 We've seen two different types of reforms being pushed to fix the curriculum disagreements in the government school system. And one has been from the top down to ban CRT, for example, or other concepts that are divisive concepts, which one doesn't actually work because it's basically a form of playing whack-a-mole where you're trying to hit the mold and the mold doesn't actually go down. It doesn't work, it's unenforceable. We have videos from all these states, from Texas, from Idaho, from Tennessee, from Iowa, and others, where you have undercover journalists going there from accuracy in media and getting the public school officials to admit that, yeah, we banned it here, but we'd still do it. We just call it social emotional learning or we call it student mental health. So they just move the goalposts and it's totally unenforceable for the most part. And the better solution in my view is from the bottom up with school choice. It's like if you're just not gonna listen to what the law says anyway, and if it's really hard to, if we can't even agree on what critical race theory even means, and it may mean different things to different parents. Parents know the specific things that they want and what they do not want taught. And the better way is to just give the money to the parents in the form of an education savings account and let them choose the school that best aligns with their values. I think this is the only way forward through freedom as opposed to force so that families can choose the schools that align with their values and meet their needs in other ways. The whole government school system is inherently in conflict with our view of what education should look like, which is parents raising kids in ways that they want to. You can't do that with a one size fits all government school monopoly. It is by definition, never going to work. You're always gonna have one group of parents forcing their views on another group of parents. It's typically a majority or in some cases a special interest minority inflicting their views on other groups. And that is a problem. And the only way out is through allowing parents to choose. DeSantis, the governor of Florida leading candidate possibly for the Republican nomination for president is a kind of fascinating case study. Florida has a robust school choice program that he has been adding to. It existed before him, but he has added it. But he's also going hammer and tong after certain specific aspects, not just with the K through 12 education, but has also tried to do that at the college and or post-secondary level. How do you feel about somebody like a DeSantis, something similar, I guess is going on in a place like Texas with Greg Abbott, where Texas oddly has not been a leader in school choice despite being a conservative state. But what do you make of somebody like a DeSantis? Is this just an internal contradiction that will have to explode? Or what do you have to say about somebody like a DeSantis? I think that the example Cora used earlier of political whack-a-mole is instructive here, right? When you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When you're a big mallet, everything looks like a mole in a whack-a-mole game. And someone like DeSantis who is seeking higher office and trying to illustrate his kind of distinctions from Trump and other candidates on the field is leaning into this moment when, as Corey pointed out, a lot of these parents are upset, they're going to school board meetings, they're trying to fight back. So I think it's politically strategic on his part to be kind of the tip of the spear in fighting some of this through the political process where others are just trying to show up to school board meetings and pressure elected officials. He is one and he has a bully pulpit and he can do something about it. At the end of the day, what DeSantis is doing and other efforts like this through the political process to restrict teachers, to modify curriculum, to tie the hands of local educators and the teachers unions. Number one, it's only going to go so far. As Corey pointed out, they're going to wiggle around it and find a way around it. So it looks good superficially for DeSantis to enact these controls or others like him, but when the rubber meets the road, are we really having the substantive changes that were purported to happen when the law was passed or the executive order was signed? Fundamentally, I think of the Henry David Thoreau quote that there are for every thousand hacking at the branches, there's only one striking at the root. And we've been here before. We've been here with Common Core. We've been here with social emotional learning. We've been here with critical race theory and now all this gender wars and many other things in the decades preceding the examples I listed. And where has that gotten us? Where have the substantive reforms been? Nothing is going to happen until we strike the root. The root as I perceive it, and I think Corey agrees is the monopoly is the guaranteed consumer pipeline to the government school system. And until we introduce substantial competitive forces to induce enough market pressure on these institutions to reform, none of these topical marginal efforts are going to have substantive change. They might make us feel good in the moment. We'll all applaud at a press conference when the new reform is announced. But months later when the dust settles and people's attention moves on to the next topic and everyone forgets about it, all the people who are still there, all the teachers union members, all the administrators are going to be continuing to do what they want to do. And we're just going to further slide into mediocrity. I want to introduce a quote from Robert Pondicio who's at AEI as they wrote this for the Fordham Institute. But it's provocative and I want to get your reaction to this. There is an idea especially prevalent among libertarians and some conservatives that school choice is the answer to the problems of social justice activism and political indoctrination in schools because it allows parents to pull their children out of schools where Wokediology has infused the curriculum and school culture. The idea is not just wrong or simplistic, it's dangerous. My question, because you've touched on this about how the attempts of some of this stuff is whack-a-mole but I guess my question for you guys is the issue of kind of community. Where does common culture go in this debate? Because it seems like America is desperate for some kind of commonality but school choice which I certainly support exactly in the way you guys are talking about it would lead in a different direction, more of a kind of a vulcanized experience. Connor, do you want to? Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, I'll go ahead. So we don't have it. We have nine out of 10 kids in public schools today and we have an extremely divided country today in politically polarized country. So there's kind of this fairytale theory of the democratic public schools. Yeah, the public schools were the crucible of... Yeah, I mean, Milton Friedman used to talk about this, who was a product of public schools in the 1920s and 30s and he would often talk about that. That goes back to that, a kind of Americanization model which may or may not have worked but it certainly is not where we're at now. And overwhelmingly the studies find that private school choice in particular leads to better civic outcomes including tolerance of others' views which I think is a really important, one more political participation and other civic outcomes as well. So the evidence doesn't bear out the theories that are laid out by the government school defenders. Yeah, Connor? Yeah, so I recently had the opportunity to go back to my old stomping grounds where I went to high school. I grew up in San Diego and I went to the high school and it was a very sad experience. What before was an open set of buildings and free-flowing student body was under lock and key. There were gates everywhere, cameras, metal detectors and all the rest and that school is not an anomaly, especially with all the school shootings, so many people want to further turns into prison-like institutions. So to your question about community and culture, I question whether a statist institution such as government schools is really going to enhance our community, build community, enhance the culture, build the social fabric. I think quite the opposite. I think the state is on one end of the spectrum and true society is on the other. We need voluntary relationships and so forth to be able to rebuild that. And as a longtime homeschooling dad, I only put my kids in that micro school this past fall. We've been homeschooling them for a decade. And of course, early on, we would get the critiques like you sometimes hear, oh, your kids aren't going to be socialized. You know, they're not going to be part of the community. And then I look at how kids on, you know, with all the, like in the government schools, the bullying, the toxicity, pornography, drugs, cheating and all the rest. And I'm like, that's not how I want my kids to be socialized. When my kids are out doing field trips in the middle of the day, while all their public school peers are sitting in a box in a brick and mortar cage, my kids are out there connecting with adults, shopping at businesses, going through museums, connecting with other families. There's very strong community. And I think that through this kind of decentralized educational marketplace, if we can continue to grow and sustain it, we're going to have a far richer and more tightly interwoven social fabric of true community than we do right now with everyone just sitting in these factory schools across the country being propagandized by leftist public school teachers. That was an excerpt from Reasons Livestream with Corey DeAngelis and Conor Boyack. The authors of Mediocrity 40 Ways Government Schools are failing today's students. If you want to see the full conversation, go here. If you want to see another excerpt, go here and make sure to come back next Thursday. Every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern time when Zach Weismiller and I are doing a live stream with somebody very interesting that you are definitely going to want to know about.