Nick Freitas (115:47)
Or it goes the opposite, right? You got less, you got lower test scores, so you need more funding. The pro. The reason why you have lower test scores is because you didn't have enough funding. So all, all schools, all public schools in America have three primary funding streams. Usually about anywhere from 40 to 50% comes from local property taxes. Right. So wealthier areas tend to have more funding for education. Then you have about another maybe 40 to 50% coming from the state level and they have various indexes in order to determine what that looks like. And then you, the remaining like anywhere from 9 to 10% coming from federal funds that are usually dedicated toward specific programs. And then you will have local authority, state authority, and then federal authority insofar as you want the federal do dollars for certain programs. So that's the mechanism that you're, you're working with. So yeah, in, in some cases, you, you, you could theoretically have a state that would give a school more funding if it's doing really, really well. But more often than not, and I sit on the education committee in Virginia, the argument that you're going to hear is, well, this school is failing because you have underfunded it. And then you look at it, you're like, wait a sec, this school is getting more funding than, than other schools that are outperforming it. So it's got to be more than the funding. Now if you really want to get pissed off, go look at the, go look at the share of funding within public education from 1970 to today, and go look at how much of it has actually gone to administrative bloat with your school system. The, the administrative bloat has far outpaced teacher pay. Anything else. And, and it certainly hasn't led all this additional funding hasn't led to drastically improved test scores. And, and then you can even ask the question, are test scores really the best way to, to solve it? Like, I, I have a real heart for. I, I saw somebody the day and I wish I could have memorized. He did a beautiful job, but he basically said he had ADHD and he, and he had had dyslexia. But the way he described it was very. He goes, he goes, I have adhd, which means I can focus on multiple independent things at once. He goes, I have dyslexia, which means I see things in an incredibly unique way that other people's can't. Most people don't see ADHD or dyslexia that way. They see it as disadvantages. I think a lot of the reason why we see certain things as disadvantages is because we have a school system that tells you to go in, sit down, shut up for six hours a day and engage in standardized testing in order to determine whether or not you've, you know, encapsulated and mastered the subject matter. Yeah, you, you put, you put an 8 year old boy in that situation, you're probably going to have some problems. In fact, you're probably gonna have disciplinary issues. You're probably gonna have a lot of things that are disruptive for the class. And you can certainly categorize those as problems for that model. But you take that same boy, you put him into a different learning environment, all of a sudden he thrives. It wasn't an Einstein that said, you know, a fish will think it's stupid if you judge its intelligence by its ability to climb tree again. Now let me, let me say something complimentary about the, the people within public school system trying to mass produce public education for tens of millions of people is incredibly difficult, incredibly difficult. But I think we need to start asking the question instead of, well, how do we improve this model, which I believe is fundamentally flawed. I think it's about time to start asking questions. Is, are these flaws so fundamental and is there a better way to do this that will actually create a far more individualized educational experience? Because I can tell you from personal experience operating with co ops, tutor tutors, and then sitting on an education committee where I'm looking at the data for this stuff. One of the greatest things that arrived from homeschool is we had, we didn't have a fraction of the resources and assets that the public schools system did with respect to what we could provide for our kids. But when my kid didn't understand a particular topic, I didn't make all my other kids stop until they caught up. They were all able to go forward and develop as fast as they can within a particular strength. I didn't have to stick with the curriculum that wasn't working for him and just hope that it would get better. I could change the curriculum, I could customize it to them. When they got to a certain age within high school and they'd gone through that basic learning, right? You got to know basic math, you got, got to learn how to read, you got to learn basic English comprehension. You have to do these things no matter what your profession is, no matter what you want to do. But we got to a point where one day I remember my oldest daughter just being so frustrated and upset with a subject matter. I think she was taking algebra 2 at the time. She was a sophomore in high school, and she was miserable. She was eating every minute of it. I said, what do you want to do? And she goes, well, she goes, these, these are, these are the categories that I have interest in. I said, you know what? None of those requirements. Algebra 2. So why don't we focus your education on something that will actually be beneficial to something that you would like to do that is both intellectually stimulating for you and financially viable. Why don't we focus on that? All of a sudden, learning went from this horrible thing that she couldn't stand as something that was exciting because it was customized toward her objectives. We didn't have to be millionaires to do that. It isn't as difficult as is made out to be. And in fact, I think we're increasingly seeing an expert class that is constantly trying to convince us. Us that we're too stupid to do things that have been done for centuries. So I would just encourage people as angry as I might have made you saying all this, just take a look into it. Because to your point, when you were talking about access to information and things like that, it has never been easier. It has never been easier. And I do think ultimately it's going to be the thing that. That saves us. Because I don't. I don't want a generation of Americans thinking that they. That the most important thing that they will do in their lives is vote. Like the thing that will ultimately decide whether their business succeeds or failures is who's in politics. That's not a free country. I. I think honestly, the most unique and beautiful thing about this country, the reason why people risk life and limb to get here and still do, it's not because you get to vote for politicians every two, four and six years. It's because up until this point in history, we were one of the very, very few places on Earth where if you genuinely applied yourself, you could create a life and be relatively certain that a dictator, a bureaucrat, an aristocrat wasn't going to come in and take it all away from you because you were the wrong class or the wrong race or the wrong religion. And that's what's so beautiful about it, right? It's, it's that, that ability to seize opportunity in a way that typically has not existed throughout time and space. And that is ultimately what is, what is at stake. And so I, I told somebody once, they're like, what do you want to be known for in politics? I said, look, I'm, I'm very, I'm very aware of the fact that two minutes after I leave politics, most people forget I was ever there. I want to, I want to have a good relationship with my family. I want my wife and kids to be proud of who I was and what I did and know that I was there for them. Insofar as I work within government, my goal ultimately is to make government so small and yet so efficient at what it's supposed to do that nobody has to worry on a day to day basis on whether it's going to come in and crush their lives. And that's still what I hold out of hope for.
