We're back with another edition of The Federalist for Radio Hour. I'm Emily Dashinsky,
culture editor here at the Federalist. As always, you can email the
show at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on ex at fdr
LST. Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts, and of course
to the premium version of the Federalist dot com as well. Today, I'm
so happy to be joined by Corey Deangelist, Doctor Corey d'angelist. He is
the author of the new book The Parent Revolution, Rescuing Your Kids from the
Radicals Ruining our Schools. Corey is a Senior Fellow at the American Federation for
Children. He's also a visiting fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. So accomplished,
Corey, and you are just despised by all all the right people.
Congrats on the book and thanks for joining the show. Hey, thanks for
having me. I'm told Corey that some people want to burn your book.
Yeah, I mean, this is crazy. It just happened the other day,
but it was a teachers union boss. A teacher union executive board member
in Wisconsin tweeted out, great day for a book burning Party in response to
my announcement of the book coming out. So, I mean, it's just
it's so hypocritical. The same yahoos that cry about conservatives pulling sexually explicit content
off of public school libraries, not banning books, which they like to call
it banning books. It's not banning books because you can still purchase these books
online are the same people who are calling to burn my book because they disagree
with it. So, I mean, the left always accuses others of what
they are doing, or at least what they would like to do, so
they would love to burn books that they disagree with. And they revealed themselves
the other day on social media. Really backfired though, because it helped the
sales of the book. And if you really want to make you to really
want to ruin Randy Winegarten's day and the other teachers Union bosses day, you
could go out and purchase The Parent Revolution as well. It's available basically everywhere.
You're making me feel badly for burning it, Corey, then yeah,
And the launch event is actually on May fifteenth at the Heritage Foundation in Washington,
d C. So if anybody's in the area, you can go check
it out. I'll do a book signing there as well, May fifteenth at
noon at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, d C. And if the teachers
unions want to protest right outside and they want to burn the books, well,
you know what, they have to buy them first, so anything but
that hopefully they don't do that, but you know there might be a side
benefit of book sales going up. Well, you know, it's a good
place actually to start with this incredible story of the parent Revolution. Again,
that's the title of the book, and the parent Revolution really has been one
of the most incredible stories in American politics and culture over the last decade.
And Corey, you were right in the middle of it. You still are
in the middle of it when people felt like it was probably at its zenith
in twenty twenty and twenty twenty one. They were definitely watching a whole lot
of your handiwork play out on the national stage. Because you know, the
Heritage Foundation is here in DC. A whole lot of parents in the DC
area actually were at the front lines, whether they were in Louding County.
The schools in Fairfax County had so many problems, so I'm sure a lot
of them will We'll come to the Heritage event to see you. Corey.
I know you know a lot of them and you've worked with a lot of
them, but can you just take us back to how you got involved in
the parent revolution and then I want to talk about what happened just in twenty
twenty twenty twenty one. But how did you get involved, Corey? Yeah,
I started education policy as a researcher at the University of our I did
my PhD in education policy out there. You mentioned I'm doctor dangelist, but
I'm really not a real doctor. I'm more like a Jill Biden doctor have
an education policy degree. But I did studies out there to look at the
effects of education choice programs, and my first study actually linked the Milwaukee private
school choice program that started in nineteen ninety to long term outcomes like criminal activity
reduction and reductions and paternity disputes. So I was really interested in non academic
effects of parents getting more of a say in their kids' education and choosing schools,
because schools don't just shape test scores. They do a whole lot and
parents are choosing schools for a whole lot of different reasons, and I think
that's also why we've seen so much momentum over the past few years. It
wasn't really based on the usual arguments for school choice, where you know kids,
some kids are stuck in objectively failing government schools based on academics, but
the families who thought that their schools were okay started to see there's another dimension
of school quality that's arguably even more important than test scores, which is whether
the school's curriculum aligns with families' values. So I've really been researching this stuff
for a long time, looking at things like the benefits of the benefits of
school choice translating to being in a safer environment, being in an environment that
focuses on character development as well, which could lead to reductions in crime later
on in life. I also had some experiences with school choice growing up.
I grew up in San Antonio, Texas. I live here now as again
after a short stint in Washington, d C. But I went to government
schools all K through twelve education, But in high school I had the opportunity
to go to something called a magnet school. It's still run by the district,
but you're not assigned to magnet schools like you are with traditional public schools
and that was a great opportunity for me. It was much better than the
school that I was assigned to that was run by the government. And I
think other families should have more opportunities for their kids to get a better education
too. But it shouldn't be limited to schools that are run by the government.
You should be able to choose private schools, charter schools, and home
based education options. And the money should follow the student. You should that
money is meant for educating the child. It's your taxpayer dollars. It should
follow the kid to wherever they're getting the best education. And then since then
after Arkansas, I've been at think tanks up at the Cato Institute first and
then I went off to Reason Foundation. Now I'm at the American Federation for
Children and I have those previous think tanks still listed as affiliations. But I've
really moved towards advocacy, and I talk a lot about that in the book
The Parent Revolution, and really document what happened over the past few years.
And look, we've been pushing for school choice reform where the money follows to
student for decades. I mean, if you really want to go back the
first school choice initiatives in the country started in the late eighteen hundreds in states
like Maine in Vermont, we were just getting real incremental reform, maybe for
students from certain categories, just special needs students for example in some states,
or maybe just very low income families in places like Washington, DC that actually
does have a private school boucher program today that is wildly popular and always has
students on the wait list to try to take their kids dollars to a private
school. In DC, for example, it's only the government school spend about
thirty thousand dollars per kid. The average scholarship is around ten thousand dollars per
kid, around a third of what they spend in the government schools. Yet
you still have families flocking to these opportunities because it's not about money, it's
about incentives, and it's about choosing the school that works best for you.
That might be the public school. But the one size fits all system is
never going to meet the needs of various parents who have diverse and different views
about how they want to raise their kids. And again, we really got
to thank Brandy Weingarten and the teacher genies, however, for this monumental support
that we've had in the past few years where conservative parents in red states have
held politicians accountable and really turned the GOP the Republican Party into the parents' party.
And it all started near Washington, d C. Where it's translated to
political victories for people like Glenn Youngkin in Virginia. Now take us to the
start of this kind of recent chapter that you know, Corey. I remember
at the Federalist we were publishing reporting and covering of some of the smoldering fire
of what would become a total volcanic eruption in Loudon County. I think starting
around like twenty nineteen somewhere around there. It was before COVID because there was
a racial training. And you can correct my memory on this, but there's
a racial training that parents were really upset about, and I think that predated
COVID. But then COVID hit. And you can explain much better than I
can how that confluence of variables. You know, kids at school, parents
overseeing zoom, the political correctness, the woke ideological indoctrination that came in after
the death of George Floyd. So where do you see the where do you
kind of pinpoint the beginning, and can you just take this back to you
know, from your vantage point as somebody in the advocacy space, what it
was like watching all of this kick off, right. I believe that a
lot of people think that the woke indoctrination, the far left influence in the
government school system just started with COVID, But I don't think that's the case.
I believe the far left had infiltrated the government's school system for a very
long time, and COVID just revealed the rot that already existed in the government
school system. And look, a lot of families thought that their kids weren't
a good place. They saw the A rating from the state that was assigned
to their school, they saw standardized test scores that were doing really well.
They saw the blue ribbon schools here in Texas. They saw they saw that
their children were coming home with their report cards that had all a's or being
on the honor roll, and they thought things were fine. But the thing
is, when the teachers unions held children's education hostage during the COVID era,
And there's been a lot of studies on this, I was the first one
to do so, and I wrote it write about this study in the book.
There's been at least six studies now linking places with stronger teachers union is
all lsequel after controlling for even the COVID incidents in the area, the political
persuasions of voters in the area, the race and income of people living in
the area, population density, and so on and so forth. The stronger
the teachers union in those areas, the less likely the schools were to open,
or the more likely the schools were to remain closed for longer periods of
time. And I published this study in Social Science orderly with my co author,
and several others had replicated the results, all finding the same thing.
And the thing is, look, the private schools were open from the get
go. The New York Times was even writing about this, and we also
knew all along that the science showed that the schools were some of the first
things that should have opened and the last things to close. Even Anthony Fauci
went on national television saying just that that the schools should be the last things
to close, and the first things to open. Had bars open. Everything
else was open. Teachers were going to the grocery store and had no fear
of doing that, but when it came to going back to work, it
was a huge problem. And I don't blame the employees or the teachers themselves.
I blame the union bosses and the incentives that are baked into the system
where the public school system gets your money regardless of whether they even open their
doors for business. And it was actually worse than that. During the COVID
era, the teachers' unions were able to lobby the CDC to make it more
difficult to reopen schools. We have evidence of this from the NEA and the
AFT, the two national largest teachers unions in the country, because they knew
that they could leverage those school closures for more money from the federal government,
and that's exactly what happened. They received about one hundred and ninety billion dollars
and so called COVID relief since March of twenty twenty. But their plan quickly
backfired because families got to see through remote learning, which let's be real,
we should have just called it remotely learning because not a lot of learning was
going on. Families one got to see that the system didn't care all that
much about them while they were frantically trying to search for other options, trying
to figure out this government school at home, and also trying to figure out
how to pay for private school tuition and fees when those schools were open and
the government schools turned their backs on them. Well, through the Zoom school
families got to see a little bit of what was happening in the classroom,
and some parents were upset about critical race theory. Some parents were also upset
about gender ideology and sexually explicit content into the classroom the schools. To put
it short, we're focusing on indoctrination from a left wing bias as opposed to
education, and parents weren't happy about that. That's more likely to mobilize parents
than just about anything else. So parents started to push back at school board
meetings, and in Louding County you actually had one of those school board parents
cited in a letter sent to the Biden administration's Department of Justice to try to
use the Patriot Act to investigate parents for quote unquote domestic terrorism for fighting back
at school board meetings and making their voices heard. The government school system,
without school choice and without families having much of us say, they just see
parents as a nuisance. They don't see them as a customer, they don't
see them as partners, so they tried to bully and silence their opponents into
submission. They also have been cutting off the mics of parents reading books at
school board meetings because the parents think that the content is sexually not age appropriates.
It's sexually explicit content, and they don't think it should be in schools.
But for some reason, the school boards are cutting off mike's of the
parents while also supporting those books in the schools when the parents aren't around.
It just really goes to show you the hypocrisy and inconsistency when it comes to
the radical lefts members who control the school system. But the good news is
their plan to silence parents only embolden families to push back even harder. So
parents have pushed for school choice as well, but they've also been holding politicians
accountable. Look at what happened in Virginia right after all of that fiasco unraveled
in a state that closed schools just about as much as California did. Not
a lot of people know this, Virginia was one of the worst school states
for reopening schools, and Terry mccauliffe, who was running for governor in twenty
twenty one. He said on the final debate stage, quote, I don't
think parents should be telling schools what they should teach. End quote. The
Republican Glenn Yunk and turned that into a campaign ad. That was a good
move by him, put it on repeat. And Terry mccauliffe had basically an
incumbent advantage. He was in a blue state, Virginia that went ten points
to Biden the year before, and he was up in the polls until that
final debate, and Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, ended up winning with education
voters by six points according to exit polling, and that was the number two
issue in the election that basically never happens. Education is usually at the bottom
of the list. And what also never happens or historically hasn't been the case,
was before COVID, the Democrats had double digit advantages on the issue of
education. So for Glenn Youngkin to pick up the football, become the Parents'
party and to win in a state like Virginia really just laid out a blueprint
for success for Republicans going forward. They can reveal the communists on the left
for what they are, who believe that the kids belonged to the government schools.
Most people in society do not believe that. They rightly believe that parents
are the primary decision makers for their own kid. That is their responsibility and
not the government's responsibility. And hey, that money meant for educating those children,
that's your taxpayer dollars, not the governments. And it's meant for educating
the child. It should follow them to the school that works best for them.
Fast forward to twenty twenty two. A lot of people were talking about
the red wave right before the midterms. Well that didn't really happen. There
wasn't a blue wave either, but there was a school choice wave. Seventy
six percent of the candidates supported by my organization, the American Federation for Children,
and our state affiliates won their races in twenty twenty two. And we
didn't just play in the easy ones. We targeted sixty nine incumbents, which
is the hardest thing to do in politics to take out a city legislature legislator,
and we took out forty of them. That translates to about a fifty
seven to fifty eight percent win rate against incumbents, which historically incumbents basically win
their reelection ninety five percent of the time. That wasn't just a blip in
twenty twenty two either. Fast forward to Texas this year in twenty twenty four,
in the primaries on Super Tuesday, well, thirteen of the candidates that
we targeted by school Choice Super pac AFC Victory fund thirteen of the incumbents who
voted against school choice. Ten of those thirteen either lost their races out right
on Super Tuesday or they were forced into runoffs, most of them in second
place, which means they're probably going to lose. On May twenty eighth as
well. And twenty twenty two in Tennessee, for example, ten of the
teachers to ten of the Republicans or so called Republicans in the House that were
running in the primaries either were funded or endorsed by the teachers Union. Well,
nine of those ten lost their primaries. The teachers union endorsement post COVID
has basically become the political kiss of debt for Republicans in primaries. So whether
the GOP likes it or not, they're going to become the parents Party because
families are holding them to it. To the Moniker of the parents party at
the ballot box. And that's good news for families. It's a political winner
for Republicans too. And in twenty twenty two we have seen actually some Democrats
start to shift on the issue, which is more good news that school choice
is becoming even more bipartisan, even though it's been hyperpartisan in the short run,
with Republicans picking up the football first. Some Democrats are starting to defect
on the issue. We had sitting legislators in North Carolina by the name of
Tricia Cotham and Georgia by the name of Misha Maynor. They flipped from the
Democrat Party to the GOP on the issue of school choice. So Democrats are
losing the voters on the issue of education freedom, but even more importantly,
they're even losing sitting legislators on the issue. And in Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro,
he's now the governor, he was the attorney general at the time.
In twenty twenty two, he quietly changed his education platform right before the election
to include private school choice in the form of a specific type called Lifeline Scholarships,
a bill that was passed by their House earlier that year, a bill
that was run by a Republican. It was a Republican bill, and he
even went on Fox News Josh Shapiro did last year in twenty twenty three,
promoting private school choice. He ultimately ended up caving to the teachers unions,
who gave him over seven hundred thousand dollars in that election in twenty twenty two.
But my point is, I talk about this in the book that for
a high profile Democrat to feel compelled to signal support publicly for school choice so
much that he's willing to go on Fox News to do so, that is
good news for parents. In the end. It doesn't matter what the reason
is. It doesn't matter whether it was a true change of heart or whether
it was because he was reading the tea leaves. That the political winds are
shifting towards school choice and not away from it. That's good news, and
I think it's going to lead to more bipartisan support in the long run.
And we did see this actually this year in Louisiana. Louisiana's House just passed
universal school choice, which means everybody's eligible, no picking winners and losers,
all families can take their money where they want. They pass it by a
super majority vote of seventy two to thirty two, and twenty percent of their
House Democrats voted for it. Now, don't get me wrong, there's only
six Democrats in Louisiana, but that is still a substantial chunk of the caucus
of Democrats in Louisiana to not just vote for a low income means tested program.
This was Democrats voting for universal bull thrown in school choice. So louis
Ana looks like it's going to become the twelfth state to pass universal school choice,
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Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Yeah, that's actually really interesting
too, because one of my big questions for you, Qurey, is where
people think of, you know, the politics of that time almost as something
that's in the rear view mirror right now. And maybe that's because the much
hyped red wave where we'd have you know, Glenn Youngkins fanning out across America,
just an army of them, failed to materialize. But this is absolutely
still happening. The Shapiro point is a great one. So what stage of
the parental revolution would you say we're in right now, Corey. Yeah,
as I mentioned, we've had eleven states already past universal school choice, meaning
everybody can take their money where they want public, private, or home based
education options. And that's you know, you might say that's only a fifth
of all the states, but that's a fifth of all the states in just
a few years. This is one of the hardest policies to pass because the
teachers' unions they basically can extort taxpayer money through the government school system and use
it to one give a lot of money to politicians, but then also they
have a lot of foot soldiers because they've basically turned the school system into a
jobs program for adults as opposed to an education initiative for kids. This is
why you see them when they get more money, they don't push for higher
teacher salaries. They don't push for putting the money into the classroom. They
push for putting more and more people into the buildings because that gives them more
political leverage to have a stronger voting block. And oh, by the way,
it means more dues paying members for the union bosses like Randy Weingarten,
who make over five hundred thousand dollars a year. They don't really benefit the
teachers in the system. But look they're they're definitely not in it for the
kids. And ninety nine point nine percent of the campaign contributions coming from the
American Federation of Teachers went to Democrats the most recent election cycle. This is
an elaborate money laundering scheme and it ought to be illegal. But the thing
is, there are more parents than employees in the system. They are the
stronger union. The kids union is going to be the one that prevails in
the end, and politicians should listen to them. So Corey, that point
I actually am fascinated. I've asked so many people this question, but I'm
fascinated based on this book as to where you fall down on how parents what
it is that is most animating for parents to get off the sidelines. So,
for example, at the Federals, so we did a whole documentary before
the Louden County elections had really even kicked off, just talking to parents,
and we were talking to people who had been animated by so many different things.
For some of them it was COVID, you know, people that had
voted for Obama, but because of the mandates over COVID suddenly started to rethink
their entire worldviews. For some of them, they were on minorities, they
were immigrants, and they were furious with the critical race theory. What I
hear from most people is that it's kind of a mix of all of these
different things that animated parents around the country at the same time, because it
was all kind of coming to a head. But from your perspective, what
is it, what do you think is the most the biggest motivator for parents
to get off the sidelines and to become part of this revolution. Yeah,
it's really hard to point PenPoint, but only I think you're right that it
is a mix of factors. It can't just be COVID in the school closures,
because well, the schools are open and the momentums continuing. I mean,
if you think about it, we had the most momentum for school choice
in twenty twenty three. The schools were opened by twenty twenty three, and
we had eight states, the vast majority of the states that are universal now
passed a private school choice initiatives for all families in twenty twenty three, dubbing
it the Year of Universal school Choice. And then this year we're having We
had Wyoming past the new school choice initiative their first education savings account. Georgia
passed their first education savings account. Missouri has momentum right now, they already
pass it through their Senate. South Carolina had one chamber past universal school choice
already, Louisiana's already had one chamber pass. And we're still in the middle
of this, right So a lot of this movement is still happening, and
we're in twenty twenty four. But if you had to ask me, look,
we always knew that the academics were garbage in some of the government run
schools, and we didn't have a lot of the same kind of motivation to
get up and fight for change when it was all about low test scores.
And I think that's because the low test scores disproportionately impact the least advantage in
society, and that's a tragedy. It's still a good reason to argue for
school choice, but it tends to be the groups of Americans who tend to
be less politically active, so they have less political influence to actually change things.
I think they still can be a driving force and they should be part
of the equation that low income families should should work their heart their butts off
to to get politicians to listen. But what I think what we've seen change
in the past few years is that you now have a lot of different groups.
It's not just low income families upset with the public schools. You now
also have politically advantaged families who are assigned to schools with higher test scores starting
to see, look, this is not the end all be all of education.
Test scores aren't everything, and the one size fits all system isn't meeting
my needs in XYZ or other words, And I think that mostly has to
do with the radical left seeing the school system as a way to mold the
minds of other people's children, and COVID really revealing through the school closures that
the schools weren't all about the basics. They weren't just teaching math, reading
and writing what parents actually want. They were teaching critical race theory, gender
ideology, and even incorporating some of that type of leftward bias into math problems
and stuff that you would normally think of as being the basics. The basics
weren't even the basics anymore more, and parents were really upset about that.
They still are, and that's something that parents aren't just going to forget,
right. This is a really important moment in the lives of young children.
A lot of people talk about how Hollywood has an undue influence from the left
on the rest of society and our culture, but the school system is arguably
more powerful, because, look, you're molding the minds of impressionable young children
for thirteen years of their lives, from kindergarten through twelfth grade, and then
that doesn't even count college For young adults learning from these lunatics at the universities,
it's hard to beat that as conservatives, the left doesn't even really have
to have kids anymore. If they can control all of these other institutions,
they can shape culture in a way that aligns with their values and raise other
people's children in their own values using the school system. And that has pissed
off a lot of conservative parents, and they've woken up there never going back
to sleep because this is their children we're talking about. And the more that
social media has allowed us to expose a lot of the rot in the public
school system, the more we're going to see more victories when it comes to
one parents having more of a say in their children's education with the public schools,
but also being able to take their money with them, which by the
way, has the side benefit of the public schools actually upping their game in
response to competition. If you can actually take your money with you, they're
going to listen to you, as opposed to cutting off your mic and calling
you a domestic terrorists. Maybe they'll treat you as a customer and do a
better job. And in fact, we've seen all across the country, twenty
nine studies have looked at this, and twenty six of them of the twenty
nine have found positive effects of private school choice competition on the outcomes in the
public schools, but it also should give them an incentive to focus more on
the basics as opposed to politically divisive topics, because if you have to operate
in a market environment where you don't want to lose any of your customers,
well, a lot of people are from the left, and there's a lot
of customers from the right. I think Michael Jordan said it best. He
said he's something along the lines of Republicans still buy shoes too, where he
was basically saying he didn't want to upset Republicans. Well, the public schools
would have to operate in that way as well and not include fringe ideologies on
the right or the left in the school system, and so they'd have a
strong incentive to just focus on educating the kids what most parents actually want.
So this is a win win solution. Obviously, when you get a choice,
parents can choose the school that's immediately the best fit for their childs.
But it has a side benefit of competition, school choice being a rising tide
that lifts all boat. Yes, Corey, are you optimistic? I hope
you're going to say yes. I'm optimistic that you're optimistic, Corey, but
you've watched this transpire over the last several years in ways that you know.
Honestly, I didn't. I figured maybe at some point parents would revolt,
But I was so pessimistic after the years and years of these obvious ideological problems
cropping up and then being ignored by the corporate press, barely getting to parents,
parents being apathetic, just assuming that everything was fine, et cetera.
But that was a real I think it was really amazing to see what people
like yourself, activists advocates were able to organize over the last several years.
Are you optimistic that you know things like school choice, that things like parental
oversight? Do you think some of this stuff is really setting students on a
better track, because the metrics of where American students are are enormously depressing.
Absolutely. Actually, a pure reviewed meta analysis came out just the other day
from one of the reason I know about it is because it was my advisor,
Patrick Wolfe at the University of Arkansas. He's a professor there. He
is one of the co authors on the study. But they found that when
you take the meta analytic average of all the effects of studies linking school choice
to civic outcomes like political tolerance of others and and and volunteerism and other civic
outcomes, those kinds of things that you would think about political participation, school
choice is actually associated with a five and a half percent of a standard deviation
improvement in civic outcomes. And this is this is this is a great result.
There's tons of studies on the on the on the is on the issue,
and we've kind of been able to count the studies before and say,
hey, look, there's you know, one hundred or so studies. The
majority of them are positive. There's a couple of them that are nakedive out
of the one hundred, and this meta analysis allows us to pool all those
effects sizes together and they found positive effects of school choice on civic outcomes,
which is the opposite of what the public school defenders will say. These defenders
of the status quo will say that, oh, we need public schools because
they're the bedrock of democracy. And my first response to that is, do
you think we're in a politically tolerant, non polarized society today. No?
And guess what, we have ninety percent of kids going through the government school
system today, it hasn't led to this politically tolerant and non divisive society that
is theorized by those who defend the traditional system that they basically have this fairy
tale model of how the public school should work. But that's not actually how
the public education system works today. And in fact, if you're not teaching
kids the basics and you're teaching them to pit themselves against each other based on
immutable characteristics, you're going to only divide society even more so competition and allowing
families to go to schools that teach the basics, that teach kids to think
logically, as opposed to I think in so many schools if they're not teaching
logic correctly, you're going to be more likely to go through society assuming that
everybody you disagree with must just be an evil an evil person. But if
you're learning logic, you're going to see that that's a logical fallacy, and
you'll be more likely to be able to disagree with someone based on the merits
of their arguments as opposed to attacking them and their character. And so that's
what this study actually found. I'm optimistic that the revolution is going to continue
because it's not just the right thing to do, it's also a political winner.
It's leading to better outcomes. And it's not just outcomes that are measured
by test scores. I mean these there's so many studies finding that school choice
leads to more safety for students. I've actually done a peer reviewed study recently
that the Wall Street Journal editorial board actually covered. They called it. Their
headline was school choice better than Prozac. And what we found in that study
was yeah, I mean I didn't pick the headline, but look we found
it, right, Yeah, yeah, we found an improvement in mental health
too, So I mean that wasn't a surprising result to me, but as
it was a rigorous study, peer reviewed in a top journal, and we
found that going to a private school all l sql led to better mental health
outcomes, even though even after we controlled for a baseline measure of mental health
when students started their schooling experience. So we were able to net out,
make it and make apples to apples compare, and look, if you're going
to a safer place, you're probably and you're not being bullied, you're probably
going to have less mental health issues. And we followed these students until they
were into it, far into adulthood. I don't remember the actual age of
the average person in the sample when they reported the long term outcome. But
it's not that shocking of a finding when look, people choose schools again for
a lot of reasons, partially academics, but partially Look, it's Maslow's hierarchy
of needs, and a lot of families are choosing schools just to get the
bare minimum. They want their kid in a safe environment. They don't want
their kid doing drugs, they don't want their kid getting involved with the criminal
justice system. And so a lot of my research has shown there are these
long term benefits of school choice that aren't measured by test scores. But we
also do have some evidence to suggest that there are competitive effects the public school
test scores go up. We saw this in Florida. In Florida, they've
been incrementally increasing school choice for decades. They went universal last year, making
everybody eligible, but even before then, they already had about eighty percent of
the population in Florida eligible for a private school choice initiative. But as they've
expanded it over time, their nation's report card scores went from the middle of
the pack to the top after controlling for different student demographics across states according to
the Urban Institute's America's Grade Book looking at the nation's report card scores. So
this has a lot of different benefits, and it also is a way to
save our country if the public schools are teaching kids not to like each other
based on immutable characteristics, or they're pitting students against each other with critical theory.
It also student surprised us that one civic outcomes could improve, which is
what the meta analysis that was peer view just found. So it should.
It should allow families to choose a school that's aligned with their own values and
raise the kids how they want. I think that's a really important piece of
this that has been missed in the conversation pre covid. This is a way
to raise your kids. I mean, whether you like it or not,
schooling is a way to outsource some bit of raising your child for seven hours
a day for thirteen years of their lives. I think homeschooling is one way
to make the decision as easy as possible when it comes to raising your kids
in the way that's aligned with your values. But if you should at least
be able to choose the community that your child is surrounded with. And maybe
the public school does reflect your values, but maybe it doesn't. And maybe
you want to choose a private school, maybe a smaller, maybe even a
micro school, where you're much more likely to find a a teacher or a
guide or a tutor who shares the values that you shared. They're not actively
working against you throughout the day. For thirteen years in the classroom, Corey
DeAngelis is the author of the new book The Parent and Revolution, Rescuing Your
Kids from the Radicals Ruining our Schools. That book is out on May fourteenth.
Corey is also a Senior Fellow at the American Federation for Children, where
they do so much great work. Corey, thank you for joining us.
Hey, thank you so much. You've been listening to another edition of The
Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Jashitski, culture editor here at The Federalist.
We will be back soon with more. Until Ben, the Lovers of Freedom
and Anxious for the Frame