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June 11, 2021 - Rudy Giuliani
49:47
School Choice: Civil Rights Issue Of The Century | Rudy Giuliani | Ep. 145
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Hello, this is Rudy Giuliani, and welcome to Rudy's Common Sense.
Today we're going to devote this episode to an exceedingly important long-term and short-term goal for the United States that I've felt strongly about for over 20 years, and that is school choice.
It variously can be called vouchers, Education choice, other names.
We'll define it and we'll talk about it.
It's been with us for years and it's been the source of some great debates and slowly but surely, a number of states, getting close to a majority now, have some form of school choice programs.
But let's examine them and let's compare them to what exists because the pandemic has illustrated for us something that has been there at least from the time that I was the mayor of New York, which was in the 1990s.
And that is the critical condition of our public school systems, particularly in America's major urban areas.
And I say that particularly in America's urban areas.
When I say the public school system during this discussion, I'm largely referring to that.
Because to speak too broadly would implicate many, many schools in suburban and rural areas that are excellent, excellent schools K through 12.
The opposite is the case in America's urban areas, where the school systems are almost uniformly failing the children.
And they're receiving, in comparison to other Americans and In comparison to the rest of the world, you wouldn't be exaggerating it to say an inadequate education, and in some cases are in danger while they're in school, which is why there is flight from the city and also increasing numbers of parents who either desire or accomplish getting their children into a parochial, a private, a charter, or now increasingly homeschooling.
Before we get to the statistics and the debates and the arguments, which is very, very heated because both the emotion and the political organization on both sides is very, very strong, particularly the teachers' union, which is arguably the most powerful union in the country, maybe one of the most powerful institutions in the country in the way that it dominates almost to a person, the Democrat Party.
And I think that was probably illustrated.
I've known that since I negotiated for the city against the teachers' union in the 90s, and probably the most aggressive teachers' union, the one in New York.
The reality is that it was becoming known to parents, but this whole issue on the opening of the schools has been an eye-opener, hasn't it?
Many public schools are still closed.
If they did open this year, they opened very sporadically.
The need for children in the areas we're talking about, in the urban areas, to go to school, it's not just to learn, it's to eat.
There were children in the New York City public schools where if I closed the schools for two or three days because of the snowstorm, children were starving.
I have a hard time contemplating how that doesn't create a massive, humane problem if you do it for two years.
And we all know that even the Democrat officials wanted to open schools last year, and they were intimidated by a teachers' union that really is the tail wagging the dog.
It's a shame, and I think this will illustrate it, and maybe some of the solutions that are necessary.
But before we get to the statistics and the arguments and the debate and the politics, You know this whole exercise is devoted to common sense.
Let's see if we can apply our common sense to this issue.
Where does it sound like the decision will be better made?
So we have two essential paradigms, right?
One is a public school system run by the government with a great deal of government rules, regulations, direction.
Even government dictates.
On the other side, we have a private system that is privately funded, largely, and run by people that are hired by the parents.
And because of the economic investment, or in some cases, not even the economic investment, because scholarships are involved, the amount of time and attention and care that it takes to get in, the parents tend to be much more heavily invested They're being made in a somewhat more democratic way, which means, of course, the administrators and the teachers have a great deal to do with it, but the parents have a great deal to do with it.
Because whether they're supplying the money out of their own pocket or through government vouchers, loans, scholarship, the money is coming from the parents.
And the parents made a selection for that school.
And because of either their own resources or the government's giving them resources, they can opt out of the school at any moment, or large numbers of them can't.
Can't do that in the public school.
So the public school is in its own sense a dictatorship.
It's run by, well it's theoretically run by the school administration.
I would say the wisdom that I gathered as mayor of New York City was that was a terrible mistake if you're going to manage them correctly.
They really are run by the teachers union.
The union representative in the school is the single most powerful person in that school, similar to the party representative or agent being the most Powerful person in a school, in a communist country, or on a communist submarine.
Remember the hunt for the Red October?
Before the Admiral could take over the submarine and turn it over to the Americans, he could turn the crew.
Had to get rid of the party agent, because the party agent really ran the ship.
Which was part of the resentment that people like he who came from Lithuania had to the Soviets.
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Let's get back to our subject.
The biggest difference, at least initially, is who makes the choice of school.
In the case of public school, the only choice parents really have is where they live.
Sometimes that can be flexible.
So parents can move around and live in a place where they feel the schools are good.
Sometimes it isn't.
Circumstance of family, circumstance of the amount of income available, flexibility.
Many, many things determine where you live, not one, and just can't easily be uprooted.
So to a large extent, the government dictates where your child goes to school.
Either in the local school or if you're attempting to go beyond the local school, the government dictates, the government decides.
You just don't get to do it or negotiate with the school.
So this is a government-run program, a top-down program, which is getting more and more top-down and more and more rigid.
And with the new influences, the progressive influences in the Democratic Party, which are substantial, you've got to look at the agenda of the progressives To look at where you're going in the public school system.
Maybe Black Lives Matter's set of principles would be the best way to look, because really they just repeat Marxist doctrine as what they want to see in the schools.
As you know, the Black Lives Matter and the Marxists are rather down on the traditional family, mother, father, child, two children.
They see that as having caused most of the problems of white privilege and most of the problems in the wicked, mean, horrible, morally inferior white community.
And therefore think the family has to be less important, maybe even non-existent.
The first thing that they argue is that there really isn't much of a reason for a presence of a father, except obviously to give birth.
Generally, they're the ones who cause most of the problem in the family and best not to have them.
But there isn't that much more toleration for a mother either.
The general theory is that the mother gives the child up to daycare at two years old, and then the child is in the right place.
The child is in the government-controlled school, and the child can learn what the school wants the child to know.
Critics would see that as indoctrination, propaganda, see it as something very similar to Hitler Youth or what the communists did under Stalin.
Parents have almost no input into what's taught in the schools.
They can start teaching sex at five and six years old, they can give out condoms, they can keep that all from the parents, they don't need parents' permission, they can have graphic sexual descriptions at six and seven years old. They teach history
that is not history, it's a diatribe against the United States. The 1619 program
has gotten the most attention given to us by the grace of the New York
Times, which has become, I don't know what it is actually, but the history book they
wrote may tell you I mean, they've distorted American history in that this very complex, very interesting, totally exceptional nation, the only one really that was built on principles,
And principles that continue to be challenged or continue to be not totally realized, but there's a quest to realize them, and some of which have been remarkably realized.
But when you put America in the context of other nations, there's nothing like it, right?
I mean, sometimes when these people are criticizing, you gotta just take a day off and just think about like on Memorial Day, how many Americans died to save other people?
No country has millions of people who died to save other people.
Nobody.
And what do we take?
Virtually nothing.
A cemetery.
You think that's taught in American schools now?
You think Black Lives Matter and those who are very sympathetic to them, which is basically the whole public school system, would teach that?
You think they would teach that white Americans died in record numbers to free black men and women?
I don't know if that's emphasized.
It wasn't just a couple of exceptional white men who were anti-slavery.
It was enough to win a war against a very, very difficult enemy.
It was a willingness on the part of this country that's so evil to spill the blood of its brothers and sisters and friends in order to achieve the goal Which was a goal that was slightly beyond people at the earlier part of that 19th century, to achieve a goal that a lot of other countries didn't achieve.
Nor do I think they teach that slavery didn't begin in the United States.
Slavery began in Africa, Egyptians had slaves.
We know that from the Bible.
Mesopotamia, Europe, Asia.
Slavery went on after the United States and slavery was imported to the United States.
And many of the people brought in as slaves to America were slaves in Africa.
Slavery remained in Africa.
So no one is defending slavery.
It's the most horrible institution in the world.
What we're trying to point out is that trying to exclusively Lodge the full sin of slavery on America, and to make it as if it's inherent sin that inheres in all of us, that all white men are racist as a result of slavery, is a direct-out attack on the United States of America, and a very, very unfortunate one because it deprives a lot of people of seeing that this, in fact, is the greatest nation on Earth.
And I'd be willing to argue that with any of them, based on any criteria you want.
The number of people liberated, the number of people made free, the amount of freedom they have, the knowledge and information they have about civilization and a critical appreciation of which civilizations civilized the world.
And by civilized, I mean taught the world that murder is wrong.
Things that make us more human and less animal.
But in any event, The choice gets made either by the government or it gets made by the parents and the heads of the school and a whole group of private people.
So you could say the government makes a better decision because the government is objective.
The government isn't deeply involved in the child, can be objective about what the child needs, and that no parent could be that objective.
And then it can organize in a more efficient way without special privileges for this one or special privileges for that one.
And that would make for a much more efficient and better system.
On the other hand, the objectivity of the decision of the government decision makers is marred by the fact that they know very little about the child.
And the larger the system, The less they know about the individual child.
They can't.
They can't possibly know about the individual child in a system like New York, which has over a million children.
So decisions get made in general categories.
This type of child, that type of child, this kind of score.
Those are making decisions about categories, not making decisions about people.
Educational decisions have to be made much more individually than that.
In the case of private parochial charter schools, the initial decision as to the selection of that school is made by the parent.
So deciding what's the right school for this type of child goes to the person who presumably would have the most information about the child and have the most interest in the child, meaning loving the child.
Are there families that are not like that?
Yes.
But should we build our model on the malfunctioning families?
Or should we build a model on the families that are working roughly correctly, build around that, and then find how do we deal with this problem, making the problem discount a solution for so many, and then moving over to a system that's inadequate with regard to performance, children, handling of children?
Well, the answer to that is, Let's see how many parents have great interest in their children, and let's take advantage of that.
And then let's make exceptions and set up a different procedure when there is no parent.
We'll be right back.
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So basically the, Let's call it right now the private system before we break it down.
The private system, the determination is made initially by the parent, the child is then evaluated by the system, sometimes the child is accepted, sometimes the child isn't accepted, but then the child often moves on to another school where the child may be accepted.
So, in a way, the decision-making with regard to K-12 becomes essentially the same decision-making that we have for higher education.
Because when you go on to college, you're not assigned to a college.
You take an exam, you apply, you think about the ones you like, the ones you don't like, they think about you as to whether you fit.
And even in our larger states, when we're talking about state schools, there's such a variety of them that you have a choice even within that situation.
And I think we'd all have to concede that American higher education, which has its challenges succeeds much, much better at educating and as well as making us competitive with the rest of the world as much more so than K through 12, where we're 28th in the world, 29th in the world.
Higher education, we're still one of the nations that people most want to come to, to increase their, you know, post high school and even post graduate education.
Why is it?
Why?
Why?
Why does this happen this way?
Why aren't the public school systems more flexible and more geared toward the individual child and more able to change their standards and change their rules to fit individual situations, which private schools can do?
There aren't the same rigid rules for teacher advancement, for teacher evaluation.
There aren't the same rigid rules in terms of curriculum.
It could be changed if it's not working.
Why is that?
And I would say the main reason for that is tremendous damage that the teachers union has done to the school system.
The teachers union has ruined public education in America by a lot of things, but not the least of which and being so political is one of them.
But the largest reason is It conceives of its obligation as protecting the worst teacher.
And the minute you do that, you recede to the norm, and everybody stops striving to be the best teacher.
Here's an example of that.
When I was the mayor of New York, I consistently offered the teacher's unit, which was then run by the same woman who now runs the National Union, Randi Weingarten, who is a fine person, but is extremely wrong about this.
I would offer her, because we didn't have a great deal of money at first, and then finally we did, I would offer her a package where we would give extraordinarily high wages, increases, to teachers that were extraordinarily gifted and showed that in terms of results for the students, which we would agree on a method of measure.
And then for the average teachers, we would pay them an average amount.
And for the poor teachers, we would pay them no raise.
And maybe in some cases kind of work toward either improving them or they were too far gone and get rid of them.
And we would loosen the rules for getting rid of the really bad teachers because New York City and many school systems have a terrible problem.
When a teacher is charged with a very serious offense, it's much harder to remove the teacher as a teacher than it is to convict the teacher of a crime.
So we have these extraordinarily embarrassing rubber rooms in New York where we have hundreds of teachers.
Who have been charged with crime, some not so serious, but some rape, some child molestation, child harassment.
They sit there for three, four years getting their pay while we have to go through the arcane system of firing a teacher.
Should be streamlined a lot more because it is more than just an isolated problem.
It is not.
A systemic problem.
But it's more than just an isolated problem.
And I found when I was the mayor, the workaround was to get them prosecuted.
We could do it faster than we could deal with the system.
And any attempt to change that, it was a life and death battle with the union.
Also, the idea of merit pay.
Of course you can.
was a life and death struggle with the idea that let's come up with a system where we can measure
the best teachers, pay them the most, measure the average teachers, measure the worst teachers.
Answer was you can't measure teachers. Of course you can.
Of course you can.
That objection is made every time an accountability program is put in in a
government agency or a corporation because I've done many of them.
Oh, this guy, we can't measure police officers.
We can't measure firefighters.
We can't measure sanitation workers.
We can't measure the engineers who make the cars.
We can't do that.
I mean, it's all very... Yes, you can.
Yeah.
Well, how about you get within about 80 or 90 percent of accuracy?
It's a lot better than not measuring at all.
You can measure police officers.
It depends on what you want of them.
What I wanted of them was to reduce crime.
So I didn't measure them solely by the number of arrests that they made.
I measured them by standards we set up for how they could reduce crime, and were they meeting those standards?
Teachers, you've got to decide, what do we want of them?
We want the children to graduate.
We want them at grade level.
We want them We want them to perform better on tests or not, is that not important?
Is the idea of graduating and moving on more important?
Do they connect with each other?
Well, you agree on these standards.
They are not perfect.
Perfection is not achieved in our lifetime, including in management.
But the failure to do anything doesn't just go to imperfection, it goes to failure.
Because the minute you allow a system like the school system has, The system quickly recedes to the norm.
That means the people who are working really, really hard, trying to do their best to educate children, just aren't driven any longer.
Only the massive heroes are driven.
And no system has a majority of massive heroes.
So therefore, you've got to watch out for what are the incentives in a system that determine your success or failure.
So let's just review for a moment as we go into a little more detail here.
What are the school systems we're talking about other than public?
As we move away from the public model, I would say charter, parochial, private, non-profit, profit, and homeschooling would be the four most prominent.
Charter are really just public schools.
that get to negotiate parents having a lot bigger role, their own rules, so they can get away from the rigid union rules that are inconsistent with being able to save a failing school because they don't allow for measuring accountability.
The next group are parochial schools.
Parochial schools are associated with a religion.
Most of them are Catholic, but there's a growing number of Protestant, Jewish, and Muslim parochial schools.
There certainly was in New York, even when I was mayor, and that diversity has grown, if anything.
Then there are private schools, and private schools are exactly what they say.
They're private.
They're not run by the government.
They make their own decisions.
The big distinction between them are most of them are non-profits, and some of them are profit.
I don't detect a great deal of difference in the two, but I have to say we haven't spent a lot of time on that.
We sort of looked at private schools in general.
And now we have a much big growing category of homeschooling.
Because of the pandemic, I would say for sure homeschooling went from 2% to 10%.
And receives rather high ratings when we start looking at the comparisons, both with regard to performance on tests, ability to get into college, ability to succeed in college.
The source of these studies, however, often makes these studies difficult to apply with authority.
It doesn't make them difficult to read.
and factor in the bias. But it makes it difficult to make an ultimate decision just based on that.
I mean, a lot of the studies are done by the government school industry, the public school
and the public school administrators and the public school bureaucrats, which is a massive industry.
You know, Ronald Reagan in 1980, 81, wanted to do away with the Federal Department of Education because he said this is a local function.
Well, probably should have, because all we did is make one of the biggest problems of the public school system that much bigger.
One of the biggest problems is the amount of money spent on useless administration.
New York City, it's a crime.
And I did everything I could to stop it, but those contracts that are written become not laws, but they become things that can be sued about and therefore required to do it whether you want to do it or not.
And then you say, okay, we're not going to abide by that rule that comes from the agreement.
We're going to fire this teacher right away because the person molested a child.
And then the teacher goes to court and the court sides with the teacher because the teacher is right.
Under the contract, the teacher is wrong in terms of safety of the children.
There is a saying that has great wisdom about major urban school systems.
And at times when you hear it, you might want to cry.
It says everybody in the school system has a rabbi.
We use that term in New York to mean a lobbyist, an influencer, A big shot who can get you what you want.
So let's call it a lobbyist.
Everybody in the school system is a special interest and they have a lobbyist representative.
The teachers, big time.
The principals, not so much, but they're there.
The supervisors, absolutely.
The workers who do the work of keeping the school going, big union.
They got plenty of political power.
They get involved in the election.
The government industry of education, which is huge.
Both on the local, state, and federal.
When they get together, these are a lot of people!
They got a lot of power.
And they got lobbyists and special representatives.
You know who has no lobbyists in the school system?
The children!
They're not represented!
The last thing thought about in the school discussion, with all these special interests around getting paid hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars to do their lobbying work, are the children!
Who cared when they had to go back to school?
Who cares?
Who cares if this teacher's been there for eight years and graduation rates have gone down every single year?
Who cares?
Who argues for them?
Parents try to come in and you see it on television, they're treated like they're criminals.
Literally, parents have no influence.
At best, at best, they're tolerated.
Usually not even tolerated.
In these places that I'm talking about that haven't been reformed, public school system is a great example of exactly what socialism and communism wants.
The government educates your child.
Indoctrinates your child, and by the time your child leaves, your child hates America, would much rather see a socialist form of government, maybe hates you.
How many times during the pandemic did a parent walk in and see the television with the homeschooling and talking about how whites are inherently evil, and the parent looks in the mirror and says, I'm white.
They just told my child I'm evil.
Or the child comes to the parent and says, How could you ever have supported slavery?
And, you know, the guy's an Irish-American whose family never had slaves, or an Italian-American, or whatever the heck he or she is.
The teachers' union is a very, very negative force.
And it hasn't gotten any better.
It's gotten worse.
Because it does not consider, at any level of priority, the children.
Otherwise, children have been back at school for a whole year.
And a lot of these things would have been cured.
So when we look at the studies, we have to always be aware of the fact that we have this gigantic government school lobby made up of the teachers and the bureaucrats and the government officials and almost the entire Democrat Party, which is Controlled by the union.
As you saw, we didn't see Pelosi or Schumer, the big shot Democrats, arguing against the teachers union on this, did we?
We saw a couple cave in, didn't we?
Not going back to school until the teachers are satisfied.
Doesn't matter what the governor says.
We own the governor.
And the pandemic has, you know, the pandemic's affected a lot.
And I think it's laid bare.
The major inadequacy of the school system, and it's an inadequacy that's worse than some of our others.
Just consider this, if we let these schools remain this way for another four or five years, and it takes us four or five years to reform them, we lose another generation, who are not as well educated as the Japanese, the Chinese, many of the Europeans.
You have an interest in it, your child may be in a great private school, Your child's going to grow up in a country in which a large majority of this country is not well educated.
Your child can't be that successful in a country that's like that.
Education has to be excellent, broad-based for a country to really, really take off.
Because we need very smart people in many, many positions, not just the guy calling the shots, if that's going to be your son or daughter.
So let's look at statistics.
Let's look at statistics knowing that they tend to be pushed a little in the direction of the school industry or the private industry, the way Democrat and Republican polls get pushed.
But I think Some of this is going to go to your common sense, and I think there's one poll among all others that gives us the answer.
So I'm looking at an analysis that's done every year.
It's done for, I think the name of the organization is GoEd, it's educationchoice.org.
And I'm going to look at first the breakdown pre-pandemic.
And we'll put the chart up so you can see it, and I'll explain it to you.
On the very first column that says outcome, those are the various tests that were taken, the two, four, six, or seven tests, studies that were done in a large number of schools.
Those are all listed as the number of schools that included many of the big school districts Then it gives you the list of the number of studies, program participant test scores.
That meant a comparison of the test scores on the private side and on the public side.
So let's look at that for a moment.
There were 16 such tests taken.
11 showed positive effects, meaning the private schools were working well, and three of them showed no effect, and three of them showed negative effects.
Educational attainment.
There were only six schools studied there.
Four showed positive, two showed nothing, and none of them showed negative effects on how easy it is to get into college.
How do they do in college?
That would be that.
Parent satisfaction is off the charts.
26 tests, 26 yes, zero no.
Public school test scores.
This is a big surprise, and you should focus on this very, very carefully.
24 positive effect, one no effect, one negative.
What that means is, when you introduced choice, vouchers, scholarships, it improved the performance of the public schools 24 out of 26 times.
That's before the pandemic.
That alone is a reason for choice.
Always argued that at the time that this was theoretical.
I knew that would happen because I understand competition, as does any intelligent, well-educated person.
But it's amazing to see this, and it's gonna be amazing as we move on shortly, to see how consistent this is.
I think the two most important poles here are those two right in the middle.
Parent satisfaction, unanimous.
Public schools, 24 out of 26 times, improved.
The teachers union are hurting the public schools by opposing this.
Do you get it?
Civic values, positive effect, six.
Negative effect, no visible effect, five.
Any negative effect, none.
Racial ethnic integration, it improved integration six to one, six out of seven times.
And finally, did it turn out to help overall with the budget or not?
Very, very surprisingly, 45 out of 50 times it did.
So that's pre-pandemic.
Now, what happened after the pandemic?
A lot of the flaws of the public school system and the undue influence of the teachers union got exposed.
Homeschooling was utilized a lot more.
If I recall correctly, at the time of this study, homeschooling was 3%.
It's now 10%, which is another form of private schools.
And one that on the early stages seems to do quite well.
So let's look now at the year of the pandemic.
So this would be rather smaller group of schools.
in the states that had the courage to send their children to school and the states that
followed the science, which said that children are not at risk. And therefore, the emphasis
should be put on the elderly, make very, very strict rules for how to see them and deal with
them and protect them.
And if maybe if you do that, and you put your resources in the right place where your vulnerabilities, you'll save more people.
And the end result is the states that did that saved a lot more people than let's say, the embarrassment in my state where so many elderly people were sent to their death.
In nursing homes, where you would say it would be the most illogical, almost mean place to put them.
If this disease affects older people, it almost doesn't affect young people in terms of mortality.
Yeah, what are you doing spending all this time closing schools and not spending time reconfiguring nursing homes?
So we offered protection, more protection to people who didn't need it than we did for the people who did.
And that happened pretty much in the Democrat states that just wanted to do anything opposite of Donald Trump.
Very sad reason for allowing people to die.
But in any event, even though the school system had gone down to a fraction of what it was, the statistics remain pretty much, you can see, the same.
If you put them against each other, it was 17 studies of test scores, and 11 were positive, and 4 were no visible effect, and 3, like last time, were negative.
Educational attainment, pretty much the same thing, exactly the same, four to two.
Parent satisfaction went up, although we picked up a parent who wasn't satisfied, 29 to one.
And public school test scores pretty much went up by one in terms of they improved.
Civic values and practices seemed the same in both.
And integration, again, Improved by the same margin.
So this is during the pandemic.
Now let's go to the first year after the pandemic, where we had the parochial schools back, the private schools back, and some, but not all, of the public schools back, particularly in the big urban areas.
There our numbers, again, remain remarkably similar, although they get larger, obviously, and we were dealing with a larger field.
The program test participants, virtually the same numbers.
It's 11.4 and 3 rather than 11.3 and 3.
Educational attainment seems now has improved slightly in the direction of the private schools.
Parent satisfaction in public schools.
Test scores remain overwhelmingly positive.
Civic values remains pretty much even and integration improves.
And once again, the fiscal effects seem to be enormous. That lays out a pretty strong argument
that various forms of these schools should be encouraged, shouldn't they?
Because just by this they work, and we know what's going on now isn't working, and we have to try, we have to have the courage to try alternatives.
I believe the one most important poll there, so I pulled it out to look at, the most important poll there is the poll that involves the teachers, rather the parents, making the decisions, rather than the decisions being made by the By the government bureaucrats.
And I'm going to go back to a pre-COVID poll on that, because that number changed quite a bit.
That number, which ends up in the post-COVID poll, let's get it exactly right, ends up in the post-COVID poll as parent satisfaction 28 to 1, right?
So if you do it as a poll, it used to be 65%, and it went up to 71% after the pandemic.
I told you, homeschooling went from 3 to 10%.
Here's the most amazing thing of all, and it's a political conundrum that has troubled me forever and ever and ever.
Those numbers I told you, you might think are heavily weighted toward white and we have our usual bipartisan breakdown between Democrats and Republicans.
And you would think that because the Democrat Party, it's part of the platform to oppose private schools and charter schools.
I mean, they're to the death enemies.
It doesn't break down that way.
It doesn't break down that way.
In this poll that was taken by By John Schilling, in April of this year, here are the numbers.
I mean, 73% back school choice.
Highest level of support ever recorded.
How does it break down among races and ethnicities?
The white support is the highest at 73%.
The second highest is Hispanic, 68%.
Hispanic 68 percent, the third is Black 66 percent, and the fourth is Asian 66 percent.
Is that good?
.
Democrats oppose it bitterly, won't even take it to the floor.
Black Democrats are almost unanimous in their opposition to it.
And 66% of Blacks would like to have vouchers and choice.
And if you look at Democrat, Republican, it's 69% Democrat, 75% Republican.
So what we have here is What we have here is the union has become more important to the Democrat politicians than their constituents.
Their constituents are begging them for school choice.
69% of Democrats would like school choice.
The Democratic Party, Schumer and Pelosi say, screw you!
Who cares 69% of you like?
We know better.
What do you know about your kids?
You're just parents.
This has got to change sometime.
It has to blow up in the face of the Democrat Party.
They have for years been defying the will of their electorate, and this number has only increased over the years.
Then there's another question they asked, which is, would you support or oppose giving parents a portion of those funds to use for home, virtual or private education if public schools do not open?
Full-time for in-person class immediately.
The answer is that almost everybody wants to close them.
Here it's 65% white and 63% black.
And it's 66% Democrat and 67% Republican.
This should be a crossover issue.
It isn't.
And it's 66% Democrat and 67% Republican.
I mean, this should be a crossover issue.
It isn't.
It isn't.
I mean, I've run on this and I've never been able to get a crossover vote based
on it, and I've seen presidential candidates run on it.
Trump got a bit of a one.
So how do we come out of all of this?
First of all, my prejudice, I was the product of a parochial school education.
I went to two different Catholic grammar schools, a Catholic high school, which I commuted to on the Long Island Railroad, a Catholic college, and my first Classroom that wasn't religious was at NYU, and when the professor came in to begin the class, I was the only one who stood up to make the sign of the cross.
And then I realized, oh my goodness, I'm in the wrong place.
I was so used to it.
I am a big adherent and proponent of my education.
I very strongly support it.
My children both had private educations.
My wife and I both worked at the time.
I would say we could afford it, but we could just about afford it.
first eight years, you would consider them also private schools, which means they were
very expensive.
My wife and I both worked at the time.
I would say we could afford it, but we could just about afford it.
It certainly took most of our disposable income, let's put it that way.
It happened during the time I was a United States attorney, and she was an anchor for a local news station.
And the rates then were like $20,000 or $30,000, they're now $40,000 or $50,000.
That's a lot of money to pay for kindergarten.
That's one of the problems with it.
However, since I believed in school choice, I felt I had a moral obligation to support it for parents who couldn't afford it.
I felt that the only way you could be a good mayor is if you made all the children of the city as important as your children.
If my children were important enough to go to private school, your children were important enough to go to private school.
And therefore, I'm going to take the money that we're spending, that the government is spending, and if you think the government is spending it wisely, Then you're just some kind of brainwashed Democrat.
And you've got to go to an un-brainwashing school.
The government spends money the most inefficiently of any business, any organization, any I've ever seen.
I mean, basically the dollar is to go for administrators, to watch administrators, to watch administrators, to administer administrators, administer.
The reason they give out so many tests is so somebody can make up the tests and be an administrator.
They don't have to go into class.
You could cut that school system and get more money to the kids in a second.
So I'll work on this if anybody wants me to, because I know it.
I know where the fault lines are here.
The reality is, if we don't revolutionize our education of K-12, whatever else happens to America, Whether we succeed in all of the other challenges we have from the Chinese communists and our enemies, we're going to be a second-rate nation.
There are a lot of reasons why we were and are now the greatest nation on earth.
Many reasons.
But the most important is the quality of our citizenship.
Both the moral and the intellectual quality of our citizenship, because the two often go together, at least in your ability to teach it to other people.
America is being eaten away, taken away from us every day in classrooms where teachers teach children to hate the greatest country on earth.
Where teachers fail to teach about the inadequacies of America without prefacing it with a strong statement about the greatness of America.
It has to change.
There's no choice.
The choice movement needs to be embraced.
It needs to be part.
It needs to be part of our freedom party.
It needs to be a substantial part of it because in the undercutting and the undermining of our education, the teachers union, the Democrats, the socialists and the communists that align with them.
have made major inroads on the path to socialism and communism for the whole country.
It's got to be reversed.
And most importantly, if you love children, you'll make this a lifetime mission about which you will not stop until every child has a quality education.
Thank you very much for listening.
I hope we can get you involved with the Freedom Network.
We'll be talking more about it in future podcasts, but I thought this would be a good way to introduce one of the reasons for it.
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