Parents Voting With Their Kids’ Feet
2021-09-06 · Guest: Matt Welch (Editor at large at Reason magazine) · 52:27
Families fleeing government-run schools and school choice
Bob Zadek and Matt Welch discuss the massive shift in American education as parents increasingly “vote with their feet” by leaving government-run schools. They explore how the COVID-19 pandemic served as a stress test for public education, revealing the inflexibility of the “one-size-fits-all” model and the influence of teachers’ unions, leading to a surge in support for school choice and “backpack funding” where money follows the student.
Topics: Education, School Choice, Public Schools, Charter Schools, Teachers Unions, COVID-19, Backpack Funding, Equity in Education
Speakers: Bob Zadek, Matt Welch
The Stress Test of Public Education [00:16]
Bob Zadek: Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show on all of radio. And as our announcer said, we are always the show of ideas, never, ever the show of attitude. Thank you so much for listening this Labor Day Sunday morning.
There’s so much in life, so much in the structure of our society, our relationship to government, that just is the way it’s always been. And we just assume certain things are what they are, and that they are the right way to structure society. And plus, who has the time to rethink every part of our life every minute of every day? God, it’s exhausting even to say it, let alone to do it.
But once in a while, once in a while, important structural elements of our society get stress-tested. And elements of our society that we have just plain taken for granted—that that’s the way it is—we start to wonder, “Hold it a second. How come we’re doing it this way and not some other way?” And that is what is happening, in my opinion, today and over the past year and in the coming months in the subject of education. And I’ll say public education, but we will refine that as we get into the topic this morning.
Every single day in every media outlet in the country, there are articles talking about how we educate our children in general, and specifically with the complication caused by managing the COVID pandemic. And we are asking ourselves, “Hold it a second. Who gets to decide? And how do they get to decide? And where does the money go? Tell me again. And who gets to decide what? And what are the roles of parents? And what are the roles of the unions? And what are the roles of government? And what’s the role of the CDC?” Questions we never have asked ourselves very much during a non-pandemic environment. And now we are asking ourselves.
And I thought this is the perfect time to do a deep dive into all of these complex issues and ask ourselves along the way whether some basic assumptions we have made about the structure of the providing of education to our children—whether those assumptions we just made because that’s the way it’s being done when we got here—whether those assumptions are correct.
To help us understand these complex issues, I’m delighted to welcome back to the show Matt Welch. Matt is the editor at large at Reason magazine, my super, super favorite. There is not even a second choice magazine that I read as soon as it comes out. And I love it so much, I even have to touch it, so I read the paper edition. And I love when it gets to my home. It is a cover-to-cover read. I have never found a story in Reason magazine that I wanted to skip over because I wasn’t interested. Even if it’s a topic I was not generally interested in, Reason made me interested.
So Matt, thank you so much for the work you have done at Reason magazine. Along the way, perhaps I’ll tell you the day I got hooked on Reason magazine. It may have been before you even got there, but I’m happy to share that with my friends. Matt has also written with Nick Gillespie The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What’s Wrong with America. That’s a big task, and they accomplish it quite well. And Matt has most recently written in Reason magazine an article whose headline says it all: “Families are fleeing government-run schools.” Matt is experiencing government-run schools firsthand because he is a customer of government-run schools living under the control of the New York City school system. Matt, welcome to the show this morning once again.
Matt Welch: Thank you so much for the generous description of my, yes, wonderful employer, a place I’ve been happy to work for for most of the last 20 years. Reason—we write it for you. So thank you for that.
Bob Zadek: Thank you. And Matt, the day that I became hooked for life is—goes back quite a while. Reason had as its cover story “The Loss of Privacy.” That was the theme of the magazine. And when I went to my mailbox and took out the magazine, on the cover there was a large headline. It said, “Bob Zadek, we know where you live.” And on the cover of the magazine was an arrow pointing to a Google picture of the town that I then lived in, Sausalito, with an arrow pointing to my house. Oh my god, how did they do it? And each of the 75,000 or so subscribers to the magazine got their personalized version. And you certainly made the point about the loss of privacy. I remember that day so well. So, and I enjoy sharing the story.
Families Fleeing Government Schools [05:54]
Bob Zadek: Now Matt, you have written “Families are fleeing government-run schools.” Tell us the premise of the article. What caught your attention that you decided to write that article? What was the premise, and what was the point you were so anxious to make in the piece you wrote in Reason?
Matt Welch: So, I’m, as you mentioned, a parent of two kids in the K-12 system. One of whom is entering into eighth grade at public school—not just a public school, but the public school that was featured in the Nice White Parents podcast by the New York Times, which is amusing, I guess is a way to put it. And then the other one is going into first grade, and we pulled her from the public school and put her into a private school. And this is not a decision we took lightly, since myself, I never went to a private school in my life, and my wife is French, so they have a different idea of public and private schools than we do.
But we did that because the massive uncertainty created by the way that New York City, like almost every big Democratic-run city in the country—and I don’t really rush to go to that partisan conclusion, but it’s just numerically true—made schooling completely unpredictable last year in ways that was just a huge challenge for everybody. We were lucky enough to have the means, perhaps foresight, to organize a learning pod where you pool up with a couple of other families and you can just, you know, if the school decides on a Sunday night at 9:34 p.m. to send you an email saying, “Sorry, school’s going to be closed for 10 days,” which happened in February of this year, then you have a way to absorb that.
But anyway, the uncertainty was so much, and the reveal—we’d kind of known but didn’t really know the extent to which incompetence, with a “ts” like the Declaration of Independents, incompetence and people who do not put children first in their organizing of policy had the most power in determining the policy of K-12 government-run schools. And we just didn’t want a part of that this year.
So the article I wrote was—we’re starting to get the preliminary numbers of enrollments for the fall. And a school 10, 15 minutes away from where I live in Park Slope, Brooklyn, had just announced—the principal had sent out an email to families saying, “We just lost one-third of our enrollment.” An elementary school lost 120 students, went down from 345 two years ago to 225 this year. And as a result, they’re going to have to let go four teachers, four other teachers found a different job as well throughout the district or maybe in private school.
So this is a huge change. Since I wrote that article, I should add, the public elementary school that my youngest—that we pulled her out of—they also sent an email saying that their enrollment has gone down from 948 two years ago to less than 800 this year. So these are some of the first indications in the country of what the fall enrollment picture is going to look like after last year, in which last year we lost about 3, 3.5% of students from the government-run K-12 system. And many went into homeschooling, private schools kind of flattened a little bit down, charter schools went up, but homeschooling was actually the biggest thing.
So I have been writing about and participating locally in the policy decisions about this thing for the last two years. And what I have been predicting for a long time is that this fall, the numbers to watch this fall—because this is the first time that a lot of parents, a lot of families, have had the opportunity to plan, right? Because the pandemic hit in March of 2020, and everyone was reeling and those things closed down. Okay. And then summer comes, the next fall comes, and people are kind of creating policy on the fly. You couldn’t like, you know, it’s difficult to pick up and move to a different state or a different district. It’s difficult and expensive to go into private systems or whatnot.
So this year, this fall, is the product of, “Okay, we’ve had a year and a half. We’ve learned what we needed to learn about the way our local school systems are run and the way that other school systems in a completely different area are run, and we’re going to make decisions.” So these preliminary numbers indicate to me that we’re going to see a kind of an earth-shaking change in public education, attitudes towards participation in it, and including attitudes towards it from taxpayers who got to be wondering, “Why are we paying more and more for a quote-unquote free system that people—a free product that people are running away from screaming?” Because that is what is happening right now.
Structural Differences: Public vs. Private [11:56]
Bob Zadek: Now, let’s unpack it because there’s so much in what you just said, for which I really thank you. You have just teed up a semester’s worth of work. We have an hour to do it in. Let’s see how good a job we can do.
First of all, the alternative is, or one of the alternatives is private schools in one form or another, charter schools being what comes to mind right away. But charter schools and private schools in general are suffering from pandemic-related problems. They have the same age demographic, obviously. They draw from the same pool of customers. So what is there structurally that makes the public school system—and perhaps larger school systems, but maybe the problem isn’t limited solely to larger systems—but what is there structurally that enables private school to cater to their customers better than public schools? And I’m sorry for commodifying your two children as customers, but after all, of course, that’s exactly what they are. So I’m not minimizing their importance as individuals, obviously.
But why—what is the structural difference that enables private schools to seem to meet the needs of their customers more than public schools? They have the same motivation. And when you answer the question, you’ll probably find it helpful to point out why it is important to the public schools for them to lose enrollment. That is, what is there about how they get their money from the state that makes enrollment important?
Matt Welch: Yeah, so just addressing the latter, in most jurisdictions, though not all, a big chunk of school budgeting is based on per-student, right? This school, that my school, went from 948 students to let’s say it’s 770, I don’t know what it’s going to be. They don’t either. That means they’re going to lose a big chunk of funding. Now, they’ll probably be able to bridge the gap for a year because let’s not forget that Washington, the federal government over the last two years, has sent something like close to $200 billion to K-12 for emergency coronavirus-related stuff, helping out. And generally speaking, on a given year, the federal government sends $40 billion. So it’s a huge flood of money that’s come on.
In theory, that money was being sold as, “We’re going to use this to, you know, improve our ventilation systems to do mitigation measures.” In practice, when you look at the numbers, it’s almost all personnel. So the teachers unions, who have a completely outsized influence on school policies in Democratic-run polities, which right now includes the federal government and the Biden administration, whose wife, Dr. Jill Biden, is a member of the National Education Association, and she had the two union teachers union presidents in the White House on literally day two of this administration.
But yes, the public schools eventually have to feel pressure budgetarily by not serving their students. So it’s an interesting—to answer the first half of your question about a different approach, private and charter schools. Private and charter schools are, of course, charter schools—they’re also public schools. They are funded by government money, but they’re not run by governments. They’re not generally not unionized places. They get to be much more nimble in the way they approach things.
And for instance, in the city of New York, they educate 10% of the student population K-12 here because the government-run schools didn’t have that great of a reputation and weren’t as nimble about helping out, being sensitive to parental needs. And there’s a cap, there’s an artificial cap that the state puts because we have crazy government in New York. There’s an artificial cap on the number of physical charter schools they can be. So even with that, it still increased last year. And even though charters were as closed as the normal schools, because they kind of had to have the same pandemic rules, it’s just that parents had the intuition that they were handling the remote learning, which is generally a disaster, but they were handling it better, they were being more sensitive, they were being more creative and flexible. So parents, especially poorer and more minority families, found that to be pretty useful last year.
What private schools did that was different than public schools last year is that they were open. It’s astonishing to see how many places—New York was one of them—where private schools were open the entire year, right across the street from a public school that was maybe open twice a week and then subject to all kinds of hair-trigger closures and shutdowns. This is especially true in California, where you are. California had the least open schools in the country. And right across the street from many of those least open schools were private schools, Catholic schools, whatnot. They were all open for the most part, except where they’re subject to too much kind of rule-setting by state governments. But generally speaking, they were open.
So even though globally the number of private schools went down in enrollment last year, they’re starting to tick back up this year. They just suffered from a lot of, you know, material shortages that parents had as everyone was sort of scrambling around. But the exodus from those institutions, from public schools, and then also particularly to homeschooling, which doubled in this country, and including the biggest growth element of homeschooling are Black families. So that is changing the way that people view education. A lot of people experienced at least some remote learning, and so they became face-to-face with the curriculum and also face-to-face with the decision-making process.
And man, when you start looking at the sausage and the way it gets made, and oh boy, I know so many parents who couldn’t believe what they saw. I had a better inkling of it because I’ve been writing about and participating in some of the policy-making in New York, especially as it concerns the subject of equity, a term of art that sort of means equality among races and classes of people in the way that things are provided. And so I was face-to-face with a lot of crazy stuff. So I knew going in that it was kind of crazy, but a lot of parents discovered that for the first time in the pandemic and came to the rational conclusion, “Yeah, I don’t really think my kid needs to go through this.”
COVID as a Stress Test [19:15]
Bob Zadek: So really what has happened, I guess a subtext, not so sub, but a subtext of your article could very well have been “Customers are discovering that they have been purchasing an inferior product.” It’s far more subtle when there are issues about curriculum and things of that nature. It’s a little harder for a typical, if there is such a thing, parent to discover on a day-by-day basis how inferior or not the product is. The only real basis is perhaps testing, which is revealing itself but doesn’t tell the whole story.
But now, in a way that affects parents profoundly, is: Is your child going to be at school? That is, do you have to arrange for childcare, or must you stay home from your job to take care all of a sudden, without planning, of your child who is now going to be at home, and must you find another way to educate? All of a sudden, parents are realizing in as profound a way as possible that maybe their vendor, the government-run school, is not the best vendor in the world, and maybe we have to look elsewhere.
So COVID is in many ways a very visual stress test of the product itself and the way it makes decisions. So all that happened was—I shouldn’t say all, that sounds like I’m minimizing it—but COVID merely brought to the front pages the inferiority of the government-sold product. Think Yugo automobiles as a reasonable parallel. That government is a provider of an inferior product, and now we better look elsewhere. And all of a sudden the demand for the privately sold product is increasing. So I think it’s a fair subtext of your article that “Families are fleeing government-run schools” could just as easily have been headlined—and I’m not a headline writer—is that parents are moving their account or changing vendors in large quantities. And COVID is not the cause of it; COVID is the stress test that brought all this to the fore.
Now, what is there about—and this is a softball question, Matt, and maybe you can just give a shortish answer—but why should it be that here you have the administration of a government-run school, which has a problem? It has to provide education and in a way that doesn’t threaten the health and safety of its customers. And a private school has the very same challenge. What is there structurally that makes one reach a wrong conclusion, terribly wrong, and the other institution, the private business of charter schools, to seem to make the right decision, at least one which is more appealing to its customers? What’s the structural issue here? Because you have given this so much thought.
Matt Welch: The overwhelming—the biggest factor, two biggest factors in determining whether a given school system district is going to be open or closed, or was going to be open or closed during the previous school year—and this will also, I think, predict mostly how school closures will happen in this fall as well—but there’s been study by everybody right, left, and center. Two things will tell you this, and neither of those two things have to do with the pandemic, the virus, the local positivity rate, none of that. Number of deaths, none of that.
The two factors are: How did this district vote when given a chance to vote for Donald Trump? I swear to God. And then two, what is the strength, the influence of the local teachers union? Those are the two factors by far. And I think it’s the second one that also has driven a lot of parents kind of batty because they, you know, are now paying close attention to the statements of people like Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, or the school unions in Los Angeles, United Teachers LA, United Teachers Chicago as well.
It’s not just that a lot of these union officials—and you know, it’s a hard question, open and close these schools, that’s hard. Let’s show some generosity here. But not only did they err really badly on the side of closing things down, even though international experience, all the other countries for the most part kept their schools open last fall, including during the Delta virus and Delta variant in the UK over the summer. But in the US, not only did the teachers union influence places close things down, but the kind of comments that they made—they would treat parents like me who are advocating for keeping schools open, they would say, “That’s white privilege talking.” They would open up all these weird cans of worms about racism and like, “You just want someone to babysit your kids,” and all of these really kind of accusatory, nasty, divisive, and also anti-science things that affected the ability of teachers and teachers unions to work at home if that’s what they wanted to do.
So it was about choice—it was about school choice for teachers. It was not about school choice for kids. And so it’s that strength of union. And once people saw that and saw that that was the mechanism, then you lose faith. Quick example for me is that New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, who I’m no fan of, about four or five months ago kind of flipped his script on schools and said, “We have to stay open, and remote learning is a debacle, and we’re not even going to offer that anymore. We have to, you know, school’s got to go through this,” right? So I was happy to hear that, and this was happening right when we were making our decision about our own six-year-old.
But I rationally looked at it and said, “Sure, he might say that, but what are the rules that are going to be promulgated afterwards? What is the policy going to be like, and who is going to be influencing that policy?” Answer: Teachers unions. Therefore, the policies, regardless of rhetoric, are likely to make it more likely that elementary schools will close a whole bunch this year. Kids will be quarantining on a hair-trigger, whereas the private school literally across the street that we’re going to is going to stay open.
Backpack Funding and School Choice [26:47]
Bob Zadek: It has been observed that to the extent that charter schools operate in the same—or appeal to the same customer base as government-run schools, that—and I think this is not even no one takes issue with it—the overall quality of the service delivered by the government-run school improves because now they have to, for the first time structurally, they have to deal with the concept of competition. They have a test. They have their customers have an alternative. They’re not a captive customer base where the customers have no choice.
So to what extent is, do you think as an observer, that charter schools remaining open, government schools closing, government schools acting unpredictably, charter schools trying to do a better job in giving parents predictability—to what extent can you optimistically, if you can talk about words like optimism in discussing school government-run schools, to what extent do you think there is hope that the experience will be that government-run schools might improve—and maybe that’s too much to hope for—simply because of the point in your piece, which is voters and customers are moving their accounts?
Matt Welch: I think that it’s more likely that the positive reforms are going to come from without than from within. There will be some nimble response to competition. There’ll be some good mayors, some good school district chiefs who will look at this and say, “Hang on, this is an existential change in our business. We need to respond to it as such.” But in fact, I think what’s happening is that you’re seeing on the policy side—it’s been, I think, half of the country, 25, 30 states, something like that, have introduced during the pandemic some form of legislation in which state education spending, which to be clear is one out of every five dollars at most states, 20% of the tax money that they spend total budget, everything is on K-12 education. So kind of a big deal.
But they’ve been passing bills saying that that funding should follow students, not school buildings. That is a huge, huge shift. That’s basically institutionalizing on a national level the charter school system, which, you know, unions and Democratic politicians of whom they disproportionately support—95% of union money goes to Democrats—they’ve been railing against charter schools. Bill de Blasio says, “I hate charter schools” at a big charter or a big public education thing when you just, you know, haphazardly running for president. He said he hated the schools that teach 10% of his kids. Are you kidding me?
But anyways, all these backpack funding bills, right? The money goes in the backpack of the student wherever the student goes. And that could be homeschooling too, which again has grown faster than any other category in the last 18 months. These things are catching fire, and that’s just going to mean if you’re going to compete or not compete, doesn’t matter. You ain’t getting money. So it’s going to be absolutely a force-fed situation of change onto these schools.
And, you know, I as someone who appreciates competition and education innovation and all of it, a big part of me is rooting this on, for sure. And at the same time, a big part of me is worrying because we’ve seen what happens when families en masse flee school systems in big cities. It’s kind of what happened in the ’60s and ’70s with the decrepitude of schools and also of, you know, bussing and a bunch of other kind of social flashpoints that happened back then. It can change a city, you know? It’s certainly on the verge of change in my neighborhood right now. That change isn’t necessarily the greatest. The people who can’t or won’t muster the ability to leave these decaying systems, which then become decaying cities, they’re kind of in a pretty bad pickle. So I think again, it’s going to—the change is going to come from outside under pressure, including from taxpayers who are going to be saying, “Why are my property taxes so high when nobody even wants the free school that they’re paying for?”
Bob Zadek: I’m so glad that you mentioned just a second ago the issue of giving—what you called backpack funding was your exact phrase, but certainly is descriptive—where you pointed out what was to be on my outline for this morning’s show, the very next topic we were going to discuss. And you just did it again, Matt, with your reference to “one size fits all.”
In our country, indeed in the world today, we are living in a world that everything we get, everything we get, seems to be custom-made. We are getting more choice than ever before in every decision we make. The world has found out how to give each of us exactly what we want at the price we want to pay for it, more or less. But in any event, clearly that’s the trend. That is indisputable.
And here we have government-run education, which as you just said, is burdened structurally—they can’t, they don’t have the skill and never will—to deliver a specialized product, which is education perfect for the gifted child, for the child who’s less gifted, for the child whose orientation is more to the arts than the sciences. We just reduce it to the lowest common denominator. And private schools have learned and charter schools have learned how to do that. And it seems to me, Matt, that a crucial dynamic is just as you have said: The public schools, government-run schools, will always be burdened with one size fits all. And I think that’s going to be their downfall.
And because of issues like equity, it’s unfair to devote tax dollars to more gifted students to the prejudice of less gifted students, if gifted is in fact a precise word, but you know what I mean. And I think that will—the public cannot help but demand from education what they expect in every other good or service they get, which is a good or service designed to meet their particular needs.
Racial Divides and Remote Learning [33:35]
Bob Zadek: We have about a minute left, Matt. Any thoughts on the profound competitive disadvantage that government-run schools have in being burdened by one size fits all?
Matt Welch: Yes, it’s additionally the burdens because if you look at the preponderance of public school education policy making, the trend lines just prior to the pandemic, and this has remained throughout, even during, it’s been to get rid of gifted and talented programs. It’s been to get rid of, in New York especially, specialized high schools. We don’t want anybody rising too far above the trend line because if we can measure that backwards and it doesn’t look in the right demographics that we would like to achieve, then there must be something institutionally or structurally racist about it.
We started to see enrollment declines in New York, and especially in the pilot districts, which mine is one of them, who started implementing some of these leveling policies. We started to see that one year before the pandemic. Enrollment had grown uninterrupted for a decade. It declined 7% in my district overnight the first year that they did a radical overhaul of admissions policies and got rid of all possible student performance metrics as part of it. This is happening nationwide.
So these two things are compounding each other. Just when everyone is learning that they can tailor-make their own homeschooling product for their kids, public schools are saying, “Nope, we are not going to do any specialization at all.” How do they think this is going to end? It’s not going to end well for them.
Bob Zadek: Matt, I’m just going to close with one observation on this one size fits all. You may have noticed that the New York City Department of Education has—is looking into getting rid of things like the honor roll and class rankings in school. And I’m going to quote: “Recognizing student excellence, the honor rolls and class rank can be detrimental to learners who find it more difficult to reach academic success.” Don’t you dare award a student for doing well because it’s going to hurt the precious feelings of the student who didn’t make the honor roll. If that becomes the policy, it’s game over for education in New York City.
This is Bob Zadek. We’ve been speaking to Matt Welch, editor at Reason magazine. Matt, how can our friends out there follow your work at Reason magazine, please?
Matt Welch: Please go to reason.com. You can also follow @reason on Twitter, and you can follow me on Twitter @mattwelch.
Bob Zadek: And please follow Matt. He writes with humor and intellect, and he has a worldview that he can see through the fog better than any other journalist I have ever read. This is Bob Zadek, thanking Matt for joining us for this past hour and inviting you to please subscribe to and enjoy my podcast, The Bob Zadek Show. Give your comments, plus and minus. We welcome all constructive criticism. Rank us if you choose to do so. And I hope to be back again next Sunday for another hour of libertarian thought. Thank you so much and enjoy the rest of the three-day weekend.