Students, Not Systems
2022-08-05 · Guest: Corey DeAngelis (Adjunct scholar at Cato) · 52:09
School choice and funding students over institutions
Bob Zadek and Corey DeAngelis discuss the necessity of school choice, arguing that education funding should follow the student rather than the institution. They debunk common myths regarding the defunding of public schools and the perceived incompetence of low-income parents, while highlighting the hypocrisy of public officials who utilize private education for their own children.
Topics: School Choice, Education Policy, Vouchers, Teacher Unions, Government Schools, Pandemic Schooling, Education Savings Accounts
Speakers: Bob Zadek, Corey DeAngelis
Introduction to the Education Debate [00:23]
Bob Zadek: Hello everyone, welcome to the Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show in all of radio. The show of ideas, never once the show of attitude. Thank you so much for listening this fall Sunday morning.
There is an issue in our country, a very tough issue, unresolved, important public policy issue dealing with public schools, aka government schools on the one hand, and private, i.e., market-based schools, charter schools, private schools if you will, on the other hand. That issue has been around probably in the forefront since the early 1990s when I think it was Milwaukee in Wisconsin first initiated a voucher program—more about voucher programs as we get into the show—and then it caught the public’s attention and imagination, and the private school, the voucher school movement has been around and active and growing ever since.
The reason I’d like to talk about it this morning is because given the effect of the pandemic on public schools, on locking down the schools, on banning classroom education in the public sector, and private schools are more able to cope with the pandemic and still have classroom learning, so the issue of government on the one hand and private on the other schools during and before and after the pandemic is in the news almost every day.
I got real curious about this and thought I would invite to the show Corey DeAngelis. Corey is an adjunct scholar at Cato for the Center of Educational Freedom, and Corey has recently published a book, School Choice Myths, where he carefully and effectively identifies and then destroys all of the myths promulgated by the opponents of school choice. He tears them apart one at a time. The book is an easy and impressive read, I commend it to all of us. And I’ve invited Corey to the show this morning to tell us what’s going on with private schools, voucher schools, and the like on the one hand, and government schools on the other. Where are we now, and what do we hope will happen?
This also becomes important because it seems that President-elect Biden has almost declared war on private schools, declared war on the word “choice.” Choice is as American a word as there could possibly be. President-elect Biden has said the days of school choice are over. What drives him to that anti-free choice approach? Corey, welcome to the show this morning and thank you very much for sharing with us what you have learned in writing your book and what the public needs to know as they follow the debate, which will be active, which will be fiery during the next four years, the debate over should Americans have a choice in how their children are educated. So welcome to the show this morning, Corey.
Corey DeAngelis: Hey Bob, thank you so much for having me. Yeah, it’s going to be an interesting four years and we have a lot to talk about today. There’s been a lot going on in relation to the pandemic and how that really highlights the need for what I call school choice, or funding the student instead of the institution.
Defining Government Schools [02:31]
Bob Zadek: Now, just to have us get us into the discussion, tell us right now how public schools are traditionally funded and how we got here. It wasn’t always this way. So tell us the big picture view of the history of what I’ll call public education in our country. It seems to most of us that we have always had the present system, but that’s not quite true. So tell us, if you will, how we got to where we are now and tell us about the hybrid system that we live under, the big picture, and then we’ll drill down.
Corey DeAngelis: Yeah Bob, I liked in your opening that you referred to them, public schools, as government schools. And I think that’s actually the more correct term because they’re not really public in any meaningful sense of the word. They discriminate based on zip code. People live in a particular house and they’re residentially assigned to a particular government-run school, and so they’re not open to the public like a public park would be, so they’re not accessible to everyone. They’re not a public good because they’re rivalrous and excludable, so by the basic definition of a public good, they’re not one of those. And they’re run by the government, they’re operated by the government, they’re regulated by the government, they’re assigned by the government, they’re compelled by the government, and they’re funded by the government. So I think you’re right to call them government schools, and I think Milton Friedman referred to them as government schools as well.
But the way that we do it in the United States is a little weird in that we fund the institution or the government-run school regardless of how well it meets the needs of individual families and regardless of whether the family even chooses to send their child to that particular institution. So this is why I refer to school choice as funding students instead of institutions. With school choice, you could pick your residentially assigned government-run school if that works best for you, and that option is still on the table and it should be on the table. But if that doesn’t work for whatever reason—let’s say there’s a bullying problem in the school, maybe there’s political indoctrination happening in the school, or maybe the school is just not teaching basic reading, writing, and arithmetic to an effective level—that money should follow the child to whatever educational institution works best for them. And that could be the public school again, or the government school, but it could also be a charter school or a private school or home-based education through homeschooling or unschooling or a microschool or what people are referring to now as a pandemic pod where several families get together and economize on the process of homeschooling to make it more economically efficient.
Funding Students, Not Institutions [04:31]
Corey DeAngelis: So this is the basic idea of school choice: just have the money follow the child. And I just like to point out that this is how we do it with so many other taxpayer-funded initiatives. And all these other initiatives, people who oppose school choice and having the funding follow the child actually support funding following people when it comes to things like Pell grants for higher education. With Pell grants, the money goes to the student and the student can pick a public or community college if they want, but they can also pick a private university, even a religious university if they would like. Same thing with the GI Bill for veterans, and same thing with pre-K programs when it comes to stuff like Head Start or other state-funded pre-K programs. We don’t residentially assign families to providers of pre-K services; we give the funding to the families and rightfully so, they’re able to choose to take that money to a public or private provider of pre-K services.
And you can go on and on with these examples with things like food stamps, for example. We don’t residentially assign low-income families to government-run grocery stores and tell them that if they want their food stamps, they must use them at the residentially assigned government-run grocery store. I think most people would think that would be absolutely ridiculous to take away people’s liberties like that and to restrict their choices like that and to protect a monopoly at the expense of choices of individual families. When it comes to food stamps, we allow the families to choose the provider. You can choose Walmart or Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s. And I can go on and on and on with these examples. And what’s interesting to me is that a lot of people who support funding the child when it comes to pre-K and higher education do not support vouchers or funding the student directly when it comes to K-12, which begs the question: why is there that disconnect in logic? And the only reason that I can come up with is because the power dynamics differ. When it comes to pre-K and when it comes to groceries and when it comes to higher education, the norm is that we already have a high degree of choice. But when it comes to K-12 education, there’s an entrenched special interest that profits off of families from being able to get your child’s education dollars regardless of how well they meet your needs, and so that’s why we see the disconnect in people fighting against funding students directly when it comes to K-12 and we don’t see that from the same people when it comes to pre-K and higher education. All I’m arguing when it comes to school choice is let’s apply the logic everywhere. If we’re going to do that with all these other programs, well, let’s fund the students directly. I mean, the education funding is supposed to be for educating the child, it’s not supposed to be for propping up and protecting a government monopoly. We should put our money where our mouths are and have the funding reflect that reality that the system is supposed to be for the child, not the other way around.
Bob Zadek: And Corey, there are two other examples I thought of in preparing for my conversation with you this morning. I thought of the VA system. Under the VA system, which is a healthcare system for American military veterans, under the VA system, which has gone under incredible scrutiny and been attacked as being inadequate in many ways, that system is in many ways like the public school system in that the veterans who are given the benefit of healthcare, as they should as part of their employment contract if you will, but the veterans are told you only can get healthcare through the monopoly system called the VA. You cannot get private healthcare. And we remember there was an enormous hue and cry, almost universal, that veterans should be allowed to take the benefit and spend it in the private sector where—no headline here—the quality would be better. So we don’t have to speculate theoretically about the merits of the system. And also in other areas of healthcare, take Medicaid, the state-run system. Under Medicaid, we give the money, the Medicaid vouchers, the program, we give it to the consumer, the patient, and the patient is allowed to pick any doctor who will accept that compensation under the Medicaid program, but the patient gets to decide where to spend the money the government gives them. Also in housing, the Section 8 housing, the indigent or lower-income tenant is given a money, money’s worth if you will, a voucher, but it is allowed to pick the apartment or the home where it spends the money. So throughout the system, Corey is encouraging the use of a system that we adopt in almost every other area of welfare-type benefits. We allow the consumer—we give the consumer economic benefit, but allow the consumer to pick how it spends it, so therefore there is a marketplace, there is competition for that consumer holding this government-granted benefit to spend it with one vendor rather than another. So this is nothing radical, we live this way in almost every other area of our life in America, but not in K-12. So this is not a radical system, this is a proven system that Americans have long since accepted.
The Role of Teacher Unions and the Defunding Myth [06:01]
Bob Zadek: Now, Corey, what are the main arguments—and I’m going to ask an obvious question, this is like a confidence builder for you, Corey, so I’m going to ask you a really easy question, a softball question just to build up your confidence during the hour we’re together this morning—so who are the opponents of giving the parents in America, who are the opponents of denying them the choice of how their children get educated? And what are the most—there are lots of alleged persuasive arguments, but what are the strongest arguments that the opponents of choice make in opposition to what you and I would propose?
Corey DeAngelis: Yeah, I first want to point out, since there’s libertarians listening to this podcast and radio show, that even though I’m using analogies like Pell grants and food stamps, that doesn’t mean that I’m saying that these are all great programs like Medicaid and Social Security, how we fund people directly. All I’m saying is that if we’re going to have that money allocated away from the taxpayer and for these certain programs, it should go to the person instead of the institution. And so this isn’t an argument about whether we should have this funding or not, and I just wanted to clarify that really quickly.
But then when it comes to K-12, it’s a little different because it actually reduces government size from reallocating dollars from government institutions over to individuals that can be used in the private sector. And voucher programs tend to be a lower percentage of what is already being spent in the traditional public school system. So I just wanted to give that tidbit of information for the libertarians watching.
But then yes, I mean, the main opponents of school choice, it’s obvious, it’s the teachers unions. I referred to an entrenched special interest that profits from the system and how it exists today. It is the monopoly, it’s the teachers union that fights really hard against allowing the funding to follow the child because then they won’t have that geographic monopoly that they currently have through residential assignment to government-run schools, which are much more likely to staff people that are from the teachers union. So that means less union dues for them and less political power for the union bosses. And of course, they repeat myths over and over and over again, even though the evidence and basic logic is takes down those myths actually pretty easily. They use their power to just repeat the myths over and over again.
But everybody on this show that’s listening today has heard the myth or argument from the other side that school choice defunds public schools, or what we would call government schools. To which I respond: no, school choice doesn’t defund public schools, public schools defund families. School choice initiatives just reallocate those dollars back to the rightful owners, which are the families. The money doesn’t belong to any particular institution. It doesn’t belong to the private schools either, it doesn’t belong to the charter schools, it doesn’t belong to the government schools, it belongs to the families. So school choice programs just flip that power dynamic to how it should be, and instead of allocating the money to a particular institution, public or private, it goes to people like it does with all these other programs. You would similarly never hear someone argue that allowing people to choose their grocery store defunds Walmart. You would never hear that, it would be absolutely ridiculous because Walmart doesn’t own your food stamps or your grocery bill each week. It doesn’t belong to Safeway either, it belongs to the family. And so I think people need to start to realize what the money is for. It’s not supposed to be for propping up this monopoly and protecting the employees, it’s supposed to be for the children. And once people start to realize that, you start to see that all these arguments just make no sense at all.
And then my second response to that particular claim is that a lot of these people that promulgate and repeat this claim are people who are defending the government monopoly on schooling, and they try to say that public schools are great and that we don’t need school choice. And at the same time, they’ll say that school choice defunds public schools. To which I respond: well, which one is it? If your public schools are so great, then why would people leave when given the option and therefore defund your public schools? It’s an admission that they believe that when families are given a choice, that they’ll leave the traditional public schools. And in fact, if you ask parents on surveys where they would like to send their children if money weren’t an issue and if we had school choice-like initiatives, about half of the people who are in traditional public schools say that they would choose something else, either homeschooling or private schooling. So there actually would be a mass exodus from the public schools, but that’s not a good argument to force people to send their children to schools that aren’t meeting their needs. So that’s a good admission that they believe that families will do something else.
And then quickly, my third response to that is that mathematically, the traditional public schools actually financially benefit from losing students to school choice programs. And this is a little bit more of a technical argument, but schools in America are funded based on student enrollment counts, but they’re not completely funded based on student enrollment counts. If you lose a student, you lose some of the money based on enrollment, but there’s also block grants that go into the traditional public school system. And Georgetown University has estimated how much of the funding is actually based on student enrollment, and in most states it’s about 60 to 80 percent. So what that means mathematically is when you lose a student to your competition from the traditional public school system through a voucher program, the traditional public schools actually get to keep 20 to 40 percent of the funding for students who are no longer there. So on a per-pupil basis, they actually end up with more money. So when they’re arguing to increase per-pupil spending, well, school choice does that, so they should be super happy about school choice. Similarly, it would be interesting, just think about if this happened with grocery stores. I always like to go back to the grocery store analogy because it makes sense to most people. Just imagine if you left Walmart because you didn’t like whatever they were providing, or let’s say you left Safeway, and you started shopping at Trader Joe’s for your groceries each week, and Safeway got to keep 20 percent of your grocery bill each week. I would argue that Safeway would be really happy about that because they would get to keep a lot of your money for services that they’re no longer providing to you. They would love that deal. Safeway would love it, any grocery store would love that deal. The traditional public schools, I argue, should similarly be happy that they get to keep any money at all. I mean, the public schools will argue, “Oh, we have to keep the lights on, we have fixed costs, you know, we have all these things that we have to pay for,” but that applies to private schools too, but they don’t get to keep 20 percent of your funding after you leave, and Walmart doesn’t get to keep 20 percent of your funding after you leave to start shopping for groceries elsewhere. So there’s a lot of responses to that myth, and there’s so many other myths in the debate, but I definitely think that’s the biggest one, that people argue—and the basis of their argument is that they believe your child’s education dollars belong to the system and it doesn’t belong to them, and they get it completely backwards.
Mechanisms of School Choice: Vouchers and ESAs [07:16]
Bob Zadek: Help us understand the big picture on how the economics work in a school choice program. When there are—we’ve used vouchers, there are scholarship programs and the like—tell us just how the money would work and does work given those jurisdictions that welcome one way or another school choice. Tell us how the voucher system works and who are the winners and losers in, for example, a voucher program.
Corey DeAngelis: Well, the families are the winners, right? But that’s the quick response. But there’s a lot of different ways to fund school choice-type mechanisms, but I’ll go over the basic way that makes sense to most people is that your money currently—your child’s education dollars currently go to a residentially assigned government-run school regardless of how well it meets your needs. With a school choice-type mechanism, that same funding follows the child to wherever the family chooses to allocate those dollars. So it still could be the traditional public school that you’re residentially assigned to, so in that case nothing changes, the funding is still follows the child to that school. But if that isn’t the decision that worked—the choice of that family—a certain fraction of those dollars—and I say a certain fraction because the way that these programs currently work is in order to get them passed, to make it politically feasible, you build in a taxpayer savings by making it let’s say 80 percent of what would have been spent in the traditional public school system. Sometimes it’s less than that, let’s say half, 50 percent of what would have been spent in the public schools. So the public schools actually financially benefit, they get to keep some of the money. The taxpayer financially benefits, they get to keep some of the money. And then the family financially benefits, obviously, from having a choice. They could still pick the public school, but the money could follow the child in the form of a voucher to pay for private school tuition and fees. That’s the basic idea.
There’s also now things called Education Savings Accounts. The money, instead of coming in the form of a voucher to pay for private school, would go to something that the family operates called an Education Savings Account. And you could use that same money to pay for private school tuition and fees, so in that sense it’s pretty much the same thing. But the difference with an Education Savings Account is you can also use it for non-private school forms of education. So you could use it for special needs therapies for special needs students, you could use it for online learning, to cover homeschool expenses, you can use it for microschools, you can use it for expenses for unschooling or pandemic pods. So it really is much more flexible and more customizable to have the ESA or Education Savings Account-type mechanism. And for people wondering, “Well, what if people spend the money on things that aren’t education?” there are regulations in place that say that it has to be government-approved education expenditures. So you can’t take the money, for example, and buy groceries with the money. You can’t use it for a big-screen TV, for example. And if you do, you can get caught for fraud and it would be—you’d be in big trouble with the law if you did that. So those regulations are in place.
There’s also ways to privately fund school choice mechanisms, things called tax-credit scholarships. And these are a little bit more complicated, but the basic idea is you can donate to a scholarship-granting organization, families can go to the scholarship-granting organization, get those private dollars and take it to a private school or to use it for homeschooling expenses, and then the donors to the scholarship-granting organization would get a tax benefit for doing so. So that’s a privately funded way to do school choice, and those programs tend to be less regulated because private funds are less likely to be regulated by the government than government funds or public funds or taxpayer funds. So that’s the basic way to do it.
The Paternalism of School Choice Opponents [08:31]
Bob Zadek: One of the complaints of those people—one of the myths in your book, of course—and one of the complaints you hear a lot if you follow the arguments pro and con on school choice is that lower-income people are not—and this infuriates me, it infuriates me even to say it as a straw man argument, but I have to say it to inform our listeners—is that lower-income people are not engaged enough in their children’s education, they’re not competent enough—it enrages me even to say it—to make the right choice. That is, let’s take the choice away and say, “Nothing to think about, sir and madam, nothing to think about. Your child will go to this school. One less decision you have to do badly.” On the other hand, engaged parents, it is presumed smarter and wealthier people, because it is presumed that wealthier people are smarter—I resent that profoundly, but that’s the assumption—that poor people are incompetent to decide the best school. It’s one more task they don’t have the time to do and they will do it badly and they will get ripped off by—perish forbid—for-profit, even though most aren’t, for-profit schools will rip them off and therefore they will have no education and the government will have diverted public resources to ne’er-do-well rip-off private schools. So help us—I mean, I hate even to talk about it because it’s so patronizing.
Corey DeAngelis: Yeah, this is the most paternalistic argument against school choice. It is the most infuriating argument against school choice, but I think it is the heart of the argument by the other side against school choice because, look, let’s face it, advantaged families already do have school choice. They can already afford to live in the neighborhoods with the best government schools, they can already afford to pay for private school out of pocket. So when we’re talking about these types of school choice programs, all of these arguments to try to take away that right to choose the school for your child disproportionately applies to the least advantaged families, particularly when it comes to the income levels of those families. So all these arguments, the root of these arguments are that they believe that the families aren’t choosing the quote-unquote “right” school because they think that these families are just uneducated or that they’re going to make the wrong decisions. To which I’m with you, Bob, I think this is a disgusting argument to make, it’s a paternalistic argument. To which I respond that low-income families—one, that doesn’t mean you’re uneducated, but then two, they make all these other decisions with these other programs. Are these same people calling to take away food stamps? You can also argue that choosing your groceries is very difficult because nutrition—you know, they’re not nutrition experts, for example. Higher educational decisions are difficult to make, there’s a lot of colleges to choose from, so should people not have Pell grants or the GI Bill anymore? Same thing with pre-K programs. But they’re not calling to get rid of all these other programs. That’s why I also say that the heart of all these arguments is about power dynamics. They’re just using whatever argument they can to take away the choice of families to take away money from the monopoly to protect the monopoly.
But then additionally, low-income families, even if they don’t have 100 percent of the information, they still have better information than the alternative. All families in general have more information about the needs of their individual child. They have the on-the-ground knowledge that bureaucrats sitting in offices hundreds and hundreds of miles away just don’t have access to that on-the-ground knowledge. And then families obviously in general have a better incentive to get these decisions right. They care more about the educational quality that their children receive than bureaucrats sitting in offices again hundreds and hundreds of miles away that might not even know the name of your child. So just the incentives are more aligned with families making the decision. And then also the families can make decisions for their unique children and the unique needs that their children have that one-size-fits-all systems just can’t meet. You can make a decision on a uniform scale that works for maybe even the majority of families in a particular school district, but it might not work for every individual child. A one-size-fits-all system does not work for unique needs that unique children have in the diverse society that we have in America. So there’s so many ways to answer that question, but look, the families generally have more information about how to get these decisions right. Look, you don’t need to be an education expert to choose schools for your child, just like you don’t need to be a doctor to be able to choose your doctor. You don’t need to be a mechanic to choose your automobile dealer. You don’t need to be a dentist to choose your dentist. The way that we make these decisions in life is that we rely on heuristics and word of mouth from other individuals. We can look up this information. But look, the long story short is families generally have the best interest of their children in mind, so we should let them make those decisions.
Bob Zadek: And if society concludes—and now I’ve got myself all worked up, Corey, I’ve got to apologize to the audience—but if society concludes that low-income parents lack the competence or the interest in selecting the right school for their children, then why are they allowed to have children? We should require only middle-class people can have children, and if you have children and you’re lower-middle-class, they can be put into foster care because you are per se incompetent. Why do we allow low-income people to make decisions about what to eat and where to live and what healthcare to seek and every other life decision? Why do we empower low-income people to make every other decision about life but disempower them to make decisions about how to educate their child? It makes no sense and it makes the whole claim so facile and so suspect. It doesn’t—it’s not even worthy of the attention we gave it this morning.
Corey DeAngelis: Yeah, it’s a dangerous way of thinking about life that could lead to a lot of other dangerous decisions from government officials. And I don’t trust the government officials to get these types of decisions right, and I don’t trust them to not engage in discriminatory practices when making these decisions. And even if you look at the logic behind this, the people making this argument will say, “You know, they don’t have the information to choose a school for their child,” even though they have a strong interest in getting the decision right, but somehow they have the capability to go to the ballot box to vote, even if they don’t have a strong incentive to get the vote right, to vote for policies in the traditional public school system. So their logic is just inconsistent. I think people should be able to vote and also be able to choose their child’s educational situation with their school. And if anything, people have a stronger incentive and more information when they face the consequences of those decisions when you’re making that decision directly through school choice than indirectly through the voting system. But people should have the right to do both. And so it’s just logically inconsistent for these individuals to say, “Oh, you’re not educated so you can’t pick your school,” but then we trust you to go to the ballot box to vote for policies in the public school system.
Competition and the Quality of Public Education [10:01]
Bob Zadek: Now, another myth you debunk, and I love your comments on this, is that charter schools and private schools in general skim the best and brightest, leaving the public school system “woe is them” with just the dregs of humanity. And when you speak to that, tell us also how the lottery system that has evolved because the demand exceeds the supply debunks that myth.
Corey DeAngelis: Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of ways to respond to this. One is that advantaged families already have school choice, like I said earlier. And advantaged people are already residentially assigned to the best public schools. And if your public school is working for you, why would you have the need to seek out school choice? So it could be that the least advantaged seek out school choice programs. And when you look at the data, there’s actually a mixed body of literature on this, but if you had to call it either way, it appears that the least advantaged, even of the eligible population that is disadvantaged already because these programs are typically targeted to disadvantaged families based on income or the quality of the school that their child is residentially assigned to and by the special need of the child. So by definition, these programs are already targeted to the least advantaged families.
But then also if we’re talking about things like charter schools, they must accept all comers and use random lottery admissions in the case of oversubscription. So in a sense, charter schools are actually more public than traditional public schools. This is another reason why I don’t like to call traditional public schools “public schools,” because they’re not really public in any meaningful sense of the word. They get to discriminate based on zip code. So if you’re not advantaged enough to live in a certain neighborhood, you just can’t go to that particular school, which may be a higher-quality school. In fact, there have been families that have actually gone to jail for lying on their application about their address to get their child into a better school. So they’re not really public. You have magnet schools in the traditional public school system that have selective admissions, but nobody complains about that because they’re controlled by the government. Meanwhile, you have people complaining about charter schools that have to accept students at random. And traditional public schools can expel students as well, so there’s another reason why they don’t accept all comers. And there’s a thing called out-of-district placement in the traditional public school system. There have been public schools that admit that they don’t have the services to meet students with particular special needs, and they’ve actually been forced by court orders to pay for students with special needs to attend a private school that has the services to meet the needs of the individual child with the special need. So there’s actually a form of school choice through the IDEA federal law, but I don’t think it should have to come through federal law, I think every single family should just have the choice regardless, just based on whether they believe the school is meeting the needs of their child in one way or another.
So this myth is just repeated so many times. And a similar argument—the main argument that people are getting at here when they say these types of things—is they’ll say, “Oh, well, the evaluations finding that private schools do better or charter schools do better are biased if there’s in fact more advantaged families using the program.” But we have so many random assignment gold-standard evaluations of these programs that net out any selection bias, and we can be pretty confident it’s the effect of the program or the school and not the background of the family or the child because it’s kind of like a medical trial that people are randomly assigned to get the treatment, or the school choice mechanism, or the control group, or the placebo as you would do in a medical trial, which is the traditional public school. And on average, you can say it’s the effect of the program and not the background of the students. And the majority of those studies find statistically significant positive effects of these programs. And if they didn’t, then you have to ask yourself, “Well, why would families be choosing these things if the evidence isn’t in favor of school choice?” But the reality is the evidence is in favor of school choice, finding that when families have the choice to choose the educational setting of their child, they actually make good decisions and choose educational situations that actually do work really well for their child.
But the main argument here is that they believe that the kids quote-unquote “left behind” in the public schools will be worse off in one way or another because the advantaged kids need to be around them to influence them in positive ways. To which I respond, first of all, that’s saying kind of bad things about the students left behind, that somehow they need these other students. I don’t think that’s actually true. A lot of people will say that about the integration effects of school choice, which in fact, the private school choice mechanisms, eight out of nine studies find that private school choice leads to racial integration because traditional public schools are already so segregated by race and by income.
But then the evidence on the subject of what happens to the children who remain in the public schools is actually pretty positive. There are 28 studies on the topic of what happens in response to private school choice mechanisms, what happens to the children left behind in the traditional public school. 26 of the 28 studies find statistically significant positive effects of private school choice competition on the children who remain in the traditional public school system. And that’s because the public schools start to have to scratch their heads a little bit and think about how to allocate the resources effectively and how to cater to the needs of the individual families. So school choice in that sense is actually a tide that lifts all boats. You don’t even have to use the school choice program to benefit from it because the public schools improve as well in response to these competitive pressures. And similarly, the studies actually find—there are five studies that I know of on the topic—school choice competition leads to higher salaries for public school teachers because, again, they start to realize that if they don’t spend their money wisely in the classroom on the teachers, they’re going to lose funding through students switching to other alternatives and they might even lose talent by teachers switching to private or charter schools in the area. So competition is a tide that lifts all boats.
Bob Zadek: While we get Corey back, I’ll just join in Corey and I’ll just remind our listeners that if you have any doubt about the effect of competition in the case of schooling, the competition imposed by private schools, then think of the US Post Office, the US Postal Service. Think about how they behaved and the service they gave us before and after FedEx and UPS started to encroach upon their turf in all areas other than first-class mail. There’s no dispute the Post Office got better service simply because of the competitive pressures of FedEx, UPS, and the like. So Corey, I was just saying as we were getting you back that if there’s any doubt among our listeners that competition does raise all boats, just look at the US Postal system before and after FedEx was on the scene. You don’t have to go any farther than that to conclude that competition is good for even the government competitive service. You don’t have to go any farther than that.
Corey DeAngelis: Yeah, and I just want to hit on real quickly, even though the evidence is overwhelming—this is one of the clearest strands of evidence in the school choice literature, 26 of 28 studies positive on the effect of the kids in the traditional public school—but I would argue even if the evidence was opposite, that wouldn’t be a legitimate argument to take away low-income families’ ability to choose the school that works best for their child because this type of argument doesn’t restrict the freedom of advantaged families that can already afford to pay for private school tuition and fees out of pocket. So I would argue that the freedom of a low-income family to choose the school that works best for their child should not hinge on the competitive response of a government-run entity. That could change over time, but regardless of how ridiculous that argument is, the evidence is in fact positive, 26 of 28 studies positive. School choice is a tide that lifts all boats, just like with these other industries that you were noting earlier.
The Hypocrisy of Public Officials [11:16]
Bob Zadek: Now let’s get up front and personal vis-a-vis our public officials. You mention in your book, and there have been statistical studies to support it, the utter hypocrisy of public officials opposing school choice and yet because they can afford it, they send their own children to private schools. In other words, they take advantage because of their wealth of a choice they deny those people who happen to earn less. So a few syllables, if you will, Corey, about the statistical proof of the utter hypocrisy of the position of government officials.
Corey DeAngelis: I mean, it’s everywhere. You can look at all of the highest-ranking public officials that bash school choice, exercise school choice for their own families. I mean, just look at President-elect Joe Biden. He attended private school, he sent his children to private schools, but then he opposes school choice and funding the student directly when it comes to allowing less advantaged families to attend private schools. For example, the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force—Biden didn’t write this himself, but it’s the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force—opposes the DC voucher program, which allows low-income families to use the funding to attend a private school in the DC area. And yes, I mean, you look at Elizabeth Warren, for example. She sent her own children to private school—Alex Warren, sent him to private school in Texas and in Pennsylvania—and then tried to hide it and even lied to a voter about it on camera. I think that really did some damage to her in the primaries that she lied to a voter saying that no, she sent her kid to public schools because she didn’t know the evidence was out that I actually found using ancestry.com and wrote about in the New York Post that she sent her child to private schools in Austin, Texas, and in the Philadelphia area in Pennsylvania, which is great. I think they should be able to make that choice. That’s an excellent decision, all families should do the best for their own children, but they shouldn’t exercise that choice and then fight against the right of other families to be able to have similar choices when it comes to K-12 education.
Teacher Incentives and Pandemic Responses [12:01]
Bob Zadek: And of course, those who advocate against school choice, they would have us believe that there’s something sort of gauzy and good-feeling about people who work in the public school system, the union members, teachers unions, that there’s something self-sacrificing about them, that they have only the welfare of the children, that they are giving away their time at below-market wages just because they care so much about our children. All this gauzy stuff, give me a break. They ignore public choice theory of economics that everybody in the public and private sector behaves as they should in their own self-interest. People do what’s best for them. School administrators want more business. If they can’t earn the business by offering a good product, the best thing to do is to compel people to buy what they are selling, compel them under the “go to jail if you don’t patronize their product.” So the teachers—and yet private schools have no trouble enlisting the aid of teachers. Go ahead, Corey.
Corey DeAngelis: Yeah, I mean, just look at what’s going on right now with the school reopening debate and the school closures that have been happening over the last couple of months. And I don’t think that people in the public sector are bad people and the people in the private sector are good people. I think people on average all generally have good intentions. I think people just respond to incentives, which fundamentally differ in the public school system from the private school system. We’re seeing all across the country that private businesses, including grocery stores and restaurants and daycare centers and even private schools, are either reopening right now or they’ve already reopened or they’re fighting against governments to try to reopen, whereas you have public schools all across the nation in so many places fighting to remain closed. And I again don’t think the difference is one of motivations, I think it’s one of incentives. One of these sectors gets your money regardless of how well it meets your needs and regardless of how well they reopen in a timely and effective manner. And so just imagine if your grocery store received the same funding from you each week regardless of whether they opened their doors and provided you with groceries. They’d have a much different set of incentives in front of them than what they have today, and we probably wouldn’t have as many grocery stores reopening. They’d probably use similar arguments of what we’re seeing from the teachers unions.
And it’s just a stark contrast between the public and private sector. And I don’t think we should force the public schools to reopen, I don’t think we should force any teachers to return to schools, but we shouldn’t force families to pay for closed schools either. Districts should have a choice to reopen or not, schools should have a choice, teachers should have a choice to return to work or not, but families need a choice too. And the only way to do that is to have the funding follow the child and then have the power in the hands of the families. And then in that particular situation, we wouldn’t have a whole national debate about school reopenings because then everybody would have the power to do whatever they wanted and we wouldn’t have to use force any step of the way. And that’s how it should be. If we had school choice, this wouldn’t be such a big issue and you wouldn’t have this predicament of schools just not opening for in-person instruction for so many families that need that right now.
Closing and Resources [13:01]
Bob Zadek: Corey, what I don’t understand is I try to put myself into the mind of a competent K-12 teacher. And in a public school, government school environment, you only have basically one employer, and your compensation is not based upon merit, it’s based upon union negotiations and tenure of all things, how many years you have been doing it. In the private sector, since private schools have to get customers and they have to offer a good product, they therefore have to reward good teachers so they can offer a good product. So if I were a teacher and if I were competent or above average if you will, I would be highly motivated to encourage private schools so I could get employment somewhere else. The self-interest of the teachers itself ought to mitigate in favor of a more vibrant private school system. Am I being naive?
Corey DeAngelis: Yeah, the government school system is a monopoly which is bad for customers, but at the same time it’s a monopsony, which is what you’re talking about, is there’s pretty much only one big employer, which is bad for employees. So individual school teachers should be fighting for school choice, not against it, because it leads to more competition for their employers, which is great for employees because then they have to compete on autonomy being provided and benefits for the individual employees. And then as I’ve alluded to earlier, is that there’s five studies on the topic: school choice competition leads to higher salaries for public school teachers because of that labor market competition, but then also because the employers and the producers of K-12 education start to have to think about how to allocate the dollars wisely, and teachers are the most important educational resource in the system, and so competitive pressures actually lead to higher portions of the dollars actually going to teacher salaries, which is what we’ve seen with the data.
And I mean, just look at DC, for example. Let’s just take an average class size of let’s say it’s 30 students. They spend over $31,000 per child per year in DC. Multiply that out, that’s about $930,000 per classroom per year, and teachers only make about $80,000 per year in DC. Where’s the other $850,000 going to? It’s going towards administrative bloat and wasteful spending. That’s only about 8 or 9 percent of the total in the classroom spending. Of course, there’s pension benefits and other non-salary benefits for teachers, but that’s still a good chunk of change that’s left over that’s not going to the teacher. And I mean, just look at data released by Ben Scafidi—Corey, Corey, I have to interrupt, I’m sorry, only that we’re going to run out of time and I know my audience wants to follow your writing. How can they follow your thoughts on education, please?
Corey DeAngelis: The quickest way to do it is to follow me on Twitter, it’s @DeAngelisCorey, just my last name and my first name. But you can also go on Google—it’s a pretty interesting website—and type in Corey DeAngelis Reason Foundation, or you can just type Corey Reason Foundation and you’ll find me, I’m the only Corey at the organization. Or you could Google Corey Cato Institute, you’ll find my work any of those ways.
Bob Zadek: And your podcast?
Corey DeAngelis: I have a podcast called Random Assignment at choicemedia.tv. So if you want to Google Random Assignment podcast, you’ll be able to find that pretty quickly as well.
Bob Zadek: Thanks a lot, Corey. I told you we were going to run out of time. Thank you so much for an hour of your time this morning. To my friends out there and to my guest Corey, have a rest, have a good balance of the weekend and enjoy the upcoming week. Thanks a lot, Corey, and thanks to my listeners out there. Have a good Sunday.