Can Public Schools Work? (with Neal McCluskey)

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0:00:07.5 Trevor Burrus: Welcome to Free Thoughts. I’m Trevor Burrus. Joining me today is Neal McCluskey, Director of Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom. His new book is The Fractured Schoolhouse: Re-​examining Education for a Free, Equal and Harmonious Society. Welcome back to the show, Neal.

0:00:23.8 Neal McCluskey: Hi. Thanks for having me on.

0:00:25.9 Trevor Burrus: Recent years and I really mean about the last two, we’ve seen some pretty pitched battles about school curriculum coming from both the Left and the Right, of course, conservatives are quite against the “woke” kind of teaching and critical race theory, whatever that may mean. And the Left has their own theories of educational content and it seems a little bit weird ’cause this kind of came up recently and I think back to my childhood growing up in the ’80s and the ’90s and while we had this kind of religious discussion and prayer in schools and evolution a little bit, it didn’t really happen in my school district. It seemed like that was a time when we were all kind of agreeing about what public schools should teach and now it’s kind of splintering. So is that one reason why you wrote the book now and is that sort of like a theme that’s emerging now in education?

0:01:22.7 Neal McCluskey: Well, I actually started working, as you probably know, on this subject a long time ago. In 2005, I guess it was, I wrote a policy analysis called Why We Fight: How Public Schools Cause Social Conflict, that was actually motivated by two things. One was working in education policy, I get tired of hearing that we should never have school choice because if we had school choice or sort of, inversely, if we didn’t have public schools, we would fracture and we’d fly off into our own little camps, we’d be Balkanized is the term often used and not only would we go off in our own camps, but it would somehow also cause us to fight with one another. I hear that a lot and I’d hear that public schools, terms like they’re the foundation of our democracy, they are what unify us, and I thought that that just sort of logically didn’t make sense. I knew enough education history that I think historically it didn’t make sense and we were actually at that time seeing some very severe conflicts over evolution and creationism.

0:02:33.0 Trevor Burrus: Oh, that was about the time of that Pennsylvania court case, it wasn’t around that time?

0:02:37.0 Neal McCluskey: Exactly. So and it wasn’t strictly creationism. There was a debate about, well, we’re really talking about intelligent design, which is supposed to be something different from creationism, although it was similar, quite related but yeah, so we were having this conflict in several places, there were also in Alabama and some other districts, they were saying, “Well, okay, we’ll teach evolution, but we’ll put stickers in the textbooks that say, ‘Okay, evolution is only a theory, if you wanna learn more, get the book Of Pandas and People,’ ” which talked about creationism. And then it was York, Pennsylvania, I believe, where they had this big fight and it was one of the last times I actually saw good journalism that did more than just say, “This side is for this, this side is for the other. The people who want creationism, we’re just gonna say that they’re pretty much troglodytes.”

0:03:25.4 Neal McCluskey: This actually got into how this debate was really ripping this town apart and how people who were neighbors, who would see each other on the way to the store or something could no longer speak to each other and how they were feeling sort of alienated and they were feeling often insulted. And I thought, “How can we have things like this going on and still say, ‘Well, public schooling unifies us’?” What it seems to do often is make diverse people fight with each other, fight with their neighbors to try and control what is taught in the schools that they all have to pay for and hence use. You’ve got a battle for supremacy to get the schools to teach what you want. And we actually have seen this throughout the history of public schooling but it kinda comes and goes in waves.

0:04:09.2 Neal McCluskey: And so today, I think we’re in another one of those waves with what’s called CRT and what people call gender ideology and a lot of sort of deep values kind of issues that have come to the fore, mixed in with a stew of anger over how schools handled COVID, which has also sort of increased the animosity and the energy in these debates.

0:04:33.8 Trevor Burrus: That, my first question was obviously leading in the sense of this idea that I think the cyclical aspect is interesting where where you maybe grow up or what time you grow up in, maybe it doesn’t seem like public schools are completely beset with this kind of conflict, but of course, if you grew up in Philadelphia in the 1840s or actually, a lot of the middle 19th century, you would be very, very familiar with these kind of conflicts. So how is that cycle kind of work, it’s obviously not exact, but we have these kind of backlashes for what the purposes of public school is supposed to do for us, this uniting purpose.

0:05:13.2 Neal McCluskey: Well, for most of our history, the biggest cleavages have been about religion, whose religion and whether religion at all should be in public schools. So we saw actually a lot of that historically. What is interesting is, so you go to the colonial period and most of our history until about 1830, and there isn’t much thought that there should be government-​run schools. There could be some government help in funding schools in large part because the British tradition was privately-​funded schools, which often had endowments from land but the one thing that was super abundant in the colonies was land, so you didn’t get as much value out of that.

0:05:53.0 Neal McCluskey: So sometimes you had private schools that received some government help and then in Massachusetts, it’s true that in 1647 there was a law passed, the Old Deluder Satan Act that said, “Okay, towns of 50-99 people have to have someone who teaches kids and if you have more than a… Or 100 or more families, you have to have a grammar school.” The idea of the grammar school was it’s a place you went to learn, but also then to feed people into Harvard to become ministers and leaders. So it was, keep in mind, sort of a theocracy, not just a government, it was they were put together, but what’s really important is people to say, “So that was the beginning of public schools.”

0:06:38.5 Neal McCluskey: Well, that wasn’t even maintained in New England and then if you’d go to the Middle Atlantic colonies, which actually have a lot more diversity, so diverse religion, people of diverse backgrounds, a large German population, there’s nothing like public schooling, so New England, they didn’t keep it, for the most part, Middle Atlantic colonies, they didn’t have it because they couldn’t because they were too diverse, and then in the south, you have a much more spread out population, but you actually do have a lot of affordable education. So you have a lot of schooling going on, it’s not public schooling, it’s largely private schooling and by the time you get to 1840, which is the first sort of national level literacy data, we have 90% of White adult Americans are literate, roughly. White is important because governments often said if you’re African American, you cannot receive education. That wasn’t a failure of the private sector, although certainly it would have been hard probably to expect many private schools to accept African Americans, but this was government doing this.

0:07:43.3 Neal McCluskey: So until you get to 1830, there’s really not much idea that the government should supply schools. When we get a new nation, you see some leaders like Benjamin Rush in Pennsylvania, Thomas Jefferson, others talking about there should be some provision of education in a land where the people now have serious say in how they’re governed. They don’t all have it, their property rights issues and things like that, but the idea is that the people have power. And you could see why some founders were worried. You had the French Revolution going on, they think, “We don’t want the mob.” And the mob was a problem in many places. “We don’t want a mob mentality so we need to sort of enlighten people.”

0:08:21.9 Neal McCluskey: But even the founders don’t agree with each other, those who call for some sort of public schooling don’t agree with each other what it should ultimately about, how it looks, and it’s not really until you get to 1837 and Horace Mann who says, he becomes the first secretary of education in Massachusetts, and he says, “Well, we really gotta have common schools.” Why? In part, it was religion. New England has changed, he is a Unitarian, he doesn’t like the more kinda Puritan types called Congregationalists by this time, and people think he’s worried about Catholics, they haven’t actually arrived yet, that’s the next big wave. But he’s… New England’s where industrialization starts, not the best farming land, lots of rivers, and he sees people coming in from the hinterlands to places like Boston and he’s like, “These people are ignorant. They’re kinda dirty. They need me to tell them what to do.” Interestingly, he homeschooled his kids, he didn’t use the public schools, but so…

0:09:20.8 Trevor Burrus: Doesn’t that always seem to be the case? You follow Corey DeAngelis’ Twitter and it’s like so many people who are against private schools seem to private-​school their kids or homeschool them?

0:09:32.2 Neal McCluskey: It’s true. In fact, I think both the Democrat running for governor and the one running for Senate in Pennsylvania, both send their kids to private schools and both have said they really support the public school system. And teachers tend to disproportionately use private schools. And so, there is a practice what you preach problem. I don’t wanna say though that Horace Mann probably didn’t think this was a good idea, I think he did. He may have thought, “Okay, this is too formative, it’s not ready yet for my kids.” But there is this sort of constant theme of people saying, “What’s best for America is that everyone sends their kids to public schools except for mine because they’re special and need special things, unlike your kids who all look exactly the same and don’t need anything different.”

0:10:18.6 Neal McCluskey: But it’s not ’til you get to Horace Mann, actually, that you have lots of fights among different Protestants about what the public schools, these common schools would teach. Do you just teach lowest common denominator Protestantism? Do you include the different beliefs of different denominations? And Horace Mann said, “Well, we’ll teach the Bible, which is we all agree is the expositor of all things in Christianity.” And people said, “Well, what you’re really trying to do is just eliminate anything other than lowest common denominator Protestantism,” which some of them said, “Hey, that’s Unitarianism. So you’ve made the school what you want, not what we want.”

0:10:58.0 Neal McCluskey: They fight like that for a while, but then you get to the really big first wave of fights, which are Catholics, who don’t use the same Bible, they don’t use the King James. Their own Bible has different books than the Protestant Bible. There’s a lot of fear that Catholics are not really connected to a democratic country, that they will do whatever the Pope says, that’s the biggest cleavage we have really up through about the ninth… So from about 1845 to 19… Well, 1840 to about 1960, that’s probably the biggest. Although, by the time you get to the 20th century, you have a lot of fights about “Should religion be in public schools at all, no matter whose it is?” But also running throughout this is race. But race isn’t as big an issue about what happens in the public schools for most of our history because for most of our history, we said, “You can’t use the public schools.”

0:11:57.8 Neal McCluskey: That then becomes though, the biggest issue when finally, really not until that, the 1960s, so you have Brown v. Board in 1954, but a long period of time of trying to get that implemented. It’s not really until the 1960s or ’70s that you start to see physical integration of the schools and race not being an issue in that “Can you access the school?” Now it’s, “Which schools can you access? How do we make sure that they are physically integrated? What do they teach about racial subjects?” And that’s kinda where we are now, actually.

0:12:34.0 Neal McCluskey: This current wave is about two things: How do you teach about the history and character of the United States, in particular, as it regards race? A lot of this was brought to the fore by George Floyd and school administrators’ reactions to George Floyd saying, “We’ve got to teach about systemic racism.” And then, a lot of the rest of it is about religion, including questions that are called gender ideology, but all these sorts of transgender issues, LGBT, or… So all those issues. Many of them have at their heart religion and religious values. And so, that’s kind of the wave that we’re in, is both of these things and how they are taught as reflecting the character of the United States.

0:13:22.8 Trevor Burrus: It’s interesting you brought up the Old Deluder statute of 1647 coming out of Massachusetts. And I’m glad you pointed out that Massachusetts was basically a theocracy, which we like to talk about religious liberty and therein search of religious liberty and… Sure, for them, but the way they ran their country would violate most provisions of the First Amendment today, if the Constitution existed, Establishment Clause and Free Exercise Clause, but that kinda brings up the interesting point because for advocates of public school who point to the… Let’s just assume, let’s just say, a teachers’ union advocate who point to the long tradition of common and public schools in this country, going back to the Old Deluder statute of 1647, I’m quite sure that if Randi Weingarten and other people were back in 1647, they would vehemently oppose the type of school that was trying to be imposed on them by the Puritans in 17th century Massachusetts, which goes to the bigger point that if you control public schools, you might be for them, but if you don’t, you probably are likely to be against them.

0:14:37.0 Neal McCluskey: Yeah, that’s actually a great point because what we find is, I constantly encounter writings, for instance, Anya Kamenetz, who had been an NPR reporter, just wrote something, oh, a couple of weeks ago, so it would have been early September, late August, talking about, “Well, you know what? The public schools really screwed up with COVID. But it’s absolutely important that we recover the reputation of public schools because they’re the foundation of our democracy and they bring us all together and terrible right-​wingers want school choice and they’re exploiting this for that purpose.” And she only, very briefly, she somehow talks about how they unify us, only mentions Catholics in saying, “Well, so some private schools are Catholics because Catholics kinda like parochial schools.” None of the background as to why.

0:15:31.3 Neal McCluskey: And then a little throwaway line about “Sure, public schools haven’t been perfect.” And that’s because when you get these kinda hagiographic discussions of public schools, they don’t actually wanna deal with much of the true history of public schools because it’s all so troubling or much of it is troubling. There’s actually another side of this that’s important but so none of them would support “Well, okay, yeah, so it wasn’t great that we first denied African Americans access to public schools and then that we segregated in their own schools. That was bad. Okay, so if you press us, we’ll acknowledge that. But we don’t do that anymore. So don’t worry about that. So this has been a great system, it’s just it had this really terrible aspect for most of its existence, but don’t worry ’cause we don’t do that, so now we know the system is really good and choice is bad.”

0:16:24.0 Neal McCluskey: Same thing for religion. To just say to celebrate public schooling and only say, “Well, Catholics kinda don’t like it, ’cause they like the parochial schools,” without saying why those parochial schools were established because the public schooling system was both incompatible with Catholicism and often very hostile to it, that means you actually don’t like most of the history of public schooling, you like the idea of public schooling and maybe they don’t realize that they are ignoring a lot of history because it’s pretty ugly and a major part of public schooling or maybe they do, but one way or the other, I don’t know anybody’s motives, but what ends up happening is you lionize the system that you know at one level has never been close to what you say it is and then you use it to attack another system only because it’s different.

0:17:22.7 Neal McCluskey: And maybe you do fear Balkanization and things like that, but one of the major reasons I wrote this book and have worked on this is because the history simply does not support what people say about public schools and that needs to be stated over and over again. And then, the part about choice, well, it unifies things like that, we can get into that obviously, but that’s not a sure thing but we certainly know that public schools haven’t done what we say they do. And that is a big part of this book and explaining why it is they can’t do what we’ve said they’ve done.

0:17:55.1 Trevor Burrus: For my lifetime, conservatives have railed against public schools to this point, and long-​time listeners have heard me say this before where I’ve always been skeptical that they really dislike public schools as opposed to they don’t like the fact that they don’t control public schools, that really, if they could control it and we see now, they’re trying to, they would like to dictate the curriculum and they think this is the right of the state to create people as conservatives see fit and the other side thinks the same thing, just different values involved. But in the ’50s, you could say that that was a time when conservatives might have controlled more of public education and more values of public education were conservative in nature, and so therefore you have the school choice movement, which is not necessarily “right-​wing”.

0:18:45.3 Trevor Burrus: To be honest, it would not even to me, register as a right-​wing movement at all, actually. Public schools seem to be extremely conservative in nature and the people who always opposed them were the radicals and the liberals and the leftists and the people coming out and saying, “As long as we don’t hold the power in the system, then we need to oppose the system imposing a theory of citizen craftsmanship, person craftsmanship onto my children.” But it’s all flipped, but it’s not a necessary flip, it could easily flip the other way and we’ve seen that in history.

0:19:21.0 Neal McCluskey: Yeah. So, you’re right that public schooling is really probably fundamentally a conservative institution. There’s lots of sociology about this but a major job of education that was given to public schooling is something called social reproduction. The idea is that the public school is where everybody in the newest generation goes so that they learn the values and the order and everything that the current generations want them to know so that society keeps being reproduced the way it is. That is a very conservative thing. That’s why most of the battles that we see through history are about more conservative people saying, “No, don’t allow something to happen. We are worried about Catholics, we are worried about other immigrants, we are worried about African Americans, we want to control what they learn, what they think, where they go.” And that is all very conservative.

0:20:21.3 Neal McCluskey: On the flip side, there is a strain of progressives who have said, “Wait a minute, we have this powerful apparatus to where we can affect minds. We should use this to change society to what we think it should be.” This is a lot of the concern the conservatives have about critical race theory, what they call critical race theory, and there is evidence that critical race theory, even properly defined, not just as something about race, is often taught to teachers, part of trainings, and I don’t know that it’s as ubiquitous as conservatives will say it is, but there are certainly many examples of it being taught of it informing how curricula are put together so it’s a real thing.

0:21:04.4 Neal McCluskey: So public schooling is largely conservative, but certainly progressives have talked about taking the reigns of it to engineer change. The fundamental problem is it’s force. It’s people from above saying, “We will decide what all children will learn. A proper American is this or to get the proper America, we have to change it to X.” I think one of the reasons though, that school choice is considered sort of right-​wing, probably goes to the old conservative libertarian infusion-​ism that seems to be falling apart these days. The old Bill Buckley, Ronald Reagan, “Hey, we can agree on general freedom, especially economic freedom, freedom to choose schools for your kids seems like part of that. We want it to be based on a free market.” And I think that’s why it is now associated with the Right but there were actually many progressives in the ’60s who were champions of school choice because they saw urban public schools and said, “These are terrible, dangerous failure factories that reproduce all sorts of dysfunction and systemic racism,” although they probably weren’t using the term then and they said there should be school choice.

0:22:15.9 Neal McCluskey: In fact, there was a good article, and I should think it might have been Justin Driver who wrote it but I can’t remember, about, “Hey everybody, progressives came first, they were the ones who came up with the school choice idea. But I think they’ve tended to do abandon it in part maybe ’cause it’s soul-​searching with the Right, but also because the kind of conservative special interest, the ones who wanna conserve their position, especially the teachers’ unions, but also principals’ associations, superintendent associations, school board associations, they’re all tend to be on the political left, which likes big government, and so I think we don’t see as many or hear as many of these progressive voices for choice anymore.”

0:22:54.6 Trevor Burrus: These concerns are illegitimate though, the Balkanization concerns, the not having a cultural identity as a country, this has long been a concern of countries around the world and it ties into many other policy areas like immigration, for example, how many immigrants we are gonna let in and how much can they completely change the ethos of the country. As we well know, there was a very big idea that we were Protestant in our nature, in our founding, and that the Protestant ethos sort of was part of the revolution and that the Catholics could undermine that and I’m not saying that that’s true, but I’m saying that there are different cultures that could undermine the nature of the collective culture of a nation and it’s not to be concerned about so maybe the actual problem here is what level of normativity we’re talking about. Maybe there needs to be something, just a baseline like reading, writing, arithmetic, like, “Let’s get some educational outcomes, that’s have people know how many Houses of Congress there are, what the branches of government… The base thing about government,” like, that baseline thing and that what really we shouldn’t be doing is going up that normative ladder and teaching religion or other types of values but we do need a baseline thing if we’re gonna be a nation.

0:24:16.7 Neal McCluskey: Yeah. Well, I am sympathetic to lots of people who worried about how do we get… First when we have a new country, how do we get people to buy into this new country? How do we make sure that they use their power as voters responsibly? Because you could look at other countries and say, well, how do we not devolve into mob rule and they didn’t have to look at other countries, actually, you could look at various rebellions in the US and say, “We really worry about mob rule.” You can certainly understand why Horace Mann saw people come in from the countryside who probably didn’t wash their hands all the time and may not have spoken very well and said, “I really worry that these people need some help.” Of course, then you find out there’s a little problem of arrogance because he actually writes at length about how foolish these people are because they don’t understand the science of… Oh no, now I just forgot the word and I just had it in my head. The thing where you look at, phrenology.

0:25:26.1 Trevor Burrus: Phrenology, yeah. Actually, I’m gonna stop ’cause I wanna read my favorite paragraph of your book as you point this out.

0:25:32.1 Neal McCluskey: Oh. Go for it.

0:25:35.6 Trevor Burrus: “Mann, at the very least, sounded as if he believed common schooling would have extraordinary transformative enlightening power and it would need Herculean potency because as optimistic as Mann was about public schooling, he appeared pessimistic about the average person based on his ruminations about parents, in particular, Mann seemed convinced that many, well, common people were either well-​intentioned but dangerously ignorant or rotten. In other words, common schooling was not about perfecting something already good but overhauling people who were intellectually and often morally dilapidated.”

0:26:06.2 Neal McCluskey: Man, what a paragraph.

0:26:07.9 Trevor Burrus: I love that. I love that paragraph. I gave that a big highlight.

0:26:10.3 Neal McCluskey: Oh, good.

0:26:12.0 Trevor Burrus: Yeah, I know it’s ’cause I find that to be ironic and a lot of these people who seem to care about the common man but also really don’t like them very much.

0:26:21.4 Neal McCluskey: Yeah. Well, ’cause a major thrust of early common schooling was the idea that people really lacked virtue, that they were kinda morally decrepit and you needed public schools to fix that moral decrepitude. And again, it’s not like it’s hard to understand why people, especially elites, well-​educated people thought that. It is a problem that they didn’t have humility so when Mann says, “There’s a really, a big problem with the average parent ’cause they don’t even understand phrenology,” modern people without necessarily condemning Mann for thinking this was good science ’cause it might have seen cutting edge at the time, but we know that, well, you probably didn’t want to impose phrenology as the end all and be all of science on people because it turned out to be quackery.

0:27:03.0 Neal McCluskey: And so, there’s this problem of a lack of humility among sort of common school champions and people who continue to be for it, but you can certainly, I hate it when people just assume if that person did something I didn’t like they were evil, their motives were bad. I don’t think that we should do that. I don’t think there’s any evidence that Horace Mann was an evil guy. I think he was trying to help to make things better. I think people who worry about influxes of folks with a different culture, maybe a different language, with a the different background, who don’t do public policy analysis all the time, it’s totally reasonable and understandable that they’re afraid, “Well, this might fundamentally change the character of the country.”

0:27:50.4 Neal McCluskey: And that’s again, one of the reasons I wrote the book is that seems intuitive. But when you start to look at these kinds of issues and kinds of things, you can start to see why actually, we shouldn’t be as afraid of them, and how public schooling that try and force them into a particular model is counter-​productive. So I think it’s Milton Gordon, although I’m always confusing him with another guy, but I think he was the one who wrote about actually immigrants, of course, when they first get here, they move to places that are full of people like themselves, you’ve got to have that.

0:28:24.7 Neal McCluskey: I’m sure it’s not actually Milton Gordon, he wrote about religion, but these two guys are connected. I’m sure I properly identified the book, I just can’t remember them. But anyway, so you move to a place with people with your background because you need familiar things in order to transition to a whole new country. You’re gonna feel much more comfortable if people were speaking your language, eating similar foods, know the same sort of stories and things like that. So that makes sense. But what you find and many people have written this, is that over time, first of all, the next generation wants to be much more like the broader culture, and you find that people, just out of self-​interest, say, “You know what? It’s actually easier for me, if I care about a baseball team that gives me a connection to other people in this country, if I get into the fourth of July, that makes my life easier, I feel more comfortable,” the next generation really tends to like those things, but you don’t wanna have to sacrifice those things that are not part of the common culture, that make you who you are. Religion is always or typically been a really big one of those.

0:29:30.5 Neal McCluskey: And so, the book tries to explain it’s understandable why you would be worried about these things, but you shouldn’t be. There are kind of natural processes that lead people to adopt the common culture, that’s totally understandable, you can see why it’s in their self-​interest, but why they may recoil and actually get angry if you try and impose it on them. If their kids go to schools and their schools say, “Your parents are backward idiots,” it’s probably not gonna make them too happy about the new country. So understandable concerns. Balkanization is another understandable concern until you realize people wanna be part of a common culture. They wanna feel comfortable in the country they are in and what will cause them to fight is if somebody says the stakes, here they are. If you don’t win, your culture, the things you think are important, you don’t get them. The other people get to impose what they want on you. That seems much more likely to cause Balkanization, this kinda fighting among groups than letting people freely choose what they think is best.

0:30:31.7 Trevor Burrus: Do we have any idea what the data might say about this? We have some recent surveys about dissatisfaction with public school and as you pointed out, COVID regulations have a big part of that, but do we have any idea about cohesiveness, social belonging, any sort of metric we could use to say do kids who go to private school feel less belonging to their country than kids who go to public school? We still have a pretty robust Catholic school system in this country, did we get the Catholic theocracy that some people warned of if we did not socialize the Catholics? We didn’t get there, we did get John F. Kennedy as President, but do we have good data, survey data or otherwise that says what actually might be happening in terms of cohesiveness, divisiveness?

0:31:19.8 Neal McCluskey: Yeah, well, so there are… Two ways that that work, we do have data on, lots of data on kids in private schools versus kids in public schools, how do they feel about their role in society, what do they know about how government should work, do they think that they should be volunteering in their society? And overwhelmingly, that research finds that kids in private schools are more knowledgeable about things like civics, are more active volunteering in their communities, even aside from schools that may require some voluntarism and that they are more tolerant. So a typical question is, well, do you think it should be legal for somebody who says hateful things about your group to speak in public? And those private school kids are more likely to say yes, that should be allowed. And this is including controls for things like socio-​economic status, how wealthy they are.

0:32:13.3 Neal McCluskey: So there is… The evidence, the research evidence suggests that kids in private schools do better in terms of creation into citizens with the kinds of attitudes and knowledge we say we want from them. One of the things I try and emphasize in the book is in terms of how are we bridging different groups, are we starting to bring different groups together? That there is some suggestive evidence that private schools do this better than public schools because a private school can stand for something in particular, and if they can bring in diverse kids, those kids then have a sort of a new cross-​cutting identity as a result of going to the school.

0:33:00.6 Neal McCluskey: But it is only suggestive because how well our schools and different ways of assigning kids to schools, how well it bridges differences, how well it… Or decreases social distance among kids of different groups has not been studied a whole lot. We focus far more on achieving physical integration, how many kids of different, typically, races are in one building together. And that’s understandable too because this started, Brown v Board said you can no longer physically segregate people and our first concern is, “Well, how do we make sure that physical segregation has ended?” And I think part of that had an assumption of, “Well, if you bring them all together physically, then they’ll start to come together, you’d see a bridging of divides.” But the research that exists, as always, is kinda mixed but does not really show that, for instance, forced busing or magnet schools or other foreign ways we’ve tried to achieve racial integration in the schools has done a whole lot to increase racial cohesion or really, I should say racial bridging. So building bridges across different racial groups, so even in buildings that…

0:34:21.8 Trevor Burrus: It would be hard to fight against self-​segregation at the minimum, right? Like, self-​segregation of a variety of forms, and of course, much of our inner racial segregation is not natural but like, if you’re pulling public schools from a geographic location like where I grew up in South Denver Metro area, we were all pretty similar, just by virtue of socio economic status, where we were living, why our parents chose to live there, and so, you’d say, “Well, that school has no conflict or very little conflict.” And so, well, yeah, because of the bias, the self-​selection just sort of made it fairly homogeneous compared to other types of schools.

0:35:00.4 Neal McCluskey: Well, yeah, so that’s a big point for two levels. One is that’s why it’s hard to achieve even physical integration. People talk about White flight. White flight did accompany, for instance, forced busing although White flight was happening before forced busing too so that’s important to know, but as long as people are able to move, they will often move away from schools and that are moving in a direction of a racial or it could be economic makeup that they don’t like. But that point about self-​selection as to where you go, it’s also really important because it is true that while we’ve had many conflicts in the history of public schooling, probably many districts didn’t see these sorts of… And many schools didn’t see conflicts. But that’s because people self-​sort a lot and it’s really important to understand that right now we have 13,500 school districts about. Even if you go back to the 1930s, which is the oldest systematic collection of data we have on school districts, back then they were… Like, 1937 there were about 110,000 school districts for a population about third of the size.

0:36:09.8 Neal McCluskey: You can imagine how concentrated and homogeneous people were in those little districts. And if you go further back than that, it was almost certainly even more. Each district was smaller and more homogeneous. There’s, I think it’s Robert Wiebe, I may be saying his name wrong, a historian who talks about, “You know, when Americans didn’t get along, for most of their history when we had a big frontier and lots of land, when they didn’t get along, they just moved.” Like, “Uh, I don’t like the neighbors. Come on, we’re going somewhere else.” And so…

0:36:36.7 Trevor Burrus: I didn’t think the Mormons ended up in Salt Lake City.

0:36:40.1 Neal McCluskey: Exactly.

0:36:40.2 Trevor Burrus: There were Mormon complaints too coming out of Massachusetts and eventually they say, “We’re peacing out.”

0:36:44.8 Neal McCluskey: Yeah. In fact, Horace Mann, probably one of the early on people to make fun of the Mormons later on and so Millerites and some other little groups that he didn’t like. So if people may say, “Well, okay, why didn’t we see a conflict all the time?” And it’s really important to understand that this hyper-​localism enabled people often to escape conflict or just never have it to begin with, and that public schools, well, over time, you get more state dictates and state control, for a long time, public schools were really civil society. People would come to a town and they’d be like or even just a settlement, probably not even a town yet, and say, “Well, we ought to have a place that kids can learn the three R’s.”

0:37:28.7 Neal McCluskey: And it wasn’t that “Somebody has told us we must do this,” because before common schools, again, literacy was very widespread. Schooling happened everywhere, even in the south where it was more widespread, even in the sort of frontier hinterlands and the counties, there was lots of education. A lot of it was because people liked to read and you have to have something to read. So there was not a lot of literacy before there was much to read, but once you have newspapers, a printing press, a newspaper, there’s a lot to read. So people wanna get educated, they have a reason for it. So it’s really important I think that people understand how much or how decentralized public schooling long was. And that is one of the reasons that there wasn’t more conflict. Where it was centralized though, you often saw a kind of ugly conflict.

0:38:16.8 Trevor Burrus: Now, when we talk about changing the system, the complaints of whether it’s school vouchers, tax credits, other types of supplying private education, they deal with making sure that there is a common school and there’s a common ethos and we need to make sure all the kids are together, but they also deal a lot with equity and saying that if we really let private schooling run rampant, if we pass voucher programs, we’re going to take all the rich, well-​to-​do kids out of the public schools and leave the public schools entirely with the poor, often people of color, students of color in those situations. And there, in terms of Balkanization, that’s not gonna do better at all and we know that… One of the most important things about being in the upper class is even if you’re not wealthy, but you move in the upper class is making upper class friends. This is probably the biggest advantage of going to Harvard is you get to meet future diplomats and presidents and senators who later can give you a job or a letter of recommendation.

0:39:27.4 Trevor Burrus: So if we do Balkanize according to monetary, according to wealth, don’t we create a different problem of like an upper class and a lower class, where the upper class is in private schools and the lower class is relegated to public schools?

0:39:41.6 Neal McCluskey: Yeah, that sort of socio or the kinda economic class-​based Balkanization is a real concern but the first thing we have to recognize is that the current system is massively Balkanized. If what school you get depends on how much home you can buy, that’s a lot more money than paying for tuition. So if I wanna go to, I don’t know, Grosse Pointe or somewhere in Michigan, I gotta be able to spend a lot of money on a house and so, rich people can do that. It’s also worth noting that rich people can already pay for private school without it hurting them in their pocketbook very much. Sometimes, they’ll pay for a prep school that costs more than most colleges. Andover, Exeter, Dalton, lots of schools like that that are the preserves of the wealthy.

0:40:31.4 Neal McCluskey: So the current system does almost nothing to fix or to ameliorate class-​based Balkanization. And then, even within schools, this is a really important thing that people, I think, don’t think about a lot, we talk about racial integration about this the most but it would include economic integration, this idea that, “Well, see, like in the south, we got everybody into the same building.” But the thing is, within that building then there is massive segregation, first and foremost, and tracking for classes. And so, often you see people who are, yeah, they’re sort of in the same building, but they never meet each other, they never know each other, they’re not taught together, and you might as well have separate schools. So the current system seems to do very little, if anything, to fix Balkanization or separation based on economics.

0:41:24.0 Neal McCluskey: What school choice can help to do and school choice is not a panacea. When we talk about school choice, we’re talking about what can be done within the education system? Much of what needs to be fixed is outside of the education system. So a major reason that we have economic segregation is because of housing policies, in particular, federal housing policies that said, “Well, African Americans, you cannot access this federal money for loans and things like that and our zoning is gonna be based on race.” So that’s not something you just fix with education.

0:41:58.9 Neal McCluskey: But within education, the idea is that school choice, at least gives the money to the family where they can begin to make up the difference of what you can afford in terms of tuition. It’s not enough to buy the mansion, but it does enable you to pay tuition, and we’ve gotta understand, most private schools are not Andover and Exeter and Dalton, most private schools are sort of low-​cost religious schools, not all religions, but the average tuition is about $12,000. The average we spend per pupil in public schools is about $16,000. So these are very affordable if you just give people that money and we want to break down this extremely expensive and big wall of house price equalling tuition to tuition equalling tuition.

0:42:49.9 Neal McCluskey: There is certainly a good argument that you might wanna put together a shape, a school choice program where it’s graduated, where lowest income people get the most, and then you may reach a certain income cap where they don’t get anything and it differs in between. But most school choice so far, has been focused either on low-​income kids or kids in schools that got very bad outcomes, which also tend to be low-​income kids or kids with disabilities who are often not well… Public schools aren’t well-​equipped to help them or may just feel they need some power rather than have to go through IDEA, the Individual Disabilities Education Act and hopefully sue the school into doing what they want. So Balkanization is a concern but it’s already a huge concern and choice, at least, breaks down that huge barrier of “You wanna access a school, you’ve gotta buy a house.”

0:43:47.3 Trevor Burrus: Some of the fundamental questions in the philosophy of public education, which to me is, it really is one of the core philosophies of political philosophy, they became clear to me when I was engaged in voucher debates in college, in high school, and I would ask people who were opposing vouchers, I’d say, “Okay, let’s just, let’s double the amount of money that the voucher has. I think it’s $27,000 per pupil in DC, the most expensive public school district in the country, let’s make it $50,000 and we’ll just say your voucher can go to any private school and they can do whatever they want with it.” And then people would always say, “Whatever they want with it? Really? Whatever they want with it? So you’re gonna give state money to any type of education? It might be Mormons, it might be crazy crystal healing new age people, it might be classes that are only finger painting or they don’t even teach math, they just teach music?”

0:44:49.2 Trevor Burrus: And you get into this entire discussion and no matter who you’re talking to, whether they’re conservative or from the Left, you end up back at where you started, which is, everyone has an idea of what needs to be taught children. And the voucher is not good enough because there needs to be a baseline, everyone comes in with a baseline about what values need to be taught to create the next generation. And so that brings the question of, is the entire project of public schooling even funding it, let’s say, with vouchers sort of insoluble? Is it not something that we can really get to where we just can’t agree on the meaning of the word education and what we should teach “our children” to such a degree that the entire concept of public schooling cannot work?

0:45:41.8 Neal McCluskey: Well, so I’ll talk about distinct public schooling and public education. So public schooling is the government actually supplies the schools, public education would be government supplies money to get the education. And I think you’re right, as long as there is some government funding involved, there are always gonna be debates about, “Well, what should the schools that get that funding have to do basically or be prohibited from doing or from teaching?” I think we already break a lot of that down with scholarship tax credits, individual use tax credits, basically, saying to people, “You just keep your money instead of paying twice for education.” We see those are less regulated than vouchers. And not always, people still say, “Well, okay, but if you don’t pay taxes, that means I have to pay taxes for the garbage collection and so you’re really just passing it off on me.” But they tend to be much less regulated because nobody can say I was forced to give somebody money that went to a school that teaches something I find hateful.

0:46:40.5 Neal McCluskey: So we’re already selling that in part with these tax credit kinda mechanisms. But then I do think we need to hopefully change minds about understanding how public schooling, in particular, but also if you say, “Well, we’ll have school choice, but every school has to teach the same.” How fundamentally at odds that is with what is the primary American value and that is liberty. If we wanna call ourselves a free society, you cannot do it by saying whatever the people with most political power come up with is what you teach the kids or you don’t teach the kids.

0:47:18.2 Neal McCluskey: And I think we’re starting to see… I think throughout our history, we’ve seen a lot of people who recognize that. And as we become more diverse, I think you’re gonna see more and more people realizing at the very least, “Wait a minute, if I’m not in charge, things get imposed on me that I don’t like.” I think we might start seeing progressives who have been the biggest opponents of choice, generally speaking, starting to realize this, not just famously, Matt Damon, actor, his mom is an education professor, she’s very opposed to school choice, he’s very opposed to school choice himself, he speaks out on it and sends his kids to extremely expensive or at least he used to and his kids may be grown by now, very expensive private schools like $45,000 a year private schools.

0:48:03.8 Neal McCluskey: And he explained, “Well, the reason I have to do that is because nobody allows public schools to have this really great progressive pedagogy.” And you’re like, “Dude, do you see the problem? You can’t get a majority to want what you want and what you would like to see other kids be able to access who aren’t so rich, does this… Wouldn’t a better system be let the money follow kids and then you’d see lots of different options made available?” That used to be the biggest problem, but I think now actually, in part because of mask battles and… Well, actually first because of the vaccination and just opening battles where even liberal towns got into big debates about whether or not their schools should be opened, then you saw it with the mask mandate, should there be one, shouldn’t there be one? And progressives started to see, “You know what? One size really doesn’t fit all.”

0:48:56.8 Neal McCluskey: And then seeing these laws passed in places like Florida and Oklahoma and others that, say, like in Florida, the so-​called “Don’t Say Gay” bill. They’re starting to realize, “Wait, the bad guys, the conservatives, they could control the schools and my kids won’t get what they want. They’re imposing their bad values on me, they’re taking books out of the library that I want to be there.” And I’m hoping at least that they start to realize, even if it’s just for their own protection, that you want to have school choice so that even when you’re not in political power, you can get what you want. But the ultimate principle should be that we have diverse people with diverse world views and they should be able to get the education they think is right for their kids, not have to defeat their neighbors to do it. And we’re seeing a good example of this outside of school choice, but it’s happening right now at sort of the extremes so we could really get into these issues if we wanna deal with them honestly.

0:49:55.6 Neal McCluskey: The Hasidic schools in New York City, that New York Times has been writing exposés about, the kids are not learning basic math and English and it’s abusive and you can certainly understand why. There’s a group called Yaffed, who are folks who’ve left Hasidic communities and said, “I didn’t get the education I needed to equip me to live outside of this community.” We can really get into the nuts and bolts now of what is the right amount of government versus freedom. You want to let individual communities that have different… And people, I shouldn’t even say communities, people with different ideas from the norm of what is the good life, the good life may not be “I get a job that gets me lots of monies to buy lots of things” and may be totally focused on God and how I serve God. And that can give people a lot of real values in their lives.

0:50:47.3 Neal McCluskey: We can finally, maybe have an open discussion about where is the limit of that community making its own decisions versus the ability of kids to become self-​governing adults where they can freely choose to join that community. So far, I’m not encouraged. Most of the debate is, “Oh, these people are terrible, and it shouldn’t be allowed” or “Leave us alone, we should be able to do what we want.” But I think as we become a more diverse country, these sorts of discussions and debates are gonna become more important and harder to demagogue because you’ll have so many diverse groups that are saying, “Wait, don’t just tell me to be quiet. I really should be able to get something different.” And I think we can have that debate and make people understand that the way to have more peace and certainly more freedom in the country, more harmony is to, for the most part, let people choose, let families choose what they think is right.

0:51:42.4 Neal McCluskey: Then the question is, is there some baseline that everyone should learn? I think there is, but it’s debatable what that is, but I would say, well, I’m not entirely even sure where I’d set the baseline. I do think kids should learn English because that is still the most commonly spoken language in this country and that gives them the chance to move out, speak it, write it, read it, and some level of math so you can do the math you may need to do for daily life or for most jobs. And maybe learn about, here’s how our government is supposed to work, except people don’t agree on that, and then it starts getting ugly, so you can at least agree on basic skills, but never should government say, “And here, by the way, are the world views that we will fund and the ones we won’t. Anything that’s religious, tough break, everybody, you’re not measuring up, everything will be secular, and then these particular secular values are what we’ll fund.” That is totally incompatible with a free society and I think with a peaceful society.

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0:52:54.1 Trevor Burrus: Thanks for listening. If you enjoy Free Thoughts, make sure to rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or in your favorite podcast app. Free Thoughts is produced by Landry Ayres. If you’d like to learn more about Libertarianism, visit us on the web at Libertarianism.