 The latest in school segregation was how the headline of a recent New York Times op-ed described private pandemic pods in which parents get together and hire an in-person teacher while public schools remain remote. The pandemic pod says the writer will exacerbate inequities, racial segregation, and the opportunity gap within schools. Business Insider had a slightly different take. They said the pods were inequitable and inevitable and that the arrangements were a dream come true for the school choice movement. But are pandemic pods just the latest tool through which white parents use their financial and political clout to separate out their children, thus increasing segregation? And is the solution to increase government spending in K-12 schools so that all parents will want to keep their kids in the public system? That was the subject of an online SOHO forum debate held on Wednesday, September 16, 2020. Arguing for more government spending was John Hale, a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Arguing in favor of pods and other parental innovations was Corey DeAngelis, the director of school choice at the Reason Foundation, which publishes Reason TV. Here's John Hale and Corey DeAngelis in an online debate moderated by the SOHO forums director Gene Epstein. Well, again, tonight's resolution reads, To combat inequality, greater investments must be made in public schools so as not to accommodate the formation of pandemic pods by affluent parents. Defending the resolution, University of Illinois Education Professor John Hale, opposing the resolution, Reason Foundation Senior Fellow Corey DeAngelis. I'll be keeping track of time and will briefly interrupt each debater to say when he has five minutes left and one minute left. John, you're first up to defend the resolution. Good evening, everybody. My name is John Hale from the University of Illinois, and it's an absolute pleasure to be here. Thank you for the invitation. I really appreciate the opportunity to participate in such an important debate and question right now in really an American history. And while I'm a social professor of education educational history at the University of Illinois, you know, I come here tonight really as a public education advocate, a father of two little girls, and a very concerned residence of these United States. And tonight I am here to again, argue in favor of the resolution, which reads, To combat inequality, greater investments must be made in public schools so as not to accommodate the formation of pandemic pods by affluent parents. And just to be clear, pandemic pods are small groups of students in the K-12 school system who gather together for in-person instruction outside of the traditional schooling system, of course, to keep safe during this pandemic that's raging around us. They're also controversial because pods can be pricey, complicated to organize. They're self-selecting and they're likely to be popular among families of privilege and affluence. But to really unpack the resolution and why we should be in favor of it, we are looking at, I'm looking at this as a pandemic, but also a dual pandemic. And here I am looking at American educational research associations, use of the term dual pandemic, and also looking at the American psychological association as racism as a pandemic. So really what we're getting here is to look at how we confront the dual pandemic of both COVID and essentially racism. And let me be very clear, first of all, is when I look at race and racial analysis, parents should not be denied the right to form pandemic pods. They have every right to form pandemic pods and to choose to form pandemic pods, nor should parents be told to go back to school if they do not want to physically send their children to school. This is something I understand personally. That's not the debate. The point here is that the focus should be on the fact that policymakers must invest in strategically governed schools to avoid accommodating and please bring here privileging the formation of pods by affluent parents at the expense of those who cannot afford such luxuries at this moment in time. Public schools must receive the support to operate and only as an effective solution to this dual pandemic, but a safe and decent option for the 51 million children that choose to attend a public school. So to unpack this larger debate, I'm going to be focusing on four main talking points. First of which is that pandemic pods are grounded in a racist history and we must look at racism and understand how this is impacting pandemic pods. Second, we're looking at parity and equal opportunities that do not exist. Parity does not exist, equal opportunities do not exist that are necessary to make a good choice that the other side will be advocating for, ultimately. And what little agency existed prior to the pandemic have been ravaged by this dual pandemic that faces us today. Third, money does in fact matter and because of that greater investment is needed. And to this point I'll also say it's not just financial investment, it can also be non-financial investment as well, which I'll elaborate later. And finally, making greater investments in education restores this perennial vision that education should be a common good that shares goals of equality. Pandemic pods ultimately move us away from the shared value system. So to look at my first point, pandemic pods are grounded in a racist history and we have to consider the underlying racist principles that form pandemic pods. So to be up front, of course, there are black and Latinx and indigenous led pods today. Claire Totenberg, Green, Mira Debs, J.P. Gerald, Jennifer Berkshire and others have noted that current pods, however, are compromised by largely white and or economically affluent families. It's been noted in the New York Times and Washington Post and others that upwards of 75% of white people report that when they're making these decisions that the network of people that they consult with to form pods ultimately, they're only discussing this matters with other white people. So in others with this largely entirely white social network and with no presence of black families or families of color, we can map this out to a racial inequity that underpins the formation of pandemic pods today. And if we look at the broader definition of school choice and to use Dr. D'Angelo's term of what school choice is, anything alternative to a public school, right, and pandemic pods fall into that. But other forms of choice also reflect this racialized sort of context. 60% of all homeschool students, for instance, are white. 60% of private school student population are white. Yet white students make up less than 50% of the traditional public school population. So it is clearly evident that pods are racialized and merely perpetuates a larger racist history. Therefore, to quote Claritone McGrane, that it is not a leap to predict that learning pods will mirror the deeply racially segregated lives of most Americans. And this, of course, builds on a much longer history. And we can go back to South Carolina in 1740, Virginia in 1819, other southern states that their first educational policy was in fact to prohibit and forbid enslaved individuals and enslaved communities the right to read and write, to deny enslaved communities a right to an education. Even in the north, if historians have documented, while some opportunity may have been provided to black families and other families of color, it was still largely segregated. So just if you look at the Brown v. Board of Education decision when in 1954, when the Supreme Court determined that such racial segregation was unconstitutional, right, we see white people pulling out of this system. Okay. So here we have the sociological phenomenon of course of white flight, where white families are leaving the city and urban centers en masse to move to the suburbs and then essentially set up public schools in the suburbs, which are largely segregated just due to residential patterns. We have segregation academies, which are formed by southern legislatures with oftentimes with public money, schools, private schools that are exclusively white as to avoid desegregated public schools. We have freedom of choice plans in which white people argue that there is a constitutional right to freedom of association, which is true, but they apply that right to not have to be forced by government schools to go to a desegregated public school. This of course is the historic basis for school choice that we know today. It's also the basis for this phenomenon we see recently of school districts actually succeeding pulling out of public school districts, infamous cases in Shelby County in Tennessee around the city of Memphis. Okay. And also as in four Hannah Jones documents very thoroughly in the state of Alabama. So while people are pulling out again and by its very nature, it's largely a white led movement. We must consider race in the institutional racism next underpinning pandemic pause. This does not mean of course pandemic pod parents, if you will, are racist. All it means is that we have to look at the larger systemic nature of racism in public education, something in which this form actually debated a few weeks ago about the police, you know, system being racist and that's so whole form agreed to it. So I mean, it's not too much of a jump to see that the school system is racist as well. Or I'm rather underpinned by racist policy. My second point is interrelated. Parity does not exist and equal opportunities do not exist for parents who need to make the best choices because they don't exist in order to make the choice to go to the best schools available to you. Not only that, what little agency existed before the pandemic, right, has been devastated by this dual pandemic of coronavirus and racism, which has exposed tragic truths. CDC reported, and you can just look at how this pandemic has played itself out. And this is, of course, captured the new cycles of as this pandemic unfolds. CDC has reported that over 21 percent of COVID cases in the United States were African Americans and nearly 34 percent were Latin X, despite the fact that these groups comprise only 13 and 18 percent of the US population, respectively. In cases where, you know, for instance, school choice research says, will indicate that cities like Milwaukee are doing a really good job in school choice. We actually see African American population in these cities where they suffer nearly four times and Latinx families suffer six times that the amount of whites in terms of who ends up in a hospital, who comes down with the coronavirus. So it's exposing these tragic racial truths. It also, in terms of the economy, we see that 48 percent of all adults living in houses where at least one person lose employment income since mid-March or the onset of what we now know as, of course, the coronavirus pandemic. For black and Hispanic and Latinx households, rather, this rises to 53 and 62 percent, respectively. We also see that nearly 33 percent of all adults live in households where they expect someone to lose employment, yet with black and Latinx families, this rises to nearly 50 percent. Additionally, we see that when we work quarantine and sheltering in place, or rather supposed to, we see that in the largest cities in the United States, black and Latinx families comprise as much as 75 percent of all the city's essential workers. So essentially, we have a racialized, essential working population that has to go back to work thus exposing them to the virus. Let's look at how this plays out within schools. Nearly 17 million children, it is reported, lack access to a high-speed internet connection. And it's also been found that one in three black Latinx and American Indian households lack such internet access, making children in these homes much more likely than their white peers to be disconnected from online learning, the format that we have come to depend on during this pandemic. Additionally, social capital is required to understand this convoluted choice process, such as, you know, educational savings accounts, which requires an understanding of a process. It requires a financial investment. It requires social networks with the knowledge to complete the process, to know how to apply and where. It requires time taken out during working hours to decipher this convoluted process. And it also includes a demand for resources, including transportation and proximity to the very best schools available to us today. So what we see then with this dual pandemic essentially is that the ability for people to make a choice, to even get to the point to make a good choice, greater investment is needed. This leads to the third point that money matters and greater investment is of course needed. To deny investment in public education starts to border on an extreme position. To ignore the fact that pods and the best choice options do not require investment once given the choices of gross oversight. Moreover, it is disingenuous to cut funding while acknowledging that more money is needed. For instance, let's just look at the cost of pandemic pods to begin with. At least reports are coming in that you need at least $30 an hour to hire a tutor or $100 or more to hire a more qualified tutor, not to mention professionally trained licensed teachers have costs upwards of $100,000 per year for pandemic pods to hire and work with such teachers. This clearly surpasses an $800 to $1,200 a month expenditure for these small pods, which is what a lot of people are paying for rents and mortgages. So there is an increased expectation that people have to buy into this in order to pay for these pandemic pods. And then of course, money of course matters. They cost money to organize a pandemic pod. And economists across the board, Kirvel Jackson, Bruce Baker, David Martinez, and others have cited dozens of studies have shown that money matters. Studies across the board show that there's a 10% increase in per pupil spending for each year for all 12 years of public schools leads to more completed years in college, just under one half, 7% higher wages and 3.2% percentage point reduction in the annual incidents of adult poverty. Kirvel Jackson, for instance, also finds that $1,000 reduction in per pupil spending due to the recession, which even happened before the pandemic, of course, leads to a decline in student test scores of about 3.9% of a standard deviation. Money matters. Even Eric Panishek, someone oftentimes cited by the other side has recently come out to say that we are uninvesting, underinvesting in education in the United States. And this is a very serious issue he recognized. Finally, to the fourth point, making greater investments actually restores a historic vision that education should be a common good. Sometimes, you know, disputed about maybe it's perhaps a public good, but let's draw on the historic language of a common good with goals of equality and opportunity. Historically, national leaders since Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, Benjamin Rush, Noah Webster have published thoughts and philosophies and ideas of their particular educational philosophies that education must be inextricably linked to the survival of the Republic and the democracy. It has been understood since the founding of our nation that education should be a common good to this extent that states have picked up upon this sentiment and enshrined this in state constitutions. Just read, for instance, Arkansas is a good example where it leaves, quote, intelligence and virtue be in the safeguards, liberty and the bulwark of a free and good in government. This state shall ever maintain a general suitable and efficient system of free public schools. California, a general diffusion of knowledge and intelligence being essential to the preservation of rights and liberties of all people. This legislative shall provide a system of free public schools. This goes on and on to the extent where it is understood that schools should and must be part of this common good of a shared value system. And we have believed this historically to the extent that schools cannot be simplified as a place to simply study a curriculum into take a test. Schools serve a much larger social function. Schools are the main source of child care for working parents, and we're seeing this during the pendant. Schools are a key place for children to get healthy meals. Schools are crucial for the health of all children. Schools are especially important for dealing with the mental health of young people. Schools essentially serve as an oasis for children who are suffering from traumatic instances outside of the school. It is a state haven and a necessary space for tens of millions of children. In short, public education has been seen as a common good, and we must continue to invest in this. When we're trying to survive this dual pandemic, greater investment is needed. It's not asking a whole lot. It's just to invest in this system where tens of millions of children must go, either in an online format or in person, to all you otherwise borders upon an extreme position that dismisses both the history of our various system of public education, and it ignores the existing problems that we must address as a nation during this dual pandemic. Perfect. Just three seconds under, John. So you did well. Thanks a lot. Now, Cory, D'Angelo, this is up for the negative. Take it away, Cory. All right, cool. Yeah, thank you so much, everybody, for coming out. I want to thank John Hale for going over his arguments for his proposal to throw more money at the problem. I'm going to argue against that proposal and offer a counterproposal that I think beats his proposal every step of the way, and basic logic would have it if you prefer my proposal to John Hale's proposal, that would have you reject John Hale's proposal to throw more money at the public school system. My proposal is to fund students directly instead of institutions and allow students to take their education dollars to whatever educational setting works best for them, and that still could be the traditional public school system. If that works for a particular family and if the traditional public school system is high quality for their family and if the school has a great reopening plan that works for them, families should absolutely be able to continue choosing that. But if for whatever reason, that does not work, the money should follow the child, the money that already exists in the education system for that child should follow them to wherever they're getting an education. That can be in a private school to pay for tuition and fees, and that could be in a pandemic pod, which is the main point of this discussion today. And I will say this should lead to more equality, because advantage folks are already going around informing pandemic pods. Advantage folks can already afford to pay for private school out of pocket. My proposal leads to more equality of opportunity by allowing for less advantaged families to have the means to be able to pay for these alternatives as well. And this is similar to how we fund so many other taxpayer funded initiatives from Pell Grants to Pre-K programs to Food Stamps. With all these other initiatives, the funding rightly goes to the families, and then the families have a choice of where to spend that money. With Food Stamps, you can choose that the money goes to the family and the family can choose to spend the money at Walmart, Whole Foods, Trader Joe's. We should do the same thing when it comes to K-12 education. So I think we should fund the student instead of the system. We should fund the student instead of the institution, just like we do with all of these other programs. And after all, the money is supposed to be meant for educating the child. It's not supposed to be meant for propping up and protecting a government-run monopoly. Everybody in here would think it would be absolutely ridiculous if we forced low-income families to take their food stamps to a residentially assigned government-run grocery store. It's absolutely ridiculous, similarly in the case of 12 education, to not allow families to have the choice to take their children's education dollars to wherever they're getting a proper education. So that's my main proposal. And I would also argue that it should be tied to a percentage of what is already spent in the traditional public school system. We already spend around $15,000 per child, per year in the traditional public school system, and that amount has increased by 280% in real terms since 1960. It's nearly doubled since 1980, and it's increased by around 40% in inflation-adjusted terms since 1990. I think it should be about 80% of the money that already exists in the system. This could create a taxpayer savings. It doesn't have to be that way, but this is one way to ensure that there's either fiscal neutrality or a taxpayer savings with my proposal. John Hale's proposal, I would imagine, would take a lot of money. He didn't really give us a number as to how much money is enough when it gets to greater investments. I guess he'll get into that in the next five-minute segment, but I didn't hear any amounts of how much this is going to take for more equality in the traditional public school system. But my incentive has a lot of benefits along with it. We don't have to guess about how much the money is going to cost. I already told you it's going to be 80% or higher or some number around there of the $15,000 that we already spend. Some states spend less, some states spend more, so it would be relative to what your child would have gotten in the traditional public school system. Hale's proposal assumes that incentives do not matter. So you can throw more and more money into a system, and it could matter, and it could matter for student outcomes in certain locations, but it's not going to matter if there are no incentives to spend that money wisely on the individual student. And I would argue the traditional public school system has a lot of monopoly power, and that individual families in the current system are residentially assigned to a particular school just based on where they live, and so that provides a lot of monopoly power in addition to compulsory funding through property taxes. And so, since they know they have your money regardless, and since the transaction costs are high for switching to another school, there's a lot of monopoly power in the residentially assigned traditional public school system. Just imagine if you were residentially assigned to your nearest grocery store, they wouldn't really have a strong incentive to do a good job because they know that they would have you on the hook as a customer. And I think this whole debate about the school reopening has more to do with incentives, and I will say my proposal does allow for bottom-up incentives and accountability to be introduced into the system by allowing individual families, not just rich families, less advantaged families as well, to vote with their feet to the provider of the educational service that works best for them, and that could lead to improvements in the traditional public schools as well. And we have 28 studies on this topic, what happens in response to private school choice competition in the traditional public schools for the children to remain in those schools for whatever reason. 26 of the 28 studies find statistically significant positive competitive effects on the children who remain in the traditional public school system. So this could be a tide that lifts all boats. And just think about the reopening plans of different businesses today. Private businesses, including private schools and daycares, are fighting to reopen, but public schools all too often are fighting to remain closed. And I think the difference here is one of incentives. One of these sectors gets your money regardless of how well their reopening decision works for their customers. And if you look at the Education Week database on this, covering over 900 school districts in the United States, which covers around 40% of all students in the traditional public school system, around three quarters of the 100 largest school districts in that data set are not reopening with any in-person instruction available to any students at all. And if we would expect that more money would lead to better reopening plans or better educational outcomes, we would think that our NAEP scores would have gone up over time. But we essentially see a huge increases in spending over time, but then pretty flat standardized test score outcomes when it comes to the NAEP long-term trend data on this. But then also, we should also expect that in the Education Week dataset that we would see that districts that spend more money should be more likely to reopen in person if it's all about the financial, if it's all about the finances in the system. But if you pull up the Education Week data and do a simple correlation between spending per pupil in the school district and whether they reopened in person or not, it's actually a negative correlation. You would expect it to be a positive correlation if more money led to being more able to reopen in person. And this relationship, this negative relationship, which is pretty shocking, stays significant and negative, even after controlling for a whole bunch of different demographic characteristics such as the racial composition in the area, the age distribution in the area, and even median household income in the area. I think it has more to do with politics and power dynamics than it does with the amount of money that's in the system. I mean, just think about DC public schools in my area. They spend over $31,000 per child per year, yet they're not reopening for any in-person instruction until at least November 6th. And so they spend way more than the national average, a little over twice the national average, and they're not reopening in person. But then you have Florida that spends much less than the national average, and 73% of the school districts in Florida are reopening with full-time in-person instruction available to all students despite not having a ton of resources on a per pupil basis. But then you look at states like California that have stronger teachers' unions and spend more than Florida, and only about 4% of the school districts in the Education Week database reported that they're going to reopen full-time with in-person instruction for all students. So California has stronger teachers' unions and spends more, yet they're less likely to reopen. And then if you look in DC, I already told you how much the public school spend. The charter schools spend less than the traditional public schools in DC. They actually spend about 29% less on a per pupil basis than the traditional public schools in DC, yet the charter schools are sending me things in the mail about hybrid options available to students and also full-time virtual learning if parents want that as well. So they're more likely to give families options, but you would expect if the money was the big deal about the reopening, then the charter schools should be less likely to reopen in person, but they're actually more likely to reopen in person. And I think that has to do with two things. Charter schools are a lot less likely to be unionized than the traditional public schools, and charter schools have a more competitive incentive to get it right because they know they need to advertise to the parents in order to give them something that the individual families want. And a lot of families do want some type of in-person instruction for their families, but they are still offering the full-time virtual school option as well in the charter schools in DC. So I don't think it's a big money issue. And although John didn't tell us how much money he's going, he would like to pour into the system, there are some unintended impacts of increasing taxes to pay for this. And I would expect it would be a lot of money, but we'll get into that in a little bit. But if you increase the property taxes, that could increase the price of renting that unit, and that could hurt disadvantaged communities by increasing their rent prices indirectly through raising property taxes. That could also, if it's funded through sales tax, that could hurt disadvantaged communities by not allowing them to consume at the same rate. And it could also shudder their employment opportunities, and then that could lead to unemployment for disadvantaged communities as well. And then I'm not sure if the schools are going to reopen, even if there are greater investments in the school system. And so with John Hale's proposal, we have to do a lot of assumptions about the schools making the right decision and actually reopening. And I'm not sure if they'll actually do that. They may spend the money on other things. Just look at the CARES Act funding. We've already allocated over $13 billion to K through 12 education from the federal government, yet the schools aren't reopened. That's about a quarter of what the federal government spends in total on K through 12 education each year. So we've already poured a lot of money into the school system, and they're not reopening. But also the schools may, yeah, they may get more money and then just say, oh, we reassessed the situation. We actually asked for $100 billion. But you know what? We think we need $150 billion. And I think that has to do with incentives. They have a pretty strong incentive to remain closed. Just imagine if Walmart got your grocery money each week and you had to continue paying them regardless of their decision to reopen. They would have a much different incentive than what they do have today. My proposal beats Hale's proposal in a couple of other ways as well. My proposal gets into, so you don't have to assume goodwill on the side of the traditional public schools, because even if the traditional public schools don't make a good reopening decision or they don't invest the money wisely and do a good job, then the families would still be able to opt out. But if the schools do make a good decision, then the families would still be able to pick their traditional public schools. So we don't have to make an assumption about what the schools are going to do with the money, because if they don't make the right decision, people could vote with their feet and take their money elsewhere. I mean, if a Walmart doesn't reopen, you can take your food stamps elsewhere. You can take your money elsewhere. If the school doesn't reopen, each family should be able to take their child's education dollars elsewhere at the same time. My proposal allows for individual needs to be met. Hale's proposal is a one-size-fits-all solution that might not work it for everybody. A school reopening plan may work for a lot of individual families, but perhaps you're from a family where you're living with your grandparents and the student has a high-risk condition for the virus. Maybe that school reopening plan still doesn't work for them in the public school system. So maybe it would still be beneficial for them to be able to use that money to go to a pandemic pod. And so that allows for this recognition of individual needs that aren't the same as the needs of perhaps the majority. And even if you have access to a quote-unquote high-quality public school, it might not be a good match for every individual child. They may not be interested in it. They may be getting bullied in that public school system. And I still think they should be able to have a choice as well. Because look, again, rich people already have school choice. They can already afford to pay for a property that's residentially assigned to the best traditional public schools in the current system. Rich people can already afford to pay for private school out of pocket. Rich people can already afford to have the option of the pandemic pods. All I'm saying is that we should allow other people to have that option as well. Even if Hale's proposal is correct in that putting more money into the public school system incentivizes families to go back into the traditional public school system. Those advantage families will still have the power to make the choice to exit that system. So they would still have that choice. So it doesn't really lead to equality of opportunity, which funding the students directly would give more families that ability to make that choice. Even if it's the public school system, they should still be able to make that choice. My proposal is safer in theory if you believe in social distancing. My proposal allows families to exit the public school system and spread out to other locations with smaller class sizes in private schools, but then also pandemic pods, which are smaller locations. And that will decrease the class sizes in the traditional public schools as well. Hale's proposal is instead trying to incentivize people to stay in the traditional public school system, which would could lead to less social distancing and less safety. And again, this also assumes that the families are choosing the pandemic pods only because of safety. And it could be that the traditional public schools spend the money on things that do make the schools a little bit safer. But for the individual families, they may say that, well, this isn't safe enough. I would still like the pandemic pod because this is kind of a big factory warehouse setting. I know you have all the equipment and materials, so the family still may not go back into the traditional public school system. And even if they did go back into the traditional public school system, the traditional public school system is inherently unequal that you have certain families that are residentially assigned to higher quality traditional public schools. Then you have others that are not assigned to the high quality schools and they're stuck in the failing traditional public schools. So even if Hale gets his proposal correct, it would incentivize families to go back into their original schools. And I don't see how that could lead to more equality. Mine doesn't eradicate inequality entirely, but it does lead to more incentives for bottom up accountability for the lower quality schools to improve. And it does give disadvantaged families options right now. And that's another point is that Hale's proposal could take a long time. Look, we've already been waiting a long time for the schools to reopen and high income families, affluent families have already been accessing alternatives to the system for the past few months. I don't think low income families should have to wait any longer. They should be able to access these alternatives like the affluent families right now. And the best way to do that in a quick manner is to allow the funding to follow the child to wherever they're getting an education. And so with Hale's proposal to invest in the traditional public school system, a lot of the issues about the safely reopening schools have to do with the buildings themselves and the high class sizes and the big structure of the school buildings themselves. And so reshaping the buildings could take a long time, which low income families shouldn't have to wait any longer. Advantage families haven't had to wait at all. And with school choice, the disadvantaged families won't have had to wait for the past couple of months either. And then also we don't know how much money this is going to take. With my proposal, we know how much money it's going to take. For Hale's proposal will be an increase in expense. Mine will be a theoretically it could be a decrease in taxpayer expense, but it also could be a budget neutral proposal as well. So in summary, it's just to hit it really quickly. My proposal beats Hale's in that it's cost less doesn't cost more and doesn't come along with all the unintended consequences of raising rent on people, raising sales tax for people or putting people out of business by increasing corporate income taxes or however it's going to be funded. My proposal allows for considers the needs of individual families, which could differ from the one size fits all approach in the traditional public school system. And each child is unique. And so they should be able to sort based on those unique interests and needs that they have and their individual family circumstances. Hale's proposal doesn't introduce any new competitive incentives for the public school system to spend that money wisely. So we have to do a lot of assuming about how the schools are going to spend the money with my proposal. It allows for additional competitive pressures for the public schools to get better and then for students to be able to access schools that are better for them. Also, the Hale's proposal does not expand opportunity for disadvantaged communities. They still just have to wait on the government to improve their education system. They've low income families have been waiting decades already for the government to pour more money into the public school system to improve. And they haven't seen those improvements. They shouldn't have to wait anymore. They should get the money right now. And it should follow their child to a better educational option. And I can get into this a little later. I know I'm a little over. But my proposal, well, it could lead to more safety by spreading children out in more locations. It could lead to more equality of opportunity. And it could benefit teachers too. We already have evidence of teachers exiting the public school system for pandemic thoughts. Thanks. That was five seconds over for Corey. So we won't find you too bad too badly for that. But I had a technical difficulties. I'm just kidding. No, no, no, actually, no, actually Corey, you considered it. I know. Yeah, you know, I'm very flexible. Gave you the 10 seconds. But you guys are doing well in terms of time, both of you are no problem at all. And now we go into the rebuttal portion of that five minutes of peace. So, John, you get your chance at rebuttal. Take it away, John. Okay, you know, Corey, there's a lot said I'm going to try to respond what I can and try to break it down to, I think, the most essential points. And part of that I'm going to say just requires about what my, it's not a proposal as much as the defense of Black families, Latinx families, and families of color in public schools, that investment is needed. So in terms of, I feel a little pressure to put a number on that, but let me explain where I'm coming from with greater investments. And I'm coming at this from a historical point of view, and a social political point of view as well, is that investment can mean more money. It can mean more money. In many ways it should be because I've been and worked and organized around many of these schools where you do need more money, but that later. But it can also mean, you know, if you look at when the first pandemic pod news hit the summer, like J.P. Gerald and Mira Jebs said, one way to invest is it's not necessarily spend more money. It's showing up to pressure the public schools to do the right thing. That's an investment. If you're forming a pandemic pod and you are worrying about paying the best teacher you can and staying safe, right, you're pulling out of that system. You're pulling out of the public discourse to pressure unions to do the right thing and to pressure local school to write things. So investment also includes that. And also in terms of I'm not going to put an exact number on it because it our, as you know, Corey, right, our and hopefully people in that as I assume we all do, how incredibly complicated our funding structures in the United States, local state, federal, and even I spent seven years teaching in Charleston, South Carolina. It's a hundred mile long school district. And, you know, you could break down numbers about personal expenditures even within this district. And it looks quite different. I mean, schools that were reportedly failing at students received more than the best performing public schools in the area. So something there's intra district disparity that these sort of broad numbers just don't cover. But let me get back to this point of investment. What I'm proposing, if you will, but what I'm really defending and asking you to consider, no matter how you vote on it tonight, whatever, it's to just take the idea that investment means believing in and empowering and uplifting those who have been historically disenfranchised by a racist public school system, who you mentioned like for decades, people have been asking and waiting for the government to do something. They've been people have been waiting, families of color, black families in particular and coming from the South for the past 10 years are not waiting. They're already demanding change and people aren't listening. And investment could be simply listening to what people want in their schools. I trust parents in public schools. I trust parents who choose public schools. They know more than I do sit in here coming from afar and champagne Illinois telling them what what they need to do. No, they knew they knew they know best. It's a problem that extends itself to the civil rights movement. Here we're looking at none other than September Clark, Ella Baker, Bob Moses, Dave Dennis, I can go on and on and on. The solutions are held in the community. I want to empower those communities and I'm going to listen to them as they tell me what investment they need because that is the solution. And just something else, I think for the remainder of the minutes, I'm, you know, personally, and I know I've heard a lot of people coming forward with articles, what not tonight, I'm very highly uncomfortable with this idea about comparing schools, which my daughters are going to go to, to a Walmart to compare it, they're going to school, like it's using a food stamp that, you know, schools, as I mentioned in my opening, and I'll say it again, because I think it was perhaps Mr. Just, you know, there's a lot happening, right, especially with faulty zoom wires, that schools are much more than a place just to learn a curriculum, that just to go and listen to a teacher and take a test, right? That's one way to look at what schools provide health, health and well-being for our students. Schools can and should be a safe place for students coming from traumatic backgrounds or experience trauma in the pandemic. The dual pandemic has exacerbated this, right? Schools are not only a safe place, but they are a meeting place for people to try to improve our democracy. So to try to put one single number on that and try to say like this is like a Walmart, I don't want to go send my daughters to a school that's like Black Friday and people are like mobbing each other to get the best product. I don't, I don't want a teacher who's paid as much as a greeter, and I love the greeters at Walmart, don't get me wrong, but they're underpaid and they're honestly are not insured properly. I don't want to send my school, my kids to a Walmart. And even I've heard before like a Trader Joe's or something, okay well then it's a grocery that's in a gentrified white area and you're limiting the choice. So I think that they're you know a better analogy than food stamps and Walmart. That's not the school that I'm talking about. That's not the school that historically we're talking about and quite frankly in this pandemic we're talking about safe spaces for our students. Yeah okay you just went nine seconds over so we're all fine, but thanks, thank you John and then hold on a second I've got to clear this and so Corey you've got five minute rebuttal, take it away Corey. Cool thank you so much John for going over the rebuttal points. I would still like to know how much more investment is needed in the traditional public school system and I know it's really difficult to come pin down a number but this is the argument that's made over and over again over the past two decades is we need a little bit more money. We'll do better this time, we promise. We need a little bit more money and we've increased every single decade on the US on the national average per people expenditures after adjusting for inflation. Since 1960 it's increased by 280%. So I really would like a number. I'm giving people a number. I'm saying it's 80% of what they would have gotten in the traditional public school system and that's another benefit of my proposal that it's there's more certainty you don't have to do all this guesswork and it's not something that we've tried a million times before and I wanted to just clarify really quickly with the Walmart analogy. I'm not saying schools are Walmart's that's why I also tried to put in the analogy of pre-K programs and Pell grants which those are educational institutions where the money goes to the family and the family has a choice in the matter and a lot of the people who do not like K through 12 having the funding follow the child will support pre-K funding following the child and Pell grant funding follow the child which the only reason I can kind of conjure up as to why you would be for one and not the other is there's an entrenched special interest in protecting the status quo when it comes to K through 12 education whereas in pre-K and Pell and higher ed the the default is more choice and more freedom already and we already have systems where people can take their money to particular institutions. I just want to get respond to a couple of points John Hale pointed out that 51 million students choose to attend public schools in the United States they don't make that choice they make that choice because it's that's the only choice that they have and they don't they can't afford to pay twice to pay for a private school out of pocket while paying for the traditional public school through the property tax system if people had the choice many more would choose private schools and pandemic pod options and I think John Hale understands this because he said this in his recent podcast where he believes that allowing the money to follow the child would be a quote devastating blow to the public school system why would it be a devastating blow to the public school system it's it's an admission that when people are given the option there won't be 90 percent of kids in traditional public schools they'll go somewhere else because they like the alternative options even when they're given less money than what is spent on them in the traditional public school system I also want to point out John Hale spent a lot of his time talking about racist origins of school choice or the apparent racist origins of school choice I will argue that school choice was around long before the 1950s we've had we've had three private school voucher programs in the United States that started in the late 1800s in Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire and those didn't have racist origins and I also will say in the 1950s people opposed school choice segregationists actually proposed opposed school choice because they knew it would allow other students into their schools and it would allow for more racial integration and in fact if you look at the evidence on the private school choice literature there's only eight or nine studies on this all but one of those studies find that on net school private school choice programs today lead to racial integration because it allows for students to escape racially segregated schools and we cannot forget that the traditional public school system is a segregated system John Hale also pointed out that and conceded that the traditional public school system there are aspects of systemic racism in it and that's a good argument for school choice why force people into a system that suffers from systemic racism why not allow people to vote with their feet and to go to an alternative situation John Hale also pointed out that I'm glad he pointed out that there's a lot of success with school choice in Milwaukee and I just want to thank him for making my argument for me there have been two random assignment studies in Milwaukee both have found some suggestive evidence of winning a lottery to attend a private school in Milwaukee would increase standardized test scores but we've seen other matching studies find increases in college enrollment and high school graduation rates and then also one of my studies I've done with Patrick Wolf has found a reduction in criminal activity in two different peer reviewed studies in Milwaukee so thanks so much for you know checking that out I also want to point out to listeners something that I thought was disturbing John Hale pointed out that some families may not have the social networks and knowledge to do the process but a lot of processes take a lot of information to gather but you know I don't have to be a medical doctor to choose my doctor I don't have to and with food stamps that it takes a lot it's very difficult to find the right foods for your family should we take away food stamps from disadvantaged families just because it takes some information gathering no we should still give them that power to make that choice um even if it's a difficult decision for them to make and I think all families have the best incentives and information about what their own children need more so than a bureaucrat sitting in an office that's hundreds of miles away that's over and also all right that's fine okay thank you for that uh rebuttal and now we go to uh the q and a portion of the evening uh and uh the loose rules are that either of you have the prerogative to ask the other question at any time let's begin by asking john at this point you can reserve the right to do so later at this point is they're a question that you would like to put to quarry or do you want to wait on and wait for audience questions or whatever but do you want to exercise that right at this point yeah can I just clarify or ask a clarifying point about um Milwaukee and why that works and I still haven't really received a direct response to about the pandemic of racism and you're talking about low income which seems to be you know loosely you know correlated you're using it as a way to talk about racism just clarify about Milwaukee specifically and why it's working just maybe to something to talk about and then also how when we talk about um I'll start with that one question walking and then connecting to that how does following the money or if I'm putting money so the money follows the student right so empower students through this sort of um handout if you will or check right you're giving students adventure to go over to to use the schools right so how does that still meet the historic and social function of schools that have been established since ultimately in the 18th century yeah I want to point out that if you ask minority families if they like school choice they're much more likely to support school choice than white families so I think uh you know when you ask them you know what what what minority families want we should allow them to make a choice in the matter um and so yeah it's not just low income families who want school choice it's all sorts of families who want school choice and in Milwaukee it's not the only place that has found positive effects of school choice programs we have charter schools all across the nation uh in most states about 45 different states have charter schools uh with voucher programs there are 17 experimental studies of the effects of private school voucher programs on test scores and the majority of those have found statistically significant positive effects on for overall or for some subgroups of students and only one of those experimental two of those experimental evaluations of the 17 have found statistically significant negative effects so it's it's hard to tell exactly what's causing the difference in outcomes because even if you have a gold standard evaluation it's something called a black box intervention where you know that you know winning the lottery is what caused the better outcomes we don't know the exact mechanisms of what's going on a lot of people have theorized about what could cause a difference in outcomes one of the best main theories is that it's competitive pressures and i will say there are the 28 other studies that i cited at the beginning of this 26 of 28 have found positive competitive effects on the traditional public school so the traditional public schools respond pretty positively uh for the most part if you look at the evidence on that as well and um just because something has existed for a long time doesn't mean that that's the best system for each individual family now and i'm not calling to eliminate the public school system i think i think that should still be part of the choice that people should still be able to choose i i made sure i started with that people should still be able to choose the public school if that works for them but if it doesn't they should be able to select some other option uh that is more able to cater to their individual needs so john you'll put a put a fine point on the answer john was pressing for an explanation about why milwaukee other places have a greater success you mentioned competitive pressures could you elaborate on that for in terms of john's question for the moment yeah the private schools uh have a strong incentive to cater to their needs of their customers because they know that those families can take their money elsewhere so because private schools have a strong incentive to cater to the needs of those families that could lead to better outcomes uh through the voucher program because they're able to access schools that already have those incentives to to do a better job all right and then uh bolson your court do you want at this point yet says the option of putting a question to john or do you want to wave that um yeah so i i guess uh one of my main questions for john is uh based on what i pointed out about that uh podcast where he said that he believed that if we had a situation like esas or having the money fall the child he believes that it would be a quote devastating blow to the public system why would giving families a choice be a devastating blow to the system that the residentially assigned to um so you know focusing on greater investments which is the resolution before so that great investors need to be made and this is a comment that i'll put in the context because you asked specifically but to make greater investments we have to understand that privileging and accommodating choice at this point in this historic moment united states can have a devastating impact let's just look at educational savings cones for instance so when when i hear other sides talk about educational savings accounts and it we just in a lot of economists right seem to assume that this is already an equal playing field right however why is it then if it is an equal playing field right why do we have so many black in latinx and indigenous american families without a savings account in the banks whatsoever so we assume that giving families and uh students more choice we're assuming there's an equal playing around but it's not right we can't make that assumption so if we all assume say okay we're going to move to educational savings account and if i'm not mistaken you actually called educational savings account a panacea um at one point um or alluded to the fact that it can it can raise all boats that in fact if you actually look at what's going to happen if you went to educational savings cone immediately there's no parity and opportunity to even put it into savings accounts right in some studies less than 70 to 75 percent of black and latinx families even have a savings account as they exist by some studies and when you look at the historic distrust of black and latinx families in banks that that doesn't seem to be a fair option to just look at one example of choice so that can have a devastating impact if you all of a sudden start to create these savings accounts and in arizona we've seen money being transferred to public schools to these states but it really doesn't work in terms of providing quote unquote more choice also historically i got to correct that that's just simply you know school choice didn't exist from the beginning of the founding of public education in the united states school choice specifically is has been traced with consensus among historians to milton freeman in 1955 now robert gross is talking about the school choice how we use it today how we use it today is largely credited with school choice so providing that choice always has this problematic relationship to racism and when we propose choice as a solution we're not taking into account the uneven playing field that already exists that is why greater investment is needed to even make that choice to even to to allow people to sort of empower their individual lives right to empower to make the decision to be empowered to invest in such savings accounts right that is why choice can have a very negative effect on uh on families of color today all right and john uh john i believe that you had a second question you wanted to put to quarry having to do with race yeah so okay and then also when you so milwaukee is very interested in from the great state of wisconsin out in the country but you know milwaukee more power to milwaukee we seem to miss when we're talking about what the historic origins of the voucher and choice program there howard fuller who i've interviewed extensively and then you know basing a chapter in him and my fourth come in book check it out maybe genus and the amazon link out later but um this actually grows out of the civil rights movement as a way to um provide community control to the black community in the city of milwaukee derrick bell founder critical race theory came to milwaukee to argue that perhaps this public system isn't working we need to have a community controlled system and that's what they propose choice and vouchers are sort of a negotiated compromise after that and howard fuller has been critiqued heavily for that he's oftentimes associated as as one of the strongest but very few black voices in in terms and in favor of school choice i don't think that's right but what i'm saying is you know we need to see how choice evolved in milwaukee to understand what the what the issues going on in milwaukee also in the city of milwaukee we have the pan the dual pandemic that ravages that city four times as many african-american families in the city of milwaukee six times the latinx families in the in the city of milwaukee come are stricken with the corona virus right so it still begs the question why are we going to disinvest for a voucher system that affects so few people at a at a national scale to point to cities like milwaukee in cleveland i saw come up as a national solution it just to me doesn't make sense and i just got to say a little bit we were talking about what the solutions that need to happen to point to milwaukee that's a majority minority city where the majority of that city or in the school system at least well like chicago and you point to you hand pick a few studies and say this is what's what's going on it's a little bit like white people i'm sorry pointing to a black friend and saying look i have a black friend i'm not racist right it's it's pointing to these individual studies to say look this is actually benefiting people and it's not there is systemic racism needs to be addressed okay that okay then that was a statement and i guess the question is uh could you respond to that those objections about milwaukee uh please answer the question cori yeah i also just want to point out really quickly that voucher programs that exist in new hamster main and vermont anybody could look it up on google right now and i'll send it in the comments in a second they've existed since the 1800s in the late 1800s in the us and either either way i mean in the 1950s there were people that were segregationists that opposed school choice and there were segregationists that approved of school choice there were differences but then also this is a genetic fall so you can't base the the benefits of a policy today and the motives of a policy today based on how some people felt about the policy a long time ago and i wonder if john hail is against the minimum wage uh because the minimum wage has racist origins too uh i guess you can not or not or are you are you against the minimum wage could you could just ask the question about walking uh please go yeah so i didn't cherry pick studies i i did go over some studies in milwaukee but i excited the preponderance of the evidence in milwaukee if you want to if you want me to cite more i can go through all the studies in milwaukee and there are five competitive effects studies from milwaukee all findings statistically significant positive effects in the traditional public schools but i also cited all 17 experimental studies i didn't just cite milwaukee um and i went through all those i also just want to point out for the listeners really quickly that each experimental study isn't really a fair experiment because the voucher programs are funded much less than the traditional public schools so when you find a null effect no effects on test scores for example that implies a positive return on investment because the the voucher schools are using lower funding amounts from the state than the traditional public schools all right at this point at this point i should probably pay some attention to a lot of audience questions that are coming in uh john and uh and cori you'll have the opportunity to ask each other questions a bit later uh one question for you uh cori has been that in your initial statement you were constantly using re openings as a criteria for uh the effectiveness of the public schools versus the private school this seemed to be a doubt on the part of some questions whether re openings are a useful criterion could you address that objection yeah the reason i was pointing out so much about the reopening debate today is because it's it's relevant today but then also the start of the pandemic pods at least in in current memory is that a lot of families were are seeking out pandemic pods because the schools aren't reopening for in-person instruction and um i would expect that one of hail's arguments is that if you have greater investment whether that's through money or otherwise in the traditional public school system some of the families that exited the system because of the school's not reopening would come back into the schools and that's how you would have more uh you know kind of equality under his um proposal and so that's why i addressed uh the school re openings with in great detail but we could also talk about um kind of just investments in schools over time and and academic outcomes too if we want to talk about those but okay uh john uh do you want to comment on cori's response you want to go into another question uh up to you john i mean there's a lot of fascinating questions coming in but um you know there's a lot to say i just want to say when we look at sort of like investment in a time and then we're going back to this argument time and time again that you know this this isn't taken away from um public school investment i just want to point when we look at the CARES Act specifically that one of the biggest problems we've had are senators proposing legislation and southern governors such as um Governor McMaster in the in the state of South Carolina where they're actually using that CARES Act money two fund private school vouchers two fund private school options so it's a very actually real threat during this pandemic that money is being proposed by our current administration and current senators who want and and not to mention southern governors like McMaster who are using that money supposed to address that just the singular pandemic of coronavirus and i put it into private school funds so i mean i think it's a little bit again disingenuous to say that well you know people public education advocates are you know are making a false claim that we're taking money away but during this pandemic alone in the past two months we have seen southern legislators and the senators who support them who also support going back to school in plain football and sec stands with a hundred thousand people there who are just defying the laws of science and medicine are also proposing that you're using federal money and guess where that comes from of course to go to privilege white affluent families so i just want to reemphasize that it is a it's not a perceived threat it is a threat and we've seen it during the pandemic that people are actually proposing using this money for private options when as cori you know we can agree on nce s statistics of these 50 million kids are in the public schools that's money you're taking literally for proposed to take away even though supreme court shut down the idea is out there okay i think that uh john i think that you addressed a somewhat different question which is fine uh so uh i think you understand the question then uh that john just addressed cori having to do with the recent allocation of the cares at so could you address that question yeah if you look at uh oklahoma is one of the states i think he that john is referring to only about five percent of the total cares act funding went to students directly through private school vouchers and in oklahoma they gave preference to low-income families so it's not disproportionately going to privileged families i think more than five percent of the funding should have went directly to families the the funding is supposed to be for the individual students not the government run institutions and as i said you can still pick the traditional public school if that's best for you and you should ask yourself as to why families would choose to exit the system to go to a private school or a pandemic pod if the public schools are in fact doing a good job for them it's probably because they they prefer to do to do something else with that money but yeah just to get to oklahoma it was only five percent of the funding and they gave preference to low-income families all right i'm getting several questions for john that relate to the same point i mean it's one of them picks up on a couple of things you said john that you trust parents and you want to empower them and so the question is then if you trust parents and want to empower them then why not or for them uh the uh the savings accounts that will enable them uh to make their empowering and trustworthy choice of where they want to send their kids so that's the question and um let me be be clear about what what what the resolution is that i'm arguing before is that it's it you know it's greater investment right as to not further accommodate and privilege that choice i'm not saying that choice shouldn't exist educational savings accounts and i think uh dr d'angeles but putting me in this direction man you can like that's a really good opportunity when you have the money to do it no doubt about it and pay for my daughter's college if i had the money to do that i'm not going to deny that choice to anybody i trust parents to make that but i'm looking at american history to show that historically and i mentioned this i'm going to open arguments black families and communities latinx families and communities and other families of color in the united states have been historically disadvantaged so i am putting a specific parameters around who we're talking about i think white affluent parents are going to do just fine i think they're going to do just i'm not worried about them i'm worried about the nearly 51 million families who admittedly don't have a choice in in many cases but they have to go to the local public school because they have to work two to three jobs right um so what i'm saying is yes i'm not taking away that choice i think they can empower that i think greater investment is needed to allow black and latinx families if they don't even have a bank in their neighborhood that doesn't charge them extra and research shows that this is true as well that we need to invest in this through something like financial literacy classes we offer this in the freedom schools all across the fan all across the country to families who are interested in that because when you listen to families in public schools they will say i want to take better advantage of x y m z and it requires a degree of financial literacy that is oftentimes not taught in public schools in y because they have been underfunded for decades you can't put that in the graph the fight you go to any school and i'll look in zoom camera at anybody going to a school i will not go into a school and say you have enough money if you looked at baltimore schools in detroit schools and speaking of detroit the gary b the gary b case where they're arguing that the basic fundamental right of literacy is not being offered in detroit why dilapidated schools textbooks are not going to go to detroit and say you have enough money we're going to end what little distance we're going to send it somewhere else so again this empowering local communities to tell us what investments they would like to see that is correcting and addressing this dual pandemic well to put a fine point on the question john as well do you oppose the proposal from the other side to give 80 percent of the approximately 15 000 in money to offer that to all families poor families as well and of course poor families including black and hispanic do you propose do you impose that proposal to offer them the 80 percent savings accounts so that they can allocate it to wherever they want to send their kids as long as funding away from the public schools themselves yeah i would love that additional bump for students to open the savings account right but as long as you're not taking that away from students yeah that sounds like it what the point i'm trying to make a greater investment so if you are given an 80 funded savings account to each student right as long as they have someone else to go if they want to right my point is greater investments it sounds like a greater investment it sounds like it's providing some opportunity but rest assured that there should be a public school for these students to go to and these families to rely on as well what what if what if they use that 80 to send their kids to to to another program outside the public school whatever again right it depends on the local setting as long as that local school that they did go to and those kids who weren't making that decision or the kids like looking at studies coming on New Orleans where um in many situations in many situations parents actually choose a school that's closest to them so those parents who continue to choose because parody and equal the opportunity does not exist again this isn't up for it doesn't exist people are going to naturally go to the public school or research says as long as they still have a school to go to and we are still investing in that public school sounds great because that's fit in what my what might what my point is greater investments is needed so if you want to take that on short call do you want to address the question Corey yeah I don't think we should fund two people for the price for for having one education it looks like John Hill only supports school choice even though he's argues it has racist origins if it doesn't defund the traditional public school and I will say school choice doesn't defund public schools public schools defund families school choices returns that same money to the hands of the rightful owners which is the family and not the institution so similarly allowing families to shop at Trader Joe's doesn't steal money from Walmart why because the money doesn't belong to any particular institution it's meant for that family same thing with the education dollars it's supposed to be meant for for the education of a particular child it's not supposed to be meant for propping up and protecting a government monopoly question for you Corey what about students with disabilities and special learning needs how would they pot up and receive the support they need if potting is left to market devices yeah there's a lot of families with students with special needs using the Arizona education savings account which is targeted to students with special needs there's actually about 20 or 21 private school choice programs in the US that are made and designed specifically with special needs students in mind and with my proposal students with special needs since they get more money in the traditional public school system already they would get much more money through the education savings account program as well which would allow them to access a whole host of other options could be the private school it could be a charter school it could be a pandemic pod option or it could just be a regular homeschool option it would allow the families to offset the cost of homeschooling so that could allow for more equity by allowing less advantaged populations of students to have more money than more advantaged populations of students and we're already seeing that happen with Brenda micro schools in Arizona today and I've already had a parent with a with a special needs child on my podcast talking about her experience with that and and she saw it as a positive experience so I think giving families an additional option for students with special needs is a great idea too and I think this really is a movement in the right direction especially when the public school system is a one size fits all student that may not work for every individual child and if you have unique needs what better way than to allow those students to sort into environments that work best for them and that still could be the public school but I think too often the you know the federal education laws and the IEPs don't actually meet the individual needs of families in the current system sometimes they do but in some cases the the special needs students may just be put into a room all all by themselves and not able to interact with other students and that might not be the scenario that works best for them so I think giving every student a choice is a movement in the right direction. Do you want to comment on that question John? I think you know giving every student a choice is a bit misleading because it still ignores the very problems where we have in our traditional public schools and I'm not one I'm advocating for public schools but I'm also admitting their problems but listen you provided choice tomorrow to go wherever you want we research indicates that a lot of families I can go to the local school because they have no other option they don't have to go with transportation go to other schools that choice itself is not going to work if we don't invest people to make what Cory's talking about the right choice or to use educational savings counts the most effectively because as is the part of this argument greater investments is needed is just to even catch people up and raise all boats to make that choice effectively again I'm not denying choice to people I'm not denying educational savings accounts make that choice but those who can't make the choice that go to the best charter schools or go to the best you know find the best pandemic pods within the city or whatever we have to empower families at times financially but there's other forms of investment and I know that this is a hard time for we're looking at this in non-economic terms but sometimes it's just showing up and participating in debates like this right that we need to empower these communities to even get to the plane to make the choice that we're talking about and I continually go back to this that's that's the argument investment in people so they can be allowed and permitted and empowered to make these choices question for you Cory we're running out of time to make it a little bit fast both guys aren't there fixed costs to the the structure of a public institution and if parents opt to abandon the public school with those savings accounts then what about those fixed costs that the government made in the in the building yeah all costs are variable in the long run just to start out with basic economics lesson but yes all businesses have fixed costs but that doesn't mean they get to keep a bunch of your money after you leave Walmart has fixed costs they have to keep the lights on they have to keep their buildings up and running but they don't get to keep 20% of my grocery bill each week after I leave they don't get to keep my portion of my food stamps after I leave but the public schools actually do get to keep a significant portion of dollars even after families leave because although public schools are funded based on enrollment counts they're not entirely funded based on enrollment counts you can look this up at Georgetown University's adjunomics lab and they do this for each state and each state has it's on average about 60 to 80 percent of the funding is based on student enrollment counts what that means mathematically is when you lose a student to school choice competition you get to keep 20 to 40 percent of the funding for a student who is who is no longer there so the public schools actually financially benefit on a per pupil basis because they lose the student they lose the cost of educating the student but they get to keep 20 to 40 percent of the funding each year for a student who's no longer there because they're only partially funded based on enrollment counts just imagine if Walmart got to keep 20 to 40 percent of your funding after you left they would be happy about that and I would argue the public schools should be super happy that they get to keep any money at all I'm afraid we're out of Q and A time John I think it's hopefully okay that you'll you'll have seven and a half minutes of summation to both answer that question and to summarize your argument so we're going to the summary portion of the debate take it away John your summary okay so again just to real quick to just address what Corey is saying at the end here again it's like the schools I want to send my daughters to are not walmers I'm not comfortable with that I'm not you know that does not an analogy that actually captures what's happening on public schools that I work with in the community wherever I live it doesn't capture that reality schools provide mental health resources they provide medicine at time we're sending kids in the right direction for the health care that they need because it's not being provided another area so it's much more than just going to Walmart to pick up you know candle soup or something that it's not that it's providing these social services so that requires seeing outside the box a little bit in terms of per student expenditures right and that it's not just simply money following the child because if that's the case that's much too simple and it does not capture the reality with public schools are on the ground but what I want to really close by saying is bringing us back to the resolution and the resolution is actually quite simple for me that this dual pandemic has exposed the ugly truth of racism it exposes a deadly pandemic that has killed nearly 200,000 people after an administration even really practically denied that it was an issue right so it's requiring greater investment in communities that have been ravaged by that to deny them greater investment and again this grand investment doesn't just have to be financial we kept talking about you know personal expenditures $13,000 per student that's one aspect of investment when you go to schools if you go to a freedom school you go to head start invested means showing up providing your own food take you know taking children on a field trip it provides finding the resources for a group of that's investment it's showing up and making it happen making you know making ends meet for children in schools we need greater investment as is dual pandemic ravages America it is it borders it begins to border on an extreme position to say that we shouldn't invest in our schools with that we shouldn't invest in programs that we know that black families need so the resolution is quite simple that we investment is needed however you want to define it in this specific historic moment in time of a dual pandemic that we cannot turn our backs on these families and say okay here's a little bit more choice here's an educational savings account it's showing up doing the work and pushing our public security option that's the investment that is needed and I think you know if we don't do that it privileges people who can have the social capital and the financial advantages to take the best advantage of choice and that more than you know telling you to vote from my proposal or you know then that it's just at the end of the day we really need to pay attention not only pay attention to these families who have been ravaged by this dual pandemic we need to show up and listen and use their local expertise to foreign policy they will tell us what the investment needs those closest to the problem of family public schools are those I trust the most so I ask you tonight right to just consider what it would mean to take the time and listen and to really go to the most ravaged communities and schools listen to their solutions and and and say that we need investment I'm here for the public schools I am here to advocate to make sure that people who will never have a choice can go to a safe decent place I'm not here to take away your choice I'm not here to tell you what to do I'm here to advocate for public schools and empower those communities that I personally know depend on those schools thank you very much and Corey I think I just gave a couple extra minutes there's no no capitalist training of minutes at this debate John but thank you for your intentions and generosity Corey you go you have seven and a half minutes to summarize your argument take it away Corey cool John Hale just finished by summing up his arguments pretty well and he said that he is for here for the public schools well I'm here for the public school and private school and every type of student and we should give preference to the individual students and individual families in the system and we should not prefer to help and defend a government monopoly such as the public school system and so my kind of proposal again for everybody is to fund the students directly and allow them to take their children's education dollars to wherever they're getting an education and this is an anti-public school because you can still take those dollars to the traditional public school that option is still on the table but if for whatever reason you should be able to take that money elsewhere to a private school if you're choosing or to a pandemic pod as well and look advantage families are already taking advantage of these other opportunities school choice allows less advantage families and if we fund students directly it allows less advantage families to be able to exercise these options as well so school choice shouldn't be limited to the rich and the powerful it should be available to everybody in society and education savings accounts allowing the money to follow the child instead of the institution allows for more families to be able to have that equality of opportunity to be able to be empowered to choose the schools that work best for their children or the homeschool setting that works best for their child whether that be a regular homeschool or a pandemic pod and they should be able to have that choice um health proposal does nothing to change the poor incentives in the traditional public school system yeah we could fight harder to try to invest in the system by having people talk about how things should be better we could throw more money at the problem but that does nothing to change the incentives of the individual schools to cater to the needs of individual families hey all likes to point out that walmart is not a school i understand that but i'm just talking about the food stamps as a funding mechanism giving funding to families and letting families choose public uh uh walmart whole foods or any other provider that's why i also use the analogy of pre-k programs which are also schooling options and pell grant programs and i'm just talking about the funding mechanism in those cases the funding goes to the student or the family and the student rightly has the choice to spend that money at a public or private university or public provider or private provider of pre-k uh in their locations and they should have that choice but they should also have that choice when it comes to the years in between in the k through 12 uh education system uh a lot of john hill's arguments were about uh the supposed racist origins of school choice uh i've kind of gone over how school choice has existed well before the 1900s three states have had private school voucher programs and some segregation is actually a post-school choice because they knew that it would lead to more racially integrated schools and then eight to nine studies on this topic find that private school choice tends to lead to racial integration because it allows students to leave already segregated schools hill admits that there are inequities in the traditional public school system and that's a good argument to allow people to leave that inherently unequal system that does not have a strong incentive to cater to the needs of individual families again my proposal is not a one-size-fits-all position whereas hill's proposal to stay with the traditional public school system is a one-size-fits-all position we should allow individual families to choose learning environments based on their individual needs which a one-size-fits-all uh system will not uh address and then also my proposal is more timely um you can try to convince families to fix things but we've already been waiting for for uh groups in the united states to try to fix the public school system we've increased per people spending by 280 in real time since 1960 and we've almost doubled per people spending in real terms since 1980 and we've increased per people spending by 40 already in the traditional public school system by 40 in real terms since 1990 so we've we've done all of this before and we haven't changed the incentives to do a good job in the current system what i'm arguing for allows for more bottom-up accountability at the same time as allowing for more freedom for disadvantaged groups to be able to escape that system and they don't have to escape the system though they can also choose the traditional public schools but for whatever reason that's not working for their family they should be able to pick something else it shouldn't these choices shouldn't be limited to people who can afford to pay for private school tuition and fees at a pocket i will just point out 80 of the 15 000 in traditional public schools that we spend today is around 12 000 which is well over what we spend on private schools for average private school tuition in the u.s which is about 11 000 according to private school reviews website in 2020 so this would allow for a lot of families to have a lot of different choices and this would be good for teachers too we already have teachers opting out of the traditional public school system to teach at pandemic pods we saw a story in washington post by a of a teacher in new jersey who was in the public school system for 20 years and then they left to do a pandemic pod they completely left the system because they saw that there could be smaller class sizes only six students versus the 20 to 30 to 40 students that could be in the traditional public school system and more autonomy they didn't have to deal with all the regulations in the public school system and they could they could eventually end up in making more money if the money followed the child because then more of the money could get directly from the student to the teacher and you wouldn't have to spend the money on all the other things in the middle so money can more easily get from students teachers and also we'll say we you know we have spent more money in the system but not a lot of that money has actually gone to teachers so when you go to you know particular school districts and see that the teachers are having to buy supplies and that they're not making a a ton of money it's because the school district doesn't have a strong incentive because they have residentially assigned monopolies to spend the money wisely and if you look at Ben Scaffidy's work on this between 1992 and 2014 we've increased real people education expenditures by about 27% in the US but real teacher salaries have actually dropped by 2% over the same time period and I would argue it's because the monopoly system does not have a strong incentive to spend its money wisely and the most wise way to spend the money in the system is to allocate it towards the classroom towards the students and towards the teachers so this could be a benefit for teachers it could be a benefit for families it could be a benefit an equalizer because it can allow less advantage families to have more options and empowerment as well just yeah just hoping the traditional public school system is going to work for everyone assumes that one size fits all it doesn't and it also assumes that advantage families aren't going to choose to do something else um and and even if they do choose to go back to the public school system advantage families will probably go back into the school the more advantage schools because we have inequities in that traditional public school system so incentivizing families to return to the schools they're already going to which are already unequal does not lead to more equality funding families directly leads to more equality by allowing families who did not have the power to make these choices to now have the same more power to make individual decisions about the type of school that their children will attend whether that's a public school a private school or a pandemic pod option and my resolution is also more timely and it could be more safe by spreading more children out to different locations and um better learning environments and so I just want to say thank you so much John Hale for this uh participating I want to say thank you to everyone and if you prefer my resolution to John Hales you will vote against John Hales thank thank you Corey all right well that concludes uh the debate uh Jane please open the final vote again the resolution reads to combat inequality greater investments must be made in public schools stores not to accommodate the formation of pandemic pods by affluent parents John your book uh is uh your book is I guess available on amazon although not yet available you can order it on the link is that correct John yes John I have two books on the freedom schools uh one uh which you can find on amazon and look on the origins of school choice will be available for beacon for beacon we'll we'll we'll post the link to that as you request an amazon link on our on our website uh and while we're waiting I did have a question uh lose an objection to what I've been doing my my timer light uh goes off occasionally and uh and the person who talked about how foolish this is doesn't realize that I'm actually renting a tiny office in downtown Manhattan and I have no control over it I don't like these things either so please bear that in mind that it's not my choice since we've been talking about choice this evening uh and then while uh the closing vote is coming in I do want to announce that we have a debate scheduled for october 18th sunday afternoon october 18th at 3 p.m new york city time that's our next debate in that case the debate resolution will read to combat climate change the world's nations must make it their highest priority to completely replace the burning of fossil fuels within the next 20 years defending that resolution will be jeff nesbitt executive director of climate nexus a nonprofit that works on climate change and clean energy solutions jeff nesbitt is the author of this is the way the world ends how droughts and die-offs heat waves and hurricanes are converging on america opposing the resolution will be bjorn lomborg author of false alarm how climate change panic costs us trillions hurts the poor and fails to fix the planet we'll host that debate at 3 p.m in order to accommodate the fact that bjorn lomborg will be in europe where the time will be several hours later again that will be on sunday afternoon october 18th and tickets are already available for that debate on our website john and quarry you have com ticks if you'd like to do that debate as part of our audience just as a reward for your polite and energetic efforts in terms of this debate i'm seeing jane metton on screen jane do you have the final voting just send in me thank you jane uh and uh i don't see it yet let me see you emailed it to me jane oh there we go okay um all right um okay uh the the yes vote for the resolution having to do with greater investment in education uh began at 15 percent and it went up to 20 percent congratulations john for gaining five percentage points on that uh the pre and post but that five percentage points is the number to beat uh the uh resolution on no the no vote began with 45 percent and it went up to 75 picking up 30 percentage points so quarry dangerous wins the tutsi roll congratulations quarry and thanks and congratulations to you both for spirit and courteous debate we hope to see you soon on october 18th and we hope all of you people can eventually come to the subculture theater at 45 glico street for physical debate john hail quarry you're invited as well we're going to that one that'll be more fun thank you and good night john and quarry a pleasure take good care um thanks