algorithm that this person is really good of course when you're in a business really do they just say you are hired or fired or promoted based on our algorithm outcome but in education government run people say it better be something that clear cut how dare somebody to deprive me of my government job they don't usually put it that way but that's the background is this is government either hiring or firing you saying how can you just let this principal subjectively determine that I'm no good and I should be fired and there could certainly be problems with principals having personality conflicts because they generally don't get rewarded based on how successful their school is so why not just make it easier if you don't get along with a teacher try and shuffle them out so they're very real concerned here it's also I think important to note that sometimes parents can they may care so much about their kids that they come in and become very bossy and bullying that could certainly be part of the problem and it happens from time to time it happens my wife is a teacher more than from time to time well they give good kids definitely and so in a way I mean you want those parents to be engaged but you also don't want them bullying you and saying you better give Johnny an A or ignore what they just did that was terrible because I said so and what I think you'd see in school choices that schools often would be able to say to those parents look you are making this very hard to do our job they may ultimately get evaluated exactly say we don't want to work with you and you would certainly see other private schools say yes we want the money we'll take care of you we'll take do what we can with your son or daughter but you empower the schools to a much greater extent too than saying well they have to take you and this is a big argument a lot of people say well it's not fair that private schools don't have to take everyone the public schools do well the big problem might be that the public schools do have to take everyone they have to try and be all things to all people even though they may be just the one school in the district and that's incredibly hard to do the one thing I just quickly add though is when you see surveys of teachers usually their biggest complaint isn't that they're underpaid most don't seem to think they're underpaid it's usually that they don't have enough control over what they teach they think too many rules and regulations how radical should the choice in school choice be so should schooling be compulsory well so this gets into murky ground and in fact libertarians debate this among themselves well you bring up children it makes us often confused about what sort of principles we apply and this is important because libertarian is usually about people who are capable of self-government of course children aren't unless you have a very precocious child so here's what I think but again this is open to debate I would not ideally now let's be very clear you cannot go to ideal from where we are now where people everybody for the most part assumes someone hands me a school and I go to it but ideally I think what we want is a system where everybody is required to make sure their child gets an education I think we don't though say that means everybody has to send their child to school I think we treat it like we treat a lot of other things if there's suspicion you are not educating your child because I do think we have children and this is what Locke said among other people you know you have a duty to your child to educate them and if somebody from the outside says look this person is not educating their child then authority should come in investigate and same as any sort of child neglect say okay you need to do this otherwise and there has to be a certain level now where do you draw the line that's tough to say I think you know the Supreme Court said 8th grade that's what they said for the Amish was you know that should be where you have to take them after that your community can decide I would say that you need to make sure that all kids are literate and numerate so that they have the basic tools to then pursue other education as they choose as they grow older but the baseline should be the government's jobs make sure everyone's getting educated by policing when people don't do it and that should be it and here's where history again becomes very important most historians even those who support public schooling will acknowledge that most people were getting an education before there was public schooling literacy in the United States was very high before there was public schooling so the reality is most people will educate their children biologically there's been research that shows we have a like a chemical attachment to our children to want and to be compelled to get what's best for them so most people they think if it's not compelled no one will do it but the reality is people did do it and there are lots of reasons to believe they would continue to do it so just because you don't say it's compulsory doesn't mean people won't get education generally what it's saying is they'll choose their own education we won't have to fight about all sorts of things what they're taught you'll have innovation you'll have individualization knowing that all kids are different you'll have a much better education system but you should have that backstop where people are neglecting to supply what their children need so that they can become self-guarding adults that is when the state has a role to step in because you are inflicting harm on that child so as a final question you kind of broach on it there but I think there's two elements of this question which I think you can bridge together one of them is sort of the last objection that's on my mind that I get from the advocates for public schooling is what about those who slip through the cracks because at some element at the end of the day it sounds like even in the system that we would be advocating I mean you just said the state would have to step in but that could be at a very low level at the end of the day there would be someone who slips through the cracks and they don't get an education the state misses them, they don't enforce this and the public education system is there to make sure that nobody slips through the cracks so that's the first part of the question the second part of the question is your hopes and dreams about what the future can be the kind of tying those two together I think you can see the point of how you can tie those two together what are the possibilities that we don't have so that's the upside what are the possibilities that we're not experiencing right now that we can't even imagine that a choice in education could bring right well so the first question about people falling through the cracks obviously that's a concern and I think when we say that the state has a role if it appears that somebody, a child is being neglected that the state then steps in and often this is because there are problems that happen before education ever occurs then we need to always compare to the current system and the fact of the matter is all sorts of kids fall through the cracks all of the time in fact there was an op-ed it might have been 2002 or 2003 I think it was on the Washington Post where this person was writing against school choice saying look I was in the subway could have been the metro I can't remember where they lived but I saw this child who looked to be in bad shape who should have been in school and how would school choice ever help them and I thought you are writing when the predominant system is a public schooling system and you are seeing this child who looks to be neglected who should be in school who isn't so how is that system taking care of them and what we've seen with school choices parents will actually be better advocates for their children be more energetic about their children when they feel that being energetic can actually cause something to happen if you just say as we often see in the school system and this goes back to what people are saying the parents are the problem you often see where people say look well you look the public schools do what they can but parents just aren't doing their job well I mean if that's what you say it's the next stop anyway they're just saying well I can't do it it's a problem for both then this gets into what I really think this might not be the revolution you're talking about like a lot of people think we have school choice you'll have more online education lots of new innovative ways it's delivered but I think what will really be valuable is if you go to school choice I actually think you will get more of what the public schools were supposed to provide which was kind of this social cohesion so this goes back to this goes to social capital theory James Coleman's done a lot of work on this but you will form real communities when people get involved in schooling and they choose schools that have shared norms shared values maybe shared just what they teach but that builds meaningful bonds between people where they will begin to look out for other people's kids they will begin to have sort of this unity we won't all be atomized just basically going where the government tells us to arguing about what's taught and then just accepting some lowest common denominator and hoping we get through within 13 years and get into a good college and I think that's the real value of school choice is it will end divisive conflicts it will let people choose schools based on shared norms and values and most importantly because people say look wouldn't that lead to balkanization where you know all the school together and all the all the people who you know like arts will go to school or whatever but in fact no matter what we've seen in the beginning of research into school choice is the building of meaningful bonds when people for instance choose a private school and they're people from different races they see greater bonds between those kids in those private schools because they've chosen something where the bonding power of what they've chosen or comes to the division that's based on race or something like that so what I think school choice would do is actually lead to the outcomes much more efficiently and effectively that we wanted from public schooling which is people being unified coming together and becoming sort of a cohesive whole without losing lots of the individual things that make them distinctive that are crucially important to them as individuals in other words you sort of marry individual liberty with social even national cohesion Thank you for listening to Free Thoughts if you have any questions or comments about today's show you can find us on twitter at Free Thoughts pod that's Free Thoughts P-O-D Free Thoughts is a project of Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute and is produced by Evan Banks to learn more about Libertarianism visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org