Freedom to Learn

Tommy Schultz on School Choice Wins, NAEP Losses, & Federal Education Freedom Opportunities

• Ginny Gentles • Season 1 • Episode 9

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Tommy Schultz, CEO of the American Federation for Children, joins Freedom to Learn for a deep dive into the state of school choice in America. From exciting wins in expanding school choice across the nation to major developments ahead in Texas and at the federal level, Tommy breaks down the game-changing progress happening right now. We also take a hard look at the powerful role of teachers' unions in blocking real reform, fueling learning loss, and ultimately harming students and educators. Plus, with the latest Nation’s Report Card (NAEP) alarming reading and math results revealing an ongoing undeclared state of emergency in K-12 education, Tommy makes the case that giving parents control over their children’s education is crucial for the future of America’s students.

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Ginny Gentles (00:00)
Welcome to Freedom to Learn, the podcast that champions choice in education, defends parental rights, and exposes the harm caused by school unions. I'm Ginny Gentles, Director of Education, Freedom, and Parental Rights at DFI, the Defense of Freedom Institute in Washington, DC.


Tommy Schultz (0:21)

The next six to nine months, both in a bunch of states and at the federal level, huge opportunities to really fundamentally change and create this revolution in our K-12 system that as the NAEP scores just showed, it's so desperately needed. We really are in this undeclared state of emergency in American education. We have the political window opportunity to fix all that this year.

Ginny Gentles (0:43)

The latest Nation's Report Card or NAEP test scores were released this week and the news nationwide and from virtually every state is bleak. Scores continue to decline for our nation's 4th and 8th grade students and already struggling students are falling further behind. With a few exceptions, students in the K-12 public education system have not recovered from the alarming drop in math and reading scores since pre-pandemic NAEP testing was done in 2019.

Tommy Schultz, CEO of the American Federation for Children, joins us today to provide a path forward. AFC advocates for empowering families, especially lower income families, with the freedom to choose the best K-12 education for their children. Tommy shares some recent education freedom victories, including a growing number of states that offer families education savings accounts (ESAs), and previews what to expect this year at the state and federal levels.


Tommy Schultz, happy National School Choice Week and welcome to Freedom to Learn.


Tommy Schultz (1:44)

Thanks for having me, Ginny. Excited to chat.


Ginny Gentles (1:47)

Does the AFC team have special plans to celebrate School Choice Week?


Tommy Schultz (1:51)

We sort of celebrate School Choice Week every week, but yes, we've got a lot of festivities going on both across the country and in DC. Look, it's been a real revolution over the last few years in terms of School Choice expansions that our team's been at the front lines of kind of orchestrating and working with lawmakers and winning elections to kind of get us to this point. So there is much to celebrate and we've got a few big marquee wins potentially this year that we're working on. So all the more reason that we need to kind of toast for just a bit this week.


Ginny Gentles (2:22)

There is a lot to celebrate during National School Choice Week and all year round when it comes to education freedom. What are some recent victories that you're particularly excited about?


Tommy Schultz (2:31)

Look, there were a chunk of states last year that had passed legislation during an election year, which is quite rare. You got, you know, Alabama to Louisiana, a few expansions and a few other states. But, and so, that's just sort of remarkable in the context of school choice history. As you know, over the last 25, 30 years of pushing for these big reforms, both in charter schools and in private school choice, usually during the election year, lawmakers get very scared. They say, “I don't want to tempt the teachers unions and their political war chest.”


So all of a sudden, when you see dozens and dozens of states proposing legislation and a chunk of them passing it during an election year, that really says a lot. And we got really close in Texas. The governor even called extra sessions, you know, went into overtime to try and get a massive piece of school choice legislation done in Texas that sadly fell short because 21 Republicans blocked that legislation at the end of the day. Most of them aren't returning to this legislative session in Texas, and essentially we have a clear path to getting school choice done in Texas after a 30 year fight. 


And then coming up this year too, I know we'll probably talk a bit more about this later, the federal school choice initiative has a shot on goal to actually get done. And this has been the dream for many, many people, for many states that just really have no political appetite because of either the teachers unions dominating politics at their state level such that they would never be able to pass any sort of robust school choice mechanism. The federal bill is going to be the kind of godsend for that. So more to come.


Ginny Gentles (3:59)

You mentioned the teachers unions twice. Sometimes I'm surprised in my Freedom to Learn conversations when teachers unions don't come up until the end because they are such a big barrier to addressing all of the problems in K-12 education. They don't prioritize learning loss, chronic absenteeism, discipline, and they are certainly a barrier to implementing passing school choice programs and expanding them. What is it that they do specifically?


Tommy Schultz (4:22)

It's multifaceted. So I mean, they're both a coalition leader, right? They obviously can call the plays in a lot of ways for the Superintendents Association, the School Boards Association, you this huge apparatus that essentially runs our schools day to day. And part of the reason that they're the shot caller for the coalition is that they're the money, right? So I usually, if I'm at an event or doing kind of some public gig talking about our issue or visiting with people who are new to the issue and they're asking questions, I'll ask them, you know, “What do you think that the unions, the big school unions, what we should really call them?” Right? Because they're not just employing teachers, they're employing any warm body within the school system as part of their union so that they can take their dues out of their paycheck every two weeks. I usually ask them, “How much do think they bring in per year?” And I give them an example that, you know, for instance, AFC last year, we deployed about $38 million across the country. How much do think the unions brought in? I'll get some estimates. Usually it's about an average, like, “I don't know, 300 million?” I'm like,


“You were close. It's about three billion,” and the jaws dropped, right? Because you think of they're usually and there's always turnover and staff and things like that, but they're usually, you know, bringing into their both two national unions and then all their state affiliates and how they're kind of always expanding the scope of they'll organize grads, students, they'll organize nurses, right? They're bringing in, they have about 3 million people giving dues on average of about a thousand bucks.


And those numbers may have creeped up now over last couple of years, but that's just some of the latest federal data and some of the investigative reporting by Michael Antonucci from a couple of years ago. Then when you really collect the entire sum of what they're controlling, and this is just going into a politically influential war chest, that is substantial, right? And compare that to presidential elections in recent years where the sum total being spent on a presidential election might be two or $3 billion.


You get a sense of just how powerful they are in the scheme of things. And then when you throw in the fact that like when it comes to bond, you know, when they're voters are going to the ballot on bond mechanisms or they're, pushing kind of hostile school choice referenda to the ballot box, they're able to also operate basically illegally without, you know, any consequence, but they can push the button to every school employee which should be technically illegal, right? You can't use government resources to do electioneering. They still do it. We catch them all the time. There's generally no recourse, but they just have these mechanisms both with cash coalition and then this kind of gray and flat out illegal area of the law that they get to operate within without any issue. So hence why school choice is so important. This equation. If you shift the power and control of the funding to the parents rather than to these bureaucrats or the kind of the union bosses total game changer in how we operate within education.


Ginny Gentles (7:05)

And the main unions that we're talking about are the National Education Association, the NEA, currently led by Becky Pringle, and the American Federation of Teachers, which is a misnomer, led by Randi Weingarten. AFT actually is an amalgamation of a bunch of different bargaining units, including like health care workers and- 


Tommy Schultz (7:22)

You've got it.


Ginny Gentles (7:23)

-public servants broadly and a higher ed. Not the sweet local teacher who cares about your kid and you're so grateful for. This is a political apparatus that, as you said, has a heck of a lot of money and power and will continue to unless we do something about that. 


I want to jump to a topic that's in the news a lot this week and that's the latest results from the Nation's Report Card, which is also known as NAEP. So those NAEP results, they were for 4th and 8th graders, math and reading, and they showed that especially for the students who were already struggling, we are not recovering from devastating learning loss caused by closures, caused by union enforced policies, caused by ongoing problems in the K-12 system. When you hear about learning loss, when you hear about the NAEP results, what's your reaction?


Tommy Schultz (8:13)

Every time I see any bit of new data coming out from this K-12 system that we've essentially put on autopilot and created back in the 1860s, right? And that the unions fully control with their power, their money. And when you see the radical reaction that the unions had by shutting down schools for upwards of two years, who does that hurt the most, right? This is what makes you really sick at night. It hurts the vulnerable kids the most. 


Families who have financial means or can figure out ways to kind of deal with union strikes or the two year strikes that we've had essentially over COVID. They're able to, it's very difficult, but they can figure it out and make ends meet or shuffle job things around. Again, the poor kids, the kids in poverty, they're going to be the ones hurt the most by this. So that's what makes me most sick about the antics from the unions that they put on year over year, but especially during that timeframe where they said, “Let's use this potential public health crisis to fulfill our political agenda,” which was, “We're going to get $192 billion.


from the taxpayers for COVID learning loss and reopening,” right? And teachers should start to wonder, “Wait, where is that money going? What happened to that money?” But when you look at this learning loss, when you're seeing especially the bottom fallout for the most vulnerable kids, we are in an undeclared state of emergency in this country when it comes to education. That's the bottom line. When some of the metrics that you're seeing were back to 1970s level of, know, whether it's math, reading, you name it, or in some of the cases, they're like, “Look, this is the worst we've seen since we've studied it in the 90s when we began taking certain parts of this test.” You know, what does it say that we have just deployed trillions and trillions of dollars over these decades to basically stay flat or worse?


That should really be unsettling for a lot of people, for policy makers, for the people that have been running this K through 12 system.


If you're just a monopoly, you get more money, the worse you perform, what is the incentive to actually change anything? So again, it's heartbreaking when you really take it down to the student level and just realize how far some students are behind and how, as we've just all known for decades, that at certain benchmarks, 4th grade, 8th grade, if you're so far behind in certain aspects, you're never going to catch up. And it's just, it's horrible. I mean, this is generally the root cause of poverty for so much of our society and it has really horrible effects long-term for us. So we have to put school choice policies in now to actually start to get ahead of this, to start to fix this for future generations. That's my message.


Ginny Gentles (10:34)

State legislative sessions are gearing up and I'd love to hear what states are on the horizon and what you're seeing starting to move through legislatures. I'd say Texas, of course, but have they started their session yet?


Tommy Schultz (10:46)

Yeah, they started the beginnings of it all. So last week, actually, the House and Senate announced their budget, kind of, that they're putting together and both House and Senate said we want a billion dollars set aside for the first year of this ESA program, which, that would make that the single biggest first year program in American history for school choice. Before Florida, for instance, did their massive expansion, I know you've worked in Florida, you know the details of all this. 


But before they did their massive expansion, they were at about like a little north of about a billion dollars across all the programs going out to families. That was just two or three years ago. So the fact that Texas is going to start at that funding level and then that's only going to grow over time because, as you know, these things get more popular, parents love it. The demand just kind of keeps up with the supply essentially. I'm excited for what that's going to really do to fundamentally change and create a tipping point in American education. Currently, 37% of kids are eligible for a private school choice program.


If Texas goes full throttle like we hope it will, that puts it at above 50% of American kids, let alone if we pass the federal bill. And then other states, Tennessee, South Carolina, Idaho, New Hampshire, there's movement across all these different states. You could even see something in the Dakotas. Some of these aren't gonna be the big massive expansions that we saw like in 2023, for instance. But I think this is really, again, that tipping point finally, especially if we get this federal piece of legislation done.


The revolution has begun, and we're on a whole new trajectory essentially where this is about building new schools. This is about opening up even more pathways for kids to access ESAs in unique ways beyond just the traditional brick and mortar style of schooling, right? So this is gonna be the most exciting 10 years in America and education history in my opinion. It's gonna be the golden age of education in my opinion. And now it's time to build, right? Entrepreneurship can really start to flourish. 


Schools that have already been doing a ton of philanthropic fundraising to try and meet a population like we've been talking about with the NAEP scores, vulnerable, low income students. Now they're going to have a more stable funding base with all of the state funding mechanisms now. This is just going to be so exciting to see the unit economic change resulting in a massive revolutionary change at the state and macro levels when it comes to education funding, when it comes to academic performance and improvement, when it comes to parental satisfaction, right? 


Because if parents are just stuck in a district zoned type of system, you know, unless you can figure a way to get around that, like you're generally not going to be happy if your students aren't performing. So big things ahead, Ginny.


Ginny Gentles (13:16)

$1 billion for school choice or education freedom in Texas sounds like a mighty big number. It is a big number.


Tommy Schultz (13:22)

It is, yep.


Ginny Gentles (13:23)

It's a billion. But how much did the state spend on K-12, the public K-12 system each year?


Tommy Schultz (13:27)

It usually shocks people when you find out. Yeah, Texas spends about 90 plus billion dollars on public education. And it's only, you know, it only grows year over year. And even when the deal got killed the last session, I mean, there was, you know, an additional six or seven billion dollars that was getting thrown, you know, for teacher pay raises, other things within the public system. So that was really the death knell for many of these legislators that oppose this package. It says, yeah, we're to give a pretty modest amount for school choice. 


At that time, the bill was kind of getting down to about $500 million. And then you're going to get like six or seven billion for public schools. Many people in those districts were going, “Wait a minute, why did you kill this deal?” And now the, you know, the pot is only getting sweeter for families wanting to control their child's education funding, of course. So yeah, in the context of it all, as you said, Ginny, when you're talking 90 plus billion dollars and they're basically filibustering or killing a deal that might give $1 billion to families to control on their own, not a political winner.


Ginny Gentles (14:26)

Right, the unions will make sure that they imply that any dollar amount, one billion, one million, whatever that dollar amount is, it of course is hurting the system and how could you do that? But is it hurting the students? No, it's freeing up the students to find an educational path that's the best fit for their needs. 


So opposition to education freedom proposals doesn't always just come from the typical union and union controlled groups. So what are your responses to some of the things that you're hearing from the opponents on the left, and on the right?


Tommy Schultz (14:56)

Look, it's funny how the arguments haven't really changed over the last 30 years, which sort of shows and gives you a sense of the weakness of the other side's position when they're like, when they can only talk about, you know, “This is defunding public schools.” That's kind of their main argument that they see as their political winner. What you have to laugh about there is like, wait a minute, take the premise of the argument, right, that they're making, which is we know if we open up and give parents control of the funding, parents are going to flee for the exits, right? And therefore that's how they're going to lose money in the district system. You know, again, do they ever wrestle with the premise of that, that they know they're basically telling us with their own arguments, they're offering an inferior product to parents? also when you look at how these school choice programs actually operate within the state level, right? The parent that is going to use the ESA just by the nature of how funding laws are written in the state, basically parents are only taking maybe upwards of 60, 70% of the funding that their student would have otherwise gotten in the school district. And that's been always their kind of argument is that, “Oh, this takes away funding, this takes away funding.” But they don't also tell their teachers, “Well, we've been increasing funding, but not paying you that much more year over year.”


When you look at the stats, when it's like over the last 20 years, know, 88% increase in administrative and bureaucratic kind of positions within the school system, but there's only been like an 8% increase in students, 8% increase in teachers. It's like the teachers need to ask “What's going on there. Where is this money going?” Right? Let alone that huge cash influx from COVID Where did all that money go? 


And I love the New York times like headline about that where the superintendents are like, yeah, it's difficult to track. I mean, that tells you everything you need to know, right? So the arguments haven't changed. On the left, it's again been this notion of, “Well we need to fully fund public schools.” And it's like, okay, we're spending a trillion dollars on public schools on average 20K per kid. That's only been increasing year over year over year.


From the right, there's always some novel argument that says, hey this is potentially government control of private schools, which again, these are fully opt-in programs. Parents can choose to participate or not. Private schools can choose to participate or not. We've done a very good job when we actually are able to be really influential within the legislative process of protecting private school autonomy, putting in mechanisms such that the government can't control kind of aspects of their curriculum, hiring and firing practices, you name it. And we've learned some of those lessons from the charter school realm where the charter schools, unfortunately, if you look at places that are the most over-regulated and there's a bookshelf of regulations like I have behind me for charter schools, I mean, that's not what we want because that's, if you're just basically creating a public or district school light, that's not gonna work. And we want private schools to have autonomy. 


We want teachers to be able to, build new schools, the micro school movement. It's so exciting right that educators who left the public school system are saying, “I want to build something that I know will work.” We're seeing those flourishing places like Florida and Arizona in particular. I'm assuming Texas soon. That's the kind of thing that, you know all the arguments that come at us you're able to basically suppress them because you show the real-world impact of what's happening in Florida. 


And even, you know, one argument Ginny that we always hear from a lot of people especially in the rural sector of America, they're like, “Well, look, private schools, there aren't any private schools in my district and therefore there isn't one for 20 miles.” Well, if I'm in the room, I usually get to say, well, I grew up on a farm. My parents were willing to drive me a pretty long way to go to a modest tuition private school, a little Catholic school in our town, and then even further for high school. Families in rural America, they're used to driving 25, 35 minutes if they need you to go to the, you know, to go to the shopping mall, to go to the store. It's not a crazy thing to say, “I want to get my kid a better education. I'm willing to drive a little bit to do it.”


But then the Brookings Institution data, shows that 92% of Americans live within 10 miles of a private school, and that's like 67% of Americans in rural counties live within 10 miles of a private school. When you go through the data and then you show that Florida in their rural counties have actually doubled the number of private schools over the last 25 years, again, you really show the facts, the arguments go away. And that's why over the last couple of years, you've just seen this explosion of private school choice programs getting written into law state by state by state.


Ginny Gentles (19:08)

I want to talk about a couple of things that are swirling around DC and issues that we might hear during the confirmation hearing for Linda McMahon, who has been nominated to serve as Secretary of Education at the US Department of Education. Her nomination hearing should be coming up in February. 


Something that came up during Secretary DeVos's hearing was this issue of school choice hurts students with disabilities and it takes away their federal rights to free appropriate public education. Shouldn't a federal school choice program, and probably in the questioner's mind state programs as well, make sure that that free appropriate public education those rights are guaranteed? How do you respond to that?


Tommy Schultz (19:55)

Yeah, look, like with any argument against school choice that our opponents try to gin up, when you explain the facts and you explain what really goes on, I mean, everything washes away. So when it comes to special education, there are dozens and dozens of states that have special education, private school choice programs where you are uniquely eligible for a certain type of private school choice program because your student has special needs. And why is that? Right. It's because parents want it. Any parent that has a child with extraordinary needs that has to battle the school district, I mean,


We always hear thousands of examples every single year that come inbound to us saying, “The IEP, they're not fulfilling it. There's all these issues. I've been at war with the school district meetings, lawyers,” you name it. I like how our opponents try to paint that the special education is just all fine and dandy in the public system. It's really not. 


And every single day, you know, public schools are putting children with special needs into private schools as part of private placement because they're either not fulfilling their needs, this private school may have a better accommodation for them. And secondly, the kind of the baseline premise where they're like, your rights are being taken away. Your rights, you know, just by definition can't be taken away, right? This is a fundamental aspect of American society. Essentially, it's a technical argument they're trying to make, but then they blow it up into a political issue. 


But if you're going to a private school, using a private school choice program, you're not essentially saying we're getting the guarantees that the district school students get, saying you get all X, Y, and Z things because naturally if a private school can't accommodate a certain aspect of your child's learning or your individual plan that they're given, right, it's odd to say that well now they need to and they're forced to. It's like well if we can't do it then that's, you're not really serving the child. So it's essentially saying look if you want to go right back to the district school and get all of that kind of aspect of the FAPE process, right, you have it, you always have it, it never goes away.


But again, if you're going into a private school choice program that says it's designed for special needs, you get more services, you get more funding. And if you can find the place that accommodates their needs, you can go do that. And again, we have thousands of parents that are overjoyed, state by state by state, because of this new arrangement and parents are put in control, right? Unlike with the district process where you're really not. So yeah, I'm sure this will come up in the confirmation hearing. But again, it's pretty easy to bat down when you break it down into its component parts.


Ginny Gentles (22:13)

There's a misconception that these private schools are just the elite private schools that are sending the kids off to Ivy League schools and they can't serve students with special needs. Not true. That's not true and wasn't true in my personal experience with my children. 

All right, we need to talk about that federal tax credit that you referenced a couple of times before we wrap up. What are you seeing at the federal level as far as work that's going on that could support and complement what AFC is doing at the state level?


Tommy Schultz (22:45)

Sure. What I'm seeing is excitement, momentum, the taste of victory on the horizon. Right now, I mean, you have scholarship groups in every community, every state, all across the country. 


They are getting charitable dollars from individuals. Those charitable dollars are getting a tax deduction, right? So someone donates a dollar, they're maybe getting 30 cents or so off of their tax bill to kind of, and this has just been a part of American philanthropic and kind of the fabric of our country that we want to foster philanthropy and charity. And now this federal tax credit is a mechanism that's modeled off about 21 states that already have it in place at the state level, which says, no, no, we believe education is so fundamentally important that we want to incentivize that further with further charitable contributions.” So the federal tax credit essentially says, rather than a deduction, you get a full dollar credit. So you donate a dollar, that's a dollar that comes off of your tax bill.


What's so exciting about that is, let's say for round numbers, $100 billion is going out for scholarships for needy kids in this country. Just overnight because of the tax math, you could potentially triple that. And what's so exciting about that is that there's millions and millions of kids, thousands and thousands of schools that have a tricky financial model. They're trying to serve these high need kids or kids in poverty. And like you said, this misconception by some people that, “Oh, all these private schools are elite,” right? When a huge majority of them state by state, their tuition is about, you know, between $6 and $8 thousand versus again, we're spending 20 thousand in the public schools on average, or in places like New York, the New York Post just did that investigation showing New York spending like $36,000 per kid. When you start to think about the unit economics of each of these schools and their financial model, if they're able to get more charitable funding going to help those kids, you know, they can pay their great teachers better. I mean,


think of all the choice programs that are in existence across, you know, the 30 plus states, all of these programs that are like Florida or Arizona, potentially Texas here soon, giving out roughly $8,000 basically that parents can control for their child's education per kid per year. If you're then supplementing that with federally incentivized charitable dollars, that might get that student up to about 10,000 per year that they're getting for state and federal money, federally incentivized money. So then again, you're creating more opportunities for schools to grow, micro schools to get created, financial models to be stabilized.


And it's just so exciting that, you know, if you look at the average scholarship that's going out from a scholarship group in the country, it's about $5,000 per kid. If you're able to just kind of take that basic math, the current federal tax credit bill is about $10 billion. You can help 2 million kids potentially, but then you really think about, no, no, there's gonna be some scholarships that are just giving out maybe a thousand or $2,000 for families on the margin. So, I mean you're talking potentially 10 million kids that could be impacted by this.


It's just a total game changer. And this is why the unions are fighting so hard because they know families are going to love this. They don't want this to get on the books. And this is really going to be the death knell, I think, for the teachers unions power and control of our country's K-12 system. The bill has 130 plus co-sponsors in the house, 30 plus in the Senate. President Trump, when he was campaigning on education, is kind of two big marquee promises where, end the Department of Education and School Choice.


This is the most ready-made, ready-to-go school choice legislation for the kind of technical purposes. There's other ideas out there and we support those kind of expansions to 529s and all that. But for the reconciliation bill purposes that's going to be debated and potentially passed by Memorial Day, is what some of them are saying. Never predict what Congress will do and what the timelines will be, but this can go right now and this would be a quick, for the president and his supporters, this is a quick promise kept on school choice within the first theoretical hundred days. 


But yeah, this is why it's so exciting. This has been something we've been working on for the last seven or eight years, and now it's on the goal line. so exciting things ahead in places like California, New York, and then all the other states that already have programs. I mean, they're either gonna get their program, get an opportunity to have a private school choice mechanism for the first time, or the states that already have these kind of great robust programs going, they're gonna be able to increase and augment the size of their programs going forward.


Ginny Gentles (27:04)

What actions can listeners take to support that federal tax credit? In the last Congress, it was called the Educational Choice for Children Act, ECCA. What would you encourage listeners to do?


Tommy Schultz (27:15)

Yeah, look, I think the old adage, I mean, call your congressman, right? But you can go to our website just for a quick, easy way to kind of get plugged in there, SchoolChoiceNow.org. 


Or, you know, look, if you're involved in a private school, your kid's involved, you you've been on a board of a private school, your kids are going to private school, make your boards and your kind of your leadership of your schools aware that this is coming because it's shocking how many times I'll talk to people locally or when I'm doing a kind of a road show of sorts. They're just not aware that this is maybe coming down the pipeline and even scholarship groups too. You have huge influence with kind of the political process to show, hey, we would be willing to, you know, take in more funding and more donations. We're already serving all these kids. There's a great scholarship group in the Bay area that I know they're serving all these kids, but there's a huge wait list for scholarships. And it's just, there's a funding need there. And there's, you know, thousands and thousands of empty seats in private schools that are currently existing, you know, city by city that could be filled if there was a scholarship mechanism that could help a child get into that school. 


So this is where it's like, get involved, talk to your senators, talk to your federal delegation about this, tell them why you support it. And really demand it too, for those that are, there's always going to be somebody wobbly in Congress about any bill that goes through Congress. For those that supported President Trump, this is one of his campaign promises. This would be an easy victory and people need to urge and kind of get the grassroots momentum further engaged on this. So yeah, a few different ways to break that down.


If you are already involved in kind of a private school or you're involved in a scholarship group, you gotta get engaged in the process because you're going to be really a key component of this. And yeah, parents just need to talk about how much they support this, how they're frustrated with their current district for some reason. They want another option for their kid. It's so important for the future of this country.


Ginny Gentles (29:02)

You mentioned School Choice Now is the AFC website. How else can people find out more about your work?


Tommy Schultz (29:08)

If you're on social, like I feel like everybody is, @schoolchoicenow is an easy way to just find out what we're doing, what we're pushing. Again, the next six to nine months, both in a bunch of states and at the federal level, huge opportunities to really fundamentally change and create this revolution in our K-12 system that as the NAEP scores just showed, it's so desperately needed. We really are in this undeclared state of emergency in American education. We have the political window opportunity to fix all that this year. So get involved.


Ginny Gentles (29:38)

Absolutely. Tommy, thank you so much for your commitment to education freedom and empowering parents. And thank you for joining Freedom to Learn.


Tommy Schultz (29:44)

Ginny, thank you for always being a warrior and for being in this fight for so long. Big things are going to happen this year and I treasure being in the trenches with you.


Ginny Gentles (29:55)
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