This post originally appeared at https://www.badgerinstitute.org/the-parent-revolution-qa-with-corey-deangelis/

Corey DeAngelis went from being a doctoral student studying Milwaukee’s pathbreaking experiment in school choice (and finding that it led to better civic behavior in adulthood) to being a full-time advocate of school choice.

His forthcoming book, “The Parent Revolution: Rescuing Your Kids from the Radicals Ruining Our Schools” is a chronicle of the explosion of school choice over the past few years — one that DeAngelis sees as having been set off by teachers unions’ antics arousing parents. Now, states not only are permitting families to use state school aid at they see best, they are giving choice to parents of all incomes.

DeAngelis spoke this week with the Badger Institute’s policy director, Patrick McIlheran, about the future of school choice in Wisconsin and nationwide.

McIlheran: In the book, what struck me is the role of the pandemic in changing the dynamics of school choice. There are suddenly a lot more people paying attention to this, aren’t there?

DeAngelis: Right, and I think it’s because the teachers union has overplayed their hand and awakened a sleeping giant —which happens to be parents who have more of a say in their kids’ education — when they’ve lobbied the (Centers for Disease Control) to make the schools close as long as possible.

They were threatening safety strikes in 2020. Some unions were posting interpretive dance videos to protest going back to work. Unions all across the country were using fake body bags, coffins, and tombstones to protest going back to work.

The silver lining was that families who thought their kids were in good public schools, based on the rankings from the state, started to see another dimension of school quality that’s arguably more important than a standardized test score — which is whether the school’s curriculum aligns with family values.

Parents seeing that their kids are being brainwashed with radical ideologies in the classroom was more, much more of a motivation for them to fight for real systemic change than something that can be captured by a standardized test, particularly because the most advantaged, politically savvy or politically powerful groups of parents weren’t as motivated before the pandemic because they thought things were okay.

All of a sudden, with the school closures, you have a much broader coalition of families fighting for school choice than we’ve ever seen before.

We had zero states with universal school choice before. And then since 2021, we now have 11 in this short period of time. So, we’ve had more big victories on school choice in the past three years than we’ve had in the past three decades — or in the preceding three decades.

Q: There was a sort of powerful inertia to believe that your kids’ school is fine, that “Mrs. Schwartz isn’t one of the bad teachers,” isn’t going to put up an “I’m your mother now” poster. That’s something that stems from human psychology, right? I don’t want to have to uproot my kids.

A: I think it’s a form of Stockholm Syndrome. And the reason I say that is because you’re right that, in general, people don’t like the public school system. In fact, Gallup’s polling most recently showed an all-time low in support or confidence in the public school system, especially among Republicans in particular. I think that was below 10% of Republicans have confidence in the public school system.

But it’s kind of like with your congressmen. Nobody likes Congress, but everybody likes their own Congress member.

With the public school system, I think it’s even worse than the Congress analogy because parents don’t want to admit that they’re sending their kids to institutions that are hurting them. I think it is a psychological coping mechanism to say things are okay with your public school.

Q: In the book, you bring up the whole dynamic of exit and voice as the ways to improve an organization that you’re in. It sounds like these two things go together. What do parents who stick with the incumbent, government-run school system care about with choice? What does it matter to them? How does it improve their life? My guess is that it has something to do with that ability to exit.

A:I think the only true form of accountability, the best form of accountability is from the bottom up, allowing families to choose the school that best meets their needs and aligns with their values, which also should provide competitive pressures for the public schools to improve. We saw this in Milwaukee. I believe there have been at least five studies finding positive effects of competitive pressures from private school choice on the Milwaukee public schools. Nationwide, the evidence shows the same results, that 26 to 29 studies find positive effects with private school choice competition on the outcomes in the public schools.

A lot of people may argue, “Well, I don’t want to leave. I don’t want to have to switch schools.” And what I point out in the book is that, with school choice, even if you don’t want to leave your public school, this might actually reduce the likelihood that you need to leave if they start focusing more on the basics, they stop focusing on left-wing ideology, and instead start improving academic outcomes. And that’s what the literature mostly suggests on the topic.

Q: So it’s that schools can’t take parents for granted.

A: Right, because if you’re a monopoly and you have no incentive to listen to families, you’re more likely to view parents and their children as a nuisance as opposed to a customer. But choice changes that power dynamic, levels the playing field, and puts parents in the driver’s seat so when parents become upset in the future, if they aren’t satisfied for whatever reason, then the providers of education services, the school boards and the school districts, would have a much stronger incentive to listen to them as opposed to just labeling them as evil people and trying to bully and silence them into submission.

Q: You pointed out that the story since the pandemic is that unions are fighting parents. They’re not seeing parents as customers. They’re seeing them as enemies. Did they intend that or did they just stumble into that?

A: I think it’s a deeply held belief and it stems in paternalism that they are the experts, the parents don’t know what’s best, and that the government should be in charge of children’s education.

I think there is this socialist ideology on the radical left that your kids belong to the state, the money that’s meant for educating them belongs to the government, and that if you don’t like it, then too bad.

Q: You’ve got this other and more powerful stream of moral values. There’s sort of this notion that the public schools are a values-neutral zone, so, at least your kid won’t be indoctrinated there.

A: There’s no such thing as a values-neutral school. Even if the curriculum looks values-neutral on paper, there’s only so many things, one, that you can fit into the curriculum, so your choices about what is included in the curriculum will have some bias introduced to it.

Secondly, curriculum and pedagogy are two different things. Just because the curriculum might look okay on paper, you might have employees in the system who teach that curriculum through a CRT lens, for example, or through a Marxist ideology lens or through just a basic left-leaning lens. And that could be what parents are upset about.

It reminds me of my first study on the topic of school choice. When I was at the University of Arkansas, I was completing my Ph.D. in education policy. My first study actually looked at the Milwaukee voucher program and followed those students from when the program started until they were about 25 to 30 years of age.

And, in Wisconsin, you’re able to look up people’s criminal records. We obviously didn’t share them publicly, but we found substantial evidence to suggest that the school choice program in Milwaukee reduced crime substantially for different types of crime.

That’s compelling evidence that might not be captured in a test score. But if the schools are competing based on character development and parents are choosing schools based on their culture and their specialized mission, and also if they’re choosing schools for religious education, that also might help with providing a moral foundation for that child to where they might be less likely to commit crimes as adults — all else equal.

Q: You’ll hear critics of choice saying that we’re just funding schools that will indoctrinate children into being this religion or that, but the result here seems to have been it’s indoctrinating children into being nice.

A: A good form of indoctrination. And guess what: It’s the parents choosing for their own kid. That is not as problematic as the government or someone else molding the minds of other people’s children in a worldview that the parents vehemently disagree with.

The public schools, in many cases, have their own form of religion and it is that they worship the state or they worship woke-ism — whatever you would like to call it. But at the end of the day, the main problem that school choice advocates point out is that we force families into a one-size-fits-all system that is, by definition, never going to meet the needs of diverse parents who just disagree about how they want their kids raised.

Q: There’s sort of an asymmetry going on, an asymmetry of time. Parenthood is brief. Give it eight, 12 years, and the kids are past school, and you’ve got a lot of other things to do as a parent. But the school administrator who opposes choice, they’re still going to be there. Is this a danger to the ongoing revolution on the part of parents, that you always have a new generation of parents who you have to activate?

A: No, because once parents get a taste of school choice, they fight really hard to keep it. We’ve had 11 states pass universal school choice already in just a few years. And once those families get scholarships and those programs keep expanding, you’re going to have a vested interest in keeping the programs around.

Two, I think with social media, even though we don’t have cameras in classrooms, we have a lot more sunlight than we’ve ever had. And sunlight is the best disinfectant.

I think the jig is up for the teachers unions. I think we’re going to continue winning. The school choice revolution will continue to unfold right before our very eyes. And there’s not a dang thing that the unions can do to stop it at this point.

Yes, they have a stranglehold over children’s education in blue states. But we do live in a country with 50 laboratories of democracy. And as more red states pass school choice, it may become more palatable for blue states to come along later on. And the more that the GOP leans into parental rights as a political winner, the more it will become a form of political suicide for Democrats to oppose it.

We … saw this with J.B. Pritzker in Illinois. Three weeks before election day in 2022, he responded to a candidate survey saying he supported the same private school choice program that he vowed to eliminate when he first ran for governor back in 2017.

Q: There’s an element of feedback loop here, isn’t there, if even J.B. Pritzker says yes to school choice. That has to send a signal to parents who weren’t thinking much about it before, a signal that this is a thing.

A: Exactly. Some of this shift happened in Wisconsin, too. Wisconsin has been a long-time leader on school choice, with the Milwaukee private school choice program and now having a statewide program.

Republicans did pass a universal school choice bill a couple of years and sent it to the governor. Tony Evers did veto that bill that would have made Wisconsin one of the first states to pass universal school choice. Shame on him for doing so.

But there was talk about the new Supreme Court in Wisconsin actually eliminating the private school choice program. Before they made their final decision not to hear the lawsuit to kill the program, Evers had released a statement. He was warning that it would cause a lot of disruption to low-income families already benefiting from these private school choice programs. For him to acknowledge the disaster that would unfold shows that he probably was reading the tea leaves a bit as well.

Just imagine how much of a PR disaster that would have been for the Wisconsin Democrats to have evidence of them literally ripping scholarships out of the hands of low-income families and forcing them back into the government school system that they desperately tried to escape.

And Evers also signed a bill this past year to increase the funding for students in the private school choice program. It didn’t expand eligibility, but it did allow for more of the funding to follow the child to students who were already eligible for the funding. That’s good news, too. Even though he did veto the full-throated school choice bill, there were things that he did that might have surprised school choice advocates a few years ago.

Corey DeAngelis, a senior fellow at the American Federation for Children, is coming to Wisconsin later this month: The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty is hosting DeAngelis at a book signing event on Wednesday, May 22, at the Ingleside Hotel in Pewaukee from 5:30 to 7 p.m.; you can find details here.

Patrick McIlheran is the Director of Policy at the Badger Institute. Permission to reprint is granted as long as the author and Badger Institute are properly cited. This conversation was edited for clarity and length.

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