On this week’s episode, Corey DeAngelis joins to discuss school choice in 2021. It’s been a year with tremendous gains for those who want educational opportunity for their children. We cover the data, the wins, and the hurdles ahead.
Corey DeAngelis is the national director of research at the American Federation for Children, the executive director at Educational Freedom Institute, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and a senior fellow at Reason Foundation. He was named on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for his work on education policy and received the Buckley Award from America’s Future in 2020.
TRANSCRIPT
Beverly Hallberg:
And welcome to She Thinks, a podcast where you’re allowed to think for yourself. I’m your host, Beverly Hallberg. And on today’s episode, we take a look back at 2021 when it comes to the topic of school choice. It’s been a year with tremendous gains for those who want educational opportunity for their children. So we’re going to get into the data, the wins, and the hurdles ahead, and we have a perfect guest to do that with us today. Corey DeAngelis joins us. He is the national director of research at the American Federation for Children, the executive director at Educational Freedom Institute, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and a senior fellow at the Reason Foundation. He was named on the Forbes 30 Under 30 lists for his work on education policy and received the Buckley award from America’s Future in 2020. Corey, thank you so much for joining She Thinks today.
Corey DeAngelis:
Yeah. Thank you so much for having me.
Beverly Hallberg:
Before we get into the data and the successes of this year, I thought I would just have you start by giving a little bit of info on your background. What was your journey to focusing on this issue of school choice?
Corey DeAngelis:
Yeah. So I will say, I attended government-run schools all through K through 12 education, but in high school, I had the opportunity to go to something called a magnet school. It’s still run by the school district, run by the government, but you’re not residentially assigned to magnet schools, and they can have their own admissions processes. So they have stronger incentives in my view to cater to the needs of families, because they don’t have residential-assigned geographic monopoly catchment zones.
And I felt like that opportunity had a positive impact on my life trajectory. And I would like to extend that kind of opportunity and others to other families at the same time. And then also, the funding shouldn’t only follow a child that they go to a government-controlled school, like a magnet school or another public school or another district-run school. You should be able to take your children’s education dollars to whatever type of school. It could be a private school, a public-slash-private charter school, or a homeschooling option such as a microschool or a pandemic pod.
The money should follow the child to wherever they’re getting an education. But after high school, after my positive experience with the magnet school, I actually did my bachelor’s and master’s in economics, where it really opened my eyes to the main problems with K through 12 education in America, which happens to be this massive power imbalance between the teachers’ union monopoly and individual families. And the compulsory funding through property taxes and the residential assignment obviously leads to large amounts of monopoly power in the current system.
And so the system doesn’t have that much of an incentive to cater to the needs of families, unless the money’s following the child, wherever they’re getting an education. That provides true bottom-up accountability. But a little bit more after that, I did my Ph.D. in education policy at the University of Arkansas, where my first study linked the Milwaukee private school choice program to crime reduction. And that kind of got my… That was kind of my first splash into the national conversation on private school choice. It was a pretty influential study. No one had linked private school choice to crime reduction before. And then I finished my Ph.D., went to the Cato Institute and then the Reason Foundation. Now I’m at the American Federation for Children.
Beverly Hallberg:
Well, I’ve enjoyed following you on Twitter. You bring out a lot of interesting stories in reference to school choice. And just by way of background on myself, I am a product of private education and it wasn’t because my parents were wealthy. They actually saved a lot of money and worked really hard just to put myself and my sisters through a small private school, because they thought that was the best way to have positive educational outcomes for us.
But the trajectory of where school choice was when I was in K-12 versus where it is today, there’s been a huge change. I know we want to get to 2021 in just the amount of movement and momentum we’ve seen towards school choice this year, but can you give us just an overview of the timeframe from decades ago to where we are today when it comes to how open people were to school choice back then to where they are now?
Corey DeAngelis:
Yeah. So some of the first private school choice programs in the country were called town tuitioning programs in states like Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. They had these town tuitioning programs that started in the late 1800s where, if you lived in an area, mostly, usually a rural area that did not have a government-run school that you were assigned to, you could take your children’s education dollars in the form of a voucher to another public school nearby, or a private religious or non-religious school.
So that’s kind of the first private school-choice programs in America. But then more of the non-town tuitioning types of programs started around the 1990s. We have the Milwaukee voucher program, is one of the longest-standing modern-day voucher programs in America. Started in about 1990, 1991. So it’s been about three decades since that program has launched.
And even before 2021, which we’re calling the year of school choice, we already had over 50 private school-choice programs in about half of the states and the district of Columbia. But only about less than 1% of the school-age population was actually using one of these private school choice programs. And for the listeners, just to define it a little bit more simply, I’ve talked about this in terms of funding students, as opposed to systems or funding students directly with the money that’s meant for educating them.
And I think it makes more sense to people when you start to talk about it in terms of things like Pell grants where, for higher education, we already fund students directly with the money in terms of Pell grants or the GI bill where the money goes to the student, and then they can choose a community college or public university if they want. But they could also take that money to a private university or a religious or non-religious university. We do the same thing with pre-K programs at the state and federal level, that you don’t have to take your pre-K funding at a residential assigned government-run grocery store or pre-K provider.
And — which gets me to my next point — we already do this with food stamps and Medicaid dollars and Section Eight housing vouchers, the money follows the decision of the family. You can take your food stamp dollars to Safeway if you want, but you could also take them to Trader Joe’s or Walmart or any other provider of groceries. The money follows your decision. So I’m just arguing, when it comes to school choice, that we should apply the same logic to K through 12 education and fund people as opposed to buildings.
Beverly Hallberg:
And why has K12 education proven to be this staunch area that the word voucher was even a dirty word for so many years? Why has there been such pushback? Is it purely because of teachers’ unions?
Corey DeAngelis:
Yeah. It’s the only difference, is one of power dynamics. And what’s interesting to me is a lot of the same people who support funding individuals as opposed to institutions for higher education and pre-K, and just about every other industry in the United States, those same people only get all up in arms about it when it comes to those in-between years of K through 12 education. And again, the only difference is one of power dynamics.
And what I mean by that is that choice is the norm with higher education pre-K and just about everything else, but choice threatens an entrenched special interest, mainly the teachers’ and superintendents’ unions, only when it comes to those in-between years of K through 12 education. So of course, they fight as hard as possible against any change to the status quo because they want to receive your children’s education dollars, regardless of how well they do, regardless of the choice and satisfaction level of the family. And from what we’ve seen over the past year and a half, regardless of whether they even opened their doors for business.
Beverly Hallberg:
Let’s talk about these power dynamics. It took something major in order to shake that up. And that was COVID. You mentioned a year and a half ago, it’s when COVID started. And this is where we really saw, as you would call, the year school choice.
I would even say the year of the parent, parents standing up and defending their children. What specifically was it about COVID? Was it just being involved and seeing what their kids were learning online? Was it masks being mandated? Schools being closed? CRT? Or is it really just a hodgepodge of all of that, its accumulation of all of it coming together? Parents just finally said we’ve had enough.
Corey DeAngelis:
Yeah. The way that I put it before is that COVID didn’t break the public school system, it was already broken. And the past year and a half has simply shined a spotlight on the main problem with K through 12 education in America, which happens to be a massive, long-existing power imbalance between the government school monopoly and individual families. But there was a lot of different things that this past year and a half has exposed, right? One was that schools were closed, right?
Private schools were fighting to reopen, or they were open essentially the entire time. Whenever a governor tried to close private schools, there were legal action, there were legal cases filed by the private schools almost immediately. One of them actually went up to the Supreme Court from Kentucky. They didn’t actually take up the case because the closure order had already expired anyway.
And then you had private schools in Sacramento County, for example, a Catholic private school actually rebranded itself as a daycare because the county health official had an arbitrary closure rule that applied to schools, but not daycares. Because COVID knows if you’re learning, it’s really going to get you. And so we got to close down the schools, but not the daycares. But that just goes to show you that the private schools were really innovative because they knew that if they weren’t providing a service that was valuable to their customers, the families, then they were probably going to have to shut down because the families would take their money elsewhere.
The public school teachers’ unions didn’t have that same incentive. And in fact, the public school monopoly actually had an incentive to keep the doors closed because they could actually financially profit from being able to lobby to the government to say, “Look, we can’t open because we don’t have enough money.” And we’ve seen this before in K through 12 education where the underperforming private schools have always shut down.
The underperforming government schools have always been able to call for more money because they can say, we’re failing because we need more money. And we’ve thrown more and more money at the problem in K through 12 education, decade after decade after decade, with no apparent overall improvements in results. And so that’s one part of just the school-closure aspect. Parents felt absolutely powerless, particularly the least advantaged too, were at least less likely to be able to afford private alternatives like private school tuition and fees, microschools, pandemic pods, and then to just providing an adequate form of home-based education.
And parents don’t want to feel powerless ever again. So they started pushing back at school board meetings and pushing back in the state legislatures for bills to fund students directly. I mean, when a grocery store would close down during COVID, or if that happened in your town, it was kind of inconvenient, but it wasn’t devastating because at least you could take your grocery money elsewhere. Same thing with food stamps. But when your school closed, the school kept the money and families were scrambling, not able to figure out any alternatives, particularly the least advantaged.
So school closures were part of it. And this just, this highlighting of the buildings keeping the money and not providing the full set of services. And then like you mentioned, it was the curriculum as well. That remote learning was horrible for so many reasons. At least the kind of remote learning that was provided by the government schools in so many places. But the silver lining was that families got to see what was going on.
And it’s one thing to argue for educational freedom based on low test scores, which we’ve done for a long time in the government schools, but it’s another conversation altogether to see that your school is not just failing your kid academically, but see that your school is indoctrinating your child for 13 years in a way that doesn’t align with your values. And so that created another angle or argument for empowering parents to one, hold their schools accountable through the school boards. But then two, to allow families to have exit options when the public schools don’t align with their views.
Beverly Hallberg:
Yeah. So let’s get into some of the data behind that. Where have we seen legislative victories in school choice in this past year? And what do we see in November the most recent election when it came to school boards? Because we know that there was a battle to overturn school boards across the country.
Corey DeAngelis:
Yeah. So the school choice victories have been monumental this year. We’re calling it the year of school choice, or if you’re hip with the lingo by now, 2021 is the year that we fund students, not systems. And we say that because 19 states have already enacted or expanded programs to fund students as opposed to systems in 2021. That is huge momentum. And the number of states with education savings accounts actually doubled from five states to 10 states this year.
And these education savings accounts are what I would argue are the purest form of funding students directly. The gold standard of school choice, because it allows for maximum flexibility on the part of parents. The money that is allocated for your child, you could take it to the government school if you want, just like any other school choice program. But if not, you can opt your child out and the money would follow the child into something called an education savings account, which you could use to pay for private school tuition and fees, like most voucher programs, but you’re not limited to spending that money at a private brick and mortar school.
You can also spend it at online school, if you want. You can spend it at a charter school. You can spend the money on tutoring and textbooks, microschool, pandemic pods, any approved education expenditure. It really takes us from school choice to education choice. And I think that’s kind of the future of education choice policies going forward.
I think most states are pushing for those types of bills now. And some of the bigger victories were in states like West Virginia. West Virginia didn’t have any charter schools in 2020, didn’t have any private school-choice programs. And then they passed the most expansive education savings account program in the nation. Regardless of income, just about every family can take their kids’ state-level education dollars to the education provider of their choosing, public or private. And it’s a [crosstalk 00:14:59].
Beverly Hallberg:
You can go ahead.
Corey DeAngelis:
It’s just a couple of the…. New Hampshire also passed something called an education freedom account, which is another expansive education savings account. Kentucky got there for first education savings account program, Missouri as well. And one other state that’s… I’m blanking on.
Beverly Hallberg:
It’s all right.
Corey DeAngelis:
But these programs, a lot of them were, it’s not just the number of states that we had expansions, it’s the size of the expansions as well that were pretty monumental. I think Jason Bedrick at EdChoice has estimated that three or over three million additional students nationwide will be eligible for the, based on these expansions.
Beverly Hallberg:
Wow.
Corey DeAngelis:
Might actually be higher than three million, but it’s at least three million. And so those are huge numbers this year. And we’ve also seen people voting with their feet too. So we’ve seen legislative victories, but we’ve seen people just switching to homeschooling in larger numbers than we’ve ever seen before.
The U.S. Census Bureau’s American poll survey suggests that homeschooling at least doubled with now 11.1% of households saying that they formally homeschool at least one child and public charter schools saw a boom in enrollment too. While the government schools lost about 3.3% of their enrollment, over 1.5 million students nationwide, charter school enrollment has jumped by about 7% or by about 300,000 students about seven, which is 7% overall.
Beverly Hallberg:
Yeah. And let me ask you just about the money side of this. So of course, when it comes to children, we want to make sure that they’re the ones who benefit the most, but there’s also another benefit. The Wall Street Journal wrote about this in an article entitled, “School Choice Saves Money and Helps Kids.” And it made the claim that school choice programs actually save taxpayer dollars as well. So how is it that we save money overall? Obviously, we want the money to follow the child and not fund systems, but how is that also a benefit to the taxpayer?
Corey DeAngelis:
Yeah. Government schools on average in the United States spend about 15 or $16,000, according to the latest numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau. And that was actually data from 2019. It’s obviously a lot higher now, especially with the federal bailout since March of 2020. The American Rescue Plan and the two other, the Cares Act and the December 2020 COVID Relief bill allocated at least 190 million dollars, billion dollars, sorry, to K through 12 education, which works out to be over $3,000 per student in the public school system.
So we spend probably a lot more than 15, $16,000 per student per year in 2021. But the school choice programs are typically funded at a proportion of what would’ve been spent in the government schools. It’s typically about half of what would’ve spent. So if you’re taking six, seven, 8,000 dollars to spend at a private school and the governments that same child could have, would’ve cost 15, 16,000 dollars in the government school, well, you’re saving taxpayers thousands of dollars in that way.
And there’s a couple of ways that you can do this with the policy. And one of the ways that legislators will do this is just tie the state portion of funding to the student, or even just to tie a percentage of the state funding, maybe 80 or 90% of the total state funding per student to the individual child. And that creates the taxpayer benefit there.
Beverly Hallberg:
I want to now turn to something that I have found just fascinating in reference to the school choice debate. So even though you do have plenty of people who are liberal saying that public education is amazing, they support teachers’ unions. Yet, those same people tend to put their own children in private school. And I want to play a clip. This is of CNN’s Michael Smerconish, and also Don Lemon. And I just want us to hear the quote in this. So let’s go ahead and roll that.
Speaker 3:
Look, I was the product of a public K through 12 education.
Speaker 5:
Yeah.
Speaker 3:
Our children all went to a particular school where the chapel service was a big part of their education. But here’s the thing, we paid for that education.
Speaker 5:
Right.
Speaker 3:
My wife and me, and not the public.
Speaker 5:
Amen.
Corey DeAngelis:
Whoa.
Beverly Hallberg:
Isn’t he just proving the case there that it is only the wealthier, traditionally in the past, it’s only been the wealthy that have been able to afford to send and their child to the school of their choosing because they had the money to do so? Because before we didn’t have the funding following a child, what did you make of this exchange?
Corey DeAngelis:
I mean, it’s the classic school choice for me, but not for the hypocrisy that we see with a lot of elites. We see this with politicians as well. I forgot to tell you, beginning of the conversation, that one of my most viral tweets, one of my first viral tweets was when I exposed Elizabeth Warren in 2019 for sending her kid to private school. This was never uncovered. Alex Warren is now over 40 years of age, and nobody knew where he attended school.
And on video at one point in 2019, she told a voter. A voter asked her, “Hey, I heard somewhere that you send your kid to private school.” She was talking about how I had uncovered it. And she asked Elizabeth Warren, “I just want the same opportunities you had for your kids.” And Elizabeth Warren quickly responded by saying, “No. I sent my kids to public school.” Which was a false denial. It was a lie to that voter. And it kind of blew up in the media. But we see this all the time. Joe Biden attended private schools. He sent his kids. His grandkid went to private school too, which is great.
Beverly Hallberg:
Right.
Corey DeAngelis:
All of these people should have the opportunity to send their kids to private school, but then they shouldn’t fight against this for less advantaged families. Especially when we’re already paying for that child’s education through the property tax system, and other tax revenues as well. We’re already paying for it. The money shouldn’t go straight to the building, it should go to the person and this would lead to more equity too, right? Funding students directly would allow more families to have access to these kinds of opportunities. So in that sense, school choice is an equalizer.
Beverly Hallberg:
Final question for you. As you’re looking into 2022, where do you see the school choice battle going next?
Corey DeAngelis:
Well, we’re just going to continue winning. I’m very optimistic going forward because parents are this new special interest group that has formed in K through 12 education. For a long time, it was just the superintendents and the teachers’ unions. Now we kind of have this parent union dynamic because they felt powerless in 2020. But parents don’t want to feel like that ever again. So they’re going to fight to make sure that they’re more empowered in their kids’ education going forward.
And the reality is, parents care about their kids more than anybody else. They’re not going to forget what they saw over the past year. And parents are going to fight for the right to educate their kids as they see fit harder than anyone will ever fight to take that right away from them. So I’m on the side of parents. And I think politicians would be wise to listen to this new, influential group, that is watching going forward. And I’ve already been tapped by or messaged by people telling me that there’s going to be several school choice bills filed in different states.
There already have been school choice bills pre-filed that I’ve blasted on Twitter. I just, right before we got on this conversation, I broke the news about a Pennsylvania school choice bill. There was one from Washington that I broke this morning as well, which is more of a blue state, less likely to happen in Washington. But we’re hearing that it’s going to be another good year. So 2021 was the year of school choice, but we’re just getting started. And I’m confident going forward that this is going to be an issue that’s pushed relentlessly until every single family has the right to take their kids’ education dollars to wherever they’re getting an education.
Beverly Hallberg:
And Corey, where can people find you if they want to follow your research?
Corey DeAngelis:
They can follow me on Twitter. It’s @DeAngelisCorey. I share my research there, but I also share arguments in favor of school choice. And you might see me battling with people like Randi Weingarten. Who, by the way, Randi Weingarten should get an award for being the school choice champion of the year. Although inadvertently for waking up so many parents by overplaying her hand and showing the true colors of the teachers’ unions. But if you also want to help us in the fight to push for parental rights and educational freedom, we have a new pledge at the American Federation for Children. It’s called the education freedom pledge. You can go to edfreedompledge.com and urge your lawmakers and just pledge to support educational freedom in your state.
Beverly Hallberg:
Well, Corey DeAngelis, National Director of Research at the American Federation for Children. We appreciate your work in this area and also for joining She Thinks today. Thank you so much.
Corey DeAngelis:
Yeah. Thank you so much.
Beverly Hallberg:
And before you go, Independent Women’s Forum does want you to know that we rely on the generosity of supporters like you. And investment in IWF fuels our efforts to enhance freedom, opportunity, and wellbeing for all Americans. So please consider making a small donation to IWF by visiting iwf.org/donate. That’s iwf.org/donate. Last, if you enjoyed this episode of She Thinks, do leave us a rating or a review on iTunes. It does help. Also, we’d love it if you share this episode and let your friends know where they can find more She Thinks. From all of us here at Independent Women’s Forum, thanks for watching.