Fighting for Freedom to Learn

Mike McShane: Hello, and welcome back to another edition of EdChoice Chats. This is Mike McShane, Director of National Research at EdChoice. And we have on the line today two friends, both of myself and of EdChoice.

We have Neal McCluskey of the Cato Institute and James Shuls of Florida State University. And they’re going to talk about a new book that they have edited. It’s called Fighting for Freedom to Learn, Examining America’s Century-Old School Choice Movement.

Neal is holding it up, but because it’s blurring his background, it looked like he was holding up something inappropriate and it was being blurred out. But there it is. I got to tell you guys, I don’t know who did the graphic design.

The cover of that book looks great. It’s a really good-looking volume that you have, and you have a great list of contributors. So I’m so happy to have you on the podcast today.

James Shuls: Thanks Mike. Thanks for having me with you. I don’t think Neal or I can take any credit on the cover other than just saying we liked it as well.

Neal McCluskey: Yeah. That’s fantastic. I looked it up.

Some outfit called Face Out Studio did it.

Mike McShane: Well, God bless them. Yeah, they did a great job. So that’s wonderful.

So this is a really interesting book that I think is covering an area that needs more covered, which is about history. We spend a lot of time in the school choice world talking about studies that have been done in the last five or 10 or maybe 20 years. We talk about kind of political machinations that have taken place recently.

But this book goes all the way back and does a kind of survey of the history of school choice throughout American history. So I figured to start at the very beginning is a very good place to start. So the question that I have to the two of you that as I was reading particularly the initial parts of the book, and I’m interested to your answer, is when did school choice begin in America?

James Shuls: Well, that’s a good question. And the way we frame it at the beginning of the book is that that’s basically the wrong question to ask, Mike. I mean, when we think about school choice, we typically think about leaving the public education system.

Well, leaving a dominant system only makes sense when there’s a dominant system, right? And so school choice as we think of it today doesn’t make sense until after the common school era begins and we have this prevalence of public schools everywhere that people don’t want to go to anymore, right? But the truth is that this impulse for educational freedom, to educate your own kids according to your values, according to your beliefs, has always been there even before we had common schools.

And so I think one of the main thrusts of the book is to say educational freedom predates common schools. It’s been a part of our country since before the founding. And school choice is just, I guess you could say, the most recent iteration of that.

Neal McCluskey: I mean, I was just gonna say that, I mean, part of what this is trying to indicate is a desire for pluralism in education existed long before there was a movement to have less plural education through the common school and then public school system. And at least part of my impetus for wanting to do this book was because I get sort of exhausted by people saying, well, school choice started with Milton Friedman and people trying to avoid desegregation. And so that’s where we’re gonna start our history all the time.

And it’s just not true. And I thought, well, maybe we should have some volume that really gets at that. But James is absolutely right.

It doesn’t even make sense to call something school choice until you have this alternate of not school choice.

Mike McShane: So Jane Shaw Stroop, am I saying that correctly? Stroop? You got it.

Fantastic. Contributed to one of the early chapters. Wrote something that I thought was really interesting.

So I think maybe you describe it in the introduction as you say that she argues that the history of American education is not one of steady centralization, but of evolving efforts to balance educational freedom, local control and societal needs. And in some ways, I feel like the story that perhaps the more historically informed school choice knicks think, that’s sort of against the grain of, I think, the narrative that a lot of people have thought. So can you maybe walk through sort of the argument that she makes in the story that she tells?

Neal McCluskey: Yeah. I mean, so the idea is that to, I mean, this is, I think, the first chapter. So the other than the introduction is to start by enabling people to understand how education was delivered before we got into the common schooling movement, which, you know, starts around 1837 with Horace Mann.

But, you know, there was government involvement before that. But what she is establishing is, you know, there are lots of different ways that education was being delivered in the colonial period and then through, you know, the early Republican period up to the common schooling era that was grounded in pluralism. And a fair amount of that was people choosing schools that were consistent with their religious denomination.

But even when you get into what people, I think, sometimes think of as a public school, like that sort of little red schoolhouse or the one-room schoolhouse that also was, it turns out, the church and the town meeting hall. All that is very actually decentralized and typically grounded in pluralism, especially depending on what part of the country you’re in, because that town tended to be people who are from the same sort of background, you know, who went to that same church, who used that same meeting room. And even that then represents sort of a pluralist way of delivering education.

But she really wanted to demonstrate that there were lots of different ways people were consuming education consistent with their individual needs and desires.

James Shuls: Yeah. And I would, you know, jumping ahead in the book and bringing in, you know, something Dick Carpenter wrote, he said, a school was public if it served a public purpose. The public education, as we think of it today, we didn’t have the same conceptions of what was public and what was private before, as Neal talked about, the growth of the common school and the public school sector.

So these schools that were made up of, you know, charity schools and people pursuing their own self-interest and community spirit and all these different sorts of things were often serving public purposes.

Neal McCluskey: Yeah. And it wasn’t uncommon for government in some way to help fund a plurality of schools because that, when you go back to the English tradition, that was often how education was funded was it was usually through land and people had a lot of land and lots of benefactors would use the proceeds from land to do that. There was abundance of land in the new world, and so it wasn’t nearly as valuable.

And so government sort of stepped in and took over that role a bit of providing some funding for a whole bunch of different institutions to be viable. So not just one type, a whole bunch of types.

Mike McShane: So I feel in the book, there’s in some ways, kind of in talking about American educational history, I don’t know if you want to call it like BC or BCS, right, like before common schools and sort of after the common schools movement. And so I think it’s actually worth taking a moment to kind of linger on as obviously the three of us who care about school choice and individual freedom and parents and decentralization and all of those good things is to kind of think about the common schools movement and and what we what our sort of opinions on it. So I’m curious of the two of you, do we think that the common schools movement was a mistake?

Was it like a wrong step in American history? Was it a good thing or was it something that was good for its time that that has now outlived its usefulness? When you look back on it as sort of like judges of history today, would you say that the common school movement was a mistake or, you know, or a step in the right direction?

Neal McCluskey: James, if you don’t want to take that one first, I’ll say a little something, because, you know, it’s always dangerous to judge things in the past using our 2020 hindsight. I would say it is a mistake. I think that if your desire is a more free, more pluralist society, you would sort of if you thought government needed to be involved in order to take education to scale so that everybody could access it.

And I think there was actually a good debate whether that was even necessary. But say we assume that you could only get universal education if government was involved. The way to do it was either to fund students or to fund a plurality of schools or to fund plural schools.

This is things like Thomas Paine talked about this, and I know I’m forgetting lots of other important people. But this idea of funding students or plural schools wasn’t something that just came about after common schools. This was how many people said it should be done.

I think that was the right way to do it. But you can also be sympathetic to the common school folks who said, look, we have this new republic and this is something really new. Democracy is new.

And they were afraid that you would have one, too many people who were kind of ignorant who were able to vote to wield some authority. And they said, well, we need to get those people education. And maybe the best way we can have a safety net is just government provides it.

And I’m less sympathetic to people saying we really need to make everybody the same. This was kind of Horace Mann, Benjamin Rush. But you could also understand that, again, because we’re talking about a new republic, a new democracy, and people were afraid, you know, we were 13 kind of unwieldy states.

The states all had new governments after the revolution. And you could understand why people were worried, you know, that we did have various rebellions, you know, the Whiskey Rebellion, things like that. They’d say, well, you know, we’ve kind of got to get everybody into one mold.

I don’t think that was the right direction, but you could understand it. I think that after a while, it started to, we started to realize or become more clear. This is a little, even a little oppressive to have a system like this, but I don’t think it was badly intended.

James Shuls: Yeah, I think that, I love similar views as Neal. And I think first you have to state some of the positives, right? I think that public education is good.

Like the idea that the, as a society, we believe that we should provide for the education of all children is a great and noble idea. And the fact that we wanted to create systems to do that, nothing inherently wrong with that. Now, did we create the right system to do that effectively and, you know, support the sort of pluralistic nation that we have?

Probably not. I mean, it’s clear that one of the purposes of the common school movement, as Neal described, was to create an American public, to create the American citizen, and to form a nation out of these different belief systems. And on one hand you would say, well, they were good at that.

They, they were, they created, I guess you could say an American identity. But in the process, you know, they stifle diversity, right? And they, for me, the biggest issue or the, if you say, was it a mistake?

It depends on which group you’re talking about and what your, you know, what your beliefs are. For me, Protestants made a tremendous mistake in pioneering, you know, championing the common school movement. And if you look at the biggest supporters of the common school movement, they tended to be Protestants.

And the Protestants thought they could create a common school movement and keep it Christian, you know, that they could continue to teach the Christian Bible in a non-sectarian sort of way. And they were wrong. As history went along, you know, all the vestiges of Protestantism were removed from the public education sphere.

And then you get down the road a hundred years and we’re left without a robust system of Protestant schools. Now there are some, of course, there are Lutheran schools, there’s some sectors where you have some, you know, vestiges of a Protestant school system, but not in the way that you had with Catholics, because the Catholics opted out from the beginning, right? They, they saw that, and Matthew Lee does a great job digging into some of this in his chapter, but the Catholics were essentially forced to create their own system, right?

They, it wasn’t really a choice that they were given. It was either comply with the Protestant public school system or opt out. And they chose to opt out.

And so we have this sort of strong system of Catholic schools in the United States because of that. So was it a mistake? It was a mistake for Protestants, for sure.

Was it a mistake for the country to want to support a system of schooling? Probably not.

Mike McShane: So a key figure of this movement was Horace Mann. Obviously a figure that looms large in this book as well. Again, sort of depending on how much pepper people have on eggs and on their eggs in the morning, you get these sort of different portraits of Horace Mann.

I think the most kind of vociferous one is basically that Horace Mann was a bigot, that he was an anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic Massachusetts guy who was trying to stamp out all of the vestiges of people’s religions, of immigrants’ religions, of their languages, of all of those sorts of things, and essentially just like a, I don’t know, a cultural murderer or something, whatever you want to put it, that thing.

Then like on the other end of it, there’s a more kind of cuddly version of him that is a sort of like, well, no, James, a little bit to what you, well, actually Neal, you did as well. Generally kind of, well, no, we recognize we have these people who are coming from a lot of different places and we’d recognize that we need to have certain shared things in common and I wanted the, he wanted the children of the rich and the poor to go to school together and was really kind of an egalitarian, this desire that he had for common schools was really out of a kind of egalitarianism, a belief in the equality of all people. I imagine the answer is somewhere in the middle, but after editing these chapters where he shows up a few times, what is, what is your, your all’s ruling on Horace Mann?

James Shuls: So, so I was thinking of that meme where I think it’s a child that says, you know, why not both? Because I think it’s, you know, maybe a little bit of both and not in the nefarious way, not to say, uh, I’m your bigoted sort of stance of like wanting to crush the Catholics and all these sorts of things, but, but wanting to form an American identity, right. And, uh, maybe there was a little bit of anti Catholicism in there, of course, but, you know, there’s, there is a good in having an American identity just as there is in having an Irish identity or a English identity or an Italian identity.

Right. So this idea of trying to form an American nation doesn’t have to be necessarily terrible and bigoted. Right.

And so, but it does mean that you were trying to steer people away from their native lands or their native allegiances. Right. So it, it depends on how charitable you want to be when looking at these things and recognize that people were operating in their time, as Neal was saying.

And when we look back from our vantage point, it’s easy to judge and say, uh, you know, they were bigoted or they did this or that, but they were operating in the circumstances they were operating in. Um, we were, we are not presently, uh, under a wave of Catholic immigration, but we have had plenty of conversations today about immigration, you know, and, and people may look back at this time period, um, with very different lenses than we’re currently operating in. So, um, I would say Horace Mann, in my estimation, um, was probably operating with a lot of noble intentions.

Um, and in, in my vantage point, um, did some very good things, but also opened up the possibility of a monolithic system that stifled innovation, creativity, and pluralism.

Neal McCluskey: Yeah, I think that’s a captured the system. Well, I think that that was his intent. I don’t actually think he was as anti-immigrant, at least if that was the driver for him, as we tend to think, because his efforts sort of preceded a bit major immigration.

What, uh, some, at least historians think is what was really motivating him, well, were a few things. One, he was a Unitarian, but grew up in a sort of Congregationalist Puritan background, and he really didn’t like that. And he didn’t like the dominance of Puritans.

Um, but he also, Massachusetts was starting to undergo early industrialization because it wasn’t the best place for farming, but they had a lot of rivers and things, so you could power those wheels that started your textile mills and things like that. And he started to see people come in to more urban developing areas from the sort of back country. And he frankly thought they were all backward idiots.

Um, if you read enough Horace Mann, you get, this is my take on him. Is he’s, he’s not so much a bigot as a paternalist, and he generally thinks everybody is, other than people like him, are kind of morons. He spends a whole lot of time talking about really how dumb parents are, right down to, you know, they, he gets into like, you’ve caulked up every crevice in your child’s bedroom, and they really need those drafts in order to get fresh air.

And, you know, maybe he’s right. Um, but he does a lot of that. I, if you read about when he goes to Prussia, you know, cause a lot of people think, well, Prussia’s where, where we look to start this idea of common scoring, he spends many pages, uh, or I don’t know, yeah, I guess they were pages, they weren’t all speeches, but when he gives his annual reports on, you know, Prussia’s great and everything, but boy, do they put too many like comforters on their kids and they suffocate them at night. And I thought, who, who thinks they need to say all this?

And of course he also has a part in there where he says parents need to be guided by educators because they don’t even understand basic science like phrenology, you know, the bumps on your head and that, and you can understand he was sort of an elite, very well-educated person, and that was sort of trendy science and you can see where a paternalist would say, well, obviously this is what the smart people think we need to control the people who are dumb, especially if they’re going to be part of sort of a democratically controlled society. So the main thing I fault him on is arrogance, but that is not something that is peculiar to any time period or group of people.

I think we all need to check our priors. And, um, so I think what he did was he thought he was well-intentioned, but he didn’t spend enough time thinking, what if I’m wrong? Is this really what should be imposed on people?

James Shuls: I like how Charles Glenn puts it in his chapter. He says that the common school serve the purpose of liberating children from the influence of their families and their communities.

Neal McCluskey: I think that’s what Horace Mann wanted. Unless it was his community, in which case that’s the one that everybody should be part of.

Mike McShane: So now both of you actually also contribute in addition to editing, you contribute to this. So I have sort of specific questions for each of you. So Neal, you’ll get the first one.

Why do you think there was a lull in the advancement of educational freedom after the civil war?

Neal McCluskey: Yeah. So, um, the impetus for my writing this chapter is, uh, I set up something called the school choice timeline, which by the way, I’ve got to update with this new federal school choice program, but that’s an aside. Um, and there’s a whole lot of activity really till about 1879.

And, and this is with the action in actually California, somebody saying, Hey, we really should have education based in money for our kids, but then we don’t have anything or we have a big lull, there are a few things that happened, but not much until, uh, 1955 and that’s Milton Friedman. But that’s also when, you know, right after Brown v. Board.

And that’s when a lot of people say, well, this is when school choice begins. And so I thought it was important to say, to try and understand, well, why do we have this gap from basically 1880 to 1950? There are some things that happen in there.

1929, a Pope, I can’t remember which Pope it was, but, um, he says, look, you’ve, the right thing for countries to do is has a system where people can choose schools because in large part, it didn’t want the Catholic church being pushed out of education was just happening. We had people a little bit in the 1940s, early 1950s, starting to say, it’s not fair that we have an education system everybody has to pay for, but if you want religious education, you have to pay twice, but there’s not a whole lot in there and I think what we’re seeing is, uh, James talked about, uh, immigration a little, I didn’t realize how huge the, the concern about immigration was until I started to write this chapter. Um, and there were huge backlashes, um, and concerns about immigrants really starting in the 1880s and in particular about German immigrants and not specifically like German Catholic immigrants, more of them tend to be Lutheran, but the concern was they’re all speaking German. And so you have laws passed that prohibit the teaching of kids in foreign languages, and those are really aimed at Germans because you have all these German communities and sort of like, especially the upper Midwest where they’re like little Germany and they’re speaking German.

And so you first have sort of a, you’ve got this big backlash against immigrants because we had some big waves of immigrants and in particular ones that through their language, you would say, well, they’re not trying to assimilate and become Americans. We also, as a result of the civil war, move much toward, much closer to this idea, we should need to have a national identity. So it’s after the civil war, we start to talk about the United States instead of these United States and referring to states separately.

And I think you see a lot of concern about that. Part of it becomes part of the Blaine amendments saying, okay, well, we’re not going to allow funds to go to any sectarian school because there’s this fear that, you know, we don’t want, first of all, a foreign power like the Vatican taking over people’s minds. But we’re also now one big country.

And so this nationalism is also important. And then there are efforts simply to stamp out private schooling. And so it’s hard to say let’s expand choice when you’re just fighting to survive with your private school.

And, of course, the apogee of this is in Oregon, where they pass the referendum saying the only education that will meet the requirements of compulsory schooling are in public schools that would stamp out all private schools, not just Catholic. So there’s word about Catholic schools, certainly, but we’ve got to remember Hill Military Academy is also part of the lawsuit against this. And so if you look at what the Klan was about, yes, the Klan, certainly it’s like a new, new-ish Klan, so they still hate African-Americans, they hate a lot of people, but they now are more anti-immigrant, more anti-Catholic, but also they have kind of an anti-elite component to them.

And so they want to stamp out not just, you know, Catholic schools, but kind of like the preserves of elites because they, sort of like today, they’re not they’re very suspicious of expertise and elites. Part of this is a result of World War I, where people become disenchanted because they felt like they were deceived and we went to a war and a lot of people died. And so that sort of anti-elitism, that sort of anti-immigrant sentiment is also very substantial in the 20s.

And that puts all private schooling on its heels. And then when you get to the 30s and 40s, there are actually some efforts to supply some help for private schooling, not necessarily school choice, but, you know, a little textbook funding and things like that. But obviously the 1930s, you have the Great Depression, it’s hard to get really behind, hey, give us a whole lot of money for our schools.

In the 1940s, you of course have World War II, that’s a bit of a distraction if your main thing is school choice. And then, you know, you get in the late 40s and then you start to see a little bit of this. So there are just a whole bunch of things that happened in this time period that made it tough to push school choice.

But what really shocked me was, or not shocked me, but surprised me was how much of this was based on anti-immigrant concerns and in particular, particular concerns about Germans.

Mike McShane: James, you contribute a chapter about a probably lesser known, you know, Neal brought up everything we talk about in 1955, we talk about Milton Friedman, role of government and education, but a contemporary of Friedman’s who’s not necessarily as well known, you write about. Can you tell us a bit about Virgil Bloom? Who was he and what did he contribute to the school choice movement?

James Shuls: Yeah, absolutely. And I want to say first that I was just recently speaking with someone who has been in the school choice movement for decades, who’s our senior by at least 20 or 25 years. And when I mentioned Virgil Bloom, he said, why haven’t I ever heard of this guy?

And that goes back to sort of the reason that Neal and I wanted to put this book together, is that a lot of this history, modern school reformers don’t know about. That we even, so going back to the point that Neal was making that on the reform side, we say it started with Friedman and on the anti-school choice side, they say it started with segregation or something along those lines. The truth is there has been a lot of interesting stuff going on throughout our nation’s history where people are fighting for educational freedom.

You know, about, I don’t know, more than a decade ago, I met this guy, Herman Kriegshauser was his name and he was in his eighties and he used to always talk to me about this group called Citizens for Educational Freedom. And I was sort of wrote him off as this kooky old guy who didn’t know what he was talking about. And then one day I was writing a piece about values and education and I came across this organization, Citizens for Educational Freedom.

And so it was like, I found this thread and I started pulling on the thread and realizing more and more about Citizens for Educational Freedom, which was founded in St. Louis in 1959, and its archives were in my library at the university I worked at at the time, University of Missouri, St. Louis. So I dig into these archives and I start realizing the important work of this guy named Virgil Bloom, father of Virgil Bloom, who was at Marquette University and did his doctoral work at your alma mater, Mike, at St. Louis University. And he was writing about school choice in the 1950s, in the 1960s, from really a civil rights perspective.

That it was, so while Friedman was writing about these things from a free market sort of perspective, Virgil Bloom was saying it is wrong for religious people to have to give up their rights at the schoolhouse door. They shouldn’t have to sacrifice the public benefit of education to receive the public benefit or to be able to choose the type of school that they want for their kids. And so he was taking lessons from the civil rights movement and the tremendous success that African-Americans were having in fighting for their rights in the courts and saying, listen, Catholics, religious people, we need to be doing this too.

And so he had this book, Freedom of Choice in Education in 1959, which inspired people to start Citizens for Educational Freedom. And then this movement just picked up steam, especially in the northern states. So you had hundreds of thousands of members of Citizens for Educational Freedom.

And, you know, again, the popular narrative is that school choice started in the South. Almost all of the members for Citizens for Educational Freedom were in the North. Very few were in the South where they were trying to push the, you know, vouchers in the anti-segregation era.

She had this tremendous movement for school choice. There was a quote, I’m going to blank on it exactly, but it said something like not a week goes by that the New York Times doesn’t mention Citizens for Educational Freedom. I mean, they were constantly fighting these battles. It was a tremendous movement.

And so when I see people today making the argument that school choice is a civil rights issue of our time, my pushback is it’s always been a civil rights issue. That’s exactly the point Virgil Bloom was making in the 1950s and the 1960s. And so that’s what I try to highlight in my chapter, but also to push back on the idea that it started as a segregationist plot of some sort.

One of the other discoveries I made, one of the great things about doing this sort of work is you learn a bit as you go along, as you start doing the research and writing, just as Neal was talking about. And I started learning more about what happened in the South. And people will talk about the segregation academies that popped up or that vouchers were created to flee segregated schools.

And the truth of the matter is, in many cases, vouchers and the segregation academies were a choice between no school or a private school. So in Virginia, for example, the legislature, when schools were forced to integrate, the legislature closed the school. And so the people weren’t choosing, do I send my kids to a segregated school or a private school? It was, do I not send my kids to school or do I send them to a private school?

And so that… complicates this narrative even in the South that vouchers were necessarily created to opt out of integrated schools. No, they were about giving people the option to get their kids in school somewhere.

And so it’s, what I try to highlight in my chapter is that educational freedom is always about civil rights. It is about giving people the opportunity to choose the type of school that’s best aligned with their values, their vision of education. And that movement wasn’t started by Friedman, it wasn’t started by segregationists, it’s always existed.

Mike McShane: Yeah, we’ve done some, just a previous podcast, we’ve been talking about that very issue. There’s that great paper, School Choices, Racist and Other Myths. It was in the Syracuse Law Review, which breaks down a lot of the stuff and I recommend people checking out. So as we look at the last couple chapters of the book, I am struck by a question that I’m interested in the two of you answering is, should we see school choice as a progressive or as a conservative reform.

James Shuls: I think it’s a good question that the school choice movement is wrestling with. Because on one hand, you have the progressive permissionless education, the micro schools, all sorts of new and innovative things that are happening.

And then at the same time, you have this tremendous flourishing of classical schools and sort of back to basics sort of schools that fit more of a conservative vision.

I think in school choice, again, you could get a little bit of both. You have both flavors of people pushing for school choice. One is the innovation side, and one is the return to sort of normalcy or classic values. So I don’t think, I guess, I don’t think you can describe school choice in and of itself as either or but that school choice allows for the pluralistic system where both can flourish.

Neal McCluskey: Yeah, I think that that’s key is within school choice. I mean, the purpose of school choice is not to be conservative progressive in terms of what education is delivered. The idea is for everybody to be able to choose that.

So I often remember we haven’t heard from this much lately, but Matt Damon used to get in the news because his mom is very much anti school choice, very much pro public schools. He would participate in rallies on those, but his kids went to very expensive private schools. And he said, look, I wish I could put them in public schools, but those schools just aren’t progressive. And we really got to get people to embrace progressive pedagogy.

And I thought, well, no, what you should want is everybody to have a choice to have money portable so they could choose the school you want. Or if they don’t happen to agree with you, they can choose something else, but not just, well, I’m going to use my own money for private schools until these guys get with the program and everybody has to do what I want.  He’s a good example of, think a group that we haven’t reached out to enough, but we should, and we try, is to people who want progressive pedagogy, progressive schools to say, you know what, the public schools are going to tend to kind of go toward a sort of like EarthSATS middle often. And you should want school choice so more people can access what you think is important.

We tend more to think of conservatives using it and we want them to be able to use it too. That’s the idea is actual pluralism.  And you would think that, so pluralism, might say, and is kind of progressive in that, you know, we accept everything. We don’t have government say your teaching is off limits and yours is all right.

But there’s also, I think, a progressive tendency to want to control from above. And if that’s progressivism, then school choice is conservative because the idea is not to control from above. I’ll just say it’s libertarian because, you know, that embraces everybody. And so it’s like the kumbaya with all sorts. So I’ll say it’s libertarian reform. And then I don’t have to give a real answer.

Mike McShane: Fantastic. Look, and I also just I totally blanked on his name when we were talking about school choices races another miss Michael Bindis It was a couple podcasts ago from IJ again another friend of the program friend to everyone here if you’re interested in that particular error and some of other bits about segregation and current research great podcast Michael Bindis, but anyway James, Neal fantastic to have you on the podcast today. Really enjoyed chatting with you.

As a reminder for everyone, fighting for the freedom to learn, examining America’s centuries old school choice movement. It’s out November 11th from Cato Press. I believe it’s available at your friendly neighborhood online book retailer. Gents, good luck with the book and thanks so much for being on the podcast.

James Shuls: Thank you, Mike.

Neal McCluskey: Thank you.

Mike McShane: And thanks everybody for listening. I look forward to joining you again at some point in the reasonably near future on another edition of EdChoice Chats.