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May 29, 2025 19:31-20:33 - CSPAN
01:01:57
Discussion on Parental Rights in Schools
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Speaker Time Text
unidentified
And they were really, really lucky to have somebody like you on your staff.
We were lucky to have you here today.
Really a fantastic conversation, insightful as I knew it would be, and honest, which is, I think, what we want, not only in the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
We don't have enough of that in our own politics these days.
So if only for that, I want to thank you for a really terrific conversation.
Thank you.
This evening, Democratic Representative Latifa Simon hosts a town hall for constituents in Emeryville, California.
Some of the topics are likely to include the Republicans' tax and spending cuts bill, which recently passed in the House, and potential cuts to Social Security, Medicaid, and veterans' health care and services.
Watch the town hall live at 9 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN.
C-SPAN now, our free mobile video app, or online at c-span.org.
Next, a discussion about parental rights in schools, the political drivers in the school choice movement, and the debate surrounding charter schools.
This was hosted by the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C.
Welcome back, and thank you for joining us for the second panel at our Cato conference on parental rights, celebrating the 100th anniversary of Pierce P. Society of Sisters.
We're going to be talking now about educational freedom.
Has it reached escape velocity and is that a good thing?
I'm joined by a very wonderful panel here.
I've got Neil McCluskey, who has already introduced himself, the director of the Center for Educational Freedom here at Cato Institute and my boss.
And then next is John Vallant, he is the director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookingson Institute and a senior fellow in governance studies.
And he holds the Herman and George R. Brown Chair in Education Studies at Brookings.
He specializes in pre-K to 12 education policy and politics.
And much of his research examines inequities in U.S. schools and the policies that mitigate or exacerbate those inequalities.
And a lot of this includes, of course, work on school choice.
And then Michael Bindes is a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice.
And he leads IJ's educational choice team.
And they do a lot of work defending educational choice policies around the country, including he's worked on the recent Supreme Court cases, Carson v. Makeum and Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue.
So this is a really good panel to take the conversation that we just enjoyed on parental rights in general and looking specifically at education and educational freedom and how do parental rights play into this.
So starting with Neil, they'll each give us a little bit of an introduction and then I'll ask some questions and then we'll open it up for audience questions.
And just like in the previous panel, if you're looking, if you're watching this online, you can ask through the event page, through Facebook, through YouTube.
You can ask directly the questions there.
Or if you're watching it on X, you can use the hashtag CatoEvents.
And using that hashtag will make sure that we see the questions that you're asking.
Great.
And I put this together and I should have introduced you.
So this is Colleen Ronchek, who is our policy analyst.
Does great work on all sorts of school choice?
And in particular, you want to follow her on the Friday feature, which every Friday goes on Cato's blog and talks about new and innovative ways to deliver education.
So thank you, Colleen, for moderating this.
And I want to thank the first panel, which I thought was really excellent, a terrific discussion.
And I hope we can equal that.
We're going to do our best, right, I guess.
All right, I'll try.
So the question for me is, and for this panel, is why school choice?
And now I will say that I don't actually think the grounding for school choice is in parental rights.
I even take some issue with the idea that parents have an inherent right to make decisions for their children.
Because the libertarian default, I think, is that no one has an inherent right to make a decision or impose something on someone else.
But it's sort of a moot point for me because I think for many reasons it is far better that parents make decisions for children than government.
And some of these were already discussed in the first panel.
But basically it comes down to three things.
First, parents really naturally make decisions for their children.
Children are born to parents.
They're born into family units.
And we have to remember that parents or that children can't or are not assumed to be able to make informed, reasoned decisions for themselves.
So somebody has to make those decisions.
And naturally, that falls first and foremost to parents.
I think that then we look and we assume that parents will know their children better and will be much more motivated to care for their children than bureaucrats or other people.
Biologically, we are driven as parents to care much more for our children than anyone else, than any stranger.
And I think bureaucracies or government are particularly poorly equipped to care for children because bureaucrats are not evil, they're not angels, they're regular people, but the work of a bureaucracy tends to be very regimented, very structured, as far as you can be from being able to give specific, unique care to each child because the nature of a bureaucracy is as a system,
it's almost sort of like a factory.
And so parents are much better situated to take care of their children and to care for their children than other people and especially government.
But I think the most important argument for making parents the drivers of decisions in education in particular for their children is that that is what's consistent with a society of diverse values and diverse communities that is grounded in liberty.
That means letting lots of people make lots of different decisions as opposed to government making one for everyone.
Government control of education tends to homogenize and is ultimately grounded in force and force that could be used for very bad ends when it is applied across a society to all people and to all families.
And so I think it is much more consistent with a free and harmonious liberty-based society that parents are the default for decisions in education.
Now, part of the topic here is have we hit escape velocity on school choice?
I think we have.
And for the reasons I just stated, I think that's a good thing.
At the very least, I think we are beyond any point, at least in the foreseeable future, where we will go back to an assumption that where kids go to school is the public school to which they are assigned based on their home address.
I think we don't, at least in the foreseeable future, return to that being the assumption for most people.
The assumption now is everybody should have some sort of choice.
And I think we're very close to saying private choice on a relatively equal financial footing and playing field is the choice that everyone should have.
So I think we can have terrific discussions about the limits of school choice.
I think that was discussed in Pierce, as I quoted earlier.
But I think choice must be the basic foundation of the education system.
Over to you.
So thanks, Colleen, for having me.
Thanks, Neil.
And thanks, too, to all the Cato folks who are working hard to put on this event.
I'm going to start by kind of laying my cards on the table about what I think about the direction that the school choice movement has taken.
I'm not particularly optimistic and not fond of the direction it's taken.
And then I'll give kind of my 30,000-foot view of why I think we're going in the direction we're going, which I'm sure everyone will agree with, and then we can just stop and go home.
Off to lunch.
Off to lunch.
So I worry a great deal about this new generation of school choice reforms.
And I'm talking specifically about state-level ESA programs, so education savings account programs, and more recently the federal tax credit scholarship program.
I worry a lot about a lack of accountability, about a lack of transparency, about the absence of quality control mechanisms in those policies, about a lack of protection from discrimination from discrimination against students in admissions, and really a whole lot of other things.
And particularly, I worry about the way that I think these policies are and will continue to direct resources from more disadvantaged areas to more prosperous areas, and particularly will hurt the rural poor.
And to me, I say that though, not as one who is instinctively opposed at all to school choice.
I actually, at the same time, believe very much that there is something that is hypocritical and elitist when people who have lots of say over which schools their kids attend want to tell other people that they can't have choices.
I believe in school choice.
I think families should have school choices.
And where I think we are and where I think this is coming from is there has always been this kind of interesting phenomenon with school choice, which is that you can make a case for school choice policy from very different principles.
And those principles tend to appeal to different groups on the political spectrum.
And this is, I'm oversimplifying a little bit, but for a long time, political conservatives have liked the kind of efficiencies that come from school choice.
So for those of you who are familiar with Milton Friedman's work or Terry Moe's work, that's the idea that we have producers, we have schools, we have consumers, parents, and families.
And as you let parents pick the schools that they think are going to serve their kids best, maybe you just have a more efficient production of education.
So it's less expensive, you get better quality.
That's the kind of view that I think tends to appeal to conservatives.
There's a second view that I think is rooted really in liberty that tends to appeal to libertarians, which is essentially, and I think we heard a lot of this on the last panel, the idea that parents and families should be able to get what they want, right?
That you shouldn't be subject to the whims of government, sort of wrapped up in government bureaucracy and goals.
And then I would say there's a third perspective that really appeals more to progressives, which is the idea that it's just fundamentally unfair that families that have resources can pick where their kids go to school by paying to live in places that have schools they want, and that that same right isn't afforded to families that don't have those kinds of resources.
And for a long time, I think really for decades, there was a coalition that was fragile and it was delicate, but it held that stitched together those different groups, which all brought their different perspectives on why we might need some kind of school choice reform.
And the policy manifestation became charter schools, because charter schools were ways for families to opt out of the traditional school system to sort of exit that bureaucracy in ways that I think appealed to a lot of conservatives, but at the same time did have some guardrails around them.
They were sort of set up in ways where they tended to benefit the least advantaged kids and had sort of enough appeal with a wide enough group of families that you saw this, I think it's something like 46 states now have charter school laws.
And to my eye, essentially what happened is as we as a country just got worse when it comes to anything that involves any kind of bipartisanship, we started to see those coalitions fray.
And in particular, I think we started to see progressives leave and sort of lose interest in charter schools.
And where I think that left us was we had conservatives, we had libertarians who were kind of looking at the school choice policies that we had been, that we as a country had been pushing for, and said, you know, this isn't really where their hearts were in the first place.
And so from charters, we then now get this push towards private school choice programs.
And what's missing in these programs is I don't think there is a strong kind of magnetic pull toward any kind of opportunity, equity, fairness.
And I think that shows in these policies.
So I think hopefully we can talk more about the Educational Choice for Children Act, for example, which is this big federal tax credit scholarship program that's on the table.
But what I think these programs really lack is they just do not have, they are not set up in ways where they're likely to benefit the least advantaged, which for a very long time has been a guiding star for a lot of our school choice policy.
Thank you, Neil.
Thank you, Cato, for having me here.
As Colleen mentioned in the opening, I work for the Institute for Justice.
We're a public interest law firm.
And among other things, we defend school choice programs when they're enacted.
Almost invariably, these programs are challenged by either teachers' unions or other interest groups that are hostile to choice, and we defend these programs on behalf of the parents and children using them.
Surprisingly, Pierce and its predecessor, Meyer, have played very little, if any, role in the litigation concerning the constitutionality of school choice programs.
They've played a very big role in the policy debates that have motivated legislatures to adopt these programs.
I think legislators have seen these programs, and correctly so, as empowering parents to exercise the right that the Supreme Court recognized in Pierce to choose a private school for your child or to otherwise direct your child's education.
But in the litigation over the constitutionality of these programs, strangely, Pierce and Meyer have played very little, if any, role.
I think that's because the constitutional questions surrounding school choice programs over the last three decades since the birth of the modern school choice movement have really all concerned religion, right?
When school choice or the modern school choice movement was in its infancy, the big question was, can you have school choice programs with religious schools or would that violate the establishment clause?
Thankfully, from my perspective, the Supreme Court answers that question correctly in Zellman versus Simmons-Harris back in 2002 and says, yes, you can have a school choice program that includes religious schools so long as the program is even-handed between religion and non-religion and so long as it operates on the private choice of parents.
No establishment clause problem.
Then the question becomes, okay, the other side here, the opponents of choice would argue, well, it doesn't matter if you can have school choice programs with religious schools.
States can still exclude religious options from these programs, or state constitutions can still be applied to challenge these programs because they include religion.
Thankfully, the Supreme Court rejected that argument in a pair of cases in 2020 and 2022, Espinoza and Carson, which Colleen mentioned in the intro, and basically held that while a state is not required to have a private school choice program, if it does, it has to allow religious schools to participate.
To do otherwise, that is to have a school choice program that excludes religious schools or to apply a state constitutional provision that bars public funding of religious schools to invalidate one of these programs, a school choice program, would violate the free exercise clause of the First Amendment, specifically a parent's right to direct the religious upbringing of their children, including the right to choose a religious school for them.
So with that trio of cases, Zellman, Espinoza, and Carson, the big constitutional questions that had kind of hung over school choice for the last 30 years were answered, and they were answered in such a way that made it very clear that you can have school choice programs, they can include religious options, and they cannot exclude religious options.
And because those questions were resolved under the First Amendment, the religion clauses of the First Amendment, the court didn't have to look to Pierce and Meyer and their kind of due process holdings about the right more broadly of a parent to direct the education of their children without regard to religion.
The cases were much more narrowly resolved on religion clause grounds.
That's changing, though.
Certainly the fights over school choice, the legal fights over school choice, are not going to end.
Opponents of choice are a very dogged bunch, and they will continue to challenge these programs no matter where they're enacted and under any kind of constitutional theory that they can concoct.
And I think Pierce and Meyer are going to play a bigger role in the litigation going forward.
And I'll talk just very briefly about two specific ways that I see this going.
One involves a variant of state blain amendments that we at IJ call public-private blain amendments.
You all probably know blain amendments, generally speaking, are state constitutional provisions that prohibit public funding of religious schools.
Some states, you know, fewer, but some states have variants of these that prohibit public funding of private schools without respect to religiosity.
They just prohibit public funding of all private schools.
Thankfully, most states that have these provisions have interpreted them in a way that allows school choice.
The courts have held that school choice programs don't aid private schools.
They aid families.
They are financial assistance to families, and it's families who decide where these programs are used, and therefore these public-private blain amendments are not an obstacle to school choice.
But in a handful of states, and I literally mean a handful, you can count on one hand, I think there are five states, that have these public-private blame variants, state Supreme Courts have interpreted them in a way that does seem to restrict or even prohibit financial assistance for families who choose private education.
So that would prohibit financial aid for students whose parents send them to a private school.
I think those types of Blaine amendments, these public-private Blaine amendments, are just as constitutionally problematic as the more conventional religious, non-religious Blaine amendments.
Because I believe that just as a state cannot enact a prohibition on the legislature's ability to provide financial assistance to families who exercise their First Amendment right, their free exercise right to choose religious schools for their kids, so too can a state not enact an absolute barrier to the legislature's ability to provide financial aid to parents who exercise their due process right to choose a private school, religious or not, for their child.
So I think that's one issue we're going to see being litigated in the coming years.
We're litigating the issue currently in two states, in Alaska and Massachusetts.
I suspect we'll be litigating it soon in South Carolina as well.
And I think Pierce and Meyer are going to play a big role in that because the whole question is, can a state penalize or bar financial assistance programs for parents who exercise the very right that the Supreme Court recognized in Pierce.
And then the other way I see Pierce and Meyer coming up in litigation related to school choice going forward isn't so much with respect to the constitutionality of these programs, but rather with the constitutionality of regulatory barriers that we're increasingly seeing be erected to the new models of education that have resulted, that have been a kind of byproduct of greater school choice and specifically of education savings accounts.
As you all probably know, education savings accounts are school choice programs that can be used for a whole array of educational options.
So it's not just tuition to attend a private school, but it's expenses associated with homeschooling.
So to purchase curriculum materials, textbooks, private tutoring, special education therapies.
These programs allow parents to really kind of provide a customized education for their children to meet the very specific individual needs of their kids.
And as a result of the proliferation of these programs, we've seen incredibly innovative new models of delivering education, the types of innovations that Colleen writes about, you know, in terms of micro-schools, hybrid schools, learning pods.
These things were largely tolerated during the pandemic out of necessity because the public schools were just out of business.
But increasingly we're seeing new regulatory barriers to these new models of education.
And, you know, these new models don't fit the old paradigm, right?
It used to be public school, private school, homeschool.
Some of these new models don't fall neatly into any of those categories, but government's trying to push them into these categories in order to regulate them.
And in turn, they're stifling the innovation that these education entrepreneurs are showing in trying to meet the needs of kids.
There, too, I think Pierce and Meyer are going to come into play.
Because I think one thing that often gets lost that we lose sight of in discussing Pierce and Meyer is that those cases were not just about the right of parents to direct the education of their kids or parental liberty more broadly.
They were just as much about the rights of education providers to provide their services to families who desired them.
Pierce was not brought by parents.
Pierce was brought by two entities that operated private schools, the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary and Hill Military Academy.
And in validating the law at issue in Pierce, the Supreme Court certainly protected the religious liberty of parents or the parental liberty interest of the parents attending those schools, but it just as much was concerned about protecting the economic rights of the education providers.
The court noted that the schools have business and property for which they claim protection, and these are threatened with destruction through the unwarranted compulsion which the state is exercising over present and prospective patrons of their schools.
The court went on to say that the successful conduct of the schools requires long-term contracts with teachers and parents.
And even though the law was not even yet being enforced in Oregon, the court noted that the law had already caused the withdrawal of children who would otherwise continue at the schools.
And the court thus concluded that protection against this arbitrary, unreasonable, and unlawful interference with their patrons and the consequent destruction of their business and property was warranted.
So again, the court is just as much concerned with the rights of the education providers.
The same was true in Meyer, which preceded Pierce by two years.
Meyer was not a case brought by parents.
Robert Meyer was a teacher.
He was prosecuted for the crime of teaching Bible stories to kids in German in a Lutheran school.
And just as in Pierce, yes, the court recognized the rights of the parents of students who wanted to send their kids to Robert Meyer's school, but the court was just as much concerned with protecting the right of Robert Meyer to engage in the common occupation of teaching and to contract with families who wanted the services that he was providing.
So that's the other area where I think increasingly we will see Meyer and Pierce play a big role going forward in litigation concerning both the constitutionality of school choice programs and the constitutionality of regulations that government might be imposing in order to thwart the kind of entrepreneurial side effects that we're seeing as a result of the expansion of these programs.
Thank you.
So I was going to copy Tommy and start off first with asking if you had questions for each other.
But before I do that, Michael's talk about the religious aspect of this made me wonder, John, with your support of charter schools more so than private school choice, what about religious parents who want a different option but can't afford private school tuition?
Do you support religious charter schools like the Oklahoma case that was recently not, you know, the ban on religious charter schools was held by the Supreme Court?
Do you think that there should be religious charter schools or should those religious parents just not have an option?
It's a good question.
And so I should say a couple things.
So first of all, the line that I draw really isn't between religion and non-religion.
What I'm much more worried about with these programs is the complete lack of guardrails around the programs that we're seeing right now.
And so take, for example, and actually maybe I'll use this as an invitation to respond to something Neil said too.
So Neil said and tell me if tell me if I'm not representing this well that parents are uniquely situated to understand their own kids and that's that's important and I agree with that very much.
I think I'll even take that a step further and say I think parents love of their own kids is the single most powerful force in education.
It's a very difficult one to harness but it's a very real force.
And this to me gets to really a question of quality control mechanisms.
Like when we have school choice, whether it's religious schools, it's non-religious schools, whatever it may be, how do we know that when we as taxpayers are paying into this system and we're investing in these public schools, which are producing public goods too, not just private goods, how do we know we're actually going to get any quality out of the schools we get?
If we rely on parents' understanding of their kids' education and where their kids are going to get the best education, I think we need to be very honest about how difficult that is for parents.
And I mean, I'll speak just to myself as a father.
I have two kids who are currently in schools.
And I should know a lot more about my kids' schools than I would be able to know about the world of schools that we could choose.
And the information I get about my kids' schools, I talk to them every day about what happened in school, and many of you with kids probably know how much information you usually get out of that.
I get report cards.
I happen to be suspicious of report cards because of grade inflation these days.
I get reports from teachers that I don't really know all that much what to make of those either.
I really don't know.
You know, are my kids getting a good education where they are?
Would they be getting a better education down the street or across town?
I don't know.
And that's for the school that they're attending right now.
And that's, I mean, I think we can take this a step further, where you start to get into those cases that we talked about in the last panel, where you might question whether the interests that parents have at heart really are consistent with the child's interest.
Even in the best case, I worry about that sort of quality control piece.
And taking it a step further, and again, the line I would draw is not on religion.
The line I would draw is in charter schools, for example, you have protections around who is able to, what a school can do when it comes to saying no to a family that wants to enter.
With these newer ESA and tax credit scholarship programs, depending on the state where they operate, you can have cases where a student who identifies as LGBTQ or as the child of LGBT parents can be told no.
A school can say, fill out this attestation form that says that you are not gay and your parents are not gay or else you can't come.
I think legally, the school could also say, fill out this attestation form that says that you are not a Democrat or a Republican or that you voted for whoever you voted for.
And again, the school can say no, you can't come.
Those are the issues that those are the lines that I think I would draw, where to me I'm worried about the direction this is taking, along with the fact that when we have moved in this direction toward private school choice programs with very weak restrictions with respect to who is eligible, you have money that is flowing to families who, for one, are already in private schools, or two, at least live in areas where there are private schools.
And often that money is flowing from relatively poor areas to relatively wealthy areas.
So I don't know that I have a particularly strong opinion on religious versus non-religious charters.
I'm not even, I wouldn't even necessarily say that I'm all for charter schools.
I think there's a lot that we could do to improve whatever form public school choice takes, but I think the direction that we have been moving is not the right one.
So we'll table religious for a minute just because I think that could suck up everything in this topic.
And Neil, he mentions accountability is an issue that is a concern with these programs.
I'm just curious what your thoughts would be about accountability in the private school programs or in public schools in general.
Yeah, so I think the quality control issue is a very common one, the concern, and I think it's very understandable where people think, well, how does a parent know what is a good school?
The first thing I'd say, though, is I step back a little.
So for instance, you use the term we as taxpayers, but we don't have like one mind.
And so I try to abstract from or move from we to we don't actually know, there's not like consensus on everything that's good for kids.
There's not consensus on what it is that is most important for education.
So my first response is we don't want to have one answer for what's good in education.
Is it test scores?
Is it completion of college?
Is it formation of morals?
Things like that.
So I totally agree that quality is a big concern, but it gets difficult once you say, well, who is going to define what quality is?
Because we have so many different things that we value.
But I think that we also may understate the ability of parents to do some discerning of what quality is.
So first, you would have some idea of what it is you want from a school, and I will put religion back in it, but just not to cause trouble, but because it's important.
Your first thing might be, oh, I want a school that teaches values that are consistent with my own.
And that's already a quality issue.
You're saying this school does that.
And you can talk to people who go to that school.
Often we get information from neighbors, open houses.
I know that you can choose a school that sometimes, if it's a religious school, it's attached to your church, so you know a lot about it.
And I think that private schools tend to use outside tests, and parents will ask for outside tests to get some assessment of where their kids are relative to kids outside the school.
So for instance, I think many Catholic schools and other private schools use Scanton tests or Iowa tests.
So you get this sort of nationally norm-referenced assessment of, yes, I'm getting grades from my child's school, but I can also see where my kids are relative to others.
So I don't think we have a sort of vacuum of quality indicators just because we don't mandate them from above.
Although, of course, a lot of school choice programs do say, well, you have to at least give a nationally norm-referenced test, which generally speaking, I don't get the sense that most school choice supporters get very angry about.
Probably there are some.
So I just don't want to, I think we may worry too much that there is no quality control in private schooling or school choice because there is, and the flip side is it's dangerous, I think, to have government say this is the measure of quality, not all these other things that people may care about.
Michael, where do you see the balance between parental freedom and choice and these accountability issues?
Sure, I think I largely agree with Neil on this, not surprisingly.
When we at IJ review legislation, we're not so much concerned with the policy choices of what line is the right line in terms of the government ensuring accountability in these programs, what testing should or should not be required, what regulations the government can or cannot impose on participating providers.
We're really looking at these in terms of are the programs legally defensible in court because that's what we're not going out to create these programs.
We're reviewing them to ensure they're legally defensible and defending them in court.
So I'm looking at this more as not from the kind of policy perspective of what the right lines to draw is.
But I agree with Neil that I think very few folks in the pro-school choice movement would have any heartburn with the types of modest assurances that are written into most of these programs to ensure that schools are held accountable in some regard.
I also agree that we can't capture the measures through testing and other such mechanisms to capture what concerns really drive many parents in wanting these options for their kids.
One of the biggest motivating factors for parents to choose to participate in these programs and to choose the specific schools that they do under these programs is safety, particularly in urban areas and inner city areas.
Parents are terrified of what is happening or might happen to their kids at the public school to which the government has assigned them.
They want their kid to come home at the end of the day, and that many times is the biggest motivating factor for parents to choose to participate in these programs and to choose the specific schools they do.
I don't know how you account for that or through regulation.
I think it's the parent that ultimately is the one that is taking those things into consideration.
And I don't see a need for the government to be too heavy-handed on this issue.
One thing I did have a question, though, on is this idea that school choice arose after kind of the charter movement after it kind of had fractured, right?
That the progressives started kind of backing off of charters and then the conservatives and libertarians took over the movement to push kind of private school choice.
I don't think that's true for a couple of reasons.
Number one, the charter and modern school, private school choice movement are contemporaneous.
Like within two years, you have the nation's first charter law and the first private school voucher law in Minnesota on the charter end and Wisconsin on the voucher end.
And in both cases, including the private school choice movement, it was progressive legislators and advocates who were the biggest champions of the private school choice program.
So I'm thinking Polly Williams and Howard Fuller in Wisconsin, Fannie Lewis in Cleveland with the Cleveland tuition program, Kevin Chavis and Virginia Walden Ford and Mayor Anthony Williams with the District of Columbia Opportunity Scholarship Program.
These were black legislators.
I can't speak for them whether they would self-describe as progressive, but I think they would.
These were the biggest champions of the early voucher programs.
And in many cases, advocates and legislators of their ideological stripe continue to be the biggest champions of choice.
So I think this is a, I don't necessarily agree with your kind of historical accounting that it was the conservatives and libertarians who kind of took us in the direction we are now as progressives backed off the charter movement.
So I would say they started contemporaneously, but if you look at where the energy was from the period from really the mid-1990s until maybe a decade ago, I would argue the energy was largely in the charter movement and in sort of public school choice because that's where you could find something resembling a 50-state strategy for some kind of choice program.
It is absolutely true that civil rights groups were important in building some of those early school choice policies.
When I say school choice, I'm not just talking about private school choice, but whatever form that may take.
I think it is a very open question whether those groups are going to go along for the ride with these new programs that, again, are just set up in ways where they're shifting resources from relatively impoverished areas to much wealthier areas.
And I think that just violates the goals and the spirit that motivated a lot of those groups to join that coalition in those early days.
Can I just say something I forgot to say?
Because when we talk about quality, it's not, I think, just about what are the outcomes we're looking at, but it's actually important, and I should have mentioned this, that parents actually know how to navigate these new systems and how we get information to them.
And Colleen's been doing a lot of work on that because I actually do think that we've had this sort of explosion of universal school choice programs.
And even I was sort of caught sort of, or I was on my back foot when all of a sudden a whole bunch of them showed up.
And I think we got the policies, but haven't had the time to put together a lot of the infrastructure that parents need to be able to navigate them.
And so if you want to talk about that, feel free, because actually that's a really important quality question that I should have remembered right off the bat.
Well, and I think there's a lot of similarities between the explosion of educational freedom and kind of any disruption where, sure, in the early stages, the well-connected, the well-off always benefit, but now we all have iPhones in our pockets.
You know, so I see educational freedom being similarly in some areas.
Of course, existing private school families are going to be the first ones to use these programs because they're already in that system.
So if they can take advantage of it, of course they will.
But as these programs grow, more people learn about them, more options open, and eventually it will benefit those communities that you're thinking of.
And along with the navigation issue, as these programs grow, as people become more familiar with them, the navigation support arises, and it's just naturally going to happen that it expands to those areas.
So I think it's easy to look now and say, oh, this is a concern, but flat-screen TVs, nice cars, cell phones, I mean, in every single area of life, as these, you know, as innovation spreads, it starts out with the wealthy and ends up benefiting all of us.
So I think that's one scenario that could play out.
I'll give you another one.
And this is the story that people who study Chile will tell about what happened with Chilean school reforms that are probably more similar to what we're doing here than anything else I've seen.
In Chile, they were providing vouchers.
Those vouchers didn't cover the full cost of attendance in a lot of schools.
And so what happens if you give people some money to attend private schools, but it's not enough to actually pay for the school?
Well, it's people who can cover the difference who are going to attend those private schools.
And it's people who have private schools around.
And what ended up happening in Chile is you got a terribly stratified school system where you had the haves in the private sector and the have-nots in the public sector, which maybe to some extent we have sort of here.
But with private schools, you know, roughly 10% of School enrollment, or whatever it is, it is not the fundamental feature of our education system.
That absolutely could be the case.
I mean, it kind of is in our public system.
Say more?
That is our public system today, where the wealthy districts have these elaborate, beautiful schools, and the poor districts have terrible, unsafe schools that people want to leave.
So, I mean, obviously, I'm not, I'm obviously concerned about inequalities within the public sector, too.
But if we're talking about taking families with wealth, essentially removing them from the public sector and putting them in the private sector, that is not going to be good for those schools that I think we're both probably concerned about, those public schools that are lacking for resources now.
That problem gets a lot worse.
And I will say, in response to something Neil said, that I agree with very, very much, that I think is a really important point on school choice, is I think we have, if there's one thing that we really have missed when it comes to school choice policy, it is that we underappreciate the number of barriers that get in the way of families when they're choosing schools.
And I think we have confused the ability to request schools with the ability to actually choose and enroll in schools.
And there's a lot to say about this, but it's everything from transportation barriers to school location.
So if you're living in poverty, you don't have great options nearby, and all of the sort of fancier top schools that you can choose locate across town, well, that's not going to do you a whole lot of good.
And then add to that information barriers, add to that enrollment processes, or schools not being so welcoming of some families.
And if the school, I think, and there's, you know, there's still, there's always time to get better with this kind of thing, but if the school choice reform movement had taken more seriously those barriers, I think it would be in a different place now.
Would you levy the same criticisms, though, at the public system, like in terms of residential assignment?
I mean, to me, that's the greatest source of discrimination in education is relegating the child to a school based on nothing more than their home address.
So what about school choice in the traditional public school context?
Are you open, more open to that than to private choice options?
And as I said at the beginning, I am not at all a school choice opponent.
I do think that families should have choice, and I worry very much about assigning kids to schools and then what that means for the families that just realistically do not have the option to go and pick a different place to live if that's what they want to do.
That I absolutely will sign on to that.
What is important to me is that the schools that they're choosing into have the kind of protections and guardrails and quality control and accountability and transparency that I think we can reasonably ask of public schools.
And I take the point about we, the taxpayers, we as society don't necessarily believe the same things.
But at the same time, I think there's enough agreement about basics, like when we're having, you know, when we're spending public money on schools, we should have some sense of what they're doing and what that money is being spent on.
So I do think there are the private interest schools that are public interest schools, and we can talk about both.
I'll just add that, so I think that, for instance, access, transportation, things like that are very real barriers.
But at least from what I've seen, people within the school choice movement are actually talking a lot about, well, how do we overcome these things?
How do we change policy so that those kinds of barriers to access are reduced?
But again, I do think, and I think this may have been sort of the historical point, was we did go from a period for a very long time when most school choice programs are small, intended to be targeted to people who are low income or assigned to poorly performing public schools to a universal choice, to universal choice in lots of states.
And there are good reasons for that.
I think everybody should.
The norm should be choice.
That money follows the kids, and that we saw that smaller programs tended to be easier to eliminate.
They didn't have a lot of people with wherewithal to sort of fight for them, to help guide to make them better.
And so there were reasons that I think we went to universal choice and it was good, but it did happen very fast.
And I think we are definitely school choice people are looking a lot more now at, well, how do we make them work for people?
And part of that is you have to have the programs in order to learn.
the problems that they have.
And again, Colleen's been doing work on helping people navigate.
We've been talking about transportation.
So the concerns you have are very real.
And I would say that people who are supporters of school choice recognize that and are working on those problems.
Now I'm a little bit late going to audience questions.
So are there any here in the room?
I've got some online in the meantime.
There should be a microphone coming to you.
He has.
Handwritten.
Oh, sorry.
I didn't see that.
And just tell us, you know, your name and where you're from.
Will Estrada, Senior Counsel, Homeschool Legal Defense.
I'm old enough to remember when conservatives are all saying charter schools were going to save education.
And so that didn't really turn out the way everyone hoped.
So the question is, how do we keep that from happening with ESAs?
Keep up with happening, sorry.
They fail to achieve the educational success that everyone, I think, right now is hoping that they'll achieve.
So I think they will fail to.
Everyone might be hoping they'll achieve.
On the charter school point, and I think this is an important part of the charter school story, and will be too for ESAs and for textbook scholarship programs.
These reforms don't happen in a vacuum.
They happen in the context of whatever else is going on in schools and society and policy.
And I would argue that when we look at charter schools and the way that charter schools, the kind of charter school movement unfolded and what kind of outcomes we got from charters, the single most defining thing is that it happened at the same time as the test-based accountability movement.
And so you had charter schools which were sort of premised on the idea that you would have, you let a thousand flowers bloom.
These schools are going to do really cool, innovative stuff, and then families are going to pick schools that are doing different kinds of things.
Well, at the same time that we did that, we had a very rigid test-based accountability structure that charters were accountable to.
I think too rigid.
At the same time, I do think there's a role for testing, but that's a different conversation.
But I think what ended up happening with the charter sector is we did see innovation, but it was innovation in service of trying to get the best test scores you could because we had imposed this sort of second set of requirements in form of accountability on those schools.
So I think the charter story is actually quite complicated.
I think it's an interesting thought experiment to ask what would the charter movement have looked like had we not had test-based accountability at the same time.
My suspicion is it would have played out very differently.
But I'm not the person to ask for how the ESA, how ESAs will unfold well, because I do not think they will.
I would just say for ESAs, charter schools, what does Finland do that's so great?
Everything we ever hear in education policy that this is what everyone should do, we should be modest about all of that.
There are no panaceas.
And I think we should say that about everything.
ESAs are not going to solve every problem.
They are part, I think, of improving an education system that has insufficient choice and insufficient parent power, but it doesn't make everybody use the science of reading, if that's the best way for all kids to learn to read.
It doesn't require moral values to be taught in schools if we think that's most important.
It is a policy, it's a mechanism that improves what we have, but it doesn't cure all ills.
And we have to say that, really, I think, about everything we do in public policy.
Yeah, I don't think there's a silver bullet.
ESAs are not the silver bullet.
Charters weren't.
My definition of success is ensuring that the needs of children are met, right?
Children are unique individuals.
They have unique educational needs.
Even the best public school, a private school in the country, isn't going to be the best school for every child.
I want to ensure that we have a variety of programs that provide access to parents and children so that they can get the education that will best meet their individual needs.
And I see ESAs going a long way toward doing that, but I certainly see a continuing role for charters, for traditional public schools.
I want all of these options because I don't think that any single type of program can meet the unique needs of all children.
That was a good segue for an online question we have, which is how does school choice support alternative scheduling such as hybrid, four-day, or non-traditional hours school options?
So this goes to some of the stuff I was talking about in the second point I made about Meyer and Pierce going forward being used to protect the rights of education providers.
I think right now a lot of these new innovations, like I said earlier, don't fit well into the current regulatory schemes we have.
And you often see government trying to kind of force them into one category or another.
ESAs in particular are making it possible for more parents to kind of demand these options and providers in turn to provide these services.
And it's unquestionably resulted in this kind of explosion in innovation.
What is interesting to me though is going to be the government response to that, whether we will, whether through good policy decisions or through litigation, ensure that the government doesn't thwart these innovations that are made possible by ESAs or are we going to see what government tends to do, right?
The government's going to government, the government's going to regulate.
And I hope that as we continue to provide greater flexibility through ESAs and similar programs, that we can ensure that government doesn't stifle and thwart the opportunity through either applying old regulations that don't fit or new regulations that are specifically designed to preserve the old system of traditional private school,
traditional public school homeschooling.
Before you guys, if anybody else wants to, but if you have a question, maybe raise your hand.
And while the microphone gets there, I was just curious, John, do you have any thoughts on not the school choice impact of it so much, but just the idea of these different types of like hybrid, shorter work school days, things like that?
So, I mean, I'm open to families having those types of choices for sure.
I think there is some room to do that within a kind of public school framework where, again, you have the guardrails and protections there.
I do agree, like something like a four-day, I mean, four-day school week is maybe a separate conversation, but I do have some concerns about four-day school weeks.
I think though, like, if a family, I mean, I should say too, I have no objection to the idea of a family paying for private school or even in some circumstances getting some public money to pay for private school because they want a four-day week or some kind of hybrid schedule or some kind of micro school.
It's not a principled objection to that idea per se, but I do actually think there's more room for that within school districts and within school district frameworks than we have explored fully so far.
Hi, Luke Moore, Americans for Prosperity Policy Team.
My question is this.
So we've talked a lot about quality control and the concerns.
Is there a sense that the parents' decision-making process, the trial and error of maybe sending their kid to a school, deciding that school is not the right fit, pulling them out, transferring schools or something like that, makes the parent the quality control expert?
Or would that be, I don't know, would that be different from what I'm saying here?
Yeah, thanks, Louie.
So the way I think about it is that I think a lot of these choice programs are implicitly relying on parents as their quality control mechanism.
So that parent who tries out a new school and maybe you don't have a whole lot of information about that school you choose because that is an important point too about testing is in the scenario I talked about with my kids who are in a public school, a magnet program in a public school, I at least can see something on state tests and there's like some apples to apples data that I can use to see how one school is doing on those measures relative to other schools.
In this environment where you have schools that may not administer any tests or they may be required to administer a test but not required to report it to anyone, which is something that a lot of states do, you really have no idea.
And so if you're a parent and you go and you pick a school and you might do your best to get a school that you think is going to fit your kid well and for reasons that are beyond your control because it's hard, it doesn't work out and then you say, okay, time to switch schools.
Implicit in this model is that that is where quality control lies and that is where accountability lies.
That the schools that are good are going to retain those kids.
The schools that aren't are going to lose those kids.
Maybe they close.
And I'm just very skeptical both that that is an effective quality control mechanism and second, that it's an efficient one.
How often though do we see underperforming public schools close though?
I mean I think implicit in the private school choice model is if the school's not providing an adequate service, parents won't choose to go there and I think the schools will close and we have seen that.
How often do we see public schools shut down because of what a poor job they're doing in serving the kids that are assigned to those schools?
So I'm arguing for different quality control mechanisms.
Like I do think even if you have these kinds of universal choice programs, we should be requiring them to administer tests.
And I think actually private schools have a fair gripe in some cases where if they administer the state test but their curriculum is not quite aligned with the state content standards, like you can, there are reasons why you might not expect to see great test scores on those tests.
But we need to see how they're doing.
We need to see how they're doing on those tests.
If they want to administer a different test, make the case for it, or maybe you administer both.
But I am of the view that we, private, public, whatever it may be, I don't think that parents, I don't think that exit, that parents exit should be our only quality control mechanism.
Yeah, I would say that it's not just the ability of a particular family to exit.
It's that you can also find out how many families or is there a tendency of families to exit that were there before you ever got there.
Some of that is because you may know the school and you may be familiar with your community and you know that there were people who went there and they left and you may even know them as neighbors and they'd say that school just didn't teach well or the hallways were chaotic or something like that.
I think that's probably how a lot of this is done.
And then we have, as we've had more school choice, an expansion of websites like Niche and others where people will put their review of the school.
Now, yes, some of that's self-selected, but you can start to see the balance.
So you can learn a lot about a school without having the government mandate it.
I think you learn a great deal regardless of the test scores.
And the other thing I'd say is, so if a school gives you their average test scores, that doesn't tell you a whole lot about a whole lot of people who may not be at that average, a whole lot of different types of kids who that school may not be serving.
And you could almost give an unfair, like overly rosy assessment of a school just by saying this is our average, by not knowing how it works for all sorts of different kinds of kids.
So I think that test scores are not nearly enough, but what parents can learn actually is very powerful.
And I think that's our time, right?
Unless the schedule change.
I think we have four more minutes because we're a little off.
I bet we could do one more question.
Okay, one more question then.
Yeah, hello.
I'm Callie Chaplow.
I'm the Director of Government Affairs for Home Educators Association of Virginia.
And I wanted to ask you guys a little bit more about understanding your position on ESAs, because we've seen with government involvement in the financing of higher education, both through the subsidies directly to the schools and to their loan programs, we've seen the quality of education and the cost of quality of education go down and the cost go up.
So how do we prevent a similar correlation when we start sending the money through the ESA programs?
I think ESAs are, by design, help combat the sort of things we've seen in subsidizing higher ed tuition because they can be used for things other than tuition, right?
It's not as if you get a check, you pick the school and it goes to the school.
The school in turn has every incentive to jack up the tuition to match the voucher or otherwise.
ESAs allow parents to exercise a lot of creativity and purchase individual courses from schools or decide that the flexibility built into them, I think, prevents the type of price inflation that we've seen by subsidizing higher education through student loans.
Jason Bedrick at Heritage has also studied the tuition increases over time in states, in private school tuition increases over time in states with and without school choice.
And obviously tuition goes up over time.
That's just a factor of inflation.
But the tuition increases over time have been less for private schools in states with educational choice programs than in states without.
So I think there's, you know, the empirical research that I'm aware of actually shows that tuition increases at a lower rate in states with robust choice programs.
Oh, I was just going to say I'm worried about that as well.
I mean, I talk about higher ed too, and I'm always worried about price inflation.
And I do worry that there will always be upward pressure to say we need to have more money into these.
But as I've worried about that, some people have occasionally talked me down from the ledge and noticed that the barriers to entry to create a new K-12 school are way lower than higher ed.
So you'll have much more of a supply response probably to school choice that will keep, will have downward pressure on price.
And that made me a little bit more comfortable.
Not entirely, because I do think there will always be this upward pressure saying, well, you know, we need to spend more, so you need to increase the ESA, but that's a problem.
When it comes to when we say in higher ed, people are learning less.
I'm not sure it's a case that in any given school they're learning less.
It's that we have put pressure largely through student aid for more and more people to pursue degrees, which means that employers are more and more likely to request, require degrees, even if the job hasn't actually changed.
And that creates a credential treadmill.
But we wouldn't really see that in K through 12 because we have compulsory education laws that say everybody has to go anyway.
So I think in higher ed, a lot of what we saw was people who might have done something else, not pursued a four-year college degree, may have done some CTE or something like that.
They feel this pressure that they have to go to higher ed, that we all have to go through K through 12.
So you can't push any more people into it.
And on the program design, a really simple way to guard against it is rollover.
So if you can roll over your funds year to year and use them for costs down the road, including higher education, career technical education after high school, I think that's the best way to guard against it because then parents have an incentive to shop around.
And I do think we are out of time for real now.
So thank you everybody for coming.
Thank you to the audience.
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