Jeanne Allen joins the podcast to discuss the creation and impact of the Yass Prize. The annual award provides education entrepreneurs with a $1 million grand prize, as well as dozens of smaller awards, in order to honor and connect organizations providing sustainable, transformational, and outstanding educational opportunities for students. Jeanne also shares her motivation for founding the Center for Education Reform 30 years ago, and her role in rallying parents and making education freedom the most important domestic issue of our time.


TRANSCRIPT

Ginny Gentles:

Today on Students Over Systems, we’re celebrating transformational, outstanding, and permissionless education options. Center for Education Reform Founder Jeanne Allen joins us to discuss the Yass Prize.

Welcome to Students Over Systems, a podcast that celebrates education freedom. I’m your host, Ginny Gentles. At Students Over Systems we talk with the creators, advocates, and beneficiaries of education freedom, and on today’s episode we’re joined by Jeanne Allen. Jeanne founded the Center for Education Reform in 1993 to restore excellence to education, and she has built that organization into the nation’s leading voice for innovation and opportunity in education. Almost three decades later, CER continues to help unite education innovators and advance and defend sound policy. She also rallies parents and she makes the cause of education freedom the most important domestic issue of our time. Well, we make the cause of education freedom the most important domestic issue of our time.

Back in 2021, with COVID making transparent the deficiencies of the traditional education system, CER launched the $1 million STOP Award to transform education, that’s now called the Yass Prize. And Jeanne has joined us here today to talk a little bit about the history of the Center for Education Reform, but then also talk about this very exciting prize and how it is transforming education in our country. Jeanne, thank you so much for joining us today.

Jeanne Allen:

Hi, Ginny. My pleasure. Thank you.

Ginny Gentles:

So, Jeanne, I feel responsible for making sure that people know that school choice is not brand new. There seems to be a little bit of a misconception that all these new exciting things that are happening, education savings accounts, universal education savings accounts, expansion of school choice options around the country, are a brand new development and something that is going to happen to our country. So you’re the perfect person to have on the podcast to say, “I’ve been at this for three decades.” So I’d love for us to start with a little bit of a history lesson and to talk about the founding of the Center for Education Reform and what inspired you to launch that center?

Jeanne Allen:

No, thank you. And it’s great timing, Ginny, because I have to say that what the most remarkable thing for me, and I was actually just sharing that with somebody yesterday, is that there is this passing parade. I stole that line from an old friend who used to say just when you think everyone’s seen the monkeys, there’s a whole bunch of people in the parade that go, “Wait, oh my gosh, there’s monkeys.” Or it could be balloons or whatever happens to be in your parade. But I was at the Department of Education when Bill Bennett was actually talking about the importance of the three Cs, content, character, and choice in that order. Content, character and choice.

And as Education Secretary in the mid to late 80s, a number of us who worked there obviously were all in, and everyone across the country thought it was the craziest thing in the world, that it was something that was only reserved for a handful of people who were not in the mainstream that public education was doing just great. And this was only a couple of years on the heels of Nation at Risk, which we’re celebrating the 40th anniversary, or we’re calling 40 years since Nation at Risk just this month, Rising Tide of Mediocrity, Mile-Wide Education, Inch Deep. I was the recipient of one of those great public educations where I got straight As and I got to college and realized I didn’t know a lot about everything. Another story, another day.

So I was thrilled when I ended up actually showing up at the Heritage Foundation as their first policy analyst to find there were a group of people from around the country who’ve been talking about this issue, who are the ones leading the charge on places like Capitol Hill. But they were talking about it as a federal issue only at the time, which I thought was crazy. And I said so, and they were not really thrilled with me because they were like, “Who are you, young person,” I was really young, “To be telling us that?” And so my pursuit after that was to try to understand where the states were and to try to help make that happen in the states.

Ginny Gentles:

So what does that look like? Understanding what’s happening in the states? There are 50 states and we at the time did not have a strong US Department of Education and still shouldn’t. But back then, likely the 10% of total education funding coming from the federal government right now is even a smaller percentage. So where education policy was happening was at the state level. But again, there are 50 states. How did you go about exploring what was happening in the states?

Jeanne Allen:

Yeah, there was actually no education policy happening in the states. It was school board control. It was superintendents and administrators groups and yes, teachers unions. And in fact, business leaders at the time, Head of IBM, Lou Gerstner at the time ran the business round table asking the feds to send money. So the three big ideas at the time were, “Send money, teacher pay, we need more money, teacher pay, and we need to mandate small classes.” That was the 1987-88 education agenda that a lot of people thought was a great idea.

And so what was happening though is parents were realizing and recognizing that what A Nation at Risk said in fact was a problem and they would just start calling and it was very organic. And so a lot of times today when people even were like, “Well, there’s parents and they’re crazy, and these parents are protesting X, Y, and Z, and they must have an ideological agenda,” it’s dismaying, but it makes me laugh because parents have been driving this movement since at least I’ve been professionally working, which is since the mid-80s in this work. And they would literally call my desk and be like, “Well, we thought Heritage Foundation might know something about what we can do in Minnesota.” Joe Nathan was in Minnesota doing charter schools, the nation’s governors were talking about public school choice and the people at places like Heritage and other economic freedom related organizations, which were very small comparably at the time to the larger Brookings Institution, we’re talking about Milton Friedman. I was like, “Who’s Milton Friedman?”

I didn’t know who Milton Friedman was. I was like a little Italian daughter, Democrat. I didn’t know any of this stuff. I wasn’t political. I was like, “Who’s Milton Friedman? Oh, that’s interesting. So he wrote something about it? Okay, well, let’s see what parents think.” And so it was really very organic. And so there were researchers and thought leaders. Brookings had John Chubb. We organized people and then people started coming out of woodwork. By the way, we not only didn’t have the infrastructure, we weren’t talking on email, there were no Zoom meetings. There was no Twitter. It sounds ancient to people, but I don’t really look that ancient, I hope, but there was nothing. You were literally making phone calls, sending out newsletters, and then writing reports, and those would get in to people and then people in the media would call you and it would be like rinse, wash, repeat all over again.

Exact same issues playing out 40 years ago that are playing out now, with by the way, the exact same drivers, which were parents, very reform-minded educators, a handful of reform-minded school and public school leaders, and then legislators and governors who were tired of business as usual.

Ginny Gentles:

All right, so you mentioned that newsletter. And I have to say, I was a subscriber when I was in college back when I was very young, long ago. And you and that newsletter started educating me on what was going on in education policy. But by then, you’d left the Heritage Foundation and you’d founded the Center for Education Reform. So let’s talk about that transition. You launched the Center for Education Reform to focus more-

Jeanne Allen:

On states.

Ginny Gentles:

Attention on these issues?

Jeanne Allen:

Yeah, on states, because Heritage didn’t do states. Heritage did federal policy briefs. They did four and five page federal policy briefs and I would stand in front of my friends or my colleagues there, including then President Ed Feulner and go, “We should be doing state stuff.” So they actually let me do a conference in Detroit. They let me do this Can Business Save Education conference, but that was it. I was supposed to be convincing people on Capitol Hill. And I was like, “Why? What does it have to do with anything?” And again, that wasn’t really coming from an ideological perspective.

I came from a small town. I went to public schools. I was first in my family to go to away to a residential college and be able to do that full-time. I was like, “Why wouldn’t we be working where people are?” So I was frustrated, which I made very well known to everybody who was around me then. And I just thought, “There’s got to be another way to do this.” And so I reached out to a handful of people, former governor Pete du Pont was one of them. And late Polly Williams, who had actually helped create vouchers in the meantime in Milwaukee to be among my first board members. Jerry Hume, who just recently passed away, who was a business leader, became very active in Heritage after our conference together, was the founding chair. And I just started basically writing lists of people who needed to hear this stuff.

So every governor, every major league education department or education chair of a committee, every superintendent, every parent group we read about, we had a clipping service by hand. You’d read about parents and you’d send them a note, and that’s who the newsletter was for. And so we worked to build a coalition of people who thought the same way and then they wanted information and it just spread from there.

Ginny Gentles:

All right. So we’re talking early 90s at this point?

Jeanne Allen:

Yes. In 1993. So I was rolling up my sleeves to send out my first newsletter in October of 1993.

Ginny Gentles:

Okay. All right. So maybe I was subscribing to your… No, no, no. Let’s see. I was in college. Yeah, I was in college. Okay. So Center for Education Reform has been around then for decades in this fight. And you mentioned vouchers, what was going on in Wisconsin, charter schools, Minnesota. These are states that kicked off these things, but in the years that you have been running Center for Education Reform, they’ve definitely expanded throughout the country.

Let’s talk about what you’re working on right now, which is really exciting. So you’ve contributed to the expansion and awareness of these parent-centered, student-centered policies. Something different is happening right now with this prize. So it was called the STOP Prize originally. Can you tell us what that stands for and the origins of it?

Jeanne Allen:

Yeah. So what I like to say is we worked on building demand for a long time, and then the great news is the advent not only of more information, the growth of these things, so many more organizations got into the mix. We had more national education reforms, we had reform-minded organizations coming together, pulling people out of the traditional system. There was less work to have to do to roll up your sleeves at a local level in an awareness building area. And about I’d say six or seven years ago, I started really, my attention was piqued by the ed tech world and the innovators there. And I realized that they were probably the least ideological on a regular basis about education. They wanted to deliver great things for students, do well and do good. And I thought it was a whole really interesting dynamic way to look at the ecosystem instead of keeping to talk to ourselves, which people in every movement, no matter what side you’re on, tend to do. You talk to the people you’re most comfortable with.

I felt like that that was making the movement sputter. Charter schools weren’t going nearly as far. There were organizations pushing for constraints, even friendly organizations. There were people saying, “Oh, let’s do a 2,000 person education choice program in a state.” And we’re like, “Well, why would you do that?” And on the other hand, the investors and the innovators I was meeting were like, “You would never start a business and say, ‘I’m going to sell to 2,000 people.’ You’d say, ‘I’m going to sell to 200 million people. How am I going to get there?'” And so they really helped me realize that we were way, way too limiting.

And so we just started doing a lot of stuff to open up the ideas about innovation. And then by 2020 when the awful pandemic hit and many of us were doing what you and I are doing right now electronically, we not only knew where the great innovators were that we should be highlighting to show the nation and policy makers why schools could continue to be in existence, even in hybrid in different ways, but why they need the freedom and flexibility to do that.

So I got a call from a good friend and colleague and someone who’s been on our board for a long time, Janine Yass, who said that they were really excited about how much attention all the frontline workers were getting. But what about the frontline education innovators who a number of us were profiling? Could we find one, celebrate them and make an example with a million dollar prize? So we stood up. Yeah.

Ginny Gentles:

So she started with this concept of a million dollar prize.

Jeanne Allen:

Yeah. It started a million dollars. It was like, we’re going to get attention.

Ginny Gentles:

There’s no messing around.

Jeanne Allen:

Nope, we’re going to get attention. We’re going to show people that there are all these folks around there. They had been visiting schools in Philadelphia and watching these blank stares looking at screens with no one really educating them, and we kept talking every other day. And I was like, “Yes, but it’s amazing. Phoenix unified in Arizona.” It’s a public school district. It has education in a bus and Friendship Public Charter Schools here in Washington is delivering stuff directly to homes and making sure people are connected, full service. And then there’s Academica. She’s like, “Well, why don’t we ask people?”

And then she also was interested. We were starting to fund and look at micro schools. So the first micro school project, Black Mothers Forum came to our attention. They were partnering during COVID with Prenda through a charter school to deliver in-person learning to their kids who were being sacrificed, if you will.

Ginny Gentles:

Well, let’s pause there for a second because I do think that a lot of my listeners are like, “Yeah, yeah, I know what school choice is and I got the terms,” but then sometimes I just want to make sure we’re defining these terms. We’ve talked about vouchers, we’ve talked about charter schools. Let’s pause and talk about what is a micro school? How is that different than a regular old charter school or even a private school?

Jeanne Allen:

Yeah. I know that people like Don Soifer and others, probably Jenny would say, “Oh, there’s a better I way to say it.” I’d say they are basically independent small businesses, small business education, and any local community. That could be homes, it could be community centers, which is what Black Mothers Forum did. And it is education delivered to a handful of students in a very hands-on personal way, in a small environment that allows them to be educated at their own pace.

Ginny Gentles:

Okay.

Jeanne Allen:

And so anyway, we’d seen that was happening. You saw it. A lot of us saw, “Oh my gosh, there’s things happening.” And then we were all just so aggravated by what Randi Weingarten and people like her did to keep kids out of school. She lied so much on the hearing that she was called to on Capitol Hill. We just have to say the word, right? I hate to say that. I’d like to say misled. I’d like to be nicer. She lied that she actually tried to keep schools open. We just have to be really clear. Doesn’t make her a bad person. There’s good and evil in the world. That was an evil moment for her to do that, but-

Ginny Gentles:

Yeah, I’ve used the word fabrication, but I do think we need to be really clear that she was not telling the truth and that she’s trying to rewrite history and really paint herself as this victim, this elderly slow victim, that those are some of the terms that she seemed to be wanting to throw around in the hearing yesterday. And that, of course, she’d been ever since February 2020, fighting to open schools, which is very much contrary to the truth, which means that she was lying.

Jeanne Allen:

Which goes full circle to full forward, full stop, forward to stop. Because one of the things we kept hearing from the education providers that we were interviewing in our COVID Action series was, “We’re doing it and we don’t care if we don’t have permission. We’re just going to do it.” And Robert Enloe said to Janine and I one day, “Permissionless. Yeah, I’ve been telling everyone.” So Robert Enloe gets credit for the permissionless. He’s told a number of foundations who now use that word, but we’re like, “You’re right. They’re doing it without permission. And we’re hearing that.” And what else are they doing? They’re doing it in transformational ways. You’re going to put education out in the equivalent of a food truck. You’re going to have people come to your home and then partner between a charter and an online delivery. Just extraordinary things were happening that maybe yes been happening in pockets of advantaged communities across the country, but never in the way that it started happening.

And so we put out the million dollar prize, we called it Sustainable, Transformational, Outstanding, Permissionless, STOP for Education. Why sustainable? Because you can’t live on philanthropy. Transformational speaks to that. Outstanding, by whatever measure matters. And Permissionless, and people came out of the woodwork and we were shocked. And the first 20 that were chosen to compete for the million dollar prize also through Business Accelerator, was so good that we just decided that they all should get at least a $100,000 as well as the million dollar prize being given, which went to Discovery Center.

And then we realized that we actually had inadvertently created a new movement and a new network of people who came from literally every kind of sector. They were ideologically different, but all totally on the same page that we have to stop for kids. Stop, stop What you’re doing, be transformational, be outstanding, start arguing with people if they don’t want what you’re doing, be permissionless. Let them come after you. Public charter, EdTech, for-profit, nonprofit, we didn’t care. And the year we did the end of ’21, when we did the award ceremony, it was just so transformational for us and it was so exciting. And it’s like things that we knew but really hadn’t seen that we decided to triple it.

So in 2022, we gave out $13.2 million and we actually raised it to 64 awards, a million dollar prize. We had eight $500,000 finalist prizes. If you start in 64, you at least got a 100 and the semi-finalist got $200,000. And they’re all part… And then they are all but, working. It’s not just the money. They’re collaborating and we have people going from Minnesota to Florida to Dallas, and we have EdTech groups that are working with women’s leadership in Texas who are also working with stimuli to do gaming.

And we have the guy who created the project in a box for a Black led group called Engage Detroit, is now actually visiting with Arizona Autism to expand it. And without even asking them, they just started getting together and realizing they could also grow and expand each other’s impact across the board. So we’re in year three of the Yass Prize and the applications are open at yassprize.org, final commercial, through July 15th. And we just don’t even know what to expect because they keep getting better and better every year. And so what we’re also realizing is as we talk to them and we are visiting them, we’re taking road shows and we’re learning how bad even the greatest policy environments are for choice.

And so that’s really the next frontier that we have to accomplish. If we’re going to find new supply, we’ve got to give them enough resources to be successful. I think we’re doing choice on the cheap, and I hope we can talk about that.

Ginny Gentles:

Yeah. So I definitely want to delve into what you see is needing to happen next step in the Education Freedom movement. And it sounds like that’s something that’s coming from the prize winners. They’re going to inform that process rather than the think tanks with their white papers, which is fantastic. Before we wrap up the conversation about the prize process and the winners, I’d love for you to talk a little bit about the 2022 award winner. This autism school out of Arizona. They won a million dollars. So that in itself is amazing, but tell us why they are amazing?

Jeanne Allen:

Arizona Autism Charter school was started by… We like to say she was a mom on a mission and her son, she was a very accomplished broadcaster. There was no place for her son that would actually in the traditional system meet him where he was and then think about what he was going to do when he finished school. And she decided to develop with a handful of other parents, the concept of Arizona Autism. And it grew so rapidly that they began to talk people across the country about starting a national accelerator for charter schools for students with autism. Her ambition is to open a charter school for kids with autism in every major city across the country. But what makes them different, because there’s a lot of people who… We know that this is one of the sadly fastest growing afflictions, if you will, or exceptionalities of our children.

I think it’s something like one in 40 students, there’s that dyslexia. I get the two mixed up because we had dyslexia, but we’ll fact check that in a second and hopefully we can come back to that. But a dramatic number of kids on the spectrum with all sorts of neurological issues. And there are ways to make sure that they are just as well-prepared as students who come with more traditional learning backgrounds or proclivities, and they have looked at the science. They have realized that what we were doing is isolating them from things that they could be doing in the larger atmosphere. And just even this week, she’s had two calls from people in other states that want her to help them open up schools to really serve that niche.

And so, as I said, sector agnostic. The first year it was a museum, Discovery Museum, which during COVID became a school and is serving the whole community and is fighting the good fight there. And this year it was this charter network that doesn’t care what sector they’re in, that’s just in Arizona, based in Phoenix. That’s what they realized was the best, quickest way to stand up. And she is on a mom on a mission, help every other mom so they don’t have to go through what she did.

Ginny Gentles:

Fantastic. That’s so encouraging. Before we delve into the future of the Education Freedom Movement, I just wanted to pause for a moment for a quick advertisement for a podcast that I enjoy listening to on a regular basis. And that is Problematic Women. So are you a conservative woman and do you feel problematic just for existing in today’s political landscape? If so, I encourage you to listen to Problematic Women every Thursday morning. On the podcast, Lauren Evans and Virginia Allen sort through the news to bring you stories and interviews that are of particular interest to you, a problematic woman. That’s a woman whose opinions are often excluded or even mocked by those on the so-called pro woman left.

Lauren and Virginia break down the news you care about in an upbeat, and it truly is upbeat and sharp-witted way. Search for Problematic Women wherever you get your podcasts. That’s one of those products out of the Heritage Foundation, Jeanne. So many good things coming from the Heritage Foundation.

Jeanne Allen:

I love it. That’s great. That’s really good.

Ginny Gentles:

All right, so Heritage Foundation, think tanks, white papers, podcasts, lots of talking and lots of ideas. But what you’re saying is that you’re out there in the states talking to these prize winners and getting ideas from them on what needs to happen on education policy. So I’d love to hear what you’re hearing from them and what you meant when you said that we’re doing Education Freedom on the cheek, I think?

Jeanne Allen:

On the cheap.

Ginny Gentles:

On the cheap. Got it.

Jeanne Allen:

So I’ll give you an example. So we went to SailFuture, which is St. Petersburg, Florida and I’d love for people, they can take a look, they can read all about it. I won’t take the time now, but started by someone himself who was in and out and 80% of his kids have had parents in the prison system. And most of them are single parent families and many of them are foster kids. That was Mike Long himself. Start a school in St. Petersburg. We all know Florida is one of the choicest states out there, very friendly.

And as we thought about all the things that Mike Long was doing when we went to visit him, he had a half a million dollar prize, it became clear that this kind of effort, which governors from Oklahoma to Georgia already asked him to come do it, he has to raise money. So our big S, our sustainable. We’re like, “Huh, how can this really be sustainable?” So the numbers that people don’t really think about, even in the policy circle, so $18,000 is Pinellas County, Florida gets per student. Mike gets an $8,000 or so scholarship through one of the choice programs in Florida. We go, “Great, yes. Oh my gosh. And now it’s universal, it has expanded.”

Mike has to petition for Medicare for his healthcare. Mike doesn’t get any transportation dollars. $11,000 is sitting on the table in Pinellas County that he doesn’t get. Local dollars, other state dollars, some federal dollars. So we start going, “Why?” They’re kids, right? They’re our students, so forget the myth that school boards and local control is somehow wholly American. What’s local about raising taxes on me and sending only a partial amount of those taxes to someone actually educating kids and letting a district sit in a building no matter what the number of students going there are? Which we know from research, I’ve written about it, other people have written, we hold them harmless from when kids leave.

So we start saying, “What would it actually take SailFuture to get 100%?” Is that 100% of not just state dollars and the state’s doing what they can in the political realm, but your student that lives in that area is being educated for less than half the money that your community has said is needed for an education. We think until we actually start talking about full funding of education, that’s real equity. So we’re going, “Yay, South Carolina, $6,000 ESA just passed. Woo-hoo.” You and I would never pick a private school for our kids and be able to pay $6,000. We have to subsidize it.

So if you’re going to build a supply of great, new innovative opportunities or expand them, we should be giving them the same money that we expect public schools to operate in. Now, we can argue all day long, does it cost $18,000? Does it cost $20,000? Does it cost $15,000? It doesn’t cost much less than between $15,000, $18,000 to educate a student, all that. If you think about buildings, if you think about electricity, if you think about people, have we overspent? Absolutely. Do we have more administrators than teachers? Yes, I’m not advocating for waste, but let’s at least start with what’s already on the table and get that money to follow kids.

I’d argue that saying that we’re going to give kids choices, this is why Randi Weingarten and the unions, I’m going to just tell you their playbook and they’ll be really excited to hear that I know this. I just know, okay? Call me crazy. They’re not making nearly as big of a stink out these programs, think about it, as they used to. Why? We’re not hurting the system. They’re still getting paid. So they’re watching us celebrate something they would never celebrate in a million years. We’re going to have pilot programs with $5,000, $6,000, $7,000, maybe $8,000 if we’re lucky, follow kids to the school of their choice. Great. Go. Because you know what? No one’s going to be able to create enough critical mass of schools to truly decimate a system that has been abominable for the vast majority of kids. You go, girl, that’s what we have to start talking about.

Ginny Gentles:

All right, so funding is a big part of it. Are you hearing about other issues? I know there’s a lot of discussions amongst ourselves as we talk to each other in the Education Freedom movement about regulations or things that might be holding back the innovators and the entrepreneurs and the micro schools. Are you hearing about hurdles or regulations that need to be pushed out of the way for these?

Jeanne Allen:

Yeah, absolutely. So full funding is one thing that we absolutely have to be talking about. Equal funding, equitable. Your spending on the public school kid should go to the charter public, the traditional whatever. We have one of our winners in Georgia, SOAR, which also serves neurodivergent kids. She started as a micro school and they’re over capacity now in a larger building they just purchased. They just had their groundbreaking. She’s not allowed to participate in the state’s Education Choice program because she doesn’t have a certified building. She has a building, it’s up to code. It’s up to private code, but it’s not up to school codes. So she can’t actually get her kids in the scholarship program.

Other states who have charter or choice programs that require schools to be accredited, what’s an accreditation? Think about it.

Ginny Gentles:

Especially now with all these captured entities.

Jeanne Allen:

Right? But even in the old days when we would go through an accreditation, I actually worked at the Department of Education and did accreditation. I thought it was about quality, and they’re like, “No, no little girl, that has nothing to do with it. Truth and lending. How many did you say? Do you have 10 books? Great. You have 10 books. Do you have 10 teachers that each have a Master’s in philosophy? Yep. Great. Check mark, accredited.” So you’re going to tell private schools who have been operating, who parents have been choosing, they have to be accredited because that’s our political bargain that we’re going to negotiate with X, Y, Z group?

And so I think we also suffer fools, thinking that that’s how we’re going to get something over the finish line, and then it just stays nice and small and limited, right? Numbers of kids, income tests, which obviously are lifting more and more. Look, I’m a big fan of give kids who need it the most the opportunity to choose. If we have a zero-sum, let them have it. You know what? I worked hard. I don’t need it. It would be nice, but I don’t need it, but it’s a matter of equity. But when you keep those lines, how do you expect a poor child to actually go to school with a middle class child and learn diversity of income and level? So I think those are issues.

Some of the other things, again, requirements for teaching, requirements for standardized testing. They’re so all over the place. Transportation, if you do get transportation dollars in some states, you have to make sure you use the kind of transportation they approve. Certificates, can you get a certificate so that if a child is taking some trade or a school, we have a lot of schools we’re working with, they’re doing really cool college prep, but they also give them a trade, is that certificate recognized then by the publicly funded public college or higher ed education institution? Laundry list of stuff.

And so you wonder why people don’t put themselves out to start something more often. You have to become a freaking legal analyst to understand the laws and the language behind it. And so those things are not accidental.

Ginny Gentles:

Well, I noticed that the Yass Prize doesn’t just mail the winners a check. You have numerous events all around the country, including, I noticed at the end of 2022, quite a spectacular concluding event where the big prize is awarded. And so perhaps those conversations that you have at those events are opportunities to bring up these issues and amplify the concerns of these …

Jeanne Allen:

And that’s largely where we’re learning. And so the ones that the people… First, when you apply, you’re automatically part of the Yass Prize movement. There’s a platform, they engage with each other constantly. Application, nothing else has to happen. As they go through the process, they’re also invited to accelerators. Once you’re in the process, we invite you to speak places. You can write for our Forbes column. And then again, we’re hearing these, we hear things that they didn’t even know were interesting and they didn’t know somebody else was going through them. And then we bring them together for each of the launch.

This year in October, we’re going to celebrate the third cohort in Cleveland, Ohio where choice started. That’s also the 30th anniversary of the Center for Education Reform. And we’re going to have a summit to which I hope you will come and be invited, and that’ll give them another opportunity to converse with people all over the country from all different fields. So we believe in a very, very big tent. We believe in lots of different kind of actors. We invite people to these things that not everybody agrees with on other issues because we think it’s really, really important to show the very truth that this truly is the whole Education Freedom Opportunity movement is a much bigger tapestry, much bigger multiplicity of organizations than our little groups sometimes talk about or realize.

Ginny Gentles:

Well, this is exciting, Jeanne, and I can’t wait to join the celebration later this year. As we conclude, please share with us your favorite school choice myth and by favorite, I mean the one that bugs you the most?

Jeanne Allen:

The one that bugs me the most is that choice, apparently parents can make choices that have advantages. That most parents, and you’ve seen it, Ginny, you’ve tweeted them out there, that somehow there’s a group of smarter parents and they’re smarter and they have money, and there’s a group of poor parents that don’t, and therefore they can’t make any choices themselves. I’d say it’s the opposite. The people I know who have more money tend to not have as much sense sometimes. And they can get there though, because they can buy the advice and they can buy… they can be exposed to lots of people because they have time.

Lower income parents have natural intelligence, they have a gut, and they see what everybody else is buying, and they want some of it, and they can make as good, if not better choices than anybody else.

Ginny Gentles:

And they certainly deserve to have those choices.

Jeanne Allen:

Absolutely.

Ginny Gentles:

Well, Jeanne, thank you so much for talking with us about the Yass Prize, for all that you’ve done over the last 30 years and for joining us here today.

Jeanne Allen:

Thank you, Ginny. Appreciate it so much.

Ginny Gentles:

We hope listeners found today’s conversation informative and encouraging. If you enjoyed this episode of Students Over Systems, please consider leaving a review on your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to share this episode with your friends. To learn more about the work of the IWF Education Freedom Center, please go to iwf.org/efc. Thank you for listening to Students Over Systems. Until next time, keep celebrating education freedom and brighter futures.