Episode 99: School Choice Rhetoric and Arguments. A Conversation with Matt Frendewey.

We draw a hard line between tweaking the school system and transforming it, starting with one idea: parents should hold the decision rights for their child’s education. We also test the biggest critiques of school choice against polling, program data, and real parent experiences with flexibility and accountability.

• why “reform” misses the real problem and why transformation fits the moment 
• what education freedom means in practice and how decision rights have flipped since COVID 
• why families say they want different schools rather than “better” versions of the same model 
• how microschools and homeschooling are growing and what customization makes possible 
• what parents tell pollsters they want most and the size of the flexibility gap 
• where ESAs and school choice policy are expanding across states and what demand looks like 
• how to respond to claims about bankrupting public schools, fraud, waste, and accountability 
• why switching schools can be stronger accountability than test-based systems 

About our guest
Matt Frendewey is the vice president of strategy at yes. every kid. Matt has over two decades of experience in strategic communications, which includes working as a senior advisor to the U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, and Gov. Jeb Bush at Foundation for Excellence in Education. A Michigan native, Matt spent eight years working for the Michigan Department of Attorney General, and has held various roles in both gubernatorial and presidential campaigns. Matt resides in Washington, D.C. with Jenn and their two dogs, and remains a loyal Detroit Tigers fan.

Connect with Matt
yes. every kid.
Matt’s substack

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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Transcript

Welcome And Why School Choice

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Uh it's flipped. And now parents are no are saying, you know, I don't want to have to ask you for permission to do something different and better for my kid. Uh the system should adapt for me.

SPEAKER_01 0:12

Hello, welcome back to the Kindle Podcast by Brenda. I'm Kelly Smith. I'm hosting today, and I'll be talking to Matt Frendaway, Vice President of Strategy at Yes Every Kid. He has over two decades experience in strategic communication, which includes working as a senior advisor to secretaries of education, governors. He's been uh in the Department of the Attorney General, he's a Michigan, native, spent eight years at Michigan, and he's held various roles in gubernatorial and presidential campaigns. Recently moved from Washington D.C. to Michigan. We're gonna love this conversation. We're gonna dive into Matt's brain around school choice and what that's currently happening, a lot of great polling data that he's getting from parents, and an understanding of just what's happening. We'll also address some of the criticisms and attacks on the school choice movement. So with that, Matt Friendaway, I hope you enjoy the conversation. Okay, Matt Friendaway, welcome to the Kindled Podcast by Prenda. I'm so glad we're gonna be talking. This is gonna be a lot of fun. I appreciate you having me on. I've been a yes every kid, I call it broader community member for many years. I just I see you guys out in the world and advocating for school choice. I think it's amazing what you're doing, and I think it's an important discussion. I love how you've added recently, I don't know if it's that recent, but you've been writing and you you just put out these very thoughtful, very well researched pieces. I get them in my inbox and I always stop whatever I'm doing. I'm gonna read whatever Matt's talking about because it's just it's good stuff. So thank you for the work you're you're doing.

SPEAKER_02 1:47

I appreciate that. That's really kind of you. Uh all right. So somebody's reading it.

SPEAKER_01 1:52

It's not just me. So your your recent one was saying, you know, hey, there's this idea from 2009, I think Peak Obama, it was like ed reform, and both parties supported it. It was about taking schools in and acknowledging that the world has changed since Horace Mann, you know, all of that, and saying, look, what do we do differently? How can we reform? How can we change? But what you're kind of saying in this piece now, and I I've picked up on this, I think in the movement, that we're we're not really talking about

Reform Versus Real Transformation

SPEAKER_01 2:20

reform anymore. I think you used the word, I don't know if you did it in Spanish, transformación. It was like uh you're saying we actually need a transformation, not a reformation. Can you just sort of differentiate for us? You know, what are you saying? What's the difference between Ed Reform a la, Obama, Joe Biden before he became president? You know, these people were pro-change in education. They later swung back the other way, but we can talk about the politics later. Yeah, what exactly are you noticing?

SPEAKER_02 2:47

Yeah, I appreciate that. Uh yeah. Um you know, the the way I kind of see it and what I wrote about was there's always this attempt to talk about education reform. And that's a term I use too, right? Like just uh in short form of what we do. But I don't really think that that's what we're trying to do or what we're trying to accomplish. And that's what this piece uh that I was kind of reflecting upon was talked about this. It longed for the day of bipartisan education reform. And I I argue that there's two problems with that premise. The first is that reform assumes that the system is fundamentally fine. It just needs tweaking, right? You just need to make modifications to it. And the second was that uh, you know, if we make if if we have bipartisan come along, then it'll be popular. And my argument to that is like education policy that we b believe in education freedom, parents be able to choose the environment best for their kid. Those policies have been popular for a decade or more. As long as I've been in this movement, it doesn't take bipartisan votes to make it popular. And if anything, that's just a also a nature of public policy. Politicians are are oftentimes the downstream of a good public policy change, right? They're following the public, they're not leading the public.

SPEAKER_01 4:05

Yeah, which makes sense, right? If you're out to get votes, you're you're kind of trying to read the room and and take the temperature and and sort of do the things that the people want, which, you know, I don't blame them for that. But yeah, you're saying they're downstream, so we're not gonna really get anywhere by pushing for political compromise necessarily and instead getting to principles. I mean, this is a pretty bold statement you make. I mean, it shouldn't be, I think, in in any other facet of life, we would say the parent making a decision for their child feels right, right? But for for whatever reason in education, and we're now almost 200 years into the common schools movement, right? So we're very, very used to a world where that's just not true. You don't you don't make the choice as a parent or you didn't for a very long time. Yeah. What can you say more about the doctrine, right? What do you mean by parent education freedom?

SPEAKER_02 4:56

Sure. Uh well it to me it comes down to kind

Decision Rights And Parent Freedom

SPEAKER_02 5:00

of like decision rights, right? Uh for historically, the system was in charge, it set the rules, and it still does in a big way. It determines how education works, where it works, when it works. And then parents kind of ask for permission if they wanted to deviate. In the last uh 10 years and really accelerated through the pandemic and COVID, uh, it's flipped. And now parents are no are saying, you know, I don't want to have to ask you for permission to do something different and better for my kid. Uh the system should adapt for me, it should modify for for my kids' needs. And families are there. Uh, you know, I am gonna steal a line from Todd Rose, uh who's an author uh and and researcher, where he said, parents don't want better, they want different. Uh and to me, like that sums it up. They don't want just a better, you know, mousetrap as as we see it, they want something completely different altogether. And we see that in the marketplace. We see that with the growth of Prenda, uh, the growth of microschooling at writ large. Uh, the fastest growing form of schooling is homeschooling. And it's not like homeschooling that you or I might remember it as when we were younger. It's homeschooling done radically different and in really cool ways. You know, uh charter schools have have have like continued to just continue to grow. Private schools, a lot of them talk about being at like max capacity after decades of lagging, right? Where private schools are constantly trying to close campuses or close schools. And so to me, it's a just speaks to this really um really big shift in uh the parents' mentality to say, I'm gonna do it, I'm gonna do it my way. I'm gonna own my own education, I'm gonna own my own my kids' own education, and we're gonna, and the system's gonna tell us uh or do what we want for us, and we're not gonna ask for for wait and ask for permission.

SPEAKER_01 6:51

Incredible. I mean, I feel that energy too as I go out and meet with parents all the time and and see people. I think one of the things that would surprise folks, it surprised me, is that it's not just the parents. I mean, you're starting from parent gets to make a choice for their child and seeing each child as an individual, the math is very simple. Then that should not be one system for everyone. That should be lots of different learning environments with different approaches, different values, different, different preferences. I mean, there's of course a wide diversity of preference in the marketplace. That said, I'll talk to leaders of bigger systems that are running the government-controlled top-down system. And especially during COVID, I remember noticing this, they felt like they had to make make the call for everyone, for tens of thousands of children. And it was tough, right? Some people felt strongly that we needed more masks. Some people felt strongly we needed less masks. And I just kind of said, wow, I I feel bad for you in that position to have one giant stick that has to place somewhere because you're inevitably going to disappoint people. And that's why I think there's a lot of frustration. One of the things that we see with microschools is each one gets their own lever. And in a way, each student gets their own lever. So you have a lot more ability to customize and tailor things. And then that leads to less stressed out adults. Like the educators themselves are having more fun as well. And we'll run into administrators of school districts that will come to our events looking into starting a microschool because they're so burnt out on trying to, you know, run in a in a maybe a more rigid way that's that's really causing a lot of grief for them and everybody else.

SPEAKER_02 8:28

Well, yeah, and and this isn't a new idea in the sense of like, and I wrote about this a few weeks ago. Like Frederick, Frederick Hayek wrote about this, right? Like uh around decision rights. And he wasn't, you know, Frederick Hayek didn't go and lobby for school choice. Like he wasn't out there, you know, under the dome. Like he wasn't the you know, Austrian economist. But his notion was that when you centralize authority and decision making, you move decisions away from those closest and best situated to answer the difficult problems on the ground. And so you're right. Like I feel for the superintendent who has to say, God, I have to make this decision for all these families, for all these students. When really the the answer to that is just flipping it and going, what's best? How do we drive those questions and those answers or those those problems down to the closest level that they can be solved? Yeah, that's really why I think you see families that don't just enjoy switching to smaller school learning environments like micro schools, but they stick to them, they drive in them because they feel a connection with the parents.

Microschools Grow And Districts Adapt

SPEAKER_02 9:30

We've done numerous one-on-one interviews with families who switched. We call them switchers. The switchers, yeah. And uh, we did about 30 plus interviews two years ago. We're in the middle of doing some more right now in different states. And it's a family that switched from public school to anything non-public. Uh, you know, private, microschool, homeschool, some charter. And almost all of them talk about one, how much it's more connected they feel with the new and learning environment. And part of that is just me just shifting the mindsets of being a passive consumer to an active consumer. Yeah. And the second is the satisfaction. I think less than I think we roughly estimated around like 95% of the families we talked about were happier with the decision they made. That 5% was mixed mostly with families who were just still nervous, right? They were they thought they made the right decision for good reason. They were concerned for their kid. They took them out of a public school, moved them somewhere else, but they were, you know, still waiting to see how things were gonna shake out. That to me is just a tremendous shift. And we should be leaning into that right now, not trying to find ways to throw out roadblock blocks for on parents.

SPEAKER_01 10:38

It's a fascinating thing to put yourself in the the shoes of a, you know, a gatekeeper of a large institution, right? And I've met some of these folks that are very much aligned with this idea. They're starting to think in terms of a portfolio of options, giving a lot more. I mean, great great school leaders have done this forever because you talk about who's close to the problem. Well, teachers are, right? But you've I mean we get every day inundated with teachers that are frustrated because their voice isn't heard, their input, which is so good. I mean, they have such good ideas of what's needed to help these kids. And now they're not allowed to do it. So for those people, starting a micro school is a way to express their creative outlet, do something different, have the freedom themselves. And of course, the the parents flock around that as well. But that's been a thing. I think listen, listen to your people, weigh in leads to buy-in. You know, those are basic leadership principles. But now there's an added layer of you can structurally do things differently. You can create, in fact, we're still working with several school districts and trying to find more where we can do microschools inside the district, right? These kids don't have to unenroll, they don't have to go sign up for any scholarship program. They can do microschools, they can keep all the supports and the great things that schools offer free breakfast, free lunch, counseling, specials, I mean, transportation. These are important things that many microschools can't do. And it doesn't make sense. I mean, going back to what you're talking about, why is this so politicized? You know, I think it makes a lot of sense to start thinking that way from the district point of view.

SPEAKER_02 12:09

Yeah. No, I I think in a in a lot of ways, and I I I think either by um by bold superintendents who want to take this on, we're gonna see a shift, um, or just the sheer shifting demographics uh with fewer students enrolling and more f families opting for for different options, um, you're gonna see a shift in this direction. Where districts recognize that they they are a um a service offering and that they, if they shift their model, they're gonna be able to better serve families than this kind of mentality of like I have to have the whole kid and I have to kind of keep them inside my school for everything, versus kind of like flipping the script on that and going, hey, how do I work with a private school or micro school and say, hey, we've got some good offerings here that we could host and we could collaborate, and that would create a better outcome outcome for the family. And you're starting to see that in Arizona, a little bit in Utah and Florida, where you have public school districts printing off rate cards, partnering with micro schools, saying, hey, if you want to buy one off class, we'll sell it to you.

Polling Shows Demand For Flexibility

SPEAKER_02 13:10

Absolutely. You know, you want to collaborate for what's best for the student.

SPEAKER_01 13:13

Sports, music. I mean, there's so many places where this can make sense. Well, you mentioned a little bit of the polling you're doing, Matt. Is there anything else that you're hearing from parents? You know, what do you what do you what's the summary headline of what parents want these days and how is it different than what it's been in the past?

SPEAKER_02 13:27

That's a great question. I'd say that there's a couple things. One, education freedom writ large is just wildly popular. One of the shifts we saw coming out of the pandemic, um, uh, and then one of the questions that came out of it was like, will this stick, right? Will the popularity stick? And not only has it has it stuck, it's continuing to grow. This unique uh thing is happening where where you see um likely, you see more and more families, and Ed Choice's touched on this in their morning concept poll. More and more families are saying, I want to explore options. I want to see what else is out there. I'm considering options. That to me is like showing that, you know, that's like families walking up to the water, right? Getting ready to take a dip. The next thing that you're seeing is uh families saying, you know, I want a system that's more flexible. I want uh I want education to be more flexible. I uh we did polling on this, and the the funny thing though is you have a huge delta, which is about 40-point delta between families that say, I want a system that's more more uh flexible. It's around 74, 75%. And then you have like 28% that say, how flexible is the system? And they're like 28% say it's flexible. Like that's a huge delta between like what I want and what I have. Uh that to me is the room for opportunity right there. Uh, you know, leaning into that flexibility. Uh, you touched on this in one of your other um podcasts where families aren't looking, they don't think of themselves or their kids as like systems. They don't think of themselves as like, well, I'm a public school system kid and I'm a micro school system kid. They want a system that is flexible to them, they want a model that says, hey, you know, you want to do uh, you know, uh to your point a moment ago, you want to do uh, you know, arts or sciences at this school down here, great, we're gonna make that work for you. And you want to do your core classes here at the maybe at the micro school, great, we're gonna make that work for you. And you want to go enroll in the public schools uh sports program, wonderful, we're gonna make that work for you. That's what parents would love. Inadvertently, the antiquated kind of top-down, one-size-fits-all model was like, no, you have to be one and you have to opt out to be something different. And even private schools historically operated this way, where like, all right, you're a private school student. If you want to do something different, you have to opt out of us to go do something different.

SPEAKER_01 15:45

It's a big deal to jump the tracks.

SPEAKER_02 15:47

Yeah. Uh, it's not how dynamic marketplaces work. It's really not what families want. And so that to me is that flexibility um, you know, delta that I was I was referencing where families are are wanting to see that space explode.

SPEAKER_01 16:02

We have these webinars where we'll we'll get people together, interested parents, interested guides, people that are thinking about microschools and they're new to the concept. So we give them a little bit of intro, and then the questions are always fascinating. So we did one of these just yesterday in Florida, and there was a, you know, this this question came up. Well, what about like the actual weekly schedule of school? And I said to them, Well, every micro school gets to set their own schedule, right? You you listen to your community, you meet together with the parents. Some of them might need more child care, some might need less, some want more time to do extracurriculars or other things, some want Fridays off, some want to meet on Saturdays and Sundays. You can do literally whatever you want. And people, you could see the wheels just kind of turning on these on these webinars. They ask a follow-up question, okay, but what about holidays and the calendar? Like we have to take the school days off. No, you can do it however you want. You go year-round, you can go nine months, you can map it to whatever the local school district is, and that's easier for vacations, or you can do something totally different to build around families that want to go travel for four months in no, you know, November to February. You could do all kinds of things. And by the end of multiple statements like that, you know, it's just interesting to see the enthusiasm and excitement. They're like, oh, it's like never occurred to people before that you could have flexibility on these things because the system, again, was just kind of a it was one thing for everyone, which it had to be back then, but now it doesn't have to be that. And so people are they're they're just tripping. And this guy yesterday was so funny. By the end of all these these questions, he was like, I'm sold, how do I do it? You know, I'm ready to go. Like, this sounds amazing.

SPEAKER_02 17:36

Yeah, I mean that's that's it right there. Uh I think that's like the best advice most homeschool families and micro school families give, or that I've heard, uh, which is like if a parent goes and starts to do their own thing or a co-op is gonna go do their own thing, like take the schooling model that you know, throw it out the window, and start with scratch. Like you're gonna you're gonna find a way better way to educate your kid uh than what the traditional system has tried to do, which which is which is what one of the struggles, right? It it's like, hey, uh we're gonna get, you know, we're gonna make the uh the oldest kids get up the earliest to get into school when they're often the ones that probably need to sleep in

Rethinking Schedules And The School Model

SPEAKER_02 18:20

the longest. And we're gonna get the the youngest kids who every parent knows gets up the earliest, typically, and we're gonna send them to school the latest. Like right there, we're starting off wrong. And every way you you think about it, um this the traditional system of where you move between classes when you ring a bell, not when you're done with your work, not when you're done with your assignment, not when you've mastered whatever you're working on. It's all kind of like built to satisfy system needs and not students' needs.

SPEAKER_01 18:49

Yeah. Yeah, and and I love to, you know, tell people look, I think school has done amazing things. I think the system was it was the best we could do for for so long, and and information was scarce. I salute so many people in this industry, including family members who are retired teachers and active teachers. And I, you know, I don't want to, they're probably listening right now. I just want to say, all amazing people. I also can see at the same time some limitations. And and one of the big limitations, it's no one's fault, is when you can only have one lever, you have to put that lever somewhere. It's impossible for that lever to really hit. Uh and this happens, you know, instructional design. If the teacher's delivering a lesson verbally, you know, in front of the class, there's some percentage of kids that might understand what he or she is saying. And then there's going to be some that are bored and some that are lost. That's just statistics, you know, it's just a distribution around understanding. And that's not a controversial statement. Interesting that, you know, sometimes people fight for that uh that that old model still. But um, yeah, I think we're at a point now where more and more parents at least are recognizing, okay, so as this is all happening, there's been a major shift in access. One of my things from the very beginning was, you know, I grew up in middle class America, right? No one I knew paid for school of any kind. That was out of the question. You pay taxes, you go to school, right? That's that's the way it works. And so um, when I started Prenda, I really wanted it to be available to families like mine, people that I know in my same neighborhood, and and that meant it had to be free. You know, how can we how can we do this? Because I knew about some of the private schools and some of the other entities out there that were charging 10 or 12 or 14 or $20,000 for a kid, and it was out of the question. And, you know, I was doing this before ESAs, but there's been, as you mentioned, the last 10 years have been a fascinating time for education. I love reading your your newsletters because you go through state by state in meticulous detail of what's going on. Our audience doesn't want all that detail, but can you sort of paint a picture of just what's going on in school choice policy

ESA Trends And Political Headwinds

SPEAKER_01 20:55

nationwide? What trends do you see? What should we be paying attention to?

SPEAKER_02 20:59

Yeah, absolutely. All that is a credit to the great team I have uh around me here at Yes Every Kid that really is doing the work, and I'm just trying to do my best to summarize it and maybe add a couple funny anecdotes along it. So a couple things that I would say it's moving. First, trend wise, um, you know, universal uh ESAs, education statements account uh remains extremely popular. I think in this year alone, we've already done a a sampling of polls in a number of states. And uh universal ESAs is around uh typically um uh like 71% of support, 68% for support. I have to go through the states like Neb like Nebraska was seventy one percent, Missouri was sixty eight percent, Texas was sixty seven percent, Mississippi sixty six percent. So the public support is there. So then the question is all right, if the public's there, where are the politicians? Where's the policy? Uh Texas just enacted one of the biggest programs last year. It's in Process right now. They've had a huge demand on the number of ESA applications. You saw another state, Idaho, they passed an education tax credit, a little bit different than an ESA, but a tax credit. Again, huge demand from applications. North Carolina, same deal. They had a big program, and again, more demand. So you have this public support that's there. You have once the programs are in act in action, you have, you know, demand is there. Arizona, where you're from, same deal. Now that doesn't always prevent politics, doesn't get in the way of good ideas, unfortunately. Or I should say politics always gets in the way of good ideas. Um so you know, we've seen some challenges, right? In Arizona, we see an effort to we see two ballot proposals that are kind of um aiming to try and um regulate the program in different ways. In um Tennessee, you've had efforts to undermine an expansion to the program. Uh in Mississippi, the Lieutenant Governor came out and just flat-out said he wasn't gonna, you know, and who has tremendous um uh political clout, uh, the way their legislature's structured. Splat out said it wasn't gonna happen on his watch. So you still have some laggards, if if we want to call them that, you know, folks who are gonna who are gonna move slower than than the public. But as I've said before, like it's happening. It's you know, the movement's there.

SPEAKER_03 23:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 23:21

Whether or not uh the politicians are gonna, you know, stand in the way, to me, it's just a matter of time. Um you know, ten years ago, I would say even more, twelve years ago, yeah, you know, Arizona passed the first ESA in the country, and people kind of you know said it's too complicated, families aren't gonna understand it. At the time it was only for you know special needs families, then low income and families on on reservations or military families. It was really niche. And we continue to talk about how the fact that like the general public wants this, they really want to have a flexible funding mechanism like an ESA. And today, universal ESA is out of the norm. It's just it's just expanding rapidly.

SPEAKER_01 23:58

Yeah. You get 65 to 70% of parents in support of this policy. There's not that many of one political party. So therefore, it means people from both parties are in that stat, right? That that support it. 100,000 kids on the ESA in Arizona. That's something like close to 10% of Arizona students are on the ESA program. That's not all children of one political party. You know, I'm politically neutral, politically independent, have been for a very long time. I don't understand, I still don't understand why this has become a partisan game just in the last two weeks. My senator from Arizona, who I voted for and I think is an overall good person, has just decided to pick up this anti-ESA banner, not just in Arizona, but nationally, and try to reject the, you know, the federal tax credit for for school choice. And I I'm sitting here just wondering, I don't know if this is political analysis that you can sort of share with our our people why, you know, why is it so controversial if the the people themselves are in support of it? They want this for their for their kids and for other people's kids.

SPEAKER_02 25:09

Well, yeah, it's politics a little bit, right? Unfortunately, politics the way it's it's structured, right? It's not always about what's the most popular, it's what's the most influential. And on uh the democratic side of the lever, to your point, again, I have some great friends on on the Democratic members of the Democratic Party who are either elected or at work there. Um, and a lot of times we just agree to disagree on this issue, or they privately tell me they're there, but they you know publicly can't. Just because of the politics of the Democratic Party. You know, they the teachers union has huge influence and they've put a marker down that if you are on the wrong side of this issue, they will come after you. And so politicians have to make a decision, right? Do I want to, you know, lean into this issue and potentially lose all the other issues that I'm advocating for by being ousted?

unknown 25:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 25:55

Or do I go along to get re-elected? And then hypothetically, like a Senator Kelly from from Arizona, I can go do all these other things. But I think what's most disappointing with Senator Kelly's recent argument, uh, who you're mentioning from Arizona, was that the the federal education tax credit does nothing to impact no state budget at all.

SPEAKER_01 26:15

Yeah. Okay, let's do let's let's just limit it to state conversations because I think there's honest people in state houses, and and I I think they're I I got I gotta give people the benefit of the doubt, right? So I'm gonna walk through some criticisms. I want you to just just think of this as we're gonna just try to figure this out for sane people. Not we're not talking to politicians anymore. This is one thing that that they'll say is every time a kid gets an ESA, seven, eight thousand dollars in Texas, it's ten thousand dollars. Going to this is state dollars that have been collected for taxes, going to a family that's not using public schools, that money is not going into public schools. So the phrase you'll hear is is bankrupting, right? This is bankrupting public schools. Senator Kelly's talked about it, but many, many others. It's a common refrain. What would you say to somebody that's concerned about, you know, look, public school has done a lot of good in the world. This is adding value to families that need it. We don't want to kill this institution, and you're killing it by doing these programs. I mean, what what would be your answer?

SPEAKER_02 27:15

Yeah, to uh I'd I'd answer uh probably one of three ways. The first is like get to the purpose. The purpose of education is to get every kid the skills, the knowledge, the talent to learn and and be successful in life, right? That's I think is something we'd all agree on. And I think the next thing we'd all agree on is that every kid is unique and wonderful and and you know, they have God given talent and potential. And to limit them because of what's best for quote a system is wrong. I don't think anyone when we first started to build this thing 200 years ago, this public school system, would think that we'd get to a place where we say, hey, the funding of a school building is more

Does Choice Bankrupt Public Schools

SPEAKER_02 27:55

important than the funding of a child. Uh that's gonna require difficult conversations, but it's gonna require healthy conversations that we can have while doing what's right for every individual child. And I the second question I'd have is when you've seen choice uh programs um in in action, the data actually goes to show you that public schools actually net benefit, right? Historically, they they net benefit um by the market billions of dollars. Whereas and the reason being is they'll end up continuing to keep those that that really care about the funding. The public school keeps the local funding and it's just the state funding that goes. So they keep local funding for a kid they never have to educate anymore, which argu arguably would increase the the the funding pie for that school. So they will keep anywhere from like two to three to four, sometimes more than that, depending on the the local funding arg uh element, while just the state funding moves and follows with the kid. And the third argument is just simple like fairness, right? I don't think it's right, and I don't think anyone would would agree that a any public institution or any private institution should receive public dollars for something it's not doing. So if a sty if a child is leaving that school to go somewhere else, whether it's homeschool, private school, public school, you we wouldn't want to continue to keep funding a system, just even if it's not it it no longer has a student in it in the classroom. Uh and to me, like that's just a simple fairness argument that I think most would recognize is is kind of a right or wrong.

SPEAKER_01 29:25

Yeah. So for homeschoolers since the 1970s, and they had to fight for this, right? There was a whole legal saga with battling for the freedom to just they didn't even say give me money. They said just let me give me permission to take my my kid, even though I I don't want the taxpayer tax dollars, tax dollars back that I've already paid. I'm gonna I'm gonna have paid taxes for the school system and I'm gonna buy my own curriculum, I'm gonna do my own work. These people were scrimping and saving, putting this together, and fighting their way through uh, you know, legal legal arguments that were trying to sort of prevent them from doing that. So, yeah, for for those people to say, hey, I should be allowed to do that. I mean, you start to look at this at a certain point and say, whoa, that doesn't feel very fair. Like we're not treating these people squarely, right? They're they're doing all this work and they're they're educating their kids and they're not asking anything of the system other than permission to do it, right? And now I think what we're saying with ESA is, and here's and and I think this is the other point. It's less money. So Arizona's ESA dollars are 74, 7,500. Arizona's average total, you'll you'll know better than me, 15,000, something like that. So if it if we're talking about half of the overall tax dollars, I just can't see the math. And I would love for Senator Mark Kelly to explain to me how every time we take a kid out to go do something else, you've got you're spending half as much. Like, how is that breaking budgets? How is that bankrupting anyone? Especially what what you say, that there's still money going to the school from the local and and maybe federal components. So this this additional dollars that are still being collected by the system itself.

SPEAKER_02 31:03

The other real hard truth that most folks who oppose ESAs, for example, don't want to admit is oftentimes they want those that the they need, as they'll put it, they need that funding to fund uh like systemic debt uh and like historical outlays and um you know long-term commitments, financial commitments that are being saddled on a kid. And to me, again, it gets down to like a right or wrong. Like the idea that we should keep that kid in a school that the parent says just doesn't work for them to fund you know the debt in the building because they took out some. Paying back bonds and things like that that are 10 years old. We are away, we've we've lost our way as a country. If that's what we're gonna start prioritizing over individual school uh education

Fraud Claims Versus The Actual Data

SPEAKER_02 31:50

experiences.

SPEAKER_01 31:51

Right. Okay, let me give you another one, Matt. This is fun. Yeah. These programs, this is another thing you'll hear uh the opponents say, these programs are reckless, irresponsible, they're full of fraud and waste. So they they shouldn't be allowed to exist or they need to be heavily regulated and and interfered with to the point where we're we can't take quite so many risks with them. Can you kind of speak to that?

SPEAKER_02 32:13

Yeah, I well, the first is let's start with with facts, right? The facts are nearly every instance where they've looked into private school choice programs, whether it's in Florida or Arizona, the two largest in the country, the fraud rates are ridiculously low. Like, like extremely, extremely low. You know, like by extremely low, I mean we're talking about one to less than one percent. Um, what oftentimes gets caught up in those numbers and artificially inflates them is misspending, where a parent makes a mistake, the system might catch it, or they might tell the parent, hey, next time don't do that, or they, you know, or the parent pay pays it back or, you know, refunds the money. And those are misspending, right? But it's but that I would argue is not fraud where a parent is out fraudulently stealing money. What I what really frustrated me though when we talk about this is like I don't want fraud in public education funding, but I I grew up uh just outside Detroit. I worked for the Attorney General of Michigan for eight years, and I can tell you of cases of millions of dollars of fraud in the public education system. I can tell you that in Arizona's largest school districts, there's been a hundred million dollars in fraud, documented fraud, fraud where people have gone to jail. That's actual fraud. And then that's separate from the misspending in public schools. And so it's like it to me, it just rings a little hollow when I hear folks bring this up, but they were completely silent when you know, when Mesa Public Schools had it had a had a major fraud incident or where hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment went missing and they were they were completely quiet, or they said, Well, we should just buy more computers or whatever went missing, as opposed to, hey, that one parent in Arizona that made that one bad purchase. Not only are we going to punish that parent, because maybe it was wrong, but we're gonna punish all the parents.

SPEAKER_01 33:54

Everyone.

SPEAKER_02 33:55

Yeah. Like if that were the case, no public school would exist. If we were to shut down every public school, you know, if they're ever caught doing something fraudulent, all public schools would be closed. We don't think we don't do that. It's not, you know, operational. The other issue, sorry, just to jump in, well, that's great, is the fraud rates in in other government funding programs are off the charts, right? Like Arizona is going to face a federal penalty on their um their uh I want to say their their Medicaid um fraud rate. If you don't have your Medicaid fraud rate below a certain percentage, uh you will get penalized by the federal government. They're going to face a a significant penalty to the federal government because of the amount of fraud that's existing in the state's Medicare, Medicaid, Medicare. But meanwhile, we're gonna focus all our attention on the energy. You know, uh and that's like a high hundred, like tens of millions of dollars of fraud.

SPEAKER_01 34:50

We're gonna presumably higher than one percent, you know, some number like that.

SPEAKER_02 34:55

Because one parent made one choice that either we didn't agree with or maybe wasn't a wise decision and was caught and was asked to pay back.

SPEAKER_01 35:03

Yeah. Incredible. I mean, this logic is great. And um, I wish everybody that's considering signing a petition right now for ESA or or taking it to the ballots later if it if they do get enough signatures and this becomes a question that goes to voters. I just wish they would think about this the way you're thinking about it. I think it's helpful to to see. And and you make a fair point. I mean, holding this up, if we're concerned about fraud and and waste, let's be concerned about that, but let's do it in a consistent way across everything and and not use it as a sort of a selective vision of you know one particular program that we really don't like.

SPEAKER_02 35:39

And when I worked in the government, when we wanted to go after fraud and healthcare fraud and other systems fraud, we started with the biggest amounts and worked down. And in Arizona, there are public policy officials who want to start at the smallest spending amounts, like the parent level, and go up. And to me, I'm like, that is the wrong way to go.

SPEAKER_01 35:58

Feels weird. Yeah. All right. So let's jump to another question. Um, and you'll hear this a lot, even from people who are supportive

Accountability Beyond Test Scores

SPEAKER_01 36:05

of the ESA idea. Um, it's about accountability. Um, I think there are sincere people here that would say, look, this is education. This is serious. What happens to your kid will affect me and my life. And, you know, because it's a collective good in that way, it's important that the government get involved and the government enforce a standard. So the logic here is that we need more accountability. We need the government ensuring that the schools are doing the right things or holding the right bar. How do you talk about that when you meet with folks? And let's assume, again, good intentions and really take that argument seriously. What's the answer back? Like, how do you how do you talk about that?

SPEAKER_02 36:46

That's a great question. And it is something we hear a lot in this in this space. The first point I would have is just I think we need to uh reclaim uh the definition of accountability. Accountability, we've done research with this. We've gone and met with dozens of parents and asked them what is education, what does education accountability mean to you? And most parents end up getting frustrated because they don't feel like the system or the schools are accountable to anyone. And it's because accountability to a parent is a consequence, good or bad. Parents, when you ask them, like, what does accountability look like to you and your kid? And they're like, Well, if my kid does something wrong, I hold them accountable. I tell them they did this wrong and maybe there's a negative consequence. Or they did something and they stuck to their word and it was good, and my kid gets a positive consequence. They parents are are are like public policy officials don't always, I think, give them enough credit. They're wise to it, they don't see testing as accountability. It's not to say they're anti-testing per se, but they don't see the consequence that comes with it. Accountability is to me the there's no greater accountability than telling a public school, I love this school so much, I'm sending my kid back here next year. Right. And there's no greater accountability to a private school than a parent saying, and this was my story, my parents' story, my parents took us out of a private school and sent us to public school because they didn't teach science one year, and they said, Well, you know, your kid will get tested tested on it next year. And my mom said, No, we're sending Matt to private school. Um, that's accountability. That was my kit, my parents exerting accountability on that school. Right. Now, separate from that is testing, right? Like assessments. Now that's important too, but I think to me, it's making sure that that assessment is tangible to the parent. And right now, that's to me the the where our quote unquote test-based accountability is broken. It's not designed whether anybody wants to admit or not, it's not designed for the parent. It's designed to give like large pic picture level data. So why the data comes out typically way late. Yeah, months, months later, months later, it's not actionable. And then as a result, it frustrates the parents. Parents get frustrated, the teachers get frustrated, everybody gets frustrated, and then you know, we like circle the drain and nothing changes.

SPEAKER_01 39:02

But if you get frustrated in July, it doesn't matter because you forget about it by the time. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 39:07

Yeah. No, you're right. And and so it ends up being like parents end up feeling like it's meaningless, but while at the same time, parents are like, wait a minute, you you stressed my kid out for weeks on this thing. You disrupted all of their learning. You did, you know, two weeks of remedial training to get ready for the test, all for the results to come out in July. And for me to find out now in August when my kid starts the next school year that uh that they're they're behind or behind the reading.

SPEAKER_01 39:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 39:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 39:36

Exactly. Wow. Well, this is I I think it's really helpful. And I love how you talked about this, the idea of accountability. I'm I'm just thinking through a situation we had as a as parents before doing Prenda, you know, we sent our kids to government schools, you know, then the district school nearby. And we had chosen, we had moved into a place that we thought had good schools, you know, we did the research like so many people do, and we were fortunate enough to be able to afford a house in a neighborhood with an A-rated school. And we've we got a teacher that was toward the end of her career and just wasn't as hard. I mean, hard to say, just wasn't a happy person. I mean, really, I think just tired and maybe had been through it. And our poor little kindergarten son, you know, just I mean, it was a rough, a rough time because he perceived that this woman just didn't like him at all. And when we drilled in a little bit to find out, it seemed like she didn't like him at all. I mean, that it was like, yeah, you're basically right. I mean, it's like annoyed that you're here, treated us rudely, you know, and and um sort of complained. And it was like, huh, like what could we do? Like we could, if we wanted to, we could go talk to the principal about it. And I think we may have done that, you know, taken that step. Ultimately, the principal's like, I've got, you know, three classrooms and the other two are full. Like, sorry, this is how it works. You know, if we really wanted to, we could have advocated somehow to the district or gone to a school board meeting or made noise. But ultimately, there's nothing we could do, right? We were where if that had been a microschool that was a self-sufficient, you know, entity, I think we would have said, hey, let's go try something else. Let's make the move here. And the level of accountability they're talking about really is incredible. Unfortunately, we hadn't yet entered that phase of consciousness as parents because legally we could have done it then, you know, we just didn't know it. And I think that's a lot of parents these days. They still think about accountability the way that we're taught to think about it, which is like, don't worry, like, look at this banner out here. This is an A plus school. It's like, wait, but my kid's having a terrible experience, and it's affecting not only his learning, it's affecting his day-to-day like mental health, you know, and and that's uh that's not okay, really. But we were sort of conditioned to believe, I think that it was okay.

SPEAKER_02 41:44

Yeah. Well, uh I'm glad you're your your kid's doing better and and it's moved on.

SPEAKER_01 41:50

And uh it was a long time ago.

SPEAKER_02 41:52

He's uh that really inspired you to start Friends. So thank you to that teacher. Um Yeah, thank you. That was great. Yeah. Um, yeah, and and I think that's the other part that frustrates parents around this conversation around accountability. It's oftentimes framed up uh in the reform space of like either um your ability, which means that you want to uh let go of switching as a means of accountability and therefore and and just use testing. And if you're anti uh testing as a form of accountability, well then therefore you must be anti-testing and we'll never know how your kid's doing. Uh and we'll just, you know, it's gonna go with the wind. And it's like, no, parents are a little more clever than that. Uh they'd like to be able to um drive down the switching cost to make it easier to switch between models to hold models uh and education providers more accountable. And along the way, good education providers, microschools, private schools, public schools, good public school teachers, they're gonna make sure the parent knows how well their kids are doing. Right. And just like that's the two can be true at the same time.

SPEAKER_01 42:57

They're both true. I mean, this is it, Prenda does it. We've we've thrown out traditional report cards because we don't think they're actionable or you know, driving the right mindset. We've created what we call the empowered learner report card, and the kids can see where they're at in their formative assessments, they can see their benchmark from the beginning and the end of the year, see their growth. Parents love this, and we can talk about it in real time and use it as an educational tool to help fill gaps and help kids progress. Kids feel empowered by that. Parents are happy with it. Yeah, it's just it feels like night and day a difference. And and it's not what, yeah, I think when people write these news articles, it's some picture of, you know, everybody's just throwing out all reading and math and everything. It's like, no, parents want their kids to read, turns out. You know, that's that's uh part of the problem is you look at the nape scores, it's like not enough of the kids are learning to read, even. So how can we, you know, how can we really be accountable and and help parents who who choose us? And if we don't do it, they're gonna leave. You know, that's a big deal.

SPEAKER_02 43:55

When you ask parents uh based on like sector, yeah, which do Students are likely to be the most educated, public, private, homeschool, charter, et cetera. Almost hands down, homeschool comes out number one. Parents are like, even if they don't want to homeschool their kids, they're like, those kids are getting educated there. That's the one sector that is like in every state exempt from like any state mandatory testing. The two don't equate. Like the amount of testing that you do does not equate the the outcomes of the student.

SPEAKER_01 44:26

Right. Well, that's a fascinating insight. It's like that kid's going to be talking to me about Socrates or whatever. And over here, we're trying to get the main idea out of a passage and answer the right multiple choice, you know, whatever. Yeah. Matt, this has been a fascinating conversation. I appreciate all of your willingness to dive into this and take some of these criticisms and have these conversations. But where's this all going? I mean, give me a couple minutes on that. And then I'd love to ask you a little personal question here at the end.

SPEAKER_02 44:50

Yeah, sure. Where is it going? To me, I am partly I'm just a just an

Where Education Is Headed Next

SPEAKER_02 44:55

absolute optimist in my heart. I think it's just getting better and better. I think education is shifting into uh a world where kids are going to continue to fall in love with learning. Right now, sadly, too many kids fall out of love with learning. Every everyone's seen it. Everyone's experienced it probably at some point in time in their own personal life. And when I walk into a microschool and some of these really small startups, to see the joy and the happiness that's uh, you know, filling the room alongside the learning is just encouraging. And that's not to say it doesn't happen in public schools, it does, but to start to see it really rapidly growing outside of the traditional system to me is just a mark of something positive that's happening in our country that oftentimes is overlooked.

SPEAKER_01 45:38

Powerful. Yeah, I agree. This is not going away. Can you kind of look back on your life? We we call this the Kindled Podcast. We talk about kindling a love of learning and some of the things you were just describing in some of these settings. Is there somebody in your life that you can kind of point to that kindled the love of learning for you?

SPEAKER_02 45:54

Yeah. Um, there's probably the number one would be my fifth grade teacher. He was also

The Teacher Who Kindled Learning

SPEAKER_02 46:00

our civics teacher or uh social studies teacher. We do our rotation, Mr. Miller. And that was the year I fell in love with just government and social studies. And it's one of those classes that like you remember to this day, uh, of just like it just like loved it. I think that's when I started just like like ignoring, like, you know, grabbing my parents' newspaper and opening up to the world section and like being that weird old kid. And it's continued to this day. And to me, it like started this weird journey of love, loving to learn. What I also remember distinctly was like I was able to keep learning outside that classroom. And I was able to just like go and I my my room was filled with like history books as a kid that had nothing to do with with my sixth grade, seventh grade, eighth grade um classes because it was like I wanted to keep going down that that pipe, you know, that that pathway. And it really started with um, I can't put my thumb on it, but just the joy and fun that Mr. Miller had uh made learning around about social studies and government back in uh fifth grade.

SPEAKER_01 47:00

Well, shout out to Mr. Miller if you're out there. That's that's inspiring and that's some some great work, and it's a reminder

Prenda Closing And How To Start

SPEAKER_01 47:05

to all of us that you have a chance to really make a difference in the life of somebody near you. All right, Matt, this has been a fascinating conversation. Thank you for the work you're doing, and thanks for joining us here on the podcast.

SPEAKER_02 47:14

Hey, thank you. Appreciate it, Kelly. Keep it up.

SPEAKER_00 47:17

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 micro school, just go to prenda.com. Thanks for listening and remember to keep kindling.