KindlED | The Prenda Podcast
The KindlED Podcast explores the science of nurturing children's potential and creating empowering learning environments through microschooling. Powered by Prenda, each episode offers actionable insights to help you ignite your child's love of learning. We'll dive into evidence-based tools and techniques that kindle curiosity, motivation, and well-being in young learners. Do you have a question, topic, or story you'd like to share with us? Get in touch at podcast@prenda.com.
KindlED | The Prenda Podcast
Episode 75: School Choice For All Families. A Conversation with Matt Ladner.
We explore how Education Savings Accounts move accountability to families, why universal eligibility builds durable coalitions, and what it takes to grow small pilots into statewide “oaks” that actually meet demand. Matt Ladner shares lessons from Arizona, Texas, Florida, and West Virginia on funding design, flexibility, and political strategy.
• ESA as flexible, multi‑use accounts beyond vouchers
• Texas milestone and scale context for a “big acorn”
• Shift from means‑tested to universal eligibility
• Coalition building across income and zip codes
• Special needs origins of choice and lived accountability
• Bullying as top driver for switching schools
• Demand‑driven design: formula funding, no lotteries
• Funding parity and the West Virginia shortfall lesson
• Plural supply: private, public courses, microschools, tutors
• Teacher autonomy and co‑creation with families
• Legal headwinds and why courts often uphold programs
• Optimistic outlook for a more vibrant, plural system
About our guest
Matt Ladner has been writing about education policy for decades and he has been instrumental in the creation of school choice policies all over the country. He blogs at Next Steps and he is a Senior Advisor at Heritage’s Center for Education Policy. Previously, Matt held roles with the Arizona Charter Schools Association, EdChoice, and ReimaginED. Ladner is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin and received a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Houston.
Connect with Matt
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Next Steps Blog
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About the podcast
The KindlED Podcast explores the science of nurturing children's potential and creating empowering learning environments.
Powered by Prenda Microschools, each episode offers actionable insights to help you ignite your child's love of learning. We'll dive into evidence-based tools and techniques that kindle young learners' curiosity, motivation, and well-being.
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Every single person that provides services to my child is directly accountable to me. I hire them and I can fire them and I will, right? And to me, that's true accountability. And like I'm sitting in the audience with like this fat tear joy going down my stair. It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.
SPEAKER_01:Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Kindled Podcast. I'm your host, Kelly Smith. Today we'll be talking to Matt Ladner. Matt's been writing about education policy for decades. He's been instrumental in the creation of school choice policies all over the country, starting in Arizona in 2011. He blogs at Next Steps, and he is a senior advisor at the Heritage Foundation's Center for Education Policy. Previously, Matt held roles with the Arizona Charter Schools Association, Chamber of Commerce, EdChoice, and Reimagine Ed. Matt Ladner is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin and received a master's degree and a PhD in political science from the University of Houston. Matt's insightful about all things ed policy and politics. He has a really good pulse on how the system works, what the ideas are that will push school choice forward. And he's been on the ground. So I hope he's able to share some great insights as we get into this discussion. I hope you'll enjoy looking into how these policies work and what some of the objections are and what a great ESA program might actually be. So with that, let's get into it. Welcome, Matt Ladner. Matt, hi, welcome from Texas. Howdy. Now you're in Texas, and today is the day after the Texas legislature passes a pretty significant thing. The univer the ESA program that can you just share a little bit about what you're seeing in Texas? And then I really want to expand that to what you're seeing nationwide. I just saw a post from you where you you put a map with lots of states colored in. So let's uh let's talk about what's going on in Texas and what's happening with the ESA programs. And maybe just quickly to start, give our audience just a quick reminder of what ESA programs are.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, so an ESA is an account-based school choice program, you know, and it's different than say a voucher. A voucher is basically a coupon you can use to go to a private school. An ESA can do that. Like you think of it as an account. You can only use it on education purposes, but those education purposes go above and beyond uh private school tuition. You could buy individual public school courses, you can uh use them for college coursework, you could hire tutors. Uh, special needs families are using it for therapists. Um, and the idea is to give families the maximum amount of flexibility in order to make sure that the best that we can that they get the kind of education they need. We started the first ESA program in the Arizona at Tebbin. And since 2022, uh they've spread all over that, you know, there's been a lot of programs now, and the latest is Texas. Texas isn't quite uh all the way past uh goal line now, but it they it did pass the house floor, which has always been the first time a private choice program has ever passed the Texas House floor. Uh it'll be a billion-dollar a year program, it'll be the biggest first-year program in the history of the movement. Um and so it's a pretty exciting time for the school choice movement. You know, the uh the map's got a lot of color on it now. In 2022, as late as 2022, there were no states with universal eligibility for a private choice program. None. And now there's I can't I've lost track. Sixteen, maybe?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Well, everything's bigger in Texas, as they say. So a billion dollars a year is is a big deal. I know some of the debate on the the House floor kind of mentioned that that's still only, you know, one percent of the kids in Texas or something like that. It's a fraction of the overall spending in the system. So just to keep that in perspective, it sounds like a huge number to those of us in smaller states. Uh Texas is just a really big state with a lot of people and it's growing. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. I mean, so for some perspective, to be fair to the Texans, the first year of the ESA program in Arizona, we had 151 kids. Right. You know, so the idea is that, you know, these programs tend to start small, but they, you know, if you design them correctly, they can flourish and become bigger. So that that will be the task ahead. Texas certainly Texans need and deserve a program that can grow with demand. This current bill is not yet that, but we've had a lot of bills that start, you know, you start and build on it, right? So that's where we are with Texas.
SPEAKER_01:Just a shout out to the Matt's blog and and some of his writing. He's really one of the influential and and just thoughtful voices in this industry. So as you listen to this podcast, you're gonna want more from Matt Loudner. Check out his information. We'll put it in the show notes. But Matt, you just recently in a in a post kind of talked about Texas and you use this phrase, you know, acorns and and great oak trees. And I think what you're talking about here is, you know, starting with something that of course it looks like an oak tree to those of us in Arizona. 87,000 kids over here in Arizona that are doing this program now. But you know, that number of a billion dollars a year is um, it's it's big. I mean, that's a that's a big start that will hopefully be able to grow.
SPEAKER_02:It's a very big acorn.
SPEAKER_01:That's the way I would describe it. Yes, yes, exactly. A big acorn that's gonna grow in an even bigger tree. Well, awesome. Can you give us so you you know, you kind of mentioned a picture of the United States with these programs kind of appearing? You used a word universal. I think this is important for listeners to understand. Can you kind of just cut talk about what that even means, what universal is, and how the 2011 start to all of this was not universal, and then you know, kind of the journey to get to where we are today?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. So for the first 20-something years of the school choice movement, we were very focused on means-tested bills, um, or meaning that like you had to have a certain be below a certain family income to qualify. And we did that for obvious and very, you know, compelling moral reasons. You know, they're they're the low-income kids tend to be in the worst schooling situations, have the greatest needs and whatnot. But eventually there was a shift in perspective. And, you know, the bottom line is that everyone pays their school taxes, right? And while equity concerns are very important, and we we can reflect them in things like, for instance, funding levels, right? We could give low-income kids more money in an ESA account. We should not, however, be restricting eligibility, right? And you and in fact, you look at every other type of education program you can think of, the idea of means testing it would be completely outrageous, right? Like, sorry, Billy, your mom and dad paid too many taxes, so you're not allowed to go to the University of Arizona is a sentence that no one is ever going to speak because it's really, really profoundly dumb. Like, you know, if the University of Arizona said that, they would instantly earn themselves the animosity of a lot of people that pay a lot of taxes, right? And even people that don't want to send their kids to the University of Arizona would be deeply offended by the notion that they're not allowed to send their kid to the University of Arizona after paying Arizona taxes, right? So this is a very basic principle. The New Dealers figured this out in the in the 30s with Social Security, right? The public is always so in the same piece of legislation, the United States government created Social Security and a program called AFDC. AFDC was only for low-income people, and the public grew to have a deep level of suspicion of hostility towards this program. Social Security, everyone paid in, everyone gets, and it's still the third rail of American politics, right? You don't have to be like a political super genius to figure this out, right? And so one of the big shifts that explains the huge uh amount of research success in the choice movement is just that. We're giving this stuff, and it's right there in the polls. If you poll the American public and say, Do you support a program that gives, you know, people below this income level school choice, you'll get a certain amount of soap support. If you say, you know, we're gonna give a program that that gives everybody that wants to apply for it access, the support goes up. Well, of course it does, right?
SPEAKER_01:It just it just hits logic in a different way. It's a di it's a different sentiment. Like, yeah, you would make that available to everybody.
SPEAKER_02:Even low-income people support the universal program more. Right. Right.
SPEAKER_01:You know, because they know you can see it's interesting to hear you talk about this because uh there's been a lot, I think, especially in the last couple of years, even in the general discussions about this kind of um, you know, political elite. There's this elitism that kind of comes from a play. And from that seat, I just want to sort of empathize with how we got to means tested eligibility requirements. From that seat, you might have said something like, Hey, rich people already have access to school choice, right? They can send their kids to a private school, they can afford that, they can move, which many of them do. And I think, you know, one of the great ironies of this movement is some of the loudest voices that are kind of on the liberal elite category. These people are saying we don't want school choice to exist, and at the same time moving to expensive neighborhoods, sending their kids to private schools. So they have it, right? And and I think that discrepancy may be part of like why we got to this. But it is, I think what you're pointing out, it's fundamentally elitist and it's patronizing a little bit to people to say, hey, we're gonna do, you know, create these programs that are just for you all, and the rest of us can, you know, do the somehow better way or something like that. Right.
SPEAKER_02:The the school choice movement should should absolutely view itself as as uh in part a constituency building exercise. And no social movement worth its salt starts off with the premise like, oh, we don't want those people. Right? Like if if you're you know, and we used to say this, I used to say this, oh, what you just said, like, oh, it, you know, those those Scottsdale people, they already have school choice, right? They bought their way into Scottsdale, they could afford private school tuition. If the question is, do you want Scottsdale soccer mom in your coalition? Let me tell everyone in the country very clearly right now the answer is yes, you do. You want everybody in your coalition, but you also want her, right? Uh that that woman is a fierce creature. I've seen Scottsdale soccer moms walk into committee hearings and there is the Arizona legislature and have the entire committee melt. She has a lot of social and political capital. She pays a lot of taxes. So, like, what's the case for like completely discriminating against her and forcing her to pay for a program that she's not allowed to participate in? But we finally got over that, right? But we've made a lot of progress since then.
SPEAKER_01:So there's a second wave of eligibility requirements that was heavily involved in Arizona's history. And I've kind of lived this since I started my first micro school in 2018 in my house over here in Mesa, Arizona. And since that time, but even before that, I was kind of monitoring discussions in the legislature. There was a, as you know, universal ESA expansion that was passed and then went to referendum through kind of a petition and then it lost in the ballots. And so we were kind of instead working in and around a district and charter schools and doing things differently to make the program accessible. At the same time, you know, we're watching this ESA program and thinking, okay, so who gets who actually in reality gets to do it? And this is, you know, it's an interesting discussion. You're bringing up constituency building and some of these things that, you know, I'm not a political activist, I don't think this way, but I think you're right to, you know, recognize that's what's going on. So maybe this is another constituency conversation, but there's a there was another set of criteria around basically special needs. You know, it was if you have an individualized education plan, an IEP, which is what the school system at large has put in place to phenomenally help kids with special learning challenges. I think in practice it's become much more of a protect against litigation in the realm of so if you have that piece of paper, that then qualified you to participate in these ESA programs. Or if your brother had one, you could, the sibling could go as well. Talk a little bit about that from the same lens. So that that was a another school of thought in terms of limiting eligibility. And you still see this in programs across the country. Only special needs kids can do it.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. The first special needs choice program passed in Florida in 1999. Uh it was called the McKay Scholarship Program. It passed the Florida Senate unanimously because John McKay uh was the Florida Senate president, sponsored the bill, and a special needs dad. Just for some background, the federal legislation on special needs education passed in 1975. It's now called the IDEA. It was important civil rights legislation. Before it passed, public schools could just flat out exclude children from disabilities from even attending public schools, but it has not been smooth sailing. And in fact, while a lot of people get what they need from the public school system, I would say that in general, the most dissatisfied and deeply dissatisfied group of people in the public school system are the parents of special needs children. It is very difficult. And some of these are due to the flaws and IDA, and some of it is just practicality, right? Can can every school hire the staff they need to deal with students with a very wide, any school of any size is going to have a wide diverging set of needs that's difficult for the school system to deal with, quite frankly. I'm not saying it's impossible or that they do as well as they should necessarily. Some do, some don't, right? So when John McKay passed the McKay Scholarship Program, it grew very quickly in Florida. And it basically just said, you know, we're gonna give the state money that would have gone to the child's public school into a voucher, and they could use that to go to a private school. Interestingly enough, the John McKay Scholarship Program in Florida led to the ESA in Arizona. As we passed a similar bill, voucher bill in Arizona when Janet Napolitano was governor. The Supreme Court struck it down, okay, but left us a trail of breadcrumbs that kind of said, look, if there was more than one way to spend this money other than just going to private school, it might be okay. And we were like, we should follow that breadcrumb trail, right? And so I would say that some of our most enthusiastic supporters of the SA program are special needs families because it gives them so many more options, right? Um, this is not just going to about going to private schools. You can literally hire your own therapists, right? We have examples where families kind of like join up together and hire their own teacher, right? If you you have, you know, a few number, you know, I was like, there are people that can make that math work, right? So it expands the universe of options. That's not to say that everything is perfect, that every every child is able to find a good solution. We also, at least in Arizona, remain with a very serious problem where the biggest form of school choice is actually open enrollment between district schools. And special needs students are categorically excluded from that in the public school system. Um, you know, because federal law only guarantees you access to your zone district school if it's a child with uh special needs. And the the district schools in Arizona made it perfectly clear like they are not interested in taking kids with disabilities. So it's a very difficult situation for a lot of families. The ESA program is a tool that some families are using and that special needs students are overrepresented in the ESA program. We have a higher percentage of special needs kids than the than the than the district school system.
SPEAKER_01:Which says something, right? That says something about what's going on.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. I mean, in fact, I would argue, Kelly, that you know, the the basis of the federal legislation is that a child with special needs has an individual education plan, you know, air quotes. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I would argue that you can't really have an individual education plan unless you have control over who is providing services to your child. Right. Yeah, you can have a now that's not to say that every IEP is hollow or whatever, but a lot of them are. And it's not that's not my opinion. That's the opinion of the families, right? And you know, to be actually in control of this, right, is to be able to like there was a great one of our ESA moms, one of the first year special needs mom, she was at a hearing in Arizona where some of the opponents of the ESA program were were grousing, right? And she um she said, she got up to testify and she said, Well, you gentlemen keep complaining about there's no accountability. There's no accountability in this program. She said, What I wanted to tell you is that every single person that provides services to my child is directly accountable to me. I hire them and I can fire them and I will, right? And to me, that's true accountability. And like I'm sitting in the in the audience with like this fat tear joy going down my it was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.
SPEAKER_01:Well, it's incredibly empowering for somebody who has probably felt for many years powerless, right? I it's interesting you're talking about IEPs. So my experience with IEPs, I knew nothing getting into when I started my microschool. Turns out I did have some special needs in my very first class. In 2019, Prendus started to kind of explode across Arizona. And so I was meeting lots of people from all parts of the state and from all income levels and backgrounds and rural and urban. And I'm I'm starting to just listen and get to know these people. And very quickly, because we were partnering with charter schools, IEPs became uh, you know, part of the lifeblood of what we were doing. So I was in these IEP meetings and and what I realized is there's basically two halves of IEPs. I don't know if they're equal in parts, but you know, one of the halves is what you're talking about is extra services. I've got a, you know, a kid with a speech deficiency, and they do need someone to help them structure, you know, the the mouth in a way to perform and and pronounce the syllables of the words. And that's real. That's there's real services, services around dyslexia, services around autism and therapies and things like that. I will say there's a there's a whole other part that I wasn't aware of. And what it basically is, is a correction against, they call it accommodations or it's basically a correction against a structure that's too rigid, that's designed for kind of big batches and moving large groups through at everybody at the same time. And and it's things like let them have more decisions in their day, give them some more time uh to finish an assignment or a test, let them, you know, maybe you know, rearrange, like there's some flexibility. And it was interesting because I would look at these things and I would see these requirements in the IEP. And I'm thinking, that's a funny thing to require. Like, why wouldn't you just give that to everyone if possible? And the microschool, of course, allowed me to do that. So we had these really funny conversations where they would say, Well, you have to do this. And I said, We do that for every kid. Well, you have to do this, we do that for every kid. You have to do this. You know what I mean? And and I was like, Oh, this is this is just it's fascinating because it's a relic of, you know, a system, a structure. And again, this is never, it's never like some teacher just saying, I just want to punish you. It's it's like I have to because of this, this, and this. And there's this federal law and state interpretation, all these things have piled up. So, you know, I think everybody feels a little trapped by this whole thing, but just the the freedom of of that. You know, I think the question, I've heard this as a criticism, and we'll talk a little bit about objections to ESA, that somehow this would exclude. You know, we got some articles about this, this would exclude the special needs kids because now you're in this private world and no one's gonna want to serve them or or take them. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:People are like, oh, you're gonna you're gonna surrender your your your federal IEP rights, you know, and some people go peak. And other people go, they're they're worthless anyway. Maybe there's there's diversity of opinion amongst this, amongst special needs kids uh families, so I don't want to represent otherwise. But you know, there are a lot of people that those rights aren't really, you know, they're not rights unless anyone's gonna enforce them, right? Right. And then like, you know, there's research that shows, Kelly, that the number one reason that parents want to switch schools by a wide margin is bullying. Okay. And bullying is something that can happen to any kid in any school, right? But it happens to special needs kids more than the general population. Okay. And, you know, a lot of school choice debates, you know, wind up getting into like, you know, ridiculous discussions about regression coefficients and average test scores and blah, blah, blah. Right. But the reality is that there are people who need an exit, and they need it right now. And it's not, you can be, you could be a kid that is at a school with super high average test scores, and it could be not working for you socially, and you could be bullying, and it is and you are not personally flourishing, right? And you need an exit, right? So, I mean, it's a wonderful thing that in Arizona, every single kid has ESA as an exit option, whether they use it or not. It's there. Okay. It is it is a tool, you know, break glass in case of emergency. We have that in Arizona, and we're really blessed to have it, in my view.
SPEAKER_01:It's powerful. Okay. So we've talked about sort of the demographics initially looking at, you know, reasons why eligibility was less than universal. One of them kind of focused on special needs, one of them focused on income levels and poverty and things like that. So are there any other, you know, as as we sort of try to give our listeners a, you know, a picture of school choice in America right now? I recently did one too, a kind of infographic where you see the map and you see it over time coloring in. And just like you say, it's, you know, one state, Arizona, and it and it was light-colored because only certain kids could get it back then. Right. And then over time that becomes more light-colored states, and now a couple dark-colored states where you're really truly universal. But can you share, you know, I uh let's try to give people a paint a picture for them of like what is the current status and and then where do we see that going?
SPEAKER_02:Boy, okay. So there are like 82 different private choice programs in the country last time I checked. It's a lot. Most of them are small, you know, they're you know, some of them are focused on individual school districts like the Cleveland Voucher Program, the Milwaukee voucher program. In reality, there's a very small handful of states that have choice programs that are will grow with demand. So this is a this is a crew, we we we won the battle over should everyone have a chance at a scholarship, right? Universal. But there are other issues that are also very important, right? If your child applies for the program, is there going to be funding for them, or do they go into a lottery and creating a wait list? Okay. Arizona's ESA program does not have a wait list, right? It is funded on a formula basis. However many eligible kids apply is how many are going to get funded. That is also true in Florida and in West Virginia and in Arkansas for ESA programs. There's also a a couple of formula funded, you know, sort of voucher programs around the country. So the number of states that really have a demand-driven choice program that, you know, that operates in that way, and that's really what you need to have something that has the potential to drive systemic change. Most of the 82 programs are niche programs that don't have the, you know, like it's not that they they aren't acorns. They could be improved, they could be fixed, but you know, the reality is is at this point, I would say we have a lot of acorns, we don't have very many oaks, right? And so I think the which is not to say that we shouldn't help people plant acorns in new in new states, right? But at this point, I think the return on investment would be much larger for actually, you know, for instance, if Texas's giant acorn actually turned into an oak, you know, there's there's twice as many kids in Texas as in Florida. And Florida has about forty percent of the total private choice students in the entire country. And it's because they have well-designed programs, very high-functioning advocacy over a sp you know, a span of decades, right? We're talking about a task for Hercules and a large student population. We we've kind of been Johnny Appleseed in the choice movement, and we might want to think about turning into arborists where it's can you let's let's talk about the perfect oak tree.
SPEAKER_01:I mean, what what would uh or the program rules that would allow I've heard you say already universal, so every kid in the state can get it. Yeah. I've heard you just introduce formula funded or algorithmically funded, which means you know, I think there are states where it's like, yeah, we're gonna allow anybody to apply, but there's only I don't know, pick a number,$10 million available for this program, and that that corresponds to, you know, some number of kids that get it, some fraction of kids. So, you know, those two I think have landed. Give us like the full picture of what what as a botanist here, what creates the conditions for a great tree to grow?
SPEAKER_02:So um Ed Choice, Robert Imlo from Ed Choice wrote a piece about this a few months ago, and I I wholeheartedly agree with what he wrote. The key the crucial elements would be number one, universal eligibility, so everyone everyone can apply, and number two, formula funding, so everyone who applies and wants to participate can participate. No wait lists, no lotteries. And then the third would be multiple uses, right?
SPEAKER_01:Okay. What you can use the money on.
SPEAKER_02:What you can use the money on. Like I love private schools, private schools play this super vital role in the choice movement. They're great, we want to support them, we don't want to support them exclusively, right? One way to think about this is that uh a voucher program can give you an opt-out of the public school system. An ESA program just gives you an opt-out of the public school and the private school system, right?
SPEAKER_01:Like, well, it this is interesting you say this because we talk to parents all the time, right? And and microschools, of course, are this is a new format. This is things are possible here, and there's pluralism. So lots of each microschool looks different, and that's like part of the beauty of all of this. We hear people say things like, I went to this public school, my parents script, you know, we we scrimped and saved to put our kids in, you know, whatever. We move into this neighborhood, we went to this school. We moved here for the school. So that's kind of chapter one. We didn't like the school, so we scrimped and saved, and we moved our kid to this private school. That's chapter two. And unfortunately, the private school wasn't that different from the public school. I mean, it was like a lot of the same types of structural things. And this, of course, is not government mandated in many states. Like in Arizona, private schools don't have the government telling them you have to do things exactly the same way. It's it's just kind of a the nature of the beast. I think, you know, you there's limited scope and vision. And, you know, I think people are at a moment in time where they're ready for more innovation. We think about how we do, you know, I I just witnessed in the last three years everybody going to Google first and now everybody going to ChatGPT first. I mean, that's a massive swing in the way we do things, but that type of swing is not happening when you think of like where does your kid, what is your kid getting in the day?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. There's not very many people around the country that really grasp like the potential of what it is we're really up to here. A demand-driven education system with co-creation between families and educators. Okay. So one of the analogies I like to use on this is like imagine a potter at a pottery wheel. There are two hands that are going to shape this creation. And the one hand are the educators, right? And I'm sure Prinda has had it's like experienced this story firsthand because I know I hear it all around the country. People go in education for the right reasons, right? Nobody wakes up one day and says, you know what, I really want to do is be a cog in some kind of giant bureaucratic system where I systematically let, for instance, young elementary kids down and don't teach them how to read properly and set them on a course to a failure in life. No one. No one wakes up in the morning wanting to do that. Happens every day in this country, but no one wants it, right? It's not why you go into education. Okay. How many times, Kelly, have you come across someone that wants to be one of your guides that used to be a public school teacher, was actually quite good at it, but got treated very badly, got very frustrated by the bureaucracy, and and was just like dying to go out and do their own thing and be in control of an authentic education community where they can build relationships with their kids. So the the one hand of the potter solder the pottery analogy Are the teachers, okay? And the other are the families, right? And together they shape what becomes the K-12 system. And we have been doing this in Arizona gradually, not suddenly, not not radically, not overnight, but since 1994, right? When Arizona families took a shine to classical education, they wind up getting more classical education schools and not just great hearts, but now there are other CMOs that do that. But when they want less of something, they wind up getting less of something, right? There's approximately the Common Sense Institute of Arizona has measured this, there's approximately 450,000 extra spaces for kids in Arizona district schools right now. Market is telling them something, right? And we have some really good district schools in Arizona, and part of those 450,000 are because kids are in different district schools, right? This isn't just like district versus charter, district versus private, right? It's actually district versus district more than anything else. It's the biggest form of school choice in Arizona. Because there's actually the divide in Arizona is between high-demand schools and low demand schools, right? Right. And so, like the idea that we can get more of what we want, we can change our minds, we can have new types of schools. People have to experience this. They they choose schools through social networks, right? They they get recommendations from friends and families and church members and things like that, right? It's really a an amazing thing. And I think the biggest possible winners could be the teachers, right? In a in a fully realized system like this, I the teachers will be in a lot more control, right? And they don't have to be cogs in this machine that we know is not working for a lot of kids.
SPEAKER_01:Well, we've definitely seen that the educators that, you know, really go from that story of just I felt trapped, I felt frustrated, I felt burnt out, to I'm free and I can create what I want to create. Uh and their passion is incredible and their ability to contribute. I mean, I don't mean to challenge the the statement of the the greatest winner, but you know, I I would put a small third hand on that pot, which is the child themselves. And um, you know, and I meet I meet these kids and I just get to see, I mean, I hear it directly from them, I hear it from their parents, just going from a world of for some reason or another, just hating it, just really suffering through uh what we this institution we call school, again, for no one's fault. In many cases, it's not like one person was just antagonizing them. It's just a combination of things. And and now I can get to a different situation, a different environment, and love it. And you see what's possible then in making that change, what that means for them and their whole lives. And yeah, this is the this is what I wake up in the morning for every day. And so I appreciate you know, you guys thinking about these structural questions so that it allows allows for these types of innovations to flourish.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, so we've got universal, anybody can get it. We've got algorithmically funded, meaning there's not just arbitrary caps in in budget or allocation. We've got use the money in flexible ways. So it doesn't have to be just private school that you can go to.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:I mean, what else would you add to that?
SPEAKER_02:Those those are the big ones. I would also add, like basically the independent of uh, you know, non-state options. So like the what we don't want to happen is like Henry Ford said, you can have a Model T in any color you want as long as it's black. As long as it's black. It's like, you know, there there is a huge urge that we have yielded to over many decades to try to standardize schools. It didn't work out for us, right? You know? Right. So we definitely like and and quite frankly, I think the best way to secure this in the long run is to deregulate the district schools, right?
SPEAKER_01:Like you know, because that's the argument is like, well, we have to play by all of these rules that are ridiculous and they're hampering our ability to help kids. It's like, have you just stop and think, like, what if we took those away instead of adding those same rules to everyone else?
SPEAKER_02:And and unfortunately, a lot of times the people that say that sort of things will have been involved in writing the rules in the first place. The district justice system was not broken accidentally, it is largely operating in the way that serves its major shareholders. So the same people often that would complain about all the rules and regulation when you when you propose getting rid of them, they're the same people who stand up. We couldn't possibly do that.
SPEAKER_01:I see. I see. Yeah. Well, but that that I it's an interesting idea. Can I can I jump a little bit? You you've brought up West Virginia, and um, it's interesting as you list these states that have the types of ESA programs that kind of check these boxes. You you said Arizona, obviously. I started in Arizona, still our biggest state for prend to microschools. Florida, we we had one micro school in Florida, a really dedicated person that was just having parents kind of pay a little bit out of pocket and she was making all kinds of sacrifices for years. And then all of a sudden, the the you know, Universal opens up, the the Pep Scholarship and some of these new new programs. And um, you know, we went from one to 50 microschools in Florida kind of overnight. And so you see the market responding to the right policies being created. Arkansas right now is our current. I mean, we're just getting every day, we're getting people from Arkansas that are learning about this and they're recognizing the policy exists. You said West Virginia, and I will say we we had that in West Virginia. They they've done universal for quite a while. What we ran into was the guides couldn't make it work financially. And the reason is the funding level. So let's talk a little bit about that as a potential criteria in a good, you know, I know the EdChoice rankings basically just says how much of the total of what districts get do you get under ESA and Arizona? All right, Matt. So this has been great. We've been talking all about ESA programs, the ideal criteria specifications, what we'd like to see in a well-designed school choice program. One of the things I wanted to get back to, I think you had mentioned West Virginia, and I want to talk about our experience there when West Virginia was actually the first state to pass universal school choice. I think it was way back in 2020. So they were ahead of Arizona, ahead of Florida. They passed this thing and everyone's excited. We've tried to open microschools in West Virginia and it has not worked. And here's why it's the funding level. So they they set the number at something like$4,000 per student, which is just a fraction of what the state might spend on education. But you know, as they did that number, that works to buy some textbooks or for a family to put together resources, but to actually coordinate a microschool and to have as part of that microschool a paid learning guide that is earning income as part of running this thing, the numbers just didn't work out. I I I wondered if we could add that to our list of ideal program criteria. If you have any thoughts on funding levels in education, in school choice specifically.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, we we really shouldn't be making second-class citizens out of uh people based on where they go to school, right? You know, I mean if uh if if going to a microschool or homeschooling or going to a private school um satisfies the mandatory attendance requirement of whatever state we're talking about, then the funding level should be equal. Right. Yeah, we shouldn't be discriminating against classes of students based on how they want to satisfy that requirement. So there's a tricky process here of you know sort of balancing supply and demand. And we don't always get it right and we learn lessons over time and hopefully we make corrections, right? But yeah, I think that that we've seen an unfortunate trend around the country of a a lot of states that'll, you know, say for instance include homeschoolers, but say, Yeah, we're just gonna give you like two thousand dollars or something like that, right? I I really don't think like in you know, we both live in Arizona, Kelly. You know, our constitution has something called the Equal Privileges and Immunities Clause, right? Which is, you know, kind of based on the um equal protection clause in the federal constitution. You know, saying that these students are worth, you know, X10, X14 sometimes more money than these students over here probably doesn't square with that as a principle.
SPEAKER_01:That's such a common sense way to look at it, although I'm I'm shocked that I've never heard it anywhere talked about in terms of just fundamental access to this education, and and we all are paying taxes. I think the thought is maybe, well, those people are fine not getting any of that tax money back, you know, paying taxes for the rest of the kids to go to school, but for their own kids, if they choose to homeschool, they're fine with zero. So giving them$2,000 is great, you know, or$4,000 in the case of West Virginia. I think it's interesting to say, yeah, well, if this is education for them, if we believe that, and maybe that's a question, maybe not everybody believes that, but it's uh I think worth it's worth having that discussion. You you talked about a constitution. I think that's an interesting point. So um I think you're probably aware of this. There have been challenges in the courts to some of these programs. And I think most recently the Utah program was held up by an appeals judge in the state saying this program's unconstitutional. The Constitution of Utah says something about every kid gets an education. And I think the interpretation was by doing this, somehow that doesn't meet that criteria. I I'm thoughts on any of this, or if you've followed the the court cases. I know there was a big federal one in Ohio years ago, and and since then it's been a tactic by people, I think, trying to stop these programs from from going forward. But any any thoughts on this? Is this a discussion we should be having?
SPEAKER_02:Most most states have some sort of language with their state constitutions that require the creation of a basically a public education system. But then they they don't typically prohibit you from doing other things besides that, right? So it's you know, we we've had a number of programs over the years that would lose at some stage of the game and then ultimately prevail on what it really mattered. I'm hopeful that's what will be the case in in Utah. You know, it was after the uh gosh, early on in the days of the school voucher movement, there was a there was an attorney for the NEA, and it was, I guess it was after they lost um the the federal big federal voucher decision in 2002. And he he very famously said, Well, I guess we're just gonna have to go litigate these Mickey Mouse provisions and state constitutions. And that's that's kind of what they've been doing since that's the strategy, litigate Mickey Mouse provisions.
SPEAKER_01:I love it. I I learn from you every time I talk, and I appreciate you just taking a minute to share with me and our listeners what this landscape looks like as you sort of zoom out and just you know, I know you write about this, you've been thinking about this for a long time. You kind of consider the moment, consider what the next five to ten years might look like. Paint us a picture for for where you see all of this going, and and then let's close on why that matters. Why we do this work in the first place. I know we've hit on that already.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I mean, like I I think I've mentioned before the the Wired magazine article in 2015 about the techies who hacked school, right? It was basically about the rise of home school co-ops and Silicon Valley. And when I read that article, I mean we were maybe like four years into the ESA program in Arizona, and it was shocking to me because what I was reading is like, oh, these people are already doing it, right? They're just doing it with their own money, right? And there was there's a whole rich academic literature on on what is called enrichment spending, right? And upper income people have been spending more and more on this over time, up to like in 2006 it was like$9,000 per kid, right, amongst high income people, right?
SPEAKER_01:9,000 just on enrichment.
SPEAKER_02:What started to happen just on enrichment per kid. Wow. Right. Now uh lower income people also do some of this, but their their trend is flat. Yeah. So what started to happen before COVID-19 is that enrichment started to disrupt custodial schooling, right? And uh COVID-19 accelerated that trend, right? And starting a great deal of experimentation in school models, including Printa. And I don't think that's going to stop. I really think the genie is out of the bottle on that. And we have kind of moved into an era of education self-reliance. Like people, the this is the big takeaway from the COVID-19 pandemic is that you need to be, as a as a parent, you need to be prepared to take care of your family yourself, right? You cannot necessarily rely upon the system, despite the fact that it's a sunk cost and you have to pay for it. You know, you don't want to rely upon it. In fact, that's exactly what that enrichment trend, you know, this was telling us beforehand, right? It was most of those people were still enrolling their kid in a custodial school, but they weren't totally relying on that school, right? They were also doing mathnesium, they were also doing coupon, they were doing summer camps and whatnot. And that process, the Silicon Valley families had basically decided, well, what if that became school, right? The project-based learning and all that kind of stuff. So it's a very fascinating time to be involved in K-12. I think we're going to come out of the other end of this with a with a much more pluralistic and sort of vibrant system that gets away from the kind of 19th century factory model. And uh I look forward to it.
SPEAKER_01:It's amazing. Well, Matt Ladner, I appreciate you. Thanks again for being here on the podcast and just sharing your insights and wisdom. I know you've put a lot into building these positions and all this knowledge that you have, both about how the process works and the policy design, but also what's going on in the market and what and what the world looks like right now. I think both of us would say it's a good time to be optimistic and just to see families stepping up and taking the keys to the car and saying, let's uh let's expect more. What what could humans be if we all took learning more seriously? And it wasn't just this perfunctory thing, you know, that that we go through. So I'm excited to be part of that and appreciate you again. Thanks, thanks for taking the time. And I guess just as we wrap up, one question I'll just bring on you is somebody in your life who's kindled the love of learning for you. Can you think back to somebody like that?
SPEAKER_02:Well, I could think of a lot of people like that. Uh Kate, you know, teachers from my high school, professors I've had along the way. Yeah. My parents. Yeah. No, it's but there's there's been a lot of people. But uh, I've had one English teacher in high school that really had a very profound positive effect on me. I was, you know, kind of a miscreant uh ne'er do well high school student, and I think she helped straighten me out and put me on the right path.
SPEAKER_01:Do you remember her name? Let's let's give her Janet McDonald. Shout out if you're listening. That's amazing. And then where can our listeners go to learn more about you and your work?
SPEAKER_02:Um, you can follow me on Twitter or X now, it's at Matthew Ladner, or you can go to the Next Steps blog, which I edit and write for, or you can go to the Heritage Foundation, where we have a whole section on education uh right there too.
SPEAKER_01:Thanks, Matt. Have a great day, and and thanks everybody for listening. Cheer.
SPEAKER_00:The Kindled Podcast is brought to you by Prenda. Prenda makes it easy to start and run an amazing microschool based on all the ideas we talk about here on the Kindled Podcast. Don't forget to follow us on social media at PrendaLearn. And if you'd like more information about starting a microschool, just go to Prenda.com. Thanks for listening, and remember to keep Kindling.
