 One of the least convincing and most dishonest arguments against school choice is that it's a stalking horse for segregation. The Duke historian Nancy McClain advanced this argument in her controversial book Democracy and Chains as has the progressive education historian Diane Ravitch who asserts that the school choice movement was created by white southern governors who were fighting the Brown decision. Chris Stewart is the head of the education nonprofit Brightbeam and a prolific writer and podcaster who publishes under the name Citizen Stewart. He argues that minority voters overwhelmingly support charter schools vouchers and other choice programs, usually at higher rates than whites do, and for good reason. There isn't an issue facing black people today that doesn't find its origins in K-12 education, Stewart writes. A Christian and a libertarian, Stewart says that school lockdowns over the past year have forced parents to become more involved and attentive to their children's education and may well lead to an exodus from traditional public schools. In a wide-ranging conversation, Stewart also talks about why he believes the government shouldn't be in charge of curricula and why support for school choice will continue to grow despite efforts by teacher unions and education bureaucrats to maintain a failing status quo. Chris Stewart, thanks for talking to Reason. Hey, thanks for having me, Nick. I appreciate it. Let's start by talking about the past year in K-12 education. I am glad both that I was not a student nor my children are out of K-12. So like I am glad I didn't have to deal with this. I know you did. But what are the essential lessons that we should be learning from the COVID-19 lockdowns about K-12 education? Well, I think one of the the most important lessons that we all learned as parents, those of us who have kids in the K-12 system, is that government is not always going to be reliable for us. So this was the first time en masse that government gave us our kids back and said, here, have at her because we have nothing for you right now. It was the first time for many parents that they encountered the idea that, whoa, wow, I am entirely responsible for these young people in my house. And it may have been the first time they had exercised muscles as parents that they haven't had to exercise before because for so many years, education has professionalized parents out of the educational equation. And over periods of time, it has infantilized parents to the point where we can't even imagine being responsible totally for our kids' education. And in this last year, it became abundantly clear government had nothing for us. They said, basically, we'll get back to you, right? Here's your kids. We'll get back to you. For you, and I mean, you have a, I mean, you write, you are an education policy wonk analyst, whatever you were on the Minnesota school boards of education or Minneapolis school boards of education, for you, what was the most challenging aspect of not only beyond having your kids around all the time and how old are they, et cetera. But then also, what was the most difficult thing that you've faced as a parent trying to keep your kids educated? So our kids are, we have three still in the pipeline. We have five total. So we've been through this rodeo a few times, but we have three that are two grades between each of them. There's two grades. And managing their various schedules and learning schedules and what not is a full time job for one, going back and forth with teachers because they're doing the remote learning from the district, which has just been, it's not, we shouldn't call it remote learning. We should just call it remote because our kids are doing something remote. It's become a full time job, really, just to stay in touch with their teachers, find out what assignments are missing and, you know, are they learning anything? It's been a lot of like also just go look at this video and then fill out this worksheet so it hasn't really been schooling. In the back of my mind, it's been really hard to feel like maybe we're robbing them of a year of learning and of experiences. So that's been I think the most challenging, but it also has raised a lot of important questions that might have us thinking differently. Like this time a year and a half ago, we probably wouldn't have been homeschoolers. We wouldn't have considered it possible. We have kids right now that would prefer to do homeschooling over going back to school or doing remote learning. So it's changed the world for us and how we look at education. Do you, I mean, what do you think you'll do on your family basis? Are you going to be like, OK, you know what, we're going to actually do a focused intentional homeschooling? Or are you like, we got to open these schools up as fast as possible just to get my kids out of the house? Yeah, we're not in the latter. We're definitely not people who feel like I think we've learned a lot about their learning. So if they were probably more leaning towards doing something we never would have considered doing, which is being full-time homeschoolers. We have one student who would probably want to go back for social life and for sports and other things. But we're definitely not sitting around like many people. I'm amazed at the number of parents that are pining for the schools to reopen as if their entire lives depend on it. I get it if it's economically necessary for your family. But we've learned so much about what they haven't been learning when they were in school and how much teaching hasn't been going on. I think there's a lot of parents who've gotten out earshot too of some of the teaching that is going on and it has raised questions for them. Is it rigorous enough? Have our kids been getting a full education? You know, as we were kind of scheduling this and whatnot, you wrote to me discussing topics we might go over that it might be time to expand beyond school type and choice to parent-determined education, which offers a broader set of learning options. And you continue to get there, we need to beef up parental muscles responsibility. Can you expand on what you mean by that? You know, what are the muscles that parents, I mean, you talked about it a second ago, but you know, what are the muscles that either weren't there or the atrophied? And what does it mean to kind of exercise muscles when it comes to your kid's education? Yeah, I think traditionally we have talked about school choice in terms of school choices. Which type of school should I choose? And part of that has been finding the right school to put your child in and then go on autopilot, let the professionals or some other group of people really take over the intellectual development of our children. When you have a child, when your child is born and you're looking at a baby, God has put into your hands something that you are responsible for in total, not in part. So the intellectual development of a person is kind of like the Martin Luther King who talked about this and I always go back to this. He said the most precious thing that we have as a race is the intellectual development of our boys and girls. And we have been outsourcing that for at least 150 years, but more like 90 years or so, we really were professionalized out of the idea that we know anything about how to develop a person, a human being, even though we're parents. Now that we have them at home, we're having to make decisions, we're having to make choices. We're the president of their education now. So we're having to decide whether this curriculum or that curriculum is worth it, right? We're not relying on a school board to tell us which is the best curriculum. Many of us aren't. Some of us are still kind of just floundering, but many of us are starting for the first time having to make critical decisions about customizing education to our specific humans that we have in our house. So in that sense, the kind of COVID lockdown is really an accelerant of something that's been happening in American society, right? Because I mean, homeschooling wasn't even legal a few decades ago. The idea of school choice came down to are you gonna, if you're super wealthy, you would send your kids to some kind of fancy boarding school or whatever. If you were an inner city Catholic person, you would might send your kids to a parochial school or you would go to the public school or you would move so your kids would go to whatever was considered a good public school. But over the past 20, 30 years, people have taken more of an interest in things like school choice or individualized education. Where, I guess, where did the professionalization of teaching and kind of shutting parents out, where did that come from? And then why did it break down to a point now where more and more parents even, and especially after COVID are saying, you know what, I gotta be involved with my kids' education in the same way that I am in like picking their clothes. Yeah, you know, so if you go way back, do you read David, I think it's Tyak's one best system from years ago, it's like a seminal work in how we advanced to be an administrative school system, how we went from the one house, one room school house with one teacher to being very consolidated state-run education with a bunch of bureaucrats on top and many professionals at many different layers and levels. That happens slowly over time with the consolidation of public education. I think the stat is today we have twice the number of students but half the number of schools that we did maybe 50 or 60 years ago, which means that we consolidate. Yeah, I know in terms of boards of education or school districts from the end of World War II, there was over 100,000 or 200,000, some insane number of different school districts and now it's like one-tenth that or something. Yeah, it's like 14,000 now, which is hyper consolidation by the state of the education process. Before you were local, local, local, local, you were super local and today you are not. Right, so what started the pushback against that? You know, I can't say a hundred percent there was one thing that I can think of that, but I do know that there were freedom movements of different sorts. So within the black community, for instance, during the civil rights movement, many of the, so people forget about this, but people like Dr. King and many of the civil rights leaders actually put their kids into elite black private schools. So even as they were talking nationally about integrating the general public schools, they were actually putting their own children into privatized schools. And the Black Panthers did the same thing. They started schools in Oakland. That was one movement, one freedom movement, but also in the 1970s, you saw like just an explosion of a different type of school choice. You started seeing open schools and schools without walls and schools on beanbag chairs and schools on roller skates. I was very jealous growing up in the 70s. A friend of mine got, I went to a crappy Catholic school that was spent probably one third of what the local public schools did. And so, and it was kind of a holdover from a different model of education that had ceased being taken seriously. But a friend of mine got to go to a new public school in my hometown of Middletown, New Jersey, where they had a tree house in the middle of the school. And I was like, oh man, that is so cool. I know, you know, we ended up, we ended up meeting in the same graduate program. So that's like, you know, different paths to get to the same place, but... You know, this is an interesting point though. Stick with that for a second, just in that, like when it came to desegregation, one of the important learnings of desegregation is if you wanted everybody to go to school together, you were gonna have to put in some pretty strong inducements. So you had a city like Kansas City, for instance, that spent 1.2 billion dollars, and that's billion with a B years ago, decades ago. And they had schools with aquariums and Olympic-sized swimming pools and all these big, beautiful things that are still there now and aren't integrated anymore. But the interesting lesson that we should take, especially as libertarians about that, is that they decided if they were gonna meet the end that they wanted to meet, they had to listen to their customer in ways that they never had before. They had to actually become customer specialists. What do you want in a school and we will build it for you? It didn't work, because of course it's government doing it again, but at least they realized magnet schools had to sell something. What kind of schooling did you go to for K through 12? Where did you grow up? And how do you rate your own education? Terrible, absolutely terrible. Probably one of the reasons why as a parent, well, first of all, much of my, I was very much an autodidact. American public libraries did way more for me than American public schools ever could do for me. And that's why I actually support that system more than, as the main education system, I support that more than I do public schools. But to answer more directly, I was in a different school for many years of my life, different school just about every year. I had a year in there of Catholic school, but besides that, it was district schools in three different states, California, Minnesota and Louisiana. So I actually went to New Orleans public schools. I went to Minneapolis public schools for one year. Went to school in your city for a year in Bel Air, as a matter of fact. We lived in Baldwin Hills. I was bust to Bel Air and I never understood, I never understood money like I did when I was bust into the school in Bel Air. So I was able to see schools from segregated to integrated, from North to South, from traditional to kind of experimental, from religious to non-religious to Godless. And as a parent, that for me just, it taught me my own upbringing, taught me that anything's possible. Like you don't have to do one traditional path to education. And you should look at your kids and decide for them what's most fitting for them, what's optimal because you don't have to do one thing. And I guess, I mean, when you have five kids, so that's like, at least five different models of education you might be considering. And I say this as a parent and as somebody who cares about education, I went on to get a PhD in English because I'm that type of person. So I take education seriously, but it is a hell of a lot of work to think about what your kid needs and then to figure out where to get that for them and then to evaluate it and keep going. I kind of, I'm sympathizing with the parents who are like, would you please open the schools up? Because that way, at least we're not seeing how little our kids are learning. They're out of the house. Yeah, I mean, there's safety in the government. It's a call to safety net. That's education safety net. You don't really have to think about it. You can go on autopilot. You can put your child, you put one or two or three through the same doorway and pretend like it's optimal for all three of them for their development to do that. I just, I think you're giving up a lot when you do that. And you're not being curious enough about government. There's a question that we will never raise, like in conversations like this that will never get raised. When we see curriculum battles and things like the 1776 project versus the 1619 project, we don't answer, we don't ask one essential question about that. Is it even ethical for a government that is supposed to be about the consent of the governed to develop its own bosses, its own people that it one day will answer to? And that's a really important question to me because we are training people in mass. If you look at people like John Taylor Gatto and others who really asked, I think, elastic questions, like maybe you don't agree with them. Maybe you read it and you think, wow, this is really far out. He's taken it really far about how free we are if we're being trained by government schools. It's important actually to ask those Alaska questions, but really should they be developing their own citizens to their own liking? I think we are dumbing down. Mass education is, I think, having an impact on the intellect of the United States. And we're seeing problems with it. We had people just storm a Capitol based upon a mountain of lies that only, it was like a million more on March. You could really only have that through a system of mass government education failure in my mind. So what, I agree with you, and particularly from a libertarian perspective, a small libertarian perspective, you don't want the government creating a system that produces good citizens from their point of view. By definition, they're not gonna be critical thinkers and things like that. But of course, the government and other sources of power within a culture or a society are gonna do that. So we're talking about school choice and not necessarily in terms of the type of school. What replaces that? Is there, in your framework, is there an obligation that society or government has to fund education, but not the type of education? Should there be a complete separation between state and school? Where do you come down on those types of issues? I really do like the way you just phrased that. There definitely should be a separation between state and school. I think we should stop thinking in terms of schools and start thinking in terms of the learning process, though, what does an individual learner need and who will make that decision and what resources will they have to make that decision? So as far as I can tell, God gives you a parent or a guardian, that parent or their guardian is the one who makes the decision. And what resources do they have? Well, right now, you have an average of anywhere, the numbers are shaky with people, but anywhere between 12 and $16,000 a year per person in your home state, it's, I think, upwards of 23,000 per student. That's the resourcing that we give to a student. That's what we spend on them. We spend on them. That's what we spend on them, right? Well, and that's what we spend on people around them. Right, right. Yeah, I mean, it's not very little of it by the time the kid is there. Here's a couple of pennies, but... So would you, in your kind of utopian scheme, would it be something like a voucher program where every, so we don't worry about where that money comes from necessarily. We assume taxation that throws that money into a bin and then each parent or guardian of each kid in school would get that check for 23,000 or 15,000 or 12,000 to spend how they see fit. Is that kind of the basic model that you would prefer? I actually would prefer that. I would prefer that we have informed parents over time. You don't have perfect parents right now, but informed parents who are resourced to determine that. But sometimes parents will be perfected every bit as much. Well, you know, I don't think that they'll ever be like perfected, but I will say this much. They'll always be more morally in charge than the government will be. So assigning me to a school against my will is much different than allowing my guardian or my parent to decide for me. We do that with daycare. We do it with colleges. I don't know why in between daycare and college, we assume that there should be no kind of like parental influence on what you learn. Well, you may have answered your own question when you say that the state wants to produce a particular type of individual that's gonna tend to be colored within the lines that they lay down. And you can deal with them when they're little kids and after college. But in December, you have a sub-stack called Unpublic, which I recommend to people. You wrote, there isn't an issue facing black people today that doesn't find its origin in K through 12 education. Without our own collective governance of our children's intellectual development, how can we win with that black self-determination and who teaches them what they learn, where they learn and how lessons are taught to them? What is the future of our freedom? And this I think I see a through line in what you were talking about. But so what are the sorts of educational institutions, temperaments, mindsets, arrangements that flow from that insight? And then how do they also kind of go beyond black Americans as opposed to all sorts of different groups or individuals? So I'll start by saying like, I spend a lot of time thinking about the eight million black children that are walking into public schools every day that aren't ready for them. Public schools that aren't helping them reach their highest potential because I do believe that that failure, that particular problem actually causes us all problems down the road, right? So there may be lessons to be drawn from elsewhere, but listen, we are drawing lessons from elsewhere when we think about like the Maori people in New Zealand, for instance, who at some point felt like they would never get a fair education within the colonist system of New Zealand, and they created their own K through 16 system of Maori education to reclaim their children to take their responsibility and to educate in the way that they saw fit, right? We've seen in the United States, there's been some American Indian movements around doing the same thing for their kids. You can't sit around and keep putting your children into a system and handing them over to another group of people and complain about the outcomes without the fingers always coming back, pointing at you saying, well, then take your children and do something for them, right? And I think what we have done honestly is after 1954, we shut down a bunch of black schools. We fired a bunch of black teachers and black principals and we lost all of the developmental capital, the educational capital that they had built up around teaching black students. People talk about pre-Brown as if we were making no gains, but that's a lie. Actually since emancipation all the way up until 1954, blacks were fastly closing the gaps when it came to high school graduation rates and participation, school participation and everything that matters. But we got rid of all of their capital, their educational capital, we fired them, we handed our kids over to a new group of people with this weird promise that we would be free by integrating and getting rid of our educational capital. Then it hasn't worked out. It's been, it had a good run. It's been about 60 years and we have declining fortunes on that promise. It was one of the biggest miscalculations of the black middle class legal strategy and civil rights ever. Because now we're having to reclaim our kids again. And we're talking oftentimes as if we're not responsible, like the system is not teaching our kids, the system is not doing this and, you know, or that for our kids. And at some point you say, okay, so what are you gonna do? Right, take your kids back, get them out of the system. Yeah, you have written about, you know, I mean, this is not a new dynamic or kind of argument within the black community. You've written about Booker T. Washington and WEB Du Bois. And you seem to come down very clearly on Booker T. Washington's idea that black should create their own institutions that allow them, you know, that they both own literally and figuratively and kind of can control and kind of hold on to. Whereas WEB Du Bois talked about things like the talented 10th and a kind of integration model that definitely serve people like him. People who are intellectually advanced and upwardly mobile. You know, what's fascinating to me about like the way that you're talking about this is that black separatism, for lack of a better term, seems to be very much out of fashion among elite circles in most white conversations as well as black conversations. What is the constituency for what you're talking about here? Well, in one, I wouldn't call it black separatism. I mean, I feel like I am responsible for my kids to develop them and train them and raise them. So for me, it's just parental responsibility. And if I do that from a lens of being an American Indian or a black person or a white person in San Francisco, wherever, we all have that same responsibility to do that. And if I'm a Gillespie, I'm hoping that my kids grow up with some Irish orientation in their lives. I hope, I don't know. I don't want to assume Gillespie. By the way, I want to point out, my grandparents all left Ireland to leave it behind, you know? So certain types of inheritances that are best left, you know, 3,000 miles away. Well, and I'm just saying, I wouldn't fault you if that was your orientation because America is made up of people that have different orientations. Raise your children and raise them. If you want them to be, you know, within your, like we're Lutheran, my kids are being raised Lutheran. If you want them to be raised Catholic, do what you got to do. But I wouldn't call it separatism necessarily, but one orientation that we don't talk about is historically black colleges. It's funny how much of the integrationist ideas break down when you get to something like historically black colleges. We're not talking about closing them. We're not saying that they're separatists or that they're a problem. We're not even calling them segregation. As a matter of fact, Morehouse, I believe it was, had a white kind of valedictorian. And there are some, many, people don't know this, too many historically black colleges that have now flipped and become white because they were integrated. Where did you go? Did you go to college? Where did you go? I was in HBCU or? So I did the two-year track. So I did community college. Also did professional credentials afterwards. And I'm in college right now at Goddard College. Oh, that? Yeah, in Vermont. Yeah, that's one of the great hippie schools of all time. Where I'm very dewy and unstructured and gave you people like Fish, the band Fish and Macy, one of the actors. So I have wildly open ideas about education. When it came to my own kids, I was more like you have to make it all the way through K16, unlike I did from the very beginning, but we were open how we got there. In terms of kind of thinking about educational institutions and structures, you call yourself libertarian. There's a strong individual streak and everything that you say and do the way you carry yourself. But you also talk about the we. Is black the right level of identity to think about education or Catholic or whatever? I mean, how do you kind of, I cost benefit and else isn't quite the right term, but how do you settle on why blackness as the operative variable here, as opposed to say a student-centered learning establishment or whatever? It's an interesting question. This is how I think about it. It comes down to the individual level. And if you're Mexican, you have a Mexican orientation on the world, right? I don't know whether we can argue you should or you shouldn't. Maybe you just shouldn't think of yourself as Mexican or you shouldn't think of yourself as Puerto Rican or whatever. But I think we are a nation of individuals who have orientations that are given to us from our families, from our cultures, from our past, our religion. I identify very clearly as a Christian. That's problematic for some people or whatnot. If we could say out of each other's business, if I get to be a Christian black libertarian who has open ideas about education and music and art and what is culture, then we're fine. It's not until we start trying to think of canonical thinking, there can be one Western way of thinking. There can be one story that we tell about America. There can be one way is when we start getting into problems for me as an individual, right? So I'll let you do the Gillespie thing. You let me do the Chris Stewart thing. Our kids will have different orientations in the world to be better for it, right? So when I think about black, I am black. My family is black. And we do have to think collectively about the data that we have that tells us that we have very clear problems. We have very clear issues that we need to solve which require solutions. So what are the solutions gonna be? Are they gonna be government solutions or are they gonna be solutions of our own making? We have black art, black history, black music. These are all black foods that we eat or whatnot. It's a cultural orientation that we have to work with when we start thinking about how do we solve our problems? And listen, we don't just call ourselves black. The world calls us black. The world hands us data that says you have an achievement gap. You have a home ownership gap. You have a high school graduation gap. Keep going down the list of all the gaps. And those are real. Race may be a social construct, but it has material consequences, right? Race may only exist truly in language, like a Wittigstein type of thing. It only exists in language, but there are material consequences to that thing that only exist in language. Talk a bit about, you've written about research that shows that having black children who are taught by black instructors do better. What is that? Because that, and I'm thinking from a kind of super doctrinaire, libertarian individualist kind of ethos. That is, you wanna follow the science or empirical work, but you also, it's like, now I don't want that to be true because I wanna believe that individuals are simply individuals. What is the evidence that black students prosper when they're taught by black teachers? I mean, there's been research on it. So it's been researched over time. There's lots of research that we have researched that white teachers see black students as older than they actually are, less innocent than they actually are, less capable of grade level work even when they qualify for it, less gifted than they actually are. When by science we can prove that they are more gifted. So we have all of this research. This isn't made up. This is all research. So this is one of my problems when we start getting into, especially with conservatives and liberals, conversations about race, and it becomes this thing about racism exists, no, it doesn't. There is no such thing as racism and there is such a thing as racism or it's not that important or it's very important or it's systemic or it's just individual. I find most of those to be not terribly serious conversations about race. Bottom line is you put a black child into a classroom with the white teacher and there's lots of research that tells you what that dynamic is. And it also, you put a black kid in a school or in a classroom with a black teacher for one year, it changes the trajectory of that child in some ways, but two years straight, it also changes the trajectory. Also, if a kid goes to church once a week, it changes their trajectory. If they go twice a week, it seriously changes their trajectory. So doctrinaire, libertarian, Gillespie, there are just some things that are gonna be true. Whether you believe in God or not, it's just true that if you go to church, it actually changes your life if you're a black kid. If you believe in race or racism or not, it's just true that if you put a kid into a classroom with a black teacher, it's different than if you do with a white teacher. And people have to ask themselves why, especially people who spend so much time pretending that racism is just an overwoke theory that's baked constantly on the left to foment division. They have to ask themselves why when they hear a stat like that about research like that. Well, let's talk a little bit about wokeism because it's a huge topic in education, especially. And you are both critical of woke activists and you derived their bumper sticker slogans and certain fixations, but you're also equally critical of anti-woke analysts. And you wrote a long piece critiquing, a critique of the San Diego Public School District from the right where a person was saying that, San Diego had just given up to wokeism and was no longer going to grade students, it wasn't going to punish them for handing in things late and all of this kind of stuff. And you talked about how being woke is its own problem, but being super anti-woke is another type of problem. And you introduced in this conversation the terms cryptomnesia and anglonegia. Can you talk about that and where you think both of these sides are kind of missing the boat on what's important? Yeah, I think so on the left, I think the woke stuff goes too far when it goes into territory where you just no measurements matter anymore. It doesn't matter whether the kids are learning, long as they're getting introduced to movies that show Che Guevara and blah, blah, blah, right? So that to me is its own problem because illiterate people is a problem for any society. So if you don't believe in measurements about whether or not your fourth graders and eighth graders can read or do math or do algebra or do geometry or whatever, as long as they have all the right buttons on their lapels and whatnot around liberal causes, that's a problem for me. That's a huge problem because I actually want thinking people to rule the country. And right now we have had a coup, we've had a moron coup. So thinking people have actually been displaced from their own leadership of the country. We have actually literally lost, thinking people have lost. So the left is damaging, I think, by not respecting real measurements about learning and demonstrative knowledge. Can you demonstrate what you have learned? On the right, I think there are such, you have so many cultural warriors on the right who only want a single story taught about the United States and they only want a single way of doing things. And they are so dogmatic that they don't understand that they are not the only people that exist on the planet and there can't be one story ever. They do the opposite of what the left does. So you just get the spy versus spy thing. It just becomes this like this two groups, the duopoly just engage in this long-term moron battle. And the rest of us who wanna be third party people and just wanna take the world as it comes actually are really without a home right now, I think on both sides. So you can hyperpolarize issues like the San Diego thing which San Diego has real problems just in general about all of these. But I think like the Cato Institute folks might say to you, someone like Neil McCluskey might say to you that a lot of this is the problem of just trying to have a common school, like a common school system. It wouldn't matter if you have leftist woke people over here and right cultural warriors over here if they all could go to a school of their choosing and we didn't try and cram everybody into one system. That definitely would work better for me. And I'm critical of both of them because I don't think that they see the damages and the limits of their dogmatism. You know, in one of the critiques against the contemporary school choice movement and particularly anything that's kind of smacks of vouchers is that it is a way of resegregating public schools or public education or K through 12 mandatory education might be a better term. And you know, there's truth to that in the 1955 essay that Milton Friedman where he introduced the kind of idea of vouchers as we talk about them still. He tips his hands to the segregationists who were engaging in what became known as massive resistance against Brown versus Board of Education and integration, you know and there are other people who say, you know that the entire edifice of public choice economics, you know, Nancy McClain in her book, Democracy in Chains, you know, said that all of this stuff is a variation on white supremacism. You push back against the idea that school choice the school choice movement is somehow inherently tied to white supremacy or and I wanna say and resegregating the schools but you're not necessarily against the certain type of segregation but where, you know, why is it wrong or what is the history that you draw on to show that the school choice movement actually is not first and foremost about segregating schools so that whites can learn at a faster clip than blacks. Yeah, so I think there's two things in your questionnaire that are really important to me that I would pull out. I tease out, first of all as libertarians we believe in free association. So that's a different principle than segregation. Those are two different words to me but they fit in the same bucket. We can have that discussion separately about, you know I believe racists have a right to be together if they wanna be together. I actually was a witness in a case here in Minnesota we have an integration lawsuit right now and I was a witness in this case and the attorney on the side of integration asked me very clearly. So Chris, it would be okay with you if a bunch of white supremacists started at a school of their own you'd be fine with that. And I said, well, you're not gonna like my answer but the truth of the matter is that would be doing me a huge service if they could all be together, right? Cause at least I know that's where they go together, right? And that actually is not a flippant answer in my mind it's true, why would I want to force them to go to school with my kids? Anyways, not a very popular answer these days but the fact of the idea that school choice is basically a segregation Trojan horse is factually inaccurate and historically inaccurate. Historically, we've had lots of different ways in which people have either gone to school or not the oldest school choice program I think people like Corey Daniels and others will tell you the oldest school choice programs in the United States far predate the Southern resistance movement of desegregation, right? So Vermont and Maine and other places had ways of which Ashley Burner would tell you that, you know we're a world laggard when it comes to offering school choice. So all of the Western world actually pays for people to go to private schools, religious schools, non-religious schools, different types of schools and they're not doing it because they're Southern segregationists in the 1950s in the United States they're doing it because they see a principle of freedom and being able to go to a school that fits within your own world orientation. As a matter of fact, in the declaration of human rights the global, the worldwide human rights article 26, number three I think it is basically says that parents have a right to choose the kind of education that their children will get that's not because they want to segregate the world it's a human right. People look over Milwaukee often time Polly Williams and Dr. Howard Fuller and others who fight for the choice movement there they do it from a very black power philosophy and black empowerment philosophy born of fatigue with all of the promises of integration and other things coming to save us. So anyways, let's just call it what it is it's a very clever argument mostly formed by communications consultants that work for the teachers unions who have figured out that that's one of the emotive ways that you can get to the American public to change the public mind around choice, right? Imagine if we started applying that to other things though like food choice or clothing choice or blah, blah, blah music, yeah, we're just all gonna we're gonna have two kinds of music from now on country and Western, right? Like so everybody else be damned, right? We wouldn't go for that but we go for it in education which is weird because that's the thing that develops your mind. What you spoke pretty eloquently in an outraged or an enraged way about the duopoly kind of throttling down decisions we are speaking a little bit before school choice week but it's actually the day we're talking is when Donald Trump is leaving office and Joe Biden is coming in as president. You are critical of Donald Trump in many of your writings and across the board. At the same time he is a, as much as any president has been he's been a proponent of school choice, Betsy DeVos whatever else one might say about her big proponent of school choice particularly in K through 12 education. What did you think of Donald Trump's what do you think of his educational policies or legacy when it comes to things like parents centered education of their kids? It's a hard question to answer because he got nothing done really. He's, Donald Trump actually is not a Republican to me. Donald Trump is not a conservative to me. Donald Trump said many things but like the Barnum and Bailey type of person that he is he said things and then forgot them 30 seconds later. He almost block granted. He almost crippled the development of charter schools for instance by block granting the money which was a weird abrasive attack on just the expansion of something that breaks down the monopoly system. And is that if he block granted he gives it all to the states and then the states are generally gonna be there's gonna be a lot of hostility towards charter schools. Yeah, I mean think about your state California imagine like Gavin Newsom being in control of the spread of charter schools. He's already demonstrated a level of pragmatic hostility towards charter schools. He wants to be president one day. He can do nothing better to get the left and to get the teachers unions than to go anti-charter and start shutting them down. Just so happens in your state of California some of the best performing schools for some of the hardest to educate students are charter schools, right? I haven't seen a national program of spreading school choice. I haven't seen vouchers fall from the sky like Manna. Like if we went back four years ago there was a promise an explicit promise we're made for those of us that believe in school choice. Chill out, we got this, watch what's about to happen. That was four years ago. It's four years later, the government monopoly on education couldn't be stronger. They spent a lot of their time trying to undo Obama era policies that were superfluous working around the fringes. And parents are no more empowered in my mind no more empowered today than they were before. So what we had was lots of fancy talk. I would argue that George Bush and Barack Obama got a lot more done for school choice in their time as presidents than this president who's leaving now. I really hope Republicans reclaim their center on these things again and start delivering. You must be very happy that we have a new president coming in who worked for Barack Obama. I'm pretty happy, yes I am happy that we have someone other than Donald Trump. I don't know that I'm happy necessarily that it's Joe Biden. Yeah, talk about Biden. What do you think of Biden's education plans and his nominee for secretary of education, Miguel Cardona? Yeah, it's hard for me to predict because I just think first of all, Joe Biden's a career politician who's been very much a hardcore centrist and for many Democrats and leftists he's been to the right of the center for them. So it's kind of an open book. And I think it was a clear shot from him when he didn't choose Randy Weingarden or Lilly from the NEA, the National Teachers Union's leaders as his education secretary that he wasn't going hard left on his education policies. But now, his deputy secretary is a branch ravician. She's a Diane Ravich person from San Diego. So I'm really confused a little bit because his Cardona, who he chose to be the education secretary is pretty mild, mild-mannered, hasn't been hostile to charter schools, hasn't been necessarily hostile to school choice, but his deputy secretary has been. So we'll see, I'm waiting to see, but I feel he's enough of a pragmatist. He's a private school parent himself. He's a Catholic. I would hope that the school choice lobby would be working on him right now. Although you did, you wrote a piece, I guess from late last year that was subheaded. Instead of making education great again for unions, maybe the president should make it better for all students regardless of where they learn. What do you mean by that? Well, listen, you have lots of public school teachers and unions and supporters who publicly say, listen, the majority of our kids 90% go to public school, so therefore we should spend the most opportunity, the most resources to give them opportunities to learn. And that to me is really a little bit of a disgusting type of way of seeing the world because first of all, you're saying that 10% doesn't matter. Now apply that to any minority of any sort. What if we said, listen, 90% of marriages are between people of the same sex? So why are we spending any time thinking about those people or of different sexes, heterosexual marriage? Why are we spending time thinking about people in same sex marriages? We would never go for that. Children learn in many different contexts. When you're the president in the United States, you have to be the president of home schoolers, the president of private schoolers, the Catholic schoolers, of magnet schoolers, charter schoolers, you're the president of everyone. So to allow public employees unions to get you to repeat the idea that only the 90% and it's really not 90%, let's be clear, it's more like 83% are in traditional schools. And many of those say that they would go to a non-public school if money were no object, right? So I have a problem with the idea that Biden would say he wants to be the president of all Americans, wants to be the healer, and then he would take a hard left on something like education that's so important to so many families. Do you think that teachers unions or teachers more broadly, but especially unions, the way that they responded to the lockdowns and the way that they continue to, is that doing real damage to their political interests? Because I can't think of a school district, particularly a large school district. I live most of the time in New York City. I've been spending some time out here in California. My kids went to school in Ohio. I've lived all over the country. I mean, I cannot think of a public teachers union that has covered itself in glory when it comes to we need to open, we need to do whatever we can to get kids learning, et cetera, they have almost to a person have been saying we are not teaching our primary function is doing well by us. We don't care about the kids. We don't care about opening schools, give us more money, give us less accountability. Do you think that the COVID lockdown is really going to change the way that teachers and teachers unions are viewed? I feel like they still have this empathy of the public. I think teachers unions are very smart about how long a strike should go on or how long they should stick with a strong stand on something. They're probably like, they're almost criminally insane. They're so smart about how long you do a thing to get to your goal or your agenda. And they right now are starting to say things like, we are all for opening schools safely. We want kids to go to safe schools and we want our staff to be safe. Public is very sympathetic to teachers and to sentiments like that. As time wears on, the patients will run then and they will change because they've always done that. You just mentioned New York. New York teachers union is very smart about how long a strike should go on. So as Chicago, in the beginning, all the parents are with them. All the public is with them because we just, we don't pay teachers enough. We beat them up. They have a thankless job. They're with our kids all day long. We want to consider them all to be Mary Poppins. And that goes on for about two or three weeks of you being out of work and whatnot. And then you start saying things like, I love the teachers but, right? And they listen for the butt. Right now the butt hasn't kicked in. There's still the idea that we have to get kids back in schools but we have to do it safely. And I guess in a weird way, your experience of having your kids around, people might be more than willing than ever to say, you know what, I understand what teachers are going through because I'm dealing with- Yeah, I'm gonna say a provocative thing here, Nick, which is just this. I don't know that everybody likes their kids as much as they love them. Like people love their children. I don't know that they like them as much as they love them for one. And I don't think that there's been a time like now where they've discovered that more. And I will also say there might be a lot of people who actually predicated their decision on having children in the number they had on the idea that they would be in government schools all day long. So the government's not holding up its end of the bargain right now. Let's talk a little bit about your path to libertarian ideas. How did that happen? And how do we create more people like you? I love the way that you're inherently kind of talking about education as an extension of individualism. And that's gonna take a lot of kind of unplanned and unpredictable forms and coalitions and things like that. But how did you come to call yourself a libertarian? For me, libertarianism in the beginning was just like this grand compromise. Like, we can argue, we can keep arguing about all these things or we can just let each other be. And I get to just be responsible for what I have in my own world and let's just stop arguing. So I was a Nader voter in the 90s. You know, I was very much on good government. You know, the consumer should rule. And that actually is what led me into libertarianism. Join the Libertarian Party in Minnesota in I wanna say 96, 98, like in those years, was a volunteer on the Jesse Ventura campaign for governor in Minnesota. And really that was to me really submerging in the Libertarian Party politics because he wasn't with the Libertarian Party but he had been a Libertarian Party All-Star. And for me, it just became this grand compromise of we have a drug war that doesn't make any sense. We are making black people in black communities a casualty of really bad policy in so many ways, education, the war on drugs, over policing. And of all of those things, I think if anybody was really having an honest discussion just amongst black people today, for instance, and I know this isn't your orientation, but and we put three people on stage, the Duopoly and the Libertarian on stage to have to answer for policies in the United States, it would be the Libertarian policies that would have done the least damage, first of all, and offered the most freedom. So things around like the war on drugs was catastrophic for our community and people don't talk about it. People love to talk about the welfare state, they don't love to talk about the warfare state, right? And it just makes sense to me, like you wouldn't have, should a guy die because he's selling cigarettes outside of a store, right? Is that cause for a death sentence? Well, one party would say maybe, the other party would say no, and one party would say hell no, and that would be the Libertarians. So for me, that was the orientation, it wasn't super ideological, although the ideology made sense to me. There are things about it that didn't resonate with me, like the whole Anne Rand atheist Libertarianism never has resonated with me, but it's just practically speaking, it's where I locate the most political hope for solving black problems, if that's my goal. How does your Christianity infuse your Libertarianism? You mentioned, Anne Rand, who's famously, not just an atheist, but a super atheist on steroids, but a lot of people I know who are Christian are also Libertarian and see a connection there. What is the connection for you or is there one? Yeah, I think that, it's interesting because so much of the radical Jesus that people don't teach and don't talk about is about freeing yourself and throwing the yoke of the world off, you're in this world, but not of it. Don't join things that are not of you. And many Christians, I think, go the opposite direction, which is a problem for me. They nationalize Jesus, they nationalize it. Patriotism becomes their new God. The flag, they pledge to allegiance. They pledge allegiance to something other than Christ. They treat a piece of cloth as if itself actually is mystical and metaphysical in ways that's weird. So for me, Jesus talked a lot about freeing you of the world and leave the world and don't be like, you know, behold into it. And for me, that is a lot of the Libertarian ethos. I know you had asked me previously about Galatians because in my Twitter byline, there's Galatians 5-1, which is, and I don't wanna butcher it. So it is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm then and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery. And really to me, it's like, I've made you free and I've freed you. Do not go back to things that enslave you. Don't become a slave again, right? And for me, that fits very well within the Libertarian orientation because number one, we are trying to fear ourselves of many things, mostly of the way that government actually programs us and polices us and keeps us in a box. But once you break out of those things, don't go back to it again, right? So that's how it fits together for me. I know it's not everybody's way of looking at it. And the Anne Rand thing is very strong. I've been in many discussions with Libertarians where I'm like, see, the good thing about Libertarians is you don't all have to be one thing, right? You can be a left of center Libertarian or right of center Libertarian. There are people called themselves Libertarian leaning. I don't know what that means. It's like kind of pregnant. And you can be a Christian Libertarian. For sure, you know, you again in our kind of conversation as we were scheduling this and whatnot, you express some interest in kind of ways in which Libertarianism might be sold to blacks or to people like yourself. There's a little question I think that, you know, the Libertarian movement sociologically has been largely white. It's been largely male. You know, what is, what are the ways that we should be selling this philosophy or maybe, you know, maybe philosophy is too strong a word. This kind of orientation, this temperament, this predisposition or whatever. You know, what are the ways that we sell it to people in your community who otherwise might think there's only a choice between, you know, kind of liberal and conservative attitudes towards things? I mean, excuse me, I honestly don't have a hard time, you know, so-called selling it. I think there's such a freedom orientation to black thought. Black thought is seen to be in a struggle and the struggle is seen to be like a struggle for freedom. So if you go all the way back, I mean, I would consider that, you know, we have people like Frederick Douglass in my mind is a Libertarian, Booker T. Washington is a Libertarian, not a conservative, a Libertarian in my mind. He believed that like versus WB Du Bois, he believed that true freedom is like owning yourself and owning your stuff, right? Like, and you can fight to be part of somebody else's system if you want to, but no one will ever take you seriously until you own yourself and you own your stuff. So I don't think that it's hard to make the sale so-called if you're talking about freedom and the struggle for freedom and the struggle to be free, just to be free of the things right now that have us, you know, the call for defund the police, which I know is such a complicated conversation when you get into the duopoly, but if you just stand aside for it and you say, is it smart to have militarized local police departments over a period of years where they can do asset forfeitures that actually just use money to remilitarize themselves over and over and over again to the point where they do no knock warrants, where they do stop and frisk, where free people are being stopped and asked to present your papers and empty your pockets and whatnot. If you can get out of the duopoly discussion of that, you don't have a hard time selling libertarianism, I think to black freedom fighters, people who want to be free at some point. So I don't know if that's enough of an answer there, but I do know, I think that there's serious damage to the sale if we're trying to sale by right wing cultural warriors who are called themselves conservatives and especially black conservatives, right? I actually think no one is doing more damage to let the libertarian sale to black folks than black so-called conservatives. Does that include people like Thomas Sowell who gets, talked about a lot and seems to me, you know, he has certain libertarian elements and certain very conservative kind of culture war type of things. Who are the black conservatives that you think are undermining a kind of move towards individual freedom and liberation? Well, here's the kindest way for me to answer that. If you have black conservatives where 90% of what they're saying is that black people are wrong about something and white people are right, that's a problem. If you have black conservatives who are super popular with white people for some reason and get retweeted constantly by white people but there's no black people ever in the room and they're gaining weight from all the free dinners that they get and they're loving the attention that they get but there's never anybody black in the room when they do this routine that they do and if 90% of what they're doing is making white people feel really good, like really like, I don't know why this guy, I don't know why more black people don't talk like him, you might have a problem, like Jeff Fox, the Fox word, he might say you might have a problem with your black conservative. The problem with them is you want to make me a slave again by selling a single story. I don't need 1619 or 1776 to give me what should be the story of what America should be. I'm a thinking person, I will figure it out for myself. That is such a deeply libertarian idea that there are multiple stories and also that the stories are gonna change, right? Because as new information happens. So let me go back to a question that I really want you to answer because I found these terms fascinating, Kryptonesia and Anglonesia. What is Kryptonesia? What is it? So Kryptonesia is when you forget what you stolen from somebody. So you've taken something from somebody. So one of the ways I've seen Kryptonesia explained really easily is that you have Dane Cook. Do you remember Dane Cook, the comedian? So Dane Cook tells this story about naming his kid a name with no vowels in it. It's just gonna be all ours. So you know, we call them, what not? Someone does some looking and they figure out that CK told that exact same joke six years earlier, right? And Dane is like, no, this is my joke. I made this up blah, blah, blah. The two of them get together and meet and it's determined that, no, you stole that but you forgot that you stole it. You saw it once and there's actually a literal term of stealing something from somebody. When we talk about things in education like the educational debt, the reason that I use the word Kryptonesia is people have forgotten what has been stolen from black people in terms of education over years. So we talk about them today. We talk about the statistics around black education as if black and whites actually come from the same place and they had the same history and at some point all debts were wiped clean and they were exactly equal. And then black people decided not to be on track, decided not to catch up. And to me, that's a classic case of Kryptonesia. No, for a good number of the years that we've existed in the United States, it was illegal to even teach us to read. After that, we made some serious gains, most of which were wiped out and people don't talk about this enough in 1954 with Brown. So the left and the right have, I think, some answering to do for where we are right now. That's Kryptonesia to me, forgetting the debt that you have to people of what you did to them. Indian boarding schools, I think is a great example. We forget about Indian boarding schools but to our own peril if we wanna be thinking people, right? So that's Kryptonesia. What about Anglo-Nesia? Anglo-Nesia is when you do that in your white person. Anglo-Nesia is when, as a white person, you say things like, I just don't know why those black folks are not at the same level that we are right now as if there's no such thing as history, as if there's no such logical answer for how the 80s related to the 70s were related to the 60s to the 50s and back, right? Generation by generation. We just talk in terms as if there was this thing called slavery and then there was emancipation and then we were all equal and we just don't know why. So San Diego is a good example of that when the piece you're referring to when I use both of those terms is you have the cultural warrior right who are so hyper-reactionary to any change, to anything that has to do with race that they are, I think, miscalculating what is being done with this one policy in San Diego around students being graded for handing in things late, you won't be graded the same way or punished the same way. Well, that's wokeism, that's over wokeism or whatnot. San Diego has racial data. They have very different outcomes by race. They're trying to solve their problem in multiple different ways. And by the way, that is not true that they're not going to ping you anymore for turning in late. They're just gonna take it out of your academic grade and put it in something called the citizenship grade. So you will still be graded poorly for turning it in late. But people are so hyper-reactionary that they jump in on it. Yeah, I mean, this is, it comes up a lot where if what is considered the canon of great American literature or something, if that changes at all, it's always a bad thing as opposed to kind of looking at how is a canon created in the first place and how is it always kind of being added to and subtracted from in a kind of fuller conversation rather than just attacking something as always being worse than whatever it replaces. Well, can't we just save ourselves a lot of trouble just by not arguing about those things? I mean, listen, if you love, I'm bored to death. I'm bored to tears by Shakespeare. If you love Shakespeare, then I love you. Then do your thing, right? Don't tell me that as a thinking person I don't have a right to not consider Shakespeare to be one of the greats. Don't consider me a bad person if I think that the movie was better than the book, right? Let's just be individuals about this and say your canon may not include James Baldwin, but mine does, right? Diane Ravich, very weirdly and famously in her book, Death and Life of American Schools, talks all about all this top-down stuff in the book that she's against. And towards the end though, she presents a canon. And I believe the only two black people on the list are Dr. Martin Luther King and maybe Booker T. Washington or whatnot. And I thought, why would you... That's good for your family. That's good for Michael Ravich, your son. I want my kids reading Baldwin as much as I want them reading anything else or whatnot. So why do we need to have a canon? I think we need to have a canon because there was a cultural war. And I don't think libertarians should be cultural warriors. I think we should step outside of the cultural war because that's endless, it's needless, and it's actually what makes busybodies. America's biggest problem in my mind is busybodiness. Like, right? If we can't just stay out of each other's business long enough to like just live our lives, we're gonna continually have arguments about curriculum and about a kind of school and even our politics. So I'm not for it. I'm not for a canon. I'm not for 16 or yeah, 1619. It was so flawed. It had so many, it was trauma porn in my mind. And the only thing that made me lessen the rhetoric that I had about my criticism of 1619 is 1776. That's the only thing that made me reprieve, give a reprieve to 1619. What, yeah, it's a kind of final question. In a year, School Choice Week will happen again in 2022. How will we know if we've gotten closer to an ideal that you would feel comfortable with of expanded School Choice? Well, one, if we're putting more resources directly into the hands of parents. So if anything that, if there could be a super big silver lining out of COVID, it's that we finally get over the hump where we trust parents enough to have some determining power of how the resources are allocated. So there's a school in Colorado, for instance, that just allows the parents to move $1,000 of their per pupil to determine what it is. And to me, that's the camel's nose into the tent. 1,000 can become two, could become 3,000 of the per pupil. And that is the parents can use a thousand bucks to further their kid's education as they see fit. Yeah, well, they can take, they can determine how that thousand is spent, right? In service of their kids. And that would be great if that became two, and then three, and then four. EdChoice actually is one of the organizations that I really, really love a lot. And they have a national map of what types of school choice programs are available in every state. It would be great to see the number of those expand in response to the pandemic, in response to closed schools. They would probably, I think, want more ESAs, but I want education savings accounts. I want all forms of voucher or parent determining devices or instruments. And a year from now, I'm not hopeful that all of this is gonna change. Well, we didn't talk in this discussion, and which is just kind of, I think the elephant in the room always is, the educational establishment's power to maintain what they have right now is hard to move. It's hard to shift. It's- I mean, if it's hard to get, you know, kind of police unions and prison guard unions to move, they're nothing compared to the educational establishment. Not at all. Not at all. And the public has a very different response to the teachers' unions than they do to all those other unions. So when you beat up on teachers' unions, you're beating up on Mary Poppins, and that's a problem for America. Well, we'll check back in a year, if not sooner, and we'll see if Mary Poppins has been bruised as a result of events on the ground. I wanna thank Chris Stewart. He is, among other things, the CEO of Brightbeam, a nonprofit network of education activists demanding a better education and a brighter future for every child for talking a reason. Chris, thanks so much. Thank you for having me.