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April 17, 2023 - Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy
01:01:06
The Woke Infection in Education: An Eye-Opening Discussion with Mark Ousley | The TRUTH Podcast #13
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Time Text
So
what we see in America today is the rise of a new managerial class that wields its power in part by exploiting fear.
We suffer this moment of a lack of self-confidence in America, in ourselves and as a country.
When you have a vacuum of self-confidence, fear fills the void.
Then when you have fear preying on that vacuum of self-confidence, the managerial class can then prey on that fear to advance their own agendas.
We saw it in recent days, okay, in recent weeks with the collapse, for example, of Silicon Valley Bank.
What did Silicon Valley say?
Well, for years, they had actually said that Silicon Valley Bank is not a systemically important bank.
It's just a weird bank in Silicon Valley that does its own business, that enters special deals with startup founders.
And that's why it was one of the reasons they lobbied for exemptions from financial regulations that said that they were allowed to take risks that large banks weren't Now, I think that makes sense.
But there's two sides to the bargain, which is that when that bank takes risks that cause it to fail, the bank and its depositors and its clients have to ultimately pay the price for the risks that they took.
Yet what did they do?
They preyed on this fear, manufacturing the fear of a nationwide bank run as a way for arguing on a Sunday night for a bailout.
And they got it because it then became a technocratic issue.
It's not a moral issue.
It's not a normative issue.
It's just a technical issue.
We don't have a bank run in America.
You got to understand the specific technicals of this.
If you don't understand this, then you're a Luddite because you don't really understand how finance works and how there's contagion from one bank to another.
Completely eliding the distinction between Silicon Valley Bank, where there's a tiny portion of total deposits that were actually insured by FDIC, compared to most banks where it's a majority of those deposits, compared to the fact that Silicon Valley Bank had the highest concentration of mortgage-backed securities and similar investments in its portfolio.
completely saying, no, no, no, no.
The reason we need to get this bailout is that every other bank is actually going to fail.
It was a disingenuous argument, but it preyed on fear.
But I make that argument because it's actually part of a deeper pattern.
I think it's a big part of what's going on in Ukraine, actually, totally separate issue.
But this fear that if we don't stop Vladimir Putin at all cost as the United States from annexing Ukraine or any part of it, then he's going to go after Poland.
as the United States from annexing Ukraine or any part of it, then he's going to go after Poland, then he's going to go after a NATO country.
Then he's going to go after a NATO country.
And in fairness, just like the bank run case, it's impossible to disprove.
And in fairness, just like the bank run case, it's it's impossible to disprove.
I'm not saying that that's a definite that that's not going to happen.
I'm not saying that that's a definite that that's not going to happen.
But that fear creates no limit to what we're willing to do then to stave it off, because then it becomes a technocratic issue, a technical issue here for the technocratic military class that understands the experts who understand what Russia is or isn't going to do.
But that fear creates no limit to what we're willing to do then to stave it off, because then it becomes a technocratic issue, a technical issue here for the technocratic military class that understands the experts who understand what Russia is or isn't going to do.
Now, that's the same expert class, mind you, that said that Ukraine was going to fall within days, the same expert class that said that Kabul would not fall for months to years that Kabul did fall within days of when the US military left.
So the fact that we call them intelligence experts is itself laughable.
But again, it's preying on this fear, this condition of uncertainty, this lack of self confidence that says, that's why we need to use Ukraine, fill in the blank Silicon Valley Bank, to prevent a domino effect somewhere else, as opposed to asking the question of how we stop the thing that we actually are worried about. as opposed to asking the question of how we stop Say, Russia invading Poland, where you have tens of thousands of U.S. troops sitting in Germany, maybe there's a reasonable conversation about moving some of them to Poland.
That's how you might actually deter aggression in Poland, instead of saying the Internet's about Ukraine.
Just like Silicon Valley Bank, by the way.
If you really care about a national background, great.
Shore up confidence in the rest of the banks across the country, instead of actually making the argument that it had to be Silicon Valley Bank.
We see this time and again.
One of the areas you saw was with respect to school closures in this country during the COVID pandemic.
We knew at the time, hard facts, even early in the pandemic, told us that the risks for kids was different.
It was fundamentally lower than for people who were full-grown adults or elder Americans who did face a higher risk.
But we couldn't be 100% sure because it was still playing out.
So what did we do?
We do.
We said the safe thing to do is to shut down schools.
Well, at least the public schools, private schools, parents could actually afford it and bring some sense in and didn't want their kids sitting at home and wasting a year.
They had a different story.
But public schools, I mean, take my alma mater, my alma mater, St. X High School.
I went to not great public school through eighth grade, but my high school people missed four or five days.
Those kids did Cincinnati public schools.
They missed almost a full year.
You talk about inequity.
That's inequity that we're never going to correct for.
That's an entire generation of educational inequity, one to two years of a difference that was supposedly about just containing a risk.
And so that's why this cultural movement, it's about reviving a sense of self-confidence, conviction.
When we have confidence in our convictions, then the managerial class cannot prey on our fears, whether it's in our schools, whether it's in our military, whether it's in our financial system.
But we live in this moment where we lack self-confidence.
And when you lack that self-confidence, that sense of conviction, both as individuals and as Americans, as a nation, that's what allows the managerial industrial complex to play their games.
I think we need to wake up to that.
Once we revive that sense of self-confidence, whether it's economics, whether it's geopolitics, whether it's cultural revival, or whether it's our education, the rest becomes a lot easier.
This is really a conversation and a campaign, not just about a political campaign, but a cultural campaign to restore American self-confidence itself.
So I'm joined today by my friend Mark Owsley.
I should say my friend, we're meeting for the first time, but I feel like we've been exchanging ideas on the internet and otherwise for a long time, who is focused, as I have been as well for the last few years, on a different kind of cancer, a cultural cancer that preys on that lack of self-confidence.
And with a particular view and a vantage point into the schools and our educational system itself and understanding how we can shore up our self-confidence to resist the woke infection in our universities in our primary education system.
Mark, it's good to finally see you in person.
Yeah, no, it's great to be here.
Thank you for having me.
So we haven't actually, even you and I, ever spoken about your background.
I know it's in education.
I know you're a teacher.
But just give me a little bit about your background, what sort of got you to be interested in these issues that I think have brought us together.
And then I want to get into a little bit of meat, getting beyond just the usual, you know, I would say lambasting of woke that you and I each have done to like get into sort of the knit and grit of how we fix some of this in the educational system.
But...
Before we do that, let's hear your background.
Well, I'm an educator.
I've been teaching for 15 or so years.
I have a unique experience in that I've been in every type of school.
I've taught in every type of school, and I've been in every type of school.
I was a homeschooled kid for a while.
I was a private schooled kid for a while.
I was a public schooled kid for a while.
But I've also taught in all of those institutions as well, in terms of private, public, and university level.
I got into this, what I'm doing now, because of the critical turn that kind of happened in 2020 through the George Floyd riots through COVID. And I'm at the University of Oklahoma as a graduate student, a doctoral student.
That's where you are now?
Yes.
Okay, got it.
Well, I'm just finishing up my doctor there.
Got it.
So, yeah.
And...
And what's your doctrine?
Choral conducting.
I'm a choir director.
Oh, nice.
So, it's a DMA in music.
So, a doctor of musical arts.
Yeah.
Oh, cool.
Congratulations.
Thank you.
Do you play any instruments yourself?
I play piano.
I try.
Okay.
But I'm a primary vocalist and a conductor.
Okay.
Got it.
Yeah.
And so, I've taught...
High school, middle school, elementary school, collegiate.
But what I've also had a unique experience in is seeing the administrative apparatus that unifies kind of all of these educational systems.
And when the woke turn kind of started to happen very quickly in 2020, 2021, I noticed a general shift that had a lot to do with what you talk about all the time, which is the managerial class that overlords over whether it's the higher education institutions or the public or private school institutions.
That institutes a line of thought.
A lot of this is through diversity, equity, and inclusion offices, which I call divisions of ideological enforcement.
They mandate – Oh, I kind of like that.
Yeah, divisions of – they mandate what you have to believe so you're allowed to teach within the institutions.
And this happened very fast, almost overnight, from one semester to the other during my doctoral work.
I went from taking classes about Beethoven and Bach to the next class I was taking was how to inject equity and inclusion into music theory classrooms.
And it was very quick.
And it seemed everyone got the memo.
happening because it was inherently racist to me to be classifying people by the color of their skin and saying whether people can talk or not based upon the color of their skin.
So I dove into it and immediately just started pushing back.
Well, because of my experience in the kind of administrative apparatus as a graduate student, but also as a fine arts administrator and those kinds of things, law, where the problem was in higher ed, and it was this kind of fusion of Title IX with the DEI office.
So when you talk about equal opportunity versus equity, and these are two opposing forces.
And so what that office was attempting to do was just generally take that over and impose an equity mindset on the entire university.
didn't get until actually your book Woke Inc. came out was how this was all connected to a larger economic goal, right?
Yes.
And how the universities were being transformed into this, into these bastions or these castles of You know, environmental social governance designed to spread like a wildfire throughout whatever state that we're in.
And so I'm in Oklahoma, right?
The reddest state in America.
But the University of Oklahoma is directly committed per its strategic research verticals, top down, bottom up, to the WEF's, you know, sustainable development goals.
And they've committed the entire institution to branching that out throughout the state.
And so it's an infiltration of this economic model, this CCP kind of derived communofascism, if you will, throughout the state.
And so we talk a lot about border security, right?
And the dangers of having too many illegal immigrants come into the country.
But what I don't think we realize as a country is that the education system is being used to infiltrate global mindsets as kind of a thought virus, as kind of a faith, if you will, a religion throughout our educational institutions, educational institutions.
And now we're seeing that in K-12 schools.
We're seeing that at the university level, but it's designed to branch out.
And so that's what really got me...
I'm on fire for this because I saw it not just destroying communities or separating communities, but individual students were being destroyed, were being used as kind of cannon fodder.
So give me an example of that.
I mean, I'm familiar with countless, but from your vantage point, give me an example of where you've seen that in action, rubber hitting the road.
Well, in terms of the- In the education system, a student or- Oh, man.
Example of students who have been stripped of their dignity or, you know, mind virus- Their identity.
Exactly.
Infected in a way that's had an adverse impact.
Yes.
At the University of Oklahoma, again, I started my doctorate in 2017. So this is kind of- Okay.
Early and then I am still working on it, but my classes were kind of past 2022. And so I got to see a whole crop of kids go through this process.
What— Being undergrads.
Yes, undergrads, especially what wokeness is designed to do as a, it's a moral religion that is designed to usurp the individual identity of the student, take it away and replace it with a collective political identity.
And you see this through the mental health processes that are on campus, where they're constantly pushing, well, are you okay?
Are you feeling depressed and constantly pushing this down their throats?
And then the political aspect of it is there's entire institutes on campus devoted to what social justice, critical social justice.
And what I always say and what I learn from my education teachers, my teachers, is that peer pressure is the strongest force on the planet.
And so when you have a top-down institutional mandate being spread through, whether it's the Department of Education on campus or just the DEI office or every professor that's hired through that office, students start feeling the social pressure to Yeah.
Yeah.
up, their mental health actually decreases.
Yes.
You feel like you've sacrificed part of your soul.
That's interesting.
Your whole soul.
And then you see that actually play out in their physical selves where they get sicker.
They stop coming to class.
They stop engaging in activities that they normally would find joy in.
I mean, I was a choir director.
You have kids that would – every class was a battlefield instead of a place to learn.
And it's really akin to the Maoist kind of cultural revolution where it's – they're trained to go in as missiles and destroy – And while in that process, they're destroying themselves and their own sense of identity.
A lot of people probably may or may not have an understanding of what the Maoist Cultural Revolution was.
He was actually using students, right?
So, I mean, this was actually Mao in the Communist Party feeling like his own Communist Party was turning against him a little bit.
And so he skipped.
He's the old guy but went to the next generation and And said, actually, you can basically take the gloves off and even use violence as a means if necessary to purge even those within the Communist Party itself.
And so it was interesting that he went to students, the next generation as a way to do it.
And Klaus Schwab has done the same thing.
Klaus Schwab has done the same thing.
I mean – and you see it.
The Democratic Party has really engaged in this where it's we are going to take these kids and make them believe that unless you are environmentally conscious or for equity and inclusion regardless of what the definitions of those words are, that – You are evil, so we're going to destroy the four olds, as Mao said.
You know, old religion, old belief, old customs.
And what better to do that than the most energetic group of people on the planet?
And, you know, you equated what a wokeness is a religion, while the tithe is in the ballot box.
And that's what it comes down to as well, is that, you know, we talked about the red wave that was supposed to happen in 2022. That was staved off.
kids that have been taught that they either vote for these kinds of candidates or vote for this party line, or they are bad people, or they are, you know, doomed to some sort of, you know, right wing hell.
And that is, but that takes an effect on the individual student.
It separates families because they're taught to, you know, if your parents don't believe like you ostracize them.
Call them out.
Make fools of them.
And so you see this kind of cultural revolution developing in America that is almost directly in line with what Mao did.
And they're doing this through the educational institutions, public, private, university.
All of them have been infected to a certain extent.
But the government is really pushing that along as well.
So, you know, as you know, I'm as focused as I've been over the last few years on exposing this problem and discussing it.
I know it's near and dear to your heart as well.
How do we actually address the solution, right?
That's actually one of the things that, you know, I've been focused on.
And I thought we could maybe get into one of the areas where you have a bit of a contrarian perspective as it relates to school choice.
Okay.
The reason school choice is very popular in the Republican Party amongst Republicans are because I have to say that I'm favorably disposed to school choice myself as well is that it diminishes the monopoly that the administrative class, the managerial class in K-12 education has.
country, right?
It says that if you give those same families the opportunity to leave their public school, then that should create more mobility, that should create actual more true diversity of options where parents will then actually have a greater incentive to understand what their kids are being taught to use that money in that should create actual more true diversity of options where parents will then actually A big part of my plan to shut down the Department of Education is to liberate the $80 billion that flows through the Department of Education and maybe even feed that to the states to be able to foster greater school choice.
And the thought is that that combined with transparency of the curriculum should give parents the ability to hold their schools more accountable than they're able to today for a lot of things, including failures of those schools, but including the orthodoxy foisted on students, the racial and gender ideology but including the orthodoxy foisted on students, the racial and gender ideology foisted on these students in So that's the normal logic.
But you have a different view.
I first of all, I think it's important that we identify and define school choice because it seems to have a lot of different translations.
Some say, well, your ability to move from one school to the Where I find...
Hesitation in this situation is when you start saying that you can free kids from government influence by attaching government money to them and injecting them into a private institution.
Because as you said, a large part of what we're dealing with are public-private partnerships.
Well, it seems to be, to me, creating, when you're talking about ESAs, so if you define school choice as ESAs, which is education savings accounts, right?
You're taking government money, you're attaching it directly to the child, which means you're putting a price tag on them.
And that, to me, makes me nervous already, because...
What do you attach it with?
Usually some kind of government string, right?
Whether or not – whether it's just as simple as you can spend it here, you can't spend it here, right?
And that has the danger of expanding outward as time goes on.
And the other part of it is the corporate influence.
One thing that I've experienced as a private school administrator and my work in private school is that It's the university model.
If you inject state dollars into a private institution, it is the university model.
And there are, as you said, captured market incentives, right, to push organizations woke.
Well, that is not going to stop at the water's edge of education.
Actually, I think there's an actual data incentive for Apple, Google, Amazon to start influencing private schools through – it can be as simple as a capital campaign, right?
If a school wants to raise the money to build a new building or wants to get a loan to build a new building, what do they have to have?
A good ESG score, right?
Or if they want new iPads, right?
Well, if Apple, Google, and Amazon start influencing the schools, They're going to have a direct effect on what those schools teach because with the iPads, with the Chromebooks comes a certain curriculum, comes a data mining situation.
And so what I've always said about school choice is, first of all, we have to make it woke-proof.
We have to – order of operations is important.
And so like you said, if you want – Defunding the Department of Education is imperative if we're going to be using ESAs.
Because with ESAs comes Title I, right?
And if you have students that are now in a lower economic area, moving from a public school that is not good, right, into a private school that is good, and they take their kind of Title I money with them, then comes Title I strings, right?
So you kind of have this merger of state and corporate power that align under an ideology many times that will price other smaller parochial faith-based schools out of the market over time.
And so you end up getting kind of a Walmartification.
Can you talk a little bit more about the pricing out mechanism just so we understand exactly what you mean?
Well, I equate it to Pell Grants.
So Pell Grants began in 1972-74, right around that area, right?
When they came out— What was the origin of that, actually?
It sort of is a weird thing, actually.
I honestly don't know the exact origin other than that it was designed—it was kind of an outgrowth of the GI Bill, I believe.
But it was in the early 70s, huh?
Yeah, early 70s, and it was— Yes, or an extension of that.
But it was designed to...
So you had the GI Bill before that, right?
And the GI Bill that came out of Vietnam and things like that, where the government saw a good impact on society by sending former soldiers...
To college to become professionals, right?
And the Pell Grant was designed, though, to go right after lower income individuals.
That's what the Pell Grant is for, right?
So we're talking about now creating equity, right?
Where it's almost an outgrowth of affirmative action.
It's kind of in that same...
It's around the same time, by the way.
All of this happened right at the same time.
But Pell Grants...
When they were first instituted, $4,000, $5,000 actually paid for 95% of schools, right?
And 95% of your college education.
Well, now, Pell Grants barely cover, you know, 10 or 15%.
Yeah, exactly.
And so, what do students have to do?
Borrow.
Right.
And so, what I'm fearful that will happen with private schools is that if you now take a $9,000 ESA... The school I taught at was $25,000 a year, right?
The private school?
Yeah.
Wait, which age bracket's high school?
The high school.
Yeah.
And so it was $25,000 a year.
Now, they had scholarships and things like that, but it wouldn't even cover half that school, right?
But say you do find one and you have a bunch of schools that come up that are $9,000 a year.
Well, they are going to start- They're going to need to fill the gap somehow.
Yes, they're going to need to fill the gap.
And so what I'm concerned is you're going to see K-12 education student loans, which we don't want to see.
But also, schools in order to compete are going to – private schools compete with academic excellence, okay?
So you have the ones that can get you into Harvard or like the high school you went to, right?
Sure.
Or, but that's not most of the private schools in the country.
Most private schools actually compete based upon amenities, just like colleges do, right?
Come to this college, you get a dorm room, it looks like an apartment, we'll feed you, we'll give you all of your medical care for free, we'll have mental health, you can, you know, it's a one-stop shop, it's its own community, right?
And this is where it goes, the market incentive actually...
It pushes private schools to adopt that model.
And have you ever heard of WISC or Whole Child, Whole Community Schools?
I have not.
Okay, you should dig into this because the WISC model— Whole Child, Whole Community Schools.
Yeah, it's WSCC, so Whole School, Whole Child, Whole Community.
And this is being implemented through ESSER, through different Department of Education grants all over the country, but California is really leading the way.
And basically what it is is to say, okay, we're going to take your school and we're going to turn it into the university model and we're going to give you all of your medical information.
Uh, needs on campus.
So we're going to have your doctors, you're going to have all your, uh, mental health, uh, professionals here.
And if you, if your kid needs a checkup, you don't have to take into the doctor.
You can just, you know, bring them over to the, to the school office, set an appointment and do it right there.
But what comes with this is this whole, this whole, I just blanked, but the sex education ring that's now morphed into gender inclusion and transitions and hormone therapies is a but the sex education ring that's now morphed into gender inclusion and transitions and hormone therapies is
Well, going back to private schools, this has a danger of merging if you accept students that are Title I eligible.
And they will use WISC as a model, as a market incentive to compete with the larger, more expensive schools, right?
And raise the rates or whatever it may be.
And so, just like you've said over and over again, the danger here is that the market is captured.
And you have an entire...
This is a corporate system that subscribes to this ESG, DEI, CRT kind of ideology, and little by slowly over time, just like they've done with our universities, will use their money, their influence, to push those schools in that direction without parents having the oversight that they might have in a public school situation.
And I just want to be very clear about this.
Public schools are a problem.
And they need reform.
And I think where you're starting the Department of Education and returning local control is absolutely necessary.
But what parents have with public schools that you don't have with private is the ability to vote.
And they say that you can vote with your feet.
But this is another thing that people don't know.
If you leave a private school and you want your money back, they're going to make you sign an NDA. Right?
Which means you can't say anything about the school.
That's right.
Which is very different than electing a different school board member.
Exactly.
And so the other part of it is the school boards itself.
There's nothing quite like God on earth than head of a school at a private school.
And they're backed by a school board that nobody knows.
And you can equate this to, say, a university board of regents.
Right?
The University of Oklahoma has a board of regents.
Nobody knows their name.
But they've instituted all of this DEI agenda at OU and funded it hand over fist.
And nobody knows them to hold them accountable.
So you can't go to their meetings and protest their meetings because you don't know when their meetings are happening.
You can't vote them out.
At the private school, for example.
Right.
At the private school.
So it's my main concern, if I can distill it, is that we're mimicking the university model through a public-private partnership.
Right.
And by injecting government money into private schools.
And so this is part of the reason why I'm very much for your campaign because you don't just spout off the talking points.
You're going to think about the problems, right?
And if school choice – and again, I'm pro school choice in concept.
Yeah, no.
We just can't just like sing the chorus.
Exactly.
And part of what I've – Really experienced in the Republican Party or the conservative end of this is that you cannot question this.
Of course.
It comes full circle with respect to certain sacred cows you can't touch.
It's climate cult on the other side or affirmative action.
But there are certain untouchables on our side too actually.
This has become one of them, actually.
And one of the major problems with it is if you explore the roots of ESA specifically.
You can trace it back in its current inception to two Marxist Berkeley professors at UC Berkeley, law professors, who designed this system in order to, quote, create equity.
Right?
And so it's kind of a redistribution of wealth.
And that's what makes me nervous about it, too, is that you're taking, say, if you have a mom, and this is actually a real story, you have a mom that has 12 kids.
I think it's $9,000 per kid, that's $96,000 a year that's going to that family.
And that money is far beyond what they pay in taxes.
And I understand wanting to help them.
That is a massive redistribution of wealth from people who don't even have kids at all, right?
And then they're taking that and the government's saying, yeah, but you can spend the money here and not here, you know, and mandating where it can be spent.
And so it's really...
There are no fast food fixes to a complex system.
And that's what I want conservatives to understand, is that, yes, I want you to be able to- Is that the new shiny object?
Right.
And it seems like that we've had this kind of Marxist dialectic when it comes to schools, where it's, wokeness is bad.
Yes.
It gets pushed out.
Bad.
But now we have this kind of antithesis of a reaction with a predetermined solution which is, hey, here's this 50-year-old program, school choice ESA specifically, that will fix your problem for you without you having to do any hard work.
Right, right, right.
You know what I mean?
It absolves you of the responsibility of actually doing the hard work.
And it gives politicians that you have said, don't actually run things, the ability to say, look, I did something.
I did something, yep.
Yeah, and that is- This actually resonates with me a lot.
So, you know, how would you handle it?
I mean, what is the hard work?
Order of operations is important here.
And I've said this over and over and over again is that if you want ESAs, if you want school choice, there has to be – first of all, you have to remove the strings of the government first, which is the public – part of the public-private partnership.
You have to remove those and so dismantle – What are the strings that exist today?
I probably should know this.
Well, there's another program called ESSA, which is Every Student Succeeds Act, which is kind of this blanket.
It's the largest thing the Department of Education puts out.
And it's so generally defined in what it can give money for.
That it has no real benchmarks for what it's actually supposed to do.
So schools just take that money and, you know, the data they provide to prove whatever they're doing is basically, oh, look, we've done social-emotional learning.
We're doing behavioral health initiatives to help students.
It very rarely seems to be education-focused in terms of math, reading, science, all of these aspects of real education and more focused towards a You know, conditioning of kids to act a certain way, whether it's politically or, you know, in public.
And so there's ESSA. So ESSA, this educational...
Yeah, it's Every Student Succeeds Act.
Every Student Succeeds Act.
Yeah.
And you're saying that attaches certain strings?
Oh, yeah.
Like what?
Well, it...
There are, I think, 74 different grants that you can get through ESSA. And if you look, one of the main criticisms of the Department of Education is that it doesn't monitor what the money does.
The data that it gets, first of all, you're getting tons of data, and although they have way too many employees already, they don't seem to be able to parse it out.
And I think that's by design.
It's...
Let's send all this money into the schools that we know have this kind of ideological bent, and this was all done through the Obama administration, you know, Race to the Top, all of those things, Common Core, that kind of push, and let them create these bastions of basically government parenting of the child.
So it has public health components to it.
It has some educational outcomes attached to it.
But basically what it is is a giant government check that mandates, in order to get the government check, you have to basically climb through a bunch of DEI hoops to get there.
Because one of Obama's main pushes, and now Biden's, is the pursuit of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
What that includes, as I'm sure you've talked about with others, is gender ideology and what we had talked about at the beginning when it comes to Just the political bend towards things.
And then there's Title I. Title I is a grant program for underprivileged kids that gives schools money to help those underprivileged kids achieve better outcomes.
But the Department of Education doesn't seem to be able to map whether those outcomes are actually happening or not.
And so you get this kind of endless pursuit of educational equity.
That's never designed to be achieved, but always designed to soak up money.
And that's what's built the large managerial class in public schools.
You know, you make an interesting contrarian point, which is simply using that money, but decentralizing it, but with still the sum of the same government strings attached.
And again, what are those strings, would you say?
But it's not going to solve the problem.
But what are those strings?
Well, there's DEI mandates.
Even in the school choice paradigms?
Oh, yes.
So, in the school choice paradigms, what you have now is...
So, everybody talks about teachers' unions, right?
Right.
And I'm anti-teachers' unions.
Yeah, that's easy.
I mean, that's easy, easy peasy.
But what people don't understand is that there are actually forces on the private end of...
A school that carry more weight, more influence over those schools than the teachers unions have ever had over public schools.
Like?
Like NAIS, the National Association of Independent Schools.
They're an accreditation body.
Ah, okay.
I like that.
So school accreditation is really, really a linchpin of this.
And it's a third-party accreditation.
So if you have a private school, this is a private entity.
It's going to be really difficult legally to say, oh, the private school can't partner with this private entity.
But what you see, one interesting fact, is all of these union workers for the public schools, the public school unions, shifting over and starting to work for NAIS. Oh, interesting.
Yes.
Multi-stakeholder, private, quasi-private entity.
I mean, that lends itself to capture.
So the NAIS is required to accredit a private school in order to be eligible?
They're not required.
There's a market incentive for them.
Because they can get then kids who have been funded with school choice, is that a limitation for use of school choice programs?
Yes.
So it is a requirement, effectively.
Effectively.
Okay, for example, I actually went through an NAIS accreditation.
And before the school became NAIS certified, it was really a subsidiary of NAIS, but it's a direct subsidiary.
We charged $19,000 a year, or maybe even closer to $17,000, $17,500, I believe.
As soon as they got their NAIS accreditation.
$22,000.
$25,000.
Okay.
Right.
That's big.
And so why?
Yeah.
Well, because with that stamp of approval...
Parents look at the nice, shiny stamp and say, oh, this school's more likely to get my kid into Harvard.
And here becomes the other part, is that Harvard is pushing wokeness, just like we saw at Stanford, for example.
They're pushing this ideology so much that NAIS adopts it because that's how they make their money.
It's saying, if your school's NAIS certified, you're more likely to get the kids that go to your school into Harvard, into Stanford, into these colleges.
Is there any evidence that NAIS... That certification or NAIS itself does impose the so-called woke agenda within the schools that it certifies.
Oh, yes.
You can just go to the website.
Okay.
I probably should.
What does it say?
When you go through an accreditation process, it's not something you just get and then keep, right?
So if you get approved and you're accepted by NIS, you usually have a year probationary period.
They come in and go through every single aspect of your school, whether it's fine arts, it's math, it's science, it's social studies, it's social programs, it's equity, diversity, inclusion.
And in order to maintain that accreditation, you have to abide by their accreditation standards.
It's kind of a teacher's union on steroids because they don't just influence the specific teachers in a school like the way a union does.
They influence the actual administration of that school, right?
Yeah, it's almost less transparent, right?
Oh, it's way less transparent because parents have no FOIA ability.
They have no ability to go in and say, what are you teaching?
Is it true that in many of these educational savings accounts, so ESAs or let's say ESSA provided grants in what we call school choice, That there's a limit to say that you can only use it for an NAIS accredited school.
I haven't seen that they...
Because that would really solidify your concern.
Yes, it would.
But here's the problem is that...
So I encountered this argument early on when I first started questioning because, again, I was really pro-school choice.
I mean, I was like, yeah, if I taught at a private school, I mean...
You get all this money coming in, you're going to make a lot more money as a teacher.
You will.
And it actually incentivizes better teaching if you're talking about merit-based pay and things like that.
It incentivizes a lot of private schools can hire teachers that aren't certified by the state.
So they haven't gone through the indoctrination of a university.
Of the government.
Right, yeah.
But maybe they're going through an AIS. Right.
Well, an NAIS... Actually, in my experience, pushes for certified teachers.
So, what was your question in terms of...
Like, school choice dollars.
Like, are they tied to being used to NAIS? No, they're not mandated to go to an NAIS school.
All else equal, it should still be a step forward, no?
It should, except that...
NIAS already provides accreditation for over 80% of the schools through its subsidiaries.
And so the market, again, is pushed towards accepting that kind of accreditation, and they're not the only ones.
But I've yet to see, I think there's one or two accreditation bodies that don't explicitly push kind of the woke agenda or the sustainable development goal agenda.
on students.
And so we have the ability to build that, but again, it's a captured market.
It's the same apparatus that prevents us from removing wokeness from universities, which is this influx of big, woke corporate dollars.
So for example, the University of Oklahoma was in financial trouble before 2020.
And they did a lot of cutting, They had a president.
He got ran out on a rail.
They brought in this person who was the first to bring in DEI. Almost immediately, it's like they turned on the faucets for anonymous donors.
$80 million here, $100 million here coming from anonymous donors.
And then you see the university really start pushing this woke agenda or this woke capitalist agenda, the stakeholder capitalism agenda, throughout the university with a design to spread.
Not only is the university system getting almost a billion dollars of state funding, but it's getting an untold amount of dollars from private companies and private organizations that don't hold Oklahoma values.
It's a merger of state and corporate power and a state and corporate influence that I think is really not on a Republican radar right now.
If I can boil it down to, order of operations is important.
School choice as a concept is good because if we have a free market and parents aren't incentivized by who's got the coffee shop, who's got the doctor's office, who's got the good sports program, and more by, okay, are they actually being taught what they're supposed to be taught?
Then it has a chance.
But if we don't eliminate some of these strings first, it's a trap.
Because if – It actually is the perfect way to decentralize and believe that you solved the problem while in fact creating 90% of the same problem but without any accountability or transparency.
Without any accountability.
Yeah.
And the other part of this is data mining.
Because – Say more about that.
I wrote an article on my little substat called The Mining of the American Mind.
And the WEF actually pushes public-private partnerships in education.
Oh, really?
Okay.
Oh, yeah.
You hear there's videos of Klaus Schwab talking about this and the reason for that is to remove the government oversight while still getting the government money.
And data is the new oil, right?
You don't pay for minutes on your phone anymore.
You pay for data.
You don't pay for text messages.
You pay for data.
And what school choice or a private school that receives public money is able to do is if they sign a contract with Google and they get Chrome pads.
Google's going to include in that contract the ability to mine the data from the students that use their technology for everything.
Are they doing that?
Do we know that?
Oh, yeah.
And I suppose that problem could exist in public schools, too, if they're contracted with public schools.
Yes, but what parents can do then is FOIA that information, because if you sign a contract...
Whereas with a private school, they're not going to be able to do that.
So is there evidence they're already doing that, both with either public or private schools?
Yes.
So Google is asking for the data of those students.
Yeah, and it is...
Interesting.
Well, and you even wrap this up into the – you talked about COVID earlier, right?
And you had this kind of extension.
It's almost bewildering, right?
I almost thought the teachers' unions were just committing hairy carry.
It was off for me because they were extending this COVID issue beyond what it was needed, obviously needed, especially for kids.
But what did they get out of that?
ARPA. ARPA. Which was the COVID relief money.
So, for example, Oklahoma got $1.7 billion in ARPA money that they used on everything from behavioral health industrial complex to, you know, water tables and things like that.
But what schools got out of that was the longer they extended it, Right?
The more they were able to justify their need for federal government money—now here's the part that most people don't understand or don't know about—is that ARPA doesn't come all at once.
It comes in sections.
Yep.
Right?
So you get four months of funding, and then you have to do what's called a reporting system.
And with that reporting system is mandated community data.
Right?
And what is community data?
They send out these surveys to kids that ask things like, have you felt suicidal today?
Do your parents own a gun?
And these are all in the same...
Interesting.
Yeah.
And this isn't both the public and private schools.
But you're saying that's the data collection on the public side, but it can be a model for what that looks like for Google entering a funding arrangement.
Yeah, well, in Google, they wouldn't even need paper.
They wouldn't even – I mean, if they're using those, it actually becomes easier in a private institution because there's not a duty to transparency.
Yes, exactly.
Like there is in government.
So let me understand your view here.
One of two views just to draw parsing a distinction between it and don't – I know you're not, but don't be afraid to sort of be unapologetic about which side of this you fall on.
Are you making the claim, A, that is – which I'll put the weaker form claim versus the stronger form claim of this.
Weaker form claim is that – This is not a panacea.
School choice cannot be a panacea.
There's a risk that people will think it's a panacea because there are other less transparent forces at work from corporate influence to accreditation that can be the vehicles of advancing the same ideology especially when it's not fully funded from a public perspective anyway that allow people to fill the void with strings attached to money with less accountability that we should be And sanguine,
you know, about – or we should be, you know, cautious about school choice being the end-all, be-all solution just because it's a Republican talking point to believing that we're going to end wokeism.
That's claim A versus claim B, which is that actually – and further, all things considered because at least in public schools, you have certain measures of accountability like electing school board members, like FOIA, Freedom of Information Act requests,
etc., That we might actually be better served just reforming public schools rather than decentralizing the problem against the backdrop of a culture that has other tributaries through which to work, that that might actually even be the better system.
Which of those two is your view?
Because I'm hearing strains of both and I want to really get your view on the table here.
I'm for local control.
Of the public schools?
Definitely of the public schools.
I believe that injecting government money into private schools is not a mechanism of freeing students from the influence of government.
Got it.
That is the thesis.
So the use of government money… And when you have a public-private partner, there is no school choice in a public-private partnership.
Because eventually what you're going to get is target school, Walmart school.
You know, it's all going to become a carbon copy of the same thing, which will actually limit choice over time.
Government is supposed to be of the people, by the people, and for the people.
What the school choice lobby does that I think is very disingenuous is uses this moniker of government as a catch-all for evil when actually our system of government is built on federalism, right, with the primacy of local and state control over a federal control, right, at least when it comes to with the primacy of local and state control over a federal control, right, at least It's actually in the Constitution, I believe.
It's Article 10, where education is a mandate powered to the states and local governments.
Well, that's why I'm right on board with getting rid of the Department of Education.
It's failed at every metric it's ever been designed to push.
It doesn't monitor anything well.
It doesn't allocate funds well.
It doesn't assess what schools are doing well.
Oh, that was the low-hanging fruit for me.
That's the easy part.
Right.
That's right.
That's getting rid of the Department of Education.
Yeah, I believe that majority and you see this in rural communities, Oklahoma example, for example.
Tulsa and Oklahoma City and Norman where OU is are the wokest, you know, that have the problems with the public schools.
The rural schools don't have these problems.
Why?
Because their community actual – the term community schools has been kind of poisoned by that system that we talk about with WISC.
But the local people in those schools run those schools.
And I taught – my first teaching job was in a town of 8,000 in northern Oklahoma, right?
The whole community was built around that school.
The people who taught there went to that school.
They came back to teach at that school.
Right.
And so they had an investment in that community and in making sure that school was good, right?
What poisoned that area was the influx of government money making people live off the government, not work.
So it just kind of – but they had a vested interest in making that school better.
So to answer your question about the two dichotomies, the two choices here, I believe that – If we embrace the thought that local control of government, because conservatives have been off the radar when it comes to their local school boards.
You had the first mass exodus of conservatives from schools back when they stopped prayer in schools.
And that slowly, over time, through my parents' generation, they took us out of schools because they didn't like some of the things that were being taught.
Well, they removed their influence from the public school.
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
And we abandoned that ground to the Democrats, to the woke industrial complex.
And only recently, in the past four years, in the past three years, have parents actually started to be involved again and started to take back their institution.
It reminds me of a parallel in the corporate and capital market world that was part of the premise for Strive, which I found.
Because there's two ways to deal – As an investor with the woke capitalism problem, say the Disney problem or the Chevron problem or whatever, one is to say I'm going to divest from those companies that are woke.
Well, the problem is those companies still continue to exist and somebody else fills the void and buys the shares from you at a lower price.
And then they get bailed out.
Right.
And then they get bailed out if needed.
Right.
Versus another, which is to say that you actually get a voice and a vote as a shareholder.
So you're invested in – I mean the BlackRock problem with Exxon and Chevron is not that they're divesting from Exxon and Chevron.
It's that they're invested in Exxon and Chevron.
And they're changing the essence of what those companies actually do, which is why the right answer – an important part of the right answer has to be to bring a countervailing shareholder voice to the table so those boardrooms aren't captured.
It's kind of a similar analogy here where if you just pull out of the system and then go to these private schools, those private schools are equally susceptible to non-transparent capture.
Actually, more so in many cases.
Because it's not transparent.
Mm-hmm.
But you can actually maybe even drive more positive change through local control and decentralization itself.
Right.
And I've done some work in Missouri recently, which is where I'm from.
So literally my home state.
And for example, you had a school board president who did everything right.
She took over the – she got elected during COVID, masks gone.
All of the COVID restrictions gone.
How was she able to do that?
She refused the ESSER money.
She refused the money from the federal government for the district.
She said, I'm not going to take your money because it comes with your strings and actually took control of that school district and pushed it in the right direction while everyone else was going the wrong direction.
And so what concerns me, and so that is an example of what a First of all, the democratic process can give you because they elected her to do it and the rest of the board to do it.
And it was that when she took over, she had the strength and courage to say, we don't need your $8 million.
And really cleaned up that school.
And now she's fighting with the school choice lobby because she's saying, wait a minute, we did it.
Why do we need to take money out of the general pot to throw to a private school when your charter schools here are not doing as well as your public schools are?
You know, and so it's, I think it's a complicated solution.
I'm always open to being moved on it, but my main issue is that, like you have said over and over again, we have to actually talk about these ideas.
And every time I bring this up, you know, I've had dialogue with Corey DeAngelis or Chris Rufo or people I like and respect, right, for the work that they've done.
It's a full stop on a conversation when this is, you cannot quit- Trevor Burrus: Third rail on school choice.
Well, you can question it if you are questioning it with the union talking points.
You know, it's like if you're going to use the democratic talking points, they're ready for that all day.
But as a conservative, as Unwokeable, which is my podcast, right?
If I'm coming saying, well, there are woke issues here.
There's money issues here.
There's a public-private partnership issue here.
There's a WF connection.
Are you concerned about that?
You know, they won't even...
Broach the conversation with someone like me and actually attack that person, get them out of the tribe.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Very interesting.
Very interesting.
Really concerning.
That is concerning.
Well, I'm...
Grateful for people like you that are willing to question any orthodoxy outside of the partisan political framework because we're not in this as partisans.
Who could – I could care less for a Republican versus Democrat distinction.
You care about the actual cultural challenges we face and to address them.
I guess the last thought – we could go on forever, but the last thought I had for you was there's a whole range of arguments in favor of school choice that have nothing to do with the – Woke issues, right?
Even the cultural issues that you and I have been talking about here relating to just improved scholastic achievement based on competition driving educational results.
What's your perspective on that dimension?
And do you think that the argument becomes a lot stronger then or do you not have views on this?
I think the concept is sound.
I look at universities.
Yep.
And I go, how much of that is in play there?
Because, and again, you're always going to have your Harvard's, you're going to have your Stanford's, and it goes down.
But it's not really driven the academic performance to a greater extent in those universities.
Actually, we were seeing kind of an influx of, hey, let us get more dollars because the government is funding it, whether it's through Pell Grants or through student loans, right?
And so- I'm talking about, let's say, K through 12.
Do you think that the achievement is going to just – raw achievement of our students is going to be higher in a paradigm with – I mean because I think that's actually the more powerful argument than public schools that are captured, especially for public schools to get kids out of there.
I think if you pay – That I'm not – no one's going to be canceling me from the spectrum of conservative debate as part of what this presidential campaign is all about.
And I'm against the invocation of silver bullets that we celebrate that somehow just because we did school choice, that's going to be a panacea to the problem of wokeness in education.
You've made a persuasive case that it probably won't be.
And in fact, there's downside risks that if we think it is, we'll ignore making that problem even worse.
I think it's a great point.
It seems to me that we're still not relating to sort of culture and woke issues, but as it relates to scholastic achievement, gonna put ourselves in a better position.
It seems to me, but I'm asking you in closing to push back on this, that we would at least do better by injecting competition into public schools that are failing our kids by actually giving parents of those kids the ability to move out of them to schools that should be set up to compete on axes of scholastic achievement.
Right.
Well, and I think I'm generally for parents, if you've got a bad school district here, being able to move them to a better school district here, right?
Especially if the student has earned a spot.
By what mechanism would you say that?
Well, it's public to public.
It's easy, right?
Then it's just open enrollment.
Open enrollment, got it.
So then you have competition within the public sphere, so you're not mixing state and corporate dollars, which is the danger part of it.
But yeah, I think competition does breed more success.
Merit-based pay for teachers is also a huge portion, but also how we define success.
So...
Conservatives have seemed to buy into this really progressive education idea of outcomes-based education.
Well, who's measuring the outcomes?
Right now, it's the Department of Education.
It's the state departments of ed who are in line with the Department of Education.
And if they're measuring the outcomes, it can be, well, you know, you spout off the right stuff about politics, so you're a good student or not.
And so if we define what—if we correctly define what competition is— And where the competition should be, not just institution to institution, but maybe teacher to teacher, right?
Or just curriculum to curriculum, or administrator to administrator, public school to public school, then I think, yes, competition breeds success.
But if that market gets captured by whether it's a government entity saying this is what success is or a corporate entity doing the exact same thing with the same aligned viewpoints, that's where you get into trouble.
So I like the sound.
Yes, market incentive is good.
It can make it better.
But we cannot just fetishize that.
We can't.
And just like you've said, the 1980s talking points.
Don't apply today.
And this is something, and I'll stop with this, is, you know, I keep getting, well, the rising tide lifts all ships.
Well, not if that tide is Marxist red, you know?
And so we need to be very cognizant and aware of where the pitfalls are and not just, okay, we fixed the problem, let's move on.
I love it.
Yeah.
This is why I love your voice in the discourse, man, is you're not going to be captive to anybody's orthodoxy, even if it comes from the member of which you're supposedly a tribe.
You're not a member of any tribe.
You're your own man.
I love that about you.
I try to be.
It's hard at different times, but I think we're supposed to be the party of ideas.
We're supposed to be a party of open debate, free speech, and talking this stuff out.
And I think that's why your campaign and your candidacy is so important.
And why I want to see you in that office is because I can see that your viewpoint of the way that our government was designed to run is predicated on our ability to speak out against the things that people say we can't question.
No matter from which side or where it's coming.
Exactly.
Amen, brother.
Thank you.
Thanks for coming over, man.
I appreciate being here.
Thank you.
It's good seeing you.
I'm Vivek Ramaswamy, candidate for president, and I approve this message.
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