Liberty, Parents, and the School Choice Debate w/ Jason Bedrick, Heritage Foundation

What happens when your zip code determines your child’s future?

In this episode, Will and Josh talk with Jason Bedrick, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy, to unpack the complex—and often contentious—landscape of school choice. Bedrick shares his 20+ year journey in education reform, tracing his advocacy for parental rights and religious liberty back to a post-9/11 awakening and Milton Friedman’s theories.

The conversation explores vouchers, education savings accounts (ESAs), the history and distortion of school choice post-Brown v. Board, and how pandemic-era frustrations accelerated parental engagement. Bedrick also addresses the tension between religious freedom and government schooling, pushing back on claims that school choice fuels segregation or undermines civic unity.

If you’re wondering how school choice intersects with parental rights, government responsibility, First Amendment protections, or the values debate in public schools, this episode is a must-listen.
Subscribe, share, and join the conversation as we examine what true educational freedom looks like—and who gets to decide.

👤 Guest Bio
Jason Bedrick is a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy, where he focuses on education freedom, religious liberty, and classical education. A former New Hampshire state legislator, Bedrick has spent over two decades working in the school choice movement and is one of the nation's most prominent voices advocating for education savings accounts and parental rights.

Transcript

0:17

Hey, welcome back, Faithful Politics listeners and watchers. If you're watching on our YouTube channel, thank you so much for being here. I am your political host, Will Wright, and I'm joined by your faithful host, Pastor Josh Bertram. How's it going, Josh? And today I am so excited to talk to our guest today, Jason Bedrick, who is a research fellow in the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation, where he focuses on policies and promote education, freedom and choice. religious liberty, classical education, and restoring the primary role of families and education. And we are just so glad to have you here with us to talk about school choice. Thanks for being here, Jason. Yeah, well, I have to ask because I asked this on most of our guests, uh sort of like the origin story of how you got into the field you got into. mean, uh reading your your quick bio does it no justice. So can you maybe just start us off by you know, tell us a little bit more about who you are and then why did you get into this world of education? Sure, great question. uh I was originally supposed to go into the family business, was selling furniture in New Hampshire. And I even went to a business school, my father's alma mater, Babson College, with that in mind. And then, uh you know, just a couple weeks into my freshman year was 9-11. And, you know, uh so what's the connection between 9-11 education policy? There's not a direct one except to say that it opened my eyes to world of politics, first international politics and then uh domestic. uh And I had always loved education and had a passion for learning. and it was really in my uh junior year poli sci class that I had that you had to tackle one issue and I chose education policy ah and that's where I became enamored with Milton Friedman's idea of school choice because I believe that the The American dream and the promise of America is predicated on a notion of a quality of opportunity. But if you've got some children that are assigned to a school based on the location of their parents' home, and they can only afford a home in an area that has lower quality schools, they don't have access to a quality of opportunity. And so it was Friedman who said that just because there's an argument for public subsidy of education doesn't mean that the government should be running the schools. And that it would be better to have the money fall the child to the school of the parents choice. So when I was in um when I was in college, I wrote that paper. There was a bill going through the New Hampshire legislature at the time that failed by a vote of 171 to 172. And it was like devastating for me. couldn't believe it. Right. And I remember having this conversation with my professor after class and he said, what are going to do about it? And I'm like, well, I'm 21 years old. I'm going to go back to my dorm. I'm going to have a pizza and some beer and, you know, play video games or something like, am I going to do about it? But that question haunted me. And so I ended up running for office as an independent originally in New Hampshire. I lost my first time around, but I won the second time My school choice bill went down in flames, ah but I came back a few years later, you know, in grad school and working with a local think tank and we got a school choice bill passed and I've been working in the school choice movement uh for 21 years and trying to expand that to all kids in all states. So I love that. Help us understand what school choice actually is. I hear a lot about it. I hear people argue about it. I hear some people say where I should have freedom to be able to send my students where my children were, where I want them to go, where the best thing, and then other people are, you're taking away money from underprivileged communities and populations. and it's white privilege or any number of things that can come out about it. What is school choice? And kind of demystify it for us and help us understand what it actually is. Sure, so school choice is an umbrella term that includes a wide variety of policies where the money follows the child to the learning environment to the parent's choice. uh At one end of the spectrum that could be inter-district public school choice. So you're moving from one district school to another school that is outside of your zoned district, but it's still a part of the broader public school, traditional public school system. uh Now charter schools are a public-private partnership. They function essentially like public schools. There's no tuition, entirely subsidized by the state. uh But they're run by private organizations. Most are non-profit, some are for-profit, but most are non-profit. And they have their own specific mission. So some might be classical education schools, some might be more progressive or Montessori, some might have a focus on You know, STEM, others might have a focus on the arts. so you can, know, parents could choose one of those schools. And then if there's oversubscription, there would be a lottery. uh Then you've got versions of private school choice. So there's the traditional voucher. That was the first type of private school choice that Milton Friedman was arguing for uh more than 50 years ago. uh So a voucher is like a coupon. So let's say the state is uh providing $8,000 per pupil. So the coupon might be for $7,000 and you can take that to a private school and redeem it. And so you go to a private school uh with uh a full or partial uh state subsidy. uh Then there's also something called education savings accounts. These are the the new kids on the block. They've only been around for about a decade. The funding mechanism is usually the same as with a voucher. So it's a portion of the state per pupil funding, nothing from the local school district, nothing from the feds, just that state portion. But you can use it for a wide variety of uh educational expenditures. So private school tuition is one, but you can use it for tutoring, textbooks, homeschool curricula, online learning, special needs therapy, and more. And you can roll over unused funds from year year. So school choice, like I said, is an term that really encompasses uh all of these different options. Got it. The ESA that you talked to, is that similar to like the 529 accounts or is that different? The name is unfortunate just because it is confusing. People think of ESA and they're usually thinking of the Coverdell or the 529 accounts that you're putting your own money into and you're saving for college. ah That's not what these accounts are. So a K-12 education savings account ah or in Arizona that we call them empowerment scholarship accounts. In New Hampshire, they're called education freedom accounts. In Wyoming, they're called Steamboat Scholarships. So they've got different names in different states. But the main difference between uh the voucher and the ESA is they're both tapping into state funding, usually something like 90 % of the state funds. But with a voucher, it's just a coupon you redeem in one place at one time. And with the ESA, you can spend it in a wide variety of places, and you can roll over unused funds to save for later expenditures. Those are the main differences. Got it. So with the vouchers, like, help me kind of understand that, is it literally just like a piece of paper, like an actual voucher, or is it just like something in the system that says, you know, this kid gets X dollar amount or something like that? Yeah, so it varies from state to state. There's usually not a little coupon. It's more of a metaphorical coupon. what you're going to do is you're going to... Golden ticket, right? You don't get the golden ticket in the mail. But usually there is a document that you're going to have to sign and then the state is going to provide the funding to the private school that you choose on your behalf. In the case of an ESA though, In some cases, they actually do have a literal debit card. So in Arizona, used to have everybody had a debit card. Now some families have debit cards, but most families have an online account, uh like a class wallet, similar to like a benefit wallet or something like that, where uh you can use that to either pay your tuition or you can go on Amazon Marketplace and there are certain things that you can purchase, uh only eligible items. uh and on and so forth. So when I was growing up, know, public school, you could have homeschool and we all thought homeschoolers were weirdos. um I'm sorry, that's not, that's just, you know, something silly, but you you had the homeschooling and then, and when I grew up, you know, learning more about, mean, I thought just public school or private school, that was really it. And that private was just for elites, you know, and people that could pay that kind of money. And they were the ones that got the great education. And we're... at the public schools and you had some home schools and the home schools that we don't they're they're weird private schools they're elite and then public schools. okay. Well, that's what most of us peons have to go and endure the public school system. But now like I you know, I became an adult and I've seen all these different, you know, options unschooling, um you know, let the kid do whatever they want homeschooling. public, private, voucher, STEM, all these different things. It can be like very confusing really to even as a parent figure out what is even best for my child. I have three children all in the public school system. And I guess my question for you is who are the stakeholders involved in this? And what are the incentives and incentive structures like part of it? I can think you have parents, you have students, right? But who else, maybe teachers, I guess, who else is involved in this where the decision makers and I guess what makes this so complicated? Why isn't education an easy thing? Why is it so complicated with all these different stakeholders? Good question. You know, certainly the parents and the students, those are the ones that are coming first. The students are the ones that are coming first, but the parents are the ones who know their kids best and love them most. And so they should be the ones that are most empowered to make decisions about their children. And why is it so complicated? Because human beings are complicated, right? And no two kids learn exactly the same. uh I excelled academically. I loved school. My siblings weren't, you know, they're very bright but they didn't like that schooling environment. I mean, I had a brother who never did his homework and he would always do very well on the tests. But he just had no desire to do the homework. was such a... He considered it just a complete waste of time. He wanted to spend all his time on the computer and he grew up to be a very successful computer programmer. ah know, so people are complicated and so education is complicated. uh And I think what we have learned, you know, with our great public schooling experiment, and something that was really that really hit home, especially during COVID, ah was that it doesn't really make a lot of sense to assign a kid to a school based in the location of his or her home. ah That, you know, we don't do that with really any other service in our lives, right? You've got lots of different options. You we don't say, okay, you live on this street, this is your doctor, right? We don't do that. uh So even in a given family, you know, one child might be a great fit for their local public school, uh but another child's, maybe they should be in a school that's focusing on STEM. Another child, maybe they're a better fit in a Montessori school. So we want to give those options to families and just let the money follow the child. Why does the government care so much about this? Do you think? mean, maybe people think it's obvious or, that's a weird dumb question, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on it because I think it's probably one of the most important questions outside of why do parents and students care? What's the government's part in this? What's their incentive in all this? I mean, so if you go all the way back to uh some of the founding fathers uh who had argued for a subsized education, there really wasn't a subsized education back then, but you can look at folks like Thomas Paine and then later in the mid 1800s, John Stuart Mill in On Liberty, uh they argued that our system of self-government depends upon an educated citizenry. uh Not every family is. financially equipped to provide their children with a quality education. And so that's where you have the argument for government subsidy uh to ensure that every child, you know, I did a great job choosing my parents, but not everyone have parents that can, you know, that are in that situation where they can choose a good school for their kids, right? You know, because we don't choose our parents, we should, we should have, we should ensure that every child gets access to a quality education. ah But that was Friedman's insight. That doesn't mean, just because there is a strong case for subsidizing education doesn't mean that the government should be the one that's actually running the schools and that we should then assign the kids to the school based in their home. Rather, let the money follow the child. So if we're gonna have the government subsidy, okay, that makes sense. But let the parents choose which school is working best for their kids and then they based on their personal experience can see, you know what, my child is not really doing well in the school. This is not the right fit. Let me move to a different school where they can thrive. ah So there is no perfect system. There are no ultimate solutions. There are only trade-offs. uh But we want to have the decision-making at the lowest, the level that is closest to those who are directly affected. And so that would be the level of the parents. You know, when I, well, I'll back up. We homeschooled our kids for a couple of years. My oldest had a bunch of serious medical issues. It just didn't really make sense for us to send them to public school. We were at a place financially where we were actually able to do it. um And, you know, we felt very blessed and it was a good experience. But. starting the homeschool process was not a very easy experience because we're like, what the heck? We're like, we'd like to see what the state said. We live in Virginia uh and got some resources, checked out. There's a homeschooling resource here in Virginia, HEAV, H-E-A-V, a lot of Christian type content stuff, but uh they were a huge help to at least get us on track. uh all of the materials we had to find ourselves because we're like, we don't really, you know, we didn't really want to use just Christian content. We wanted to kind of diversify and, you know, focus on art and other things. So, you know, as I say all that to say the homeschooling experience was great. Our kids are already weird, so I wasn't really worried about that. um And. They all know they all know, ah but but but it's like the amount of money that we spent just to kind of get up and running um and to have activities, know, field trips or whatever, like it became a lot. like how would a school choice education system help homeschooling families? Well, you can speak to homeschooling families in states that have education savings accounts like Arizona, Florida, New Hampshire, et cetera. There's now more than 15 states that have some form of education savings account. uh It helps the homeschoolers because now they get to use those same funds that they've already been paying for as taxpayers. ah But now it actually gets to benefit their children as well. so uh each state has different rules, but you know, in Arizona, let's say you can use those funds to pay for your curricular materials. ah You can use it to, you know, for certain field trips. So you can, you know, you can't pay for gas and you can't pay for flights or anything like that or a hotel stay. But you could pay for the museum tickets. Let's say you wanted to take your kids to Washington, D.C. Okay, so you're gonna pay out of pocket for the flights and for the hotel. But you wanna go to the Smithsonian, you wanna go to some of the other museums that are in D.C. or see some of the sites, you can use uh your ESA to cover those sorts of things. uh Let's say, know, most subjects you feel you can teach your children, but when it comes to calculus, you want to hire a tutor. Okay, so you can pay for the tutoring out of pocket, or you're going to do an online class for the kids to learn Latin or French or something like that. uh You can pay for that with the ESA. So it really gives families the freedom and flexibility to customize their child's education. uh I would love to kind of switch gears to have you maybe talk about some of the concerns that at least I'm hearing um about school choice. And correct me if I'm wrong, but the history of school choice wasn't always necessarily a flowery, rosy one, right? Like after Brown v Board education, there's a big push, integration. You know, like there was a big push to not integrate and folks like Bob Jones University and others really pushed and advocated for school choice to kind of keep the school separated. So that's a dark part of the school choice past. And a lot of the critiques I hear about school choice tend to reference that history. So I'd love for you to maybe come reference that history, it's an extremely distorted history. That is primarily the dark history of public schooling. It was the public schools that were segregated. ah So first, a few myths to bust. One is that the idea for school choice came in the wake of Bord V. Brown. That's not the case. Like I said, you can trace it at least as far back as uh Thomas Paine, who, you the author of Common Sense, who is writing about this in the 1780s, you know, and there was no racial component to what he was talking about. He's talking just about, you know, principles of government. uh Likewise with John Stuart Mill writing in On Liberty, there's no racial element there either. uh And Milton Friedman was already working on his seminal essay uh on, of course now I'm going to forget the name of it. uh but on the role of government and education, that's what it was called, on the role of government education uh before Brown v. Board. It was published after Brown v. Board and he references it in a footnote, but he published it before Brown v. Board. So it was not just a reaction. And if you look at that debate, there were segregationists and integrationists on both sides of the school choice debate. There were people who, uh there were a lot of Catholic schools that were already integrated. There were there were private schools in other words that were integrating even when the government school system was segregated uh And you had of course those who said we want to you know when the government is forcing integration They're trying to use school choice in order to preserve segregation, but on the flip side the teachers union in Virginia was arguing against school choice because it would lead to integration. The teachers union in Virginia said, we have already figured out a way of keeping schools segregated by drawing the lines a certain way. And if you uh allow students to leave and we've got a certain number of seats in a white district, because we've drawn the lines a certain way and that district is white and they leave to go to a private school, then if black students come in they're gonna have to give them those seats and it will lead to and I quote this is a term that they used Negro engulfment of the public school system school choice is going to lead to an integration so there were segregationists that were arguing against school choice particularly the teachers unions ah so yes I know there are those today who tried to use this as a political weapon and say you know all the public school people were pure integrationists and all the school choice people were evil segregationists but that's not the case at all. This is just a tool. School choice is a tool and both integrationists and segregationists uh were in favor of it and there were people in both camps that were opposed to it. oh Well, know, politics is where nuance goes to die. So I really appreciate uh you sort of clarifying that. Sure. Yeah, you know, and I'm thinking about this ongoing tug of war between public good and individual and really like kind of family unit freedom. And I would love for you to kind of just kind of give me your thoughts on that. Is there a tension there between the public good, the good for the most amount of people, the individual freedom? I mean, obviously there's a tension. It's all tradeoffs, right? I would love for you to kind of talk about that. How have you managed that tension? How have certain people, like what are those tensions when it comes to education and how have, like what are some of the best solutions I guess you've seen? Sure, like I said, what got me into the movement uh was this case that your future shouldn't be determined by your zip code. And I find it actually quite ironic that... the people who are making the argument that Will just brought up, and I hear it all the time, they're essentially saying that because school choice was used as a tool by some to preserve segregation 75 years ago, that we should not have it today. which means they're the ones that are now standing in the schoolhouse door telling black families, no, you can't get access to the school voucher, right? We don't say that on any other thing. I mean, if you go back and you look at the history of uh the minimum wage, okay, there were people, the KKK argued in favor of the minimum wage. because they thought it was going to set the wage level such that undesirables, by which they meant people of color and immigrants, wouldn't be able to get that wage, and so only Native whites would be able to get that wage. So you don't hear anybody arguing today against the minimum wage because it was used as a tool by the KKK to keep blacks out of the workforce. uh It's just a bad argument. The KKK, by the way, a hundred years ago, persuaded the state of Oregon to ban private education. Why? Because they were mostly Catholic schools. And they didn't want Catholics having their own schools. in a case that was decided 100 years ago last month, Pierce v Society of Sisters, the US Supreme Court unanimously said the child is not the mere creature of the state. That parents' parental rights include the right and the high duty to prepare your children for the obligations of adulthood. The right, in other words, to direct the religious education and upbringing of children. Is there a tension between uh the uh individual good and the public good? uh Possibly, in theory, I think there could be. And certainly this is the case that the other side makes. Like, okay, we're gonna just have school choice. Everyone's gonna choose the school that's best for their kids. But that means that those who are most interested in education, ah they're gonna leave the public school system. They're gonna go to a private school. Those kids are gonna have a better education. the public school system is going to have fewer kids. That means fewer resources. The kids who are in the system are going to be the harder to teach kids, the ones whose parents are not as interested in education. And that means the quality of education is going to deteriorate. And then what's going to happen as it deteriorates is that more families who are interested in education are going to leave and you're going to have that death cycle because as more kids leave and the resources leave, the school gets worse and so on and so forth. uh That's a totally legitimate concern to have 30 years ago. uh But now we have lots of experience with states that have enacted robust education choice programs and we have seen that those concerns have not actually borne out. ah As a matter of fact, and I'm just gonna pull this up, there have been 30 studies of the effects of uh the introduction of a school choice program on the performance of public school students. 27 out of 30 studies found a statistically significant positive effect effect. Okay. So why? Well, number one, the families who are leaving tend not to be, it's not that, you know, oh, the cream is going to leave, the top students are going to leave. If you look at Florida, which has had a robust school choice program since the year 2001, right? They've been doing a longitudinal study that looks at all the students who are participating in their school choice program year after year. And what you consistently find is the students who are switching out of a public school have lower test scores on average than their demographic peers. In other words, it's not the best and the brightest who are leaving. If they're doing well in their school, if they're thriving, their parents keep them there. It's the kids that aren't doing as well that aren't a great fit for this school that the parents are saying, I need to find something better. I need to find something different. They're the ones who are leaving. So even if the schools did nothing else, you're going to see the public school test scores increase because those other kids that aren't performing well leave. What we find with those students is that after just a few years, they're performing at or above the level of their demographic peers. So those kids are better off, the other schools are better off. But also just like everywhere else in our life, when there is more choice and more competition, you have higher quality. Right? I mean think of the areas of your life where you've got the worst quality. It tends to be areas where there's either some form of natural monopoly or something close to it or uh government regulations have led to just like a small number of, you know, think of like cable companies. or something like that, right? It's like the people that you really struggle with are those companies where you don't have many options and where you've got lots of options, you tend to have better quality at a lower price. ah So this is what school choice is reintroducing, uh is that competition. Got it. So, I mean, like, how do you, how do you get a bunch of people off of public school um and like into the system? So for instance, you know, again, I mentioned I homeschooled kids in public school now. uh Would I homeschool again? Absolutely. Would I love to have money for it? Definitely. You know, so like when it comes to school choice, I'm like, hey, like sign me up, you know, but, from a logistical standpoint, you know, I like my kids' school and I like their teachers and their principals, you know, and I do care about them. So like... uh I'm not going to let that level of care be greater than my care for my own children, but still, I couldn't tell you. I have no idea where the closest private school or school that would accept vouchers are, where I live. How does a parent work through that? And maybe even more broadly, how do you do that careful switch from one system, a new system, to something that everybody is already accustomed to using? No, great question. So first I would say the goal is not to get everyone into a private school or home school. The goal is to get every child into a school that works for them. And if that's a charter school, if that's a traditional public school, whatever it is, we just want to make sure that parents are empowered to make that decision. uh But yes, as you're switching from one system to another system, there is... you have to educate the populous. And there's a government role there. know, State Department of Education should be taking the lead in ensuring that every family, just like they know where their local public school is, they should know what the other options are available for them. But we've also seen the private sector and the nonprofit sector step up in this regard. So I'm the board of an organization out here in Arizona called Love Your School. They started, I don't know, Is it five or six years now already? ah And they're operating in a few different states now, but their goal is to inform every family about their options. So can look at loveyourschool.org and for those states that they operate in, you you put in your zip code and you can see, okay, here are all the traditional public school options in your area. And, you know, if there's a school that you want to go to that's outside of your uh zoned district, you can use the Inter-District Choice Program in order to access one of those schools. Here are all the charter schools and how charter schools work. A lot of people don't know that charter schools don't charge tuition. They think, I can't afford to go to a charter school. Like that school sounds great, but I can't afford it. It's like, nope, there's no tuition there. Here are all the private options in your area. And you can use either the tax credit scholarship program that we have out here or the education savings accounts. Likewise for homeschooling, you know, there are some homeschool co-ops. ah Here are some other homeschool resources. Oh, and you can purchase the following things using your ESA. So yeah, we do need to get to that point where families know their options and in a transition phase they often don't. But there's some great research from Thomas Stewart and Pat Wolf in an article, actually it was an article in a book from like 2015 called The School Choice Journey. And what they found was that the way parents engaged with education changed in Washington DC after the introduction of a school choice program. So Washington DC's program was for low income families. So this was mostly low income minority families. And what they found was that initially there was very low engagement with the school. And you'll hear this from teachers all the time. Ah, it's the parents. They're just, they're not engaged. you know, so how can you possibly have school choice? Like they're not going to, They're not gonna know what to do. And what they found was that the level of engagement being so low was a rational response to the schools not giving parents any opportunities to make a difference. So when you, for a long period of time, parents go to school boards and they express their views and nothing changes, parents stop going to school board meetings. And what we saw again during COVID was parents that were in communities that were working fairly well for them and all of sudden they were shut down and they go to the school board and they were like shocked to discover the school board did not care what they had to say. Because a lot of these school boards are elected on off cycle elections where the unions and the people in the system, they're informed and they make sure their people run but the average parent is like not informed and they're not coming out there trying to help them. uh the democratic school board system essentially gives the illusion of accountability to parents, but parents woke up and found out, oh these schools are not directly accountable to me. uh But what they found was that when you introduced school choice, parents started to, wait, now I have an option. So they describe in the book how parents shifted to what they call uh consumers. So now they're looking at their variety of options, they're doing their research, okay, this school's offering me this and the school's offering me that and then they're choosing which one and they're paying for it. So they've moved to a consumer but then eventually they said they moved to what they call citizenship. So now they're engaged, now that they've chosen the school and they're paying for the school and often you know the voucher covers you know 80 % but then they're paying some out of pocket so they've got sort of some skin in the game right. Now they feel like this school is accountable to me, I'm gonna show up and I'm gonna voice my opinion. That's the citizenship part. I'm gonna voice my opinion and expect that they're going to listen and that they're gonna collaborate with me. And so actually the parents got more involved and engaged with their kids' school once there was this reciprocal response that the school actually cared what the parents had to say. And that came because the parents, the school leaders knew if you your parents aren't happy, they're gonna leave and they're gonna take their money somewhere else. So we have to engage with them to make sure they're happy. In other words, you have changed the incentive structure and therefore you have changed the dynamic of the relationship between the parents and the school. That makes a lot of sense. Sorry, I was unmuting there and I clicked the wrong thing. That's why the awkward silence. So I'm a pastor. I teach my kids the Bible. I teach them morals. I look at the curriculum for the schools. I look at the sex education, what they're talking about, what my wife and I, we actually... would like to know what's going on and we would like to have an option to uh remove our kids if we don't really agree with what's being taught. growing up it wasn't as much of an issue, but now um especially it feels like there are a lot of things that they might be taught in a public school setting that conflict with our worldview, with our uh biblical worldview, Christian worldview, all that kind of stuff. And yet at the same time, right, we have, I believe in the Constitution big time, First Amendment, separation of church and state, know, the free exercise clause, all of that. And I'm wondering what the tensions are with school choice and religious freedom and the separation clause, the free exercise clause. what the tensions are there. guess I'm imagining, you know, Christian school, they're getting a bunch of funding now publicly because of this school choice, but then the Muslim school on the other side or the Jewish school on the other side or the Hindu school, now they don't really have like the same amount. And then maybe it creates its own segregation where all the Muslims now they're going, to one place, the Christians are going to one place, the Hindus are going and the Jews, right? We might think that people, they would want their kids to be pluralist or they want, but they may not, right? I don't think that's necessarily a good assumption to be honest with you. And I'm not even saying that forcing people to do it, I'm not saying I have a solution to it. I'm really wondering what are the tensions and how have they been addressed? with school? Like is there a tension there? Is what I said actually like a realistic thing or is it kind of like you know it's the leftist agenda that Will has been and you know has been uh putting into my head some you know surreptitiously. uh What do you think? Is there a tension there with the First Amendment and school choice in terms of religious freedom, free exercise and all that and how do we solve it? the main tension between religious freedom is not with school choice, which embodies religious freedom. I think the tension is between religious freedom and government schooling. uh And that's why there was no public school system at the era of the founding. uh All education, almost all education was private. uh Some were subsidized. There were public subsidies in different states for uh private schooling, all different forms of religious schooling, by the way, as well. uh Now, that was mostly Christian. There were some Jewish schools in New York that were receiving public subsidy alongside the Christians. So was mostly various denominations of Protestantism. uh And so we would essentially be going back to a system that our founders imagined. uh The rise of public schooling, to some extent, uh spread because of the rise of nativism. As Catholics were coming to this country and bringing with them, know, Rome, Romanism and rebellion, there was a concern that they were going to bring their papist ideology to this country and we need to Americanize these kids, which is to say, Protestantize these kids. And so when the Catholics said, well, you you've got all these different, the common schools, we're non-denominational Protestant schools. common schools were the forerunners to the public schools today. uh They taught the King James Bible. They led kids in school prayer, but it was a non-denominational prayer. So any Baptist or Episcopalian or Congregationalist would feel comfortable there. And then you're going to teach them your specific doctrines on nights and weekends, but it's going to be essentially a non-denominational Protestant school. The Catholics said, Well, this doesn't really work for us. We don't use the King James Bible. We don't like the form of prayer that you're using. We're happy to have you use it, but we want to do our own thing. And we think that just as our tax dollars are going to your schools, that the tax dollars should go to our schools. The Protestant majority said, whoa, wait a second. No, no, no, no. Our schools are non-sectarian. You're welcome to have your own private sectarian schools, your parochial schools. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge Catholic, right? But ah we're not gonna subsidize those. You get no subsidy. But our schools are open to your kids. You wanna send your kids to our Protestant school, we will gladly Protestantize your kids for you. sorry, I Americanize, Americanize. We'll Americanize your kids for you. So I think that's where the real tension is because uh schools eventually did become secularized. ah But first of all, there's a major loss there in the secularization because uh There is no value neutral schooling. There is no value neutral education. And that, you know, the so much of what we're trying to impart to our children, the cultural transmission, the character formation, the color and content come from our own unique religious traditions. And so by banishing that from the classroom, you're leaving this incredible void and almost a meaninglessness to their education. that you can only fill in the private sector these days, but that vacuum ends up being filled by other things and often it gets filled by, as we've seen in recent years, a radical ideology. uh So look at what's been going on uh in Montgomery County in uh Maryland. They started by trying to teach children in their sex ed curriculum that gender is not binary. it's a spectrum and uh all these sorts of things. uh can grow up to be men, girls, boys can grow up to be women, girls can grow up to be men, all this kind of stuff and they're imposing this on the children. And when parents started opting out of the sex ed curriculum, the school board worked with the administration and then they started putting these books into the English curriculum and other parts of the curriculum. And then when parents tried to opt out of those lessons, They said, nope, no opt-outs. Logistically, it's too complicated for us. Now Montgomery County, I don't know much you know about it, but they have a high Ethiopian Orthodox population and also a pretty high Muslim population. So a combination of those two and other traditional Christians got together. They were having all sorts of school board meetings. School board didn't want to hear anything. about it. School board basically shut them out. That case went all the way up to the Supreme Court and it was decided last month that the parents had a right to opt their kids out. And they cited Pierce v. Society of Sisters. You have a right to opt your kid out of the system entirely. But then there's a question, well what if you put your kid in the system? Can you opt out of particular lessons that violate your religious views? Now hopefully the school will be working with the parents. But as we saw uh in some cases they weren't working with the parents and they were teaching radical things and and really shutting down I mean you saw in their school materials that they were you know if teachers were trained that if a student were to say that they've learned at home that there are only two sexes or only two genders they were to tell that child that statement is hurtful not to engage with them logically, not to have a conversation about it, to shut it down by telling that child that what they had said is something that is hurtful. So clearly, this is an area where there's a great deal of tension between religious liberty and government schooling. A system of choice where you can choose a school that aligns with your values and a school that reflects your religious tradition, I think that sort of system is in the best tradition of America's freedom and pluralism. We were a country that was born in religious liberty and you had all sorts of, at the time, mostly Protestant denominations and a handful of Jews and Catholics and then over time, uh know, Muslims and Hindus uh and Sikhs and all sorts of other religions. uh I think as we are young, that's the time to foster and cultivate attachment to a particular tradition. But in a system uh where you recognize I get to choose a school that reflects my values and you get to choose a school that reflects your values. That's where the toleration come from. And now interestingly, uh there's been a lot of research on this too, also from, again, Patrick Wolf uh on uh a wide variety of uh issues related to civics. And most importantly, a question of political toleration, because that's your concern. Are we going to balkanize or can we have a system where everybody has their own faith traditions with their own school systems, but still forge American systems? I'm sorry, American citizens. uh And interestingly, what they found was that a wide variety of measures, including patriotism, the private sector outperformed the public sector. And religious schools did particularly well, including in political toleration. uh Just one example of a study, how are they measuring political tolerance, right? uh What they do is they ask the uh person taking the, the person they're interviewing, they ask them to identify the group that they like least. Now you should be happy to know that overall uh the group that is least liked is the KKK. uh But uh among Hispanics, the least liked group was LGBTQ activists. That was the group they liked the least. Now, for this group of Hispanics, the question was, ah you asked them on a wide variety of these issues, do you think the people that are in this disfavored group, should they have freedom of speech? Should they be able to hold a public rally at the town hall? Should they be able to have the right to vote, the right to be a teacher in a public school? You have a whole long list of things like this. Hispanics who had gone to a Catholic school were significantly more likely to display political tolerance to this favored group than those who had gone to the public schools. Now wait a second, you might think it would be exactly the opposite. If you're gonna go to a Catholic school and the Catholic Church's teachings on sexual morality are very clear, you would think they would be even less tolerant. But no, there they learn, you know, hate the sin but love the sinner. They learn that we treat people, we respect people because they are created in the image of God. And even if we disagree with their views, we have to respect them as individuals and respect their rights. And so the ones who were exposed to a robust Catholic education, even if maybe their views on sexual morality were even stronger, and we don't know, that wasn't one of the things that was questioned, but even if we, it's not a bad assumption to make. Nevertheless, they were the ones that displayed more political tolerance. So I do believe that we can have an American society. mean, religious liberty is the first freedom for a reason, not just because, you know, it was put first in the US Constitution in the Bill of Rights for a reason. And that is because we have this great national story of our national forefathers crossing an ocean in order to worship God according to the dictates of their conscience. And we recognize as Americans that if we want that for ourselves, we've got to respect the rights of others to worship God in their way as well. So I think that school choice is the system that best respects and reflects that freedom and pluralism uh that our nation stands for, much more so than government's going. Oh, man, I have so many more questions for you, Jason. ah But we don't have enough time for me to uh answer them all or for me to ask them on, just so the audience knows. Like I sent Jason like this laundry list of questions about school choice. I think we may have touched on maybe three of them. ah more along the way, but yeah. This would be my last question just for the time we have is um the one big beautiful bill just passed, handsome school choice provisions, I think in it. um Could you maybe break down what those school choice provisions were and how people can expect to see that impact their lives? Yeah, we're gonna have to, I can give more information after it goes through the whole rulemaking process and we see what the Treasury Department and the Department of Education actually come up with for how this is gonna work. uh But it's based on, uh there are 23 states now that have something that's called a tax credit scholarship. uh So it's similar to a voucher in that you get money to go to a private school. uh But. It's a, uh mechanism for paying it is through the private sector, right? So people will make a donation to a scholarship organization and then they receive a dollar for dollar credit on their taxes. With the big beautiful bill, can donate up to $1,700 to a scholarship organization and then your taxes will go down by the amount that you donate, up to that amount, $1,700. the scholarship organization than funds eligible children. So in some states, everyone's eligible. In some states, it's only low income families that are eligible. ah I think with the big, beautiful bill, ah it's ultimately open to everybody, they uh prioritize low income families. So we have to see what the mechanisms are gonna be exactly for that. ah In some states, it's first come, first serve. in other states you're going to have you have an application window and then we're going to have a lottery or we're to you know we're going to give Tier 1 first and Tier 2 second and Tier 3 third. So I don't really know the mechanics yet. uh But the other thing is it's opt-in for the state. So it looks like the governor is going to choose whether their state is going to participate in this program or not. An earlier version of the Big Beautiful bill was uh all 50 states. But after it went through what they call the birdbath, where the Senate parliamentarian applies the bird rule, uh you had a different version of it that came out. now it's it's it's opt-in so I'm sorry I don't have more details for your listeners yet they're just not available yet but I think one thing that your listeners might be interested in is you might be in a state that has school choice and you don't know it there are now 17 states where every single child is eligible for school choice in 2020 that there were zero states where that was the case now there are 17 at least for for public funded options. ah So there's a great resource called EdChoice. So EdChoice.org, EdChoice, Education Choice, ah that they've got a list of every single state and all the private school, sorry, all the school choice options in that state. So if you are interested, you very well might live in a state that these options are available to you and you can find out it's got all information for each program. Who's eligible, how much you're eligible for, how to access it, so on and so forth. So I highly recommend checking that out. Yeah, that's awesome. Thanks for giving us that information. I'm like texting Will, like is VIT Virginia? Are they school choice? he's like, nice, okay. Well, I'll look into that. And this is really the last question um for you today. And our last big question, we'll have just some housekeeping things, how people can keep up with you. Here's the question. It seems to me that the issue, a lot of the issues, they really come down to this core sense of parents know what's best for their kids. And they're gonna love their kids more. They interact with their kids more. um It's their children, right? I mean, we're citizens of the United States, but they're our children. That family unit is the unit that the society's built on. That's great. And I agree with that. completely. So there's, but the tension is that the government wants its citizenry to be educated and parents are going to want to educate their children differently m in different ways and with different values. And I think the values issue is the biggest one in my mind. I mean, it's a core, right? One of the core issues. How do you Do you believe that there is enough shared value? I think I might know the answer to question based on um what we've already talked about, but I would love for you to articulate it even more specifically for this. Can we get to a place where there is shared values, enough that this works, where we don't need a government telling us what those values are, essentially, but we have enough shared? with that almost educational standards, how do you ensure educational standards? I know that those are not the same question. I know that values and educational standards are different, but they interact in my mind. terms of moral teaching, sure, teaching of character and the standards there, and then the standards of what should be known, em you know, for anyone, math, reading, all these different standards. How does that work within the school choice system? And how do you see that playing out? That's great question. So in the first case, like I said, ah are no ultimate solutions. There are only trade-offs. And parents can certainly make mistakes. Just because we say parents are the primary educators of their children and we trust parents, generally speaking, and they're in the position to know their children best and love them most, doesn't mean parents aren't gonna make mistakes. uh So the question isn't, you know, education utopia versus whatever system you're proposing, it's of the realistic systems which one is going to produce the best outcomes, generally speaking, for children. ah Not that it's always going to come to the right answer, but if a parent makes a mistake, as tragic as that is for their kids, ah it's a lot different than when a state bureaucrat makes a mistake and affects the lives of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of children. When a whole state goes from to whole learning, to whole language, right? And then you got a whole generation of kids that don't read as well as they should be, right? That's much more tragic than if one particular family makes a mistake like that. uh As far as the question of shared values, uh yeah, I think this is something that is too uh important to leave to government. And uh we have essentially as a society, think, unfortunately outsourced that to government for too long. But the government, because for understandable reasons, uh is trying to avoid controversy and the schools have secularized and they're appealing to the lowest common denominator. They are not providing that, you know, robust set of values that we really want. And then it's left to parents on nights and weekends to do that. And that's bad enough when the government is in a system where there's a vacuum, but when that vacuum is filled by ideas and values that are contrary to what parents want, then you're in this conflict with the school. Instead of the school bolstering what you're teaching them at home and bolstering what you're learning in your house of worship, you're now in a more adversarial relationship, and that's a problem. uh But I do believe that we can get back to a system where there's enough shared values. There's always going to be conflict. We are always going to have political conflict. We are always going to have different political values. And that's okay and that's healthy and that's important. I you go back to the founding era, you had the Federalists, you had the Anti-Federalists, you know, that will continue on until eternity. And that's okay. As long as there is a shared core, right? As long as we're all committed to liberty and equality and uh justice. We might have different ideas of how to order those priorities. We're going to have different ideas of what exactly those things mean, but there does have to be that shared core. But I think that shared core is pre-political, meaning it's coming from society, not from the government. And so we shouldn't be counting on the government to educate our children in those values. I've been involved in a project called the Phoenix Declaration, uh named not just for the city where we announced it, but for the mythical bird that rises from the ashes of its former self. uh And uh it recognizes that education is about a lot more than just... uh job training. The term I hate the most these days is college and career ready ah because that has become the goal of education is that we should be college and career ready. uh Sure, that's important, but it's not the most important thing that our school system should be doing. I'm not just looking for the school to help me forge good workers. We want good citizens, good neighbors, good friends, good people. So we want schools that are teaching children and encouraging children to pursue the good, the true, and the beautiful. We want schools that take character formation seriously. We want schools that take cultural transmission seriously and schools that take citizenship seriously. And I feel like the public school system has not been doing a great job of those things. And so the Phoenix Declaration uh sort of reorients how we think about education, how schools, how parents, how school boards, how uh policymakers at the local, state, and federal level think about education, and then we should restructure the system based on that. School choice is a huge role to play there. If we believe that parents are the primary educators of their children, they should be able to choose a school that aligns with their values and that works best for their kids. ah But that doesn't mean that we're going to abandon the public school system. The public schools, most kids are still in the public school system and probably will be for the foreseeable future, even in states with universal school choice. So we've got to care uh about what those public schools are teaching and how they're teaching it. uh parents need to get much more uh involved uh at the school board level or working with private school administrators. They need to know what's going on in the classroom. You mentioned about school standards. uh Real accountability is not top-down regulations. We've got to get out of that paradigm where, you know, accountability means the government has a rule, right? Real accountability is when an institution is directly accountable to those who bear the consequences of their performance. And in that case, it's the children and their parents. uh They need to be the ones that are in the driver's seat. I like that. I appreciate it. How can people follow you and your work and how can they like, what do you have coming up that you want to tell them about? Sure, they can follow my work. I'm at the Heritage Foundation. So heritage.org. They can also find me on X uh at Jason Bedrick. And uh the Phoenix Declaration is something that I'm we announced it earlier this year uh in Phoenix and we are looking to get school boards to adopt it. So you can if you just Google Heritage Foundation Phoenix Declaration, it'll pop right up uh and I'm easy enough to find if anybody is interested. If you think this is good for our school board, I'd be happy to have that conversation with you. Well, that's great. Well, thank you so much, Jason, for coming on the program, spending a little time with us today and giving us not just your time, but your insight. I really appreciate it. Thank you for having me, I appreciate it. Absolutely, it was our pleasure and to our friends and viewers guys. Thanks for joining here today Make sure you're liking and subscribing doing the stuff that hacks the algorithm We really want to get this great content out to you and your friends. So make sure you're sharing it This is good stuff and we want to make sure that we're able to keep doing it So please share so we can keep growing keep producing this great stuff for you and we'll make sure that we put links in the show notes for all of Jason's what he's doing there at the Heritage Foundation at the Center for Education Policy. And until next time, guys, keep your conversations not right or left, but up. Thanks and God bless.