Episode 82: School Choice: The Great Debate. A Conversation with Mike McShane.

We trace the rise of school choice from early voucher experiments to modern ESAs, unpack how funding actually follows students, and use fresh data to separate myths from reality. Mike McShane shares trends on parent preferences, teacher morale, and why safety and fit now drive decisions.

• defining vouchers, ESAs, tax credits and open enrollment
• how school funding works and what follows students
• common school history, Zelman ruling and universal expansion
• charter schools and homeschool regulation contrasts
• enrollment shares versus parent preferences by sector
• arguments for and against school choice, addressed charitably
• why families switch: bullying, stress and unmet needs
• impacts on districts, hold-harmless provisions and supply growth
• teacher morale trends and why microschools attract educators
• ten-year outlook and how states can make access truly universal

About our guest
Dr. Michael McShane is Director of National Research at EdChoice. He is the author, editor, co-author, or co-editor of twelve books on education policy, including his most recent Getting Education Right (w/ Rick Hess). He is currently an opinion contributor to Forbes, and his analyses and commentary have been published widely in the media, including in USA Today, The Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. A former high school teacher, he earned a Ph.D. in education policy from the University of Arkansas, He is also a senior fellow at the Show-Me Institute and an adjunct fellow in education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

Connect with Mike
edchoice.com
Getting Education Right

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Powered by Prenda Microschools, each episode offers actionable insights to help you ignite your child's love of learning. We'll dive into evidence-based tools and techniques that kindle young learners' curiosity, motivation, and well-being.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome & Guest Introduction
• 1:44 Mike’s Path From Teacher To Researcher
• 5:37 What Vouchers And ESAs Actually Are
• 10:45 The Legal And Historical Roots Of Choice
• 17:12 Pandemic Shift And Universal Programs
• 20:52 ESAs vs Vouchers vs Tax Credits
• 24:06 How Schools Are Funded
• 29:05 Inequity, Housing, And Open Enrollment
• 34:24 Charters, Homeschooling, Regulation
• 41:35 Current Landscape By The Numbers
• 45:04 Why Parents Switch: Fit Over Tradition
• 50:12 Do Choice Programs Hurt Public Schools?
• 57:52 Tradeoffs: Resources, Programs, And Fit
• 1:02:22 Teacher Morale And Microschool Supply
• 1:09:36 Demand Signals And Growth Potential

Transcript

SPEAKER_02: 0:00

I mean, I talk to a lot of parents who are just like, we we've gone to public school, we've tried it, like my kid can't learn like that, or like my kid has this, you know, unique issue or this unique need where we really need these options. And now that we have the school choice option in Arizona, Florida, like these states, I'm hearing all these stories about like my kid is happy, they're they can go to school now, they're progressing now, just because we were able to give them some choice, some options. Because people are unique. Hello, and welcome to the Kindled Podcast. I'm Katie Broadbent, your host for today, and in this episode, we're talking to Mike McShane, and I'm gonna tell you a little bit about him because get excited. This is an amazing episode. You're gonna love it. So, Dr. Michael McShane is director of national research at Ed Choice. He's the author, editor, co-author, or co-editor of 12 books on education policy, including his most recent Getting Education Right with Rick Hess. He is currently an opinion contributor to Forbes, and his analysis and commentary have been published widely in the media, including in USA Today, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. A former high school teacher, he earned a PhD in education policy from the University of Arkansas. He also is a senior fellow at the Show Me Institute and an adjunct fellow in education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Mike is a truly incredible individual. He knows his stuff front and back, and I'm super excited to talk to him today. In this conversation, we focus a lot on the topic of school choice, what it is, the arguments for and against it, and the trends that Mike is seeing in the data. This is a hotly debated issue in the education world, and I love how appreciative and positive Mike is about folks on all sides of the conversation. I learned a ton about the history of school choice and how it might impact the future of education. So let's talk to Mike. Mike McShane, welcome to the Kindle Podcast. Thanks for coming.

SPEAKER_00: 1:44

Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_02: 1:45

Alright, so tell us your story. What makes you so interested in school choice? What's your big why? What's like the change you're seeking to make in the world? But maybe while you think about those big questions, just like literally start at the beginning and like how did you get to where you are? Like what got you interested in this? Like, tell me like the origin story of Mike McShane.

SPEAKER_00: 2:04

Yeah, I mean, I depending on how far back you want to go, I'll say I started, I was a high school teacher. Um, and I taught in an inner city Catholic school on the west side of Montgomery, Alabama. Uh and I was sort of connected through that through this program called Ace, which is the Alliance for Catholic Education. It's the easy way to think of it, it's like Catholic Teach for America. We we tend to think it's a little bit more rigorous. It's through the University of Notre Dame. And it was basically like I got a master's degree in teaching while teaching, and they they sort of have people teach in underserved Catholic schools around the country. It's been going on, it's terrible now because it was each year there's like a cohort name, and I think I was ace 14, and every year there's a new one, and I'll get the email like the email updates, and I see like the new one, I think it's hit like the 30s or something, and I was like, I'm perpetually thinking all these these people are two or three or maybe five years younger than me. It's like, oh no, they are substantially younger than me now. Um, but it's an incredible program, and people uh people should check it out. But yeah, so so I was a high school teacher, I taught in Catholic school, I was an English major in college. I think really all I wanted to be was a high school English teacher. That was like my goal. That was my thing, and that's what I was doing. So it's awesome at 22 to get the job, to get the job that you want. Um, but that program was coming to an end. Did I want to stay at the school that I was teaching at? Did I want to, you know, move somewhere else? And I had thought of maybe moving and teaching somewhere else, but I found out through uh a former roommate of mine that the University of Arkansas was starting this PhD program. They had had this new department set up called the Department of Education Reform, and they were having their new set of students come in. And I I had sort of in passing had had seen some of the professors and the things that they did, and I was like, well, that seems kind of interesting. And they were offering these rather generous stipend stipends where I was probably gonna make more as a student than I was as a Catholic school teacher. And I was like, okay, like on a lark, I'll apply, see how it goes if I get one of these, um uh get one of these stipends, that that'd be great. And so I got in and I did, and I'm originally from Kansas City, and Fayetteville is only about three hours away, so I was like, oh, it's kind of close to home. Like making more money as a student than as a teacher. And I had been like sort of tangentially interested in education policy. Um, you know, teaching at an urban Catholic school. We had a big public school across the way that a lot of my students had come from and had come with a lot of like horror stories uh of things that were happening. And we were the school, unfortunately, where I taught has since closed, but we were going on a shoestring budget. And at some point I was sort of like, this doesn't seem like a a bright way to allocate resources. Like, if the students are leaving that school to come here, maybe some money should like follow them there or something. And someone was like, Have you ever heard about this thing called the school voucher? And it's like, no, I was an English major, so like I read, like, if you want to talk about like Victorian literature, I'm your man. I'm not necessarily talking about like Milton Friedman's papers from the 50s, but then people introduced me to those ideas, and I was like, oh, well, this is interesting. And I'm naturally kind of a curious person, so the the thought of being a researcher was like, oh, that sounds like fun. So I kind of flipped a coin and was like, I could stay being a teacher, maybe be an administrator, or go to graduate school, and it landed on graduate school. So I did that, I studied, and I happened to be to be a research assistant for Pat Wolfe, who was at the time had these big one was a big federal contract, and one was like a state contract to evaluate voucher programs. So I helped, you know.

SPEAKER_02: 5:37

So just real quick for our listeners who also don't read Milton Freeman much, tell us what a voucher is.

SPEAKER_00: 5:42

Sure. So vouchers at that time we were evaluating a program in Washington, D.C. called the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program, and a program in Milwaukee called the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program. And what these basically did was give public funding to families to send their kids to private schools. And at this time, they were some of the only programs that exist in the world. There's a lot more of them now. They were relatively small, they were limited to low-income students. And so the team that I was a very, very junior member of at the University of Arkansas worked with in in Milwaukee with the team from the University of Wisconsin. And so we collected a whole bunch of data. We collected student test scores, and I went up and did like focus groups and site visits and interviewed people and and sort of tried to evaluate how these programs uh were doing. We did something similar in in Washington, DC. And like at the time, like we were generally finding positive things, and I was going up and spending time in these schools, and people seemed happy and like it was going well.

SPEAKER_02: 6:37

And I was like, So those programs essentially give families state funds to go to private school. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_00: 6:42

Like an accurate, yeah, for sure. And people seemed to be happy, so I was like, hey, maybe we should do more of these things. And as I was finishing that program, Rick Hess, who runs the Education Policy Studies Department of AEI, um put out uh an email to some of his friends saying he was looking for like a pre-doc, postdoc person, so someone's just sort of finishing their PhD up. And my advisor, Pat, had gone to graduate school with him, and so he said, Hey, you'd probably be pretty good for this. So I was like, Okay, sounds like a good idea. So before I knew it, I was in Washington, DC, um, was there for a couple of years, um, and then wanted to move home, wanted to move back to Kansas City. I was getting I got married at the time and um was looking like the Midwesterner in me was looking at the like little tiny apartments and things and how much they cost, and all my friends back home were buying like houses and stuff, and I was like, oh, with yards and dogs, and I was like, this seems like a better way to live. Um so I moved back to Kansas City and I worked for a think tank based in Missouri called the Show Me Institute that basically focused on I did the education stuff but but focused on the state of Missouri, and then I got connected to EdChoice, where I work now, and they had created this new position called the Director of National Research and asked me if I wanted to do it, and I did it. So I've been been doing that ever since since like late 2017. So I've been there for a while.

SPEAKER_02: 8:00

Well, what an exciting time in history to be in that position, right? Like you couldn't have picked a better like block of time.

SPEAKER_00: 8:07

For sure.

SPEAKER_02: 8:08

Tell me a little bit more about what Ed Choice is.

SPEAKER_00: 8:10

So Ed Choice was founded now more than 25 years ago. It was originally called the Milton and Rose Friedman Foundation. So I had sort of name-checked Milton Friedman before. He was a Nobel Prize-winning economist. In the 1950s, he wrote this paper called The Role of Government in Education. And he's thought of as one of the kind of fathers of school voucher, school choice, at least the sort of modern version of it. It's been around for a long time, but this is sort of the modern version of it. And so as he was reaching the, he and his wife, who is no slouch herself, it kind of sinks. When your husband wins the Nobel Prize, you can be like really brilliant. And it's like you're always kind of in the shadow there. But the two of them really worked closely and well together. But it was really fascinating because he did work all across economics and in all these different areas. But when he was thinking, like, what is what do I want my legacy kind of foundation to be? And what issue do we want it to tackle? Turns out it wasn't free trade, it wasn't those, it was actually educational choice. And so EdChoice was founded to both do research about school choice and school vouchers and all these areas, and then also to advocate for them. And yeah, again, started in like the late 90s to do that and have been doing it ever since.

SPEAKER_02: 9:19

That's awesome. So circling back then to the original question, what do you see as your big why or like the change that you're trying to make in the world?

SPEAKER_00: 9:28

Yeah, I mean, I my big why goes back to that time as a teacher that I was, I taught ninth and tenth grade, and I taught a lot of students who were way behind. I mean, they were reading at like, I don't know, third or fourth grade level. And by the time I kind of they kind of got to me, there have been so many failures, like not from them, but sort of systemic failures that that led them to led us to meet in that way. And it's like we gotta be able to do something better, right? Like we we we we we live in too great of a country to allow stuff like this to happen. So I I'm still think about those students and students like them all across the country and think about how could they have more opportunities, better opportunities, how could they better sort into schools that meet their needs younger in their life. You know, I think they were probably doing better by the time they got to me, but it was like, you know, this problem would have been much easier solved when you were seven as opposed to when you're 14, you know. So how can we fix those problems?

SPEAKER_02: 10:25

Interesting. Okay, tell me a little bit more about the history of school choice. You mentioned like Milton Freeman in the 50s, and then like in the 1990s, Ed Choice started. Like tell me a little bit more about like where it started, why it started, and like kind of any milestones over the last, I don't know, like 20 or 30 years that have kind of landed us where we're where we are now.

SPEAKER_00: 10:45

Yeah, going like way back, um, you know, there have been people talking about what like what we mentioned before of like a school voucher or some sort of system like that, where you have public dollars that allow you to go to private schools. I mean, Thomas Paine, who was who was writing, you know, pamphlets during the time of the American Revolution, wrote about this. John Stuart Mill wrote about this a long time ago. Generally speaking, though, and and and there were basically sort of in the late colonial periods to the mid-19th century, there were the lines between private schools and public schools were much blurrier. You know, you had a lot of religion in public schools, like people read Bibles and sang hymns and all those sorts of things, and there's the sort of growth of Catholic schools in America, sort of in a response to that, because Catholics were like, well, can we read our Bible or sing our hymns? And they were like, no. So it's like, I guess we have to start our own schools. So, but that that was where things were blurred. Our sort of contemporary public education system, growing out of the common schools movement in the mid-18th century, really being established by the kind of progressive movement in the teens and twenties, etc., established the sense of public schools, sort of the way that we think of them now, generally residentially assigned, secular, etc. So starting in times like the 90s, Milton Friedman was one of these people, but he wasn't the only one, who sort of said he approached it as an economist, which was like, well, you're sort of granting a monopoly, where if everybody lives in this one area, you're going to the same school, and we think monopolies are bad in most other areas, so they're probably bad in this one too. But you had people from religious communities sort of echoing arguments and made before, arguing Virgil Bloom was one example of people like this, who saying, you know, we should maybe have some pluralism in our system where we have different schools pursuing different ends, whether religious, non-religious, different philosophies, and others. Well that was all sort of circulating around. There were some small experiments and places, but the the real start of the kind of voucher movement as we think of it today, the first real kind of larger scale we're gonna give scholarships funded by the government so the kids can go to private schools was in Milwaukee and started in the early 90s, which is a whole, there's like a whole fascinating backstory of how that happened, Howard Fuller and Polly Williams and the people that were advocating for that. But started relatively as a relatively small program. Not long after that, a similar program was started in Cleveland, Ohio. And then most of these programs, maybe some, I think there were some other sort of smatterings and places, but they were very, very small because there were questions at the time of whether they were constitutional. Does this violate the separation of church and state or the First Amendment free exercise or the establishment clause, really the establishment clause of the First Amendment? And a ruling, I think Zellman versus Simmons Harris, which I think was in 2005, ruled that they were constitutional. And so we saw more growth after that. We saw states like Indiana and Florida and others create these larger programs and the kind of and grow their programs. So this is sort of through the aughts and into the teens, whatever we're calling these these decades now. And then we had the pandemic. And, you know, these programs were growing, and lots of states had lots of small programs, but the pandemic happens, and for lots and lots of interconnected reasons that are hard to necessarily individually parse out, but created this sort of opportunity where people really thought about rethinking education and saying, wow, this like system that we have, I don't know if this is really working for us. It's certainly fragile. We've got lots of sort of issues that we're here, and and a dam kind of broke. And in Arizona, where you are, um in West Virginia, and now in a cascade of states after that, states have decided to create like universal school choice programs. Whereas in like Milwaukee and in Cleveland and in DC, as I mentioned earlier, when these had started, these were small, targeted programs. It might be low-income students or students with special needs, or only in certain cities, or if you were zoned for schools that performed a certain way. These new programs that we're seeing sp uh spring up all across the country are open enrollment, that any student in the state can be eligible for them. And that's been the really the story of the last three or four or five years. Massive growth in the number of these programs, big growth in enrollment in these programs, and only sort of poised to do more.

SPEAKER_02: 14:59

Yeah. When there are four Prenda microschools here in Arizona, I would be like talking to moms at the park and they'd be like, What do you do? I'm like, I was already weird because I homeschooled, right? And so I'm like the only person that in my neighborhood that homeschools. So I'm like talking to moms at parks now about microschools. And it's taking me like 45 minutes to explain what a micro school is, maybe. And now it's like I say that my kids go to prend to micro schools, and everyone I talk to knows someone who is microschooling, knows someone who is homeschooling, doing something different. Much of it because of these, we call them in Arizona, it's called the empowerment scholarship or an ESA. You're even using the term voucher, which is so interesting because I think nowadays there's there's there's been some like weird political lines drawn around this that if you look closely, it like doesn't make any sense that this would be a partisan issue because we all have children that we care about and want the best things for. Uh and if you look deeply, it is totally a nonpartisan issue. So I have been talking to these moms, and sometimes I say that I use like the ESA program or something, and they're like, oh, I would never like do that because it's like, you know, we all we all feel very like nostalgic a little bit about like the school system. It's like, oh, like my third grade teacher and like how the school smells, and like all these things, like we have this kind of like romanticism around it. And I'm like, oh they they view it as something that's trying to just destroy that, like in a very kind of like violent way. And so I'm wondering if you'd tell me more about that. Like, I've it's never quite made sense to me. So, like, what are the arguments against giving families access to state dollars? You've mentioned a few of them, but can if we can dig into that a little bit, help us understand. Yeah. And also just so we've been using the word voucher, which is now kind of like the the opposition's word for them, like it's a bad thing. So you can actually kind of tell if someone's like pro school choice or against school choice if they call it an ESA or like a scholarship, they like it. If they call it a voucher, they hate it. And so I'm like, okay, like that's it's just like an interesting little tell. It's funny. But yeah, go with like why do people why is this controversial?

SPEAKER_00: 17:08

So yeah, so we'll we do we'll we'll unpack voucher first and then we'll we'll find because it's true. Because voucher, yeah, voucher, like the other word for voucher is just like a coupon, right? And I don't know if coupon just didn't sell as well or something. I don't know like why, but it was if you think about it, like a gift voucher or something is just like a piece of pay rather than having fifty dollars in cash, you have a piece of paper that says fifty dollars to whatever AMC movies or whatever it is. And so it was like, well, that it was that for education, like take this thing to the school in exchange for one education, you know. And that was like the predominant way of doing it until, as you mentioned, there were these really interesting policy innovations that started now more than a decade ago in Arizona, where someone said, Hey, like, okay, voucher, that's a cool idea. But what if, you know, we have the technology now to rather than having to give people like a coupon to go places, you can like have all that money in an account and you could spend different things out of that account. Couldn't we do that same thing for education? We have health savings accounts. So rather than just saying, hey, you have like this one HMO or whatever doctor that you have to go to, we can put money in a in an account and you can choose whatever doctor works best for you, and you can get your Tylenol at CBS or whatever, like you can do all of those things. And someone's like, why don't we just do the same thing for education? And thus the ESA was born, which has now a lot of these states that are doing these, and and they're interesting because they're all slightly different from one another, and they're different from, you know, how broad of a set of things can you choose from and how they're administered, but they're kind of following that same logic. But but actually, even recently in states like Oklahoma, you know, they've basically created a universal choice program through the tax code where you can get a tax credit, you know, you your expenses, you can get credited against your your tax liability, and and you can even get more for the for the taxes that you owe. So there's still a lot of innovation happening in this place. And yeah, as you're right, people who would tend to be opposed to them call them all vouchers. But we have vouchers, we have ESAs, we have tax credits, we have all of these different ways in which this is happening.

SPEAKER_02: 19:13

And just real quick before we keep going, I I'm just being like a little listener-sensitive in our conversation. I feel like you and I know kind of what's going on here. And I just want to back up even just a little bit more and just even just talk about how schools are funded generally. Because we have all this, like if you just send your kids to school, you just think school's free.

unknown: 19:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 19:30

And like you don't really give it a second thought about like where this money is coming from. So can you just like one minute explain like how that works? And then like the voucher on top of that is like that means that this money is flowing in this new way. And like talk go into that a little bit.

SPEAKER_00: 19:45

So your local public school, if we think about the American public school system, there's roughly 13,000 school districts across America. There's about a hundred thousand public schools. So a hundred thousand public schools in these thirteen thousand districts that exist. Those schools are funded from usually three pots of money. And the easy way to remember it is as a rule of thumb, it's different, but the rule of thumb is 45, 45, 10. About 45% of the money comes from your local property taxes, about 45% comes from the state, which depending on what your state is, could be an income tax, could be a sales tax, could be some property taxes that are actually assessed at the state level. Depends. Um, and then about 10% comes from the federal government. That in your school district, that's basically what it is. So you draw from all of these different sources, and that gives the the the money that that that funds those schools.

SPEAKER_02: 20:35

Well, just so that means that if I like all the years that I homeschooled, I was still paying all of those taxes.

SPEAKER_00: 20:40

Yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_02: 20:41

But my kids were not receiving the education. I was out of I was paying out of pocket for all of our education expenses, but still paying into those pots for other kids. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 20:51

For sure. So if your kid or if you have kids that go to private school or whatever that you're paying out of pocket for, you're basically paying double. You're paying for the public education system and you're paying to privately educate your kids. Um so then, yeah, so vouchers or scholarship accounts or any of these tend to be the state's contribution, that 45%, which then follows that child to wherever they go to school. And so instead of that 45% going to your local public school, they can it can go into their education savings account or it will go into a voucher that they can redeem for one education somewhere. Different states do this differently, but that's the general rule of thumb in these, which is an important thing to remember because local property taxes stay in their school districts. Now, I can't be it's always dangerous to say when there's 13,000 of anything that everything is going to work exactly the same. But generally speaking, you get your property tax bill every year. And it's not saying, well, we have X number of kids or whatever. It's a property millage rate multiplied by however much your property is worth, and that's how much you pay. If there's one kid or if there's a million kids, that's how much you're paying. The state money tends to fluctuate more based on how many kids are enrolled, etc. And frankly, like federal money, there's all these complicated things that are in it that basically says you'll never get less of it. Good rule of thumb is like once you get a certain amount of federal dollars, you keep getting that same amount of federal dollars. So really, the the sort of sticks, the local money stays, the federal money stays, it's the state money that would follow a child to where they're going to school.

SPEAKER_02: 22:20

Interesting. So going back to like this property idea of property taxes, this is kind of why we see inequity in schools, why like you if you live in a quote unquote good neighborhood, your house is worth more, like those property taxes are more, so then the school has more money, essentially. True?

SPEAKER_00: 22:35

Yes and no. Yes and no.

SPEAKER_02: 22:37

Okay, go into that.

SPEAKER_00: 22:38

Most states have, in fact, I think all states now, have what are called equalization formulas or they're funding formulas that basically account for that. So if you are in a lower property tax area, the state kicks in more money. That's why it's like 45, 45, 10 as a rule of thumb. But if you're in very wealthy districts, it could actually be like 8055 because it's all coming, there's enough local property wealth to pay for all of that, and so it doesn't, and so the state kicks in very little. Whereas in very property poor districts, you would have, you know, the the local contribution might be 10 or 15 percent, and then the state contribution will be much higher. Now, there is still variation because some places are wealthy enough that like even on top of the equalization, like even with the state kicking in no money, you still have a lot. But there was this we this is a very long history that I'll spare you, but there was a series of lawsuits in the 70s, 80s, and 90s around both what were called adequacy lawsuits and equity lawsuits. So adequacy was basically every state in its constitution has a guarantee for children to get an education. And this was a bunch of lawyers made a whole lot of money determining what dollar value it means for a child to get a quote unquote adequate education. And I'm trying to remember, you used to remember the one in Missouri. It was literally like$23. And as long as they were spending$7,423, it was constitutional. And if you spent like$7,422, you were violating the Constitution. So then then so that was like adequacy. There were also these equity lawsuits sort of addressing what you were talking about, which is what if we have these massive disparities? And so in lots of states, and again it varies from state, but they sort of brought that in line where poor um property poor districts got more support, property rich districts got less. So we do still see those inequities. It used to be wild, like it used to be in the 60s and 70s, you'd see massive, massive disparities between these. Those have really been brought much closer to one another.

SPEAKER_02: 24:37

Okay, interesting. That's good. Because you hear about like the real estate world, the number one, one of the top few questions is like, are the schools good here?

SPEAKER_00: 24:44

Sure.

SPEAKER_02: 24:45

Like that's a real estate question. And so and you also hear about like redlining.

SPEAKER_00: 24:49

Sure.

SPEAKER_02: 24:49

Is this to talk a little bit about that? Like trying to get into a good school based on where you live. And like I'm just trying to get at like where like if you have already are pretty wealthy, you essentially have ubiquitous school choice. Because you can move.

SPEAKER_01: 25:02

Yes, yes.

SPEAKER_02: 25:03

Right? But if you are in this in the district and you're stuck there and you can't move, then you don't have options.

SPEAKER_00: 25:09

Yes, and what we've basically done is created private public schools. Because if we tell me about that, if we residentially assign children to schools, right? We say you have to live in this area, and as you mentioned, the first question that everybody asks is how good do the schools? There's a limited number of homes zoned to that area, limited supply, bigger demand, prices go up. So what we have is people basically paying tuition. I'm making air quotes for those of you listening.

SPEAKER_01: 25:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 25:38

You know, paying tuition in the form of their house being more expensive. But like the quality of that school is what economists would say is being capitalized into the value of that house. So you're basically just paying tuition to that school. Uh you're just paying it in your house as opposed to cutting a check to them. And so as a result, we're not going to be able to do that.

SPEAKER_02: 25:57

You can't get into that school unless you live in the neighborhood. So there's like this.

SPEAKER_00: 26:02

You've basically created a private public school. And these districts exist like this. Now, redlining that you mentioned is more of a historical phenomenon that was explicitly racist, in which housing covenants and other like just laws that existed drew areas in which it was usually to discriminate against black people, saying, like, you can only live in this area. And so they would take a map and literally draw a red line around it and say, you can only live here, and and other white families and other folks could live in other places. So again, if we have schools that are based on where people live, and we have historical segregation patterns that still persist to this day, because even though the redlining is illegal because of the stickiness of the housing market, these things still exist and you can still observe these patterns in places, you're gonna exacerbate that problem. If we say you're gonna go to school based on where you live and where we live is uh ethnically or or racially segregated, but it's also true if it's economically segregated or any of those, we're just gonna exacerbate all of those problems.

SPEAKER_02: 27:06

Okay, so enter school choice, this idea of like giving parents the dollars to say now you have a choice, you don't have to live in that neighborhood. There are things like open enrollment that kind of preceded this. Can you go into that? Like, so Arizona's an open enrollment state, so when we talk about school choice, everyone says you already have school choice. And I'm talking about an ESA, and they're talking about really what's open enrollment. So go into that.

SPEAKER_00: 27:31

Yeah, so all of these things are basically severing where you live from where you go to school, right? So you can have open enrollment that could be within your district. So some districts, so you know, you're you're living within this district area, there's five or six schools. In a lot of places, you're zoned not only in your district, but you're zoned for a particular school. But some places around the country say, actually, you can go anywhere within your district. And that's one form of open enrollment. We would call it like intra-district open enrollment.

SPEAKER_01: 28:00

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 28:00

What states like Arizona have is that you can actually cross district lines. So it's not just you can choose within whatever district or school that you're zoned for, but you can actually go to the the district next door and go to that school there.

SPEAKER_02: 28:13

Without lying about your address. Because people have been doing this for a long time. Because it's like, well, our aunt lives in that, and when we register for school, we'll just use our aunt's address so we can be zoned for that better school, right? So then you're like literally committing fraud to get your kids into a better school. People went to jail for this. We no longer so yeah, we don't need to break the law to get your kids into good schools anymore. Progress.

SPEAKER_00: 28:33

And so that's within the traditional public system. So those are still school districts, one of those 13,000 school districts, they're run by a school board, yada yada yada. The next kind of step are charter schools. So charter schools are independently operated public schools. So they are not run by an elected school board like your 13,000 school districts are. They're completely funded by the government, they're open enrollment. If you have too many kids, you have to hold the lottery, but they're usually not geographically zoned. So anybody can go to them. Like if you have a school-age child and you want to go there. So they're sort of one step beyond open enrollment when it comes to school choice. So there's still publicity.

SPEAKER_02: 29:14

I feel like with Yeah, with charter schools, there's also kind of like a focus. Like, you know, they've written their own quote unquote charter, which is like a like a th a purpose statement, right? Not just like your neighborhood school, but like this school is about like performing arts, or like you'll you'll see kind of like a focus. Is that kind of for some charter schools not exactly better?

SPEAKER_00: 29:34

The charter refers to, as you mentioned, like a document, like the charter that they basically said, hey, we want more freedom to exist outside of this existing system. But in order to get that freedom, we promise to do this stuff. And so a lot of it's performance based. We promise our kids will do XYZ well, or a lot of it is we're gonna offer these programs, these special programs and things. And they are authorized, and again, it depends on the state, sometimes it's a state. Board, sometimes it's a university, it could be mayor's office, it could be the local school districts, etc. And every so many years they go up to get their charter reauthorized. And in theory, folks, they hold up the charter and say, okay, you promised to do A, B, and C. Did you do A, B, and C? Okay, you get to keep existing. Oh, you haven't done A, B, and C, you don't get to exist anymore. So that's in theory how it's supposed to work.

SPEAKER_02: 30:21

Sometimes I hear parents say, like, oh, I don't deal with fill-in-the-blank negative aspect of public school because my kids go to charter school. And knowing what I know about charter school, it's like actually, you're like they are still using standardized curriculum. Like people sometimes in Arizona will be like, oh, we don't use Common Core because we do charter school. It's like, no, the standards still apply. Your kids still take the standardized state test. Like they still feel you are still part of the public school system.

SPEAKER_00: 30:45

They are still public schools and they, yeah, you're right. They take all the same.

SPEAKER_02: 30:48

Do they get all of the funding?

SPEAKER_00: 30:50

No.

SPEAKER_02: 30:51

Do they get less funding?

SPEAKER_00: 30:52

They get less funding. They tend to not get the like facilities and capital funding that public schools get. So they tend to get similar levels of per pupil funding, but public schools also get money to like build and upkeep their buildings and all that sort of stuff that from sort of separate pots of money. And charter schools depends, some states are starting to change that. But general, the last time I checked, at least, in lots of places, charter schools don't get that.

SPEAKER_02: 31:16

Okay. And then the other way, another like category of school choices coming to my mind is the legality of homeschool. Sometimes states have outlawed homeschool. So you have to choose a school, and there are like truancy laws where like if your kids don't come to school, you go to jail. True? Yes?

SPEAKER_00: 31:32

So it now I think homeschooling is legal in all 50 states. Yeah, you can homeschool everywhere. Now it wasn't always that.

SPEAKER_02: 31:38

Regulated in different ways, right?

SPEAKER_00: 31:40

Totally regulated in different ways, exactly. You have some states that the sort of broadest homeschooling, I think they're, I think they're called like no notice states, which is literally you homeschool your kids, don't have to tell anybody, you don't have to tell local school district, you don't have to tell anybody. You just homeschool, do your thing. Yeah, you do you. Whereas on the other end, there are states that have not only do you have to register, but oftentimes you have to submit your curriculum, you have to submit student uh evidence of student work. A lot. This is like Massachusetts, I think Pennsylvania, New Jersey, I think these are some mostly northeastern states have.

SPEAKER_02: 32:14

Sometimes you have like a person you have to report to that like meets with your student occasionally and checks in on you.

SPEAKER_00: 32:21

Yeah. So there's so there's a mix. Now I will say, looking at America, it leans much more towards the no-notice states than the high regulation states. There are a lot of no-notice states and there are a lot of very, I think we would generally, I guess it's all in the eye of the beholder, but generally pretty lightly regulated homeschooling where you don't have to follow.

SPEAKER_02: 32:41

I mean, if you look at the last like 40 years, like has been kind of like a hard battle that's been fought by the homeschool. You know, there's like the homeschool legal defense, like there's lots of like entities that have have helped protect someone's right to homeschool.

SPEAKER_00: 32:53

Yeah, homeschooling, it's really interesting because like homeschooling, again, the time when the the nation was founded, up to daytime, these lines between public and private and home and and formal schooling were a lot blurrier than they are now, right? Like a lot of kids, their early years would be taught at home and then they'd go to formal schooling, and sometimes they'd come back and they'd do all sorts of stuff. It was really with the advent of like compulsory education laws, like you mentioned truancy, which was at the sort of end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, where these new sort of formal public schools were existed and then laws were passed requiring students to attend those schools. That homeschooling all but died out in America from the 1920s until like the 1970s. And then a confluence of different people, I'm probably telling you things that you already know, but you know, a confluence of different people for different reasons. And a lot of people like to tell homeschooling is like one, it was this group of people, but it really wasn't. There was multiple different groups of people for multiple different ideological reasons, sort of slowly but surely built up the homeschooling movement. But interestingly, enrollment had in the maybe five to ten years before the pandemic, and sometimes it can be hard because of no notice states, it's actually kind of hard to get our handle on how many families actually homeschool. From the best statistics that we had, homeschooling had sort of plateaued in the kind of five to ten years before the pandemic. And then obviously exploded.

SPEAKER_02: 34:18

Plateaued at what? It plateaued at a percent.

SPEAKER_00: 34:20

I want to say around two percent of the student population in America.

SPEAKER_02: 34:27

And the student population is like what, like 50 million kids together.

SPEAKER_00: 34:32

There's about, I think about 49 and a half or 50 million kids in public school. So there'll be another few million on top of that in private and homeschooling. I can actually give you, you know, most of these podcasts I just shoot from the hip. But because of the respect that I have for you, Katie, I actually have numbers in front of me. Oh my gosh. So if you want some numbers, I've got numbers. So if you want to know, okay, yes. Let's dig into the data. Yes, so this is something we calculate called the EdChoice Share, which is basically how many kids are in the different sectors of the American education system. And my colleague Colin Ritter does it. It's available on our website. You can go to edchoice.org and see this, but I'll just tell it to you. So 74.8% of students attend traditional public schools, right? Well like what we were talking about earlier, residentially assigned, yada yada yada. Another 4.9% attend magnet schools. So that's magnet schooling is a kind of form of open enrollment, right? Could be within district or across districts, but they magnet schools are operated by the traditional public school districts, but they just have kind of more freedom to enroll there. But it is a school of choice, it's a form of school choice within the traditional public schooling system. So that's where we went, we've got 74.8% plus 4.9%. So we're at about there, around 80% are sort of within that traditional public schooling system. And then as we start to step out of that, 6.6% attend charter schools, another 6.8% attend private schools self-paid. So not participating in a choice program, but just like paying tuition to get that. 4.7% are homeschooled, and 2.5%. That's up from yeah, doubled.

SPEAKER_01: 36:14

Okay. Yeah, double. Oh wow.

SPEAKER_00: 36:16

Since in recent years, yeah, homeschooling basically it shot up even higher than that during the pandemic and it's since come down a bit. Uh and then last is 2.2% use some sort of educational choice program to be in that. So if we want to call them private schools, but also it's a mix of kind of blurry lines of private schooling, micro schooling, homeschooling, etc. So that's that's basically the breakdown. So you've got about 80% of kids are within the traditional public sector with some variation there about the amount of open enrollment that's that's available and that are taking advantage of that, and that other 20% are in a mix of private schools, charter schools, homeschooling, participating in choice programs.

SPEAKER_02: 36:54

Okay, interesting. What do you think is behind that shift? Like obviously the pandemic like opened some eyes, but like it stayed, right? Like all all these choice programs are opening up private school to kids, homeschool to kids, other things. Like what like why isn't everyone just like, oh, why would I ever look for something different? You know?

SPEAKER_00: 37:14

Yeah, the thing is, and we do any thoughts on that? We do a lot of polling and survey work where we, you know, we talk to parents and others. And I think one thing, and this is where I think a lot of school choice people can kind of get over their skis and sort of take our own sort of complaints about public schools or others and and sort of impute them for everyone. Most people and most parents like their kids public school. You know, when when asked, they give them A's and B's. So they're not there, there's a small percentage, you know, I think it's usually around three-quarters of public school parents say, like, I give my kids school an A or a B. So first off, you know, 25% not giving that, when we talk about a number as big as 50 million, 25% of 50 million is a lot of people, right? It's a lot of people. That's how you can like double the number of kids in homeschooling. We might like double the number of kids in in school choice programs, etc. And while that looks small, you're like, oh wow, like, you know, 5% of 50 million is a lot of kids. So that's one part of it. But then the other part of it is that it seems that while parents like their kids' school, they're open to doing better. So if something someone can show them a thing that says, oh yeah, totally, like, totally get why you like your kids' school, we're doing this. Maybe it's a better fit for for your child, maybe it fits into your schedule better, maybe it fits into the things that you want for your kid, etc., that I think is what's happening in lots of places. Saying, oh yeah, no, like I don't hate I don't hate my kids' public school, but I think this thing might be a little bit better.

SPEAKER_02: 38:42

Yeah, it's kind of like if you're used to going to a grocery store that always has the same thing, and someone asks you about your grocery store and you've never had options, you've never thought about it, you're kind of like, it's fine, like it feeds the family, like there's nothing wrong with this. And then someone's like, at our grocery store, this happened. Like this other stuff, and you're like, oh, like I didn't know there was a difference, you know? So that's I think I feel like kind of like what's happening in education right now.

SPEAKER_00: 39:04

And I think that's a good thing. We can make mistakes if we're like trashing that grocery store. People are like, well, like, no, our grocery store's fine. But if you sort of pitch exactly the way that you do, which is like totally get it, feeding your family. But you know, this grocery store has like the nice salad bar. You like salad? Because I got this place has a salad bar. Like, you know, the butcher convenient is awesome. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 39:29

Maybe your kid is allergic to all of the food at that grocery store and you have to find someone else. But totally because of the way your district you're you're assigned to that grocery store, yeah. Your child is having a really hard time getting nourished and fed.

SPEAKER_01: 39:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 39:45

Right. And so then, but but because of the way school funding works that like the monopoly you were talking about at the beginning, you know, it's like it makes it really hard for that other option to open and sustain itself.

SPEAKER_01: 39:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 39:57

And to feed those kids where maybe like the the the traditional neighborhood grocery store is not like suited to serve that individual student. So I mean, I talk to a lot of parents who are just like, we we've gone to public school, we've tried it, like my kid can't learn like that, or like my kid has this you know unique issue or this unique need where we really need these options. And now that we have the school choice option in Arizona, Florida, like these states, I'm hearing all these stories about like my kid is happy, they're they can go to school now, they're progressing now, just because we were able to give them some choice, some options because people are unique. Yeah, you know, people we hear this term like the one-size fits all, or like the square peg and the round hole. It's like we don't need to have a bunch of holes and pegs. Like we can live in a way that is a little bit more creative now. And which I am actually so pro-public school because it has been like the hugest boon to society in the last 150 years. Like it has raised a ton of people out of poverty, and like it's such a good thing.

SPEAKER_00: 40:56

Yes. So this is important. And it's a question I think you asked earlier that I didn't really answer when you talk about like opposition to all of this, like opposition to ESAs, opposition to open enrollment, opposition to charter schools. And I think, again, taken charitably, which I think is how we should deal with people who disagree with us, that the insight that you just made there, I think, is at the core of it, which is to say that public schools have been this important institution in American life. And if we track the the history of America, particularly in the 20th century, where we saw this like incredible boom and growth in our economy and in living standards and improvement across all of these different areas, an educated population, which was by and large done by public schools, was a huge part of that. And there was this broader belief coming out of even in the name of it, the common schools movement, this idea that we have these institutions that all of us are part of, so we all pay taxes to them and we all send our children to them. And it's a way for it's it's a way to sort of socialize our children, to inculcate democratic values, to quote unquote, like make Americans out of everyone, so we have this shared experience. And the belief is if you allow people to opt out of that system, that a few things could happen. Number one, that it would be worse off for the kids that are left behind, because if all of the most motivated with it kids leave, well, what does that mean for the you know, all the kids that are left behind are stuck with each other, you know, not having the great peer effects of of better treating children or create stratification. Yeah. And and we worry about things like, well, if the people that are leaving are wealthier or if they are more educated or others, we could see more sort of stratification in our education system. That we have, okay, well, like the kids of college-educated parents are all going to private schools and other kids are left there. Or we could see racial stratification or economic stratification, et cetera, across all those sorts of things. And this, what is supposed to be a unifying institution, could actually be just another institution in American life that is polarized and segregated and separated from one another. And so I think, again, this is another one of those things where I mean, obviously, I have my critique of all those arguments, and I'm happy to share them. But I think that if you support school choice, you should take those arguments incredibly seriously, and that those are actually coming from a good place, and they are coming from people who care deeply about our society and its children and our communities, and we dismiss them at our peril. So I think it's really important to engage with those arguments, but I think that that's where a lot of it is coming from.

SPEAKER_02: 43:21

Yeah, I agree. So let's go into like a handful of the arguments against it. A lot of the time I hear like a statistic thrown thrown around that like all the people that are using these ESAs, like the ESA money, they're all they were already sending their kids to private school. They can already afford it. There's no reason that they need the state funding to help them go to public school or to to uh to have a choice. What do you say to that?

SPEAKER_00: 43:47

Well, I'd say a couple things. The first one is it's always dangerous when you tell other people what they can and can't afford, you know? Like, because there's lots of what, you know, and oftentimes the people that are making those arguments would never make those sort of arguments in other aspects of people's lives, where it's like, well, healthier food is more expensive. You can afford it if you're doing and you know, we don't want to make those sort of value judgments about how people spend their money, but in this case, somehow people are able to. And I think that that's an important thing to note, though, that lots of people that are already in private schools are in private schools because schools are providing scholarships, because they're part of religious communities that are paying for these sorts of things, that are scrimping and saving, and as you mentioned earlier, paying twice in order to do this, you know, demonizing people who are already in private schools, I don't think is a super solid plan. But if opponents want to keep doing it, you know, never never get in the way of your opponent knocking themselves out. But so that's part of it. So one of which is there are lots of people that are in private schools that are struggling to pay for them, that if they were given money to support that, could spend more money on food and clothing and shelter and all of those things. So I think that's one is part of it. Number two is sort of like what we talked about earlier, which is every child in America is entitled to a government-funded education, right? So if those children that were currently in private schools stepped into public school tomorrow, they would have to educate them and they would have to pay for it. So the fact that they'd be happy to do it. Totally.

SPEAKER_02: 45:13

Like if you had some rich kid show up to your public school and be like, hey, I'd like to go to school here, the principal would be like, Great, the Simmons family, like so excited to have you and your money here. But like, but we don't see that. You would never say, like, oh, you already have enough money to pay for private school, so we won't serve you at the public school.

SPEAKER_01: 45:28

Exactly.

SPEAKER_02: 45:29

But that's literally the same thing we're saying when we say like if you have have enough money, you shouldn't have the ESA.

SPEAKER_00: 45:34

If we want to means test public schooling, we can means test private school choice.

SPEAKER_02: 45:39

What's a means test? Tell us. I'm saying just um economics thing.

SPEAKER_00: 45:42

If you just want to limit it, like if we want to say if you make X amount of dollars more, we're not gonna pay for public school anymore, then okay. But you know, the wealthiest, you know, Jeff Bezos had a kid, they can go to public school and everybody else will pay for it. You know what I mean? So that I that argument has never really carried that much weight with me because you know, that's just not how we fund schools. It would be different if if we if we funded schools differently. But everyone's entitled to one, so I don't know why they wouldn't be able to participate in this.

SPEAKER_02: 46:11

Okay, so the next one I hear is I don't want to participate. So when a state passes in ESA, Prenda is totally run based off ESA. We used to operate under the charter umbrella and we met all of the requirements and restrictions, and all our kids took the state test. We because we're very committed to access. We don't want to create another option that only wealthy people can afford. That's not systemic change in education, which is what we're pushing for. So we actually, in all of the years, like through through the pandemic, we had people knocking at our doors, begging us to let let them give us their private dollars to open a prend a micro school in some state. Yeah. And we said no for a lot of time because we would want to, we we said, no, we don't accept private funds. We only make partnerships with the school district and we run this full access to everyone in a state. And so we would, I mean, we could have grown a lot of microschools and built a lot of microschools, but we literally said no because we're committed to access. So once the ESA laws were passed in Arizona, we kind of flipped that to say, like, okay, now we have a way to operate a microschool that's where we still can give kids full access, and it's a little more streamlined for us. There's more flexibility, more autonomy and things like that. And parents, kids are still learning, parents are still happy, so we're happy with the results. So as soon as a state passes an ESA law, and I'm sure like you in a choice, like we're tracking all of these, the legislation and things like that. And so we'll go into a new state and the well, we we like any other company, like we run ads, right? And so we'll educate people about this way that they can have educational choice and be able to send their kids to a print of microschool with no out-of-pocket cost to the parent. And if we make an ad that says that, that ad gets so much hate. Like all of the comments are just like, you're destroying public schools, like all of this hate. So I'm like, wait, I really want to sincerely understand does this destroy public school? And a lot of the like quote unquote opposition is just like it it there's so like literally the organization that is against school choice in Arizona is called Save Our Schools. Sure. Like the opposite of that is ruin our schools or shut all our schools down. Or it's like, I don't think the 2%'s gonna hurt the 80%. Like this is not this is like a Dave and Goliath situation where the Goliath is being very aggressive on the ad comments. But talk a little bit about that. Does it does it hurt public schools? Like, how should we think about that?

SPEAKER_00: 48:31

So I think like the first way of thinking about it is okay, like what is actually happening here? And what's happening here is that like you have kids currently, like or without these programs, that go to these schools because they have to. Because they have no other choices, and that's why they're there. And these programs are created, and then they have a choice and they choose to leave. So what exactly is that telling us? Like, that's telling us that like that kid's not doing so hot in that school, right? And the only reason they're staying is because they're forced to. And so, in some ways, this whole argument of like it's gonna destroy public schools is kind of an indictment of public schools, right? Because if your schools are doing awesome, nobody wants to leave. No one will want to leave, right? And I think that that's actually tied into the second bit because I think there is a misapprehension that who leaves when it comes to these choice programs, right? Everyone says, oh, the best and brightest kids leave, all the best kids in every class are gonna leave, and who's gonna be left with the worst kids? And then you think to yourself, for like 30 seconds, wait, if my kids crushing it in this school, why the hell would I take them out? Right? The kids who are gonna leave are the kids who are not doing well in that school and are gonna be looking for somewhere else. And then if you just play the tape out a little bit longer, you think, whoa, wait a second. You know, we might think about that kid leaving and going to a better school, and that's good for them, but then think, what's what about the classroom that that child left? That kid's not in it anymore. So the kid who's not doing well, who's struggling, is not in that class anymore, and the only kids that are left are the kids who want to be there. So part of what we can have, and and look, part of this is like economists were sort of on the vanguard of this, and they love things like we're gonna have competition, where like the schools are gonna compete for kids and the best kids' schools, where where it's like a better idea of sort of thing about is like, no, it's about sorting. The kids are gonna be able to sort into the schools that work best for them. And what might be a great school for one kid is not necessarily a great school for another kid. Right. And so as these kids move, it's better for everyone. It's better for the kids who are left behind, it's better for the kids that are going to to these new schools. And so, like, I don't actually think that that's destroying public schools. I think that's actually making them better. Because like the people that are there are the people who want to be there.

SPEAKER_02: 50:48

Won't we, just to play devil's advocate here, like, won't we see some schools close though, or like classrooms close or things like that? Like, talk a little bit about that.

SPEAKER_00: 50:55

Yeah, so like that is true that if your kids leave, you will have you will have less money coming in because uh, or at least the portion of the money that follows kids will follow that kid out of there. And you'll you would reach a point that if, you know, I don't know, 80% of your kids leave, your school's gonna close, right? So we we can't pretend like that things like that wouldn't happen. Now, again, I don't think that that's if 80% of kids, when given the chance, leave, probably school shouldn't be open. Like, I don't think that that's unreasonable to say if the only reason it's open is because people are forced to be there. Again, we can draw out, I don't know, uh analogies of other sort of businesses or others that are like, well, the only reason we go to this place is because we're forced to. It probably can't stand under its own two feet. Uh but even then, I mean, like the funny thing is that so so we're talking in the sort of purely like theoretical range now of like it's almost an imagining if all of the money follows the kids, whatever. In most of these choice programs that exist, there are you know, only a portion of the money leaves and a bunch of it stays. There are various like hold harmless provisions that are added in, where it's like when it comes to calculating state aid, you can actually count the kids that leave for like years for like two or three years in your enrollment to soften the blow of this whatever like all the capital monies so like they people have gone out of their way to make these programs as non-disruptive as possible. But like at the margin, or I you I should say sort of like at the extreme, like yes, if all of your kids leave, you don't have a school anymore. And so, yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 52:31

Which a lot of the the arguments like that I hear also when I'm you know, I'm talking to parents who are education shopping looking for solutions, and they say, like, oh, do you have a robotics program at Prenda, or do you have a really good orchestra? And I'm like, No, no, I don't have any of that. Can my take my kids take the bus? Do you feed them free? Like, is there a lunch program? Like, no, no, I don't have any of that, right? So, like there's a ton of benefit to your neighborhood school still, like it's a good option. And you are like in making a different choice, oftentimes like choosing to have fewer resources. So it's not like I don't know.

SPEAKER_00: 53:06

No, I think and I think that that's the right, but but part of this comes from, you know, again, going back to what we talk about common schools, kind of progressive movement where the thought you know, we had a bunch of little, you know, think of all the one-room schoolhouses that were all over America, and we said, no, like we need to bring kids together into like the comprehensive high school, which is like, hey, like there's no way we can teach calculus to one kid here and one kid there. Let's get them all in one room, because that not that many people can teach calculus, let's all get them in one room. So that was like solving the problems of a particular time and solving them well and with the tools that they had.

SPEAKER_02: 53:40

With the best the best we could do for a long time.

SPEAKER_00: 53:42

But it turns out, oh, and and you know, there might only be one in the town that you're in, there might only be one band teacher or one drama teacher or whatever that existed. So we gotta get all the kids in one place to do it. Well, now, you know, like maybe your school doesn't need an orchestra because there's like a local one that kids from a bunch of different schools could go to. Or maybe there's a robotics club somewhere that people can participate in, or whatever, and maybe with like the flexibility of ESA dollars, you can you can still have those things. Or there's lots of kids who say, like, well, maybe, you know, all the money that that school spends on a robotics team, I have no real interest in, I'd rather go to a school that focuses that on having, I don't know, smaller classes or science labs or whatever the hell it is, you know. So so I think that like thinking about the idea that not every school has to be everything for everyone. When we had the big comprehensive high school, when your district had one high school, they tried to be everything to everyone. And lots of kids got a great education there. Like lots of them. Maybe we might even say the majority of kids. We think of the big bell curve, all those people in the meaty middle of the bell curve, they did great. But the kids in the tails, like if you are really, really high performing, you're really, really low performing, like that's not necessarily the the best place for you. All of these things can be true at the same time.

SPEAKER_02: 55:01

Right, right. So I want to switch a little bit and then we'll wrap up. Um, talking about the supply side of choice. Who's starting new schools? Like what's driving people into that kind of like line of thinking. And then I mean, we've talked a lot about kids doing well in schools and being happy, but we haven't talked at all about teachers. And we talk, I mean, we hear a lot about how like teachers need to get paid more. This is a very stressful job. I think like was it Gallup who like rakes like all or maybe it was Pew, I can't remember which which survey this came from, maybe you know, uh, that just said like teaching is that the most K through 12 teaching is the most stressful job by like a wide margin, like compared to firefighting, like everything. Like they are the most like burnt out, stressed people. And I've actually had teachers come to talk to me about starting microschool with Prenda, and they're like, Oh, the first day of school, I had to be taken to the hospital in an ambulance because I had an anxiety attack. Like this is like really negatively affecting people, this space. So I'm interested in that. Well, we can just touch on that for a minute.

SPEAKER_00: 56:03

I have more numbers for you. Um I love polling. Consulting my pages in front of me. So this is from polling work that we do. So we at EdChoice in partnership with Morning Consult do a ton of polling work. Every month we poll a nationally representative sample of Americans and of American parents to understand their views on a host of issues. And we also regularly um poll teachers. I think we did two, we used to do a quarterly, and the numbers didn't move all of that much, so I think we've we've done it to like we moved it to twice or three times a year. But we just did a recent one, I think, was in the field in in March. Um, and what we found, we've been asking this question, asking them a thing from market research about a net promoter score. So if you've ever gotten sometimes if you like shop at Home Depot, you get one, or sometimes after you you stay in a hotel, you get asked this question would you rate your your experience from one to ten and would you recommend whatever this Home Depot or something to uh folks from one to ten? For those of you that don't know how that's being used, what they do is is calculate something called a net promoter score, which is basically you take all of the people who gave you a nine or a ten and you subtract all the people that gave you a zero to a six. Right? So actually, in those, if you answer, if you give a seven or an eight, your number isn't actually even counted. So in the future, if you want to tell people that they did a great job, yeah, you gotta give them a nine or a ten, or you gotta give them a zero to a six. And actually, I think a zero to a six, it doesn't matter what number you give a six or you give a zero, and you get the same thing in there. But basically what you do is you subtract those two, and as you might imagine, you want positive numbers, you want more promoters than detractors, or what they're called. So, teachers, in our most recent poll, teaching was underwater by 18 points. So 45% of teachers were detractors, and only 27% of teachers were promoters. So, well, it's gonna get wilder because that is actually a net promoter sort of negative 18. Yeah, negative 18 is a net promoter. Negative 18 is the net promoter. Now, what's wild is that we asked that same question a year ago, so in April of 2024. Uh at that time it was negative 47. So negative 18 is actually a substantial increase. So we we separate them out and we look at district school teachers and private school teachers. And in our most recent administration, private school teachers were above water. So there were they were a plus seven. So there were 35% of private school teachers were promoters and only 28% were detractors. So they were above water, and that's interesting because that same poll a year ago, they were minus 31. Whoa. Which is wild because normally so this I I don't know. This is something I'm really interested in, because to to do the last bit of data, and then we can so public school teachers were a minus twenty-three, um, this this time, so 25% promoters, 48% attractors, but a year ago were minus 48. So what's wild is that in our polling, because we've done this for a long time, private school teachers were almost always, except like a year ago, were almost always above water. Charter school teachers, when we've had a big enough sample of charter school teachers, they've generally been above water. It's been mostly driven by traditional public school teachers that were more negative than than private and charter school teachers. But for whatever reason, last year, and only last year, so in the years before it, it wasn't. So this is like the 23 24 school year, teachers were super, super negative. Within this question, I'm not making like a global judgment on teachers, but just with with respect to this question of asking them like on the profession, whatever something happened last school year. I'm not 100%. Percent sure what it was because almost any explanation that I have thought of doesn't actually answer it. Because it's like it wasn't the pandemic, it was like after the pandemic. It wasn't like political events don't line up with it really, like social events don't really line up to it. Like I don't really understand why this happened, but for whatever reason, last year we saw this massive dip in teacher morale, and it has rebounded. Um again for public school teachers, it's still underwater. For private school teachers, it's above water. But something happened and may continue to be happening that I made them less. Yeah, that made them less happy. They're happier now than they were a year before.

SPEAKER_02: 1:00:35

They're happier now. Wow. Interesting.

SPEAKER_00: 1:00:36

And they were happier a year before. There was like this dip last school year.

SPEAKER_02: 1:00:39

This dip. Interesting.

SPEAKER_00: 1:00:41

I don't know.

SPEAKER_02: 1:00:42

Okay, so like what's the best, the best net promoter score you're seeing, like amongst is it amongst private school teachers?

SPEAKER_00: 1:00:48

Private school teachers. So look, this could start to answer your question of like who's starting these schools. You know, I think you have a lot of traditional public school teachers, and there's a group like the National Micro Schooling Center, did that great report that came out recently where they've like asked people where they came from. And what you have is like a lot of traditional teachers, you know, from the public school sector, but also from the private school sector and others that are saying we want to do something different. The way the system is currently constituted doesn't work for us, and so we want to to start something new. So that's a huge source of where people come from. And so when you see net promoter scores like this, where people are like deeply unhappy, it's like, well, they might try and start something different.

SPEAKER_02: 1:01:30

Can I tell you a funny, a funny thing?

SPEAKER_00: 1:01:32

Please do.

SPEAKER_02: 1:01:33

You want to know Prendas apprenda guide net promoter score?

SPEAKER_00: 1:01:37

I would love to.

SPEAKER_02: 1:01:39

Positive 60.

SPEAKER_00: 1:01:41

Whoa. That's from the guides about like their own jobs?

SPEAKER_02: 1:01:43

From the guides, yeah. Over several years, hundreds of microschool guides.

SPEAKER_00: 1:01:47

So we shouldn't be surprised to see more prendas opening. If someone can trade a minus 23 net promoter score job to a plus sixty net promoter score job, you're probably gonna see more of the latter.

SPEAKER_02: 1:01:59

Gonna see more of that.

SPEAKER_00: 1:02:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 1:02:01

Well, wow, I feel like I've been on like an educational roller coaster. Like, I feel like we've hit so many topics, and like I I I wanted to know are there any other numbers that you have that I didn't ask you for? Let's see, what numbers are any of just like your most interesting like you were shocked, or like, yeah, just a couple of things.

SPEAKER_00: 1:02:19

I'll give you two more numbers. So, one, this is another one that sort of answers a question we're talking about where are these people coming from and others. So we've asked this question in our polling for a very long time, but we asked parents if you could send your kid anywhere, where would you send them? Like what sector would you send your kids to? And the our most recent thing of school parents, 41% told us that they would send their kids to public school, three percent said that they would send their kids to private school, eight percent to charter school, eleven percent to homeschooling. So now if you true that up with what we said before, where like so 40% say that their ideal situation is public school, but 80% of kids are in it. So there's another situation where again people may like those schools, but it's not their optimum one. If we talk about private schooling, where you have six percent self-pay, two percent in uh in choice programs, right? That's far away from 33% of parents who say they'd ideally like to go there. And even think, you know, charter schooling is actually pretty close. I think it's like six and change to eight, but then homeschooling where you have just south of five percent actually do it, but eleven percent want to. So to me, I see scope for both private schooling and homeschooling. Like, I don't know if we're gonna see a lot more growth in charter schooling because we're sort of lining up with what people want. I definitely see there being scope for growth in both private and homeschooling, because there's more people who said they would like to do it if they could. But still, let's just say go ahead.

SPEAKER_02: 1:03:42

I'll just throw microschooling in there as a word that's kind of a hybrid between it is a private school, but it feels a lot like homeschooling. So, like if people knew the word micro school, which very few people do still, maybe they would choose microschool.

SPEAKER_00: 1:03:54

Totally. And again, this kind of also goes back to our conversation where this is this is like there's no obstacles, there's no options, which is obviously are always gonna exist. So like it's never gonna look like this when we're done. But even if you think about that. 41% of people, the even in this system, the largest single sector of education would be public schooling. Right? Like the plurality of the still choosing that. Yeah, 41% of people still won public schools. Public schools would still be the largest sector in America. So even under like full, unencumbered, do whatever the hell you want to choice, public schools would still be the largest thing here. So again, that's another thing that I say to public school people where it's like the public schools are gonna go away. I'm like, I don't think that that's actually the case.

SPEAKER_02: 1:04:34

So we always say at Prenda, real quick, the the thing that we always say at Prenda is like the best way for Prenda to go out of business is that neighborhood schools get so much better that no one would want to leave. Like in that situation, I like sleep very well at night.

SPEAKER_00: 1:04:47

I'd go do something. Closed Prenda.

SPEAKER_02: 1:04:49

Like, great, we don't need that. Awesome.

SPEAKER_00: 1:04:50

I'd go do yeah, I would very happily go do a job somewhere else. Yeah. You know, there's any number of other careers that I would like to pursue, and I would I would go I would go do that. So the last thing I would just say is this question of why. Why are people choosing schools? Why are they leaving certain schools? So we asked this question about, you know, the school that you're of parents who've made choices, looking at like the school that they left and what were issues that they had with the school that they left. Okay. Number one answer, bullying. Wow. 31% of families telling us that. 30% say excessive stress or anxiety, 28% saying academic needs not being met, 25% difficulty with teachers, um, and then it sort of goes goes from there. But interestingly, the sort of academic element, which again comes in a lot of these conversations about people think that school choice is entirely driven by academics or that the most academically gifted or whatever people would leave. Turns out like that's not the most common answer of what people are talking about. They're talking about bullying, they're talking about mental health, they're talking about those issues of moving kids from from one place to another. And again, and and and stuff like that, like just is not really ever part of the school choice conversation, at least it's sort of like the policy level. People generally talk about academic indicators and others, and it's like, well, that may not be the primary thing that's motivating a lot of parents. And again, if your kid is getting bullied, what you what the school's math scores are not really that important, right? Yeah. Or if your kid is miserable, you know, doesn't matter if they got a great English teacher. Yeah. Exactly. Like people don't really care about, you know, again, if they've got a robotics team or not, right? Like there are some basic things that people need to. And I think, look, my two sense of why in the growth of micro schools and hybrid schooling, homeschooling, and others is much smaller, tighter knit communities where kids are known and understood, and where you can convey, you know, you can just create respectful, supportive environments that are really challenging to do in very large institutions.

SPEAKER_02: 1:06:53

Yeah, that's interesting. Your numbers that you shared about bowling actually line up almost perfectly with our internal polling of kids, asking them about their pre-prenda experience. We get like 30% of kids telling us that they were bullied. And the numbers at Prenda are way lower because if you're in a group of 10, it still happens. Sure. But it's like there's an adult watching you like and creating a culture that's connected. And I mean, if you look at uh have you heard of self-determination theory? I haven't. We talk about it a lot on the on the Kindled podcast. If you're a longtime listener, you've heard me talk about this a lot. But it's just it's one of the the most well-supported psychological like kind of frameworks about our basic psychological needs. Like every human needs connection relationship, every human needs to feel competent, and we call that like a sense of mastery, or like that's why we personalized learning to meet the that need for competency, and they need to feel a sense of autonomy. And so all of those things are really hard to do, they're hard to deliver at scale, right? When I'm running that big school, I I can't let kids choose what they want because I have I have standards, I have this system that I'm implementing. I can't spend a lot of time building relationships because I have a lot, I'm spread thin as a teacher, right? I have a lot of things, and then I can't give everyone a personalized education because I can only one thing can come out of my mouth at a time, right? So really hard to deliver on that. And that's where we see those low mental health scores.

SPEAKER_01: 1:08:10

Totally.

SPEAKER_02: 1:08:11

And kids looking to bully because they're looking for connection, they're looking for dominance. Like, you know, we get all these like psychological things going on. You pull these kids out into homeschool or private school, a smaller setting, those needs get met, the mental health shoots up. And then chakra, they start doing better academically. So that's kind of the story that I'm seeing broadly. But as soon as schools are able to meet those needs, like, I don't see a need. Like I love public school, I love public education. I think it's so, so important, so foundational to our country, and want to see it thrive, want to see it do well. But I also care deeply about students more than I care about that preserving the preserving like the nostalgic system. Like if it's almost like, you know, like the national union of like typists, like in the 50s or 60s, whatever. Like they're really good at typewriters. Yeah. It's like, well, we don't don't let computers in here because like we would lose our typing jobs. And we're just like, there's still some typing to be done on a computer. Like your skills will transfer, but it's gonna look different. And maybe like, or like the telephone operator. Yeah. It's like, well, we don't need to have like rows and rows of people doing this, plugging telephones connections in, but like there's still like really important, valuable work to be done. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:09:17

But you may find like far more fulfilling and enjoyable. For sure. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 1:09:22

Yeah. So I I feel like it's we're just kind of like all realizing like what the future of education looks like and what society looks like and how we can preserve the things that are important to us, keep kids at the center. And I think that school choice seems like a powerful way to to keep families and kids at the center and to we just need to like make the connection of like these things are still going to preserve all of the things that we hold dear.

SPEAKER_00: 1:09:44

Yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_02: 1:09:46

Anytime, anytime things change, it's hard.

SPEAKER_00: 1:09:48

Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_02: 1:09:51

Okay, any um thoughts? I'd love to know. I know this is going long, but uh where do you think school choice will and education will be in like 10 years? I mean predictions.

SPEAKER_00: 1:10:00

Yeah, I mean, like these school choice programs, like Texas just passed that law recently. I mean, we're looking at now, like over the course of the next couple years, something like half of American school children living in a state where they would be eligible for one of these programs. Now, a lot of these programs that they're technically universal in that they're like, you know, anybody can participate, but they're not really universal because either there's not enough funding for them or even like what people can choose is kind of restricted. So I think there's gonna be a lot more policy work on that front to make these universal programs actually universal. Where, you know, everybody who wants to participate can. So so that's I think like on the policy front where where it's going. It's like making universal programs truly universal. I think enrollment in these is just going to grow. You know, I I think we see, you know, what was it, Tennessee last week or something like they launched a new program, and in the first weekend it was open and like thousand tens of thousands of people signing up for it. Louisiana's got this problem, the very good problem now. They launched the Gator Act, which is of course the very Louisiana of them, which is like an ESA program. And, you know, what was it, 40,000 kids applied for it, and now they're like, oh, well, we we were thinking it was gonna be like six or seven. Well, now we gotta find the money for it, and you know. So those are the sort of issues that I think that are be coming up. But I mean, I just see I just see continued pretty steady growth in these.

SPEAKER_02: 1:11:24

Love that. Okay, wrap-up question where can people learn more about your work?

SPEAKER_00: 1:11:29

EdChoice.org.

SPEAKER_02: 1:11:31

There you go. And you can also track, I love EdChoice as a resource because if you're interested in what school choice looks like in your state, very helpful resources on edchoice.com to go look at your state and to to know like how if you want to bring school choice to your state, how you can get involved in advocacy and making that happen. Okay, final question: Who has been someone in your life who has encouraged you, motivated you, or kindled get it, your love of learning, your passion to help you become who you are? Who's that person?

SPEAKER_00: 1:12:00

So I want to give a shout out. Unfortunately, passed away, I think, in the last year, my high school English teacher. I had the same teacher for my freshman, junior, and senior year. So as someone who writes for a living now, giving a shout-out to probably the most formative person in my writing. His name was Andy Hagadorn. But what I want to give him a particular shout out for, and I think is something that we need more today, he was very demanding. He was a challenging teacher. He had super high standards. And it took me a long time, only until I was sort of a teacher myself and even probably beyond that, to realize that like that's someone who actually cares about you. Like the teacher who makes life easy and is like the cool teacher that everybody loves, like, doesn't actually care about you the way the person who's like, I'll be unpopular and I'll be difficult and you won't like me sometimes because I'm gonna push you to be the best that you can be. And look, I worry, and even in like even in the world of school choice and others, you know, that there's a temptation to sort into schools that are easier. No, hey, you know, it's a place where you're gonna get easy A's, you'll have a high GPA, maybe it'll help you get into college, whatever.

SPEAKER_01: 1:13:12

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:13:13

And so I think just from a sort of cultural or sort of perspective, to continue to push, like, no, we need to valorize like teachers in schools that hold high standards, because that's actually what it means to care about kids, is to say, like, I believe in you, you're capable of more than this, and I'm not going to accept less than that, even if that makes you angry, even if that makes your parents angry, even if it's like you can do better than this. So, shout out to Mr. Haggadorn. The world needs more of them. It certainly kindled to me. I don't think I would be the writer or person that I am today if someone at that formative time in my life hadn't said, do better, do better, do better, do better, do better. And I try to continue doing that today.

SPEAKER_02: 1:13:53

I love that. Mike McShane, thanks for coming on the Kindle Podcast.

SPEAKER_00: 1:13:56

Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_02: 1:13:57

The Kindled Podcast is brought to you by Prenda. Prenda makes it easy to start and run an amazing microschool based on all the ideas we talk about here on the Kindled Podcast. Don't forget to follow us on social media at PrendaLearn. And if you'd like more information about starting a microschool, just go to prenda.com. Thanks for listening, and remember to keep Kindling.