Season 6, Episode 4
A look at Secretary McMahon, education policy, and the political debate around accountability.
Topics: unions; testing/accountability
Transcript
Auto-generated transcript with light cleanup. Words may be imperfect; policy names and guest names reviewed where noted.
Okay, Corey, if you want to unmute, we can talk through our agenda for this space. We've got a few things we want to talk about that have come up in the news this week. As the title says here, Secretary Linda McMahon TROLLS Democrat press conference. First on the list that we'll talk about, but we've got some others too.
Yeah, we have a lot of stuff to talk about. I'm probably going to lose track of some of the things because so much is going on today. I was just tuning in, watching the Texas House Democrats crying about the livestream not happening for their committee meeting. When they've already had a full hearing on the school choice bill, they're just grandstanding because they know the bill's going to pass today.
And it's just so happening to be happening as we're as we pined out this livestream. They have enough co-sponsors to pass that bill at a committee from the Texas in the Texas House. Nine to six, it looks like it's going to be a nine to six vote. And the speaker has said, Dustin Burrows, that the Texas House school choice bill is going to have more votes for it than they have co-sponsors.
So it's going to be at least nine six in committee. They have 76 co-sponsors on the bill overall. That's the exact number of votes you need to pass the bill out of the Texas House. And so I'm guessing he's counting himself as an additional, though, maybe Brian Harrison.
And it looks like my home state of Texas is going to try to follow in the footsteps of your home state, Matthew of Arizona. Our bill is not as good as what you have on the books in Arizona, but I'll take it. So let's just for the listeners here, let's walk him through just, and I know it's not set in stone, but timeline. So everyone wants to know, okay, that's cool that it's going to pass that a house in Texas.
What's just kind of a ballpark timeline for when the governor, governor Abbott could actually sign something and it gets passed into law? Do we know when that might happen? I mean, it all depends. It'll happen before June, I think, hopefully sooner than that.
But the house has historically been slow on these things. And it's amazing that the house has even got the votes. I mean, this is the first time in Texas history that we've had the votes in the house. And now we've got a speaker that's in favor of a universal school choice bill.
So the good news is they've already had a bill pass out of the Senate 19 to 12. And that is the bill that they're taking up in the committee today. They could have voted on their own house version. But they're substituting in a bill for that Senate bill two.
So what that basically means is they won't have to send it back to the Senate and it'll streamline the process a little bit. So the listener is a quick rundown in the Texas bill. It's an ESA. It's about $10,000 per kid.
Depending on how the committee substitute looks, it could be more than that for special needs kids. One of the versions of the bill had it allowed the funding to go up to about 30,000 per kid. Because it's based on how much she would have gotten in the government schools. And the special needs students do get more funding that ultimately doesn't make its way to the student or the classroom and goes towards the administrators and box checking activities doesn't really go towards the kids' education.
That could be up to 30,000. And I know Arizona does something similar where a special students or special needs can get a significantly higher amount of funding each year. That's a good move with this bill. But it looks like for the average student, it would be a little over $10,000 per kid.
And for homeschool students, if you're using it for homeschool expenses, it's only about $2,000. I think that should be equal. Like it is in Arizona, we shouldn't discriminate based on delivery method. But I think what most conservatives are upset about with the Texas bill, if we're going to nitpick at it and we should, we should always push for the best bill possible, is that it's only 100,000 students based on the budgeted amount for the bill.
And that budgeted amount in each proposal is a billion dollars from the Senate. That matches what the House has proposed in their budget proposal. And so you do the quick math on that. It could be 100,000 or fewer kids.
Well, that's how we've seen this in other states, though. We've seen this in other states. North Carolina most recently, they had a wait list of like 50,000 kids that legislature came right back because that pressured them to eliminate the wait list. And so we don't want to miss the force for the trees.
We take this incremental win, makes it easier for us to get another win. And so yeah, I just wanted to mention Texas real quick because I was looking at that right before we started the Twitter space. And Texas will be the biggest day one school choice program in the nation if this passes and it should pass. Governor Abbott's obviously going to sign it's been a main priority.
And it's kind of like one of these blessings and disguise that it failed last year. It was even more targeted bill last year. It died because 21 so-called Republicans joined all the Democrats in the House to kill it. And then we got a new more conservative House.
And now we finally have the votes. There was actually only seven of those guys returning to office this session. And one of the seven who voted against school choice that's returning, he signed his name onto the bill as a co-sponsor. And another guy, another one of the seven Ken King, he signed a pledge to support universal school choice.
So he's not a co-sponsor at this point, but maybe he'll still vote for it based on what he did on that pledge. What's the Milton Friedman quote on getting the wrong people to do the right thing? It's not about getting the right people into office, it's about creating a climate where it becomes politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. And so it doesn't matter whether they've had a true change of part, whether they're just reading the political tea leaves.
I'd hope that they'd have a true change of heart. Maybe that's the case. But even if not, it's the will of the people, and they made their voices heard at the ballot box. So I think we spent enough time on Texas.
I'm biased because it's my home state, and it is going to be the biggest day one school choice program in the country. And it's just a start though. We can't spike the football after this. We got to keep the pressure up in Texas as well to continue the momentum.
But yeah, Linda McMahon, did you see the clip yesterday of her trolling the Democrat press conference outside the Department of Education? It was so cool, Corey, because you get the idea that at one point in the clip that Linda McMahon had, Secretary McMahon had just met with all of those Democrat lawmakers in the Department of Education, and then they go out and she had to give it apparently. They said this in the press conference that she gave them permission to use the Department of Education space to hold that press conference. And then she goes down and crashes.
It was so funny. The picture for just standing there in all white, like look into the side. And then in the video, I feel like the Democrats kind of toned it down from what they had planned. And once they saw Linda was there, and it became kind of an awkward moment for them.
And then inviting her up to the podium, she gave her quick remarks about the plan of sending the money back to the States, moving vital functions to other agencies. Basically to clear the air with all their fear mongering, they're basically using this as a just like they're doing in Texas right now, crying about the live stream. They do these things, these little press conferences to try to gain votes against their political opponents. So they're just, it's a dog and pony show, and they kind of sourd that moment for them.
And then they called her up. And then right when she walked off and left, one of the Democrat congressmen, I forget his name. I think it's from California, came up and started becoming a jerk again. So it's like right when the person leaves, they start to, they put their game face back on and become big and brave and tough at talking smack about the secretary of education.
Which, yeah, super. It was so cool that she did that honestly, you know, of course that's not common commonly. Exactly. Yeah.
That's what it is. Someone on X had commented, and they used one of the gifts of her in the WWE from long ago. And they said, if only she would have arrived with the metal chair, it would have put the ice cream on the cake, and it would have, that would have paid even, maybe next time. But there is a bill in Illinois right now, and then we've talked about this, and you've seen my tweet went pretty viral about it, where the Illinois Democrats just had got rid of school choice, what, in 2023, less than two years ago, and now they're coming for the homeschoolers, and they have a bill that has got a committee, what was it last week, and it was a party line vote eight to four to come after homeschooling freedom to require homeschool families to submit home declaration forms and to provide a lot of personal information, and the homeschoolers were pissed, and rightly so, and they's about 42 more than 42,000 of them.
I'm sure it was only homeschoolers, other people too, in the community signed witness slips. In opposition to the bill, there was only about a thousand in favor of the bill that signed on. And so you do the math on that real quick, it's about 99 percent signed against the bill, and what did the Democrats do on a party line vote?
They voted to advance it to the House for anyway. And that's, to me, I mean, the main takeaway here is, you hear all of this fear mongering about school choice, where people say, well, with government shakles, comes government shakles, school choice is going to be a Trojan horse. Illinois proves that school choice is not the problem. The main problem is the authoritarian leadership body in the House and Senate in the state that does two things.
The same people who are voting to violate your freedom as a homeschool family is the same person who's going to go there and fight against school choice. So these politicians can walk and chew gum at the same time. And the Republicans can too, the freedom fighters can, and they do. In states like Ohio, they deregulated homeschooling in 2023.
And guess what they also did? They passed universal school choice. You look at this year, Wyoming, they deregulated homeschooling and a week later, they passed universal school choice. You look at states like Massachusetts, Rhode Island and other blue states, they get the rating as the worst homeschooling laws on the books, New York.
They require you to have a certain proficiency level on the standardized test just to raise your own kid at home. They don't have any school choice initiatives. States with more school choice tend to have more homeschool freedom. And that might, the other benefit there is that if more families are banding together because of school choice, if you get more people to build a broader coalition, you're going to have a better chance to fight back against these authoritarianists who whether you have school choice or not, they're going to come after your freedoms.
And so eternal vigilance is the price of liberty and you're more likely to win the fight if you have more people on your side. So Illinois, it's bad news, but it does provide an important story, an example as to who the real M is. Yeah, well, and on that note, the real lesson here isn't the school choice as the Trojan horse, as you've already noted, it really is that elections have consequences, right?
And so if you don't get the right people into the right seats, of course, they're going to take away your liberty because they think that they know better than you do, not just for what you should be doing and where what you should be doing with all of your property and resources and so on and so forth, but they also believe that about your kids. They believe that they know what's best for your children when it comes to education and the myriad of other things. So the truth is, elections have consequences and all of this is downstream from elections, as Illinois has shown most recently, absolutely, they're willing to take away every bit of freedom to make choices about your family and about your kids' education. And how bad does it have to get before things change?
You know, that the worst, you're the best example of why we need school choice and the best example of unions doing a bad job during the COVID era and definitely really they're still doing it now. You look at the contract in Chicago. I mean, they were tweeting that it was racist to reopen schools, they deleted that tweet. And they were cotton controversy and hypocrisy for fighting to close the schools, voting to strike in 2022, even.
And they had a board member vacationing in Puerto Rico, it's not safe enough to go to school, but it's safe enough to go thousands of miles away on vacation, taking selfies on Instagram. And today, I posted about a Wall Street Journal headline that just came out talking about Chicago again. And they spent about 30,000 per kid. They shared some data from 2019, the enrollment in Chicago Public Schools has dropped precipitously, has dropped by about 36,000 kids since 2019.
Do the math on that, it's about a 10% drop. And guess what they included in their contract? Well, we knew the usual things, they included about a 16% raise for all the teachers on top of the raises that they would have already gotten from, from seniority. And they also included at least 800 additional employees.
So there, and even before this contract, I've seen data showing that overall staffing since 2019 while enrollment dropped by 10%, I already knew that. Staffing had increased by 20%. And now we're seeing a contract that despite those enrollment losses, they are calling, it's a tentative agreement at this point, which means it'll probably go through 800 more employees as they're losing students. I mean, in any other industry, you lose 10% of your customers, you're probably going to think about cuts, you're not going to think about increasing the jobs program.
That's what has become. Yeah, it's incredible. It really isn't credible. You know what's sad too, is, was about three weeks ago or so, I published a piece through EFI that just showed how Illinois isn't alone.
Now, I didn't include Illinois in the headline or in the title of the working paper. But this is happening everywhere and most recently in the past few years, it's really happening because of Esther funds. They're taking Esther money, COVID money, and throwing it into long-term expenses, but they're using short-term funds to do it, you know, money that's going to run out. Now, in a state like Illinois, that's deeply blue, they may not, you know, they're probably just fine-spending out of your text dollars to do that and not, you know, federal giveaways.
But it just shows the larger problem that a lot of states have gotten themselves into, which is that they've added, they're adding staff while enrollment decreases. And this is happening nationwide, but Illinois, you know, they've outdone themselves on this one. Yeah, the chart that I always share that Elon Musk has replied to at least twice or, quote, tweeted, is, you know, we have data since 2000 showing enrollment up by 5% pretty, pretty slow. Teacher positions up by 10% twice the rate of students and then administrative positions up by 95%, which is more than 19 times the rate of student enrollment growth.
So it's become more of a jobs program for adults in an education initiative for kids. School choice should fix that salute, that problem by creating a pressure for them to funnel more money into the classroom, as opposed to towards more dues paying members. But yeah, that's a crazy number. So you said Illinois isn't the only problem.
There's another problem that I just posted about yesterday in another blue state, funny how that works, is Colorado. And with Colorado, this was going viral on X yesterday, they passed a bill that would basically infuse gender ideology into the schools and require for that to be the case, even in charter schools. And specifically, another part of is that it requires courts to consider, quote, unquote, dead naming and, quote, unquote, misgendering in child custody cases. I'm sure you saw that one in the past.
Seven to four party line, all the Democrats voted for it, all the Republicans vote against it. And so if the kid, I guess what this means is that if the kids believe that they're the opposite gender or sex, and if the parent doesn't affirm that new identity or idea in the mind of the child, when before they've even fully formed their brains, is that they're going to use the courts are required in this bill to use that against the parent that is just based in reality, basically. Right, right. Well, then what's crazy?
I think California's already doing something like this. Yeah, yeah. Well, the parents have been prosecuted and lost custody of kids as a result of it. It's insane.
It's literally the state inserting themselves between the parents and putting their thumb on the scale, really, they're not really saying like it's, it's not going to be part of, if anything, it should be, this should not be part of the custody decision. Now they're going and flipping the script and saying, it must be part of the decision. And oh, of course, they're going to say that if you're not in fantasy land, then that's going to penalize you. And that's ultimately going to hurt the kid if you're confusing them at a young age.
And so that bill doesn't stop there. It goes forward and says that if a school is going to pass a policy on, you know, a chosen name that a kid picks, that's different than their legal name, it quote and quote, the policy must be quote, inclusive of all reasons a student might adopt a chosen name. And so it doesn't force the schools to make this policy. But if they're, I think they're doing this in response to some red states passing a given name actor.
And so they're putting their thumb on the scale again to say if you pass a policy, when it has to go, has to do with kid's names, it has to be inclusive for all the reasons a student might adopt a chosen name. So it's insane what they're doing. And what's interesting is that they're only doing it for this, right?
But that seems arbitrary. Why did they arbitrarily, well, we know why. But you know, why arbitrarily choose gender ideology or gender identity as the one preference of your child that you have to affirm. And it also says school dress codes cannot be based on gender.
So your dress could have to be non-binary, too. And so on and during that hearing, I also found out last night there was a representative, Jarvis Caldwell, Republican who obviously voted against the proposal. And he shared some audio from that hearing. There was no video, they just had audio.
And so he shared like who was saying what? And turns out that a couple of the Democrats, one in particular by the name of Yara Zokai, representative on that committee, and she compared parent groups to hate groups, said there were hate groups, and compared them to the KKK yesterday. The actual quote was her response to the representative saying, we should include more stakeholders because I just heard about this bill yesterday that Republican was saying, there might be some parent groups who want to hear about this. And the response from the Democrat Yara said, quote, a well-stake-olded bill does not need to be discussed with hate groups.
She continued on to say quote, as an example, we don't ask someone passing civil rights legislation to go ask the KKK for their opinion. Really? You're going to compare a parent's rights group to the KKK, call them hate groups. It's just, I mean, Matthew, you said earlier that you said that collections have consequences.
At some point, if the Republicans are smart, they need to lean into this. I mean, this is smart by this Republican on that committee making a video about it and sharing this with the world. Republicans all across the country need to be the same thing. This is the Glenn Youngkin playbook in 2021.
When Terry McCollough said, I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach, that backfired in him. Youngkin won in a blue state by six points with education voters. That was a number two issue in the election. But why didn't that happen?
It didn't magically happen. Youngkin made a deliberate decision to lean into parental rights as a political winner. What do most Republicans do?
What have most Republicans done historically? They've been silent on the issue of education. They've been afraid to talk about it because they thought it was a political loser for them. They thought that, well, all the polls are showing that Democrats have an advantage on education.
So we should talk about the economy and crime instead and stay silent on education because we're not the group that's going to throw more money at the problem. But Youngkin changed the game to being about who he reframed the debate, to being about who's going to allow you to decide the upbringing of your child. Who respects the rights of parents to choose the education that's best for them?
So more Republicans can do that. They can win on the issue. Democrats, I think, are vulnerable, especially after in the Senate. They unanimously just voted against the protection of women and girls in sports act.
That's an 80-20 issue. School choice is similarly like a 70-80-20-30 issue. So Republicans need to lean into these issues pretty hard. I think they might win some seats in the midterms because of it.
If they do, it'll be a big deal too because usually the party that loses the presidency see some gains shortly thereafter and then the next election cycle. This is a good thing to just put a really fine point on that for decades and decades, Democrats have dominated on the issue of education, as you said, because they were the ones that were more than willing at the drop of a hat to throw more money at education. And so they win. We're funding your schools.
We're the ones that are going to take care of that. Well, COVID changed all of that because parents started to get a window into the classrooms of their children. And they saw a lot of things that they didn't like and they started talking about them and saying, we can change that. Now, the funding issue, Democrats will continue to win on, but parents care much less about the amount of money that's going into their classroom than they do about you undoing teachers, administrators, faculty and staff inside of schools undoing what parents have tried to do for their kids at home.
And so yeah, it's been a political winner and they need to drive that point home. And now I think for the foreseeable future because I don't see Democrats changing their tune on these social issues that are so important to parents, I think these red, these Republican legislators, any government officials at any level that will support parents, I think they're going to win on education like you said to the tune of 70-80 percent of the time because they're willing to let parents decide. Yeah, and the conversation has also changed from being solely about standardized test scores to exactly what you talked about having a school that's aligned with families of values. And if you feel like your kid is being brainwashed, to be used that are antithetical to everything that's going on at home and teaching kids to hate their country, which there was an education next survey that just came out.
And if this is not a bias source, I'd say it's more lefty than anything else. It's an academic source. And they asked, they got a US population nationally representative sample of high school students. And they asked if the teachers were talking about different things that were related to critical race theory ideology.
And all over the place, you were seeing that it was a widespread phenomenon. And one of the findings that stuck out to me was that 36 percent of high school students said that their teachers were teaching them often or almost daily, this isn't even a rare occurrence, that quote, America is a fundamentally racist nation. And so when you're teaching kids that they're oppressed and that they're going to be failures, just because of their background characteristics or that they're bad people because of immutable characteristics, we shouldn't be so surprised when we see decades of learning loss on the nation's report cards. We shouldn't be so surprised when we see the achievement gap not closing in different states.
And that's it might be part of why Trump won the parent vote by nine points. And in fact, this was kind of under the radar. There were actually two polls on the issue of before election day in 2024 asking voters who they preferred on education. Trust me, I was looking for them.
I couldn't find any others because education's typically on the lower list of priorities when you poll voters unless the candidates make an issue out of it. And Trump did run on abolishing the Department of Education. He ran on passing nationwide school choice. He ran on parental rights and education.
And these two polls were from Atlas Intel. And if you don't know Atlas Intel, they were the most accurate pollster from 2020. And in 2024 they correctly predicted Trump winning all seven of the swing states. So I'd say they were the most accurate in 2024 as well.
And they both found Trump beating Kamala Harris on the issue of education. So the the the young convictory wasn't a one-off Trump led the way after campaigning on the issue. Maybe if he was quiet on education and tried to play defense like a lot of the other Republicans have done historically, maybe he would have lost on education as well. Maybe that wouldn't have been a strong suit.
But these accurate polls that are unbiased showed that he was winning on education leading up to election day. We don't really have exit polling on this issue, but we did see that he won the parent vote, popular vote by the parent popular vote by nine points, which is a huge deal. That was a 15 point swing to the right in four years since 2020. And I'm glad he's the he's promises made promises kept going in full throttle, signing that executive order to abolish the Department of Education or at least try to give a death by a thousand cuts, which I think they're doing a pretty good job of starting that process.
They fired half the people at the department. Things haven't really changed and all that much. Why did they have 4,400 people working there to begin with?
I don't know. It's another jobs program that push and paper, making six figure salaries, not educating a single child, not employing a single teacher. Each state already has its own Department of Education. We don't need another one in DC.
And I like how we flip the script on the framing of abolishing the Department too. He didn't frame it in terms of destruction, which a lot of libertarians actually liked. But his sentiment has always been, we're going to return education to the states. And so I think that has more of a positive spin.
And it makes clear his plan is to block grant the funding back to the states to see, to spend as they see fit. You'll have more local control. And Randy Winegarten has a lose in it. She said he's angry.
She's really, really mad. She said on MSDNC. And that's because I found out she's spitting mad. Yeah, she can field and see the power slipping through her fingertips as we speak.
And she can't help herself. Or she knows that it's actually not that big of a change. And she wants to help her Democrat buddies get reelected or to gain seats in the midterms. I think that's all that a lot of this is about.
And she admitted on a podcast with Molly Zhang fast. I think that's how you say her name. A far lefty. And she admitted that she, you know, she understands the argument that they're going to block grant the funding back to the states.
That doesn't stop her from saying this is going to defund education in her and her kids in other ways. But she admitted on that podcast, she understands the block grants and that she's concerned mostly about states like Texas might use the money for school choice. Okay. Oh, the horror.
They're not just going to give the money back to the states. The states are going to give the money back to the parents. Now what a concept. I mean, they are the primary decision makers for their kids.
They're the first educators of that child are the best educators for their own children. And you can't really be the parents when it comes to raising their own kids. Obviously, there are outliers, but there's outliers with the public school system too. That isn't really right.
We abolish all public schools. Some are better than others. But I think on that note, real quick of closing down or, you know, what's dismantling, right?
The dismantled the Department of Ed and return it to the states. We just got news. I think it was yesterday that five head start offices had closed around the country. New York, Boston, Seattle, San Francisco maybe.
And then another city or two, they closed down. But again, you know, those services don't go away. In the case of head start, that's unfortunate because it really should just go away. But yeah, head start evaluations.
And I talked about this on the Jordan Peterson podcast. And the random assignments studies of head start found mostly null results, meaning no effect, spending a ton of money. And they use lottery. So you win the lottery, you get pre-K.
If you lose the lottery, you don't get pre-K. You're educated at home basically for that year or two. Right. And they found using random assignment.
You can say it's the effect of pre-K. No effects on basically anything. They looked at like 50, 60 different outcomes. And I think like five of them were statistically significant and positive.
This is by through the end of third grade. And six of them were statistically significant and negative. So if you had to call it one way or the other, there were more negative effects than positive effects. But most of them to vast majority were zero effects.
And if you look at so many outcomes statistically, just by random chance, you're going to find some false negatives. And some of them are going to be statistically significant, even if there's not no true effects. So it might be some of that. And so it's best to classify it as it doesn't do anything for kids.
And it costs taxpayers a ton of money. And the latest pre-K evaluation, which is much more recent, I think it was published in 2022, was in Tennessee. Another random assignment study. And they found winning a lottery actually hurt kids by the end of sixth grade.
So the outcomes don't just fade out. Over time, they actually flip and get war like behavioral outcomes and academic outcomes in Tennessee got worse for the pre-K kids, which raised the question of why would this happen? And my theory is that, well, maybe parents are better at disciplining their own kids than the pre-K daycare centers. And maybe the parents are better at, maybe the kids learn more when it's self-directed at home with mom and dad.
And they're not, you know, somewhere where they're unhappy and at this daycare institution, kids like their parents more than other adults they don't know. So that might be it. There's, you know, there's other more detailed complicated explanations. I guess you can get into theories as to why they would flip negative.
But yeah, so those head start centers closed down, but the head start itself is not going away. Trump is, or the Bill in Congress by Mike Brown's returning education to our state's act has already pointed out that the head start would move under the Department of Health and Human Services. And the day after the signing, and by the way, that was a fun signing at the White House, so it's honored to be there. My wife was there with me as well.
She's, she's actually on the space right now. Everybody say hi to Miranda. If you see Miranda in the group, she'll follow her. She hasn't tweeted a single thing, but she has over 100 followers already.
So that's pretty great. But oh, and it was her birthday on April 1st. And I'm not that's not an April full stroke. It's actually true.
And happy birthday, Miranda. She just says happy birthday. And I don't know where I was going. Oh, yeah.
And so yeah, I get flustered because I'm talking about my wife. And she's the most beautiful person in the world. And she's taking care of Angelina right now. So thank you for that.
And Angelina just turned eight months old too. So that's great. And she's doing really well. And yes, so the student loans Trump has already announced the day after the signing are moving under the small business administration.
And the other move already was special needs programs are moving already announced by Trump to health and human services. So when the Democrats spearmonger and say this is going to take away vital programs for special needs kids. And it's going to take away funny. It does none of those things.
They're literally it's a straw man that they've created to try to score political points against their opponents. And I really want to talk about something I tweeted about or posted about yesterday very early in the morning. Most people probably didn't catch it because it was so early. I was with Angelina.
And it was about a Georgia Republicans sabotaging as a school choice bill. So if you don't remember listeners Matthew, you do in 2023 Georgia passed a new school choice program. And everybody otherwise would have thought it was a big deal. But it kind of went under the radar because of just how many victories we've seen that are actually bigger in other states.
So we've we've had 15 states and four years past universal school choice Georgia. Any other year their win would have been monumental. But the reality is the barometer of success has changed. And if you're passing a program like they did that's only 25% of the kids.
It's not people are not many people are going to point to Georgia as being like the leader on school choice. Better than the blue states will give them that. And better than things that gone historically in Georgia will take the win. But it's only for kids in objectively failing schools that they get a failing grade in their school.
And that's only about 25% of the population. The bill doesn't really say you know is it your school that you're zoned for and currently attending? Because you could be in a school that let's say you're an elementary school. And that one is passing.
Maybe as a seat. And the high school or middle school that you're supposed to transition to. Maybe those are are are failing schools. And one interpretation of the bill is that well it should be for whatever's you know any of the schools if any of them are failing because you don't want kids transferring back and forth between systems.
You know they if they want to go to a private school they should be able to go now. And so that would be more expansive. That would include more kids than before. And however this House Education Committee in Georgia took up a bill from the Senate.
And the Senate bill was pretty simple. It was a small improvement. It was very simple to allow all foster kids to be eligible for the program. This is a very small portion of the population very disadvantaged obviously portion of the population.
And they would all be included as being eligible for the program regardless of the type of school that they're that they're zoned for. These are transient you know trans-tory kids and they're you know hop them from one place to to the other sometimes. And this this would be it's not a big change but you know the Senate passed it moved it to the House. And in the House their Education Committee chairman his name is Chris Irwin and their committee substitute and his committee included a provision that defines the eligibility for the program overall for being only that that failing school determination is only for the school that you're you're currently in right now.
And so if you're about to transfer to a middle school that is failing but that you're currently technically in a elementary school that's not well then you're not going to be eligible for the program even though that it should be eligible for kids assigned to failing school. So you see that? And so it's now that they're in a sticky predicament and that that that passed on a party line vote from seven six I believe it was barely passed. And at the very it was really weird hearing this just happened a couple days ago.
One of the Democrats actually was you know he asked the Senate sponsor of the bill Greg Dolezal is a Republican he's the school choice champion out there in Georgia. He was the primary sponsor of the school choice bill. He actually won the Senate actually in 2023 passed a universal school choice bill. The House watered it down already earlier this year I forgot to mention they cut the funding for the program by 100 million in the House in Georgia.
The Senate's holding strong they're going to have to do some conference committee stuff and iron out the details and come to an agreement. But the House has really been gunning for against school choice and the Senate's been holding strong I hope they continue to do that. But the senator Dolezal was there and he was basically you know pointing these things out that I've just laid out on on the X-base and the Democrat you know was was kind of remember what his name was but he was you know over here like well you know shouldn't they be grandfathered in and he said if I introduce an amendment to do that would you be supportive of it and I believe the senator Dolezal said yeah of course that's basically what he was arguing for the whole the whole time at the very end of the hearing that same Democrat motioned to amend the bill. Basically he was going to amend it to make it so that any school that you're zoned for whether it's the current school you're in or when you're going to change to if it's failing you're you're in especially because families who thought that was the case have already applied right he wanted those families to be grandfathered in guess what Chris Erwin did he said I'm not I'm not entertaining that motion right now we don't have time for it and the Democrat was not out of order this is something that that should have easily passed and so I did some digging on Chris Erwin and I should have known because this is always the case no I'm not going to say he's sentenced to private school I didn't I don't really know whether that was the that's the case or not but if you look at the background of Chris Erwin he he currently works for a I'm looking for my thread real quick so I get that the facts completely right and I know it damned to you but he works for a construction company there it is he works for a construction company that primarily does work for school districts so you have it's kind of an incentive you would say you would think to to protect the status quo that's paying his employer I mean you see this in a lot of different areas but this is kind of what appears to be an obvious conflict of interest here and he's the chair of the education committee in the house and he magically refused to even consider an amendment from a Democrat to make the school choice policy slightly more expansive and so there's that tied to the school system but it doesn't stop there he was also in a picture that I posted on that same Twitter thread x thread at the Georgia School Board's Association and he was tabling there with his employer so there's there obviously in cahoots with the school districts and oh by the way he was a public school district superintendent before becoming a lawmaker I believe it was before he was also the president of the school superintendents union he looked at his bio it says representative or when is a former president of the Georgia School Superintendents Association and he was also on the board of the American Association of School administrators the administrators union so you know that you'd think that Republicans you know there must be the school choice supporters that's on their party platform it is red states that are passing school choice is it is overwhelmingly Republicans that vote for school choice our president is a Republican he's all in on school choice governors you know are leaning in hard the Republicans on school choice to you see you know the governor do see led the way in Arizona in 2022 passing their universal school choice program governor Abbott here in Texas has been a freedom fighter on the issue doing everything he can to get it across the finish line and then it's going to happen this year and then you have people like Chris Irwin but when you you wonder why why are they why are they locking arms with some of the with most of the democrats on this issue or you know even if they're not doing it in an obvious way they're doing in these kind of more subtle ways like blocking this amendment to an important bill that not a lot of people are paying attention to oh he has all these ties to the unions he has all these ties in the school districts and I don't know what to do about it but I think just more people the sun lights the best is infected and more people need to pay attention to these things because even before you know I posted about this yesterday I wasn't really paying a ton of attention either about this small bill and Georgia because I'm paying attention to other bills you know we've had a lot of you know we've had three states go universal on on school choice this year Tennessee Idaho Wyoming there's a big fight in Texas right now New Hampshire they're passing bills like gang busters and they're coming to a conclusion they have different versions in each chamber New Hampshire is going to go all in this year and you know there's things like this Illinois bill that's they're coming after home school rights and that's that's a hot button issue and it's something that I've been paying very close attention to and so some of these things slip under the radar even for someone like me who's trying to pay attention every single day of the week and so well and I just looked at one of my favorite websites for listeners if you don't know of this place already it's a great spot to just go and do some digging is follow them on e.org and you can see campaign donations and click through so I just went and found Crister when as you've been talking about him and you can click on his top donors and not too far down the list is something you could guess Georgia education association oh wow another NEA affiliate in Georgia right right and know what's what's I believe and what's funny is people in some of these red states like Georgia and and my home state of Texas is they'll they'll try to tell you that they don't have unions in these states because they don't have collected bargaining right but you know in Texas for example Randy Weingarten's affiliate is Texas AFT they blocked me on Twitter on X and they um you look at their Twitter which they don't use anymore they did a whole you know they lost the election and then they're crying about Elon Musk and so they went on top of Blue Sky and and other places and they said we're not going to be here anymore because fascism or whatever they usually say and they call themselves a union so if they if it walks like a duck if it quacks like a duck if it says it's a duck and calls itself a duck it's it's probably a duck and so you know you can call it association or union they call themselves union and they do union things well it's funny because it's really funny because people know that Republicans don't like government sector unions as much as Democrats I mean if you look at the unions donations they are mostly all got a Democrats or rhinos and they know they have to rebrand and call themselves something else well if you're so happy if you're so like behind what the unions doing then just go ahead and call it a union for several years that you've seen this too because people have said it to you on social media and in person I'm sure that well Texas Texas doesn't have unions it's not allowed and North Carolina the same thing well Ted North Carolina doesn't have unions it's not allowed they do this in South Carolina too I remember I went and spoke before Ellen Weaver was elected state superintendent and she's great she beat a union stooge in the Republican primary which was basically the general election in South Carolina because the Democrat has no chance and she beat she bit her about like double digits I think it was it was a blowout but I was there and I you know I was talking about the teachers unions and stuff like I usually do and the reporter thought he was so smart and said something like oh and Cory DeAngels was here and it was at like their Republican party you know annual thing or something I forget what the name of the event was but they they basically said oh and oh by the way Georgia doesn't have teachers unions like instead of just being a reporter you know they tried to present in a way that they were unbiased but it was obvious what they were trying to do like trying to quote unquote fact check me when they're actually wrong so yeah so it's it's always funny watching them kind of yeah well and it's perfect in Texas where they say no no no no we're a union yeah I think I've shared videos from one of their private meetings I screen recorded one of their videos at the Texas AFT and one of their leaders was like oh yeah they they just kept going on and on about how they're union and so I shared it on on on X and that went pretty viral as well and it's like come on just just find a different fight this is not the hell to die on they're calling themselves the union so yeah one more Cory the new hamper union leader oh yeah so I did mention New Hampshire so we got to bring this up and this is something I also posted very early in the morning and so New Hampshire just to give a background everybody they have two different school choice bills this year they already have a school choice program it should always been universal but you know they they were a little bit more incremental in their approach and they passed what they called education freedom accounts which I think is the best name for school choice program of the nation instead of calling education savings accounts or empowerment scholarships like an Arizona an EFA as opposed to an ESA but does the same thing and so it was income targeted before and this year you know they gained seats in the Senate they gained are they kept the governors mansion with the not with an in an open seat race that governor Kelly I don't know how to say her name I'm not gonna try and she she supports universal school choice and the house passed a bill that's true universal meaning it's everybody's eligible to apply and if there's and they don't cap the number of scholarships so that's you know that that would make New Hampshire you know one of the best states I will say I always quote 15 states passing universal but I really mean 15 meaning everybody's eligible regardless of income and there's no you know there might or might not be caps on the number of scholarships turns out that only about half of those states seven of them have true universal no caps everybody can apply and everybody who applies can get a scholarship so it includes Arizona Florida Iowa Arkansas and a couple others yeah and so these are the real leaders on school choice New Hampshires house bill would make them one of those true universal states well guess what they have a Senate bill that passed in the Senate very easily I believe it was it was party line vote and they have a very it's that they they can afford to lose a couple votes if they wanted to and still pass the bill in the Senate and what they did was they amended it in the committee to only be for 10,000 scholarships so in Hampshire the smaller states of 10,000 still pretty good they don't have 10,000 people signed up to the program yet you know they have much fewer than that and so it's it's probably not a limiting factor at this point yeah and in the building includes something called an automatic escalator meaning if you get close to that scholarship threshold one year like let's say you have you know 9,500 or so applications well in the next year that the bill automatically increases the cap without having to vote on it again to 25% more so that would go to you know 12,500 I hope I'm doing the math I went to government schools so don't don't fact check me on that but I'm pretty sure 10,000 times 1.25 is 12,500 call me out if you want Matthew but no that's so that and then you think about compounding rates once that gets to a certain number 25% can be you know it can be substantially increased from one year to the next so it basically becomes universal without having it like with it it's it's it's an okay limiting factor in this bill I don't think it's a big I don't think it's as big of a deal but why even mess with that why not just if you have the votes why not just pass the house version that's that's better and if the argument is that you're not even close to the cap anyway well then why even put the cap in if you're not close to the cap so either way what whichever bill passes and whatever they figure out and not details they get ironed out in conference committee which I believe is what's gonna happen because they've each passed their own bills they're slightly different it's gonna be a huge win and it's gonna be a universal school choice bill based on eligibility and so I came across a a clip from Deb Hose H O W E S she's the president of ranny wine garden state affiliate there called New Hampshire AFT and they she was testifying against a parental bill of rights and she said basically well if if if you want more of a say in your kids education you want more transparency in the public school system too bad you should just you should probably just send your kid to a private school you just send your kid somewhere else she said and so it's like well that's it's free advertising for school choice that's that's the view that it's gotten a lot of views on my ex account already I'm trying to scroll I retweet so many other people that it's hard to find some of these things even though yeah here it is my headline was New Hampshire teachers union president suggests parents should send their children to private school if they want more of a say in their education a lot of the replies are saying yeah that's what we're trying to do that's why we should take universal school choice give us the money to go somewhere else and the ironic part is in in in Hampshire school choice bills are typically funded based in every state on the state portion whatever the state portion is that same out the money that follows the child schools are funded from a lot of different sources state local and federal sources and on average in america it's about 50% state 50 you know 45% state 45% local and the rest federal on New Hampshire not all states are the same it's they're very heavily local property tax funded and so although their government school spend about $20,000 per kid actually more now substantially more than that their state portion is only like like a fit so their scholarship amount is only like 5,000 a kid so interesting yeah look if anything you were going to win this fight on the the state portion and get universal for everybody I think the net this this brings up the conversation of what's next in these states and New Hampshire republicans have at least introduced a bill a few years ago I think Glenn Cordelli was on it he's a great representative out there he's on the he's now a senator on the senate education committee and he's a huge supporter of school choice and he had introduced the bill and I don't know what year it was and it got tabled ultimately because they weren't ready for this fight yet but it was to allow localities to to opt into the EFA program scholarship program to let the local funding follow the child too so you could imagine you know once we get universal school choice for all the families regardless of income and they're about to do that in New Hampshire the next battle I think is to allow districts to opt in to allow them to say let's say you're a republican district to control whether a portion of that funding also is tacked on to the scholarship amount and so you can imagine in your state if you have a you know a very conservative school board that's not in bed with the teachers unions that allows the money to fall the child too so instead of just getting the five thousand you get closer to the twenty maybe they don't do the full twenty maybe they say let's let the half of that local funding fall the child and let's say that's about instead of five let's say it's twelve thousand and not so you kind of meet halfway there so the school the public school gets to keep a lot of the money still for the kids who's no longer there maybe they decide to send it back to the taxpayers and the public school gets to keep some of it and the parent gets to get a little more and it makes more private education options accessible to a lot of families and so I think but the main story from today was this teacher union president they're testifying against parental rights that should be a red flag to begin with and then they let the mask slip set the quiet part out loud and said oh by the way we don't really give a crack about your kids we you can it's a let them cake moment too because they're basically saying you should pay for it yourself you should go somewhere else and still fund us in the public school system even though we don't put back here and the still fund us part it's kind of funny you know with so much of the funding for public schooling in New Hampshire coming from local and the the state portion only representing 20 percent which is all you get with an EFA in the state you you have to wonder if she ran the numbers and said you know what yeah it would be best for you all to leave yeah well yeah we'll have empty what empty buildings right and in those buildings instead of getting 25,000 we're gonna get 20,000 a kid that do nothing we don't have to no kids empty buildings right and yeah so it's almost uh you know in states like New Hampshire it's almost a perverse incentive they're they want to push the kids out um yeah you know maybe but but honestly Matthew I think the public school still get better and it's still a competitive pressure because they're not educating the kids anyway yeah right and so um they still do I think want to keep some of the kids so that they get the full 25,000 or so because they don't just want 20 they're greedy they want the 25 and whether the kids there or not they're not providing an adequate education anyway and you know um if they're not really putting a lot of effort into the students it doesn't really matter whether the kids there or not and um I think the other part of this is it's not just money it's also control they want so even if they get to keep a lot of the money they want uh they want to be able to inflict their views and values into into the brains of other parents kids yeah I agree with that and that's enough that's I think you're right I think that they truly believe a lot of these people really honestly believe that the world would be worse off by far if it weren't for them and that their that your children really need and deserve their time and attention because you just can't provide you're dumb you're stupid and I'm trained and certified and so I'll take care of it I'll raise them in the way that you just can't I think that that's true I think that they really believe that yeah it's why you hear all this language of our kids all the time it's now they're not your kids they're they're they're not society's kids it's uh the the parents are are the the ones who make the decisions they should be in the driver's seat we need a super cut we need like a super cut of all these videos all these people saying our kids our kids our kids it there's plenty of material out there we just need someone to splice them all together and say our kids like a million times yeah yeah yeah yeah so I look Matthew I think we I think we so on the record we we we planned to talk for 30 minutes so everybody who's listening we talked uh over twice that amount and it's recorded so if you want to go back and fact check anything we said uh it's all here uh if you want to splice it up and make clips and share things on social media you can do that too be happy for you to do so actually and um I'd say we call it a day Matthew and I really would like to get off this and check what's happening in Texas right now because we just so happen to start this right when they were doing the committee hearing I expect I might be wrong I haven't looked that it's going to pass uh nine to six it might be better it might be closer but I think it's going to be a nine six vote uh based on the number of co-sponsors they have on that bill and you really shouldn't I really probably shouldn't predict things you never know when the Texas House um without looking but I promise I haven't looked and we'll see what the vote is and um shortly thereafter as the speaker said it's gonna go to the floor at some point and they're gonna have more votes he said than what they have signed on to the bill so they they have more than enough votes past universal school choice and um Texas is gonna it's it's I look we live in 50 laboratories of democracy the red states are are partially or for the most part engaging in friendly competition to expand school choice maybe some others will come along and maybe some of those blue states will come along at some point and at some point I think they're gonna have to hopefully it doesn't come to this but well maybe if you're a Republican it will that is a positive maybe the blue states will become red states if Democrats lose on the issue and if they don't hopefully we get enough defections from the Democrats to join lock arms and be on the right side of republic history with the republicans yep and pass school choice and some purple is sure or bluish states has happened yet and Illinois went backwards on the issue actually that's the only state to do so and they're now they're coming after school choice so uh just what well now they're coming after homeschooling so just to remind everybody homeschooling and school choice advocates should be on the same team uh the people coming after homeschooling are the same people coming after school choice and uh we should lock arms we shouldn't uh be on different sides of this of this issue and Illinois Illinois is proof positive that they got rid of school choice now they're coming after homeschooling if anything school choice if it's big enough can reduce the likelihood of them coming after your freedoms if if you built a broader coalition to fight back and they've done this Ohio got rid of homeschooling regulations as they've expanded school choice same year Wyoming this year they got universal school choice right after reducing homeschool regulations in the same session in Missouri last year they expanded school choice while reducing the ability of public school districts to come after and sick that law enforcement on homeschool families so what again we can walk and chew gum at the same time um and uh states that have more school choice tend to have more homeschooling freedom too i said we're gonna get off so we should probably get off but that's the pattern but yeah yeah thanks everyone for jumping on and listening yep thanks Matthew for setting this up and thanks for everybody for coming on this is the educational freedom institute podcast in the form of an x space it's great because i don't have to get a suit on for this uh so maybe we'll do more of these thanks Matthew yeah you bet thanks Cory thanks everyone thank you for listening you can find efi online at efinstitute.org on twitter at ef underscore institute and on facebook at educational freedom institute
