As state legislators across the country restore parental rights in education, Corey DeAngelis joins Grover on the Leave Us Alone podcast to discuss the coming School Choice Revolution.
Corey DeAngelis is a senior fellow at the American Federation for Children. He is also the executive director at Educational Freedom Institute, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, a senior fellow at Reason Foundation, and a board member at Liberty Justice Center.
Today there are 21 states with school choice programs including 6 with universal school choice for K-12 education.
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Episode Transcript:
Grover Norquist:
Welcome, Grover Norquist here with Americans for Tax Reform. This is the Leave Us Alone Podcast. Topic today is School Choice, the School Choice Revolution. The whole idea of the Leave Us Alone coalition is that the center right in America is a collection of groups and individuals that what they want from government is not other people’s money or other people’s approval or other people’s attention then won’t be left alone. And you certainly see that in the Second Amendment community and taxpayers and businessmen and women, religious liberty. And one of the places we see it changing elections, changing states changing the world is in the debate over school choice and allowing parents to have the choice of where to send their kids to school, whether it’s homeschooling, religious schooling, private schools, choice within the public school system big changes taking place. And we have with us today a man who’s making this happen.
Corey Angelis is a senior fellow at the American Federation of Children. That’s the group out there. Lots of groups are doing many good things at the state level. American Federation for Children as one of the key ones. He’s a senior fellow there, and he’s on an executive director of the Educational Freedom Institute and an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. He’s very active in School Choice and a senior fellow at the reason foundation reason’s been longtime champion of the issue of, of School Choice and serves on the board of the Liberty Justice Center. I wanna take just half a moment here and encourage everyone to subscribe to this podcast. If you like what you’re hearing, please subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or leave a five and leave a five star review. Then everybody can see it.
And join us in the future. And if you’re watching this on live stream, please be sure to hit the thumbs up on, on YouTube and subscribe to the Americans for Tax Reform YouTube channel or like us on Facebook. Okay, with that part of the workday over, I want to look at School Choice. And Corey, let me tell you my favorite anecdote and then ask you why 1983, Newt Gingrich brought 30 Republican congressmen out to Maryland, and we spent a weekend I that wasn’t a congressman, I was guy who helped out. And all these congressmen were there and they were divided into tables, and they were to think of something interesting and some said flat tax gold standard, a whole ze, because it was pizazz backwards. I mean, we were out there with ideas here. And one table said school vouchers and a very prominent conservative Republican who you would know who was a congressman, stood up and said, if you’re going to talk about school choice, about vouchers, I’m going to have to leave the room. 1983, leader of the modern conservative movement, terrified that anyone would say he was in the room when school choice was being discussed. Now, when I walk through the halls of state legislators, the default position in talking to Republicans is that they support very expansive school choice. Corey what brought you to this fight? And then how did it unfold? How did we get to where you can stay in the room when somebody mentioned school choice?
Corey DeAngelis:
Yeah, totally. Before we move on, you did mention 1983. Well, there’s a 40 year anniversary coming out of an, of a report that came out that year, 1983, April, the Nation at Risk Report. And it’s I have a book coming out with Conor Boyk from Libertas called Mediocrity as a reference to that nation at Risk Report 40 Ways Government Schools Are Failing Today’s Students. It comes out on the 40th anniversary of the Nation at Risk Report, which will be April 26th coming out next month pretty soon. So I have a copy. It’s order, it’s available for Amazon on Amazon for pre-order. But yeah, I got into this fight because I actually benefited from School Choice growing up in San Antonio, Texas. I went to government run schools all through K through 12 in high school, though, I was able to go to something called a magnet school, still run by the government, but you’re not assigned to it.
So it doesn’t have strong monopoly power. They are public schools of choice, and I felt like that was a good benefit for me. And I feel like other families should have similar opportunities, but it shouldn’t be limited to schools that are run by the government. You should be able to take your child’s education dollars to a private school, a charter school, or even to a home-based education option at the same time. After that, I did a PhD in education policy, which is my, where I really got thrust into the national conversation and the University of Arkansas. I was a education policy PhD in the Department of Education Reform. And my first study there linked the Milwaukee Private School Choice Program, which started in 1990. We used student level data from the state longitudinal evaluation and looked be by the time the students became about 25 to 30 years of age able to access their individual criminal records after adjusting for differences in demographics and household characteristics.
My part, my co-author Patrick Wolf and I at the University of Arkansas found large reductions in the likelihood of crime by the time the students were 25 to years of age as a result of being exposed to that parental choice program in Milwaukee. So it’s a, an outcome that not a lot of people have looked at. There have been six peer reviewed studies on that topic. I’ve done two of them with Patrick Wolf, all six of them, all peer reviewed, all finds large reductions in the likelihood of crime, which I would say is arguably more important to parents in the long run than anything that could be captured on a standardized test. Most of the studies, however, look at standardized test scores because that’s the most readily data that’s available. And so that kind of got me into this from a researcher standpoint.
And then when I was looking into going into academia, I started to figure out that my peers in the peer review process were more so my enemies than anything else. Most of the people in the education departments are close to Marxists, and so you don’t get really a fair shake. Despite that, I, I’d have published about 40 peer reviewed journal articles. It was an uphill battle though, and I decided to go somewhere that I would be rewarded for my ideas as opposed to punished. So I went into Think Tanks, Cato Institute Reason, and now I’m at the American Federation for Children, where we are having a lot of victories all across the country with the latest school choice revolution, partially because of our work, but also because of teachers unions and their bosses like Randy Winegart, who have overplayed their hand over the past couple of years and awakened his sleeping giant, a new special interest, the parents who just want more of a say in their kids’ education.
Grover Norquist:
I debated Randy Winegarten once or twice, I think on one of those morning CSPAN shows and back ways. The line from the heads of the unions, the teachers unions, oh, we like charter schools, <laugh> they weren’t crazy about private charter schools. They liked public charter schools. They just didn’t like those private schools, charter schools. Okay. Private schools not okay. In the recent election, it’s my understanding that in 2020, anyone who got support from the teachers union was required to swear on something or other that they would defund no federal funds would be allowed to flow to charter schools. That, that they, they were done pretending they liked charter. That’s, is that accurate?
Corey DeAngelis:
That’s right. I mean, yeah. The, the Democratic Party in particular has been controlled by the teachers unions even more so recently with Randy Weingarten’s Union, the, a American Federation of Teachers. In the most recent election cycle, according to open Secrets, 99.97% of their campaign contributions have gone to Democrats. And so they’ve taken a hard stance against any form of choice in competition, whether that’s charter schools or private school choice. I mean, I think that they’ve historically been more accepting of charter schools before, perhaps because they, these, these schools can be regulated by the, they’re they can’t be religious. They can’t charge tuition. And perhaps it, it was less of a competition for the traditional public schools because they’re less likely to be very different and specialized relative to the government run schools. But private schools opens a, a, another level of competition that, that they haven’t been comfortable with. And, but either way, the charter schools or the private schools, they’re not typically staffed by teachers unions. And so that’s the main issue there. And so you have a lot of opposition, most recently with the Biden administration trying to use a rulemaking process to regulate the teachers unions who, who own him their competition, the charter schools through
Grover Norquist:
Could, could you give us a sense of the arc? Back in 1986 the 1986 homeschooling was legal in two states, and not legal often go to jail in 48. That’s a little more than 40 years ago. That’s a long time to just about 40 years ago, a long time to <laugh> from going to jail to legal in 50 states. The marijuana people haven’t been able to do that. And that, that’s a huge step forward. What happened with vouchers? How did they come about? What, yeah, how far did we get so far be from nobody has, yeah. Choice in the sense of, of allowing your tax dollars to come back with your child to go to school. They want to where, you know, where we aren’t yet, which is everybody has complete control of their education.
Corey DeAngelis:
Yeah, totally. So in the first voucher programs were actually in Maine and Vermont, something called Town Tuitioning programs that started in the late 18 hundreds, specifically for students who lived in rural areas that didn’t even have public schools. So they were giving vouchers to families in rural areas to attend a public school in another area, or even a private school. Which is funny because a lot of the arguments you’re hearing today to try to stem off school choice in red states is that, oh, well, we can’t do it here even though they do it over there because we have rural areas here. And that means that gives us a check and we don’t have to vote for our party platform issue. But some of the oldest voucher programs were specifically for kids in rural areas. So this can benefit students from rural areas. And before I move on, I have to hit that the, these same politicians will say on the one hand, you know, we can’t do it in rural areas or I’m not gonna vote for this because my constituents don’t benefit from school choice.
They can’t use the voucher because there’s not a lot of private schools. Or maybe they’ll even say, the public school is the only option in my area. But then in the next breath with a straight face, they will somehow be able to say that this will defund and decimate our great rural public schools. Well, if that’s, if they’re, if it’s true that they’re great, they won’t be decimated, they’ll be fine. And then two, well, you can’t have it both ways. If you don’t have any exit options, your schools definitely won’t be decimated. So you should be the last person arguing that this will defund your public schools. If it’s true that your area has the fewest exit options, you should be the last person voting against this. It’s more of a an excuse. They try to conjure up to side with the establishment and, and to go against their party platform issue.
But since the late 18 hundreds the first modern day voucher program was actually in Milwaukee, the parental choice program in 1990. And since then, up until a few years ago, we were making incremental progress. And we had private school choice programs in 30 states. So the majority of states plus DC already had private school choice programs, either in the form of voucher, tax, credit, scholarship, or education savings account. And the thing is though, with, with, over those three decades or so, it was incremental reforms. It was typically targeted to students who are at the lowest of income levels or capped at a certain number of students. I think in DC the average household income using that program is about $30,000 per household. In DC and in Florida, their tax credit scholarship program their average household income, I wanna say was about $40,000 in, in Florida.
So they, these were typically very targeted, the low income and also targeted to students who had a special need. But over the past couple of years, we’ve kind of had this, the wind at our backs, instead of going with these incremental inching forward reforms that take decades and decades to expand, politicians are now understanding that we fund education for everybody at the K through 12 level already in our state. Why not have that same funding follow the student as opposed to the system? We don’t income cap public schools. We don’t say, because you ha have this income level, you can’t go to a public school. Why would we Inca income cap, having the money follow the child to a private school doesn’t make any sense. So, and it’s also because the, as I alluded to, the teachers unions overplayed their hand and pushing the keep the schools closed, allowed parents to see what was happening in the classroom.
And so parents who weren’t just from lower income levels, middle income families too, started to see that even if their kid was assigned to a school that was a rated by the state, maybe they’re, they thought it was a, a great school because of the standardized test scores started to see something else going on, which was another dimension of school quality that’s arguably more important to parents, which is whether the school’s curriculum aligned with their values. And as Vodi Baum once said, we cannot continue to send our children to Caesar for their education and be surprised when they come home as Romans. Well, good news is parents aren’t surprised anymore. So they’re pushing back at school board meetings. They’re pushing back at the ballot box. We’re doing really well with elections. It’s become politically advantageous to support parental rights in education, and it has become a form of political suicide to come out against parental rights in education.
Terry MCC McCauliffe and Virginia learned that all too well, when he said, I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should should teach. At the final debate stage, Glenn Youngen won by six points with education voters, in particular in a state that went 10 points to Biden just the year before. And that was the number two issue on the election. But now the states are going all in. I mean, we have six states in the past two years alone that have gone universal, meaning all families eligible regardless of income and regardless of background or zip code. What is the six, the six states? The first one was West Virginia in 2021. Second was Arizona in 2022. And then we’ve had four states go universal in 2023. We can now claim this to be the year of education choice. It’s the biggest wins we’ve seen in any single year, and we’re not even done with the year yet.
It’s only March. But we had Iowa, Utah, Arkansas, and now Florida Governor DeSantis signing into law, the biggest universal bill of of the year, because Florida’s just a bigger state than the others. If you add up the number of students in, in the other five states, it’s about the same amount. It’s about 3 million students in the K to 12 level in West Virginia, Arizona, and the others relative to Florida having about a little under 3 million students. So in one fell swoop, Florida just doubled the number of students eligible for a universal school choice program in the country. So this is a huge win. And the way that I’ve put it before is the dominoes are falling. We’ve, we, we’ve reached escape velocity with school choice. It’s, we’ve gone from inching along to just racking up victories left and right, and red states in particular, it’s become a G O P Litmus test issue.
And, and in, in the midterms, look, we didn’t have a red wave or a blue wave, but there was a school choice wave. 76% of the candidates supported my, my organization, the American Federation for Children won their races in 2022. And you don’t have to take my word for it. You can look at the liberal tears in the New Yorker magazine when the author lamented that education freedom candidates fared depressingly well in the midterms. And, and also you can look at the article that came out from NBC News yesterday. They were trying to fear monger about you know, a Betsy DeVos backed group, the American Federation for Children racking Up wins on School Choice all across the country. It was meant to be a hit piece, but it read as a, a fantastic endorsement of the work that my organization is doing all across the country.
Talked about the seismic victories that we’re seeing. And it’s funny that they tried to point out how much money we spent in the elections, but then they didn’t point out any of the money that was spent in opposition. Why did they not do that? Because our opposition has a lot more money than us, and yet we’re still beating them. That just goes to show you how popular school choice is among voters across party lines. Real clear opinion research polling, most recently finding 72% of American supporting school choice with super majority support among Republicans, Democrats, and independents. It’s no wonder N B C didn’t want to ask or even dig into how much the teachers unions spend. They have a war chest to defend the monopoly, and they’re part of the status quo. It’s easier to, to defend something that is the status quo than to, than to change, to have a policy that changes things in the K communication
Grover Norquist:
Governor, governor Reynolds of Iowa said that she had three bites at the apple, started with the small, just handicapped than just poor people, then everybody but before the last vote, which passed school choice education savings accounts for everyone in Iowa she went after and primaried nine Republicans who had been voting against school choice opportunities for children in their districts and in, in Iowa. And the eight of the nine were defeated. And when she last first met after this, the gentleman who she had primaried unsuccessfully, he ran up and said, I’m Team Reynolds. I’m Team Reynolds. So the idea that rural areas are actually representing their own people, that they’re sorry, they’re that they’re actually representing their own constituents as opposed to doing what the teachers union wanted them to really was showed that Iowa was
Corey DeAngelis:
Nonsense. That’s right. And, and we took out, or Reynolds and our, our group and parents pushing back at the polls took out the chair of the House Education Committee. So you had someone in leadership position and incumbent Dustin Height got soundly defeated. I think it was like one of those, you know, 69, you know, 70 30 vote. Just absolute destruction of an incumbent who came out against school choice and who was funded by the teacher’s union. As a Republican, that should be the political kiss of death for any Republican moving forward. This is a line in the sand issue. Much like other issues for the G O P cause families, it’s, it’s about parental rights. Families should be able to direct their own children’s education.
Grover Norquist:
Yes, you’d think so, Georgia, what happened in Georgia and what, what, what, what moves forward now?
Corey DeAngelis:
Hope, hopefully Georgia’s a blessing in disguise, just like we saw with Iowa. So last year, Iowa Republicans in the house, even though they controlled 60% of the seats could not get it done. Even though Governor Reyn, they already passed the Senate with all Republicans, except for one who voted in favor overwhelmingly passed their Senate. Governor Reynolds held the legislature, passed the hundredth hundredth day and, and, and advocated for the policy very heavily. And it didn’t happen even though they had 60% of the chamber. And then, but that bill was much more targeted. I think it was only like 2000 students or something. It was income cap. It wasn’t going all in on school choice. Well, that loss turned into a blessing in disguise because we got some real Republicans in office in Iowa, and they passed universal school choice, the first state to do it this year, the third state in the country to do it.
So that’s that’s a win that came out of a loss. And perhaps in Georgia, something similar to what happened. So just the other night it was, it was their last, their signee died the last day. They needed to pass something. Their senate passed a bill education savings account, school choice bill through a party line vote 33 to 23 couple weeks ago. And all Republicans voted in favor. They voted, they came up, they vote, they came out, voted for their party platform issue and got the job done. I will say though, it was amended down to only the students who are in the 25% lowest performing schools. I would rather have it be for everybody, but hey, this is meant to, to be a compromise, to be, you know, if you didn’t want to go to, with Fullthroated support for Universal, perhaps we can get a quarter of the students eligible, the ones who are in the worst schools.
They got it done in the Senate, moved over to the house, they put it up for a vote a couple days ago, the last day of session, and it failed on an 85 to 89 vote. You need 91 votes to get it done. And we were, we were six votes short. The speaker didn’t vote in that 85 vote. He would’ve probably voted in favor if, if he was the final vote. So we were probably only down like five votes. But that meant with the makeup of the Georgia House, 16 so-called Republicans voted against a party platform issue of school choice, incited with the establishment. And you should have heard, I was watching it all day. The, the, the Florida debate, when that vote happened, the the audio stream had the Democrats just screaming with joy in support of the bill going down in flames cuz the teachers unions were happy, obviously.
And they were basically cheering on those 16 Republicans who voted against school choice. So, hey, look, 80, 84 Republicans voted in favor. There was actually one Democrat that voted in favor too. Misha Mayer, who is a, a strong advocate for school choice. It shouldn’t be a partisan issue. Both parties should support it. But look we’ll see what happens with elections coming up next year. I think a lot of people are upset about 16 so-called Georgia Republicans voting to kill school choice just as every other state’s doing it. I mean, governor DeSantis had just signed his universal bill into law, and a lot of these other states are engaging in friendly competition to, to support families. I mean, I live in Texas. The Senate Education Committee just passed their universal bill 10 to two with all Republicans in favor. The two Democrats who voted against it in Texas attended private schools themselves, <laugh> which is just glorious.
It always, it always happens. They, it’s always this hypocrisy. Joe Biden went to private school and sent his kids to private school, but he doesn’t support school choice for others. You see this all over the place, but there’s a lot of momentum. And yeah, there’s a, you know, every once in a while we’re seeing a, a loss. But look, although the unions blocked it in Georgia for now, they may have won the battle. They will not win the war. This is, it’s, this is a policy that has reached escape velocity. It’s super popular. States are engaging in friendly competition, and families have woken up
Grover Norquist:
Anymore. States expected to have a vote this year. And if, and what do you, does one look forward to next year?
Corey DeAngelis:
Yeah, so Oklahoma they just had a vote couple days ago this week. Their house passed a universal school choice bill, 75 to 25 three to one vote. Bam. That’s how Republicans should get it done. And then this, this week moved over to the Senate, Senate amended it down to if you made $250,000 or less, you know, that’s pretty good. It’s not universal, but that’s pretty dang good. To go from not having a program to 250,000 income level. That’s the, the majority of the families will be eligible. It’s a good step in the right direction. And their Senate passed it 40 to seven, I wanna say all Republicans in favor. And the Democrats oppose. So that’s huge margins. They, they gotta do a committee, a conference thing now to where they hash out the, perhaps they raise that income cap higher, perhaps the house gets what more of what they want than what the Senate passed. We’ll see how that goes, but it looks like it’s almost certain that Oklahoma one
Grover Norquist:
More. Any others you’re looking at this year?
Corey DeAngelis:
Yeah, Texas, Nebraska there’s, so Tennessee just passed an expansion to add another county to their ESA program that passed both chambers. Nebraska’s funny because they, they have a unicameral, you mean the two-thirds majority in the filibuster? And they finally got it this year. They’ve always passed it pretty consistently with majority support, but they got the super majority support on the first vote this year. They need to pass it two more times which I don’t see why they wanna be able to repeat
Grover Norquist:
What they, they have Luann Lenihan there. And so I think that that makes it all possible in Texas. Are the votes there or is there a bottleneck in one of the committees at this point?
Corey DeAngelis:
The votes are there in the Senate. And look, Texas passed a universal e esa before it was cool to do so in 2017. Their Senate passed it 18 to 12 or something, and they had the votes in the Senate. I mean, look, they passed it party line 10 to two through the committee. It, I expect a vote this coming next week in the full Senate that’ll give it extra momentum. The house has historically been a problem in 2017. They blocked it. And the thing is, it isn’t 2017 anymore. I mean, Texas Republican primary voters responded on the ballot last year. 88% supported school choice up from 79% in 2018. So that’s a nine percentage point jump in support. Families are paying close attention now. I think there wasn’t a lot of hubub about the, the failure in 2017. It, it would, the world will turn upside down if the house kills school choice this year, but I don’t think they’re going to, I mean, Abbott has been campaigning all across the state doing these parental empowerment nights.
I was just at a rally with him in Austin. He is really pushing hard to get it done, and I haven’t seen this kind of leadership anywhere. So typically you get two out of the three you know, one chamber in the governor’s office, you can get something done. And the, the sense at the capitol is that something is going to get passed. I hope it’s universal, but we’ll just see how, how it plays out. Th th this will be the crown jewel of, of the school choice victories we just talked about. Florida being a big win, Texas will be even bigger. It’s over 5 million students who would’ve access to private school choice. Yeah.
Grover Norquist:
How can people get involved and, and work with you?
Corey DeAngelis:
You can follow me on Twitter. It’s at DLI Corey, but also you can, if you wanna help us in the fight for Education Freedom, you can sign the Education Freedom Pledge. It’s just education freedom pledge.com
Grover Norquist:
And the name of your book, again,
Corey DeAngelis:
Mediocrity 40 Ways Government Schools Are Failing Today’s Students Comes Out, it’s already out for pre-order on Amazon, but it’s also comes out officially April 26th next month basically this month. If, if, if you’re watching this tomorrow April 26th, it’s the 40 year anniversary of the Nation at Risk Report.
Grover Norquist:
Okay, wonderful. Final thoughts here. The Parents Movement, the Parental Rights Movement, the School Choice Movement are key parts of the Leave Us Alone coalition. If you go around the table who’s sitting there saying, leave me alone, you’ve got, people are concerned about the, their PR ability to practice their faith and transmit it to their children. The Second Amendment community, taxpayers, small businessmen, and women independent contractors, vapers, would like to be able to save their own lives without the government getting in the way. And parents who wanna homeschool. What are your best numbers, Corey? On the jump in homeschooling since we had this situation since Covid, I, I get very cheerful, but conflicting numbers up from 3 million.
Corey DeAngelis:
Yeah, I mean, the latest data that I saw from the Census Bureau indicated at roughly a doubling of the homeschool population. You know, that, that’s, it’s a survey and it was, it’s a pretty legitimate survey. It’s the U US Census Bureau, and they had a huge sample. So it’s just kind of hard to tell. But I would say about a doubling. Some students probably went back, some didn’t. So we, we gotta wait for more data.
Grover Norquist:
3 million kids in charter schools. They’re now more parents of children in charter schools than there are public school teachers in New York City. So when the other team wants to do the little calculation about where the votes are, charter schools alone, of all the choices out, out, can outvote the teachers union itself, not out contribute perhaps, but out vote. Corey, thank you for your leadership on this. It’s been a long trip. It’s not over, but one can see increasing votes in the future. And in running Americans for tax reform, we often look at how people leave state high tax states and move to low tax states from the, to the 14% in New York City, down to zero in Miami, on, on, on income taxes, city and state. Imagine what happens when you add to going from 10% income tax to zero as you move from California and New York into the rest of the country without income taxes, state income taxes add to that five, six, $7,000 per child allowed to get to you to, to begin to go move to the school of your choice. Young parents with families will begin to leave. The blue states, not just wait until they’re the, they start to make some, I just
Corey DeAngelis:
Did it. I moved from DC to Texas, no state income tax, and we’re about to get school choice done.
Grover Norquist:
Excellent. Corey, you have started a wave there. Thank you very, very much, folks, and have a good day. Take care.