FL State's James Shuls & Cato's Neal McCluskey on History of U.S. School Choice

The Learning Curve James Shuls And Neal McCluskey

[00:00:00] Alisha Searcy: Welcome back to the Learning Curve podcast. I’m your co-host, Alisha Thomas Searcy, and joined by our other co-host, Dr. Albert Cheng. Hey Albert. How are you?

[00:00:30] Albert Cheng: Hey. Doing all right. How about you, Alisha?

[00:00:32] Alisha Searcy: Doing well. There’s so much going on. Yeah. But excited to be here with you today and talk to our guests, and I think before we even go into our guest and our story of the day, it would be fitting to acknowledge that we just lost an icon.

[00:00:49] Reverend, Jesse Jackson. He passed away in mid-February, but his celebrations were last week. And so, you know, we take this time to honor his life and his legacy and his contributions to the world. It’s really important, I think, to acknowledge the life and legacy that he lived. I had the great privilege of working with him in my very early twenties.

[00:01:13] I was just out of college and working with the NAACP and he was in Atlanta quite a bit because there were some fights around trying to protect affirmative action. And so wherever you may fall on that issue, Jesse Jackson’s life was about civil rights, human rights, and making sure that people had access, right, regardless of their color.

[00:01:37] I think a part of his legacy in terms of Rainbow Push, which was the organization that he started after he ran for president, and that was legendary, but it was really about bringing people together and not. Judging by color or you know, by people’s background, but just what it meant to be American and what it meant to believe in the ideals of this country.

[00:01:58] And he sacrificed a lot, worked in other countries as well. So his impact is worldwide, and so we just honor him today and acknowledge his life and his tremendous contributions to this country and to the world.

[00:02:11] Albert Cheng: Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for sharing that. And we had not too long ago, an excellent episode on, on Martin Luther King, and certainly Jesse Jackson was a protege.

[00:02:19] I don’t know if it’s appropriate to use that word, but they certainly were connected and, and united by that shared legacy.

[00:02:26] Alisha Searcy: Yes. They did work together and as many people know, he was present when Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis and so very important history there. You can only imagine what that must have been like personally and in terms of the work that they were doing, you know, in the civil rights movement.

[00:02:44] So it just speaks to his longevity, his learnings, and again, his contributions. So we, we thank him for that and we thank his family for sharing him with us. I, as I said, did get a chance to work with him for a few years, and certainly that’s one of the privileges of my life to have worked with him and to learn from him.

[00:03:02] Albert Cheng: Yeah. Yeah. Well, thanks for sharing that.

[00:03:04] Alisha Searcy: Sure thing. So with that said, Albert, it’s time for us to jump on in for the show today. I think it’s probably a good thing to start with our stories of the week. Would you like to go first?

[00:03:15] Albert Cheng: Yeah, sure. I found a really uplifting story in Education Next this week, it’s an article about Central Wake High School in Raleigh, North Carolina.

[00:03:26] So in case you haven’t heard of it, it’s a charter school and it serves specifically students who were on the path of dropping out of high school, or maybe they have. And anyway, it’s really there to give them a second chance. It was a fascinating article to read about the kind of support that these students get.

[00:03:44] You know, they give students flexibility to come to school, to learn things at their own pace. They’ve got folks to help them navigate and think about life after high school. I’m probably not doing justice by just kind of explaining this, but you know, so check out that article. I mean, it was so encouraging to hear about another school that otherwise would’ve maybe gone unnoticed by the rest of us if it weren’t for this article. So go check it out.

[00:04:12] Alisha Searcy: Yes, we appreciate that. We love inspirational articles and to hear about good work going on on behalf of kids, so we thank you for that.

[00:04:22] Albert Cheng: Well, what’d you find?

[00:04:23] Alisha Searcy: Well, I came across a really interesting article about, and this was in the Smithsonian Magazine, how historically black schools create and preserve their own history through amazing artifacts, from paintings to marching band hats.

[00:04:39] And this is an exhibit at the Smithsonian. Very interesting. I graduated from an HBCU. I went to Spelman College. Yay. Spelman founded in 1881. But it was a really interesting piece about all of the different artifacts that are in this particular exhibit. So talking about, for example, the history of Cheyney University, well now it’s called Cheyney University.

[00:05:04] But according to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, from the 1860s to 1900, more than 90 of these institutions were established. Shaw University was the first to be founded after the Civil War, and so it talks about a number of colleges and universities, you know, on display and the number of artifacts.

[00:05:25] Mm-hmm. One of the really interesting things that I didn’t know at Tuskegee University there were students who helped to make the bricks to build the institution.

[00:05:35] Albert Cheng: Wow. Wow.

[00:05:36] Alisha Searcy: Yes. They could not afford to pay the tuition, so they helped to build the bricks in order to essentially pay their way through school. How powerful that was.

[00:05:45] Albert Cheng: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:05:46] Alisha Searcy: Or to hear about some of the artwork. And some of the black artists that were given exposure through some of these programs. And so what’s most interesting to me, Albert, you know, we’re in a time right, where we’re debating about history and Civics and you know, what’s gonna be taught in schools and what’s not.

[00:06:06] And I just think that I wanted to bring this forth in particular because historically black colleges and universities in this country. And we’re talking 107 of them that only represent 3% of US colleges, but produce 20% of black college graduates, 80% of black judges, 50% of black lawyers, 70% of black dentists, and 40% of engineers are produced at HBCUs in this country. Very, very powerful. It’s definitely an exhibit I want to go and see. So just wanted to share that and I’m grateful that they’re writing about it and that it exists.

[00:06:43] Albert Cheng: Yeah. Yeah. Well, appreciate you telling that story. And, and you know, it reminds me a couple weeks ago we had a, a show with Ron Matus out at Step Up, and I think he mentioned he talked about the Rosenwald schools as well.

[00:06:54] Yes. And HBCUs, Rosenwald Schools, I mean, these are institutions that, I mean, they’re, they’re very much a part of the American story, and so I really appreciate you giving us some airtime.

[00:07:05] Alisha Searcy: Yeah. And what’s also interesting, I think I may, I may have mentioned it before, but now there’s a, a movement, if you will, for HBCUs to create charter schools.

[00:07:14] Albert Cheng: Mm.

[00:07:15] Alisha Searcy: And that’s a really unique and important relationship. Again, going back to the Rosenwald schools and it’s sort of the legacy and the history of HBCUs already.

[00:07:23] Albert Cheng: Yeah.

[00:07:24] Alisha Searcy: I’m excited about all of that. And so yes, happy to bring that forth and, and make sure that these conversations are being had and that we know what’s happening around schools.

[00:07:34] So with that said, we’ve got a great show today. We have two special guests coming up. We’ve got Neal McCluskey and James Shuls, who are co-editors of Fighting for the Freedom to Learn, Examining the Nation’s Centuries Old School Choice Movement. So we’ll hear from them when we come back.

[00:07:58] Neal McCluskey is the director of Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom. He’s the co-editor of the book, Fighting for Freedom to Learn, Examining the Nation’s Century Old School Choice Movement. His writings have appeared in such publications as the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and Forbes. In addition to his written work, Neal has appeared on PBS, CNN, the Fox News Channel and numerous radio programs.

[00:08:29] McCluskey holds an undergraduate degree from Georgetown University where he double majored in government and English. Has a master’s degree in political science from Rutgers University and holds a PhD in public policy from George Mason University.

[00:08:43] Albert Cheng: And joining him is James Shuls, the head of the K 12 Education Reform branch of the Institute for Governance and Civics at Florida State University.

[00:08:53] Dr. Shuls focuses on school choice education, finance, teacher labor markets, and character education. He is the co-editor of the book, Fighting for the Freedom to Learn, Examining the Nation’s Centuries Old School Choice Movement. Before joining Florida State University, Dr. Shuls served as an associate professor and the graduate program director of Educational Leadership and policy studies at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. He earned his PhD in education policy from the University of Arkansas where he was a doctoral fellow at the Department of Education Reform, if I might add the best Department of Ed policy in the United States. Anyway, guys, welcome to the show.

[00:09:32] James Shuls: Absolutely great to be with you. Thanks for having us.

[00:09:35] Alisha Searcy: So you’re both co-editors of the excellent new book, Fighting for the Freedom to Learn, Examining the Nation’s Century Old School Choice Movement. Would you give our listeners a sense of your rationale for producing this volume and a very brief overview of the key chapters?

[00:09:54] Neal McClusky: Sure. Well, so I will start because I guess it was probably originally my idea at the very least, it’s a Cato Institute published book, so I have to take responsibility for it.

[00:10:04] And as with all things that I ever do, the genesis for this book was something made me a little angry, a little irritated. And primarily that was based on my seeing both people opposed to school choice and in favor of school choice, speaking in writing as if school choice was an idea that originated in the 1950s.

[00:10:28] So if you’re against school choice, you would tend to say, well, school choice started after Brown V. Board of Education by people in the south who were attempting to avoid integrated schools. ’cause the, you know, the Supreme Court said that you can no longer by law segregate by race, public schooling. And there is some truth to that.

[00:10:48] There were certainly states that said, well, we will give people money to go to private schools with the expectation that those will be segregated. On the pro school choice side, people often say, well, the school choice movement started with Milton Friedman’s essay in 1955 that said we should decouple the funding and provision of education.

[00:11:10] So government might still, or even should still fund education, but it shouldn’t do it by funding the schools. It should give the money to families and then they would choose schools. And there’s certainly truth to that too. I mean, Milton Friedman was very important for school choice. His idea was very important.

[00:11:28] But the idea in the delivery of school choice long precedes either of those things. And we thought it was important to have a book that lays that out so that people understand this isn’t a new thing. This isn’t grounded in segregation. This isn’t grounded in market competition. This is grounded in a fundamental desire of diverse people to get the education that they think is right for their kids, which is often different from what other people think is right for their kids.

[00:11:56] James Shuls: So Neal reaches out to me and says, I’m angry, and I know James Shuls is angry too. So let’s do a book together.

[00:12:04] Albert Cheng: I mean, well, so Neal, in light of that framing, I mean, let’s start at the very beginning in, you know, the 17 hundreds, late 17 hundreds. I think folks may or may not know that a lot of state constitutions like Massachusetts had details about primary and secondary education, academic and civic goals to inculcate knowledge for virtuous citizens as well as liberal and a porous relationship between church state and private independent religious schooling.

[00:12:32] Let’s talk about Jane Shaw Stroup chapter, the years before Common Schooling. What can we learn today about some of those original intentions about pluralistic schooling.

[00:12:44] Neal McClusky: One of the things that you take from her chapter. Also, you can go to Dick Carpenter’s chapter on the funding of education. William Janes has a chapter on, sort of related to it, is that education evolves for one thing, it evolves in different ways, in different parts of the what becomes the United States of different colonies in different regions.

[00:13:04] But what Jane Stroup writes about is that there are actually lots of different ways to educate kids that evolve at the same time. People tend to think, and especially if you’re against school choice, you’re for public schools, you’d say, well, you know, education at any scale really started in New England with the old Diluter Satan Act in the 1640s saying, well, town’s very, uh, depending on your size, either needed someone to educate kids or grammar school.

[00:13:31] So a place where that happens with the intent of prepare people to enter, to go to Harvard to become sort of colonial leaders. And they say that’s where education really began. And what she’s saying or laying out is no, there are lots of ways to deliver education and some of them were even for-profit schools.

[00:13:48] And so yes, you had kind of the town school model in New England, but you also had, you had dame schools, which were sort of schools or education. Provided and often older women’s homes. There were things in like in the South called old field schools where communities would establish schools on their own and fields where the soil was exhausted from cultivating crops.

[00:14:10] And then a lot of people, even in New England didn’t find that the town schools were especially useful, they weren’t always practical. And then you have the rise of even for-profit schools. Jane Stroup has written about this in this book. She also wrote a chapter in another book we did on higher Ed about for-profit schools that sort of balloon in Philadelphia because people want hard skills, business skills and things like that.

[00:14:37] So it’s really establishing that there’s a rich ecosystem of schools and of education in these early colonial days, early Republican days that I think people aren’t aware of and need to know that the only way of providing school is not just the government gives you an institution.

[00:14:56] James Shuls: There was a book by Tak and Cuban back in the nineties, tinkering towards Utopia, which I think some people have this impression that we started out with no real clear public education.

[00:15:07] And then over time we’re, we’re getting better and better at centralizing education and providing public education better. And I think the theme that you see from Jane’s chapter all the way throughout the book. Is that that is not the case. Like it’s not, education is not about changes over time, making us better and better, but about constant battles and fights where people are.

[00:15:29] Not, not just battles and fights, but different interests. People pursuing education for their own kids and their own communities, for their own needs, their own desires, you know, their own value systems. And you see that from the earliest stages of our nation all the way throughout. And again, like Neal said at our beginning of the conversation, school choice didn’t start in the fifties, but these impulses have always been there from the very beginning.

[00:15:54] Alisha Searcy: That’s super helpful and important context to have. So speaking of history, all of the founding fathers, especially Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Mason, wrote widely about the intimate relationship between diffusing, classical liberal arts, mathematical and scientific knowledge in their experiment and Republican self-government.

[00:16:15] What do you see are the key lessons from the founder’s enlightenment ideals regarding what citizens need to know to uphold basic American constitutional principles?

[00:16:26] Neal McClusky: I think what you see is the common thread among the founders who talked about education. And I think it’s important to note, we tend to focus on people like Jefferson and Adams.

[00:16:38] And Jefferson and Adams were a little different, and actually in Washington’s a little different about the degree to which they thought government should be involved in education. But I think it’s fair to say that the founders who write about it actually wanted more government involvement in education than the average person did.

[00:16:54] That early Republican period, which is why, for instance, Thomas Jefferson has a whole plan to provide public education or public schools, and it isn’t enacted in his lifetime. All he gets is UVA, so that’s the first thing to understand is when it comes to government revision versus choice, they p leaned a little more.

[00:17:12] Toward government provision than the average person in their time. Although even if you go to the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution with Adams had a lot to do. They talk about cultivating all types of education and arts. So that’s the kind of governance provision part. The other part is what they were focused on was typically creating virtuous, that’s the term citizens.

[00:17:35] That typically meant somebody who was kind of selfless and there was usually some sort of religious connection, although the founders were, they differed on their religious beliefs, but they generally tended to think there was a religious component. And that virtue meant you need to create citizens who wouldn’t only focus on their own good, but when they were called to do things for their community and for their country, they would do that as well.

[00:18:00] But they ended up having lots of debates about how you operationalize that in actual education too. So like Webster and Benjamin Rush got into big debates about, do you include the Bible? Do you include Bible as a way to help teaching? Does that minimize the meaning of the Bible? So. They certainly believed in this kind of cultivating virtue, but when it came to actually what you do in schools and how you provide that, I don’t think there was as much agreement.

[00:18:26] James Shuls: One thing that I think Neal touched on there is it was about virtue, it was about character, which stands in contrast to how a lot of people see public education today as job training. Right? So when the founders were writing about education, it wasn’t, ah, we need to increase the nation’s GDP, or, you know, we need to make sure these kids have, uh, 21st century job skills.

[00:18:48] Or I guess they would’ve said maybe. 18th or 19th century job skills or whatever it was they were writing about character and virtue. The things that schools, especially public schools today, oftentimes shy away from because they’re afraid to touch on the values issues. So that to me is a real key difference between the founder’s views of education and our views today, especially when it comes to public schools.

[00:19:13] Albert Cheng: Well, James, let’s pick up on that a bit because something changed between then and now, and so I wanna bring in Charlie Glenn’s chapter, the Emergence of the Common School ideology. You just referenced earlier, the Tik and Cuban volume as well, I think hits on some of these themes. Could you tell us about that chapter?

[00:19:30] You know, whose horse man? What’s the Common School of Movement and how might it have abridged the founder’s original, kind of liberal, ecumenical and pluralistic view, if you want to call it something.

[00:19:43] James Shuls: Of the two of us Neal is our resident, Horace Mann scholar, so I’ll let him touch on that. But the one thing that stands out to me most in this chapter is really how Charlie Glenn explains that the move towards common schools, which is essentially the growth of a large state supported public school system over time is, it’s a shifting of education, a separation of education from the family more to the state. And I think that that’s what you see throughout his chapter is explaining this fundamental shift in how we view education. But Neal, I’ll let you jump in and explain more ’cause I think you’ve got some great stories and anecdotes about it.

[00:20:22] Neal McClusky: Oh, well I don’t want to go on too long about Horace Mann and I’m not, I haven’t spent a huge amount of time on Horace Mann. What I do think is important, and James got to this about Charlie’s chapter is his argument, I think, is that the purpose for many people of the common school, in particular Horace Mann, but other supporters, what’s kind of separate kids from their community that could be their family, their religious community, and sort of attach them to the state.

[00:20:50] And separate them from these communities into which they were born. I don’t think that was the entire goal. I definitely think if you read Horace Mann and you read other people who are common school kind of. Advocates early in the common schooling movement, and especially if you look at how they sort of admired Prussia, the goal was certainly to build people who were citizens and viewed themselves as citizens first and members of a state, and of course a country.

[00:21:18] Although, and Horace Mann’s time, people were still more connected to states than they were to the country. But if you look at, for instance, we talked about George Washington. He had a desire to connect people to the country. Although focus actually more on higher ed than it’s sort of the K through 12 level.

[00:21:33] But so Mann certainly wanted to connect people to their state, but he was actually driven from reading his reports and other writings. He was driven more by concern that most people were kind of just sticky. So he had very low opinions of parents and he had very low opinions of parents’ ability to take care of their children, and he really wanted to separate kids from their parents because he thought they didn’t know how to even teach them basic hygiene.

[00:22:02] He thought that they were ignorant about that. He goes on like at length about too many of them caulk up the cracks in their walls and don’t let air flow through, and he is really a paternalism. And so a lot of the common schooling movement, at least as he was writing about it, was paternalism as simply separating kids from their parents because their parents were ignorant and educators, at least the ones that he would control, he thought knew better about how to do everything than parents did.

[00:22:33] Alisha Searcy: Wow. That really speaks volumes. Thank you for that. So next question. In 1850, Massachusetts Court case Roberts versus Boston sought to end racial discrimination in the Boston Public schools. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled in favor of Boston finding no constitutional basis for the suit.

[00:22:54] The case was later cited by the US Supreme Court in Plessy versus Ferguson, which we now know established the separate but equal standard. Can one or both of you talk about this case and some of the wide variety of ways that American public education has failed to uphold a quality of educational opportunity based on race?

[00:23:14] James Shuls: This case itself is not directly discussed as far as I know in, in the book, but it does highlight an important nuance that we don’t often think of. Like oftentimes we think that, you know, segregation was only a southern issue and the case highlights clearly that it wasn’t just in the South. There are issues that were faced throughout the country.

[00:23:36] Even in Massachusetts, even in Northern States, that seemed to be progressive at the time, or even still today, that shaped education policy. And you also see issues of, you know, discrimination here, whether it’s on race or whether it’s with women in the past not receiving quality education. I think that that comes out in the book somewhat in that the battle for education or Fighting for freedom to learn.

[00:24:04] Isn’t just a school choice issue, but it is, you know, across a lot of different dimensions where people have been fighting over time to try to achieve some level of quality education for their kids, or again, whether that’s on racial issues or gender issues or whatever it is, or even just quality issues.

[00:24:25] Neal McClusky: So I should say the first thing you do is you want to check out Cheryl Field Smith chapter, which talks about the many ways that public schooling has failed African American families and how African Americans have empowered themselves to get the education that was often denied them. And I think one that’s important because it sort of deals directly with the myth that public schooling is some great uniter.

[00:24:50] Historically, it has not been public schooling and government, which runs public schooling is, is what mandated segregation for so long. But it also illustrates that people will empower themselves. Government often gets in the way of them doing that, but they will, uh. People aren’t just passive or helpless, they want education.

[00:25:10] And if you get government outta the way, they will often pursue it. And I think that’s a major part of this chapter. And I don’t think she mentioned the case in Boston, but it really is important to understand that public schooling was segregated, not just in the South. We do tend to think that, but there were problems in the, in the north, the Midwest, and you know, it’s not.

[00:25:33] Probably a coincidence. I’m not an expert on New England or Boston or Massachusetts, but Boston busing and the controversy over Boston busing is one of probably the best known and most painful experiences that we’ve had as a country of trying to deal with. Integration and segregation and education. And it was because in part, Boston developed with a whole lot of neighborhoods that were very ethnically identifiable.

[00:26:01] Not just African Americans, but Irish and Italian. And some of that illustrates that people will tend to live with people like themselves, and it’s very difficult to overcome that by force. But it also shows that these problems are not just unique to the south. All over the place. And I think we make a mistake when we say, well, the only places that had segregated public schooling was in the South ’cause that simply wasn’t true.

[00:26:27] Albert Cheng: Neal, let me pick up on that. ’cause you mentioned Cheryl Field Smith’s chapter where she writes, African Americans were largely excluded from the 19th century common school movement, yet they have persistently pursued education as a path toward freedom from slavery to today.

[00:26:41] And so you talked about some of the injustices that have occurred in the past. Could you discuss a bit more about her chapter? I mean, what were some of the ways leaders within the African American community, you know, were trying to obtain and realize a, a quality education.

[00:26:57] James Shuls: Cheryl touches on a variety of different things. I mean, Neal’s point is, is so good though that public education or the government schools were oftentimes the source of discrimination. And you know, we had laws in the South that at one point in time prevented. African Americans from learning to read. So she talks a little bit about field schools and how in the fields that slaves or even, you know, after that field workers would teach their kids to read.

[00:27:24] Then she talks about the movement during reconstruction and the Freedman’s bureau and the schools that they tried to establish. She talks about the Rosenwald schools and private support for education in the South means. So much of what she’s describing throughout her chapter, all of these different initiatives.

[00:27:42] Or just as Neal described, the initiative of people who’ve been oftentimes oppressed on their own without government support, seeking out education and seeking out the best educational opportunities for their kids, despite significant. Pressure or significant discrimination from the government system.

[00:28:02] So her chapter, I think, spans a large period of time and continually touches on the same theme that African Americans, that, you know, black Americans value education. This is one thing sometimes today people I think get wrong, that so many. People in the African American community, they value education.

[00:28:26] And you could see it throughout our nation’s history, how they fought for the right, for their kids to get a quality education in whatever circumstance they were in.

[00:28:35] Neal McClusky: And Ashley Burner, she’s writing about sort of responses and resistance to common schooling, and a big part of that is just recognizing diversity, that people want different things out of common schools.

[00:28:48] When she talks about, for instance, you know, you can’t actually have a values neutral school even saying you are values neutral. Is a value saying that other values are not as important as what we call neutrality. And so she talks about a lot of that resistance. And I think you can also see that, I can’t remember whether Cheryl Field Smith includes this in her chapter, but you can see it in, in New York in the 1960s, where African-Americans, and I think they’re also Puerto Rican communities, where they said, we don’t want our schools that serve our kids to be controlled by people in some school district headquarters.

[00:29:23] That doesn’t reflect our community and what we want our kids to learn. And so they, you know, try and take control of the schools that serve their communities away from, you know, people in the district headquarters. And it leads to lots of conflicts with the teachers unions and things like that, but. It’s an ongoing theme of one system of schools cannot supply what everybody wants.

[00:29:50] And sometimes the schools were designed specifically to say, well, what you want is wrong and therefore you can’t have it. And then sometimes it’s just, well, we think that these other things are more important, so we’re gonna focus on that. And a consistent theme against common schooling is people saying, well, you may want something else, but we want what we think is best for our kids and common schooling can’t provide it.

[00:30:13] Alisha Searcy: So this has been a really interesting conversation about choice, and one of the things that I struggle with when it comes particularly to private school choice in its current. Forum as we’re seeing it across the country, I think about segregation academies, and so for decades, the main criticism of school choice has been that after Brown V Board of Education, a variety of private, white only, or segregation academies were established across the south.

[00:30:40] I live in Georgia. In addition, there have been persistent concerns about the academic quality, basic accountability, and the goal of educating. For common American democratic purposes and publicly funded private school choice programs. As an example, choice centric states like Florida and Arizona remain well below the national average on nap reading and math scores. How does your book address these critiques?

[00:31:06] James Shuls: So my chapter, and this is actually where Neal and I kind of connected in the first place is a few years ago, I came across this guy named Virgil Bloom, who wrote a book in 1958 called Freedom of Choice in Education. And then he helped start an organization that began in 1959, citizens for Educational Freedom.

[00:31:25] And they were tremendous advocates for school choice, and yet nobody was ever talking about them or mentioning them or citing them. So I’d written a couple of papers on this, and one of the things that I point out in my chapter. And I, I think we can go back also and we’ll talk about Neal’s chapter two because everyone points to the fifties as when school choice started, partly because there was this tremendous dearth of activity just before that, which Neal covers, and then in, in the 1950s, you have a whole bunch of things happening.

[00:31:55] You have brown versus board of education happening. You have an increased push for federal aid and education, and you have this sort of big explosion of activity for religious freedom coming from citizens for educational freedom in other groups. And so there’s a big movement towards school choice. It’s unrelated to Brown V. Board of Education.

[00:32:16] There’s a quote that I have in the book where Bloom is writing to someone else and he says something like, you know, not a week goes by that the New York Times doesn’t talk about citizens for educational freedom. I mean, they were active all over the north. If you look at their membership, which I cite in the chapter, if you look at the activity where the bills and the things that were sponsoring, it was all over the north, but in the South, what happened after Brown v. Board of Education? Again, going back to some of the stuff Neal and I said before, the people wanted to keep public schools segregated, right? That was the goal. And so when, say Virginia launches into the massive resistance, their whole goal was to keep public schools segregated, not to expand educational freedom or school choice.

[00:33:00] And so. We tend to think that these segregation academies sprouted up because of segregated public schools, and that’s not entirely true. What happened, at least in Virginia, is that when someone sued and the school was being forced. To integrate the state closed the school, and after the school was closed, then parents had to decide, well, we have no school, or we can go to private school.

[00:33:27] And then that’s where you see the, the segregation academy start to pop up. So it wasn’t like people fleeing integrated schools, they were fleeing no schools. And so there’s nuance to this argument, but the point that I try to drive home in my chapter. About this period following Brown is that the arguments weren’t all about segregation.

[00:33:47] The bulk of the school choice arguments were in the north about religious freedom, and they were talking about religious freedom in the same sort of language that the civil rights people were talking about regarding race. They were saying, we should not be discriminated against based on our religion.

[00:34:06] So you see this tremendous movement for school choice completely unrelated to anything we’re touching on race. And yet the critics of School Choice again, like to point to this period and say it all started with race. And that’s again, simply not the case.

[00:34:19] Neal McClusky: We certainly have to acknowledge that school choice.

[00:34:22] There was school choice as an answer to Brown V. Board of Education. But we have a chapter by Ron Matus that really covers the 19, we’ll say mid 1960s to roughly mid 1980s about the progressive drive for school choice. And a big part of the progressive drive for school choice was a recognition that African Americans or, but also other low income people, lots of other groups.

[00:34:51] Don’t have power in a public schooling system. ’cause in public schooling it’s about who has the most political power will decide what it is you get out of education, what resources, what the curriculum will look like. And a whole lot of progressives said the only way we can circumvent the problem of people who have power, who control public schools is to move money to families and give those who don’t have money.

[00:35:16] Actual real power, the ability to leave the public schools and go somewhere else. So a major sort of somewhat forgotten. Drive for school choice in the latter 20th century was progressives. People who are really focused on empowering groups that didn’t have political power, especially in education and giving them that power by giving them the money.

[00:35:40] So one of the things we learned is, yes, you can have the Supreme Court say, well, you’re no longer allowed to segregate schools by race. And certainly that was a good decision, but that’s not nearly enough to empower people to ultimately get what they think is right. There’s a lot more to that, and school choice is a big part of it.

[00:36:02] Letting people who don’t have the power to control the system, get out of the system and choose. Something else. And so I think choice has been a big part of the driver of that. And the other thing we see is, you know, we don’t actually talk, I don’t think and hear a whole lot about test scores, but one of the things that’s been found pretty consistently is that when public schools face competition, it causes them to do better academically as measured by things like test scores. That hasn’t really been a major driver for most of the history of school choice. The idea of school choice for academic achievement actually is sort of a, a smaller part of the education history, but it is part of it. So I think choice addresses a lot of the concerns, Alisha, that you have.

[00:36:47] But these are all also very complicated. The reality is you can’t just snap your fingers and there’s a miraculous cure for social divisions. It takes a lot of social evolution, a lot of things happening for those to be overcome.

[00:37:03] Albert Cheng: We’re gonna be fair to each of you, Neal and James. James had a chance to talk about his chapter. So Neal, I want to give you a chance to talk about your chapter in particular. It’s entitled, where did It Go? Pluralism in Education from 1880 to 1955. So Neal, I’ll let you get your word in, and James, if you wanna say anything else about your chapter, jump in after.

[00:37:24] Neal McClusky: Oh, well thanks. I don’t actually, we don’t need equal time doctrine here, but I’ll take it.

[00:37:29] So my chapter was sort of the origin of it is a while ago we put up something called the school choice timeline again, because I was getting annoyed by people acting like, oh, school choice didn’t. Coming into existence or even anybody’s thoughts until the 1950s. And so again, it starts at kind of the beginning of with the colonial period.

[00:37:51] Actually, it probably starts with the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution, but it traces a lot of this. But what I saw was there was actually a pretty big gap in sort of overt. Calling for money in somewhere or another to follow kids, either by connecting it to kids or funding a multiplicity of schools. And it was roughly from 1880 to 1955 and I thought, well, gee, what’s going on here?

[00:38:15] And does this indicate that? Well, actually nobody was even thinking about school choice for a long time before you get to the fifties. When I thought. Well, it’s wrong to say it starts at the fifties and I wanna know what was happening and what you find, or at least what I found is it wasn’t that there was no desire for school choice or educational options, it was that the very existence of those options was under threat.

[00:38:40] So it’s in this, a time period that you first have a lot of people saying, well, you can’t have schools that teach kids in German. Actually, the German population was of major concern to a lot of people in the 1880s up through, as you can imagine, World War I, and they said, so these shouldn’t be options, either private schools or public schools teaching German.

[00:38:59] But there were some Lutheran schools in particular and Catholic schools that taught a whole lot in German. And they said, well, we can’t allow those, so we will forbid the teacher of German. Then eventually you get to World War I and there’s suspicion of any kind of private school, especially German speaking schools.

[00:39:16] And then you get to the 19, early 1920s and you have the rise of sort of the second clan, which is especially active in kind of like the Midwest, but also the Northwest. And that’s when you have Oregon pass the referendum saying that to fulfill your compulsory schooling requirements, it can only be done in public schools.

[00:39:34] The intent was very clearly to eliminate private schools, first and foremost Catholic schools, but also other private schools. So there was a Catholic school, but also the Hill Military Academy were part of the lawsuit against that. And that’s because the Klan was not only against certainly Catholic schools and if there were Jewish schools against Jewish schools, but also they tended to dislike any private schools because the Klan was also at that time very anti-elite.

[00:40:01] And so through much of that time period, there’s a hostility to the very existence of private schools. So it’s hard to argue that you should be getting money for private schooling when people are trying to say, we should destroy private schooling completely. And then in the latter part of that, so the 1930s and 1940s, obviously in 1930s, it’s not a great time to ask for money for schools that weren’t getting money because there’s just not a lot of money.

[00:40:25] And then in 1940s, you know, obviously for the first half you have World War II. Again, not a great time to ask for money, but you do start to see laws passed that allow funding for textbooks or transportation for private schools. So you’re starting to see sort of. Uh, return to a school choice movement because of they want to at least help defray some funding.

[00:40:49] And then you get into really even 1949, there’s a book by Bernard Iddings Bell, I think is his name. I always get the first name wrong, but he says, look, well, we have these public schools that everybody has to pay for. They are often defacto secular schools, and it’s wrong that you can’t get funding for religious schools.

[00:41:07] And then eventually it gets to what James was talking about, you know, a much bigger movement with the CEF, which is not the Center for Educational Freedom of Cato, the other CEF and Virgil Bloom. And so we’re starting to come out of this lull in school choice efforts, even by the latter part of this period, from 1880 to 1955 but there is a period where just private schooling, its very existence is under very serious threat.

[00:41:33] Alisha Searcy: So finally, in closing chapters of Notre Dame Law Professor Nicolete Garnett and Jason Bedrick discuss the legal elements of the private and religious school choice revolution and the explosion of universal school choice programs in many states.

[00:41:48] Would you briefly tell us about these chapters and where school choice is heading? Especially with the federal government now joining the mix and the new IRS led National Education Tax Credit program.

[00:41:59] James Shuls: I think you could look at both chapters. Explaining why we’ve seen such significant growth in school choice in recent years, but answering it in very different ways.

[00:42:10] Neal talked about sort of the attack on private education, and then you heard me earlier talk about the movement for school choice from citizens for educational freedom. And yet none of that led to anything. And you heard Ron Matus’ chapter talked about with the progressive push and part of the reason that nothing ever went anywhere is because we got a several Supreme Court cases that were very bad for school choice.

[00:42:35] They essentially made it. Almost impossible to get any school choice programs going. There was a letter, again, citizens for Educational Freedom, where they said something like, you know, all their funding was drying up because, you know, no one wanted to donate to programs or movements that couldn’t actually succeed, so nothing was moving forward.

[00:42:54] But then you see in Nicole’s chapter. The changes that happen over time, the court precedents that get overturned, the things that happen in say, Zelman v Simmons Harris that allow for school choice to flourish. So now school choice is in very firm footing in lots of places, both at the US level and even at the state level.

[00:43:15] These things that used to be called or blame amendments in the constitutions. Which prevented dollars from going to religious schools or private schools are basically overturned now. And you see Nicole explaining that legal arc that led us to where we are today. So on one hand you could say that’s an explanation for why we have such growth in school choice, as the legal landscape has dramatically changed.

[00:43:39] And then you have Jason chiming in and saying, well, the reason we’ve really seen the explosion in recent years is because. We’ve moved away from making simply the market based arguments or the equity based arguments that we made in the early part of the, the nineties and early two thousands when we pushed these modest school choice programs.

[00:44:00] And we started, I would say, returning to the roots of some of the school choice arguments based on values in what Jason calls the red state strategy that I think Jason’s chapter sort of lays out. The early explanation of the history that has unfolded in recent years, saying that this shift in marketing and strategies what led to so much school choice today.

[00:44:22] So I think again, both of these chapters give different answers for why you’re seeing the tremendous growth that we have right now.

[00:44:30] Neal McClusky: I think James pretty much got it all just right there. I suppose the controversial part is Jason embraces the Red State strategy, which was specifically to appeal to conservative people in conservative states, to say that your public schools were teaching a lot of non-conservative things and that you want school choice in order to escape them when that argument was being made, some folks might remember there was sort of some debate within the school choice community about, well, should we make that argument or not? But I think his basic argument is, politically to succeed, you need to appeal to the people who are gonna vote on it and in the places where it’s being voted on. And that means showing people why school choice would benefit them.

[00:45:17] And so I think then the next question is when somebody writes the next history of school choice after the next. After history of school choice or the future history or whatever you’d call it unfolds is well, is there a purple state strategy? Is there a blue state strategy that’ll eventually get school choice into states where there are people who tend to, I think just philosophically be more opposed to school choice and more in favor of public schooling.

[00:45:45] And Alisha, you mentioned the federal scholarship tax credit, that might be the sort of thing where future historians are talking about as the mechanism that started to move private school choice into these purple and blue states.

[00:46:00] Alisha Searcy: Very interesting. Well, guys, this has been fantastic. I think Albert and I have both learned quite a bit as we’ve talked to you today.

[00:46:08] So thanks so much for taking the time to be with us. Thanks for your book.

[00:46:12] James Shuls: Our pleasure. Oh, thank you.

[00:46:26] Alisha Searcy: Well, Albert, that was pretty fascinating. I really learned a lot about the history of education in this country.

[00:46:32] Albert Cheng: Yeah, yeah. You know, Alisha, I, I had the, uh, privilege of attending a panel that they put together at a conference. It’s been a couple years now where they were presenting some initial look at some of the chapters in this volume. And I remember sitting there thinking like, man, I can’t wait to read this book. So it’s great to have, have him on the show.

[00:46:49] Alisha Searcy: Yes. And now here we are getting to interview them. Very, very good. So great show. Before we go though, we’ve gotta talk about the tweet of the week, and it comes from Chalkbeat and the article is teachers, parents, and students. What’s your take on homework?

[00:47:04] Albert Cheng: Is it homework?

[00:47:05] Alisha Searcy: Yes. And it was really cool. So for our listeners, check it out. Especially if you are a teacher, parent, or student, they actually have a survey and they wanna know. How you’re doing homework, because there’s a whole debate, as we all know. You know, is homework effective?

[00:47:21] Do you get grades on it? I just had this, actually, this debate yesterday with a friend. Mm-hmm. So make sure you check that out as this debate continues and help to inform more writing, I’m guessing, on what the outcome is on the status of homework in America.

[00:47:36] Albert Cheng: Yeah. Well, it looks like our listeners have homework.

[00:47:39] Well, I don’t know. I had to drop a dry joke in there. I guess.

[00:47:42] Alisha Searcy: That was perfect. That was, do you do dad jokes? That was a good one. That was a good one. Well, as always, Albert, great to be with you. Great show today. Make sure you join us next week. We’re going to have Willard Sterne Randall. He’s an American historian and an author of Alexander Hamilton.

[00:48:00] A life and the founder’s fortune, how money shaped the birth of America. So be sure to check us out next week. Have a good one, everybody. Thanks Albert.

[00:48:10] Albert Cheng: Alright, thank you. And see everybody later.