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Womansplaining with Julie Barrett
Julie Barrett, Founder of Conservative Ladies of America, covers today's trending hot topic with a Christian world view.
Womansplaining with Julie Barrett
Unmasking the Illusion: The False Promise of School Choice with Robert Bortins
Join us for a compelling conversation with Robert Bortins, CEO of Classical Conversations, who challenges the conventional wisdom surrounding this hot-button issue. As a homeschooling advocate and leader of a Christ-centered educational organization, Robert pulls back the curtain on the supposed freedom offered by school choice. He shares insights from his provocative article, "The Dependency Trap: Why School Choice is a False Promise," and recounts his journey in homeschooling, revealing the global impact of Classical Conversations.
This episode critically examines the school choice movement, highlighting the hidden dangers of government involvement in education. Bortins discusses how school choice may lead to dependency rather than independence, unpacking the implications of ESAs and vouchers on parental rights and long-term educational outcomes.
• Dissecting the concept of school choice and its implications
• The role of government in school funding and control
• Understanding the dependency trap created by government money
• The financial motivations behind advocacy for school choice
• Exploring the consequences for homeschooling and future educational policies
The Dependency Trap: Why School Choice Is a False Promise | RealClearEducation
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Conservative Podcast | Julie Barrett Womansplaining
I have been down in the rabbit hole of policy and legislation for the last four years and one of the big issues that I've been learning a lot about is the so-called school choice movement, and I'm excited for you to hear from my guest today who knows a lot about the school choice movement and homeschooling and educational freedom, and this is a very educating conversation, enlightening conversation, and I think you're going to learn a lot today. Welcome to the Woman's Planing Podcast. I'm your host, julie Barrett. I'm the founder of Conservative Ladies of America. We are an organization of like-minded ladies and gentlemen who are working hard to empower and encourage and equip citizens to stand up, speak up and take real action that can create change on a local, state and even national level, and I'm really excited you can learn more about our work and how you can get involved in the movement, whether you're a lady or a gentleman, at conservativeladiesofamericacom.
Speaker 1:That's conservativeladiesofamericacom that I had with Robert Bortens, who is the CEO of Classical Conversations, a homeschool organization, christ-centered, community-centered. I discovered him on X a couple of months ago. I read an article that he wrote in Real, clear Education called the Dependency Trap why School Choice is a False Promise, and I've been following him on X ever since is a false promise, and I've been following him on X ever since and he speaks out a lot about the school choice movement and really what is behind it and how it's not exactly, not even close to the educational freedom that people think it is. So listen to this conversation. Make sure that you share this with other parents and friends, because this is a huge issue and it's big on all sides of the political aisle and it's something that we as citizens, especially as parents and grandparents, need to be paying attention to and need to engage on. You have 10 siblings. Did I get that right?
Speaker 2:No, no, no. I think I was the last 10 boys in our family had. Last 10 children born were boys until I had a daughter, so maybe that's where you got that from We've got. There's only about 30 of us in the entire world, so our family is very small.
Speaker 1:Our family's very small.
Speaker 1:Okay, Well, your mother started Classical Conversations in 1997, correct For homeschooling families, and you are the CEO now and I think I caught you on X, maybe back in like November.
Speaker 1:I caught an article that someone had shared that you wrote about the school choice movement and I have been in the rabbit hole for the last four years in the rabbit hole on policy and legislation and a lot of conservatives talk about how great school choice is and at first I'm like, yeah, school choice, the funds follow the student, that sounds great. And as I've been down in the rabbit hole, I'm like, oh, maybe this isn't the freedom that it's been sold to be, and so that's what your article was about. And you know I've been following you since and I love your transparency about the school choice movement. So that's what we're primarily going to talk about today the school choice movement. So that's what we're primarily going to talk about today. But can you just tell people a little bit about what you do and the classical conversations in the homeschool movement and anything else you want people to know about you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I'm married to my wife, april. She was a public school teacher for 10 years, so I do talk about that and her experiences. We have three beautiful kids 10, 8, and 4 1⁄2. And I was homeschooled through high school. I got an industrial engineering degree from Clemson University, and my mom started classical conversations in our basement when I was getting into high school because she wanted me to not just have to debate her and do all of these harder subjects alone. But she knew that we needed a group of peers, and so those 10 students and myself decided we wanted to do it a second year, and from there it's grown.
Speaker 2:I took over the family business in 2012 after working in the corporate world for about six years after college graduation, and since then we've grown Classical Conversations into 60 countries, every single state of the Union, and we have about 130,000 students worldwide. And so we approach homeschooling from a classical Christian perspective. We believe Christ should be the center of education, not children perspective. Uh, we believe christ should be the center of education, not children. And, uh, we do that through forming local communities that meet once a week with a trained parent tutor, so it's not a lone schooling and you homeschool your kids four days a week, uh by yourself, and then come together in a group and do uh different activities that are difficult to do on your own, get prepared for the next week and you have someone to mentor you. So we have roughly 2,200 communities or so around the United States.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. So I'm sure that we have a lot of people in Washington State that are watching, because that's where I come from, lived there for 48 years of my life, which is all but the last two, and so for those of you, for my friends from Washington that are watching us today, they're in Washington state and you know that I harp on you guys to get your kids out of the government schools. So look into Classical Conversations I'm going to put I'll put the website up here on the screen so you guys can go and check that out. But this might be a perfect resource to get your kids out of those government schools, and they're. They're going downhill in Washington by the day, getting worse by the day. One of the things that I saw on your website is.
Speaker 1:God trusts parents with their children and so should we, and I love that because we see in the government schools that the government thinks they should supersede the rights of parents, which I think is the primary reason that people should get their kids out of these schools. I just think. I think that that is a key piece of what we're going to talk about today is is the parent versus the government role? Piece of what we're going to talk about today is the parent versus the government role, and one of the things that you mentioned in your article is how the government in the school choice movement parents think that it's freedom, but it's not. It's actually government still has control. Can you explain, kind of, how this whole school choice idea works and where that government control is still in play?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. And so just to define our terms, you know, when I talk about school choice today, we're not talking about being able to choose different high schools in your district or being able to go to a charter school. What we're talking about is these ESAs and vouchers where the government is saying hey, if you are homeschooling or send your kid to a quote-unquote private school, we'll give you seven. You know, the number is typically around $7,000. Each state's a little bit different, each mechanic's a little bit different. Luckily, homeschoolers have been excluded from most of these bills, as the homeschoolers do not want government money and so, yeah.
Speaker 2:So from a Christian perspective, you know the Bible is very clear that it's the parents' ultimate responsibility to educate their kids, that it's the responsibility of the fathers to take care of their families. And there's actually zero Bible verses that give a civil government any responsibility over education, especially Christian education. They're almost exclusively for parents' responsibility, and there's only a couple verses that even give the church any responsibility over Christian education. And so what we see here and you can kind of think about the war on poverty as well we saw how the war on poverty destroyed those families. Marriage in especially African-American communities is at an all-time low. Poverty is higher than it's ever been. So that's an apt kind of illustration.
Speaker 2:So school choice, these ESA and vouchers, you know they're selling it by saying, oh, it's your money anyways, and you now are free to use that money at any institution that you want to. And so what does that really mean? Well, first of all, it's not your money because you paid it in taxes, and most of these programs are giving more money back than anyone's paying in taxes Like, for example, my friend in Arizona. They have five kids. They're eligible to take the money. They decide not to take the money, so they're turning down $35,000 a year and they can spend it on whatever they want. At least now they can.
Speaker 2:But what it's really doing is it's taking place of the father. It's taking the role of the father away from them, the role that the Bible explicitly gives to the father, and inserts the government into it. So we're taking I think most of us can say our governments are sick, you know they're not operating as they ought to be and so we're taking a sick government and inserting it into a healthy family and a healthy education system and ultimately that's going to lead to dependency, it's going to lead to capture. That's going to lead to dependency. It's going to lead to capture, and your kids might have free choice or something for a year or two until they start putting strings on, and then eventually, your grandkids are not going to have any choice at all.
Speaker 2:And so that's ultimately, when you break the rules set forth in the Bible how God designed the world, you have negative outcomes, and so we know that you value what you pay for, and so when you are using third-party money to pay for something, you do not use the same care and consideration when making choices. You know that's a fundamental part of the free market and why the United States, at least up until maybe the last 20 or 30 years, has been so prosperous. But as more and more regulation gets added, we know that the boot of the government is on our necks more and more, and by increasing state budgets which school choice has done in every single case so far we're just putting the boot of government on our neighbor's neck even heavier, because our neighbors have to pay more in taxes, widows have to pay more in taxes to stay in their houses, and et cetera. So there's nothing conservative about school choice, there's nothing free market about school choice, and there's definitely nothing Christian about school choice.
Speaker 1:So I want to talk about like who are? Because, as I've been digging into all this, you've got lobbyist groups that lobby for school choice and one of the things I think a lot of just your average citizen who's not paying a lot of attention, but they hear kind of the buzzwords. They don't really understand all of the sort of behind the curtain stuff that goes on. And so on the public education side, you know, you have all the typical. You have the teachers unions and the PTA groups and all of that. On the school choice side you have sort of an equivalent to the unions, correct?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So it's mostly my friends that are on the school choice side. So organizations like Americans for Prosperity and some of their groups like yes, every Kid. You've got groups like the Heritage Foundation. You've got all sorts of different conservative think tanks, fee that are pushing and creating this grassroots-like momentum. But really it's just that they're paying a bunch of people to promote it. These people again are my friends. I've made phone calls with AFP. I've knocked on doors with AFP. I wrote part of the education chapter for Project 25 with the Heritage Foundation. So these are.
Speaker 2:You know, I agree with 70 to 90 percent of the things that these groups are doing, but I vehemently disagree with school choice and how they're portraying it. It's very disappointing for me to see that they're not being honest, since I have been a donor in the past in a number of these organizations. I'm in a number of conservative think tanks. I get invited to different conservative meetings. They admit to me behind closed doors that they don't know if this is going to work. But this is their best chance. It fires people up. They're going ahead with it and I'm like well, if you don't know that it's going to work and you admit that my concerns are valid like why are you not just trying this in two or three states, let it play out for a few years, see if it does work or doesn't? But you're barreling ahead to 25, 30 states trying to get this passed and you admit that there's no way of doing it.
Speaker 2:And a lot of times they say, yeah, so we don't necessarily even agree with school choice that much, but our donors do. And then so you've got to follow the money and their donors are people who are involved in WEAF and people involved with the United Nations trying to do some globalist things. So you know they have good conservative donors, like me, but they have some dark money that don't necessarily want to be involved with either. So you know their heart's in the right place. They want to help kids but ultimately they're not helping kids. It's not going to help families, because at least now we have a place to run to if our government school is failing us. We can homeschool, we can send our kids to private school. There's scholarships available for private schools for low-income people. There's even scholarships for homeschoolers if you're a low income or widowed.
Speaker 2:So the private market has filled this in and these donors, I mean, have literally spent hundreds of millions of dollars promoting it. I mean, if you look in Texas and I don't know if everybody knows a typical Republican primary here in North Carolina, you're going to spend maybe $30,000 on a seat and then you're going to spend probably $300,000 to half a million dollars in the general election. Well, in Texas and Texas is a little bigger, so that number might be a little higher they were spending $4 million to $8 million against Republicans in primaries to kick them out and get school choice people in Republicans in primaries, to kick them out and get school choice people in. They were spending, I think in one district in Tennessee, a million dollars on a primary against a really good conservative Republican who said school choice isn't conservative, and so they spent a million dollars to kick them out. The guy lost by 30 votes.
Speaker 2:And so you know for these organizations like, well, why didn't you spend? You know it's your money, but why didn't you spend $130 million opening up new private schools and helping to change laws and giving scholarships out and really empowering parents through philanthropy, which they normally are what they're doing? That's why I was like calling them out. I was like, look, this is what it says on your website. You're doing the opposite of your core values that you have written, and so it's. It's really heartbreaking, uh, to me. And so it's. It really is a dependency trap, and it's not. It's not a slippery slope.
Speaker 1:Um, I'm happy to give, uh plenty of examples, uh, of why this is not going to work out like they say. It's going to work out millions of dollars in campaigns to get pro-school choice candidates elected over conservative candidates, when they could be. If they truly cared about the children, why wouldn't they spend that money in scholarships or building actual you know private schools that you know for for to advance educational freedom? I think that's a huge point that people need to know. Don't miss the money trail.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so let me tell you. So I was at an AFP event and Carrie McDonald was there. She's been part of FEE in the past. She has a podcast, she promotes school choice. I'm sure she's paid to promote school choice A lovely lady, by all means. And Iowa had just passed their comprehensive school choice bill and everybody was there. It was kind of celebrating, patting each other on the back, and we're at this education forum and she goes. Iowa just passed the school choice bill. This is great.
Speaker 2:The only problem is Iowa has so much red tape it's almost impossible to start a private school in Iowa. I'm like wouldn't the conservative case been to cut the red tape? Like, should have we done that first, I mean. And so yeah, it's just it's a false promise. So one of the things that's really the most disgusting to me personally because I know that these people go to church is just the fact that they're either ignorant or intentionally being deceitful when they call school choice a free market option. You know, if you can go, look at Merriam-Webster's definition free market is absent of government intervention and school choice is anything but that. And so what school choice actually is is anything but that. And so what school choice actually is and I hope Real Clear Policy Education is going to. I hope that they print my op-ed on this, otherwise I'll just put it out on X. But it's really a quasi-market and so most people probably have never heard of a quasi-market. You're just probably hearing it now for the first time. And so quasi-markets they're really popular in Europe. It's a form of welfare. I do appreciate the Tennessee School Choice Bill that they're pushing right now because it does define it as a welfare entitlement program in the bill itself.
Speaker 2:But other quasi-markets in the United States are the college system and the student loans. So we have over $2 trillion in student loan debt. The cost of college has skyrocketed. I saw some research today. For every $1,000 increase in student loan availability, the price of college goes up $300. So it's basically a 30% premium increase. And so colleges have gone down in quality and up in price because of all this market that's flooding into it.
Speaker 2:Sweden is a great example of a quasi markets. They have all sorts of quasi markets and their research shows that quasi markets decrease quality while increasing costs, because whatever the threshold is, that's who ends up, that's where it ends up going. So they basically, if they're giving seven thousand dollars, say, to private schools. Well, private schools are all going to try to price point themselves at seven thousand dollars, $7,000 plus what the market will actually bear. Those institutions that are the most desperate for cash are going to be the ones most likely to take these voucher participants. They are not on good financial footing. They're dependent on the legislator that gets elected every two years to keep the money flowing. And ultimately, every single situation. In quasi markets you typically see the big players wait for the small ones to fail and then they buy them up. So you can see Bill Gates buying up a bunch of private schools in the state of Washington. You can see the Walton Foundation in Arkansas is going to buy up all the private schools in Arkansas. You can see Jeff Bezos might buy up all the private schools in Florida In Florida, where you live now, right after they passed the school choice bill.
Speaker 2:Florida, in Florida, where you live now, right after they passed the school choice bill, communist China actually bought IMG Academy, which was the biggest private school in the entire world, or at least in Florida. The Florida legislators had to step in and stop it, but you can imagine that Communist China will have its ways of getting around. They'll give money to this company that gives money to this company that gives money to this nonprofit that buys up the school. So it's ultimately going to be a data mining operation of our kids. The quality of private school will plummet. Parents will feel like they have done the right thing because they've got this money and they put them in this private school. You know, just like every single public school is a rated, now I'm sure every private school will be a rated and eventually they'll have to comply with government mandates. I mean, you can imagine. I mean, just think about covid. When we went through that and all the public schools were mandating covid vaccines and masks and all of these different things oh, there was red state governors mandating that for the public schools. Well, suddenly your private school is taking all this public money. Guess what? You're going to have to comply with those same standards. So if another COVID happens, you're not going to have anywhere to run because the private schools are dependent on these school choice monies. They're going to have those same rules and regulations.
Speaker 2:We looked at when COVID happened. President Biden had two orders. One was that hospitals had to vax their nurses and doctors, otherwise they couldn't be reimbursed with Medicaid and Medicare and they did one for big business over 100 employees Well, classical conversations. At the time we had about 120 employees, we had 170. Now we filed an America's Brief with the people suing the Biden administration and we won. But the hospital's lost and the hospital's lost and the Supreme Court basically said because these hospitals are paid by the federal government, the federal government can create the rules in which they operate under. So if the federal government wants to say all nurses have to do a somersault before they start work, the federal government could mandate that in the contracts.
Speaker 2:And I just use that absurd thing because the whole thing is so absurd and so there is actually no choice at all.
Speaker 2:And even though it's being pushed by these so-called conservative or Republican think-tanks now, this actually originated in the 1970s out of Cal Berkeley as a way to infiltrate private schools and force them to bow down to the state and to comply with state mandates, and it was kind of an idea from some communist professors there.
Speaker 2:And then the United Nations has adopted this as part of their global strategy for inclusion and equity, and so you know, they've already run this playbook in European countries and I think we all know at least if we're conservative, we don't really want any European policies here in the United States, cause, uh, I mean, our poorest state in the United States is way richer than the richest. You know countries uh overseas and uh, yeah, so. So they've already ran this playbook in other countries and they've had their private education systems devastated. Countries, and they've had their private education systems devastated uh, where they're the only choice parents have is uh which building they want to use the state or uh national curriculum in, and so it is a school choice trap, it's a dependency trap and it's uh anti everything we read in the bible well and based on what you're saying, is it starts out.
Speaker 1:It might start out like it seems okay, but it just snowballs like more red tape. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Every single policy. I mean, yeah, they start with no strings attached. I mean just think about Obamacare, when it got rolled out Like the first time oh, there's no strings attached, there's all these subsidies, there's all these things going on, so it becomes palatable to the user that this takeover is happening of the healthcare system. And then by the time you realize what's happening, well, you can't get out of the system. The system hasn't really just taken over the entire body and you're stuck. And so you know the same thing is going to happen with school choice. I mean, a lot of times they pair it Arizona, arizona, it's the best you know. School choice state, you know, is the original. There's no strings attached to the money. It's like, well, first, first of all, isn't the conservative principle to attach strings? I mean like when did we think giving away tax dollars willy-nilly, uh, with no accountability is a conservative idea, or any good government uh would do that. And then, uh, second of all, it's uh, you know it's. It's.
Speaker 2:It's disgusting how some of these parents are using the money. Like there's a document being floated around Arizona how you can buy a thousand dollar espresso machine and a espresso curriculum so that families can get a thousand dollar espresso machine for their house, say it's for education, and get reimbursed by the state. Now people say, well, I'd rather the parents have the money than the government. Well, guess what? They gave all the public schools more money too, and so they're spending hundreds of millions or billions of dollars more in budget. They'll eventually have to either increase taxes or reduce benefits, and think about our federal government being $36 trillion in debt, or whatever it is now. Why is it? Because we have all these entitlement programs. You can't ever cut them because everybody's dependent on them. And if you're dependent on them, that becomes an issue.
Speaker 2:And I'll just tell you one story. So our friends earlier that I alluded to that aren't taking the money. She had a friend who did take the money the first year and she was trying to sell our friend on it. And she goes Rachel, don't you understand how great this money is? Before I had to work a part-time job in order to homeschool. When I was doing that, I had to call my aunt. My aunt had to come watch our kids for the day so I could take this part-time job. I don't have to do that anymore because the government's giving me this money.
Speaker 2:My friend Rachel, she's trained in the classical, know classical model, and she's a really really deep thinker. She goes okay. So let me make sure I get this straight you used to depend on hard work and your family and now you depend on the government. And her friend's jaw just dropped and, uh, because she realized, like what this program, how it was messing with her mentality, that, oh, isn't this great that the government can step in for my family and and part of hard work. And so, uh, you know it, it really is part of the.
Speaker 2:It's not really what school choice itself isn't woke, but it is. It does have, um, parts of the woke mind virus. School choice is really part communism, a redistribution of wealth. Right, they take from everyone in your state and then they redistribute the money to the people they want to or people who are qualified. And then it's also part fascism, because ultimately the state's going to pick or allow which institutions to take the money or which ones not to take the money. Let's look at Virginia. Right now Virginia has a bill, I think SB 1041, or might be SB 1042.
Speaker 1:Is that the one you just posted on your ex account about?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. So Friday or yes, they're supposed to have a yesterday, a hearing on it, and it's been booted to Monday. But in Virginia and each state has its own homeschooling laws One of the allowable reasons in Virginia to homeschool is a religious exemption. So you say, hey, I want to give my kids a religious education is a religious exemption. So you say, hey, I want to give my kids a religious education. They're not able to get that in their, you know, in the state schools, and so we're going to homeschool them.
Speaker 2:Well, democrats in Virginia have launched this bill to remove that exemption. So you can imagine, you know Virginia flip-flops. Sometimes it's a red state, sometimes it's a blue state, sometimes it's a purple state. It's been more blue lately than not. But imagine that Governor Glenn Youngkin had passed the school choice bill last year. Let's pretend that it flips blue this year and Democrats are able to pass this bill and sign it into law in, you know, 2026.
Speaker 2:Well, suddenly every single institution, christian institution, is going to have to close their doors because they're taking this money and basically, you know, their students can't attend anymore because they don't have a religious exemption clause. And so I mean, it's not, it's not a slippery slope. Like I said, we've got Sweden. We can look at higher education, you can look at the medical field. I'm sure many of you, especially if you're on X, but you've probably seen those economic graphics where it shows like the cost of TVs are going down, the cost of cars are going down, but medicine and education and all these other ones are going up and to the right. Well, all those ones that are going up and to the right are pretty much quasi markets, and all the ones going down and to the right are more or less free markets and so quasi markets. All the research shows that prices increase and everything else goes down. You know, quality goes down and even choice ends up going down in the in the long run. And it's and it's not, you know, two years or four years, you know it's typically. You can see it typically somewhere between eight and 20 years. So that's why I say, yeah, it might be good for your kids, but it's not going to be good for your grandkids.
Speaker 2:And so you know, are you thinking about a momentary pleasure? I almost think of Esau in the Bible. You know, he had a birthright and he came back from a hunt and he was hungry and he sold it to his birthright for a bowl of soup to his brother, jacob. And for these Christians, our birthright is we're prince and princesses in the kingdom of God and we're ambassadors here on earth. And so we're selling our birthright the right to be taken care of by the king of kings, to be taken care of by the government, to ease a temporary pain because we don't want to work for it. And you know, the Bible says if you don't work, you don't eat. I think we can probably apply that to a lot of other areas.
Speaker 2:And so, yeah, people might say well, you know, a lot of times you'll hear people say about school choice Well, what about the poor, robert? And I understand what they're saying, but first of all, none of these school choice bills. They're all touting them as universal, so none of their bills are targeted at the poor. The other thing is what programs the government offers to the poor actually work. Aren't you actively trying to cut all those? Because they've destroyed the family? They cost a bunch of money.
Speaker 2:The actual results have not met the promise of the program. I mean, it's such a contradiction in my mind that I don't know how they sleep at night, and that's why I say, you know, in 1984, it was written to sell a lie first. You must believe it yourself, and so I think part of my job on earth right now is to, you know, wake these people up. You know, give them a shake. Like you are betraying your core values. Right now, you are betraying everything you believe in. There's the story about Davy Crockett, not yours to give. Some people say it's fictitious, I don't know if it's not, but the idea is real. Shame on you for not encouraging private donations and things like that. So I think that's another thing that people need to understand about school choice is, these school choice proponents are very specific on ESAs and vouchers, and so let me tell you so the state of Georgia has a program.
Speaker 1:Can I push pause really quick? Will you just very quickly explain what those are, what ESAs and vouchers are and kind of the difference between those, and then go into your story, Because I think some people watching may not be well-versed in that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so ESAs generally stand for Education Savings Accounts, and then there's vouchers. So there's two primary ways the states have distributed school choice funds and so one way, and there's so many different mechanics, but I'll just try it. One way is an ESA where they'll say hey, you get $7,000 per kid. It's deposited in an account for you, typically managed by ClassWallet I wonder who is their investors and you can basically apply funds or use that money to pay for things directly. You can basically apply funds or use that money to pay for things directly. And then there's vouchers, which is oftentimes like a school will apply to be on the list and then you'll enroll in that school and the state will directly send them your allocation directly. And so that's what we're talking about. That can go to nonprofits and me as a business or a person can actually, instead of giving the state the money, put it in this nonprofit and I get credit as if I had paid my taxes. So the state never touches the money, it actually reduces the state budget. That nonprofit then allocates that money to scholarships for low income families or families that are going through some sort of financial troubles or divorce, et cetera, et cetera. So Georgia's had that working for a really long time. The money never touches the state coffers. It's all through private entities and private individuals opting into the system.
Speaker 2:Well, they could have expanded that, made it larger. I mean, you could have effectively make it so that every single taxpayer in Georgia is just paying into the scholarship fund and now there's a bunch of money to be out there for scholarships and starting schools and all of these things instead of the public schools. But they didn't want to expand that. They wanted ESAs and vouchers so that the government can do what Control it. Because they can't control tax credits, they can't control, you know, these donation programs that are actually set up in a number of states. Florida, Florida has them or had them before the school choice bill.
Speaker 2:I'm not sure if those still exist or you could. You know, if you sold something, you could actually allocate the tax dollars to a nonprofit that gave scholarships to students going to private schools. So that's another thing they could have just spent, you know, instead of spending $8 million. You know, trying to primary a good conservative in Texas or a million dollars primary a good conservative in Tennessee, a million dollars primary a good conservative in Tennessee. They could have done that on use that on an ad campaign to say, hey, did you know that these scholarships are available? Hey, companies and business people, and, you know, taxpayers of the state, did you know you can allocate your tax dollars to these nonprofits and these nonprofits will provide scholarships for low income people.
Speaker 2:So so the lie is it's not a free market, it's a quasi-market. There's other options for funding private education that I just explained to you. Like, our church has a arm that gives out money for Christian education, and then they're saying that they don't want control, but the exact mechanism that they could be adopting laws for, and laws that are already on the books in many states these tax credit programs. They're not promoting those. They're saying that it's a grassroots operation, but they're spending hundreds of millions of dollars on that. I've never heard of a grassroots operation that had hundreds of millions of dollars on that. I've never heard of a grassroots operation that had hundreds of millions of dollars. And so it's just, it's a bunch of astroturf and they're violating their own core values.
Speaker 1:I think grassroots is a term similar to conservative that's been hijacked by political actors and I want to, because I think this is an important point. Kind of backtracking just a little bit. But when we're talking about public school funding, with school choice, school choice, when you add in school choice, you're not going to take funding away from public schools, you're adding new funding, right, and we're going to continue to. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Speaker 1:Because I think people, especially since COVID like, if we take the kids out of the public schools, public schools won't get that money anymore. Can you kind of talk about that?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So each each state again is going to be a little bit different, so we'll just talk about general principles. So so, first of all, all about 20 percent of people are already paying for their own education prior to these school choice bills. So if they're truly a universal school choice system, uh, and they're paying, you know, seven thousand dollars per kid, and you've got a million kids in your state doing, uh, you know, private schools or homeschool, well, that $700 million has to be added to your state budget just to cover that. And since these bills are really unpopular with legislators, they typically come with teacher raises, building fund allocations and additional money for public schools. So they typically add hundreds of millions of dollars to your public school budget. And so they use government math to say, well, in the future, it'll save us money. And anyone who has a brain knows that every time the government has said, in the future, this will save us money, I think their track record is zero for a billion, so their track record is not great on fulfilling that promise. And so, yeah, in theory, you get public school students who then go to private school that wouldn't have paid for it on their own, and if the state is paying $14,000 for their education and then giving them $7,000 for their education. In theory that's a $7,000 savings, but first, again, you have to offset all of those students that were never in the system to begin with, that are now. And then the other issue is you know, people bounce around. 30% of kids move every single year. So you might be in the system this year and out of the system next year. Educational options have been almost become ubiquitous, where people will send their kid to the public school for elementary school and homeschool them for middle school and send them to the Catholic school for high school, but then send them their junior and senior year back to the public school. So it's not like these kids are out forever, they bounce around all the time.
Speaker 2:The state of Tennessee has the worst school choice bill ever, probably going to be voted on later this year that basically actually double funds the students. So the state of Tennessee and this hasn't been the case in most of the school choice bills, but it just tells you how unpopular it is they're going to give a $2,000 bonus to every single teacher in Tennessee. I'm not saying they deserve it or don't deserve it, but that's part of the school choice bill. They're allocating tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to building funds to build more improved public schools and then if a child leaves public school, not only are they going to give him the $7,000 or whatever the voucher is to leave public school, they're actually going to fund that public school, which I think they give somewhere between $7,000 or whatever the voucher is to leave public school, they're actually going to fund that public school, which I think they give somewhere between 10 and $12,000 a year per student on average, fully funded. So you can imagine, you know you could have a public school. You know, if this program was worked well and they don't like people don't leave public school, it's not, it's only private school people really taking this money, the vast majority of it, you know, more than 50%, so they're not paying for themselves. But I mean, in theory, if this worked really well, you could have a public school that had, say, a hundred students in it. All hundred leave for a local private school. Well, that public school would receive just as much funding now that it had zero students. Everyone in that public school would receive just as much funding now that it had zero students. Everyone in that public school would still be employed. They would be making improvements to that public school with the money that was allocated to it. Meanwhile, the halls would be sitting empty and the teachers would be making TikTok videos all day.
Speaker 2:And so, again, not conservative. They're not being honest when they're telling you the benefits of these programs. It's expanding the government, people say it's. This is the other lie that they tell. It's like, well, it's shrinking the government, and I've never seen a government budget go up and someone argue that the government had gotten smaller. And because these programs need administrated, they all form either new administrative positions and new departments within the state government or they create new responsibilities inside you know current government entities that already exist that now have to be manned with somebody. And so you've got more government administration, you've got a bigger government budget. They're typically using like a third party provider, like class wallet or one of these other ones. These groups can take anywhere between 1% of the funding to 10% of the funding.
Speaker 2:So if you think, okay, the state of you know say you know Tennessee, oh, we're going to allocate, you know, $200 million to this program. Well, 20 million of it, up to 20 million of it, it's going to go to the third-party provider that's going to be helping out, and they're still going to be adding you know 10 new roles, or you know four new roles, whatever the number is, and a whole new bureaucracy inside the government, and there's no protections. Basically, the lawmakers are saying the bureaucrats can make whatever strings attached to it they want in the future, and so ultimately it's a false promise. The people pushing this are either ignorant of economic policy, in which case we shouldn't believe them, or they're intentionally being deceitful about it. And so you know.
Speaker 2:People say well, robert, why are you helping out the teachers unions? And I say look, I have been fighting the teachers unions for my entire life. We've been rescuing families from the public school system my entire life. I have known no different. What question I have for you is why are you trying to make every single private school a public school? You don't think teachers unions can be required for private school? Once you have school choice, oh, come on, if you're getting public money, of course the teachers unions can be required to be hired in your private school.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's not on the docket right now, but I guarantee you that's going to happen. Or at a minimum, private schools that are taking the government cheese are going to have to offer the exact same benefit packages as the public school teachers, and so you know it doesn't do anything to hurt the teachers unions. You know it doesn't do anything to make education stronger in our country. It's going to decrease the quality of education in private schools. It's going to make them dependent on the government. I'm old enough to remember when Colorado was a solid red state. There's other people in their 60s that are old enough to remember when California was a solid red state. You know legislators come and go. Florida bright red right now, but it used to be purple and sometimes leaned a little blue. So you know tides change, things change, and what we see in Virginia right now is foreshadowing of what we'll see in any state that adopts school choice. We are selling our future for a bowl of soup today.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and this quote that I put up on the screen from Joy, that's a quote from your article, the Dependency Trap, which I put a link in and I will make sure that it goes in the description on YouTube after we're done with the live, because it is a great article, it's a must read, it's a must share and in in closing I just I want to kind of touch on this issue in Virginia that's happening with the homeschooling, because I don't want people to miss that. They won't. This will not leave homeschool in touch. They will eventually come for the homeschooling, as we're seeing with Virginia.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. And right now it's very hard to pass homeschooling regulation because homeschoolers do not take any government money, not take any government money. Say there's 5 million homeschoolers and they save the government $20,000 a year. It's a little bit high, but that's $100 billion a year. I think that homeschoolers are saving the government, state, government every year. So you would have to raise taxes that much.
Speaker 2:But right now we have the higher moral, we have the higher moral ground. We can say we don't take any of your money, we don't take any of your resources. There's no reason for you to make us jump through your hoops and even dark blue California has tried, and they always capitulate and never pass anti-homeschooling bills. As soon as you take the money, the state has a moral high ground. They actually have a moral requirement to be accountable for the funds it distributes. That is the christian perspective, that is the conservative perspective, and so, yes, they'll put strings on there that aren't morally right, but that they all have the moral high ground.
Speaker 2:And when you go to beg, when you get on your knee to beg the master to have some money and freedom, remember this podcast, right, I'm sorry, my knees will not bend and I'm asking you as an independent, free citizen, love liberty. Give me liberty or give me death. Stand strong, call your legislators. Do not let them pass school choice bills in your state. Do not sell your birthright for a bowl of soup and a temporary reprieve from a little bit of pain.
Speaker 1:Amen. That's a wonderful note to end this live stream on. You've been so enlightening, I appreciate. I'm so glad I found you down here in the rabbit hole and I appreciate you. I've learned so much from our conversation today and I know that a lot of the viewers have as well and will definitely be putting out the calls to action for different legislation of school choice around the country that we see to not pass those bills. So I hope that you'll join me again soon and, for everybody watching, make sure that you follow Robert on X. It's at the Robert B show and he puts out great content and you'll learn a lot about school choice, as I have, and even more so today. So thanks everybody for watching and thank you, robert, for joining me today.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you for having me and thank you everyone for watching and we are going to. I'm going to quickly plug my refining rhetoric podcast. During school choice week, we have six different episodes, one each day starting January 26th through February 1st, and we will have some great speakers all talking about the dark and the deep part of school choice and what really it's all about, and so please join us for that and share those episodes with a friend.
Speaker 1:Awesome. I'll look forward to that and I'll be happy to share those as well.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 1:See you later. Everybody, thanks for joining us. I really hope that you enjoyed our conversation today. I have all of the links to how you can connect and learn more about Robert and Classical classical conversations and the work that he's doing on school choice and true educational freedom. I look forward to having more conversations with Robert in the future, so I hope that you will make sure that you subscribe to the podcast and share this with other concerned citizens that need to know the truth about the school choice movement. Thanks for listening and I look forward to chatting with you again next time.