Corey DeAngelis, Heritage Foundation fellow, argues school choice surged after COVID exposed teachers’ unions pushing radical agendas like CRT and gender ideology, with 18 states now adopting universal programs. He cites Chicago’s $30K-per-student spending yielding 0% math proficiency and Camden’s $40K per student amid failure, blaming union-backed DEI mandates and administrative bloat—95% more staff since 2000. Data shows minority students in DC vouchers thrive, while union influence traps families in failing systems, demanding defunding of political privileges to restore parental control over education. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're going to have such a good conversation with Corey DeAngelis today, you guys, about school choice and your favorite and mine, Randy Weingarten, and teachers unions and where's your tax money going for schools and where should it go?
But we can't do any of that until we do something simultaneously.
So, Brie, take it away.
Dr. Von Hardy, you're in trouble.
So I know why you're here.
You're here for the simultaneous hip.
It doesn't take much.
If you would like to enjoy the special holiday version of the simultaneous hip, what do you think you need?
Well, I'll tell you.
All you need is a cup or a mugger glass, a tank or chalis or stein, a canteen jug or flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine of the day, the thing that makes everything better, the simultaneous sip.
go.
Oh, best sip of the week.
That was delicious.
Cheers, you guys.
So for those of you that might be new or joining us for the first time, my name is Erica.
And this is the Scott Adams School.
And it's separate from Coffee with Scott Adams, which still lives and exists on this channel.
And there's thousands of hours of amazing genius content from our beloved Scott Adams.
And there's even more of his content and lessons and fun goodies over on his locals channel, which is scottadams.locals.com.
Again, my name is Erica, and we're joined today by Owen Gregorian, who's feeling a little better.
Good morning, everyone.
And the beautiful Marcella.
Good morning, you guys.
And our special guest professor today, right below, we are so happy to have him is, oh, I, you know what I almost just said?
Anyway, okay, it doesn't matter.
It's Corey DeAngelis.
Okay.
And Corey is a newly, right?
You got a new job at the Heritage Foundation.
You're a fellow at the Heritage Foundation.
Congratulations.
And I know that your resume is vast and impressive.
And Corey, I've been watching you for years.
You have been so consistent and steadfast fighting for children and parents, their rights, their education.
And for our, I don't have children, but you're fighting for my tax dollars and you're fighting for our future.
So I thought it would be so great for everybody to get to know you if they don't already and give you a chance to just explain to us the importance of what you're doing.
And then everybody's goal here is to be useful.
Scott has taught us to be useful.
So we're going to listen to you.
And then if you have a homework assignment for us or you want to tell us how we can be useful, we are an army for you.
So, Corey, thank you so much for joining us.
And if you can just give them a background of what you're doing, we would love that.
Yeah, thanks so much for having me.
Far Left School Choice00:15:15
And you let me know if I'm talking too much, but we were finally winning on the issue of education freedom because the teachers' unions really stepped on a rake.
They overplayed their hand, showed their true colors, especially during COVID.
And Scott Adams was steadfast at calling them out every step of the way as well.
He would retweet me very often.
So that was a big boost to the school choice movement.
And he mentioned, you know, a lot of the wins that we were racking up on this show over time as well.
But, you know, before COVID, we didn't have any states with what I would call universal school choice, which was Milton Friedman's vision, who was a Nobel laureate economist for the money to follow the child for every single kid, regardless of income, background, or zip code.
In the U.S., we spend about $20,000 a kid, and that's taken through property taxes and other revenue sources.
And you're basically stuck going to your assigned government-run institution that we call public schools.
And if you don't like what you're getting, there's basically no recourse.
You have to move houses to get to a better so-called public school.
And even then, you're still assigned to another government-run institution that could go downhill over time.
And the other option is you can pay twice, which who has the money to do that?
You can pay for the school you're not using through taxes, the government-run facility, and then pay out of pocket for private school tuition and fees.
So that's not a viable option either for most parents.
And then the unions have told us for a long time that, you know, the public schools are so accountable because they have this so-called democratic accountability.
You can show up at the school board meeting.
And if you don't like what you're getting, they're going to listen to you and everything's going to be fine and dandy.
And we're all going to get along.
That was proven to be a farce during COVID.
What did parents do when they didn't like critical race theory after they saw it on remote learning?
Well, they listened and they said, you know, they told me to go to the school board meeting and maybe they'll listen to me.
And they had their mics cut off for trying to expose gender ideology and trying to rip out sexually explicit books from the school libraries.
They somehow was okay for little kids to read these things without their parents.
But when the parents came to the school board meetings to read the same words in those books that were for the kids, all of a sudden it was not appropriate, which goes to show you how ridiculous it all was to begin with.
And then when parents were protesting critical race theory in places like Virginia, they didn't just have their mics cut off.
They were labeled as domestic terrorists under the Biden regime.
They actually had a letter from the School Boards Association at the time to the Biden administration requesting that under the Patriot Act of all things, parents should be investigated for quote-unquote domestic terrorism.
And a lot of people who even know that story don't know the backstory of the FOIA request that went through showing that earlier drafts of that same memo that went to Biden, urging him to basically lay down the law on parents and to try to bully and silence them into submission.
They called for the military to be deployed to school board meetings to tell parents to sit down and shut up and not be involved in their kids' education and their upbringing.
Well, it was a bold strategy, Cotton.
It didn't work out for them.
It backfired.
Since then, 26 states have left the school boards association.
And now we have 18 states that have passed universal school choice, allowing all families to take their taxpayer money to a school that works for them.
And the reason that this is such a great policy mechanism is that it creates competition.
I mean, just imagine if you were assigned to a government grocery store.
I know Zoe Ramdani is trying to do that in New York City right now.
But just imagine, you know, for most rational people, you'd understand that it's a horrible idea to try to assign people to a government-run institution for groceries where you get government cheese.
And if the shelves were empty or if they gave you food poisoning each week because the food was expired and they told you, just go complain to the grocery board and things never got any better.
And oh, if you want a better, if you actually don't want to die and get food poisoning, maybe you should move houses to be assigned to a better grocery store.
That would be ridiculous.
They'd have no incentive to change.
It would be the same problem over and over again.
The definition of insanity, doing the same thing and expecting different results.
And that's exactly the problem with our government school system.
But now, in states like my home state of Texas, Arizona, Florida, it's the red states that are doing this right now that aren't controlled by the teachers union cartel.
They can take their money to a private school that's aligned with their values that doesn't teach the far left propaganda.
And then maybe if you want to go to a school that does have critical race theory, I mean, you can, that's up to you.
So it's more of a freedom-based initiative instead of a top-down initiative where we can agree to disagree.
If you're a Democrat and you want to take your money to a school that I don't agree with, that's fine.
But I just don't want to be stuck in a one-size-fits-all system where you don't even have a majority inflicting their will on the minority.
It's worse than that.
You have a minority special interest, the teachers union, who are way far left of the Democrat Party, trying to pull them into socialism, if anything.
Well, they exert their influence through the political process, control the school boards, and then infiltrate the curriculum.
And it's actually even worse than that because you mentioned Randy Weingarten earlier.
She was just at the World Economic Forum.
What the hell was she doing over there?
But she announced at her annual convention last year, I think it was in DC, but that she was partnering with the World Economic Forum to create a curriculum for American kids.
I mean, if you thought Common Core nationalized curriculum was a bad idea, Randy Weingart said, hold my beer.
We're going to impose a globalist curriculum on everybody else's kids.
And it gets even worse than that.
She also announced a partnership with AI companies like Open AI to, you know, they want to get their left-wing agenda programmed into the AI and they're trying to get it ahead of the wave of AI technology and its revolution.
And they're trying to use that to install their left-wing agenda.
So, I mean, you can even go back to their annual convention of the NEA, which is the National Education Association last year.
It was in Portland, Oregon.
Their teachers union boss is Becky Pringle.
She just started making the rounds again on social media.
I posted about this last summer and people just now, James Woods and others started picking up the video clip that I shared last year of her just jumping around on the stage and saying, we need DEI.
She's like, say the words, say the words.
And it's just insane.
At their annual convention, of course, she was crazy, but they picked one person as their teacher of the year.
And you'd thought, you'd think it would be someone who did a good job and all of all of their students, you know, graduated and went to college or whatever, you know, success looks like for those kids.
But it wasn't that.
They picked a political activist.
Her name was Ashley Croisson from Pennsylvania, public school teacher.
And she used her two minutes of fame or whatever on the stage to say that her job as a teacher of all things was quote unquote deeply political and always had been.
And so they really let the mask slip.
They also passed a whole slew of resolutions that had nothing to do with education.
One of them, I mean, they read more like a declaration of war on the Trump administration than anything else.
They called, and one of them abolishing the Department of Education racist, which is crazy.
If anything, that department has done nothing but exacerbate achievement gaps.
It hasn't closed them.
It's hurt the minority kids more than anybody else by sticking them and trapping them in failure factories that they're assigned to and relegated to by their zip code.
School choice would actually allow for more equality of opportunity so that more families could access private education who couldn't afford it before.
Trump has even called it the civil rights issue of our time.
And I will say, Trump did endorse my book.
It's called The Parent Revolution.
Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of War, also endorsed it as well.
And Randy Weingarten came out with her own book this past year in 2025.
Mine was in 2024.
I dedicated mine to her for overplaying her hand and doing more to advance school choice and homeschooling than anyone could have ever imagined by showing how crazy she is.
But her book is called Why Fascists Fear Teachers, and it's the same background as mine, same color scheme, same font.
She was pressed on a podcast about this for copying me.
And she said, oh, no, I didn't plagiarize.
It's just a coincidence.
Everybody's book looks exactly like this, even though they're in the same arena and the same topic.
After he had just dedicated his, it's obvious she copied the background of my book.
So I don't know if anybody else has a copy.
She is severely evil.
And I'm not even saying that lightly.
And, you know, she's been around in the political sphere for decades, for decades.
And she's been the head of the teachers' union for what, like 17 years now?
Yeah, decades.
But she also was an at-large member of the Democratic National Committee.
And nobody knew about this.
I was, I was, I'm pretty dang involved in teachers union and their politics as far as doing research on them and seeing what's going on.
Like, I know she makes over $600,000 a year, and that's a big deal to a lot of teachers who don't want to continue funding her far-left agenda.
And I was asking people at other think tanks and stuff in DC, like, did you guys know about this?
Because the New York Times reported on it last year, not too long ago, that, you know, and they reported as if everybody knew this thing.
I mean, maybe they did, but they never reported her as a DNC member.
They always reported her as the head of the teachers union so that they could pretend that she was representing all the teachers.
But she was at the DNC for 26 years and she was also on their influential rules committee.
So she was a very high-ranking member and nobody knew about this.
And so, like, I often tell people to follow the money, right?
And you see that her union contributes to the Democrat candidates.
And Open Secrets has this.
You don't have to take my word for it.
But 99.97%, basically all of her political contributions went to Democrats last election cycle.
And it's been like that for decades.
It's a form of money laundering.
It's ridiculous.
It should be illegal.
We shouldn't have government unions that are forced, that force taxpayers to fund a far-left agenda.
And her sister union, the NEA, Becky Pringle's union, has something called a federal charter.
It has the backing of Congress.
And they got this special privilege over 100 years ago.
And this is also something that people in DC even like, what?
The NEA, the union, has a federal charter?
That doesn't make any sense.
And so the thing is, you know, to get rid of it, you'd need a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.
The Republicans have a majority, but they don't have 60% of the seats, which is what you need to end the victory.
At least defund it.
So, you know, the thing is, the NEA has over $400 million in dues revenues each year.
And the thing is, the teachers think.
It's a form of Stockholm syndrome.
They think that they need the union because when they go and sign their paperwork on their first day, basically they're told, if you don't have us, you're going to get sued by all the students and you're going to lose your job and you're going to go to jail.
You need legal representation from your union.
So even if a conservative goes in and wants to just focus on the basics, keep their head down and not be engaged in the political activities, they think they need to sign this paperwork and get involved with the union just out of self-interest that they want to protect themselves.
But the thing is, there are other groups that are providing this liability insurance even for free.
One of them is called the Teacher Freedom Alliance.
And donors are covering the cost if you leave a government-run union and join them instead.
And so I think this is what scares Randy Weingarten and Becky Pringle almost as much as school choice, which gives them competition, this idea of teacher choice, where no teacher can be forced to join a union and to pay union dues as a condition of employment anymore.
That came out from the Supreme Court in 2018 and then something called the Janice decision.
And Linda McMahon, the Secretary of Education, just put a video out a couple of weeks ago reminding all teachers about this.
Even if you're in a blue state like California or New York or Illinois, you can't be forced to pay the union dues anymore.
And so this, of course, the union's not going to advertise this.
Of course, the school districts aren't going to advertise this either.
And so a lot of teachers who have been in the system for a long time, they think this is just how it's always been.
This is how it has to be.
But you can opt out today.
You can go to optouttoday.com.
That's one of your homework assignments if you're a teacher.
You would be crazy if you're a conservative or independent or libertarian or even a rational Democrat who just wants to focus on academics as opposed to activism.
You would be crazy to continue giving your hard-earned paycheck to people like Randy Weingarten and Becky Pringle, who make over half a million dollars a year, who put their thumb on the scale and make the entire profession look bad by fighting with conservatives every day.
I mean, Randy's book labeled all conservatives as fascist.
And she even went on MSNBC on national news and said that she wore a paper clip because it reminded her of the teachers in Norway during Nazi occupation.
And she went on national news, basically comparing America to Nazi Germany, which is totally insane.
So what made you choose this cause?
Like what made you choose to focus on school choice?
They actually started as a researcher and I benefited from school choice even before my academic career.
So I grew up in San Antonio, Texas.
My dad was in the Air Force.
So we moved to military city when I was like three or four years old.
And so I did my entire K-12 education here.
And yeah, I live back in San Antonio now.
I lived in DC during COVID.
Don't recommend it.
They had all these restrictions.
You couldn't go into restaurants.
The closures were horrible.
Funding the Individual, Not the Institution00:03:46
But I went to government-run schools.
So if I make any mistakes today, that's probably why my government education.
But in high school, I had the opportunity to go to something called a magnet school, which is still run by the district.
But it's a form of school choice.
I'd say one of the most kind of milquetoast versions of school choice, but at least it's something.
They have to attract their clientele.
You're not assigned to them.
They have specialized missions.
Mine was called Communications Arts High School.
was still able to play sports at the assigned government-run institution.
They were actually on the same physical campus.
And I was able to see a night and day difference.
Even one of my classes had to be because the school was so small, the magnet at the big behemoth factory model school in ninth grade, I went and did a math class over there.
And I could see walking through the halls that you look into the classrooms, it was just total chaos and disruption, even back then.
I know it's gotten worse now.
There's so much of this restorative justice policies going on where teachers don't feel like they can discipline any of the kids.
And, you know, if no, if people don't actually want to be there, it's hard to kind of, you know, rally the troops and get everybody to focus each day.
And if you're not doing a good job, it's really, really bad, really hard to get people to focus on you.
And I just saw that, you know, there was this night and day difference.
There were fights on the government-run school campus.
In my middle school, I had a friend who tried to teach me how to walk the right way because I didn't walk with a limp.
And I still talk to this guy this day.
We took different paths, but it just, you know, it goes to show you like people tell you you can't homeschool because of socialization.
Well, there is some bad socialization going on in the government-run institutions.
People in my middle school used to go get beat up in the restroom.
They called it getting rolled into the gang.
If you wanted to be in the bloods or the crypts, you wore blue or red.
And the way to do that, the initiation tactic was to go get beat up in the bathroom.
I don't know if people still do that or if it was even a thing in other places, but that's something that happened in my middle school.
And it was looked, it wasn't looked down upon.
It was, it was a form of social status to get into fights and beat other people up and to do drugs.
And so I didn't really fall through the cracks, but a lot of other people who could have otherwise gotten a better education and taken a better path, they might have turned out a lot better than they did.
And so I think other people should have access to educational opportunities.
And it shouldn't be limited to a school that's run by the government, like a magnet school.
You should be able to take that money to a private school.
Just like with food stamps, we don't say you have to take food stamp dollars.
And, you know, we can disagree about whether we should have food stamps at all.
That's not the argument I'm making.
But if we're going to have it and if we're going to fund SNAP benefits for people and taxpayers are forced to spend money on those things, it shouldn't go to a government institution.
And we shouldn't corral people and say, you got to go here and line up in the breadline.
Instead, like we do with food stamps, the money should follow the person.
And so we should fund the student, not the system has been my tagline for years, fund the individual, not the institution, which is really interesting because Democrats support all of these other programs where the money follows the person and not the building, like Medicaid vouchers.
Those, you don't have to take those, that funding to a government-run, assigned hospital.
You don't have to take Pell Grants, which are college scholarships for low-income kids, students.
You don't have to take those to state-run universities or the community college, and certainly not one that you're assigned to.
You get to choose a private or public university.
It makes sense for your children.
It's your health.
It's your diet.
Anti-ICE Protests at Schools00:03:43
It's your whatever.
So why, why wouldn't you be able to choose?
It's just, we're in America.
You have children.
You hope for the best for them.
You, you know, like, I mean, I look at some towns that are decent towns, but the school's shit.
And so now what?
Like, I'm just stuck here.
I got to uproot my whole life and move somewhere because I have to go to this school and I can't afford a different private school.
It makes total and utter sense.
And all I've seen in the last, you know, call it decade for sure, are parents' rights being stripped away and blatantly and teachers blatantly saying like they're our kids.
And, you know, this is what I do for our kids.
I'm like, oh, they are not your kids.
They're students of that school.
And that's about it.
And also, you know, I don't want to forget what's going on now either at these public schools or indoctrinating kids into becoming.
Protesters and, by the way, some violent protesters, and you know the.
The parents don't even know what's happening, and I just want to touch on that too for a minute Corey, if you could.
You know, let the group know what's going on with those things too at public schools.
Yeah, it's insane this, these anti-ice protests, which are not organized by the kids, but the unions want you to believe that they are.
But kids want to get out of class.
Obviously they're kids.
You need to have some leadership in the schools.
The adults are the ones who are supposed to say, you know what you're supposed to be on campus, they're supposed to be keeping these kids safe.
That's the, the low, that is, the bottom rung of school quality.
Is they're supposed to try to keep the kids there and to keep them safe?
I mean, when I was in high school uh, in San Antonio Texas, we couldn't leave campus for lunch unless we were seniors and we couldn't just leave just for any reason, and so they didn't have any problem enforcing that type of mechanism.
But you have the same school that I was assigned to having these anti-ice protests and kids um swarming onto the streets, and you see this as a larger pro problem.
The Florida Education Association just had their uh, and they had a press conference the other week and they are the state affiliate of the NEA Becky Pringle's Union and they had one of their speakers.
They only had like five people speak and one of their speakers said that these anti-ice student walkout protests, these political activities, were both rational and quote required.
That caused a big blowback and now the union is like just backpedaling and saying no no no, that wasn't a union official representative yeah, but that was your official union press conference and you guys knew what he was going to talk about.
I mean, this guy that they invited to speak was um he, he kind of got his name through organizing student walkouts back when he was in high school, and so what do you think the guy was going to talk about in this kind of moment of having all these anti-ice protests?
I mentioned earlier that the NEA had uh crazy resolutions last year at their annual convention.
One of them was to they.
They passed a resolution to dedicate thousands of dollars uh, to call president Trump a fascist and in that same resolution they misspelled the word fascism.
I mean, you really can't make this stuff up.
They had a separate one that a lot of people forgot about but that I brought up the other day because of all this anti-ice stuff.
They passed a resolution to dedicate tens and thousands of dollars of union money and resources towards UH, towards mobilizing the troops and supporting student walkout, student UH protests of ice, and to protest Protest Trump's immigration policies.
NEA's Political Agenda00:07:34
So these things didn't bubble up out of nowhere.
You also had Becky Pringle in Los Angeles last year when they were having their anti-ICE riots.
And this was like several months ago.
This was last summer.
And so, you know, lo and behold, after you had the union doing all these things, putting their thumb on the scale, they also sent out all of this propaganda to teachers telling them to wear blue on certain days to protest ICE.
They also encouraged teachers to sign up for their anti-ICE web training that was put on by the NEA and so on and so forth.
It's just this, they also have on their website right now still anti-ICE or at least pro-immigration propaganda posters for people to encourage the teachers to print them out and plaster them on the walls in their classroom.
And so the NEA needs to lose their federal charter.
I think that's there is a bill to do that in Congress right now.
It's by Mark Harris out of North Carolina.
There are other co-sponsors too, like Mary Harris, I believe her name is, or Mary Miller out of Illinois.
They're both Republicans.
And there's another bill that's similar that I think could have more impact, which is, I think it's called the Student Act.
And I believe the main sponsor is Senator Cynthia Lummis out of Wyoming, another Republican.
And the bill says, okay, you want to keep your federal charter, fine.
But if you want to keep it, we're going to say you can't engage in political activity anymore.
And you know, the union would fight that one even harder than getting rid of their, because if you just get rid of the charter, what it does is basically kind of gets rid of their false sense of kind of legitimacy that's bestowed to them by Congress.
And it kind of gets rid of some of their tax benefits that they get in DC.
But otherwise, they would still be able to engage in politics.
They'd still be able to do lobbying and campaigning.
And so the more influential bill, which is kind of counterintuitive because people think that if you just get rid of their federal charter, that'll do more.
Using it against them is actually the more powerful tool.
And so the thing is, I tried to mention earlier is that you need 60 votes in the Senate to do anything.
And the Democrats, it's going to be really hard for them to vote against the people who give them all these campaign contributions.
The teachers' union is basically turned into an arm of the Democrat Party.
And it's worse than that.
Becky Pringle is still an at-large member, the NEA president of the DNC.
So it's an incestuous relationship between these two groups.
And, you know, there is a bill in Florida right now moving.
So I think more of the magic happens at the state level.
And the bill in Florida is actually up.
It might have, they might have just had a vote at a commit, their final committee stop in the House, but it's House Bill 995.
There's a Senate companion version.
I want to say is Senate Bill 1296, but it's definitely House Bill 995.
And it does two simple things.
One is if you want to recertify your union each year, you have to have at least 50% of your members vote to recertify the union.
Okay, you have to have a majority vote.
And the thing is, a lot of the union members don't vote to recertify the union.
And so that would kind of put a stake in the heart of some of the teachers' unions in Florida.
And the second piece is that it would prohibit taxpayer funding of union activities like campaigning, going and lobbying on certain things and engaging in political activity, which, why in the world are taxpayers funding that directly anyway?
If you want to go do that as a teacher voluntarily when you're not supposed to be teaching, fine.
But why should taxpayers have to support this additional kind of advocacy that goes contrary to what the parents want?
I mean, you're basically forced to pay the political activity of people who hate you, or at least causes that go against everything that you stand for.
So I think that's probably going to pass in Florida.
And that's why the unions are freaking out right now after that press conference, because they went viral for saying that the anti-ICE protests are required.
Marcella, I know you have questions, especially being a former teacher.
So, hi, good morning.
I was a teacher in California and I had to pay union dues at the time where I was teaching.
It was a long time ago in my 20s.
And you were forced and pressured to think like them, to want to be like them.
Of course, I didn't remain there because the other thing that I would want you to speak about is the actual materials you teach the kids.
They strap you like you're not allowed to teach really.
Common core math, the way that you would teach English, the way that you would teach anything, you couldn't.
I don't really think it's real education that you can give them.
And so I wanted to see what your thoughts are on the actual curriculum that's being taught.
And the other question that I would have is: why do you think now the, and maybe it's always been this way, but to me, I feel like it's become more radical.
Teachers and the teachers' unions have become more radicalized.
They've become further left than they were before.
Maybe it's a product of the universities giving these students or these future teachers this type of agenda or ideology.
Yeah, I think the teachers' unions are doing a bad job of representing their everyday members.
So, you know, I mentioned earlier, 99% of their money goes to Democrats, but not 99% of teachers are Democrats.
I mean, there's, I saw a poll recently from Education Week that showed that, you know, about a third of teachers were conservative or a quarter of them were conservative.
A little more than that were Democrats.
And then the rest were independents.
And, you know, most of them voted for Hillary Clinton in that survey, but there's much more balance than what their contributions would make you believe.
And, you know, I think most teachers just want to want to teach and not have to deal with all of the mandates.
And I think part of the problem is, like, especially today, is I did a podcast with Prager Yu recently with Marissa Stripe.
And the other person who was on the podcast with me was a California teacher.
And her name is Jessica, I want to say Tapia.
And she was pointing out part of her story.
I think she was basically forced out of the public school system because they were trying to get her to buy into transgender insanity.
And because she, you know, had her religious beliefs, I think she ended up winning a settlement in court and got paid out by the government school system for violating her religious rights.
And I just saw, I was on Newsmax discussing this the other day, but there was a teacher in Maryland, I want to say, where the teacher, the teacher believed in biological reality of men and women, right?
And they were trying to force, yeah, it's just crazy, you know, you can't have that, you can't have that in the propaganda.
Religious Beliefs vs. School Policy00:15:51
Women and men, what?
Yeah.
So that was her religious belief.
And the teacher was forced to Voice the preferred pronouns of the confused child, which I'd say that hurts the child and it also hurts the rel the rights of the teacher because that's reinforcing this transgender insanity confusion of the child.
And you, you know, if someone has troubles and they're confused about things, you shouldn't, you know, if someone has a drinking problem, you shouldn't say, oh yeah, go and have another.
You should, you know, try to steer people on the right course towards reality, especially when we're dealing with children.
You know, maybe you can make an argument that maybe it's different when they're adults.
I'd say they're still confused, but especially for children, you shouldn't try to put your thumb on the scale in the direction of having them confused for the rest of their lives as well.
But my point is that, you know, teachers are having their rights violated, not just parents and kids.
And if you look at where the money goes, yeah, a lot of it goes to the union.
And, you know, now teachers can keep that money in their pocket, not give it to the union.
Like, why would you not do that?
Join the Teacher Freedom Alliance, optouttoday.com.
But if you look at overall spending in American public schools, since 1970, we have data on this.
Per student spending has increased by about 170% after you adjust for inflation.
So it's a huge increase in spending to about $20,000 a kid now, which is about 30% higher than average private school tuition right now.
And teacher salaries, we have data on that as well from the National Center for Education Statistics.
Over the same period, have the teacher salaries increased by 170%?
No, they haven't.
They've only increased by 3%, basically haven't changed.
And so when teachers are saying, you know what?
My hands are tied.
I have to deal with all the BS mandates and you're not even compensating me well.
I have to dig into my pockets to give supplies to the kids each year.
I kind of feel bad for them.
The problem isn't with their competition.
It's not the private and charter schools.
The problem is their employer is a monopoly that has no incentive to spend money wisely.
So it goes towards administrative bloat.
We have data on this since 2000 for the administrative bloat.
Since 2000 to about 2021 is the kind of period that I've examined, the student enrollment has been basically flat.
It's actually decreased a little because of the COVID mass exodus of kids leaving the government school system and going towards homeschooling more than anything else.
But the number of teachers in the system has increased by about 10% over that period.
Well, they've lost students, which is an anomaly by itself, but it gets worse than that.
The number of administrators in the system has increased by about 95%.
And so it's become more of a jobs program for administrators than an education initiative for kids.
And you have to ask yourself, why would the teachers' unions want this?
And the reason is that, again, they're a political entity.
They benefit in two ways from having more people in the buildings.
Well, one is that they have more dues paying members.
If they were to spend that money on salaries, they want to increase their total revenues because their revenues come from how many members are paying them dues.
It's not based on, you know, if you have a higher salary, you're going to pay a lot more in dues.
It's based on, you know, are you a teacher?
And so if they have more boots on the ground as well, they have more political muscle because they have a larger voting block to push their socialist agenda.
And so they email all the teachers all the time.
If a school choice bill is up, they'll email all the teachers, give them the form to press a button to contact legislators.
And then you have even Republicans sometimes think, oh my goodness, this is not a popular issue.
Getting a thousand emails that all look the same with a canned response because either the superintendent tells them that they need to do these things, or the teachers union leadership tells them that, oh my goodness, you're going to lose your job if there's some little bit of competition, which has never happened.
School choice has never destroyed public schools.
If anything, it's made them better through competitive pressures.
And I've actually seen some evidence.
And I wrote about this in a piece actually all the way back in 2018 in the Washington Examiner called School Choice Benefits Teachers Too.
The limited evidence on the topic shows, and I did one of these studies myself, but there's about five of them that show that more competition from school choice leads to higher teacher salaries in the public schools.
So we already knew the test scores improve in the public schools, but the teachers actually benefit too, because instead of spending that money in ridiculous ways, having it go to superintendents who make more than the president of the United States, they actually spend it wisely on an important educational resource, which is the teacher.
And one last thing I'll point out is that in the Washington Post, which they've taken a good change lately, they've kind of had new leadership, I think, and they have some more free market kind of articles coming out in the Washington Post.
But at the time, during COVID, it was a kind of a broken clock strikes twice a day kind of thing where they had an article highlighting the story of a New Jersey public school teacher who had been in the system for decades.
And she started her own micro school, which they were calling pandemic pods at the time.
Basically, 10 students get together in the household of the teacher and they economize on the process of homeschooling.
You make it easier for parents.
And the teacher was making the same amount she was making after being in the New Jersey school system for decades, which they spent a ton of money.
In Camden, they spend over $40,000, I think, a kid in Camden, New Jersey.
Wow.
And so she's making the same amount, even without a school choice program and the money following the child.
Parents voluntarily paying out of pocket, just 10 kids as opposed to 30, 40 kids in the school system, having more flexibility and freedom, not having to deal with the curriculum mandates from the state.
And, you know, they highlighted this story and said, this is so great for these teachers.
But they didn't take the next logical step, which is, well, shouldn't other teachers be able to do this too?
Shouldn't more families be able to do this too?
The best way to do that is to take that 40 grand and maybe give parents at least half, about 20,000.
You know, we'll save some taxpayer money while we're at it and parents will still be better off.
You think about that: 20,000 times 10 or 12 kids.
You know, 12 kids is like $240,000 in total revenue a teacher could pull in.
And, you know, of course, you have some expenses, but your job will be a lot easier.
You don't have to spend all the administrative costs because there's not much to it, right?
You don't have to buy a principal for your micro school.
You don't have to buy a all these other things.
And so that could benefit the teachers and the kids.
I do know a lot of people that are homeschooling their kids now, and they're kids of different ages in one family.
I know people are asking, you know, is it hard to do?
Listen, you get together with some other friends that would want to do the same thing.
And you could even say, let's just try it for a year.
You know, like Scott would say, test small, try it for a year.
But there's really good curriculum you can get on the internet.
And they're literally how to homeschool your child.
And of course, you'd find the one that's right for you.
You could talk to other parents that do it.
There's definitely resources for that.
And they're having so much success and they're spending like really meaningful time with their kids.
And then also what they do is they take turns.
So maybe it's like, maybe like this week I teach all the kids and maybe next week she teaches all the kids, you know, so it's not like, or a lot of them have hired teachers and that teacher teaches the kids because you don't have to, it's not like you need all the same age.
It's really one-on-one and you're kind of moving from each student for their level.
It's not like you're in a classroom type of a thing.
They also get real life experience.
They're learning things that are also practical.
They're not being indoctrinated.
They're living up to what your morals and values and standards are as a family, not the teachers or the teachers union.
And I think it's something worthwhile trying.
It's your kid.
And if it's, if it's at all possible, it might be a struggle.
It might be difficult at first, but take the first step in doing it.
And, you know, if you could buddy up with someone even better.
But I mean, Mike Cernovich, his wife is, they're both huge homeschool proponents and they have four kids and Shauna's homeschooling four different ages, two boys, two girls.
And the bonding and the experiences they're having, I think it can be done.
I think it could be a challenge at first, but you'll find a way.
And it's your kid and it's worth it.
So I just, I want to push that because the schools are just little mini indoctrination camps and no shade, but most of these kids are not learning Jack about Jack.
No, it's a glorified daycare program.
And even then, it's worse than that because the kids aren't safe.
I mean, look in Chicago.
They have 55 public schools with not a single kid proficient in math.
55 schools with 0% proficiency.
It's crazy.
And they say, how much money?
30,000 a kid in Chicago.
And guess what?
Their teachers union president is named Stacey Davis Gates.
She called school choice racist a couple years ago.
And we just found out she sends her own kid to a private school.
So if the chef doesn't eat the food at the restaurant, don't go to that restaurant.
They know better than anybody else.
And so she knows like this is this is not going to cut it.
And Vodie Bawkham said it best.
We cannot continue to send our children to Caesar for their education and be surprised when they come home as Romans.
You know, the good news is parents aren't as surprised anymore and kind of the genie is never going to be put back in the bottle.
We can't unsee what we saw through Zoom school.
And now we have social media, people going viral for injecting politics into schools.
And, you know, this isn't just happening in blue states.
It's in red states as well.
And parents aren't having it anymore.
And I'd go even further to say that the public school system in its current form discriminates in particular against all families, but especially against religious families, because they say they can't be religious.
But if you're religious and you want that kind of upbringing, you almost don't have a choice.
You have to send your kid to a private Christian school or another type of religion and you're forced to pay twice.
There's actually an argument to be made that the public school system is a violation of your 14th Amendment rights.
And I'd take it a step further.
And so did Phil Hamburger, a professor in the Wall Street Journal the other, it was a few years ago, where he even took it a step further and said, the public school system violates your First Amendment rights because it's a form of compelled government speech.
So if you want to get a good grade in that school system, you basically have to regurgitate what the leftist teacher tells you.
Your taxpayers are forced to fund it, even if they disagree with what's being taught in the school.
And so the only way out, if we're going to have a publicly provided education or at least taxpayer-funded education, is to allow the money to follow the child to a school that's aligned with their values.
So then you're not infringing on anybody's rights.
You can make an argument that the taxpayer still might be upset if they don't have children, but it's still a step in the huge, a huge step in the right direction of saying, look, we'll still fund public, we'll still fund an education for the public, and we'll do that through taxes, and we won't change that.
But instead of forcing everybody into this one silo and getting what basically nobody wants, everybody can get a little bit of what they do want if you have the money following the child.
And so that could be a public school if you're crazy and want to still send your kid there.
But if not, you can send them to a private school, even a religious school.
And one thing, you know, we do this with pre-K too.
I mentioned other programs, but pre-K, we have the federal Head Start program, which Democrats support.
And you can use that money at a religious pre-K.
It's their private providers.
The money follows the decision of the parent.
And so why not do that with K through 12?
Why would you be supportive of it for pre-K?
And then you'd also support the money following the student for college.
But then all of a sudden, when you hit kindergarten, when you go from three to four years old, all of a sudden it becomes a big problem.
We can't have the money follow the child.
It's because of unions.
That's the only reason.
It's because of power dynamics.
Special interests have a monopoly only for K through 12, where they say, you know what?
That threatens because if people choose something else, that money is going to go somewhere else.
Whereas you don't have that same kind of status quo for college or pre-K.
It's only in K through 12.
What is their argument?
Because they're basically saying the school choice.
We have choice in many other realms, like you explained in grocery stores and everything else.
Why do you think, what is their argument?
How is it racist?
Because I have so many DEI friends.
I really do.
And I'm arguing with them.
And some of them are teachers.
And they're like, oh, you know, the white man wants to keep us down.
And I'm like, that's the current system.
That's the public school system.
You have these segregated schools by zip code where minority kids are fed more than anybody else.
And you want to trap them there, which is what the government school system wants to do.
And they see those kids as dollar signs and doesn't want to give them an opportunity to do something else because they know if those kids were to have an opportunity, they'd take it and get a better, a lifeline to success.
You look in DC, for example, they have a voucher program that was passed by Congress.
That's the only way they were able to do it.
It's a federal district.
So of course, Congress has the ability to do it there.
And I think it started in the early 2000s.
And 95% of the recipients of those scholarships are black or Hispanic.
The average household income last that I saw was about $30,000 to $40,000.
And this is in the District of Columbia, a higher cost of living area.
And so you have these programs benefiting the least advantaged more than anybody else.
And then you have the Democrats who typically say that they're for helping the disadvantaged, kind of standing at the schoolhouse door saying, no, no, no, you can't come in.
You can't leave.
Governor Doug Ducey had a great quote when he passed universal school choice in 2022 in Arizona.
He said something along the lines of 50 plus years ago, politicians, union-backed politicians stood at the schoolhouse door to keep minorities out.
Today, union-backed politicians are standing at the schoolhouse door to try to keep minority students in, trapping them in their failing government schools.
Exactly.
So, you know, choice is choice.
And, you know, and if you like that system and it will, for whatever reason, great.
Standing at the Schoolhouse Door00:05:47
But this isn't a racial thing, right?
It's just, it's for everybody.
And, you know, there's a lot of low-income and non-white kids that use these programs.
And I think that's one of the reasons that DeSantis won his first governor's race in 2018.
The headline in the Wall Street Journal the next day was that school choice moms tipped the governor's race for DeSantis.
And that's because there were 100,000 kids using their scholarships at the time.
They were disproportionately non-white and low-income kids.
And the exit polling from CNN showed that black moms came out in support for DeSantis much higher than expected.
And that was after his opponent called to get rid of their scholarships.
So they might have disagreed with DeSantis and everything else, but they saw that this basically became a single-issue vote for them because they wanted their kid to get a better opportunity than they had.
And school choice is the way to do it.
I want to hit one thing that I saw in the chat because this audience may kind of be aware of this argument and they might believe it.
And I don't think it's a good argument.
I think it's making perfect the enemy of the good.
But the argument goes that we can't have school choice because that would mean government controlling all private education.
The shorthand argument is with government shekels comes government shackles.
My quick response is that you can get the shackles without the shekels.
And look in states all across the country this past year that were calling to regulate homeschooling.
You had Illinois, New Jersey, California, all of these states that don't have school choice programs.
So the states that have school choice are actually the ones that have more homeschooling freedom, not the opposite.
And when you have more beneficiaries of homeschooling through school choice, you build a bigger tent to fight back against that overreach.
In fact, the opposite happened in Illinois.
In 2023, they killed their school choice program.
They got rid of scholarships from 9,000 families.
And then those same tyrants came after homeschool freedom two years later.
And so even after 40,000 homeschool people and others in the community signed up against the bill, the committee passed the bill on a party line eight to four vote.
It ultimately died and didn't get to the governor's desk, thankfully.
But, you know, it's kind of this eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
They're going to come after you again.
And the best way to mobilize is to get more people on your team in order to fight back against that.
And it's your money.
It's your taxpayers' money.
You can't get it.
And your kids.
And your kids.
Imagine that.
If you're a homeschool family and you're still concerned and you say, you know, I still don't want to take any chances.
No school choice program has ever forced anybody to take the money.
And so you can make that cost-benefit decision on your own, but you shouldn't tell other families that they can't make that choice for their homeschool situation or private school.
So, you know, the thing is, we can't make perfect the enemy of the good.
We don't want to miss the forest for the trees.
If you're on Randy Weingarten's side and Becky Pringle's side, and not, you know, President Trump's side and Milton Friedman's side, a free market economist who first wrote about school choice in 1955 in his essay, The Role of Government in Education.
I'd say there isn't one, but if we're going to have one, he should have renamed it the lack of a role of government in education.
I would just echo that, like, I live in the Chicago area and I don't live in the city of Chicago, but I've seen what they're doing, and it just doesn't make any sense at all.
They're refusing to close schools, even though there's 3% of enrollment students.
There's all these empty schools basically.
And they just, it's like a jobs program for the teachers.
It's like, okay, we actually could consolidate schools like normal people do.
Like, I mean, in my area growing up, that's what they did.
Because, you know, enrollment goes up, enrollment goes down.
And when you don't have enough enrollment, you close the school.
You move people to a different school.
You consolidate, but they don't want to do that.
And it's all about the money.
And then with this DEI stuff, like in my kids' high school, fortunately, they were out by this point, but they the principal resigned and went to some other district.
And they said, you know what, we don't need the principal, or maybe it was the superintendent.
We don't need the superintendent anymore.
We're going to have this DEI director that we're going to use the salary for.
So they brought in this DEI director.
And then a couple of years later, they said, you know what?
We actually do need the superintendents.
Now we're going to add that.
But of course, they kept the DEI director.
So they just backdoored this in there.
And then what happens next?
They decide they want to get rid of the gifted and talent program.
Why?
Because not enough minorities were in it.
Because it's racist.
It's racist.
It's racist to give minorities a chance at getting a gifted education.
And it was all about just hiding the fact that minorities had this racial achievement gap that they always were handling around.
But the net effect was, of course, they took away that opportunity from everyone, including the minorities that were in the program.
And the parents, I predicted this, but at the time, but it was like they, of course, rejected it.
Like they said, no, you can't do that.
Because colleges want to admit kids that are in that gifted and talented, like the honors program, basically.
And so that program lasted exactly one year.
And then the parents revolted and said, you have to put this back.
And along the way, again, right after this happened, they put in a class that they claimed was student requested, which of course it wasn't.
What student requests any class?
But it was like, it was basically an activism class.
It was like all about how to use the right language about LGBTQ.
Yeah, do you guys not want to do math anymore?
Support School Choice00:02:45
You do some fun stuff.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But and I looked at the article about this and it was like all the stuff they were teaching the kids.
It was every kind of activism you can name, including one I had never heard of called adultism.
What the hell is adultism?
And they're literally teaching the kids not to respect teachers and adults.
It's the opposite of what you think it would be.
And you shouldn't, you know, adults shouldn't have authority over kids.
That was the whole idea behind that adult.
I'm like, what the hell?
Yeah, let's pull you away from your parents.
Don't listen to your parents.
Listen to me instead.
It's yeah, I saw a headline a few years ago in Chicago.
They had a school that was at 3% of their capacity and they were fighting to keep it open.
I mean, so you're right.
There are, there were empty schools in Chicago.
If you guys remember, they were also the union that tweeted out that it was sexist, racist, and misogynist to open schools in 2021.
And they also had a board member that was caught vacationing in Puerto Rico while saying it was too unsafe to open the schools.
Yeah.
Corey, first of all, everybody listening, I'm sure you're really enjoying this conversation.
It's important to everybody in this country, whether you have children or not.
The children are our future.
If you are enjoying the school today with our guest professor, Corey DeAngelis, could you please hit the like button or, you know, just on each platform, just make sure you give this a like so we can keep these kinds of classes going.
So, Corey, we only have a few minutes left.
And Scott always talked about, you know, if you have a goal, you need to have systems over goals.
So, what can you tell us in these closing minutes?
What kind of systems, what can we do?
I mean, it's like one thing is we can tell teachers to opt out of the teachers union.
Like, you want to sweep the knee, right?
You want to like take the funding away from these people.
So, what are maybe like the top three things we can do after school today?
Yeah, go to optouttoday.com if you're a teacher.
That's very easy.
You click on your state, it'll show you how to opt out of your union.
And then, look, you have more money in your pocket.
You still have twice the legal representation than you had before.
You get 2 million in liability insurance in your name as opposed to the union's name.
I mean, I think Randy Weingarten's union gives you a maximum of a million in this insurance, whereas this one gives you 2 million and you don't have to pay for it.
Like, why would you not do that?
So, optouttoday.com if you're a teacher, even if you're a Democrat, because you guys might want to focus on the basics as opposed to activism.
And then the other thing is tell your lawmakers to support school choice.
It's, you know, there is a federal school choice program that's a tax credit that just passed in the big, beautiful bill.
President Trump got it done, and 27 governors have already opted in.
Support Your Lawmakers00:02:35
How do we do that, Corey?
How do we lawmakers that we need to tell?
Yeah, so that one is solely in the decision of the governor's hand.
So you can tell your governor, you can contact them.
You can Google how to contact your governor very easy and they have forms.
And then also, lawmakers in your state, just tell them to pass school choice because this is how you have true leverage.
Even if you want to stay in the public schools, it's good to have that ability to escape if you need it.
And then, you know, if you go to the school board meeting, if you're in a competitive environment, they'll listen to you instead of, you know, calling you a terrorist or labeling you as a bad person.
So those are two things that I think everybody should do.
I love that.
And the other thing you guys can do is forward this video to them, this live stream to them, just to hear the conversation and the reasons why.
Corey, I hope you enjoyed this and I hope that you'll come back again because this is so informative for us.
And it's just nice to be able to have a conversation and take our time to kind of parse things out.
And I know that we'll have more questions next time if you do join us now that we've got this ball rolling.
And if we can ever do anything for you, you have the Scott Adams school army behind you in this endeavor.
And we will be sure, everyone will, I'm sure, be following you if they haven't already and reposting your information.
You're doing God's work.
I tell you, you are tireless.
I see you out there for years, and you are definitely one of the more useful human beings I've seen.
And we can't thank you enough.
And I am running late.
It's one minute after 11.
I'm not doing my job.
So we're going to do.
It was great.
Thank you guys so much.
And I'd love to join again.
I could have kept going for another couple hours.
It was so fun.
So thank you.
We're going to do a closing sip to Scott to everybody that came into school today.
We truly, we see you.
We appreciate you.
We're reading your comments.
And we'll be back tomorrow with the news crew to close out the week with some news.
Corey, thank you so much.
And you guys, I will post Corey's information after the show when we repost this live stream.
And as always, Scott Adams, we miss you so much.
And we hope we're doing you proud.
And so let's have a closing sip to Scott, our beloved Scott, to Scott.