School Choice - Past, Present, And Future

>> Steve Bowen: Good morning, everybody. Welcome to this morning's event. My name is Steve Bowen. I'm the executive director of the Hoover Education Success Initiative, a project here at the Hoover Institution. Very pleased and honored to have you here today for our event on the Past, Present and Future of School Choice.

So for those of you who celebrate, this is School Choice Week, National School Choice Week, which was put in place in 2011, I believe, as an opportunity to every year sort of look back across the growth of school choice across the nation in the last few years. And as those of you who study this field know, there's been a lot of changes in school choice over the last few years.

We're gonna spend some time today talking about that. So we're gonna begin our program today with a virtual interview with Governor Mitch Daniels, who until very recently was the president of Purdue University, and obviously, the former governor of Indiana. And he'll be in an interview with our director of the Hoover Institution, Condoleezza Rice.

And they'll talk over the work that was done in Indiana when Mitch was the governor there. Really a pioneering state in terms of school choice, and talk about how that happened and what has happened since then, the impact of those programs. We'll then turn to our research panel.

So these are folks that have worked with us here at Hoover and produced some terrific research reports on school choice. So we're gonna be joined shortly in the second half of the program by Paul Peterson, who's a senior fellow here at Hoover and at Harvard University. Anna Egalite, who's a visiting fellow here at Hoover, joining us from North Carolina State University, and Patrick Wolf, who's joining us from University of Arkansas.

All of whom have done tremendous work on research on school choice. So we'll do a roundtable panel to discuss what's been happening in school choice, and what do we see coming ahead in the years to come or even the days or months to come. We're seeing a lot of work happening in the States as we speak.

Just one other housekeeping item before we get started, I wanna draw your attention to the school choice related resources on the hoover.org website. Chief among those is our school choice map, which is something we released just last fall. And we've been updating that resource as we've been going.

So you can go on there and find some research and information about all the school choice programs in the country. And you'll also be able to find on the website a whole slew of research reports, again, including reports done by all three of our research panelists today. So we're again very thrilled to have you here, honored to have you here.

We're going to be recording today's event, so please take this opportunity to silence your devices. And we're just looking forward to a tremendous program today. So with that, I will turn it over to our director, Condoleezza Rice.

>> Condoleeza Rice: Thank you very much, Steve, and welcome to the Hoover Institution.

I look forward to the conversation with my good friend and longtime colleague, Mitch Daniels. Hello, Mitch. How are you?

>> Mitch Daniels: I am fine, Condy.

>> Condoleeza Rice: Great, I understand it's snowing in Indiana, so you can always come to Hoover anytime you want.

>> Mitch Daniels: It always sounds attractive, and especially today.

 

>> Condoleeza Rice: So, Mitch, our topic today is school choice. And under your leadership in Indiana, you were really a pioneer in the school choice movement. So I'd like to take you back in time a little bit. Tell us how this developed. How did this become a central part of the goals that you wanted to achieve as Indiana's governor?

 

>> Mitch Daniels: It was a goal of mine from the day I sought that office, and it took a long time to be practical of achievement, Condy. But I always felt very strongly about the issue for multiple reasons, not simply the educational quality that I thought competition would enhance in the public schools as well as non-government schools.

But also for what I consider the social justice dimensions of this issue. So I was for it all along, but for six years, we made only incremental progress in education reform. Some of it was meaningful, but none of it involved the subject we're discussing here today until we were able to achieve a major breakthrough, captured the house of the legislature which had been in the hands of the loyal opposition the previous four years.

And at that point, we ran the table on education reform, which included many other long time goals of mine, collective bargaining reform, performance based pay and other things. But it took a lot of patience, honestly. But when we got our chance in the opening in 2011, we went for it in a big way, and there were really very few things that we were able to do in all those years that were as gratifying as that.

 

>> Condoleeza Rice: I know, Mitch, that there's a lot of hand to hand combat in anything like this. You're really working with the legislature, you're working with other constituencies, but there's also a public facing part of it. It's making the argument, if you will, creating the narrative around school choice.

And it seems to me that you did that exceedingly well when you actually make the argument about school choice as one of the social justice of a civil right for parents, no matter their means, to be able to educate their children as best they can. Can you talk a little bit about the public facing side of this?

Cuz I know you spent a lot of time, so to speak, on the stump talking about it.

>> Mitch Daniels: And I think people interested in this subject, in public life, have to take on the responsibility for doing that. One reason that reform comes so rarely, so slowly, and sometimes so fleetingly to education is that the establishment, the educrat establishment, is permanent.

Parents who are dissatisfied or become interested in bringing change come and go as their children age. And so the system has a way of outweighing citizen reforms. But therefore, people in positions of public authority, I think, have a very special responsibility in this area, and I did try to undertake it very sincerely.

But also, I think, in terms of the attracting others to the issue, stressing the social justice aspect is, to me, primary. Here's a very misused term, in my opinion. What is justice has been one of the primary questions of philosophy for centuries, and nobody owns that word. And so, whatever social justice means, it has to include the concept that people of all means and all stations in life should have the same right to make this fundamental decision about their child's education as their wealthy neighbors do.

And frankly, as a majority of public school teachers do. So that was always the lead in the argument. Yes, I think the evidence, and Hoover's been a terrific contributor to this, people like Dr. Peterson. Yes, I believe that the educational benefits are plain for those students whose parents make a different choice.

Yes, I do believe that the competition improves all schools, ultimately, if it's allowed to flourish. But I think the most important, and I think probably most persuasive argument to many other people is, look, this is simply a matter of simple fairness and justice. And why should low income families, minority families, inner city families be told that their children are incarcerated in a school that may be very substandard, not just educationally, but in terms of the physical safety of their kid?

 

>> Condoleeza Rice: You make a really good point, which is, in fact, we do have a choice system. If I am of means, I can move to a district where the schools are good, that's a choice. I can send my kids to private school, that's a choice. So in a sense, what you're saying is that the only people who don't have those choices are people who are not of means.

And so in a sense, school choice is an opportunity to level the playing field, if you will, for the parents of poorer kids.

>> Mitch Daniels: That is absolutely, I believe, the right way and the most understandable and appealing way to look at this problem. I want to mention another corner of this, Condi.

In Indiana, yes, we did inaugurate what are now almost universal scholarships, or as most people say, vouchers. But that was only one aspect of the choice we wanted to bring. And we have what amounts to a full range of choice, in my opinion, vouchers for non governmental schools, the nation's, each year our charter school legislation, our charter school laws on the books, are voted the best in the country, the most open to innovation in the public school system.

And also, as a consequence of the way we cut property taxes in Indiana, families can now move from one public school to another public school without paying tuition. And frankly, there is as much of that that goes on as the actual exercise of the vouchers. So last I checked, something in excess of a quarter of all Indiana students had chosen a school other than the one they would have been assigned in the old traditional system through one of these three means.

 

>> Condoleeza Rice: Well, that's a really important point. When we did our school choice map here at the Hoover institution, we were trying to explore all the possible elements of choice. We tend to think about choices, vouchers or maybe charter schools. But you did really expand on those ideas and kind of a leader, maybe with our good friend Jeb Bush, in having a variety of ways to allow parents to have choices.

You also had a tax deduction program. So that's another aspect. So I know you probably have some war stories on how one gets those kinds of things done, given all the opposition. Take us inside some of those discussions, some of the arm twisting, maybe that was necessary to get this done.

 

>> Mitch Daniels: I'd like to think of it in terms of friendly persuasion. But it's absolutely true that even after with a very conscious purpose, we raised a lot of money and as I say, it got a lot of people elected. This would have been in the 2010 elections and swept a very large majority in and made all these changes and other reforms like the right to work law, for instance, possible.

That wasn't the end of the job. We had to reason with a lot of people who were allies who were still not sure about this particular issue. Many of them had been worked over pretty well by the best funded and most sophisticated political interest group in our state, and many, which is the teachers unions.

And many of them bore the scars of some past encounters there where if you try to change anything, you're immediately labeled as anti teacher and cheap shots of that sort. So we did have some missionary work to do there with them. And there were many rural members, for instance, who just didn't see this as particularly relevant to their districts.

They didn't think there were or would be practical options. I will say as an economic purist that I often tend to be, early on, I imagined that if we could just make this breakthrough, people said, well, there are so many places where there aren't non governmental schools. And I said, well, the demand will call the supply into existence.

That has happened to some extent. A number of, for instance, of the parochial schools that were thinking of closing are now not only open but flourishing. And there are some new schools who have come along, but not as many as one might have imagined, or that in theory we might have predicted.

But what has happened is, as I say, a lot of charter schools and a lot of movement from out of failing public districts into nearby, more successful ones.

>> Condoleeza Rice: It's one of the things that we did note when we did the map, is you'll see that there's some states that you might expect actually to be on the choice side, but because of the rural issue, you see less there.

So how did you bring those particular districts along? Because Indiana has some of them. Some states are almost completely rural. States like the Dakotas, for instance, have tended not to have as much in the way of choice, so, yeah.

>> Mitch Daniels: It was probably harder than I'm reminiscing nostalgically now.

I'd like to think that in many cases we simply persuaded people. I mean, we brought parents of children who were earnestly seeking this in to meet with legislators. It's pretty hard to be dismissive of this issue when you've met parents who literally not only believe their child will be poorly educated, but maybe in physical danger in a given school.

Absent these reforms, we certainly did a lot of that. We did a lot of public advocacy. Back to your first question, which tried to provide some air cover. For a legislator who says, well, it's not very relevant to my district. Why do I wanna fight, be in the gun sites of my teachers union when there's no particular benefit to my constituents?

So we tried to provide a little bit of supportive cover there. And yes, I mean, there were a few, I think, that we had to say, well, there's some things we know are important to you, but we're not interested in talking about them unless you help us with this all important issue for children.

 

>> Condoleeza Rice: That's the arm twisting part, right? The gentle persuasion part.

>> Mitch Daniels: Yes, friendly persuasion. I always prefer to think of it that way.

>> Condoleeza Rice: Friendly persuasion, yeah, absolutely. So let's go back for a moment. I personally don't understand how you make an argument against school choice and parental choice.

Given that I often say, Mitch, don't write an editorial in the Washington Post about how school choice will destroy the schools and then send your kids to sit well friends, right? Send them to Anacostia, and then we can talk. So I've never quite understood how one makes an argument against this.

What are some of the scare tactics stories that people threw up as you were moving down this road?

>> Mitch Daniels: You just named the main one the main line of argument. Just because it's specious doesn't mean it can't be effective. If you think about the education reform landscape broadly, the biggest misconception red herring of all has been that money equals care, concern, and improvement.

If anything's wrong, you're supposed to send more money. And so when people say that it will deprive the public schools of funds, it's not true, of course, in the sense that dollars per student go up, not down. In most school choice regimes, you rarely transfer all the money that a given student would otherwise be bringing with her or him.

But that doesn't mean it doesn't have salience. And everything gets translated into being anti the system, anti-teacher, and often that's quite enough. Along with the muscle that the union tends to bring politically to these debates, I can't honestly think of. Occasionally there'll be a challenge to the idea that the education gets better.

People cherry pick data, and what this overlooks, and I know I've mentioned it twice already, but I think something that is too often de-emphasized or underemphasized in this discussion, is safety. If you've met as many parents as I have, in inner city neighborhoods, particularly, who are desperate, who are in waiting lists, who want to get their child to some different environment.

More often than not, the quality of English and math instruction is second. More often than that, they really want their child in a safe and stable place of schooling, which, of course, is a prerequisite to schooling anyway. Nobody learns in a classroom. There's all kind of data on this.

It takes just one disruptive boy, and the data is usually about boys, in a class of 25 or 30 to lower the outcomes for everybody else. And so that's one reason I try to keep reminding people that there aren't too many people who can't relate to that. Some may be confused about whether the schooling is really better or not, but everybody can understand a parent's desire to shield their child from possible physical harm.

 

>> Condoleeza Rice: So it's been about a little more than a decade since the passage of the landmark legislation that really got all of this started. If you could reflect a little bit on what these programs have wrought, and maybe from the perspective of having perhaps seen some of these young people, you were, until very recently, the president of Purdue.

I just have to say you did a lot of very, very innovative things at Purdue, too. And so maybe we'll come back and one day have a conversation about how to reform higher education, which could use some attention to. But as the president of Purdue, did you see some of these kids come through?

Did you hear from families and just reflect a little bit on a little more than a decade of having really led on this school choice issue?

>> Mitch Daniels: I did, I had students come up and mention it. I have some really moving letters and emails that I got from parents who said, but for this program, my child wouldn't be there or wouldn't be wherever they are in school and in life.

And so there's no question that we know that it made a positive difference in the lives of many, many young people. Now, I will say that, and this applies as much to other changes that we brought in this comprehensive. This was a part of an omnibus education reform bill, we just ran the table when we got the chance.

And a key lesson looking back there is just passing wise and important legislation isn't enough. There has to be implementation. If the friends of the status quo get their hands on the levers, as they did in our state following our eight years, for the next several years, their superintendent of public instruction was hostile to the reforms and hostile to school choice.

And there's an awful lot of ways that the system can throw sand in the gears and impede what was progress. In the first NAEP, National Assessment of Educational Progress, that following the passage of our school choice and other reforms, Indiana had the biggest jump in the nation. Arne Duncan, President Obama's secretary of education, singled out Indiana's reading and other gains and said, Indiana, I think he said, knocked it out of the park.

There's been some progress since then in results, but more slow than I would have hoped and wished. And I guess the lesson I take from that is you can't simply make a breakthrough. And I'm delighted to see breakthroughs now in many other states, but the job's not done and the system never goes away.

And so somebody needs to keep watching and try to make certain that it's implemented, that parents know of their choices and are here and there helped to make the right one.

>> Condoleeza Rice: And let me just, on that point, let me close with you, kind of looking out into the future.

We are here in National School Choice week. There have been some really big wins, most recently in Iowa. Arizona is a state that everyone would point to, so let's say we're here a year from now. What would be your hopes about where we might be? You mentioned not going backwards, and you've also mentioned the connection to the electoral system.

It has been in some ways, some of this has been bipartisan, as you mentioned, Arne Duncan and the Obama administration. But this relationship between politics and the process of school choice, not just passing the legislation but actually getting things implemented, what are your hopes about what we would be saying a year from now, if we're sitting here for next year's National School Choice week?

 

>> Mitch Daniels: That we'd be citing another two or three or four states which have, one way or another, joined the movement for progress, that we would once again be able to say, and I don't track all these surveys. But the public opinion survey questions, answers I've seen on this topic lately are becoming overwhelming.

I believe I've seen approval for this general concept at very large majorities now, and that that would be increasing. And I would hope we would see public officials, especially those of what we would probably label more conservative persuasions. Seeing both the imperative but also the political opportunity here to align with people who they've not historically attracted or been associated with, with a whole heart and a clear and a happy conscience.

People should embrace this and elevate it in their hierarchy of topics to talk to the public about. And as they do, they'll be standing up for people who deserve it and who may begin to look at them in a different way. So I would hope we'd see a lot more of all of that.

 

>> Condoleeza Rice: Well, thank you so much, Mitch. It's great to be with you, Governor Daniels. President Daniels, I meant president of Purdue, although. Really, we are so grateful to you for spending this time with us and go Boilingmakers. They got a pretty good basketball team this year.

>> Mitch Daniels: Better than good.

Well, no subject I'm happier to discuss and nobody I'm ever happier to discuss anything with. Condi, thanks for having me.

>> Condoleeza Rice: Great to be with you. Thanks so much.

>> Mitch Daniels: Bye bye.

>> Steve Bowen: Researcher panel speaker join us on the stage, and as they get settled, I'll do some quick introductions.

So down on the end, we have Patrick Wolf, who's a distinguished professor at 21st Century Chair of School Choice, the Department of Education reform at the University of Arkansas School of Education and Health Professions. We have Paul Peterson here in the middle, the senior fellow here at the Hoover Institution and professor of government at Harvard and director of Harvard's program on education policy and governance.

And Anna Igalite here on the end, who's a visiting fellow here at Hoover, an associate professor in the developmental education leadership, policy and human development at North Carolina State. So with that, I'll turn it back to the Director Rice for the panel.

>> Condoleeza Rice: Well, thank you very much.

Well, we just talked about how great leadership in a state can actually bring about real change. What we do here at Hoover is we are not a political organization, but what we try to do is to do the best research that we possibly can on issues of public policy and make that available to people who can then carry it into the policy and political sphere.

And I have here on stage with me three people who are doing precisely that. And so welcome, Paul. Great to have you here, but also really glad to have Patrick and Anna here. So let me just start with you, Paul. Let's just begin. We noted with Governor Daniels that 2020 was a big year for school choice.

It does feel like there's energy here, maybe some of its parents seeing what happened in COVID, maybe it's people finally getting the social justice argument. But what has been the big news from your point of view from last year, and where are we now?

>> Paul Peterson: Well, thank you, Condi, for arranging this event.

I'm especially excited to be on the stage with my former student Patrick Wolf, who knows so much about this topic and has done so much, and with Anna Igalate, who worked with Patrick and worked with me. And Hoover has always played such an important role in sustaining me in this field of activity over the years.

So it's just great to have this opportunity. Now when we look to what is happening, the Iowa events are really quite interesting, and I think in two respects. First of all, Iowa is a, I would call it an orange state. I decided to wear an orange tie here, too.

It's not a deep red state, and it shows that the conversation is widening on choice. The pandemic definitely widened the conversation. People began to think about options out there. There's a much more serious attention given to school choice. Enrollments in the traditional public school are down by about a million as compared to before the pandemic.

And enrollments in charter schools and private schools are up and homeschooling is sort of exploding out there. So there's now 6% of the population are being homeschooled. So public opinion is changing and state legislatures are enacting school choices. In 2021, 20 states expanded their school choice program in one way or another.

So Iowa, that was in 2023, 2022 was sort of a re-election year, right? Everybody was worried about re-election, they didn't do much. But now 2023 is on hand. It looked like we could see some further steps forward in 2023, if Iowa is any hint of what is to come.

The second thing that's interesting thing about Iowa is that the school choice program enacted there is the education savings accounts. Now it's the 9th state to have enacted a law which is called an Education Savings Account, or ESA, as the abbreviation goes. And ESAs are the newest and most popular form of school choice out there.

If you do the polling on things, it gets less criticism, less opposition. Both Democrats and Republicans like it. And so you say, well, what is an ESA? A lot of people have never heard of it before. So what's an ESA, and why is it actually getting a lot of traction?

And one key thing about an ESA is that it's very flexible. You can use the money that the state provides for you to do all kinds of different things. If you decide to move your child from a public school to a private school, it'll pay tuition. But you can also use this money for computers, for curricular supplies, for special courses that you may wanna take.

There's a whole range of things that you can do with the ESA. So more people are beginning to think that this is something that might be available to them. Now, they're designed in different ways in different states. Of course, the basic rule about everything about school choice is that it varies widely from one state to the next.

There's no one thing that you can say about it that's gonna be accurate in general across the country because there's so much variation. But ESAs are very flexible and they are being designed so that almost everybody can have an opportunity to do something about it. And I have one more point to make, and that is the Supreme Court is possibly going to take up a case this coming term in which it will open the possibility that we could have religious charter schools.

Charter schools are now thought to be state institutions. You cannot teach religion if you're a state institution. But the Supreme Court may find a way to rethink what a charter school is, because, after all, charter schools are operated by a nonprofit entity. Just like a lot of hospitals are operated by nonprofit entities, which also have religious activities taking place within them.

So that could change the landscape in rather dramatic ways. But finally, having said all of that, the choice movement is still a relatively small part of the landscape. As much as you see growth out there, it's still the case that four out of five kids are going to their traditional public school.

So some of the choice opportunities that Governor Daniels talked about and what you talked about, Condi, within the traditional public school sector are going to have to be part of the choice landscape if we're really gonna provide everybody with choice.

>> Condoleeza Rice: Paul, this idea, the point about religious schools, really very interesting.

Because, of course, in higher education, the federal government has never been worried about with Pell grants or others, supporting Notre Dame or Catholic or other religious institutions. And so there probably are ways to think about this that might actually.

>> Paul Peterson: Of course, almost every other industrial country in the world provides money to religious schools, whether they're Canadians or British or French or German or Australian or Italian, you name it.

They provide money to secular schools and religious schools and treat them pretty much on the same basis. We're outliers in that regard.

>> Condoleeza Rice: Patrick, let me turn to you. You've been doing this for a while, and I'd like you to take a little bit of a journey of where this was when you started and where you think we are now in terms of the landscape.

 

>> Patrick Wolf: Sure, thank you. And I'm proud to be a member of the Paul Peterson coaching tree and School of Choice. I think it rivals Mike Shanahan's in the NFL. So when Paul and I started evaluating these programs back in the early aughts, there were a few small urban programs in Milwaukee and Cleveland.

They had been the product of sort of a strange bedfellows political coalition, urban African American progressive Democrats partnering with free market conservatives enacting those early programs. And then there were some philanthropists who wanted to see what broader school choice could do in terms of transforming students, parents, schools and communities.

And so we started evaluating these privately funded scholarship programs in New York City, Dayton and DC, and started to document the various positive effects that choice has on student outcomes. Fast forward, 25 years and choices just exploded across the country. There are now over 700,000 students enrolled in 76 different programs in 32 states plus the district of Columbia and Puerto Rico.

And the research also, I think, has expanded, evolved, and diversified. Where it's looking at a variety of things besides just test score outcomes. It's looking at parent empowerment, it's looking at student educational attainment. Far and long, students stay engaged in the educational project. It's looking at school safety.

And it's in many of these sort of character outcomes where we're seeing the most consistent and most transformative positive effects of school choice.

>> Condoleeza Rice: Let me just, Paul mentioned some of the factors that might have been leading to. It does feel as if there was, there's been a moment lately.

So talk a little bit about why you think we are seeing this, as you call it, explosion across the country, because if you could bottle it, maybe you could get an even bigger explosion. So talk a little bit about why.

>> Patrick Wolf: Well, I mean, I think part of it, I know Paul mentioned that Iowa is not exactly a red state, and there certainly are many states, Illinois, Rhode island, that are actually quite blue and have adopted school choice programs.

But I think the current wave is really being driven in part, in large part by the fact that the Republican Party has placed parental empowerment through school choice at the center of their education platforms. And so new governors and new legislators in red states are on fire for school choice.

And so I think certainly the current wave of program enactments and program expansions are going to be primarily in red states because support for parental choice has become a litmus test in the Republican Party.

>> Condoleeza Rice: Anna, let me turn to you. You're with us here as a research fellow and visiting research fellow.

We're very excited about having you here. The next generation, no offense, Patrick and Paul, of people who will carry this work forward. And I'd like to pose something to you about the research. Opponents of school choice actually argue that the research on school choice programs is mixed at best, they would say, and that there's a sort of damage to traditional schools that isn't taken into account.

So talk a little bit about what the research is telling us about school choice and what you think the future of that research might look like.

>> Anna Egalite: Thank you, I would love to do nothing more. So when we think about participants that are part of these programs, we can think about the outcomes as being short run and long run outcomes.

And I think a lot of the critics are very focused on the short run outcomes, the test score outcomes, and we're very lucky. There's not many areas of public policy where we can point to so many experimental evaluations. There's been over a dozen since 1999 of private school choice programs, and nine of those show positive effects for participants.

A sizable number, but six show null effects. And really, there's two studies that are experimental in nature that found a negative effect, and they're pretty recent studies, both of the Louisiana Scholarship Program. So there's something to be learned there. But I also think that we waste time if we only focus on those short run outcomes.

There's quite a growing body of the long run outcomes, and those are the things that we arguably care a lot more about. So things like high school graduation. So Patrick has a study in Washington, DC, an experimental study, which is the gold standard, showing that students that received a voucher graduated high school at a rate that's 21 percentage points higher.

That's life changing. Similarly, in Milwaukee, the effect there was a little bit smaller. So four percentage points. When we look at the college outcomes, it's one thing to graduate high school, but do they really enroll? There's very consistent evidence there from New York City, from Milwaukee, from Florida.

And in every one of those studies, it was about a six percentage point advantage for students that received the vouchers. Interestingly, in Florida, they were also able to follow up and say, did they actually finish the degree? And as you can imagine, that's a really important outcome for us to look at.

And it's true that on average, about one to two percentage points, the higher likelihood of actually obtaining a bachelor's degree for students that participated in the scholarship program there, the longer they spent in the program, the bigger the impact is. So if you entered the Florida tax credit scholarship program in high school and you spent three years, at least in the program, that's a five percentage point higher likelihood that you went on and actually got a bachelor's degree afterwards.

The second part of your question is about the traditional public schools, how they have been affected by this. And there is a very wide body of literature on this. So I did a synthesis a few years ago that summarized 21 studies. In no case have we ever found a study that showed public schools have been hurt academically by voucher programs.

And so it's consistently no effect or a small positive effect. And the most informative study on this comes from Florida, because their program is so old now. So David Figlio led a team that tracked the program over a 15 year time period, where it expanded dramatically. So the number of students participating grew sevenfold over this time period.

And so you can say, well, what happens to the public schools over that same time? And they found that math and reading test scores went up, absences went down, suspensions went down. It's a happy story all around.

>> Condoleeza Rice: Very happy story. And you would never know that from a lot of the reporting.

So, I'd like the others of you to talk a little bit about the research landscape and how you think about the questions that you would like to see research take up. I was really struck, Anna, by your point that there are outcomes other than test scores. There are outcomes about dropout rates.

There are outcomes about safety. There are outcomes about college participation and success. So it sounds like there's a lot of work to do. So first maybe to Patrick and then to Paul. How do you see the research landscape emerging?

>> Patrick Wolf: Well, I've organized a team of scholars to look at the civic outcomes of private schooling and private school choice programs, because I think that's one area that hasn't achieved its rightful position in the discussion.

Because from the founding of our republic, we've been concerned about schools preparing the next generation of citizens with their civic duties and civic dispositions and responsibilities for self government. So we're doing a meta analysis of all the findings that are out there regarding school choice and civic outcomes.

So it'll be interesting to see if private schools even do as well or better than government run schools in forming new citizens, since that's such a central goal of education. So that's where I'm sort of pushing kind of the frontier of my own team's research. Well, of course, the irony of education always is that it takes a long, long time in order to find out whether or not it really paid off.

So we have that with our own children. Will they make it to the next step? And that's sort of, it is with research. So as we are now able to look at people going through their lives, how are they living their lives? Are they doing it differently based on their experiences in high school and elementary school?

And did the opportunity of choice make any difference? And Anna has explained that we're beginning to see that with college enrollments. But there's a lot more. How about future earnings? How about family formation? How about intact marriages? There's just so many. The quality of life is really what we're really concerned about.

Do people lead better lives because they have choice? We think the early signs are positive, but we really don't know the long term story because it takes so long and so hard to collect that kind of information.

>> Condoleeza Rice: And is there good research on the impact of choice on the family, on the parents, on the siblings?

It seems to me, just as an outsider is very focused on what happens to that child, but there are a lot of other effects, and I'm just wondering the degree to which people study those. Anna, you want to?

>> Anna Egalite: Yeah, I agree that's really important. And as we collate these data sets across multiple state agencies, so linking commerce data with education data and building those longitudinal data sets.

We'll be much better positioned to be able to say, look, this child participated in a voucher program for this many years, and here's his siblings and here's his mom. And even as far as we have public sector teachers where we'll be able to go back in time and say, that person was also a recipient of a voucher and tracing it all the way back, I think those longitudinal data systems will be really key.

 

>> Condoleeza Rice: It sounds like that takes a lot of infrastructure to do it, though. And one of the things that I'd be interested in for a place like Hoover, and maybe, Paul, you're the person to address this, is to kind of think about places that might be able to build that infrastructure.

One of the advantages that we've had in my field in international politics, in particularly the security side, is there are a few places that have the full infrastructure to do that, and academics can tend to be kind of atomized in their own little silos. But these are the kinds of questions that you're asking, Anna, are really multidisciplinary questions.

And so, Paul, give us a little bit of advice here at a place like Hoover as to how we do this.

>> Paul Peterson: Well, of course, Hoover is so important because it is a place where you can really study issues without political constraints being placed upon you. And I have to say that schools of education around the United States tend to have a point of view, and there are exceptions, and the one that Patrick leads in Arkansas is a great big exception.

But in general, the opportunity to really delve into this and to study this in an independent way is a contribution that Hoover and very few other places can actually do. Hoover has this remarkable capacity to be an independent entity within a university. So it has all the great strengths of the university, the commitment to scholarship, to detachment, to objectivity, and at the same time, it doesn't have the political pressures on it that other units within the university increasingly are facing.

 

>> Condoleeza Rice: Patrick, do you wanna talk a little bit about that as well?

>> Patrick Wolf: So there are kind of two things here, right? It's external political pressure and also just the infrastructure of conducting research. And I think on the external political pressure, our big advantage in our department of education reform is we were formed with an endowment.

So a bit like the Hoover institution in that we have resources already committed, and with those resources come independence. We are a very heterodox group of scholars, as Anna knows from her time as a doctoral student, and we embrace the heterodoxy and celebrate it, and it is a source of enrichment in our discussion, in our research partnerships and such.

But also the resources do allow the building of research infrastructure. Now, Stanford here also has some important infrastructure. The CIDA database that Sean Reardon has put together is really important. And the fantastic databases that Mackie Raymond has put together for charter school performance, which I partner with her, and some of my charter school research on that.

So it's good research is really a team sport. It requires a lot of collaboration, it requires a lot of access. And I think the move to open science, data sharing, research partnerships across universities and across the country is going to create the opportunity for more of this longitudinal research that Anna and Paul were talking about.

 

>> Condoleeza Rice: So when we were talking with Mitch Daniels, he talked from the perspective of a political figure about the opposition that one faces in the school choice movement. So I'd like each of you to perhaps talk a little bit about that also. Does anybody study the opposition? Do we have a good sense of the strength of the opposition?

And one could imagine that there might be ways to really, there's a lot of anecdotal data, but what would we study if we wanted to do that? Anna, do you want to?

>> Anna Egalite: So, I'm not a political scientist, but yes, there are great people doing it. Michael Hartney over here, a visiting fellow at the moment, does great work on school boards, and I think there's a lot to be learned there.

I think that what gets lost in the political debates is the human element of who exercises choice. And something that has really struck me in my work is that even when a program is targeted for low and middle income families, the median user is extremely low income. They're extremely disadvantaged.

And I feel like opponents get hung up on the income cap, and they say, this is not a low income family. To say that 300% of the federal poverty line as an eligibility guideline is a good target to target our program towards. When we looked in North Carolina, where a family could earn up to $60,000 for a family of four to be participants in our voucher program, the median household income was actually $16,000.

And that's actually been been replicated in other states, too. In Louisiana, group of researchers there published a paper in 2018 that found similar $15,000 was the average family income. So I feel like we lose that human element when we get caught up in the political battles, because opponents do say these are programs for the privileged.

This is privatization, and it's a brain drain from our public schools. And that's the other point that is just not supported by any sort of empirical evidence. If you look at the academic profile of who's exiting a program, these are low achieving students coming from low achieving schools.

And even within their low achieving public school, they're on the very far left of that distribution. They are struggling, they are looking for an out. So I think using the data to really humanize the issue is key.

>> Condoleeza Rice: Yeah, absolutely. I'd like to do a study of the politicians who oppose school choice and where do their kids go to school.

That would be really interesting.

>> Paul Peterson: Yes, it is, there's plenty of evidence on that.

>> Steve Bowen: Yeah.

>> Paul Peterson: Actually, a lot of people oppose the school choice send their kids to private school.

>> Condoleeza Rice: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, Patrick, talk about this question about the understanding the opposition better.

>> Patrick Wolf: Sure, well, so I think one area of opposition that's been very difficult for supporters of school choice to get past, you referenced it, Director Rice, in your discussion with Governor Daniels, is rural legislators, rural state legislators in rural areas.

And because opponents of choice make two self-contradictory arguments about rural areas in school choice. They say, well, we don't have any private schools in our area, so none of my constituents are gonna benefit from school choice, but a choice program's gonna empty out and destroy the district run public schools.

Well, both of those can't be simultaneously true. And in fact, there's a really exciting out of Florida by Ron Mattis, where he looked at 30 rural school districts in Florida, tracked them over time as private school choice in Florida snowballed and expanded. And it's interesting, basically, the district run public schools lost enrollment share, but they gained enrollments.

Well, how does that happen? It happens because more families with children moved into rural areas because they knew they'd have school choice, and most of them enrolled their children in the district run public school. But it was important to them that they had a school choice option in case that didn't work out.

So in a sense, school choice, the availability of school choice can be a source of economic and population development for rural areas. They should be celebrating it. They should be welcoming it.

>> Condoleeza Rice: Interesting, Paul, do you wanna talk about the opposition and how-

>> Paul Peterson: I think we tend to say, okay, the unions oppose school choice and they throw everything they can against it.

They finance campaigns to state legislature, they campaign for school board members, they finance school board elections. They're all present at all levels of government. They are a very disciplined force, a very capable opposition. Teachers are well educated people and teachers are articulate people. And if you compare them to other unions, they are probably the best union at articulating their interests and expressing the perspective of their members and their interests as an organization.

But at the same time, you have a lot of opposition from the rest of the school system. School superintendents and school boards are very conscious of the problem that competition might create for them. And so I think Governor Daniels talked about that, and definitely that is something that legislators, especially rural legislators, are aware of.

A local superintendent is a very prominent figure in the community. School board members are very prominent figures in their communities, especially in rural areas. And if you're a state legislator and you're gonna take on these substantial figures, you're gonna do that only after a lot of thought and care and paying attention to who your opponent in the next election is going to be.

So, yeah, it's not just unions, it's a broader force than that.

>> Patrick Wolf: And if I could just add quickly one thing. So as political scientists, we learned that in policy environments where opposition to a policy has sort of concentrated interests, like the teachers union and the beneficiaries are diffuse and dispersed, that it's really difficult to get those kinds of policies passed.

Well, that was the environment for school choice for a long time. But what we're seeing, especially in the wake of the pandemic, is parents are getting organized. There are all these parent groups, parent empower groups, a parent union, moms for liberty. So the pro-school choice advocacy group is becoming politically organized in a way and to an extent that we haven't seen before, and that's transforming the political environment for choice.

 

>> Condoleeza Rice: I'm gonna come back at the very end here in a moment to ask your predictions of what we would be saying if we're sitting here a year from now for National School Choice Week. But I wanna pick up on the political side for just a moment. If you were advising, and a lot of this happens at the state level, if you were advising governors or advising those who wish to be governors and want to push the school choice movement ahead, what advice would you give them?

 

>> Anna Egalite: Well, I would start with open enrollment. So I live in North Carolina. We don't have open enrollment and it feels very unfair. If you look at the median home price in districts that have the highest performing public elementary schools, it's four times higher than the districts that the zip codes that have the lowest performing schools.

And the fact that over half our states don't even allow that sort of inter-district transfer feels very unjust. So I would start there with exercising public school choice. And the other thing I'd say is not to underestimate the wedge that ESAS education savings accounts might drive, because they're not just empowering parents, they're empowering teachers to access providers.

So all of a sudden there's this money for small scale customization on the margins and we need providers and teachers are very well positioned to become those entrepreneurs. And there's not a lot of attention being paid to that yet the Vela Education Fund are supporting some of those startups.

I think that's a really interesting space for us to watch and see where that innovation goes.

>> Condoleeza Rice: Fascinating.

>> Paul Peterson: So I think in terms of advice, we have a school choice movement that's very focused on serving the most needy and there's a good case for doing that. And we've heard that repeated several times by Governor Daniels and by many other governors that this is a program that's serving the poor.

However, school choice has come to acquire a bit of an image of a welfare program, that it gets that negative image. And I've never heard the people at Apple say, we're making smartphones for poor people. They make smartphones, or Teslas for poor people. No, no, we market to the very well to do.

And once they establish their marketplace among the most prestigious segments of society, then it spreads. It's very difficult for an idea to spread when you market it as something for a group in the society that doesn't have all that positive valence. So I would think governors might think as they move forward, a more universalistic, everybody can benefit from school choice.

So open enrollment's a good example of that. There could be other ideas out there. Education savings account lends itself to this idea of let's make choice available to everybody.

>> Condoleeza Rice: Yeah, that's great.

>> Patrick Wolf: So I would encourage governors to package school choice expansions with the deregulation of public schools.

Because the public schools, and supporters of the public schools, opponents of school choice make the legitimate point that it's very difficult for public schools to respond to competition from choice. That's why the gains. There are gains, Anna's right, but they're modest. They have difficulty responding cuz they are so constricted by all these particular regulations.

And they're constricted in that way because they've been regulated like a monopoly, because they've been a monopoly for so long. So if you are exposing them to competition, if that's going to be an alternative accountability system for them, you can deregulate, you can free up public schools to adjust and to adapt in a vibrant, competitive, choice-based system.

So packaging school choice with public school deregulation, I think, makes a lot of policy sense and it's also a political winner.

>> Condoleeza Rice: Well, let's close on our predictions. You can either do it as an actual prediction or as a hope for next year's National School Choice week. And I'm gonna start with Anna and then to Patrick and then to Paul.

Anna?

>> Anna Egalite: Excellent, so I am very hopeful about the disruptive potential for ESAs. And I think that we could liken it, this is my hope. We could liken it to what happened to broadcast television. So the cable giants did not know what to do when Amazon and Netflix came along.

They have over 200 million direct subscribers now. That was once an unimaginable number. And as that has happened, we don't just watch whatever's on anymore. We really gravitate towards the top tier content. There's more content uploaded to YouTube in an hour than Disney has in its entire streaming catalog.

And so I'm really excited to see the education analog of that and what ESAS will unleash, that type of innovation and that long tail of customized products and services for kids with very diverse needs, cuz I think that's what's key. And we've known that for a long time, since Chub and Mo wrote about personalization being what's key for education success.

So that's my hope.

>> Condoleeza Rice: Great.

>> Patrick Wolf: So my hope and expectation is that next year we will be talking about school choice policy initiatives as a more bipartisan sort of enterprise. And Governor Daniels was hinting at that, too, as more democratic politicians realize that this is something that their constituents want and value and that it doesn't destroy things.

It enlivens and enriches the educational environments of cities, towns, suburbs, etc. So I'm looking forward to a pivot back to a more bipartisan discussion of choice next year.

>> Paul Peterson: Well, I suppose I should talk about what I fear, and I fear that we could get a much more partisan conversation.

And it could be that Republicans being increasingly concerned about the curriculum available in public schools and the policies of the public school system, that they will become all the more strident in their advocacy of choice. And then they will be criticized for creating places that are intolerant or unacceptable in one respect or another, despite Pat's research on this, that shows that up until now, that is not a concern.

So that is a fear, and my hope is that we can contain the discussion of education and focus on what's best for the child, best for the family, and not turn it into a political football.

>> Condoleeza Rice: Yes, we have enough political footballs already. Well, thank you very much.

I wanna thank Anna Egalite. I wanna thank Patrick Wolf and of course, Paul Peterson, and of course, once again to Governor Daniels for joining us. And thanks to each and every one of you. And perhaps we'll see you back here next year for School Choice Week 2024. Thank you very much.