529. Public Schools and the Battle For Children | Corey DeAngelis

Summary

Podcast Title: The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Host: Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Guest: Dr. Corey DeAngelis
Episode: 529. Public Schools and the Battle For Children | Corey DeAngelis
Release Date: March 13, 2025

---

Introduction

In Episode 529 of The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson engages in a profound discussion with Dr. Corey DeAngelis, a respected education policy expert specializing in school choice. The conversation delves into the systemic failures of public education, the monopolistic structures that sustain these failures, and the transformative potential of school choice programs. Throughout the episode, Peterson and DeAngelis explore empirical studies, policy implications, and strategic avenues to reshape the educational landscape in the United States.

---

The Problem with Public Schools

Monopolistic Structures in Education

Dr. Peterson opens the dialogue by highlighting the various monopolies entrenched within the public education system:

• Geographic Monopoly: Families are compelled to send their children to schools based solely on their residential location, eliminating genuine choice.

  Jordan Peterson [00:09]: "There's a geographic monopoly and there's a state mandated monopoly because you have to send your kids to school, and then there's a teacher certification monopoly."

• State-Mandated Monopoly: The legal requirement to enroll children in public schools restricts alternatives.

  Corey DeAngelis [00:09]: "And that trickles down from the university level into the K12 system."

• Teacher Certification Monopoly: The educational faculties maintain strict control over teacher qualifications, stifling diversity and innovation.

Consequences of Monopolies

These monopolistic structures result in several adverse outcomes:

• High Costs and Low Efficiency: Public schools are extraordinarily expensive yet deliver disappointing educational outcomes.

• Ideological Indoctrination: The dominance of progressive ideologies within educational faculties leads to ideological warping of students.

• Lack of Accountability: Without competition, there is little incentive for public schools to improve or innovate.

---

School Choice and Its Benefits

Empirical Evidence Supporting School Choice

Dr. DeAngelis presents compelling data from various studies demonstrating the efficacy of school choice programs:

• Reduction in Crime and Teenage Pregnancy: Participation in voucher and charter school programs correlates with a significant decrease in crime rates and teenage pregnancies.

  Corey DeAngelis [00:17]: "We found a reduction in crime, but also a 38% reduction in paternity disputes, which could be caused by out of wedlock births or teenage pregnancies."

• Increased Graduation Rates: Students in school choice programs exhibit higher probabilities of graduating from high school.

  Corey DeAngelis [00:13]: "The findings were less pregnancy, less crime, and higher probability of graduating."

• Case Study – New York City Charter Schools: A lottery-based experiment showed that male students who entered charter schools had a 100% decrease in the likelihood of committing crimes during the study period.

  Corey DeAngelis [00:17]: "A charter school experiment... decreased the likelihood of crime for male students by 100%."

Economic and Parental Rights Perspectives

Dr. Peterson and Dr. DeAngelis discuss school choice from both economic and parental rights angles:

• Economic Efficiency: Competition introduced by school choice leads to better resource allocation, reduced administrative spending, and overall improved public school performance.

  Jordan Peterson [09:39]: "There's no competition, there's no real incentive to do the hard work that produces improvement."

• Parental Rights: Emphasizing that parents are best positioned to make informed decisions about their children's education, advocating for funding mechanisms that empower parents rather than bind them to underperforming public schools.

  Corey DeAngelis [01:14]: "Children should be watched over by those who have their best interests most firmly at heart, and that's inevitably going to be parents."

---

Critique of Faculties of Education

Leftist Dominance and Ideological Control

Dr. Peterson criticizes the faculties of education for their radical leftist orientations, which he argues undermine educational quality and promote ideological conformity:

• Marxist Orientation: The Department of Educational Reform at the University of Arkansas, where Dr. DeAngelis earned his PhD, is cited as an exception to the predominantly Marxist educational institutions.

  Corey DeAngelis [05:05]: "I didn't. It was actually the Department of education reform... 99% of education PhDs are Marxist institutions."

• Influence of Teacher Unions: Teacher unions wield significant power over state budgets (up to 50%) and educational policies, stifling reform and perpetuating inefficiency.

  Jordan Peterson [05:30]: "Republicans don't have a hope in hell of ever winning the culture war if they allow faculties of education to maintain their hammerlock on teacher certification."

Implications for Educational Quality

The monopolistic control of educational faculties leads to:

• Low Standards for Teacher Certification: Extremely low SAT scores among education faculty indicate a lack of rigor and competence.

• Increased Administrative Overhead: A disproportionate increase in administrative positions without corresponding improvements in educational outcomes.

  Corey DeAngelis [35:34]: "Administrators have increased by about 95%."

---

Impact on Low-Income Families

Access to Quality Education Through Choice

School choice programs are particularly beneficial for low-income families who are often confined to poorly performing public schools:

• Equalizing Opportunities: By allowing funding to follow the student, low-income families can access higher-quality private or charter schools, breaking the cycle of multi-generational poverty and educational underachievement.

  Corey DeAngelis [80:28]: "There's a really interesting story about how DeSantis actually won in 2018... it's benefiting over 100,000 kids at the time."

Case Studies Supporting Benefits for Low-Income Families

• District of Columbia Voucher Program: Studies indicate significant benefits for predominantly low-income and minority students, countering narratives that school choice primarily aids affluent, white families.

  Corey DeAngelis [52:06]: "The average household income was about $30,000 per year... about 95% of the kids were black or Hispanic."

• Political Endorsements: High-profile endorsements from political figures underscore the program's impact on diverse demographics.

  Corey DeAngelis [76:07]: "Trump endorsed the book... my senator from Texas... she sends her own kid to a private school."

---

The Role of Competition in Improving Public Schools

Competitive Pressure Enhances Public School Performance

Introducing competition through school choice leads to substantial improvements in public schools' performance by fostering accountability and encouraging efficient use of resources:

• Resource Allocation: Studies show that in competitive environments, public schools allocate more funds directly to classrooms and educators rather than administrative expenses.

  Corey DeAngelis [37:02]: "26 of the 29 studies on this nationwide find statistically significant positive effects of private school choice competition on the outcomes in the public schools."

• Examples of Success: Florida, with its robust school choice programs, has seen public school rankings improve dramatically while spending remains below the national average.

  Corey DeAngelis [37:44]: "In places like Florida, there is a control group... now they spend 27% less than the national average but have school choice for everybody."

Mechanisms of Improvement

• Cost-Effectiveness: Lower administrative costs allow more funds to be directed towards instructional quality.

• Teacher Retention and Motivation: Competitive pressures necessitate better compensation and working conditions for teachers to retain high-quality educators.

  Corey DeAngelis [37:44]: "They're going to allocate those additional dollars instead of towards administrators, they start to allocate them towards the classroom, towards the teachers."

---

Head Start Programs: A Historical and Contemporary Analysis

Historical Context and Long-Term Impact

Originally, Head Start programs aimed to provide early educational opportunities to disadvantaged children with the hope of long-term academic and behavioral benefits:

• Positive Behavioral Outcomes: Early studies indicated that children who participated in Head Start showed reduced crime rates, lower instances of teenage pregnancy, and higher graduation rates later in life.

  Corey DeAngelis [07:58]: "Head Start accelerated cognitive performance... by grade six, there was no effect, but there were positive behavioral outcomes."

Recent Challenges and Negative Findings

Contrary to earlier optimistic reports, recent randomized control trials (RCTs) have presented unfavorable outcomes:

• Tennessee RCT Findings: A recent study found that participation in Head Start was associated with worse academic and behavioral outcomes by sixth grade.

  Corey DeAngelis [52:16]: "They found that those who won the lottery were worse off academically and behaviorally by the end of sixth grade."

Implications for Early Childhood Education

These conflicting findings suggest that while early interventions might offer temporary cognitive boosts, they may not sustain long-term academic or behavioral improvements without broader systemic changes.

---

Strategic Approaches and Future Plans

Terminology and Framing

Dr. DeAngelis emphasizes the importance of framing the school choice debate in terms of "funding students, not systems" to shift the narrative and place the onus on public schools to justify their funding:

Corey DeAngelis [48:39]: "Funding students, not systems."

Bipartisan Strategy and Political Mobilization

Leveraging bipartisan arguments and strategic communication efforts has been pivotal in advancing school choice:

• Bipartisan Arguments: Combining libertarian ideals of limited government with civil rights perspectives to appeal to a broader audience.

• Political Endorsements and Movements: Collaborations with influential politicians and participation in state-level policy changes have amplified the movement.

  Corey DeAngelis [58:34]: "Trump won the parent vote by nine points... education voters."

Expansion of Educational Options

Innovative models like micro schools and education savings accounts are emerging as viable alternatives to traditional public schooling:

• Micro Schools: Small-scale, flexible educational settings that cater to diverse learning needs and preferences.

• Education Savings Accounts (ESAs): Vouchers that parents can use for various educational services, including private schooling and homeschooling.

  Corey DeAngelis [72:48]: "Education savings accounts... making available to everybody... families signed up right when they opened up the gates."

Addressing Certification and Teacher Quality

Reforming teacher certification processes and reducing bureaucratic barriers are essential for enhancing educational quality across all schooling options.

---

Conclusion

The episode underscores a critical examination of the U.S. public education system, revealing its inherent inefficiencies, monopolistic constraints, and ideological biases. Dr. Corey DeAngelis provides robust empirical evidence advocating for school choice as a transformative solution that empowers parents, improves educational outcomes, and fosters accountability through competition. The discussion calls for a multifaceted approach, combining policy reform, strategic communication, and grassroots mobilization to dismantle the existing monopolies and cultivate a diverse, high-quality educational ecosystem.

Notable Quotes:

• Jordan Peterson [12:09]: "And you have competition, you don't have a monopoly, you have to do something efficiently."

• Corey DeAngelis [13:24]: "Professors there... Patrick Wolf did a lot of the early evaluations of voucher programs."

• Jordan Peterson [30:31]: "We found that the best predictor of being a politically correct authoritarian... was low verbal iq."

• Corey DeAngelis [37:02]: "Public school teacher salaries slightly go up... allocate those additional dollars towards the classroom, towards the teachers."

• Jordan Peterson [74:17]: "If you're going to spend the money, we might as well fund the people as opposed to."

---

This comprehensive discussion between Dr. Peterson and Dr. DeAngelis illuminates the urgent need for educational reform through school choice, backed by rigorous research and strategic advocacy. It presents a persuasive argument for dismantling entrenched monopolistic practices and fostering a competitive, choice-driven educational system that serves the best interests of all children, especially those in underserved communities.

Transcript

[Jordan Peterson]

So there's a geographic monopoly and there's a state mandated monopoly because you have to send your kids to school, and then there's a teacher certification monopoly.

[Corey D'Angelis]

And that trickles down from the university level into the K12 system.

[Jordan Peterson]

The findings were less pregnancy, less crime, and higher probability of graduating.

[Corey D'Angelis]

I'd also say on the teenage pregnancy thing, we found a reduction in crime, but also a 38% reduction in paternity disputes, which could be caused by out of wedlock births or teenage pregnancies. Another separate study in New York City was a charter school experiment. They found that winning a lottery to go to a charter school in New York City decreased the likelihood of crime for male students by 100%.

[Jordan Peterson]

Republicans don't have a hope in hell of ever winning the culture war if they allow faculties of education to maintain their hammerlock on teacher certification. Everything else, as far as I'm concerned, it's blowing in the wind.

[Corey D'Angelis]

And if Democrats are smart, the way that we can get towards bipartisanship on school choice is through.

[Jordan Peterson]

Hello, everybody. I'm speaking today to Dr. Corey D'Angelis. He has a PhD in education policy, which under normal circumstances wouldn't necessarily be a good thing, but he graduated from the Department of Educational Reform at the University of Arkansas. And that's one of the rare schools, maybe singular schools, that isn't, you know, terribly bloody Marxist in its fundamental orientation with, you know, a smattering of incompetence thrown in there just for. Just for good measure. I've been following Dr. D'Angelis Corey on X for a good long time. He's one of these one man wrecking balls, one person wrecking balls, like Leila Micklewait, who's fighting the good fight against pornhub, and Robbie Starbuck, who's a complete bloody army in relationship to calling corporations out for their foolishness of their DEI policies. And Corey's been distributing the word in relationship to school choice. And school choice is a matter that's bigger than you might think, even though it has become quite a hot political issue, because the school system, the public school system, is a failure in many ways. It's extraordinarily expensive, it's expansive, and it does an absolutely dismal job of what it should be doing, which is educating children, at least teaching them to read, let's say a bare minimal standard of literacy. And although it turns out to be quite effective as a propaganda machine, there's a variety of reasons that it's rotten to the core. But the fact that it's A monopoly is definitely one of them. And we delved into that topic in great detail. If you're a parent and you're concerned about your children's future, if you're concerned about your rights as a parent, if you want to have the option to find an educational institution of high quality so that you can give your children the start they need in life and also to protect them against a substantial amount of ideological warping, then the issue of school choice should be something that's paramount in your attention, as it has become for many people in the United States. In any case, we delved into the rationale for school choice from the free market and libertarian perspective, but also from the perspective of parents rights. I suppose a cardinal question of our time is, well, just whose children are they? And I think the right answer to that question is children should be watched over by those who have their best interests most firmly at heart, and that's inevitably going to be parents. And so it's in the service of children that parents have the right to determine the educational pathway that they can pursue. And even though parents might not be able to do that on their own, because educating children is a difficult job, they're certainly in the best position to make intelligent choices about the direction to take if those choices are available to them. And so Corey's been working very hard on making that possibility a reality for parents. And so that's what we talked about today. Well, Dr. DeAngelis. Hey, I got to make sure I'm pronouncing that exactly right. Am I pronouncing that exactly right?

[Corey D'Angelis]

Yeah, DeAngelis. Like Los Angeles. But I'm not. I'm not a real doctor. I'm more like a Jill Biden doctor. Got a PhD in education policy.

[Jordan Peterson]

Oh, yes. Where from?

[Corey D'Angelis]

University of Arkansas.

[Jordan Peterson]

I see. When did you get that?

[Corey D'Angelis]

Pretty recently, actually. Well, I'm getting older now. It's 2018 or so. I got the PhD and I studied school choice. Balls.

[Jordan Peterson]

Brainwashed.

[Corey D'Angelis]

I didn't. It was actually the Department of education reform. So 99% of education PhDs are Marxist institutions.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yes.

[Corey D'Angelis]

This one was housed in the College of Education, but not a lot of people liked us there because it was the Department of Education Reform. Just the very name of the department implied that we're trying to shake things up to try to improve the education.

[Jordan Peterson]

You said 99% of education PhDs are Marxists. I think it's higher than that.

[Corey D'Angelis]

99.5%.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, definitely. The rest of them are socialists. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And so how did that institution come to exist. And why does it still exist?

[Corey D'Angelis]

I think it originally was funded by a grant from the Walton Family foundation, and it still exists. There's professors there. My advisor is named Patrick Wolf, and the Journal of School Choice is actually housed in that department. And Patrick Wolf did a lot of the early evaluations of voucher programs. Like in D.C. for example, they were able to use random lottery to determine the different outcomes for kids in the public schools versus the private schools. Much like a medical trial, you do the placebo for the kids who lose the lottery, which is the public school system business as usual if you win the lottery to get a voucher to go to a private school. Wolf's evaluation, for example, in 2013, found about a 30% increase in the likelihood of graduating from high school from getting more educational opportunities through the voucher. And you can say that was random. Yeah, randomized controlled trial. So you can say with a big enough sample with certainty that this is not because of the family characteristic of the student. It's not because of the student's racial background or their income. It's because of them getting a better opportunity to go to a better school. And so I did that kind of research when I started. My first study was actually with Dr. Wolf, and we found that the Milwaukee voucher program that started in 1990, we found a huge reduction in crime later on in life. So, yeah, shouldn't. Shouldn't be very surprising. You get a. You're more likely to graduate. Graduation rates we didn't control for graduation, but it's probably closely linked. If you're more likely to graduate, you're probably going to be more likely to get a job, less likely to be involved with the criminal justice system.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. Oh, well, okay, let's back up and do a big picture overview. You should perhaps let everybody know. Well, two things. You've authored or co authored two relatively recent books, right? One of these, this is the Parent Revolution, and that's this year's 2020.

[Corey D'Angelis]

24.

[Jordan Peterson]

2024. Wow. So essentially this year, pretty. Pretty recently. Yeah. And then there is another one that.

[Corey D'Angelis]

You co authored, Mediacrity. Right. 40 Ways Government Schools Are Failing Today's Students. And it was on the 40th anniversary of the Nation at Risk report which came out, which basically said that, look, our. Our outcomes are horrendous and things haven't gotten any better since then. In some cases, they've gotten worse and we spend a lot more money than we did back then.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, that's better, at least for people.

[Corey D'Angelis]

Who spent money we spend about $20,000 per student per year now, which is about 52% higher than average private school tuition in this country. That spending in the government schools has increased by about 164% infl adjusted since 1970. Have the outcomes gotten 164% better? No, obviously not. But it's because they're not focusing on math and reading. They're focusing on gender ideology and critical race theory in the schools. And if you're focusing on those things and teaching kids to hate your country, it shouldn't surprise us that the academic outcomes aren't getting any better.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. So why don't you explain exactly what problem you are attempting to address. How would you characterize your. Because there's, you're, you're an interesting person. Because lots of people are focusing on the dismal plight of the schools, let's say, and they're dreadful expensiveness. You know, 50% of US state budgets are spent on K through 12 education. Right? 50%. So that means essentially that the teacher, you. Teachers unions have a hammer lock on 50% of the state budgets. And it's, it's worse than that. It means that the faculties of education, we can talk about them in some detail because they have a monopoly on teacher certification, basically have their. What would you say? Their status is subsidized by half the money that Americans spend at the state level. Right. And it's the only way they can survive. Because I don't know if there's a more dismal faculty than the faculties of education social work might compete.

[Corey D'Angelis]

They have the lowest. They have the lowest scores on all the SATs and other academic credentials. And they also have a monopoly, a geographic monopoly when it comes to the K through 12 government school system, where in most places in America you live where you live and you're assigned to a school just based on your address, which gives them no incentive to spend additional dollars wisely. I mean, just imagine if you had to shop at a government grocery store that you were assigned to based on where you lived and they had empty shelves, no food. And when they did have food, imagine if you got food poisoning or it was expired, and if you wanted to go somewhere else, they'd tell you to go complain to the grocery board, who wouldn't listen to you and would try to cut off your mic, which is what happens with the school boards right now. And if you had to just move houses to get access to a better grocery store, that would make zero sense. Or if you had to pay twice, basically once through Taxes for the government grocery store you're not using, and then again out of pocket for a grocery store that actually provided you with healthy food. That's what we have with the government school system today. You cannot go somewhere else unless you pay twice, essentially. And low income families are basically just screwed in the worst failure factories that we call public schools today in places like Chicago, they have like 33 public schools with 0% math proficiency rates and they spend about $30,000 per kid. And guess what? Their teachers union boss, Stacey Davis Gates, she sends her own kid to a private school. She knows better than anybody else that their schools are not working for kids. And that's the main problem that I see. And everything else trickles out from that monopoly issue. They don't have an incentive.

[Jordan Peterson]

There's a number of different monopolies operating that you just described. There's geographic monopoly. Right, and that's a good analogy. So there's no competition. The problem with no competition is that when there's no choice, there's no real incentive to do the hard work that produces improvement. And there's actually no possibility even for comparison between different systems. Right. So without competition, you don't have any possibility of really head to head evaluation. Right. And no. No necessary incentive for innovation. So there's a geographic monopoly which you just described. You send your kids to the school that's in your location and that's that. And then there's a state mandated monopoly because you have to send your kids to school. And then there's a teacher certific unification monopoly. So we actually.

[Corey D'Angelis]

And that trickles down from the university level into the K12 system.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right, right. Okay. And now, so you've fundamentally concentrated. And does this include your doctoral research? You fundamentally concentrated on the issue of choice per se. And were you interested in choice as an economist might be interested in choice? Or, or why were you?

[Corey D'Angelis]

Yeah, I did my bachelor's and master's in economics.

[Jordan Peterson]

Oh yeah.

[Corey D'Angelis]

And I had a professor there. John Merrifield was his name. He's now a retired professor, but he was prob. Only free market professor at the University of Texas San Antonio that I knew of. And I had him. I took all of his classes. He was my advisor. He was affiliated with the Friedman foundation at the time, which is now called EdChoice, which is a school choice advocacy group. And he was the one who directed me or suggested to me at least three different times, hey, you should probably do this PhD program. And I ultimately took his advice and I'm glad that I did and that's how I look at the school system. I see it as one of the most socialist institutions that we have in America today, where the government operates, rates the means of production. The schools that you have, whether you want to call it the local, state or federal government, they all have their hands into the government school system and taxpayers have to fund it. And there's a monopoly. They.

[Jordan Peterson]

There's also kickbacks. What's the percentage of Democrat.

[Corey D'Angelis]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Financial support from teachers unions across the U.S. yeah.

[Corey D'Angelis]

So if you look at in the high 90s, if I remember, 99.9% of Randy Weingarten's union. She's the head of the American Federation of Teachers. She lobbied the CDC to make it more difficult to reopen schools during COVID That's another story altogether. They knew they could hold children's education hostage to get billions of dollars in ransom payments and so called Covid relief. That started in 2020 because they knew if they were closed they could say we need more money because we're closed. It's the same story as we see with the test scores. They say we're failing because we need more money. It's the definition of insanity. Doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results.

[Jordan Peterson]

They're not doing the same thing because they keep ramping up the mounted costs. Yeah, right. So it's worse than the same thing.

[Corey D'Angelis]

Their same thing is always give us more money and it never improves anything.

[Jordan Peterson]

Smaller classes, more money.

[Corey D'Angelis]

Yes. And in every other industry, if you think about what smaller class sizes actually means, that means lower units of production output for the same inputs.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah.

[Corey D'Angelis]

Everywhere else. You increase your production over time with more technology.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, in principle, you'd assume that much of the heavy lifting could have been done by computational technology. And I think that's particularly true if it was applied properly.

[C]

For what does the future hold for business? Ask nine experts, you'll get 10 different answers. Bull market. Bear market. Inflation up, inflation down. Can someone please invent a crystal ball? Well, until then, over 41,000 businesses have future proofed their operations with Netsuite by Oracle, the number one cloud, erp. Bringing accounting, financial management, inventory and HR in into one fluid platform with one unified business management suite. There's one source of truth giving you the visibility and control you need to make quick decisions. Think about it. With real time insight and forecasting, you're essentially peering into the future with actionable data. When you're closing your books in days instead of weeks, you're spending less time looking backward and more time focused on what's next. For any business owner looking to Streamline their operations, NetSuite is the solution I'd recommend. Whether your company's earning millions or even hundreds of millions, NetSuite helps you respond to immediate challenges and seize your biggest opportunities. Speaking of opportunity, download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning at netsuite.com jbp this guide is free to you at netsuite.com jBP Again, that's netsuite.com jbp.

[Jordan Peterson]

You know when you're, when you're teaching children basic skills, likely reading is the best example of this. So when children learn to read, contrary to the whole word theorists who are also a product of the faculties of education and devastated literacy in their theoretical stupidity. So English obviously is a phonetic language and the way you learn to read is that you learn to associate sounds with letters. And that's actually a rather dull process. There's nothing intrinsically not. There's little that's intrinsically interesting about that. Some kids will treat it like a puzz puzzle. Some children can associate letters with sounds very rapidly and some take much more practice. That's IQ dependent fundamentally, although it's. There are other contributing factors. You can have high iq, kids with dyslexia, but it's basically an IQ phenomena. But what you want to do with little kids is continual exposure and practice because they need to produce little neural circuits that recognize each letter and that use the conjunction between the visual system and the auditory system in the brain to tag each letter with a sound. Letters first, two letter combinations, three letters, small words. Then as you develop expertise, phrases you get in a single glance and maybe even sentences if you start to become stunningly proficient. Right. Computers are unbelievably good at the first part of that. Right? Because they're are incredibly patient and they can give you immediate feedback. And so, at least in principle, it would be possible to augment teachers with appropriate technology and increase their efficiency. And we've seen none of that, right? None of that.

[Corey D'Angelis]

And the reason that we see so many of people in the Democratic party fighting against things like school choice, where families can take their money somewhere else other than the government run school, is because of that money laundering operation that we just addressed where the teachers unions send almost all of their money 99.9% to one party, the Democrat party. And so even though Democrat voters want a better education for their kid and they want choice as well, the teachers unions influence those elected officials. It's special interest politics at its worst. They Also influence them to close the schools as long as possible. You had the Chicago Teachers Union tweet out during COVID that the push to reopen schools is rooted in sexism, racism and misogyny.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, but every. Everything is rooted in sexism, racism and misogyny.

[Corey D'Angelis]

They threw every wall. Yeah, every genderism, you know, and I'm glad that that's not working anymore. And I think that unions actually stepped on a rake. They overplayed their hand during the COVID era and that showed families what the heck was happening in the classroom. We wouldn't have known a lot of this Marxism was in the government run schools. Maybe some families saw it here and there, but for the first time ever as a country, we were able to at large scale, get a peek into some of the far left lunatics who are running the government run school system through remote learning, which, let's be real, we should have just called it remotely learning. There wasn't a lot of learning going on. But families have been mobilized more than they've ever been before. And since COVID we've had 14 states now, all controlled by Republican legislatures, go all in on school choice. Arizona is one of them, one of the first actually, to allow families to take that money that would have gone to their government school, to a private or charter school or home school.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, so let's take apart this issue of choice because it would be easy to assume that you're an advocate of something approximating parental freedom. Right. That parents have the right to choose, let's say the value set that defines the education of their children. But it sounds to me more that your primary concern wasn't so much the freedom of parents to choose as it was your observation of the fact that in the absence of competition, so in the presence of a monopoly, particularly a government run monopoly, the probability of low quality is 100%.

[Corey D'Angelis]

Is that it's both of those things. I think it's actually more so than the outcomes. It's more so about parental rights. Rights and who gets to direct the upbringing of their children. I got into this as a libertarian, a limited government. Okay, so you're making two arguments. One is it's an outcome based. And also. Yeah, values as well. And values as well. Whose children are they? They're not the government's kids. They're not the teachers union's kids. Even though they just posted recently, right before we came here, that we got to protect our kids. They always use language of ownership of. It's a communist ideology. And I think that's what Woke up so many people with recent elections, too. You look at the Trump versus Harris election, Republicans typically don't do well on education because they don't, you know, throw more money at the problem. But right before the election, there were two nationally representative surveys by Atlas intel, which was the most accurate pollster in 2020, and they correctly predicted Trump winning all the swing states in 2024. They both found that Trump was beating Kamala Harris on education. And I think that's because it's changed from a conversation about who's going to throw more money at the problem to who's going to respect my right as a parent. And Trump won the parent vote by nine points, too.

[Jordan Peterson]

All right, so back to the issue of, let's see. We've covered school choice on an economic grounds. We've covered school choice on a parent's right ground. The next issue might be. Let's talk a little bit about the Marxist element. Okay, so I'd like to focus for a moment on the faculties of education. Okay? As I intimated earlier, I don't think there is a more corrupt and intellectually bankrupt faculty than the faculties of education. My experience with faculties of education as a psychologist is that the worst of all psychological theories are always picked up and amplified, magnified, publicized by educational psychologists. Okay, so let's take that apart a little bit. Whole word learning is a good example, right? So whole word learning was predicated on the idea that expert readers read words at a glance. They don't sound them out or phrases even. And so since the experts do it that way, that way, it would be reasonable to teach children to do it that way right from the beginning. Now, that presumes that experts read when they learn to read the same way they learn, they read as experts, which is a completely preposterous idea neurologically, but that didn't seem to occur to any of the people who are pushing it. And the introduction of whole word reading, if I remember correctly, into the California school system, knocked California from number one in childhood literacy to number 50, if I remember that correctly. Okay, so whole word learning's been a complete bloody disaster, but it's still often utilized. And then there's the self esteem training. There's another terrible idea from psychology. First of all, the idea that there is such a thing as self esteem. So you can model self esteem with extroversion and neuroticism. So people with high self esteem are low in neuroticism. That's the primary issue. So they are less likely to feel negative emotion, and that's temperamental trait. Maybe there's some environmental contribution, not a lot. And then they're more likely to be extroverted because that's positive emotion. And so if you're low in self esteem, you tend to feel a lot of negative emotion, particularly in women. Negative emotion is self directed. So women with high negative emotion have a lot of bodily concerns, for example, they're self conscious. Right. And that's, that's not, it's not an attitude, it's not a cognitive set, it's a temperamental feature. And the evidence that you can do something about that with something like self esteem training, well, not only is it thin, to say the least, there's reasonable evidence to presume that teaching children to concentrate on their emotional experience actually makes them worse. So the psychologists who laid out the Big 5 personality template using statistics to begin with. The most common measure is the NEO PIR and its measure of neuroticism. Negative emotion has facets. One facet is literally self consciousness. So thinking about yourself and being miserable are so tightly associated that you can't distinguish them statistically. So if you get children to dwell on their negative emotional experiences, then you tend to exacerbate the problem.

[Corey D'Angelis]

Yeah, exactly.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. So anyways, you can't use self esteem training to.

[Corey D'Angelis]

So when we started seeing the videos from libs of TikTok and other work otherwise with of critical race theory in the classroom and teachers bragging about how they were injecting gender ideology into the schools, a lot of people would ask me, how prevalent is this stuff anyway? And it's like I'm seeing it all the time and parents are complaining about it at the school boards where they were later labeled as domestic terrorists for doing so and they had their mics cut offs. But there was a nationally representative survey that just came out earlier this year in January that found that 36% of kids in high school reported that their teacher often or almost daily said that America is a fundamentally racist country. And there were a lot of other findings in that survey as well. It's by education. Next. And that was the first that I saw that this is actually a wide scale phenomenon. My first reaction.

[Jordan Peterson]

It's the norm.

[Corey D'Angelis]

Yeah. When people like I didn't have like a data point to point to and I had this.

[Jordan Peterson]

When was this? When did you figure this out?

[Corey D'Angelis]

This survey was January this year. This just happened.

[Jordan Peterson]

Oh, oh, oh. And you didn't realize how widespread it was until that survey?

[Corey D'Angelis]

Until I saw, you know, because I'd get asked this all the time, like Corey, is it really a big problem? And I'd say, well, we're hearing about it all the time. And if it's a big problem for this parent, then this is a big enough deal for us to change something. Right? If that parent is unhappy, they should have a choice to go somewhere else, even if it's only 1% of the time. Well, now we know it's not just 1% of the time, it's all the time. It's everywhere.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, well, conceptualizing it as a problem in some sense is misleading because a problem implies that there's a normal course of events and some aberrations. That's just not the case. The entire education system, and this is a consequence of the operation of the faculties of education, is radically, resentfully leftist at its core. The aberration is any learning that happens outside of that philosophy. And so I want to tell you about a study we did because this is relevant to the faculties of education. So I did this study with a student of mine, Christine Brophy, master's student. We were going to follow up on it, but my academic career exploded shortly thereafter. But it was a good study. The first thing we wanted to do was to assess how political beliefs clump together. You can do that statistically by looking at the. You can say, imagine you ask a large number of people, a large number of questions. You can see across people whether answering one question predicts in a given direction predicts answering another question in a given direction. So then you can clump the questions and so you can analyze how belief statements aggregate. So the first question we wanted to ask answer was, was there a coherent set of politically correct political beliefs? Because back in 2015, the idea of political correctness, that there was a coherent body of belief, was parodied or pilloried as a right wing conspiracy theory, which, you know, was on the face of it, absurd, but it still needed to be demonstrated. We actually found that there was two forms of politically correct belief systems. One was more like classic left wing liberalism, right. But there was a smaller group of left wing totalitarians, authoritarians. And so those were people who adopted progressive policies, so called progressive policies, but we're also willing to implement them with force, essentially. So there's a tyrannical aspect to it. Okay, so once you establish that these groups of beliefs exist, you can look at the correlates or the predictors. Right. So, and there's a standard set of features that you would look for in a psychological study. You know this undoubtedly, if you're trying to predict Behavior. One of them would be general cognitive ability. So which is essentially iq, which is essentially something. Rate of learning and temperament. Big five temperament and then sex and then.

[C]

Success in business isn't just about offering an amazing product or service, though that's certainly essential. What truly sets thriving companies apart is having powerful, reliable tools working behind the scenes to streamline every aspect of the selling process. These are the systems that turn the complex challenge of reaching customers and processing sales into something that feels effortless and natural. That's exactly where Shopify enters the picture, transforming the way businesses operate in the digital age. Nobody does selling better than Shopify. They're home to the number one checkout on the planet. And here's the game changer. With Shoppay they're boosting conversions up to 50%. That means fewer abandoned carts and more sales going to your bottom line. In today's world, your business needs to be everywhere your customers are. Whether that's scrolling through social media, shopping online, or walking into a physical store. Shopify powers it all seamlessly connects, connecting your business across the web, your store, customer feeds and everywhere in between. And here's the truth. Businesses that sell more sell on Shopify join over 2 million entrepreneurs who have already discovered the power of unified commerce with Shopify's all in one platform. Upgrade your business to the same checkout we use with Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com jbp all lowercase head to shopify.com jbp to upgrade your selling today. That's shopify.com jbp.

[Jordan Peterson]

Environmental history and so we used those variables and we found that the best predictor of being a politically correct authoritarian, that's radical left wing authoritarian attitude, was low verbal iq. Right. So you can imagine that people will default to a particular kind of simple minded worldview if they can't think critically very well. It was a very powerful predictor. It was the major predictor by a lot. It was better predictor than the relationship between general cognitive ability and grades.

[Corey D'Angelis]

So you're less likely to tolerate others beliefs and think of them as a, as a, as a person.

[Jordan Peterson]

No, I don't think it's tolerance. No, I don't think it's that. I think what it is is preference for a maximally simple explanation.

[Corey D'Angelis]

So yeah, because you can't explain well, maybe they have good motivations behind what they're thinking because they can't come up with those alternatives.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, you also can't criticize, you can't crit like America is a racist society. All inequalities are a consequence of systemic oppression. Well, that's one sentence. It's one sentence.

[Corey D'Angelis]

And now you can have an explanation.

[Jordan Peterson]

For the whole world. Well, that's attractive. Like we like belief people like belief systems that collapse into something simple. Okay. There are other predictors. Okay. Being female.

[Corey D'Angelis]

Yep.

[Jordan Peterson]

Having a feminine temperament. That was an additional predictor over and about.

[Corey D'Angelis]

That was, that was after controlling for.

[Jordan Peterson]

This is controlling for intelligence and being female. The next was having a feminine temperament. Agreeableness in particular trait agreeableness, Empathy, essentially. And the next predictor was ever having taken even one politically correct course. Okay, so now why am I telling you this? Well, partly because it's useful thing to know, but the other reason is that the students in faculties of education, as you said, have the lowest SAT scores. Okay. Now the SAT purveyors don't like to describe the test as an intelligence test, but it's an intelligence test. Yeah. It's correlated at like 0.9. It's an IQ test. It's just not corrected for age.

[Corey D'Angelis]

So I wonder, I wonder if why there's selection into the education academia based on these predictors. Is it, is it because going into the school system is seen as an easier job with pretty good benefits and so.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, that's a good question.

[Corey D'Angelis]

That could be.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, I think first of all, the admission criteria are low to absent. Right.

[Corey D'Angelis]

So you can get in that barrier to entry.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. And it's very frequently the case that if you don't know what you could do, that's a degree that will more or less guarantee you a job. And then the other potential problem, and I don't know of any research bearing on this specifically, is that the, the security and the holidays, my suspicions are, attracts people who are lower in conscientiousness. And one of the best predictors, by the way of teaching ability, apart from general cognitive ability, because hopefully you'd have smart teachers, is conscientiousness. And conscientiousness also predicts conservative political leaning, not liberal political leaning. Right. So you have kind of a perfect storm in the faculties of education is that they, they educate. Their academic standards are very low for admission, which really matters. Right. And then they tilt radically to the left, which is also something that would be attractive to people who have decreased cognitive ability. They select against conscientiousness because of the work hours and the security. I mean, these are all things.

[Corey D'Angelis]

I had also seen a study that selection into education degrees was associated with risk aversion too. So if you know you have a union protecting you.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah.

[Corey D'Angelis]

You're not going to. You have job security even if it's not the highest pay. You're going to have a pension when you retire. You can't get fired if you do a bad job. You're not going to get paid any less if you're not doing as well as the person across the hallway.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. You said, I believe, I think it was in the parent revolution. I read both your books in the last week and so I don't remember where this stat came from, but you said that the New York State dispensed with a dozen teachers over what do you remember the period of time? Was that a 10 year period? Was it a one year period?

[Corey D'Angelis]

I don't recall.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, well, the fundamentals.

[Corey D'Angelis]

Yeah, it's very low. Very low.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right, right, right. There's virtually no assessment of teachers for effectiveness. Right.

[Corey D'Angelis]

You need no merit pay. So the best teachers leave. The best teachers say, to heck with this. We're not. That's a person across the hall showing videos all day and they're getting paid the same or more than more than me. But just because they've been around the system longer, they reward years of service.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah.

[Corey D'Angelis]

Not much. And I mean I mentioned earlier that spending has gone up by 164% in real terms since 1970. Teacher salaries on average have actually only increased by about 3% in real terms. Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

So where's the bulk of the money going?

[Corey D'Angelis]

So I think it's also going to pensions and other benefits too, but it's going towards administrative.

[Jordan Peterson]

So the same thing that happened at the universities.

[Corey D'Angelis]

Fundamentally same in healthcare. Since 2000. We have data on this in the US and we've seen that enrollment for students has increased in this public school system by about 5% since 2000. The number of teachers in the system has increased about twice that rate, by about 10%. Administrators have increased by about 95%.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. Right. So it's exactly the same pattern as in higher education.

[Corey D'Angelis]

Yes. Become a jobs program for.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, it's a weird thing. The administrative issue is a very complicated one because the problem with the managerial strata, let's say, is that it's very difficult to parameterize the demand. If you're in a complex system, you can always see that more could be done regardless of the direction you happen to be moving in. And what that implies is that there's no limit to the number of potential administrative contributions. And, and then the question is, well, what would limit the growth of the administration? And in a competitive Environment, free market principles essentially limit. Because you run out of money, right? So you can only hire as many people as you can afford to hire. This isn't a problem with administrative bureaucracies that have an unlimited source of funding. So they're just going to continue to grow it. I don't know what it is, 5 to 7% a year or something like that.

[Corey D'Angelis]

And there's actually been four studies on this. Not a lot, but it's what we have. It's a really niche area of research that the more private and charter school competition in the area, all else equal. After they control for all the usual demographic characteristics, the public school teacher salaries slightly go up. And now a lot of people say, oh, that's counterintuitive because it's stealing money from the public schools. They say, which the money doesn't belong to the schools. It's for the kids. But all that aside, the. Because there's also competition, they start to allocate those additional dollars instead of towards administrators, they start to allocate them towards the classroom, towards the teachers. So the teachers who remain actually end up better off.

[Jordan Peterson]

That's the teachers moving into the private sector.

[Corey D'Angelis]

Stop them from going to the private sector. Stop the kids from going to the private sector. Because now if you have. There's a monopsony situation and a monopoly situation. Monopsony is a monopoly in the labor market. With the government school system. You want to be a teacher, you basically got to take what they give you. But now if you have more competition in the labor market too, competing for your. For your excellence, if you're doing a good job, then the public schools have to say, you know what, we got to treat the teachers better too. So some teachers are underpaid, some teachers are overpaid. Depends on, you know, we try to treat everything as one size fits all in our current system. But that's an interesting finding that actually benefits teachers. But also we found in places like Florida, there is a control group of. You mentioned earlier about how do we compare systems In Florida, there's 11 academic studies on this topic. Ten of them find positive effects of competition on the outcomes in the public schools. It's been a rising tide that lifts all boats and just over time, you can see it work out in Florida too. So a couple decades ago, they were at the bottom of the pack on what we call the nation's report card, the math and reading scores. Now U.S. news and World Report has ranked Florida number one on education. They're at the top of the rankings for the nation's report card. And it's not because they pump more money into the system. They spend 27% less than the national average in Florida, but they have school choice for everybody. Same here in Arizona. They have school choice for everybody. If you like your public school, you can keep your public school for real this time. Unlike with your doctor. Thanks Obama for lying about that. But the public schools in this case actually do get better in response to competition. And we have.

[Jordan Peterson]

It's funny that you studies all across. Well, it's funny that you even have to make that case. I mean it's so absurd that. Well, that we have to sit here and discuss whether having more provider of a given mandatory service is going to improve quality. Like well how. What else would improve quality? What wishful thinking or more money? Well, you can, you can spend an indefinite amount of money stupidly and counterproductively so obviously.

[Corey D'Angelis]

I also did one more study on this issue and I haven't brought it up in a long time because I've done like 40 peer reviewed articles on school choice which is really tough in the, in the academia for education. The peers are your enemies, not your peers for sure.

[Jordan Peterson]

I mean at least you manage that.

[Corey D'Angelis]

So I mentioned that first study I did about school choice reducing crime later on in life. It was a very good study, the first of its kind, long term data, student level data, very rigorous study. One of the reviewers and one of the first places we sent it was a journal called Urban Education. One of the reviewers said, you know, we like the methods and we buy that it's a causal relationship. But they said you called the students urban students. You can't say that they are students in urban areas. So it was like a politically correct thing. And I looked at their about the journal. The only reason we said that was because they said urban students in their own about the journal. Total hypocrites on the issue. Why were they allowed to say it but I wasn't allowed to allowed to say it. But they went further than that. They also said that we have to reject this because you didn't talk about how the results relate to whiteness, structural oppression and power. I mean it's just so ridiculous. But the study I wanted to bring up about competition was actually in my home state of Texas. I did a survey experiment with my co author. So I randomly assigned different surveys to public school leaders in Texas and, and one of the treatment group had a randomized note that said on one of the questions you're going to have a new charter school that's Expected to open nearby. And I was asking them where they were going to put their money next year, where were they going to allocate resources. And the treatment of having a charter school competing with you had the effect of reducing administrative allocations and having more of that money going to the classroom.

[Jordan Peterson]

Any idea why?

[Corey D'Angelis]

Well, because they know that they might have, they might have to think about where they're going to spend money if they have a competitor, because if they waste the money, families are going to go there.

[Jordan Peterson]

But their argument usually is, is that obviously it's got to be something like more administrators make for a more effective school system.

[Corey D'Angelis]

That's what they tell you publicly, but privately they know that's all bs, which is what that study. Because they didn't know what the study was doing. They just thought, I'm answering a simple survey question.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right.

[Corey D'Angelis]

And one, you know, they didn't know whether the treatment group or not.

[Jordan Peterson]

So point. How did you manage to. You said 40 studies.

[Corey D'Angelis]

Yeah. Peer reviewed. Yeah, well, other ones that weren't peer reviewed. But I almost think peer review is a negative indicator at this point because of the peers that are looking at your study.

[Jordan Peterson]

We will go there. Yes. Yeah, but, but in your case, that's probably not the truth because the probability that you're going to publish something that challenges the. Absolutely man. So the fact that this is exactly what I'm asking you. It's like how many, over how many years did you publish 40 studies?

[Corey D'Angelis]

2016. I want to say it was my first. So what is this, nine or so years?

[Jordan Peterson]

So you've published four, five studies a year?

[Corey D'Angelis]

Yeah, and a lot of them were at the very beginning when I was in grad school because I thought that that mattered for getting an academic job. Well, I thought it mattered.

[Jordan Peterson]

It did matter.

[Corey D'Angelis]

But. And I, I was serious on the job market, but I applied to like three schools and most people apply to like 100. Yeah, serious. But I knew I was probably going to go into a think tank where I'd be rewarded for my ideas as opposed to being punished.

[Jordan Peterson]

You mean when you were on the job market?

[Corey D'Angelis]

When I was on the job market, my first think tank was called the Cato Institute. It's a libertarian think tank. And I moved to DC while I was finishing my PhD like two and a half years into the program. I ended up finishing it. And I've slowed down publications since then, but, you know, some of these lefty departments didn't even give me a call. But I had, I had like nearly a dozen peer reviewed publications that few years into my PhD program.

[Jordan Peterson]

How do you do that?

[Corey D'Angelis]

But they.

[Jordan Peterson]

So just for everybody watching and listening. So you can, you can draw a rough equivalent between number of publications and a given degree. So for example, with one publication, you, you have a master's degree, essentially. Although most master's students don't even have one publication. With three, you have a PhD and you have 40. Yeah, right. And you said you had a dozen of them two and a half years into your PhD. Okay.

[Corey D'Angelis]

And some of the far lefty departments won't even call me.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah.

[Corey D'Angelis]

Because they select based on ideology. They don't, they don't select based on productivity or, or intelligence or anything like that. But peer review articles are not the same thing as intelligence. I'll say that. But I found out really quickly that. And I'm glad I had a fork in the road. I did have an offer from one academic institution. It was Kennesaw State University in Georgia. And I think they had like a free market center there. So they were friendly.

[Jordan Peterson]

So how many publications. Sorry, how many publications did you have when you entered the job market? Did you know that Andre Bocelli, Steph Curry, Justin Bieber, and Tim Tebow share something remarkable. Each of their mothers faced pressure to end their pregnancies, yet chose life. When women experience unplanned pregnancies, they. They often find themselves at a crossroads, wanting to make the right decision while facing societal pressure. This is where preborn makes a difference. Their network of clinics provides a compassionate care and essential support for women considering their options, including free ultrasounds. It's incredible how hearing a baby's heartbeat can transform a mother's perspective. Women who see their ultrasound are twice as likely to choose life for their child. If you believe in supporting women through difficult decisions and protecting un inborn lives, consider partnering with preborn. Your contribution directly helps empower women with the resources they need. Just $28 funds one ultrasound and 140 can help five mothers choose life for their babies. Monthly donors receive updates with stories and photos showing the impact of their generosity to make a difference today. Dial pound250 and say baby or visit preborn.comjordan Again, just dial pound250 and say the keyword baby baby or visit preborn.com jordan Together we can support mothers and transform families and futures.

[Corey D'Angelis]

Approximately nearly a dozen does.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, so in principle, you should have been a very hot prospect because dozen publications in most institutions would give you.

[Corey D'Angelis]

I didn't publish in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. It wasn't like the.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, still dozens. A lot, lot you know, a dozen's a lot. And that. That would give you serious consideration for promotion to associate professor at many educational institutions. So they should have been lining up at your door.

[Corey D'Angelis]

Okay. I also didn't do it. Seriously. Like, three, you know, applying to three schools just to put my feet in the water to see what would happen is not the same thing as what most people do with, you know, they're applying to 100 different schools.

[Jordan Peterson]

True.

[Corey D'Angelis]

And so, you know.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, so you didn't have a full test of whether.

[Corey D'Angelis]

Yeah, so it might have. Have. Not that it might have been. I might have gotten more of a fair shake if I actually did a real.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, okay, okay, okay, okay. Fair enough. All right. So another mystery about you, I would say, is you've had a lot of impact. How old are you?

[Corey D'Angelis]

33.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay. Okay. So you're pretty early on in what would be an academic career, let's say. And you've. You've had a lot of impact on public policy, but more on public consciousness. And so not only have you produced a remarkable body of research, but you're very good at public communication. That's a rare combination of skills. So I guess the first thing I'd like to know is, I mean, I know about you. I'm probably more prone to follow, find and follow people like you. Tell me about how you understand your public influence. Like, how broad an influence do you have? How well are your books selling, and what are your other major dimensions of communication?

[Corey D'Angelis]

So this one hit the national bestseller list. USA Today, the New York Times, they didn't put me on their list for some reason, but Trump endorsed the book. Vivek Ramaswamy, Pete Hegseth, Ted Cruz, my senator from Texas. He actually says on the back, you can ruin Randy Weingarten's day by reading this book. So there's that. But I also went to government schools all through K through 12, so I don't know how I did any of this. You can just check out my handwriting in the beginning. It's very horrible. I blame it on my government school education. It's to you, Jordan. I'm going to give it to you right after the recording. But I think the way that I really started to change the narrative when it came to school choice was talking about it differently. You know, these days we can just say school choice, and you and I know what we're talking about. But when I first entered the think tank world, I made a deliberate shift to talk about funding students, not systems. And it's a linguistic.

[Jordan Peterson]

Is that Your phrase.

[Corey D'Angelis]

That's my phrase I came up with.

[Jordan Peterson]

It's good to have a phrase.

[Corey D'Angelis]

It puts the other side on defense. Because now if you want to argue with me, you have to say why we should fund the system and not the student. So it changes the burden of proof to be on them. Whereas the school choice supporters for a long time have been trying to explain ourselves as to why families should have a choice as opposed to the other side explaining why.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, yeah, you should never let the side that you're opposing define the terms of engagement. Conservatives are very bad at that. They're always on the. I'll give you an example. So in the last Canadian federal election, I think there were, in the debate, the leaders debate. I think there were five topics that were debated. All five of them were picked by the left. Right. So one of them, for example, playing.

[Corey D'Angelis]

On their turf already.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, 40 of the debate was about climate change. Right. So as soon as you debate that, you lose. Right. Because the fact that you're even talking about it means that it's one of your priorities. And so, yeah, you got to get the question right. So you said, tell me your phrase again.

[Corey D'Angelis]

Funding students, not systems. So it's more transparent. People know, like, this is the concept of the market, they are the consumer nerve. Yep.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah.

[Corey D'Angelis]

And the other thing that is very useful in how I changed talking about this was that it really pointed out the hypocrisy of a lot of the Democrats, not just because they send their own kids to private school, but also because Democrats and other people who are supported by the teachers union, some of the rhinos will support programs where the money follows the individual. Think about it. When we have grocery stores, which I mentioned earlier, we have food stamps.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah.

[Corey D'Angelis]

We don't say the food stamps must be spent at a assigned Walmart.

[Jordan Peterson]

That's a good analogy.

[Corey D'Angelis]

And so we also do this with higher ed. It's not just. It's not just that we do this with other industries. We do this with education, too. Higher ed. We have Pell grants in the U.S. we have other. The GI Bill. These are taxpayer dollars that can be used at private universities if you want. And it follows the decision of.

[Jordan Peterson]

So it's the equivalent of money, essentially, although a little more narrowly targeted.

[Corey D'Angelis]

Yeah. Because the status quo would always say, we need public money for public schools. And my quick response was, well, you support public taxpayer dollars for private. Everything else. When it comes to higher ed, you support Pell grants that go to private religious universities. You support vouchers. When it comes to Hospitals. We have Medicaid vouchers. You can take that to a religiously affiliated hospital if you want. We do this with pre K. We have the Head Start programs. All the Democrats support it. It's a pre K program where the money follows your decision to a private provider of pre K, even a religious one.

[Jordan Peterson]

Has that helped Head Start, do you know? Has it improved its quality?

[Corey D'Angelis]

Head Starts? The Head Start evaluations are horrible. They. They find that it spends a lot of money.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah.

[Corey D'Angelis]

And they. They don't improve outcomes. Most of the results are null results.

[Jordan Peterson]

They improve some outcomes. They. People are more likely to graduate and they're less likely to be thrown in prison or get pregnant. I don't think they don't improve. Improve cognitive.

[Corey D'Angelis]

I don't think that was the RCT, though. I think that was more of like. Like a. Like a regression with controls, which could be still.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, the crucial issue is there's no evidence that Head Start improves academic performance. And that's a consequence of multiple reviews. And it's really a catastrophe that it's the case.

[Corey D'Angelis]

And the latest pre K evaluation statewide was in Tennessee.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. When was that?

[Corey D'Angelis]

That was a few years ago. They followed them through sixth grade.

[Jordan Peterson]

Oh, yeah. Wow.

[Corey D'Angelis]

And it was a randomized control trial. They found that those who won the lottery were worse off academically and behaviorally by the end of sixth grade.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay. Won the lottery.

[Corey D'Angelis]

Meaning you won a lottery to get a scholarship to go to pre K relative to the families who lost the lottery and stayed with their parents.

[Jordan Peterson]

Maybe because they were worse behaviorally as well.

[Corey D'Angelis]

Maybe because the parents have an advantage at raising their own kids. Maybe they're better.

[Jordan Peterson]

That's interesting.

[Corey D'Angelis]

Disciplining the kids at home.

[Jordan Peterson]

I did a. A very programmatic review of Head start in the 80s. So that's quite a long time ago. But the programs had been operating for a very long time. And there were, I think, five major reviews. And at that time, the findings were that Head Start accelerated cognitive performance. So test scores for a year or two following the interventions, but that by grade six, there was no effect. But that the longer term effects seem to be behavioral and so reduced crime. No, no, they were positive. They were positive. Less pregnancy, less crime, and higher probability of graduating. So. And the relevant issue with regards to graduation in principle was that because the kids who had gone to Head Start behaved better, they were less likely to be held back. But you're saying that the more recent.

[Corey D'Angelis]

The more recent Tennessee experiment, which is the latest one, RCT Negative Effects on Academics and Behavior through 6th Grade. Which is the last year of the study. And I'd also say on the teenage pregnancy thing, that's another important outcome that we looked at in our follow up crime study that was published in the Journal of Private Enterprise. Yeah, yeah, we found a reduction in crime but also a 38% reduction in paternity disputes which could be caused by out of wedlock births or, you know, teenage pregnancies. And we also had a, there is an RC that was with choice, that was with a voucher program in Milwaukee. That one was not an rct. We did the best we could with, we even controlled for neighborhood and single parent households and religiosity. As many demographics as you could get to control for. But another separate study in New York City was a charter school experiment by Roland Fryer and his co author, published in the Journal of Political Economy, I believe in 2015. They found that winning a lottery to go to a charter school in New York City decreased the likelihood of crime for male students because we're the ones causing all the trouble by 100%. It was a complete elimination for lottery winners through the study period. I don't remember how long they covered. It might not have lasted forever, but through the study period it was like 5% were incarcerated for the control group in the public schools. Lottery winners who got into the charter schools, 0%. So all this to say on the Head Start thing, I don't bring up these analogies to say that we should. I, I'm not, I'm not saying that I support Head Start or Pell grants or food stamps. I'm saying if we're going to spend the money, we might as well fund the people as opposed to.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, yeah, no, no, I understand. Well, I, I sidetracked a little bit into Head Start because doing that review for me was actually very disheartening. Because the thing about Head Start and this can allow us to talk about political issues more broadly or conceptual issues, nobody liked the fact that poverty tended to persist multi generationally. And there were reason to assume that if you gave so called disadvantaged kids a Head Start, that A, that might work, but B, that it might even have self reinforcing consequences. Right. Because the idea was, well, you take the disadvantaged kids, you give them a bit of an academic boost when they're three or four and the consequence of that compounds with time. And so they're actually farther ahead of their peers by grade six because they got this Head Start, you know, and that didn't happen. And that was a catastrophe for the right and the left Politically, as far as I was concerned, because it was a reasonably motivated endeavor. Now, I did some arithmetic calculations with regards to Head Start to try to figure out how many adult minutes a Head Start program actually bought a given child. And the answer is virtually none. And also the Head Start programs were also used as employment programs. So the probability that a given Head Start teacher had any qualification was extremely low. You know, when you're dealing with three and four year olds, let's say, it's very hard to, especially in groups, it's very hard to spend time teaching them anything because just taking care of three and four year olds is such a daycare plan. Well, exactly. And often not a good one. Now, when I was looking at the positive results, say in the 1980s, the hypothesis was Head Start might not have been good for most kids and probably not good at all for kids who had decent families. But for kids in Absolutely.

[Corey D'Angelis]

Can't get any worse, right?

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, maybe you, you.

[Corey D'Angelis]

Whereas if you're taking them away from parents that are already doing a good job, you're kind of nudging them in that direction, they're going to be worse off.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. So. But you were convinced this, the Tennessee.

[Corey D'Angelis]

Data that's, I don't know, experiment.

[C]

Yeah.

[Corey D'Angelis]

And it's peer reviewed.

[Jordan Peterson]

Too bad.

[Corey D'Angelis]

And the head starts that I've seen as far as the RCTs. Yeah, yeah. But one more thing that I think that I added that was really important to the conversation about school choice. I mean, one thing is it's not all me. Right. It was covet that helped open the eyes of parents. I was just there with the right ideas laying around at the time, as Milton Friedman famously put it. It is that we were taking a bipartisan strategy for a long time to get school choice. And I'm sure you've heard this before where people say, like school choice is the civil rights issue of our time. We still have elected officials saying these things, using left leaning arguments to advance school choice, which I think they're all good arguments. It's true that the lowest income are in the worst schools, that they would benefit the most. School choice is an equalizer. But there's also right leaning arguments you make about choosing schools that align with your values. The public schools are Marxist. We don't want gender ideology. We want schools that teach you that America is a great country, not a horrible country. And so you can make all these different types of arguments.

[C]

Are you tired of being held back by one size fits all healthcare, of having your concerns dismissed or being denied that comprehensive lab work. You need to truly understand your health. I want to tell you about Merrick Health, the premier health optimization platform that's revolutionizing how we approach wellness and longevity. What sets Merrick apart isn't just their cutting edge diagnostic lab labs or concierge health coaching. It's their commitment to treating you as an individual. Their expert clinical team stays at the forefront of medical research, creates personalized evidence based protocols that evolve with you. Unlike other services that rely on cookie cutter solutions, Marek Health goes the extra mile. They consider your unique lifestyle, blood work and goals to craft recommendations that actually work for you, whether that's through lifestyle modifications, supplementation or prescription treatments. And with a remarkable 4.9 out of 5 rating on Trustpilot, you know you're in great hands. The best part is you can get 10 off your order today. Just head to marichealth.com and use code Peterson at checkout. That's merrickhealth.com code Peterson for 10 off. Stop guessing and start optimizing your health today with Merrick Health. Because your best life starts with your best health.

[Corey D'Angelis]

But when you go into a red state making blue state arguments, these lefty arguments, you might alienate might alienate some of the Republican legislators who might say this isn't my issue, so you know I'm not going to lead on it. And then the Democrats, they're controlled by the teachers unions anyway, so you're not going to make much ground with them regardless of the argument you're making. They respond to power, not logic. And then if you alienate the Republicans, we weren't really getting school choice passed in blue states or red states in a meaningful way. But now it's become more of a GOP litmus test issue. Voters have gone to the ballot box and hold Republicans accountable for being against school choice. In Texas, my home state, we failed on school choice last year because we had 21 Republicans join all the Democrats in the House to kill school choice. And they came up with their arguments about how they were in rural areas and they didn't need to vote for this. But after the primaries, now 14 of them are gone. That was a political earthquake. And now for the first time in Texas history, The house has 76 co sponsors to pass a school choice bill, which has never happened. And you need 76 votes to pass a school choice bill.

[Jordan Peterson]

What did you have to do with what happened in Virginia?

[Corey D'Angelis]

Well, in Virginia we had Mr. Terry, I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach. McAuliffe on the debate stage. He was the former governor of Virginia and he said that at the final debate he was up in the polls by a lot. It flipped right after that because parents were pissed. Virginia closed their schools just about more than any other state. They were as bad as California when it came to reopening the schools in Virginia. And Glenn Youngkin turned that into an opportunity. He laid out a blueprint for success for Republicans going forward. And Glenn Youngkin ended up winning that election by six points with education voters. And that was the number two issue in that election, which is a big deal because education is usually at the bottom. The bottom right voters, they rank, you know, jobs, the economy, crime at the top. Education was number two. And a Republican won on that issue.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, given that 50% of the bloody state budgets go to K12 education, it should be like number one or number two all the time.

[Corey D'Angelis]

You would, you would think. But I think for a long time people thought things were fine right before they saw. I mean, if you're a high income parent and you're sending your kid to the assigned public school and it's consistently getting a ratings, your kids coming home with A's on their report card, they get into great universities that are, well.

[Jordan Peterson]

They'Re also, for a long time, like when I went to school as a kid, like I hated school. It bored me to death. And. But I have to say that my teachers didn't teach me insane things, right?

[Corey D'Angelis]

And so we don't know when that flip happened either.

[Jordan Peterson]

Somewhere around mid to somewhere around 2010, things really went sideways. They went sideways in the universities too. Like I saw that blip of political correctness in the 1990s when I was teaching in Boston. But it was mostly outliers. You know, it was the radical fringe, although a lot of them were in the educational psychology departments, but they weren't, they didn't have the upper hand. And somewhere around 2010 that flipped hard. And I think that those, that sort of thing flips partly too. You said you talked about good teachers leaving. Well, one of the things that does happen as an enterprise disintegrates is that it'll hit a point of no return where it becomes so unbearable for anyone competent to be in the system. They all leave, right? And then, well, then you're just left with the worst of the worst, right? And then they hire people who are even worse than they are and the whole thing's gone off its railings. And so. So I guess part of the reason that this has become an issue is because the Student. The schools moved from merely like traditional incompetence, traditional socialist incompetence, let's say, to absolute bloody insanity. And then people started to notice and it was likely the gender issue that.

[Corey D'Angelis]

The more that we talk about and see that there's a lot of left leaning bias in the schools that might attract more people to want to change other people's children's views in that direction to select.

[Jordan Peterson]

Oh yeah.

[Corey D'Angelis]

So it's almost like it's a reinforce, it's, it's, well, it's self fulfilling prophecy.

[Jordan Peterson]

It's. I've, I've spoken to Republican governors about this on multiple.

[Corey D'Angelis]

I think I met you at rga, by the way.

[Jordan Peterson]

That's.

[Corey D'Angelis]

Yes, briefly.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yes, that's right, that's right. You know, and I've been beating the drum on this issue, not very successfully I would say, is that Republicans don't have a hope in hell of ever winning the culture war if they allow faculties of education to maintain their hammerlock on teacher certification and if they continue to spend half the state's money on K through 12 education, essentially that's dominated by progressive Marxists. Like everything else that is happening is, as far as I'm concerned, it's blowing in the wind. And so I want to challenge you on a couple of things because I'd like your opinion. See, I can understand the rationale, the logic for your choice approach and I can see it from the free market perspective. So let's say the libertarian perspective, I can see it from the parents right perspective and I appreciate the data that you, you've described in terms of demonstrating that when you do open the market up to competition, you get an increment in quality, even on the public side and a decrease in administrative spending. Great. All of that makes sense. But, but I am wondering if you've hit the nail squarely on the head because I'm, and I genuinely want your opinion on this. It seems to me that the fundamental weakness in the system is still that faculties of education have a hammerlock on teacher certification. So because, you know, I know people who are sending their kids to private schools, but the private schools are full of WOKE teachers too. Right. The Catholic schools are full of woke teachers. Like it's a pervasive problem. And so I want to know your thoughts on the teacher certification issue because I think what the Republicans should do is just, they should just take the.

[Corey D'Angelis]

Monopoly away from the we need alternative certification. So I think you're right that we have to have a multi pronged approach. School choice isn't the silver bullet for everything. And neither is alternative certification. We should fight the battle on multiple fronts. And some people do set up this false dichotomy. They'll say, oh, you're saying school choice will cure everything. Well, not exactly. We should also reform the public school system. You should still go to your school board and try to change things because a lot of kids are still going to go to the public schools whether you have school choice or not. But we also need an escape valve. I mean, for example, if you only try to, to change the system from the top down, which is what we've done partially in my home state of Texas. Some good tweaks. They've banned critical race theory. They're talking about banning DEI in public schools this year as well. We have Trump with his executive orders helping out as well. But we have undercover video from a group called Accuracy and Media. They've gone into all these public school districts in red states like my home state of Texas, where they've gotten these administrators to admit on undercover video that they're still teaching things that are banned.

[Jordan Peterson]

So sure, of course they are.

[Corey D'Angelis]

And they're, they're proud about it. They're like, what? Yeah, we're still doing crt, but how the hell is something else, how do.

[Jordan Peterson]

You ban ideas like this is, this.

[Corey D'Angelis]

Is behind closed doors, they continue to do what they want.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, you see this in the universities too. It's like, well, we're going to scrap our DEI programs. It's like, they're not scrapping, they're just renaming them. They move. They just retitled this person and they continue to do exactly the same thing. And you can camouflage what you're doing with words, no problem. It'll take people years to figure it out. And so this is another part.

[Corey D'Angelis]

Okay, so, so I'm not saying that we shouldn't try because it's, it isn't perfect enforcement, but we should have both of these. We, we need top down accountability, but also bottom up. For if you, if you're a parent, you get a whiff of these things happening, even if you can't prove it before a judge and, and change the school system that way. You need to be able to say, you know what, screw this, I'm sending my kids somewhere else.

[Jordan Peterson]

Somewhere else. Yeah.

[Corey D'Angelis]

And I think that would give a pressure for the public schools to say, let's knock it off, off. I don't want to irritate anybody on the left or the right. I'm going to focus on the basics, math, reading and writing and Then you know you're not going to have all of them. And so you might say, well, what about the private school? Some of them, they also operate in this kind of small market right now already when you don't have choice. But when you, when you unleash the market and families can vote with their feet, you'll have a different supply of private schools pop up as well. Especially right now we're pushing something called called education Savings Accounts. It's kind of like a voucher where you can use it for a private school, but you can also use it for homeschooling, micro schooling. They were calling them pandemic pods during the, the COVID era where five to 10 children were getting together in a household. Kind of like the one room schoolhouse idea. Those are more likely to sprout up and you're more likely to have a thousand flowers blooming if you have these low cost options. And this has happened in Arizona too.

[Jordan Peterson]

So you think the diversity of, of school proliferation will eventually solve the ideological problem.

[Corey D'Angelis]

Because if you only have a couple elite private schools and they're captured by the left, it's kind of like, okay, what can I do now? I'd say that's still better than the status quo where you have zero choices. But at least now you can take the funding. Hey, if you want to just homeschool your own kids and use it for the curriculum or private tutors, that is a step in the right direction. Even if it's not perfect for most.

[Jordan Peterson]

Of the school choice programs set up so that you could set up a micro school and educate your own children.

[Corey D'Angelis]

Most of them now are. And Arizona has an education savings account. They've had one for over a decade. They just went all in in 2022, making available to everybody. They actually crashed the government website in Arizona because so many families signed up right when they opened up the gates.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, it's an interesting twist on paying women to have children because in some sense that's what you're setting up, right? Well, well, yeah, yeah.

[Corey D'Angelis]

Because this is what the public school system is already, right?

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, right. It's subsidy for.

[Corey D'Angelis]

But it's a failing system that not a lot of people don't see it as well as.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, if it's $20,000 a year per child and the typical family has two children, the woman has to make $40,000 a year to justify the subsidy. And so that, that's after expenses. And so that's, that's a very, it's very unlikely.

[Corey D'Angelis]

Think about a classroom of, you know, 30 kids at $600,000. Where's all the money going? If teachers are only making 60,000 a year on average, where's the rest? And it's.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, well, you can figure what for overhead in terms of physical plan, but something like that.

[Corey D'Angelis]

So that's, you know, a lot of them make more than the President of the United States. We have a. Less a half a dozen or so who make over $400,000 a year.

[Jordan Peterson]

So where does. Well, so tell me, where does the, where does the.

[Corey D'Angelis]

So a lot of buildings. They love building new schools and stadiums.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah.

[Corey D'Angelis]

So one of the school districts in Texas, La Jolla isd made headlines recently because they had a big, like a, like a big water park at, at their campus. So maybe that improves, you know, the self esteem of the kids or whatever the teachers are trying to do these days, but it's just frivolous things. And you see this at the university level too, right? They have these extravagant water parks and tuition is going up to cover these things and also subsidies from the government too. But these micro schools are really shaking things up. The whole factory model itself is frightened because of this. In fact, when CRENDA micro schools in Arizona was reporting just huge increases in enrollment during COVID because the government schools were closed. So families were figuring it out and a lot of them went to these micro schools. The nea, which is the largest labor union in the country, the National Education association, they also lobbied the CDC to close the school longer. They put out an opposition research sheet on Prenda micro schools and their founder, Kelly Smith, because they were so afraid of them, of, of them basically providing something that they weren't providing to students. They knew they were going to lose funding because public schools are funded based on enrollment counts. And so if you lose some students, you're going to lose some money whether you have a school choice program or not. And in Arizona you can use those education savings accounts to pay for prendom microschools and other ones too.

[Jordan Peterson]

Define micro school.

[Corey D'Angelis]

It's a miniature school and some people, there's a lot of different definitions for it, but basically a miniature private school. And during COVID era it was basically five to ten children getting together in households to economize on homeschooling. And you can either do it with one of the parents, you can take turns with the parents doing different subjects, or you can even hire a private tutor to do it it which you.

[Jordan Peterson]

Could do if it's $20,000 per. So what's, what is the amount of the typical Voucher, if, if school. If student expenditure. Yeah. Why?

[Corey D'Angelis]

It saves taxpayer money. And most of these bills are passed at the state level.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah.

[Corey D'Angelis]

In the US we're funded in the public school system in every state, by the federal level, which should not exist at all. We. The word education is not in our constitution. It's an unconstitutional waste of time and money. It's. But that's only about 8% of the total spending. 8 to 10%.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay.

[Corey D'Angelis]

The other 45, 45 are state and local dollars. These bills are typically passed in state legislature. So it's about half of the total that follows the students. So let's say on average 10,000 versus the 20,000 that's spent in the government schools.

[Jordan Peterson]

So is any of that happening locally as well? To pull in the rest of the.

[Corey D'Angelis]

There are some local vouchers that have passed in Colorado, a blue state there was Douglas county had at once a couple decades ago passed the voucher program. It got nixed in the court by a, by a lefty judge and that program's no longer on the books. New Hampshire, which passed a state level program, also proposed a bill a year or two ago in their legislature to also allow the local, local districts to have the money follow the child. If they opted in as well. That bill got tabled. That was one that I was. I think that's the next step in the revolution. But at the same time, if the private schools are doing it for less and if the micro schools are doing a good job for less, do we want all of the dollars following the student? I think it should be equal across sectors. If we're going to spend the money, I think the state and local should follow the student, not just the state. But the reality is it's mostly basically everywhere at this point.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, and also the reality is, as you pointed out, that there's money at the state level to, to produce economic incentive for the micro schools. For example, you know, you could imagine five kids together, that's $50,000 a year. That's a pretty good supplement for given parents income. So. Okay, so let's talk about, let's see, where should we go now? Yeah. Okay. Effects. So I want to talk a little bit more about your means of communication. You've been working for these think tanks, but your work has received broad public attention. Okay, so now you also said that that was in part because you were in the right place. Yeah, yeah, that makes a difference. And you've done the background research. Right. So you had a message that was saleable given the state of the zeitgeist, let's say. Okay, well that's crucially important. Right. But it's also important to be able to capitalize on that. Okay, so how would you characterize the consequences of your work so far? What have you seen shifting that you would attribute at least in part to the message that you've been disseminating?

[Corey D'Angelis]

Yeah. Changing the way people talk about school choice in terms of the money following the child. There have been a lot of legislators on the House floor, Senate floor talking about funding students, not systems. So they've developed my arguments and I think a lot of them follow me on social media. And politicians, again, they want to get reelected, they want to look good. And so when they're following, you know, different influencers on social media, they want to look good in the public eye when they're debating the issue against the Democrats on the House and Senate floor. And so I think they've adopted some of, some of the language and arguments and studies that I've conducted and also cited myself.

[Jordan Peterson]

Is X your most effective?

[Corey D'Angelis]

It is for sure, yeah. I have Facebook and Instagram, but they're not nearly. I have over 200, 000 followers on X. It's not like crazy, but it's, it's ballooned in a, in a short amount of time and it's.

[Jordan Peterson]

Who follows you? Like, do you follow me? Yes, I certainly do.

[Corey D'Angelis]

Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, a lot of the, you know, Vivek Ramaswamy, there's a lot of influential people who follow me. Libs of TikTok, a lot of big accounts. Donald Trump doesn't follow me. Maybe after he sees this episode, he'll, he'll, he'll, he'll jump on the state governors, state treasurers. Yeah. So Doug Ducey who's here in Arizona, he, he the first state to go all in on school choice and I have a good relationship with him. He's no longer the governor. It's now Katie Hobbs in Arizona who's a hypocrite on school choice. She went to Catholic school and now she opposes school choice for other families. But Doug Ducey was a leader and you needed one state to do it first to show the rest of the states they could. He often uses the analogy of when the first person broke the four minute mile, mile before, before he, the first person did. I don't remember his name. People thought it was impossible for a human being to run below a four minute mile. But once the first person did it, you had just this cascade effect of Tons of people. Now with school choice, no one thought that any state could do it where that, where it's every family. Because for a long time there was an incremental approach on the school choice front. It was decades we were hitting our head against the wall. It was small incremental wins where maybe the lowest income families here, maybe just in this city, they're going to do it maybe just for special needs kids. But now the barometer of success is do you have a universal program, meaning for everybody regardless of income, which these are the types of programs I support one because it allows for more competition, allows for a bigger supply side response, more of a market response. But also we're paying for public schools for high and low income families. They should be able to benefit from school choice as well. We don't discriminate based on income for the public schools. We shouldn't discriminate based on income for school choice either. And politics again is all about organized interest, pushing for what they want. If you have a small program that not a lot of people are benefiting from, well, the problem there is if Democrats get in charge, they're going to be more likely to be able to take it away because low income families are not as politically active.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, well, so, so let me ask you about, let me ask you about that. I've discussed school choice with some of my more intelligent liberal friends and one of their objections has been that the. I think you'll be able to address this given what you already said, but I'm going to lay it out anyways. Parents who are involved in their children's future, in their children's educational options, given the vouchers are going to do the research and they're going to find the best school to suit their children. But then there'll be the children whose parents can't or won't involve themselves and they're going to default to the public school system. And if it collapses as a consequence or degenerates as a consequence of funding being distributed widely, then then don't we risk setting up a group of kids who are already suffering because their parents aren't involved to fail even worse because they're going to exist within the confines of a degenerating public school system.

[Corey D'Angelis]

You already have that inequality baked into the government school system. You have Baltimore, they have 40% of their high schools have 0% math proficiency rate. You see the same thing in places like Chicago. And so they shouldn't make perfect the enemy of the good. And this fear mongering hasn't happened with school choice. The public schools, if anything, have gotten better. I cited Florida, but we also have nationwide data on this. 26 of the 29 studies on this nationwide find statistically significant positive effects of private school choice competition on the outcomes in the public schools. Even enemies of school choice who are in academia who have any form of honesty at all, they admit that the studies on the competitive effects are positive. So the main argument that the unions put forward is the worst argument in terms of it being supported by the evidence. But a lot of people respond to fear mongering and so they do that.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, it's a reasonable hypothesis. But the fact that the studies have already been done indicating that the.

[Corey D'Angelis]

There's one other study on this topic that I think is really important and it was done by Cornell researchers published in 2018 and they actually found that when school choice was introduced, peer reviewed study, when school choice was introduced, the number of searches online for different private education providers spiked. Doesn't seem like a surprising finding to me. Probably not. If you have choice now, you can exercise it. You're going to look, the point is, school choice increases parental involvement. By definition, yes, there will be the parents who are involved anyway, but on the margins, the parents who just felt like they were depressed being in the school system where they didn't have any other options, now all of a sudden you give them $10,000 dollars to seek out a better option. They're not going to be depressed by looking at the private school. So they're going to look and they're.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, it's definitely the case too. Like I remember reviewing studies probably about the same time I was looking at Head Start on attitudes of the underclass towards their children's education. And look, if people are going to be motivated by anything, they're going to be motivated by the thoughts that their children might have a better future. Right. So. And so most parents, for example, regardless of their own literacy levels, would like to have children who are literate and well educated and they might not know how to do it, but they know.

[Corey D'Angelis]

Their kids better than anybody else.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, well. And they actually care.

[Corey D'Angelis]

That's right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. They care as much as they care about anything and they care far more about their kids than anyone else is likely to. Right. Okay. But the critical issue is, as you already pointed out, out, if these studies, and you think the studies that show a salutary effect on public school quality because of increased competition, you think those are reliable?

[Corey D'Angelis]

Yeah, they're, they're rigorous studies. There's, you can't randomly assign competition, but it's as good as you can get. And okay. So I've cited all the studies on that topic.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, okay, okay. So let's end with this, let's end this, this portion of the discussion. I think what we'll do.

[Corey D'Angelis]

I wanted to hit one more thing that.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, well, this is what I want to give you the opportunity to do that. So, so if there's anything else you'd like to bring up, do it, do it now. And then we'll turn to the Daily.

[Corey D'Angelis]

Wire on the issue of whether low income families are benefiting from this. I already talked about the theoretical about how they're in the worst schools already. So they had the most to benefit, most to gain from having more options in their, their kids education in D.C. they have a voucher program which I think Obama was against even though he sent his own kids to Sidwell Friends. A private school. School choice for me, but not for me. Hypocrisy again strikes again. It's every, it's everywhere. But we looked at the data most recently in D.C. and the average family, their average household income was about $30,000 per year for the entire household in the District of Columbia, which is a higher cost of living area than the average in the United States. And I believe about 95% of the kids were black or Hispanic. So this goes completely counter to the narrative that the left is saying about how this is only for rich white kids using the program in Florida as well. There's a really interesting story about how DeSantis actually won in 2018. He actually barely won the governor's race in 2018. And the headline in the Wall Street Journal the next day was that school choice moms tipped the governor's race for DeSantis. So they looked at exit polling from CNN of all places, and they found that black moms in particular came out in force for DeSantis much higher than expected after his opponent Andrew Gillum, who was a black Democrat, called to get rid of their private school choice program that was already benefiting over 100,000 kids at the time. And those kids were disproportionately low income and non white kids. So this is another way that one Republicans can make inroads with groups that they hadn't reached out to before. And it's also, it shows you that this shouldn't be a partisan issue. And if Democrats are smart, if, if they're going to bleed votes on this issue to people like Ron DeSantis in Florida, they should come along too. And this is something I point out in the book, that the way that we can get towards bipartisanship on school choice is through hyper partisanship in the short run because the more that the Democrats lose on the issue, like we saw with Terry McAuliffe, Andrew Gillum in Florida, the more they're going to scratch their head and you'll have some defectors and say I'm going to join the kids union and listen to them, the parents, as opposed to just the teachers union.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, it isn't an obviously partisan issue. Well, it's like cost cutting in government. It isn't obvious at all why that default left winger would be against getting rid of fraud in the political system and political spending. Right. Because then at least in principle, more money could be spent on other things that actually work. Yeah, exactly. And, and this seems to be, I mean you can make a perfectly cogent case, as you have, I would say, for how broadening choice, it might even preferentially benefit people who are poor and dispossessed. That seems to be highly likely to me because as you pointed out, the worst schools are the ones that are serving the people who are trapped, mired in poverty, often multi generationally. And I don't see any way out of that, that the multiplication of supply and it's also the case that the money of a poor person is just as good as the money of a rich person. And so if they have that money at hand, their children are more likely to be valued by people who would like to get paid for their efforts. Right, right, right. All right, so I think we'll turn to the daily wire side now and I think I'll talk to you about a couple of things. I'll, I'd like to know about your future plans, strategic and conceptual. Where do you go next? I'd like to know what it's been like for you to deal with the new administration federally and, and particularly on the federal level. And I'd like to talk to you more about any pitfalls you see emerging on the school choice side. It. So we'll talk about the future, we'll talk about strategy, we'll talk about the new administration. We'll talk about potential risks that you might see maybe in the hyper partisan approach, but also and in the school choice conceptual domain per se. So we'll turn to that on the daily wire side. Everybody watching and listening. You're more than welcome to join us for an additional half an hour behind the daily wire side paywall. Thank you very much for coming.

[Corey D'Angelis]

Thank you so much yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. It's really good to have you here and appreciate it. And, you know, you're. You're spending your time educating people, too, and letting them know, well, exactly how they should be thinking about the fact that their children are sent to a pathologically unproductive monopoly. Right. That eats up half the resources at the state level. Right. It's really something. It's really something to see. So. All right, everybody, you can join us there.