Corey DeAngelis: The School Choice Wave Sweeping America

The Parent Revolution author on lockdowns, teachers unions, and voter rage.

Note: Scroll down to start listening immediately to my new Reason Interview with school choice activist Corey DeAngelis, author of The Parent Revolution: Rescuing Your Kids from the Radicals Ruining Our Schools.

Here’s a quick thought experiment: How radically different would the world be if the mandatory, universal K-12 schooling we all attended (or still attend—hello young readers!) wasn’t widely assumed to be some sort of hellscape?

From Catcher in the Rye to Frank Portman’s recent classic King Dork to Heathers and Mean Girls to Pink Floyd’s The Wall and Alice Cooper’s School’s Out, our popular representations of education have long declared that being forced to attend grammar and high school is to be remanded to a minimum-security prison at best. Even works that make school fantastically exciting—think of the Harry Potter books and Buffy The Vampire Slayer—figure school as a primal scene of alienation, anger, and general awfulness. For mostly good reasons, schools, whether public or private, exist in our collective memory as fear factories and crucibles of conformity rather than as places where kids flourish and start to learn about the world and how they may engage it and become themselves as individuals. Here’s a fun, five-minute fun video I made with my Reason colleague Justin Zuckerman about “Why Schools Suck in Movies and Real Life”:

Over the long haul, I did well at school, academically, athletically, and socially, but on any given day, I felt totally isolated and shunned, stupid and out of step, mocked and ridiculed, and a little bit worried that I would be physically bullied or humiliated in the classroom by teachers or smarty-pants students. In the best moments, I felt physically secure and part of a vibrant community of friends and teachers who kind of cared about each other. But most of the time, going to school sucked and was filled with fear of the literal and figurative stochastic violence we talk about these days in politics.

I should add that I went to low-rent, parochial Catholic schools in central New Jersey (St. Mary School and Mater Dei in Middletown), where the physical threats were probably a little lower than in the surrounding public schools, but the academic lassitude was much, much higher. My public school friends and I would swap stories and generally agreed there were more fights in the public schools but the top-level academics were far better there, too. Even in the advanced classes at Mater Dei, nobody seemed really interested in academic excellence, at least when I was attending. Because they were inexpensive and gave out a lot of scholarships, my grammar school and high school (which shut down a few years ago due to lack of students) was diverse in class terms if not so much in other ways that would be touted today. We all shared the same religion and tended to Irish, Italian, Polish, or some mix of the same, with recent roots in America. It was common to have grandparents who didn’t speak English at all, which is itself a powerful and underappreciated form of diversity. Only about 40 percent of my high school graduating class (1981) immediately went on to some form of college, compared to about 54 percent of high school grads overall that year.

As a parent of two adult sons who were mostly educated at public schools in Oxford, Ohio—home to Miami University—I saw education from a different perspective that was no less frustrating. The Talawanda School District serves not just a college town but a wide-ranging geographic and demographic area that included farm kids, a couple of trailer parks, and various sorts of upper-income people living in the countryside outside of Cincinnati. The district generally boasts good aggregate scores and the like, partly because so much of the student body was made up of faculty kids. “In most studies, parental education has been identified as the single strongest correlate of children’s success in school, the number of years they attend school, and their success later in life,” notes Education Next. Talawanda wasn’t terrible but it also didn’t set the world on fire and it often seemed uninterested in the sort of innovation, personalization, and engagement one wants to see in their kids’ schools. Most important, it didn’t seem to go out of its way to help kids from less-privileged backgrounds. Education can really help kids from lesser means gain more opportunity and options in life—and it’s a shame when schools don’t work overtime to deliver on that score.

But you don’t need to be a Marxist or a public-choice-economics libertarian to recognize that the function of schooling is mostly to replicate the status quo and existing order rather than develop individuals who might challenge it. Apart from a small private school serving K-8 grades, there were no options for 10 miles or more in any direction. That might have been the single-biggest source of frustration, to be honest—an absolute lack of choice.

Which brings me to today’s The Reason Interview, where the guest is school choice activist Corey DeAngelis, whose provocative new book is The Parent Revolution: Rescuing Your Kids from the Radicals Ruining Our Schools. A senior fellow at the American Federation for Children and a former education policy analyst at the Reason Foundation (the nonprofit that publishes Reason magazine), Corey has been called "the most effective school choice advocate since Milton Friedman."

His new book explains why K-12 education failed so badly before and during the COVID pandemic and how to fix it once and for all by making the needs of parents and students the central concern of schooling. For Corey and others, the problem is ultimately one of standardization and centralization of money, curricula, and power. You route around that, he argues, by giving parents and kids the ability to buy the education they want.

Back in the 1960s, busting up the factory model of education was mostly a left-wing project, part of a countercultural push to bring human scale to everything (take a minute to listen to Mario Savio’s denunciation of “the machine” that helped to kickstart the Free Speech Movement—it’s all about destroying bureaucracy and setting people free to pursue individualism). Actors like Orson Bean, who wrote a paean to Wilhelm Reich’s orgonic theories of sexual liberation, ran a school in downtown Manhattan based on the principles of A.S. Neill’s Summerhill School, which along with Montessori schools, were embraced by hippies, dropouts, and early home-schoolers (home-schooling, by the way, only became legal in all 50 states in 1992).

These days, school choice mostly codes right-wing, conservative, and Republican. The Duke historian Nancy Maclean made a splash a few years ago with her ill-informed book Democracy in Chains, which argued that the school choice movement was, is, and always will be a segregationist ploy (read a critique here). Such a liberal/progressive attitude purposefully ignores the massive and growing support for school choice among African Americans and Hispanics, who support it at higher levels that whites. As the American Federation of Children, a pro-choice group notes:

Changes since April 2020 include the following:

Overall support: 64% -> 71% (+7 pp)

Political Parties:
Democratic support: 59% -> 66% (+7 pp)
Republican support: 75% -> 80% (+5 pp)
Independent support: 60% -> 69% (+9 pp)

Race & Ethnicity: 
Hispanic: 63% -> 71% (+8 pp)
White: 64% -> 71% (+7 pp)
Black: 68% -> 73% (+5 pp)
Asian: 56% -> 70% (+14 pp)

Yet as Corey makes clear, there is no question that the GOP is currently the party of school choice, if only because it is an amazingly popular issue among voters and parents who are fed up with ever-increasing amounts of tax dollars going to schools that seem unresponsive if not actively hostile to what parents and students want or need.

I’m uncomfortable with the reactionary and anti-intellectual elements in much of the school reform movement—especially when such people call for a uniform curriculum at the local, state, or national level. Calls to ban particular books or discussions of particular parts of our history are typically done for culture-war purposes and partisan political gains, not out of a sense of what is best for kids. More to the point, state-wide bans on this or that topic or method of teaching strike me as being made at the wrong level. The age of one-size-fits-all anything is over! Corey works mostly with Republicans and conservatives to expand and increase choice programs but he notes that a commitment to real educational freedom means allowing schools teaching critical race theory every bit as much as Christian theology.

He’s right. Let a thousand flowers bloom when it comes to education by giving parents, educators, and students the ability to find one another and have the best experiences possible. I look forward to a world in which movies and novels and songs about how shitty school was are completely unintelligible to us, relics of an unthinkably backward past.

Here is a YouTube link to the video version of my talk with Corey. Below that are links to the Spotify and Apple podcast versions. Go here to watch/subscribe at Reason.

Previous appearances:

• "Watch Elizabeth Warren Lie About Her Son's Private School Education," by Nick Gillespie and John Osterhoudt. January 29, 2020

• "Corey DeAngelis: COVID-19 Is Super-Spreading School Choice," by Nick Gillespie. October 7, 2020

• "Thanks to Teachers Unions, Families are Fleeing Traditional Public Schools," by Nick Gillespie and Corey DeAngelis. January 29, 2021

• "Corey DeAngelis: 2021 Was 'the Year of School Choice,' But 2022 Will Be Even Better," by Nick Gillespie. January 26, 2022

• "Corey DeAngelis: How COVID Has Changed the Face of Education Forever," by Nick Gillespie. September 26, 2022

• "Why Do Public Schools Suck and What Should We Do About Them? Live With Corey DeAngelis and Connor Boyack," by Nick Gillespie. April 19, 2023

Today's Sponsors:

• The Dispatch: Is Donald Trump really going to jail? Does Joe Biden really have what it takes for a second term? Do these questions even matter in the 2024 election? Get past the bluster and get back to the facts by joining The Dispatch.

• New York City premiere of Reason's Backpage documentary and panel discussion, Tuesday, July 23. Was the federal prosecution of the online classified ad site Backpage.com a win for opponents of sex trafficking or a loss for First Amendment rights? View a new documentary by Elizabeth Nolan Brown and Paul Detrick, and participate in a panel with Brown and Old Pros' Kaytlin Bailey about the case moderated by Nick Gillespie. Tickets are $10 and include beer, wine, soft drinks, and a light buffet. Seats are limited. Details here.