How Covid Changed the School Choice Debate

0:00:07.2 Aaron Powell: Welcome to Free Thoughts. I’m Aaron Powell.

0:00:09.3 Trevor Burrus: And I’m Trevor Burrus.

0:00:11.5 Aaron Powell: And our guest today is Corey DeAngelis. He’s the National Director of Research at the American Federation for Children, the Executive Director at, Educational Freedom Institute, and adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and a senior fellow at Reason Foundation. Welcome to the show, Corey.

0:00:26.0 Corey DeAngelis: Thank you so much for having me.

0:00:29.7 Aaron Powell: We’re gonna talk about school choice today and the prospects for it, and the efforts that are taking place, but I’d like to start broad and just… What is school choice? Exactly. What counts as school choice?

0:00:42.0 Corey DeAngelis: I will say I’ve changed how I even talk about the concept of school choice. Instead of saying school choice, I’ve talked about it in terms of funding students directly or funding students as opposed to systems. It’s beneficial to talk about it in that way, because it provides more transparency. It’s allowing children’s education dollars to follow them to wherever they’re getting an education. Which could be a traditional public school that they’re residentially assigned to, it could be a charter school, it could be a private school, or a home schooling option, or even something like a pandemic pod or homeschool co-​op or a micro-​school, which is what a lot of families started to experiment with this past year.

0:01:25.7 Corey DeAngelis: So… Yeah, it’s this concept of funding following the student to wherever they’re getting an education. That… It’s also beneficial, to talk about it in this way because it turns the burden of proof around on the teachers’ unions to try to explain why we should fund systems as opposed to student, if they wanna try to argue about this concept. So I think it’s beneficial from a transparency standpoint and from an argumentative standpoint, to reframe the conversation about funding students as opposed to systems.

0:02:00.5 Aaron Powell: Does that clarify the underlying issue though? Because if I… As of right now… Like, my kids are enrolled in a public school. And if I move to where I’m zoned differently, move them to a different school, the funding does follow them, right. In the sense that the tax dollars, my tax dollars, that we’re going to that school are now going to the other school. Is that different than the direct… The funding of students that you’re talking about?

0:02:27.6 Corey DeAngelis: Yes. It’s different because in order to exercise that first version of school choice, you have to get up and move houses in most cases. Which is highly inequitable. There’s huge transaction costs associated with moving your entire family in order to change a particular type of service that you’re receiving. So just imagine if you weren’t happy with your grocery store, you weren’t happy with a restaurant, and the only way to get away from it and to take that money that you’re spending at that particular place elsewhere you had to get up and move houses. That would be extremely costly. And I would argue it leads to a lot of monopoly power in the traditional school system, which leads to lower amounts of accountability and lower likelihood of those service providers to provide adequate educational opportunities… Or services to families. Funding students directly through something like an education savings account is a lot different where you can… You’re literally… You’re having the funding follow the child to wherever they’re getting an education. So that could be another public school, but it could be a private school or a charter school. And it allows for much more flexibility and real choices on the part of the family.

0:03:39.9 Trevor Burrus: Now if we’re taking the broad 10,000-foot libertarian view here, aside… ‘Cause you were in the trenches, especially this year on fighting for… Having the funding attached to the students, but broader… If we’re conceding that the funding… That some sort of taxpayer funding that is supplemented by not just your own money, should be going… Or maybe this… Just a… Where we are now. But if you concede that, doesn’t the state have an interest in the nature of that education, because it is the tax payer money that’s going into it? Like so what the education looks like, what’s being taught… Like they have a substantial interest in this because we’re conceding the taxpayer side of this.

0:04:22.9 Corey DeAngelis: Yeah. And look, it depends on the type of program that’s being introduced and where it’s being introduced, but there’s a wide variety, in the amount of government regulations that are attached to the voucher funding or the Education Savings Account funding… I’m more likely to argue for a lightly regulated program. I think families have the best information about what their children need in terms of their education. But I think I would be okay with minor regulations just based on things like financial reporting, make sure… And to make sure the money is actually being spent on education. And I don’t think that regulators should get so heavy-​handed to where they’re trying to decide what an adequate education looks like, specifically. Because a lot of the times that’s measured by a standardized test score, which doesn’t capture everything we want in an educational environment. And if you ask families why they choose one school over the other, a lot of the times, they rank standardized test scores towards the bottom of the list and they rank things like safety and the culture of the school at a higher level.

0:05:36.2 Corey DeAngelis: And… If you think about other programs that fund people directly and allow them to choose providers, we don’t have a very heavy-​handed approach. Like with food stamps, for example, you make sure that the funding is spent on food, but the regulators don’t step in and say, “Oh, you have to have a certain type of diet when you’re spending that money.” So similarly, with an education savings account, you can’t go spend the money at a restaurant, you have to spend it at… On education services. But for the most part, with most of the education savings account programs the regulations haven’t been so strict to where they say you have to have this type of education provided. But just it has to be an approved education provider.

0:06:22.4 Aaron Powell: I wanna dig more into those issues because I think they’re at the heart of a lot of the education debate in America. But before we do a clarifying question, because we’ve been throwing some terms around. What do we mean by… And what’s the difference between, say, vouchers and tax credits and education savings accounts? And are there other forms of school choice or payments just for students that are out there?

0:06:47.3 Corey DeAngelis: Yeah, so the education savings account is similar to the voucher. And many of the listeners are probably more familiar with the voucher idea where you’re residentially assigned in… For the most part, in most cases in the United States, that the status quo is that you’re residentially assigned to a government run K through 12 school, and your children’s education dollars go to that school regardless of your preferences or your satisfaction with that school. And if you wanna go somewhere else, you either have to move to another residentially assigned government school or you have to pay out of pocket for private school tuition and fees. The voucher idea is it allows families to take their children’s education dollars that would otherwise go to their government-​run residentially assigned school and would allow that funding to follow the child to a private school.

0:07:39.7 Corey DeAngelis: That’s pretty much it, when it comes to the voucher idea. The education savings account idea… The same kind of thing. The money that would have went to your government-​run school that you’re residential assigned to, it could still go there if you still choose that for your child. But if not, that funding would follow the child again, but instead of only being able to use that for a private school for tuition and fees, you’d also be able to use that for any other approved education expenditure. Which could be used for tutoring, textbooks, other instructional materials, micro schools and pandemic pods, homeschool co-​ops. So it allows for maximum flexibility and customization on the part of the parent, whereas the voucher in most cases, is restricted to only being able to be used at a private school for tuition and fees.

0:08:30.0 Aaron Powell: And then an Education Tax Credit is the other one that we hear of.

0:08:32.7 Corey DeAngelis: Yeah. So tax credit scholarships… There is one tax credit scholarship program in New Hampshire that operates like an ESA where you can spend it on any approved education expenditure, not just private school tuition and fees. But for the most part, Tax Credit Scholarships operate similar to vouchers in that most of them can only be used for private school tuition and fees. But the main difference between the voucher and the tax credit scholarship… The voucher is easier to explain because it’s the money that’s allocated through the state education budget that would have followed your child to the government-​run school can now follow the child.

0:09:10.1 Corey DeAngelis: When it comes to tax credit scholarship programs, you have donations that are contributed by households or individuals or corporations to something called a scholarship granting organization. And those entities that donate to these scholarship granting organizations with private funds can then get a tax benefit for doing so. And then other families can go to those scholarship granting organizations and apply for the private funds that never entered the tax collector’s hands, and then they can take those private funds to pay for private school tuition fees. So it’s an indirect way to fund students as opposed to systems… They happen to be less likely to be regulated because those are by definition, private funds. They never entered the text collector’s hands. But one of the downsides to tax credit scholarships is the scalability of these programs, because it’s harder to raise funds through voluntary contributions than… And it… I’d say the other downside is it’s more difficult to explain. It was much easier for me to explain just having the money that’s already allocated, follow the child, than it is to explain, “Well we have these scholarship granting organizations that you donate to and you get a tax benefit.”

0:10:29.4 Corey DeAngelis: So I’ve been more… At first, when I first got into these discussions as a libertarian, I was really excited about the tax credit scholarship program because it was private funding, less likely to be regulated. But the reality is that it can still be regulated, and I think some of the benefits of the publicly funded programs or tax payer-​funded programs in terms of scalability and just ease of explanation have kinda pushed me towards favoring both. But I think the benefits out way, the cost when it comes to supporting the tax payer funded programs.

0:11:11.0 Trevor Burrus: So if we look at the states right now… Over the last 20 years, school choice educational freedom is very different than it was 20 years ago. Where have we seen some of these programs, whether it’s vouchers or tax credits, really make a substantial effect? Do we have good data on this? Is there some state where we’ve seen 30% of kids now have school choice of some sort? Like in maybe New Hampshire or something like that.

0:11:36.8 Corey DeAngelis: Yeah… I will say one of the longest standing voucher programs started in… As far as modern day voucher programs, started in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. That was known as the birthplace of the modern school choice movement in 1990. So they’ve had… So they’ve had access out there for about three decades. But a lot of people forget the fact that we have had school choice for a lot longer than the Milwaukee programs in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. They each… Each of these states have something called town tuition-​ing programs that had been around since the late 1800s. Where if you lived in a place that did not have a residentially assigned public school, you could take your children state-​funded education dollars to a private school or a public school in another district. So it’s not your typical type of voucher program, it’s a very different type of eligibility criteria, but it is the same kind of idea of having the money follow the child to a private school. And what’s interesting in that Maine case, the Supreme Court just took up a case from Maine based on the program previously… Or actually, they’re still doing this… Only allowed the families to take those education dollars to a private non-​religious school. Which people are now in the movement making the argument that that is discriminating against religious families.

0:13:07.8 Corey DeAngelis: And I think there’s a pretty strong precedent at the Supreme Court from the Espinoza v. Montana decision in 2020, which ruled that if you’re gonna have a private school choice program, it’s unconstitutional to exclude families from taking their children’s education dollars to a religious private school because you’re discriminating on the basis of religion. But I think they made a First Amendment free exercise argument. It was a 5-4 decision in 2020…

0:13:33.5 Trevor Burrus: Yeah. I’m working on that brief right now. So…

0:13:36.6 Aaron Powell: Can I then…

0:13:36.7 Trevor Burrus: We’ll definitely be filing again that case…

0:13:37.8 Aaron Powell: Then on that though… This is one of the objections that people have to, say vouchers is, on the flip side of that, I might not want my tax dollars going to support the religious… Specifically religious indoctrination that I disagree with. And that this ends up looking like… It’s called an establishment clause violation.

0:13:58.8 Corey DeAngelis: Yeah, I would just argue that’s an argument against taxation because a lot of stuff that a lot of families don’t agree with that’s going on in the public school system. So are you arguing to abolish education taxes? I don’t think so. But most of the people make these arguments aren’t arguing against taxation altogether. But the other response to that is what Trevor pointed out is there is some type of religious indoctrination happening in the public school system by a different kind of definition…

0:14:26.2 Aaron Powell: Right. But that’s not… We can say that, but the religion has a particular meaning and we have… And there’s a specific carve-​out about it in the Constitution, and so it does seem a little bit different.

0:14:35.7 Corey DeAngelis: Yeah, and my third response to that is what I think you want me to get at in a little more detail, is that the money is going to the families and they’re the primary beneficiaries of these programs, the schools aren’t. And because they have a choice in the matter, they could take the funding that’s allocated for their child to the non-​religious public school, they can take it to a non-​religious private school, or they could take it to a religious private school. Because the money is going to the primary beneficiary, which is the family, and they have a choice in the matter, it is not an infringement on… It’s not a violation of the Establishment Clause of the US Constitution.

0:15:10.4 Corey DeAngelis: And one of the earlier cases on this was from 2002, Zelman versus Simmons-​Harris… And that was a 5-4 decision about a voucher program, I believe in Ohio. Where they made the same argument. It was… The primary beneficiary was the family… They have a choice in the matter. It’s the same reason why Pell Grants, don’t violate the Establishment Clause. You can take your Pell Grant funding to Notre Dame, a religious university, and no one has a problem with that, and no one makes this argument. And I think what’s interesting… And the same thing with the Head Start Program for pre-​K, the funding goes to the family. And you can choose a religious provider of private pre-​K services, and nobody has a problem with that.

0:15:49.5 Corey DeAngelis: And I think the difference here is that a lot of the same people… And what’s interesting is that a lot of the same people that support funding students directly when it comes to higher education and pre-​K, and support funding people directly when it comes to food stamps and Medicaid vouchers, which can be used at Catholic private hospitals and Section 8 Housing vouchers and all these other types of programs, they only get all up in arms and oppose funding students directly when it comes to those in between years of K-12 education.

0:16:19.8 Corey DeAngelis: And the main difference to me is one of power dynamics. That choices generally the norm when it comes to higher education, pre-​K and just about any other good or service… But choice threatens an entrenched special interests that would otherwise profit from getting children’s education dollars regardless of how well they did, regardless of the satisfaction levels of the families… And as we’ve seen over the past year and a half, regardless of whether they even open their doors for business. So of course they fight really, really hard against any change to that status quo. And they’ll use any argument, they can. They’ll use the separation of church and state argument. They’ll use the… Any argument they can. And there’s actually a ton of arguments that are spewed by the other side, which is a book that I co-​edited with… Covered in a book that I co-​edited with the Cato Institute’s Neal McCluskey called School Choice Myths, setting the record straight on education freedom. Where we go over with various authors 12 of the biggest myths in the school choice debate. One of them being this argument that school choice is somehow unconstitutional.

0:17:21.6 Trevor Burrus: It’s interesting that when you take a step back and you look at the education debate… There was a time when it was a very liberal view in the classical sense of liberal. The state running education was a very bad idea. And it actually seems like… I always say… And long time listeners have probably heard me say this… That for most conservatives, their opposition to public schools, say since the Reagan era, has not so much been about them not… Them opposing public schools on principle, but them opposing public schools that they don’t run. Because for a lot of Conservatives, if they could… They were mad at how left-​wing the public schools were. But if they could craft the curriculum, get some values in there, that kind of stuff, then they would be totally for it. And I think that if the Conservatives took over public schools and took over the curriculum, the Left would become school choice advocates on a dime. Like they would turn around on a dime. And is that kind of your experience too, that it’s not… It’s more about who’s controlling the schools, than whether or not we’re for or against public education on principle?

0:18:25.0 Corey DeAngelis: Yeah, I think a lot of it has to do with the curriculum that’s in the traditional public school setting. If you’re happy with the scenario that your child is in, you might not push as hard for having exit options to that scenario. So I think a lot of what we’re seeing over this past year, a lot of school choice advocacy groups, including the American Federation for Children that I work at, have dubbed 2021, the year of school choice. EdChoice has called it the same thing and you can just see so many outlets calling this the year of school choice. One of the arguments is that the teacher unions over-​played their hand, they showed everybody their true colors, they’ve kept schools closed for so long, it got so bad that families finally started to see that they wanted an exit option. But another thing that’s talked about, I think a little bit less often, is that remote learning allowed a lot of conservative families and maybe families of all political stripes to see what was going on in the classroom. And a lot of families as you’re seeing at school board meetings right now are not happy with the type of curriculum that’s in their public schools. So that’s also fueled movement for families to push for expanding educational options.

0:19:41.3 Corey DeAngelis: So that’s another piece of the conversation. I do think it is more mobilizing for a family to want an exit option, if they feel like their kid is being educated in a way that doesn’t align with their family’s values. That’s much more convincing than for a family to say, “Okay, look, the test scores are kinda low in my public school.” So I think the conversation has changed from these are failing academically to these are failing your kids on a deeper level when it comes to your personal family values.

0:20:17.0 Aaron Powell: But that brings us back to the earlier conversation about what counts as education or standards or taxpayer interest in this. Because one thing that we’ve all seen over the last, especially year, year and a half, is that there are a lot of Americans with a lot of really crazy, unfounded, dangerous beliefs, who seem like totally irrational when interacting in at least the parts of the world that we can see them in. And it seems there is something not immediately easy to miss in saying, look, they might do all this harm to themselves by say, ingesting horse deworm or whatever the fad is at the moment. But we as a people have an obligation to ensure that their children get a quality education, and if we let… Do we really want QAnon-​focused schools because that’s what the parents want, and maybe they wanna… They were watching the remote learning and seeing that their kid wasn’t learning about the coming storm and other truths of QAnon. And they wanna pull them out, and maybe we do have an interest in saying, “No, the public school system, which is run by experts, teachers who are educated in education and subject matter, probably know better than a lot of parents about what’s best for the kids in this regard.”

0:21:42.7 Corey DeAngelis: I would say people in offices and employees don’t know more about what other people’s children need. So I think in general, families should be in a better position to make better educational decisions about their own kids than bureaucrats sitting in offices hundreds of miles away. But I understand your argument that there might be these extreme outliers, but at the same time, we shouldn’t use outliers to dictate policy because I can just turn around just as quickly and say there might be some examples of abuse happening in a public school. But should we ban all public schools just because there’s this one example of a far-​fetched idea being propagated in a public school or something of that matter. So I think the reality is there are no perfect solutions, but in general, families are more likely to get the decisions right. And if there is evidence of abuse or something really bad happening in the private sector, I think it’s okay for the government to come in after the fact and to say, “Okay, look, you’re not spending this money on education. You’re doing X, Y or Z with the funding. Maybe you’re taking it to spend it on restaurants or whatever it is, maybe you’re buying a big screen TV or something with the money.” So I think when there’s a clear-​cut evidence of wrongdoing by the families, I think it’s okay for the government to step in after the fact, but I don’t think before the fact they should try to determine what exactly that education should look like.

0:23:21.2 Trevor Burrus: Let’s talk about teachers unions. They’re an interest group, but teachers like everyone else, need to have good working conditions and make sure that they’re not being really hurt by their job in certain ways. So is this something we should just oppose entirely, or do we know much about what they’re actually doing and what’s operating behind the scenes? I know you’re their favorite person right now, so [chuckle] I’m sure that they have many opinions about you, so what about them?

0:23:50.1 Corey DeAngelis: Yeah, so I don’t have much of a problem with unions in general. If Walmart employees go on strike, for example, in the private sector, I can take my money elsewhere and shop at Trader Joe’s. If school employees go on strike, families are pretty much the ones that feel the pain in that scenario, the employer doesn’t feel the pain in that relationship, so I think there’s an inherent problem with public sector unions, that private sector unions don’t feel… That private sector unions don’t experience as much. I think one way to fix that problem that’s baked into the public school system and non-​existent feedback loop is to have school choice, is to have the funding follow the child, because then if the unions make decisions that hurt the student outcomes or don’t prioritize the needs of the families, then families could provide some sort of bottom-​up accountability by voting with their feet to another institution. So I think we should allow unions to exist when you can provide that bottom-​up feedback mechanism. Then unions, they might not spend as much on staffing surges and administrative bloat.

0:25:07.8 Corey DeAngelis: If you look… Ben Scafidi’s report from… He’s over at Kennesaw State University. He looked at data from 1992 to 2014 and he found that per pupil education expenditures after adjusting for inflation increased by about 27%, but real teacher salaries actually dropped over that same period by 2%. And I’m not sure what the trend was for pensions. That might be part of the story here, but another part of the story is that whenever the unions get additional funding to spend on K-12 schooling, a lot of that money goes towards just putting more people into the system, which helps them expand their bureaucracy and allows them to have more dues-​paying members, which is great for the power of the union overall, but because there are trade-​offs, a lot of the funding that could have went towards increasing teachers’ salaries for the people that are currently in the system, doesn’t make its way into the classroom.

0:26:14.3 Corey DeAngelis: So there’s also five studies that I know of on the subject that find that school choice competition, whether that’s defined as private school choice or charter school choice competition, all five of these studies find some evidence of higher teacher salaries in the public school system as a response to that competition. Because their employers, the public school system, starts to understand that if they wanna keep their customers, they have to spend the money wisely, and the best way to spend that money wisely in a lot of cases is to put that money into the classroom towards the teachers, which happen to be the most valuable asset in the education system that we have. So I think competition is great and we focus on the market for goods and services, it’s great for the consumers, but competition’s also good for employees when it gives monopoly employers stronger incentives to cater to the needs of the employees.

0:27:18.6 Aaron Powell: That nicely tees up the one question I had on our list of things I wanted get to, which is the nature of the objection on the part of public school teachers to instituting school choice or more options in education, because it seems like there’s a teacher-​to-​student ratio, and it’s a range but we have a decent sense that at the elementary level, you don’t want one teacher per student and you don’t want one teacher per 100 students. And so if education funding is following the students, and school choice isn’t going to lead to a dramatic drop in the number of students in America, school choice is not going to lead to fewer kids, then it seems like all it’s going to do is say, potentially jobs that were in location A are now in location B, but location B is still going to need roughly the same number of teachers, and so the teachers will just move to a different school. So why would a teacher necessarily object to school choice? It seems odd that they would care that much about their paycheck being signed by a government bureaucrat versus a private employer.

0:28:42.4 Corey DeAngelis: Yeah and another thing to note is I think a lot of this would be a long-​term trend. It’s not like one year, there’s gonna be a school choice program and then all the public school teachers are gonna have to move over to the private school. I think the adjustment period would be a pretty long period of time, just because people don’t switch right away automatically, these are very important decisions that especially if you already have a kid in one sector, you might wanna just finish off their education. Even if you see that the other sector might be a little better for a couple of years, continuity is important to family, so I think it would take a long time, but the other thing is, I think the biggest objection to school choice is among teachers who aren’t confident in their services or are teachers that happen to be in schools that are under-​performing, and I think that’s an argument for school choice, not against it. If the first response to a business or anything to allowing families to go somewhere else is you’re gonna destroy my institution, that should tell you that the institution needs to do a better job.

0:30:00.1 Trevor Burrus: Wasn’t their argument though, with the fact that you’d take these students out of public schools, you take the good high-​performing students out of public schools and then you leave the public schools with all the low-​performing kids? And then you say you compare them and you say, “Look how much worse public schools are compared to private schools.” And they’re like, “Well, yeah, because we have all the problem kids.” That’s an argument they make a lot too.

0:30:20.9 Corey DeAngelis: Well I think this is one of the reasons we shouldn’t care about whether the private schools on average have better outcomes than the public schools. Even if we found that on average private schools had much lower outcomes, whatever it is, satisfaction, test scores, safety, on average had lower outcomes than the public schools, that’s still an argument for choice, because when you’re arguing to fund students directly, no one’s arguing to take the public school off the table. So just because something might be on average a little worse doesn’t mean that a certain private school might be a better fit for a particular child or that one private school might be higher than the average of all private schools all together, so I think the whole conversation is about public versus private… Miss the conversation altogether.

0:31:10.7 Corey DeAngelis: And instead, we should be focusing on that funding mechanism, following the child to wherever they’re getting an education, and so it should be less about private versus public, than it should be about individual choice, public or private. Whichever you would like. So yeah, another thing is, I think the teachers unions want to set up this situation where it seems like people who want any change to the status quo are against public schools. And the way that I’ve put it is that allowing families to choose their grocery store is an anti-​Safeway. It just won’t even make any sense for people to say that because you can still choose Safeway but still prefer to have a choice, just in case you wanna go to Walmart or Trader Joe’s. And so similarly, allowing families to have a choice when it comes to their children’s education is not anti-​public school, it’s just a separate conversation altogether.

0:32:11.7 Trevor Burrus: Well, I’m pretty anti-​public school, because one of the… It’s very hard to compete against a publicly-​funded… What would make them public schools then in this regard? So you have private schools and public schools, and the money is going wherever you wanna go. So what makes them public is that they’re government employees, I guess, right? But aren’t we still voting on curriculum and everything else too?

0:32:33.7 Corey DeAngelis: This is why I like to make the distinction… I’ve liked to call them government schools because that really gets to the distinction is that they’re directly operated by the government. They’re government-​run schools. And some people on the other side think that that’s not a nice thing to say, or they want you to call them public schools. But I think it’s more accurate to call them government schools because they’re run by the government, they’re funded by the government, they’re highly regulated by the government, they are geographically assigned by the government, they’re compelled by the government. And they’re not open to the public like a public park, in most cases, where you have these residential assignment mechanisms where you can’t access a certain public school if you don’t live in the fancy neighborhood. And families have actually gone to jail by lying about their addresses to try to get their kids into better, “public schools.” So I think we should move away from calling them public schools and towards calling them government schools. And if you get upset about that, you should ask yourself why you’re upset that the government is running the schools. And it also helps with the distinction between charter schools and government-​run schools, because charter schools are “public on paper,” but they’re not government-​run.

0:33:50.6 Corey DeAngelis: They’re run by private entities. They’re public in the sense that they are public on paper, they’re funded by the taxpayer almost exclusively, but they’re really a quasi-​public private entity. They’re highly regulated by the public. They’re more open to the public than government-​run schools because they have to use random lottery admissions and you’re generally not residentially assigned to them. So that’s a really interesting conversation. But Trevor, one thing that you pointed out that the other side says is that the more advantaged students are gonna take advantage of these programs, the least advantaged are gonna be stuck in the government-​run schools, and they’re gonna be worse off but we have a ton of evidence on this subject. There’s actually about 28 studies on this that look at the effects of private school choice competition, money following the child to a private school, and how that affects the children who remain in the traditional public schools, for whatever reason. And 26 of those 28 studies find statistically significant positive effects of that competition on the children who remained in the public school system. So school choice is a rising tide that lifts all boats because the public schools or government schools, whatever you wanna call them, they start to think a little bit more about how they allocate resources and they start to do a better job, they up their game a little bit.

0:35:11.2 Corey DeAngelis: And so the students who don’t even use the programs benefit from them as well without even having to use the programs. But all that said, if you look at the programs that are in place today, the least advantaged are more likely to use these programs, mostly because the eligibility tends to be restricted to the less advantaged groups, either by your student having a special need, or if your student comes from a lower-​income household. They get priority, or in some cases, they’re the only eligible students at all. And then lastly, I’ll argue that school choice is an equalizer. This is another reason why this shouldn’t really be a partisan issue, is that advantaged families, like it or not, are already more likely to have school choice. I said earlier that advantaged families are already able to pay their way into a neighborhood that is residentially assigned to the better public schools. They are more likely to be able to pay out-​of-​pocket for private school tuition and fees in addition to what they’re paying to the property tax system. And they’re more likely to be able to afford to put their child in an adequate home-​based educational environment and so funding students directly allows for more equity by allowing more families to access these kinds of alternatives.

0:36:35.0 Aaron Powell: I’m gonna ask the question that I think some of our more radically libertarian listeners might be wondering about this, which is that a lot of this argument that you’re making is essentially a Hayekian one, which is, as you said, the bureaucrats sitting in their offices don’t know as well as the teachers might what’s good for the students and the teachers don’t know as well as what the parents know, because it’s this the more local you get the decision-​making to the knowledge, the better the outcomes, but does that mean then that we should also consider like why do parents get to make these decisions like the kids have… The kids are the ones who have the most direct impact from the education, and you can imagine say like a high schooler who wants a particular kind of education and the parents don’t. The parents want something else. Should we eventually be taking into account back to the, if the money genuinely follows the student, then it’s the student’s decision of where to go.

0:37:38.6 Corey DeAngelis: Yeah, I think that’s an easier argument to make when we’re talking about things like Pell Grants where they can choose their college, but younger children are not as in a great position to make a lot of types of decisions about their lives. Right, and I think I’m okay with allowing the families to make that decision when they’re not of adult age, so you can imagine a whole bunch of other things that we don’t want children to be making choices when it comes to a lot of other things in life. And so I think I’m okay with having the families be the closest decision-​maker that is most likely to have the best interest of the child in mind, and again, if there is the case where there is a family that’s not doing something right by that child, and there’s a clear violation of that child’s rights then the state or other people in society, I think would have a compelling interest to step in, and handle that in a lot of different ways.

0:38:46.8 Trevor Burrus: Yeah. That’s not too radical. I don’t think think letting 5-​year-​olds choose their schools would be… Would be interesting, it’d be interesting thing to see what would happen with that, but… So, and talking about…

0:38:55.5 Corey DeAngelis: I’m all on board with the un-​schooling thing and in self-​directed learning by the child, but that’s typically… That’s not the child going out and doing whatever the heck they want, that is a family overseeing those decisions that are directed by the child, but that doesn’t mean they just get to do whatever they want.

0:39:15.9 Trevor Burrus: So let’s talk a little bit of this pandemic time. We’ve seen a lot of anger, the teachers unions have been interesting on this. It’s very easy to attack the teachers unions as somehow disingenuous or pursuing agendas that are hidden agendas or not primarily what they’re saying, but if we are charitable to our opponents and say that teachers are genuinely concerned about getting sick, and so therefore they’re trying to push for the things that make them feel safe, is there something wrong with that in the way that they’ve pushed for the teachers themselves to feel safe in the classroom?

0:39:52.8 Corey DeAngelis: There’s something wrong in that when… And look, I’m with you, I don’t like to question the motives of others, and I don’t think it’s the problem… A problem with the people in the system, I think it’s a problem with the system itself and the messed up set of incentives that are baked into that system. The employees are rationally responding to the incentives that are built into the public school system. So when you saw the headlines of the Chicago Teachers Union Board member vacationing in Puerto Rico while railing against her members going back to work in person, I think a lot of people might not have been so hypocritical publicly about it, but when given the choice, if you can remain at home and minimize an already low level of risk when it comes to interacting with other people, and then also minimizing child care responsibilities and commute times while getting to keep your same benefits in terms of job security and pay, the rational response to that, arguably, is to do just that.

0:41:02.1 Aaron Powell: Well, I actually… Let me jump in there because I wonder about that, and I wonder on the broader question of how much is talking about like, Well, the Teacher’s Unions are saying… So there was the standard thing, it happened of teachers unit said, “Okay, well, we won’t go back into the classroom until we can get vaccinated.” And so teachers got vaccinated among essential workers, the early groups. And then it was like, “Oh well, okay, now that we’re vaccinated, we don’t wanna go back until all of the students are vaccinated… ” Moving, the goal posts. But I wonder how much those kinds of things masked, I guess basically disagreement among the teachers. Because like my wife is an elementary school teacher, and so she got vaccinated very early and she was itching to get back because she became a teacher because she likes to be with kids and she hated remote learning, it was terrible, and she just wanted to be back in the classroom. And I imagine that is actually the experience of a lot of teachers, because that’s what they love about their job.

0:42:01.3 Corey DeAngelis: Yes, I think you’re right Aaron, and there’s a lot of… There’s different preferences among teachers, they’re not a monolith, they don’t all think the same way, but it’s probably true, there are some teachers that hated it wanting to get back into person, there are some teachers that loved it, they wanna continue remote learning. I think the unions have even released surveys showing just that, that there are large fractions of teachers that prefer one over the other, and so it could go both ways. But at the same time, I think the unions fought to keep schools closed for profitability. They were able to use the school closures as a hostage-​taking situation where they could hold children’s education hostage and use that as leverage to lobby to the taxpayer for more resources, and they largely got their way.

0:42:54.1 Corey DeAngelis: They largely won this battle over the past year and a half in that Congress since March of 2020, has already approved 190 billion additional dollars to K-12 education, mostly going to the public school system. And so they got a ton of money, if you look at individual school districts and the trends of what we’re seeing in the 2022 budgets, the spending has gone up a lot, or at least the budgeted spending. For example, in Los Angeles Public School since 2019 to the current budget year, the spending went from… It jumped by about 69%, I didn’t adjust it for inflation, but it was only over a couple of years, since 2019 to 2022. And the latest budget has the district spending about $27,000 or $28,000 per student. And something that I said earlier was backed up by this example in Los Angeles is that they’re losing thousands of students each year, and they are planning to increase the amount of teachers in the system by about 8%. They’re planning to increase the amount of custodial workers by 25% and the amount of psychological social workers by about 80%. So you’re losing customers, you’re putting more adults into the buildings, and you’re increasing the funding by about 69%. In Chicago also over the past two years, I believe, according to the latest budget numbers, I think they went from $20,000 to $27,000 per student, and that was about… Whatever the number was, it was about a 34% non-​inflation adjusted increase over a couple of years in Chicago.

0:44:57.2 Trevor Burrus: Well, that gets to the interesting question. Again, not to be someone who thinks that teachers… I think most of these teachers are good people and they do actually care about kids, but I remember one time I was hanging out with Bryan Caplan, and I said something like, “Well, we all know public schools don’t really work.” And Brian said something like, “Well, they might work exactly the way they’re supposed to work if you view the beneficiaries as the teachers and the administrators and not the kids, and that the people who have gained the system, it makes entire sense why they have done it, this way.” And so then they are afraid their pensions and their salaries and $27,000 per pupil is a lot of money. I feel like I could set… Yeah, I feel like I could set up a school that could do a pretty good job for, I would say less than that, and [0:45:49.0] ____ a guess on that, maybe we should be a little bit more skeptical of what the teachers unions are actually doing, which is protecting their pensions and their jobs, for many of them first and students are second, but they probably think they’re the same thing actually, that the interests are aligned in some way.

0:46:05.4 Corey DeAngelis: Yeah, and if they truly are aligned, then they should be absolutely okay with that funding, following the student to wherever they get an education, because if they’re really confident in what they’re pushing for for the adults in the system translating to benefits for the kids in the system, then there’s gonna be a disconnect. But the reality is whenever there’s any proposal to weaken their stronghold on children’s education dollars and control over that money, they act like the sky is falling. Whether it’s a proposal for 100% of the funding to follow the child or whether it’s a proposal to have 0.1% of the funding follow the child, because they know that when families are given the choice, they’re gonna take their kids elsewhere.

0:46:48.1 Corey DeAngelis: And in fact, if you look at the latest polling on this, I know EdChoice has done some and some other… AFC has done some of this polling as well, but every poll that I’ve seen on this that has asked families where they send their kids now and where they would prefer to send their kids if the money followed the child. It typically turns out to be about less than half of the families with students in public schools would actually prefer to send them to public schools. So I think there’s about 87% of families of students of school age that are in public schools today, but then when you ask their families, the percentage tends to be about 30% to 40% would actually prefer for that to be the case. And I think they should still be able to pick that, but the reality is, for a large number of families, they’re not satisfied with what they’re getting for a lot of different reasons.

0:47:40.8 Aaron Powell: Well, that brings up this question of the popularity of school choice programs among different groups, because it seems like a lot of the strongest, the most vocal loudest arguments against public school, against school choice are coming from middle class, upper middle class Democrats and teachers and whatnot, and they’re the ones who by and large are living in districts with good public schools. But what about how does school choice play out among parents of, say, urban Black communities where the schools are worse like what do they think about school choice when they have… Was it Florida had a program for a while that was then pulled, but do we… Because it feels like a lot of the time, we have these kind of upper middle class Democrats who’re like, “I know what’s best for other people,” but if those other people… What do those other people, the people that we’re trying to protect for the public schools actually think about public school choice.

0:48:57.3 Corey DeAngelis: Yeah, if you look at likely Democratic voters, the African-​American and Hispanic populations are much more likely in general, to support the concept of funding students directly than White Democrats, that’s been a pretty well-​known trend for a while. And what’s interesting to me is over this past year, according to the latest RealClear Opinion Research polling, the jumps in support for School Choice, first of all, overall, were just pretty large between April of 2020, there was a… And June of 2021, there was a 10% point jump in support from 64% support in April of 2020 to 74% overall support in June of 2021. And the largest jumps in support were among groups that previously were less likely to support school choice, so for Democrats, I believe the jump was about 12% or 13% points.

0:49:53.1 Corey DeAngelis: Similar jumps for parents that had kids in the public school system. So I think it’s clicked more for more people this year because people who are otherwise okay with the public school system saw that maybe they don’t wanna feel powerless ever again going forward. The schools weren’t even open, families were scrambling trying to find alternatives, and their education dollars remained with the closed institutions that weren’t providing services for their kids while meanwhile they were either… There’s a huge labor market effects too, for female workers in particular, having to go back into the household, there’s well-​documented evidence on that. And even if you like your public school in normal times, maybe parents started to figure out, “Well, maybe I want an exit option, just in case, so that I could really remedy this weird power imbalance that exists in the public school system going forward.”

0:50:57.6 Trevor Burrus: So what are we seeing around the country in terms of how they’re fixing that?

0:51:01.1 Corey DeAngelis: Yeah, there’s been huge movement in the minds of people just supporting it, there’s the concept of funding students directly in polling, but then there’s been 19 states that have had bills passed and sign into law to expand or enact programs to fund students as opposed to systems. Again, we’re calling this a year of school choice because there’s been so much victory and in some states, there’s been substantial growth. For example, in West Virginia, they didn’t have any charter schools on the ground last year, they didn’t have any private school choice mechanisms at all, and then this year, they passed the nation’s most expensive Education Savings Account program in the country, 93% or 94% of families will be eligible to take their children’s education dollars to a private or to any approved education provider of their choosing. And so the way that I put it is they went to from zero to 100 real quick, in West Virginia. New Hampshire had a huge win as well, it’ll be the nation’s second most expansive Education Savings Account program. Think about half of the population will be eligible for it. And then Kentucky had a very expansive program as well, which will be the nation’s third largest… Not largest, most expansive Education Savings Account program in the nation.

0:52:28.7 Corey DeAngelis: And to get to Aaron’s question, a little bit in more detail, when you look at the families that are using either charter schools or private school voucher programs, they tend to be higher rates, of lower income families and families that are non-​White. So for example, in DC, some of the latest data that I’ve seen from the DC voucher program is that about 95% of the students are Black or Hispanic, and the average household income of a student using the DC voucher program is about $28,000 for the entire households in the District of Columbia, so obviously that’s much lower than the average income household income in the District of Columbia. And you still have the administration… The current administration calling to end that voucher program in DC. And the kids that are using this program… The average voucher is only about $10,000 per student. The average public school in DC spends about three times that amount, about $30,000, $31,000 per student in the public school system in DC. In Florida, the average household income of their tax credit scholarship program, which serves, I believe over 100,000 students is similar. It’s about $27,000 per household.

0:53:58.2 Trevor Burrus: So in this year of school choice, it’ll be better, and probably in five years, the school choice environment will be better than it is today, and we’ll identify the pandemic year as like the jumping off point.

0:54:11.7 Corey DeAngelis: Yeah, I think so. And the more and the more that the teachers unions overplay their hand and expose their true intentions, I think the more families are going to continue the fight towards expanding educational freedom and the fight towards funding students as opposed to institutions. And the teachers unions can’t seem to help themselves. It’s like they haven’t learned from 2021 so far, and they’re continuing to either talk about metrics to close schools again or to impose certain mandates on families, which are really igniting more battles that are started by families to free their kids from the clutches of the teachers unions.

0:54:58.3 Corey DeAngelis: And for me, I don’t really care if your school has a particular rule when it comes to masking or not masking, but the reality is, this is really exposing the problem of a one-​size-​fits-​all system. And the only way to fix this problem going forward without mandating a one-​size-​fits-​all solution on other people’s kids is to allow the education funding to follow the child to the institution that works best for that family going forward. I don’t see any other way out of this. Cato Institute, Neal McCluskey has documented this for over a decade now, is something he calls The Public School Battle Map, where he highlights so many problems with the public school system that are the result of forcing everybody into an institution that does not align with their values or their needs, which creates all these unnecessary fights or battles in that one-​size-​fits-​all system.

0:56:06.4 Corey DeAngelis: The way that I’ve tried to put it is that just imagine if we were all residentially assigned to a government-​run grocery store, and we all had to fight with one another about the uniform set of groceries that was delivered to every single family. You’d have the vegan lobby coming in, you’d have the meat eating lobby coming in and advocating for their things to get attached to that grocery bag. But it really wouldn’t make any sense, and a lot of families will be unhappy with the overall results, it would be extremely costly and it would create these unnecessary battles, kind of like what we’re seeing in the public school system. The better solution is to not force other people’s kids to go into a school that has masking rules or even curriculum that they vehemently disagree with.

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0:57:05.2 Aaron Powell: Thank you for listening. If you enjoy Free Thoughts, make sure to rate and review us in 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 www​.lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.