Ep. 346: What’s Up with The Fractured Schoolhouse

November 2, 2022

In this episode of What’s Up with Mike McShane, we talk with Neal McCluskey who is the Director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom. He authored a book that, among other things, talks about how we can build bridges and connections in the school choice movement.

Mike McShane: Hello, welcome back everybody. This is Mike McShane, Director of National Research at Ed Choice. This is an episode of my podcast, What’s Up with Mike McShane? And today we’re asking what’s up with the fractured schoolhouse? And the fractured schoolhouse is not a literal fractured schoolhouse, a metaphorical fractured schoolhouse, and that it comes from the title of the book, “The Fractured Schoolhouse: Reexamining Education for a Free, Equal and Harmonious Society”, written by Neal McCluskey, who is our guest on the podcast today. I have known Neal forever. Neal writes about all sorts of education issues. He is the Director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom. You may have seen some of his other works before. He was the co-editor of School Choice Myths, setting the records straight on education freedom and unprofitable schooling, examining the causes of and fixes for America’s broken ivory tower. You may have also seen some of his work, even though his name wasn’t necessarily associated with it.

He helps maintain Cato’s Public Schooling Battle Map. I highly recommend, if y’all haven’t checked this out, you can just Google it, Public Schooling Battle Map where they actually look at places around the country where there is conflict related to public schools, where there’s arguments and disagreements, as you imagine. In the last couple years, they’ve had a lot of grist for the mill, right? There’s been a lot of stuff popping up on this map, but you can definitely check that out. It’s really interesting. I really enjoyed reading Neal’s book. When you do an interview like this and you kind of want to talk to somebody for half an hour, so you can’t get into everything and it’s a really meaty book. There’s a lot of interesting history in there, some social science, some kind of rhetoric argumentation. It’s a really dense, interesting, thought-provoking book. I highly recommend people check it out.

And without further ado, here’s my conversation with Neal McCluskey about his new book, “The Fractured Schoolhouse: Reexamining Education for a Free, Equal and Harmonious Society.” So Neal, it’s great to have you on the podcast. Your new book is “The Fractured Schoolhouse: Reexamining Education for a Free, Equal and Harmonious Society.” I just checked, it is available on Amazon and I think a variety of other platforms out there. So folks that are listening, you can definitely get this. We won’t be able to talk about every part of the book today, but we’re thinking this is like the movie trailer, right? We’re just kind of getting you interested into it. So you come out, buy the book, read it. Now, before we get into the book though, I actually want to ask you kind of a personal question. You and I have known each other for some time now and we’ve been on panels together and I follow you on social media. Are you @NealMcCluskey on Twitter? I’m right to know that.

Neal McCluskey: Yep. That’s me.

Mike McShane: Okay, so for people who want to follow Neal, @NealMcCluskey on Twitter. And I have to tell you, I have always admired the way you engage in the public debate. You are polite, you are charitable, you are magnanimous. You don’t try and break down straw men. You really try and really truthfully engage with other people. And I have found that sometimes this enrages people and people say really nasty thing to you. And part of it I think is the libertarian thing where people don’t really understand libertarian. So it’s like, “Oh, you’re a corporate shill or whatever.” And you just don’t take the bait, right? Like I said, it’s something I really admire. But my question for you is like how do you do this? Do you start your day with meditation? How are you able to continue to be this kind of, it’s maybe a cliche, but this kind of happy warrior and be magnanimous in the face of the sort of vitriol on social media?

Neal McCluskey: Oh, well first of all, I appreciate that. Second thing I’d say is, the fact that I try and stay calm and not straw man a lot, it’s really kind of hurt my follower count. So everybody who appreciates decency and a nice, calm conversation, please be sure to follow me. And I can also say that while I may eventually come across on Twitter as being calm and magnanimous and happy with everybody, if you are in the room with me when I’m seeing a lot of these things on Twitter, it’s a very different situation. I frightened family, I’ve scared pets. And so it’s not always like that, but I think part of it is, oh, when things were getting especially polarized, it really struck me as a terrible thing that we were getting polarized. So part of it was I was just trying to lower the temperature.

Probably more deeply than that is because I get accused of things that I know are not true, where people will just make assumptions about me or about my motives and it drives me nuts and I think it’s unfair, but then I shouldn’t be doing it to other people. Something I try to never do is ascribe motives to people. And it’s also because you see Twitter, you see debates and amazingly we only ever find bad motives for people we disagree with. They could never have a good motive for anything they say that we disagree with. And then the other thing is it’s just kind of unpleasant to get into angry, vitriolic debates with people on Twitter. There was a time when I did a lot more arguing on Twitter and maybe some on Facebook with people, but it’s sort of painful and it’s only occurred to me in the last maybe year or so that it’s a sort of awful situation to be where because of Twitter or Facebook or lots of these other social media platforms I’m not on, you can be in sort of a perpetual argument with people.

No matter what you’re doing, you’re still in an argument and who wants to be constantly in an argument. You just want to have dinner at night. No, I got to be arguing, I want to go sleep. No, got to argue. I want to go play with my kids. No, time to go argue. And then this feeling that if I’m not on Twitter, people are arguing and saying things about me that I need to stop. And so I just find it all very unpleasant now. So it’s much selfish as magnanimous why I try and be as kind and pleasant as I can on social media.

Mike McShane: It’s good. And I think your description of it was very strong. I’ve always thought of too, it’s like when you open up social media, you’re seeing a bunch of other people arguing with each other and sort of like if you walked into a restaurant and all the people at the tables around you were all shouting and roaring at each other, you’d be like, “I don’t want to be at this restaurant. It’s crazy. I would’ve been in a calm place and just enjoy a good meal.” But social media, it’s like you walk in and suddenly the argument is in your living room because you’re in the living room and looking at this, it’s like people are arguing right in front of you. It’s forget this, what are we doing here? Well, anyway, I-

Neal McCluskey: There’s let’s say intention real fast there though of, especially if you work with a think tank or you do any kind of public policy, you also want to be heard. So the flip side of this is, hey, I really want to tell people what I think is right. I want people to be paying attention to what I say. So as much as I find the arguing and other stuff unpleasant, there’s a big part of me, it’s like, you know what? I really feel like maybe I should do some zingers here. Really lay someone low in as empty a fashion as possible. But that really generates happy feelings in people’s lizard brain and get lots of followers and lots of attention and adulation from people I agree with. So I try and avoid these things because in the end the balance is more pain than gain. But I totally understand why people are doing it. It just doesn’t work for me and I ultimately think it’s kind of poisonous for society.

Mike McShane: Well I’ll tell you, I admire that about you and wanted to begin the podcast by saying that, but let’s get into the book. So one of the things that I thought was really interesting about this book and it’s contained in the title which I will repeat for everyone, is “The Fractured Schoolhouse: Reexamining Education for a Free, Equal and Harmonious Society”, was that your book really was talking about kind of school’s roles in society. It’s not really a book that says here’s how school choice is good for test scores or here’s how… It’s really talking about the role that schools play in society and how we determine where our children go to school and who can operate a school and what those schools should teach affects our sort of broader community. So I’d be sort of interested as someone who’s interested in school choice and the education system, there are lots of different angles you could have taken into that one. Why did you choose that one?

Neal McCluskey: Yeah, well I mean in a way it’s connected to what we were talking about, about polarization and not being angry. But the ultimate sort of reason I got into this is in part because I was angry about things that I read, but also because I think this is absolutely crucial and it’s become especially crucial first because we were getting polarized. You would say the Trump election maybe manifested a lot of this polarization we weren’t seeing, and we’ve gotten even worse over the last couple of years with debates about what some people call critical race theory, gender ideology, all these things that are really very personal to a lot of people. But what initially got me sort of upset was that a common objection to school choice or educational freedom because we’re going beyond just school choice with education savings accounts and things like that. But a common objection was the assertion that public schools are the foundation of our democracy and they’ve unified diverse people.

And I just thought that was wrong. And I think if you look historically, it’s just not true. And I think if you look at the present day, and so I run something called the Public Schooling Battle Map, which I always have to promote. It’s a Cato thing, it’s an identity based conflicts that we find through media reports in public schools. And the reason it exists is mainly to illustrate we still force people to fight over basic values or basic identities. Critical race theory is a great example of both of these because it has a lot to do with people’s personal identities. Are you African American? Are you white? What does this mean about it? It also has to do with values. Do you think it’s most important to teach the flaws about your country or what’s good about your country and public schooling by forcing diverse people to pay for one system?

To me the logic is, that actually causes more division because it forces conflict. And I wanted to look into this and to put into one book all the evidence that actually public schools do not unify, that they have forced conflict. And that school choice is I think clearly a way to avoid a lot of the conflict. But I also think that it provides a lot of the stuff within education we need to actually start bridging divides among people. I wanted to have something out there that talked about all this while also noting another thing, this goes back to our first conversation that bothers me is that, I always feel like the people who are against school choice, who always want to say we do it for terrible motives because we just want to enrich fat cats who don’t want educated population because they need drones to work in their factories and all this other stuff that I think is totally unfair.

But it’s also, I think, unfair to say that people who support public schooling, they’re just unionists who do it to line their pockets or because they don’t believe in freedom or something like that. I wanted to also talk about there actually were good motives for public schooling. People really did want this to lead to a more harmonious society. And I think it’s important that, that be laid out too, that actually the goals to some extent have largely been the same for both major camps, public school people, school choice people. But the evidence is actually against what seems sort of intuitively that if you just force everyone in the same schools, they’ll just get together and become friends and we’ll all just sort of learn to live with one another and appreciate each other. I just don’t think that the evidence bears that out at all. But I do think it’s important to understand that this has been a goal for public schooling and it’s one that I think we all share is a harmonious, kind of unified society.

Mike McShane: And I think that’s one of the things that makes your book really interesting, is that I feel like most people that read it in the initial pages of it where you set out, sort of these beliefs of what a schooling system in a nation should do, I feel like pretty much everybody reads that’s like, oh yeah, that’s what we’re going for. And ultimately what your book is about, well, does this actually accomplish those goals? And if it doesn’t, what are other ways in which we could do that? So I hope people who read this book engage in it in a really productive way by saying, oh, look, you could imagine talking about some other public policy where it’s like, I don’t know, we’re trying to eliminate some disease. And you’d have some people saying, oh, well we need a pill or we need to do a surgery or we need to do a whatever.

And it’s just like, well, we’ll just try and figure out which one’s actually accomplishing those things. But the other thing that I think is really interesting about this book is it’s a lot of history. There’s not as much sort of contemporary social… You spend a lot of time talking about the history of the education system in America and actually the history of education systems and countries across the globe. One of the things that I think is really interesting, another argument for kind of public education has been the need of an educated society. We’ll talk about when we’ll get into some of these other things that you were talking about, about societal cohesion and democracy and all of those things.

But you bring in some really interesting evidence to bear that I had never actually really thought about before of someone in the early days of America, the level to which people were actually educated before we had the sort of system of common schools that we think of emerging in the mid 19th century. And it has to do with books and pamphlets. I was wondering if you would tell people like this sort of backwards sort of way of determining whether people were able to read or not, which I had never thought of before. I thought it was super interesting.

Neal McCluskey: Yeah, so first thing I’d say, I mean I’m drawing a lot of historians here, so most of this isn’t really my original research, but I think this is part of the history of education that is not talked about. And actually there’s a book that I really like. Bernard Bailin who was a famous historian of colonial America, he only apparently ever sort of wrote once about education. And this was in the sixties and he was actually kind of commissioned by Williamsburg, the people who run Colonial Williamsburg, to write about education in colonial America. And a major part of what he ended up writing was, you got to ignore a lot of the history that you’re hearing about education in America because it was written not by historians but by educationist, public schooling advocates who wanted people to think that there was just basically ignorance until we had public schools.

Now he doesn’t actually go as much into the literacy and things like that, but it’s really an interesting commentary that we’ve actually kind of ignored a lot of the history of American education because it has instead been used as a tool to try and say, okay, we didn’t have literacy, we didn’t have enlightenment until public schools. But there are various people who have written about literacy before public schools. Albert Fishlow, I think was a historian, he was the first person I saw who put a number on it saying by 1840 and so you got to put this in some context, Horace Mann starts his kind of crusade, at least as the Secretary of Education in 1837. So really before there’s any sort of major common schooling, he said, “Look, 90% of White adult Americans were literate.” Now of course white is important because many states had laws that said you cannot provide education to African American.

So they may have also had literacy levels at that high if government weren’t blocking them. But 90% White literacy was a very high level, certainly relative to almost every European country, achieved before there were common schools at least of any widespread common schools. And part of this was that people taught their kids how to read and then the question is, well, why were they teaching how to read? How are they teaching how to read? And you got to sort look at, well, what was the concrete reason to learn how to read? And these things sort of feed on themselves. So you got to go back to until we had the printing press, and I should remember exact years, 1400s, 1500s where it really starts to crank things out. There wasn’t very much to read at all, so of course you didn’t have a lot of people reading, but as you get to the printing press and then you get to the publication of newspapers and pamphlets and then increasingly books.

But still it was these newspapers and pamphlets that were really accessible to people. People have things to read and of course that encourages them to learn how to read and there’s a great benefit to learning how to read. And so when you look at reality, you find out that most people are able to read and they were reading sort of interesting, meaningful things and they were doing it because really only for a very short part of history were these things even accessible to them. And so I think that’s really important. And I should give credit to Lawrence Cremin, wrote this giant three volume history of education in America. And a huge part of it was saying lots of education happen outside of the public school system. So if you really want to get into it, that is a great source to read is American Education, and there are these three volumes. But reading that was eye-opening and it makes sense. People learn to read when there is something to read and then they start getting a lot of value out of it and then more people can read, the more it’s worth publishing things because you can make money. And I think that sort of concrete reality is absolutely necessary to understand.

Mike McShane: So you mentioned Horace Mann there. I want to read an excerpt from your book talking about some ideas of Horace Mann. It says, “This was the message for Mann and many other public schooling advocates. Public schooling was necessary to empower all people to discern good from bad, right from wrong and focus on the betterment of society. Free schools were ‘indispensable to the continuance of a Republican government,’ Mann proclaimed because only they were capable of ‘diffusing widespread intelligence.'” Why was he wrong?

Neal McCluskey: Well, so the first thing is, again, this is important to note because it means his motives weren’t all terrible. So there’s a tendency if you’re for school choice be like Horace Mann was an awful person. There were reasons to be critical of Mann, certainly, but you could understand why this was a concern for people in his era and the sort of many supporters of the idea of sort of government provided common schooling who proceeded in. Benjamin Rush, Pennsylvania, sort of famous for this. People always talk about Thomas Jefferson and others, was this fear that the people would become a mob and they’d be an unenlightened mob and they would be dangerous as a result. And I think many of them looked at the French Revolution at the time and said, “Look, here we are trying to establish a country that’s based on the people in one way or another, being in charge, voting.”

Of course, it took while before everyone could vote, but this was a change of, hey, the people will be in charge, not a monarch or something like that. And they saw a similar impetus in France, but they saw that devolve into mob rule. In the US, you could see the same thing with Shay’s Rebellion and things like that. So you could understand why he thought this. And then Mann was seeing, I just heard recently somebody say, “Well, Mann was really upset because Catholics were coming to Massachusetts.” But that wasn’t it. Mann was troubled in part because he didn’t like Congregationalists who had been Puritans. He didn’t like puritanical rule, which is a problem because you wouldn’t say that the Puritans were a mob. In fact, he disliked that they had a lot of strictures. So is it really about the mob or not? Or is it, I don’t like these people?

So he didn’t like that. But he was also concerned because Massachusetts was seeing the beginning of industrialization. New England was the worst farming part of the United States. It’s cold, it’s kind of rocky, but they have a lot of rivers. So this is where you see industrialization starting. It’s like, oh, I see these people coming in from the hinterlands who had been farmers and they don’t have good hygiene. I don’t think they follow the science like I do. And so they’re just kind of slobs, kind of dangerous, can’t take care of their kids. They’re not me and they’re not like my friends and we need to shape them that way. I think maybe the biggest problem was one that totally underestimated the average person who was managing to live, their kids to grow up. Certainly there were lots of problems. The other problem is it was incredibly paternalistic.

And what’s important to understand is that Horace Mann, while he may have been cutting edge and very well educated for his time, was also, as a lot of people who think they have all the answers, really wrong. So he was most infamous for being a phrenologist, you know that, if I could identify the bumps on your head, I can tell you everything I need to know about your personality and your future and things like that. He actually said in some of his writings, “Parents are so dumb they don’t even understand phrenology.” And you’re like, No, see that’s a problem is that you think, well, anybody who can take care of themselves, they can’t do it if they don’t know phrenology. And so it was an arrogance that lots of people have, that we all probably have, but especially if you’re an elite that you think you have the answers and you don’t. And then the other big part of that is it turns out if you want to have common schools, everybody has to kind of agree on what they teach.

And what he found early on was actually a lot of other people in Massachusetts, a lot of Protestants disagreed with what some thought were going to become Unitarian schools, of course, Mann was a Unitarian. It becomes a much bigger issue when Catholics arrive because their Bible’s a little different. A lot of the idea of what’s a good American was you were Protestant, which means you weren’t Catholic. And so there was a lot of sort of Catholic bashing in schools, but he wasn’t prepared to deal with diversity. And that is a huge problem that plagues public schooling really from the beginning.

But I think the arrogance part is also important, understanding that if you put just one group of people in charge of educating everyone else, if you have something wrong in their thinking, you magnify it. You don’t have that crucial balance of other ideas that compete with it. That may be better. When that’s gone, then maybe instead of curing diseases or something with vaccinations, we’re all going to still be measuring everybody’s head bump to see how do we get rid of COVID? Well, we’ll just mash down this part of their skull.

Mike McShane: I like to think you have a brilliant person’s bump, I don’t know if I have the sort of the bit sticking out that points to criminality or I’m not exactly sure. I maybe need to have someone read my head at one of these points. But another point that you talked about in the book, looking at these broader ideas of what the role schools play in society. If we think about Horace Mann talking about the common school movement, this belief that we’re going to bring diverse people together. America is an increasingly diverse country. We need them to all come into one place so that they can meet each other. They become friends with one another.

Here’s what you write later on in the book, “How do diverse people eventually mesh? Here’s how they do not, by force. Government efforts to assimilate people which have largely been the responsibility of public schools have been contentious, insulting, and ultimately impotent or even counterproductive, building resentments instead of bridges. As Francis Fukuyama has put it, ‘social capital is like a ratchet that is more easily turned in one direction than another. It can be dissipated by the actions of government much more readily than those governments can build it up again.’ Government can easily force zero sum contest, but is ill-equipped to build fraternal feelings.”

Now this strikes me as kind of the crux of the book. Now some folks say that the only way to bring people together is sort by the force of government. They say segregation only ended when the government came in and frankly in this case it was the federal government goes to Mississippi, goes to Alabama, goes to Arkansas and says, “We’re sending in the National Guard, James Meredith needs to go to Ole Miss. Orval Faubus, we’re removing you from the doors of the courthouse.” But you seem to disagree with this idea of government force as the way to ultimately mix people together in a way that builds fraternal feelings. Could you kind of explain that argument?

Neal McCluskey: Yeah, so part of it is sort of logic and another, actually, I think much bigger part is the evidence. So I get the logic on one level. I called it the Lego Theory of Social Cohesion or something that if you just push people together, they’ll stay together. And that was kind of the idea of public schooling to begin with. Although, the first goal of unity was actually we’re going to form people to all be the same. Then you get to Dewey, who actually, John Dewey, changes a bit and says, “Look, this idea that we just put everyone on a school and we make them the same cog is dehumanizing. What we should do is bring everybody together, diverse kids, and then have them work on things that are of mutual interest.” He was actually on to something, but the sort of superficial thinking is, well, we just push everyone together and that’s how they learn to get along.

There’s also a democracy aspect to this. Some writers, Diane Ravitch is probably the most known for this, is that, well, if you force diverse people into one school system, they learn to get along by going to school board meetings and arguing and then hatching out compromises. I don’t think that makes a lot of sense. I think what you end up doing is, if diverse people have to support one system of schools, you inherently make them enemies. If they disagree, it becomes a contest. I must defeat my neighbor to get what I want. This has been made very clear in many school districts in just the last couple of years, COVID with going in person or not in person, masking. That became very heated in a lot of places because for many people that was life or death or at least they felt it was life or death.

And they said, you guys just kind of hash it out and that’s when you saw these school board meetings, people pounding on cars and screaming and stuff like that. That’s probably the worst case of it. But CRT, again, gender ideology, all these other things we debate about, they’re all examples of, we’ve actually forced fellow Americans and often neighbors to become enemies because they have to beat each other in a political game to get what they want. So I think that that’s inherently divisive. And then when you look at the evidence, even when we’ve achieved sort of physical integration in a school, this is probably most notable in the south because the south relative to other regions probably has the most physical integration in their schools. But what we’ve seen of research of social distance, not the kind we got to know about COVID, but how we feel about people in other groups or how we associate with them.

You have the least sort of mixing and creating a bridges across group differences in the south of any other region according to research on, are these fiscal integrations actually bringing people together? You see probably a more broad demonstration of this with white flight where it wasn’t just because of schools. In fact, some evidence suggests white flight would’ve happened regardless of schools, but it’s because people also have an inclination to associate with people a lot like themselves. And so if there’s no other reason to be together with other people than somebody’s trying to force you to, you try and lead. What I think makes more sense is that you need something that can create a bridge where your identity is no longer just your race. And in fact, when we tried to force people together by race, I think we actually sort of magnified race as what separates people.

Because the idea was if you are African American, we’re going to put you here because you are African American and if you are White, you will be in that school with African Americans because you are white, or we will move you because you’re white because you’re in African American school. Though the way desegregation worked a lot more was we forced African Americans to go to White schools and have White teachers and White principals. But I think it’s pretty clear that trying to force people together really is more likely to make them feel like enemies in a contest than give them sort of kindred feelings that we’re all sort of together and the same.

Mike McShane: So, how do we build those kindred feelings in education? What do you think some of the solutions might be?

Neal McCluskey: Right, so the first thing I’d say is, I have to say this all the time for every reform now, it’s not a panacea. So the fact that people tend to want to associate with people like themselves, which by the way isn’t bad, it’s just kind of natural. You feel more comfortable when people speak your language, eat the same food, have the same sort of culture, but because of this natural inclination, nothing we do in education is going to magically bring everyone together. But I think the first thing we have to do is end force where people feel like I have to control the other folks, the other groups so I can get what I want, otherwise they will force something on me. We shouldn’t be in this camp where people are always our enemies in the zero sum game, but that’s what public schooling, what education policy is when you have one system for diverse people.

So I think that the way, and it’s counterintuitive, but the way in education to start to build this sort of sustainable bridging among different groups of people is actually through school choice. Part of that is, well, there’s social psychology that supports this. Jonathan Haidt talks about this idea of you want to create crosscutting identities, and the way you create crosscutting identities is not to discuss your differences but your commonalities. And it talks about in schools, not mainly through school choice, but that means you put people of different groups into the same sort of teams. You may make a house, we’re all part of Slytherin or whatever. And I have to admit, I haven’t read Harry Potter, so I say that without any real knowledge.

Mike McShane: Makes two of us, don’t feel bad.

Neal McCluskey: We’re the only two in the world, I think. But anyway, so you put them in the same house or something like that. But public schools can only produce so much unity because there are things they can’t do. They can’t be religious. It’s actually very hard to teach about any sort of character. It’s hard to have an emphasis on arts or something like that. Whereas private schools have much more autonomy to say, this is an arts based school and we’re all artists here, or this is a Baptist school and we’re all Baptists here. And that sets the conditions where people may be from a different race, or if it’s the art school, maybe people from a different religion.

The emphasis is not on what’s different about them, it’s on what they all want together. It may be we all want to be artists or we all want to be good Baptists or in Catholic schools, they often say, “We all want to help each other get to heaven.” That’s a pretty good goal for everybody. And so I think the stuff of lasting unity comes through freedom, even though that’s counterintuitive to a lot of people.

Mike McShane: Well, Neal, it was great having you on the podcast today. As a reminder to everyone, Neal’s book is The Fractured Schoolhouse: Reexamining Education for a Free, Equal and Harmonious Society.

Neal McCluskey: Thank you.

Mike McShane: It’s always great talking to Neal. You know what I said at the beginning? I meant Neal is your classic kind of happy warrior. It’s funny to know that maybe behind the scenes things actually enrage him, but public facing, he gets himself under control. To put that out there, I actually find that comforting to know that he is not just a sort of constant sea of magnanimity, that he is human like the rest of us, but he just knows how to control himself. A lesson that all of us could take. Again, check out his book, it’s called “The Fractured Schoolhouse: Reexamining Education for Free, Equal and Harmonious Society.” I really enjoyed it. I found it really thought provoking. There’s lots of interesting history. There’s stuff in there that I had not thought about before that I didn’t know, so I really enjoyed it. I think you would too.

As always, I’m always looking for guests for this podcast, so drop me an email, hit me up on Twitter. Let me know if you or someone you know is doing something interesting in education or you’ve written something interesting and thought provoking that would lead to a good conversation. Please also subscribe to this podcast. You can do it on any of your podcasting platforms. Give us a nice rating too. I’d love if you subscribed, I would really, really make me happy if you also gave us a high rating on that because it helps more people understand that this podcast is out there and that they can listen to it. I want to thank also as always, Jacob Vinson, our wonderful podcast producer who edits all this stuff together, makes me sound more coherent than I actually am, and always check out all the stuff that EdChoice has.

Www.edchoice.org. Check out our social media feeds, all the cool stuff that we’re putting out. We have some new polling that’s coming out. Our annual Schooling in America Poll came out recently. We look back at 10 years of data on public opinion on education. It’s super interesting. Our trackers coming out every month. We’re going to have cool stuff. There’s all sorts of legal developments that are happening. So many interesting things happening in the world of school choice. www.edchoice.org is the place to find out about it. It’s great talking with you all and I look forward to talking to you on another edition of EdChoice Chats.