Grand Canyon Times

Phoenix resident Jason Bedrick, a research fellow in the Center for Education Policy at The Heritage Foundation, joined the Grand Canyon Times Podcast to discuss school choice and parents rights in education in Arizona. 

Jason’s work focuses on policies that promote education freedom and choice, religious liberty, classical education, and restoring the primary role of families in education. Jason is a former state legislator from New Hampshire and the co-editor and co-author of two books on education policy. For the last decade he has resided in Phoenix with his wife and five children.

Available on: Apple Podcasts and Spotify

• Introduction:
  • Jason Bedrick is introduced as a research fellow in the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation. His work revolves around promoting education freedom, religious liberty, classical education, and emphasizing the primary role of families in education.
  • Jason has co-authored two books on education and was a former New Hampshire state legislator.

• Relocation to Arizona:
  • Jason moved to Arizona about 10 years ago, primarily because of his wife's family being from there and Arizona's pioneering stance on education choice.

• Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESA):
  • Jason explains that ESAs, known in Arizona as "empowerment scholarship accounts," allow families to receive the state portion of education funding. This funding can be used for various education expenses like private school tuition, tutoring, textbooks, homeschool curricula, and more.
  • ESAs differ from college savings accounts as they allow families to customize K-12 education for their children.

• School Choice:
  • Jason emphasizes the shift from school choice to education choice, highlighting the flexibility ESAs provide to families in choosing diverse learning environments for their children.

• Importance of School Choice:
  • Jason shares his personal experience, emphasizing the importance of religious education for his children and how states like Arizona empower families to make education decisions.

• Comparison with Texas:
  • Jason contrasts Arizona's success with school choice to Texas's slower adoption of similar policies. He mentions the challenges faced in rural areas and the misconceptions about school choice.

• Testing and Accountability:
  • Jason discusses the differences in testing between public schools and those in the private sector. He emphasizes a bottom-up approach to accountability in the private sector, where schools design their curriculum based on students' best interests and then choose tests that align with that curriculum.

• “Gender” and School Policies:
  • Jason discusses two bills vetoed by Gov. Katie Hobbs (D-Ariz.) related to so-called “gender” issues in schools: the "Given Name Act" and the "Arizona Accommodations for All Children Act." The former would require schools to address students by their given names or common nicknames, while the latter would provide separate accommodations for cross-dressing children.

• Future Prospects for School Choice:
  • Jason believes that these bills might be reintroduced in the future, but their success might depend on a change in leadership.

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Full, unedited transcript of podcast episode -- The Heritage Foundation's Jason Bedrick on the Grand Canyon Times Podcast (September 27, 2023):

[00:00:00] Leyla Gulen: Welcome to the Grand Canyon Times podcast. I'm your host, Layla Gulen. In this episode, we welcome our guest, Jason Bedrick. Jason is a research fellow in the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation. His focus centers on policies that promote education freedom, religious liberty, classical education, and restoring the primary role of families in education.

[00:00:25] Jason is a former New Hampshire state legislator and the co editor and co author of two books on education. Jason, welcome. Thank 

[00:00:34] Jason Bedrick: you so much for 

[00:00:34] Leyla Gulen: having me. So you relocated to Arizona with your family about 10 years ago. Why did you decide to leave the East Coast and settle in Phoenix? Uh, there were a 

[00:00:42] Jason Bedrick: number of factors.

[00:00:43] Number one, my wife's family is from here. So I think that was the deciding factor. But one of the things that really enticed us about living in Arizona is that Arizona, for a long time, has been the pioneer in education choice, so which is to say, [00:01:00] empowering families to choose the learning environments that align with their values and work best for their children.

[00:01:04] Leyla Gulen: Let's talk a bit more about that. We wanted to talk about something called ESA and primary education first. Can you explain to our audience what ESA stands for and what it is? And what it's designed to do 

[00:01:16] Jason Bedrick: for ESA usually refers to education savings accounts or in Arizona. They're called empowerment scholarship accounts.

[00:01:22] But essentially what it means is that families receive the state portion of education funding, right? There's federal funding, there's state funding, and there's local. They tap into the state portion. And they get it in the form of a restricted use bank account that they can then use to pay for a wide variety of education expenses, things like private school tuition, tutoring, textbooks, homeschool, curricula, online learning, special needs therapy, and more, and they can roll over unused funds from year schools to save for later.

[00:01:57] So this isn't like college savings accounts. [00:02:00] These are accounts that allow families of children who are in K 12 to really customize their children's education. 

[00:02:07] Leyla Gulen: And how does this play into school choice? Does it play into school 

[00:02:10] Jason Bedrick: choice? Oh, yeah. I mean, certainly it's, it's really moving from school choice to education choice.

[00:02:15] So, I mean, the classic form of school choice would be the private school voucher. A voucher is a coupon that you can redeem in one place at one time. The ESA recognizes that education can take place in a lot more places than just a traditional school. I think we got a great education in that inadvertently due to the pandemic and the public school closures.

[00:02:39] Families were scrambling to find all sorts of different learning arrangements, pandemic pods, micro schools, traditional private schools. Some families are doing what's called hybrid homeschooling. Part of the time learning alone, learning at home, part of the time learning with a group of other students, sometimes in a traditional school environment.

[00:02:58] So there's all different ways [00:03:00] that students can learn and all different places where students can learn. The ESA recognizes that and really gives families the freedom and flexibility to customize their child's education. And 

[00:03:09] Leyla Gulen: before we get into more details on ESA, I'm just curious, you said that school choice was a big factor in your decision to move your family to Phoenix.

[00:03:18] So maybe you could tell our audience a little bit more about why school choice was so important to you. You have five children. Is that right? That's 

[00:03:25] Jason Bedrick: right. We have five children who are currently school age, all in a private school. We are traditional observant Jews. And for us, it's very important that our children are educated in an environment that has an immersive.

[00:03:39] Religious experience where, you know, in every class, the Torah is guiding how they learn and what they learn, uh, even in math, let's say, they should understand that the orderliness we see in the universe is sort of like the hand of God. They should see the hand of God in the order of the universe, whether it's the natural sciences, math, etc.

[00:03:58] So for us, it was very important [00:04:00] that our children be in that kind of environment and states like Arizona, Florida, Indiana, and there are a number of others now that have followed Arizona's lead, really empower families to make those decisions for their children. And 

[00:04:14] Leyla Gulen: Arizona being a border state along with Texas, you recently wrote an article about Texas education and kind of getting on board with this philosophy.

[00:04:23] So, so where are we now with 

[00:04:24] Jason Bedrick: that? Yeah, Texas has been a real laggard in a sense, especially in the last two years, we've seen a lot of states have been moving in this direction. The experience of COVID, school shutdowns, zoom school, the parents waking up to all sorts of nonsense that's going on in a lot of the public schools these days.

[00:04:43] Families were saying, you know what, it's time that we have more options. That one size does not fit all, one size at best fits few. And so a lot of states, more than a dozen in the last two years, have embraced some form of education choice policy. Texas [00:05:00] unfortunately has not. So there was a real effort this year.

[00:05:02] Governor Abbott was strongly pushing for it. The state Senate passed an ESA that was very similar to Arizona's, but ran into trouble in the state house. And so that has been deferred. Texas finished their, uh, the first part of their legislative session earlier this year, that they were going to be called back into a special session this fall.

[00:05:25] So we are still hopeful that they're going to make some progress, which I mean, it's really important. One of the things that we hear over and over in Texas and around the country is that school choice is going to destroy rural education because they say rural schools are already so small and if students leave, then the whole system is going to fall apart.

[00:05:44] Well, if you look at the National Assessment of Education Progress, they are already falling way behind in rural Texas. Students who are currently in 8th grade on the most recent NAEP, that's the, it's considered the nation's report card, [00:06:00] they are performing at the same level as 6th grade students.

[00:06:04] Fifteen years ago, or just to say that the eighth grade students today are two grade levels behind where they should be. Meanwhile, in Arizona, I mean, Arizona has the most robust education choice environment in the country. If the critics were right, then Arizona's rural public schools should be a wasteland.

[00:06:22] But no, as a matter of fact, Arizona's rural districts have been gaining on the NAEP. Some of the fastest improving schools in the country have been in Arizona's rural areas. So even after the pandemic, Arizona was in their rural schools were ahead of where they were 15 years ago. So they should take a page out of Arizona's book and pass education choice so that those students in rural areas can benefit just the way they have in Arizona.

[00:06:52] Leyla Gulen: Where's the resistance coming from? Why should legislators or anybody who has a stake in this resist that idea if it has already been [00:07:00] proven to be beneficial and to actually show results that are in a positive trajectory? 

[00:07:06] Jason Bedrick: It's the defenders of the status quo. And often in rural areas, the public school system is the single largest employer.

[00:07:12] The teachers unions are strong and they play in Republican primaries. So they'll support if you're looking at a blue state or a purple state. They tend to get in bed with the Democratic Party in a red state. They're not dumb. They're not going to just detach themselves to a rump party. They're going to play in the Republican primaries.

[00:07:30] They're going to support candidates who are down the line conservative on issues like abortion or immigration or taxes or guns. But on this issue, they're going to be, they're looking for somebody who is in favor of the traditional system and against any alternatives to that system. So that's where I think a lot of the resistance has been coming from.

[00:07:49] But we've seen that there is a gap between where the politicians are and where the voters are. I mean, even in Texas, last year in the Republican [00:08:00] primary, they have propositions in Texas. They're really more like resolutions, but proposition nine. Asked voters if they supported school choice or not, and explained what that was.

[00:08:10] Almost 90 percent of Republican primary voters supported the resolution saying that they wanted school choice and some of the highest levels of support, including 92, 93, 96%. Support came in in the 10 most rural districts in Arizona. Sorry in Texas. So Texas families, even in rural areas, recognize that they need more options than just the local school.

[00:08:36] They want to do hybrid home. They want to do hybrid homeschooling. They want to do micro schooling. They want to have more distance learning options. And when they want to Schools are faced with that kind of competition. They need to improve. It's a very strong incentive for improvement, which is why we've seen when they are exposed to choice and competition, the public school systems improve.

[00:08:56] You've 

[00:08:56] Leyla Gulen: done a lot of study and written two books. You've authored, you've co [00:09:00] authored, and you've contributed to a lot of articles on this subject. Now, I'm curious if your study has extended to other states that maybe have not adopted the school choice philosophy as much as Arizona has. And what their graduation rate looks like as compared to Arizona, seeking higher education, getting into competitive colleges, how does, is there any state that stands out to you in particular that seems to be kind of along that line?

[00:09:29] status quo path that has been doing okay, or is everybody just kind of falling behind if they don't get on kind of the Arizona school choice train? 

[00:09:39] Jason Bedrick: Yeah, so there are a number of different factors. School choice is just one of many factors. So it's hard to make state versus state comparisons and then say that this particular thing is the cause.

[00:09:49] We can isolate the effects of school choice. There have been more than Two dozen studies looking at the effects of school choice on public schools, and almost [00:10:00] all of them find a statistically significant positive effect on public school performance. You can also isolate the effects of the program on individual students, and the way they do that is through what's called a random assignment, uh, trial, very similar to say, medical trials, where you take a, a group of people randomly divide them into two.

[00:10:22] You give one of them the treatment, one of them the placebo, and then you compare the outcomes between these two groups. So what you can do is take a large group of people, or if they pass a school choice policy in a state, but they have a limited number of vouchers, let's say, you can randomly assign who gets the voucher and who doesn't, and then measure differences in outcomes between these two groups.

[00:10:43] So you're looking at things like performance on tests, you're looking at things like graduation rates, college matriculation rates. And a number of other factors and overwhelmingly the studies find positive effects. There are some that find no effect. There are a few that find [00:11:00] negative effects, particularly in Louisiana, which is probably the worst designed program in the country.

[00:11:04] Unlike Arizona's, it's really heavily regulated. Arizona has a much more free market approach. Uh, and those programs, I think that take the more free market approach than the ones that have demonstrated superior outcomes. But harder to do a state versus state comparison than it is to do a look at a particular policy and look at the students who are receiving the benefit of school choice versus those who are not.

[00:11:28] And you 

[00:11:28] Leyla Gulen: say that people who are, who dissent from the idea to get on board with the whole ESA program and school choice program. Is there a question of cost there? Are ESAs more expensive and burdensome on states, or is it kind of even, does it just kind of come out even at the end of the day? 

[00:11:50] Jason Bedrick: Yeah, I mean, certainly it depends on how the programs are designed, but all of the programs that have been designed thus far, that have been enacted thus far, have been designed to save [00:12:00] money.

[00:12:00] So they're providing scholarships that are less, usually considerably less. Then the state is spending per pupil here in Arizona. Governor Hobbs has been claiming that the ESA program because a lot more students are signing up for the program than had been anticipated. She is claiming that it is going to bankrupt the program.

[00:12:23] She's been saying all sorts of wild figures that it's going to be half a billion dollars. And that sounds like a lot of money that it's going to be half a billion dollars. So she, she also said that 53 percent of all new K 12 education spending in the next year's budget is going to be going to 8 percent of Arizona students who are accepting the ESA on this all sounds terrible, but what you have to do is take a step back and look at what's really going on.

[00:12:47] Total spending. On the ESA students, particularly we're looking at the ones who Arizona originally enacted the program only for students with special needs. They expanded it a few times and last year they expanded [00:13:00] it to all students. So if you look at the expansion for all students, just 2 percent of Arizona's Total K 12 spending is going toward those students, and yet it's about 8 percent of the students in the state.

[00:13:18] Yes, they are going to be getting about 350 million, but that's compared to 15 billion, with a B, that's spent on the public school students each year. And actually, the latest numbers from the Joint Legislative Budget Committee show that more than 60 percent of the new K 12 funding Is going to be going to public school students, even though the public schools are, they have got flat and declining enrollment.

[00:13:45] All of the growth has essentially been in the private sector and in the charter sector, which is to say 60 percent of new funding is going to the sector that has 0 percent growth and the sector that has 100 percent of all the new growth is only [00:14:00] getting 40 percent of the new funding. So, and that's just looking, if you're only looking at the cost side, but the reality is every time a student switches out of the public system to accept an ESA, they are producing savings for the state.

[00:14:15] And a new report by the Common Sense Institute finds that between the charter schools, the ESA students, they're producing a savings of about 640 million. So, in fact, it's an incredible cost savings for the state. 

[00:14:32] Leyla Gulen: Oh, that's interesting. And let's talk about testing. So, so at the end of the day, all students need to test at a certain standard, at a certain level.

[00:14:41] So students that are involved and taking part in school choice and ESAs, as opposed to the traditional public school route, Where are we coming out in the test.

[00:14:59] Jason Bedrick: [00:15:00] The public school has their form of accountability and they've decided that the way to do that is with the state test and there's a curriculum that public schools adopt is aligned toward the state test. But in the private sector, we don't want to have a system where there's one test. And everybody has to bend their curriculum to that test.

[00:15:20] Take, for example, what had happened in California a number of years ago when they decided to adopt Common Core. And you had a lot of schools that had been teaching algebra in eighth grade, and then Common Core wasn't testing until ninth grade. And so either you're going to have students that Haven't seen the material for a year and so they're not going to do as well as the students who it's fresh in their minds or you're going to bend your curriculum to meet the test and teach to the test.

[00:15:49] We didn't want to see that in Arizona and in other states with school choice. So the state doesn't require a test. That said, the vast majority of private schools on their own choose from a [00:16:00] wide variety of nationally norm reference tests, the SAT or the Iowa 10. And there's a number of different tests that they can take.

[00:16:07] And what schools are doing instead is they're designing their curriculum based on what they think is in the best interest of students and the order and subject matter that they think is best. And then they're choosing the tests that best align with what they're doing. So it's it's a really bottom up accountability instead of top down accountability.

[00:16:29] Leyla Gulen: Well, that's interesting that you had mentioned Governor Hobbs a few minutes ago now that she recently vetoed bills that she said were anti LGBTQ. What did these bills do? Yes, so 

[00:16:40] Jason Bedrick: there were two bills that she vetoed, SB 1001 and SB 1040, also known as the Given Name Act and the Arizona Accommodations for All Children Act.

[00:16:50] The Given Name Act is pretty simple. It says that a school, no school staff or no teacher, no one at the school can call a child by [00:17:00] any other name besides their given name or common nicknames. So, if a student's name is Jonathan, the teachers can call him John or Johnny. They can't call them Jennifer, right?

[00:17:11] And that they can't call them by any pronouns other than those that align with their sex that's on their birth certificate. So, unless they have written permission from the parents. And the reason that this was so important is that there are more than 10 million students nationwide in 17, 000 public schools.

[00:17:35] That have policies that openly state that the district personnel can or should keep a student's transgender status hidden from parents. So these schools are teaching these kids, they're filling their heads with all sorts of ideas about a spectrum of genders and gender fluidity and so on and so forth.

[00:17:53] And we're seeing a sort of social contagion where more and more children are starting to identify this way, [00:18:00] but without their parents input. And this can be really dangerous because... What it can lead to, that first step is what's called social transition, which is where you dress differently, you go by a different name.

[00:18:12] But social transition can then lead to chemical transition, where students are taking puberty blockers, cross sex hormones, and things like that, and then that can lead to surgical transition. And that basically makes somebody a lifelong patient. It's removing healthy breasts and healthy genitalia. And replacing them with something else that is essentially non functioning.

[00:18:35] And even here in Arizona, Tucson Unified and Mesa Public Schools, two of the largest school systems, have policies that keep parents in the dark about their children, if their children are struggling with gender identity issues. So it's really important for children's... Physical, mental, and emotional health that their parents be kept in the loop about these sorts of decisions.

[00:18:58] I mean, you wouldn't [00:19:00] allow a school district to give a child a Tylenol without express consent from the parents. When it comes to issues like this, parents need to be involved at the beginning, middle, and end of that process. That's what the Given Name Act... Would have done, but Governor Hobbs decided that she would put this radical gender ideology ahead of the best interest of students and she vetoed it.

[00:19:24] The second one is the Arizona Accommodations for All Children Act. It recognizes that there are children who are struggling with gender identity issues. In most cases, if you take what's called the wait and see approach, these what's called gender dysphoria issues resolve on their own. But in the meantime, you have students who, let's say, are biological male who feels like a female or a biological female feels like a male.

[00:19:52] They don't want to be in a locker room. That differs from how they feel. And so this [00:20:00] this law said that you have to accommodate those students with Separate accommodations, right? So you're not going to put a biological male in the girl's locker room Nor are you going to put a biological female in the boy's locker room They will have their own space that respects their dignity and their privacy But without violating the dignity and privacy of other students.

[00:20:19] And this is really important because we've seen, especially in the instance of a girl's locker room, girls are changing and then all of a sudden there's a male with male genitalia looking at them, changing their clothes in front of them. There have been all sorts of reports about this sort of behavior around the country.

[00:20:34] And also, you know, people like to talk about just bathrooms. Bathrooms, you're in your own stall. Locker rooms, you generally are not. Sometimes they're showering together. You also, there's the issue of overnight accommodations, having separate spaces. So, what this was trying to do is balance the interest of all students, respect the dignity and privacy and modesty of all students, and again, Governor Hobbs puts this [00:21:00] radical gender ideology that says there's an infinite variety of different genders and that gender is something that essentially anybody can choose and everybody else has to go along with it.

[00:21:11] She puts that ahead of the

[00:21:15] Safety and dignity of all students by vetoing the Arizona Accommodations for All Children Act. 

[00:21:20] Leyla Gulen: Why do you think she's bending towards this ideology? And is there going to be another crack at trying to get these bills passed in the future? 

[00:21:27] Jason Bedrick: I'm sure they're going to try passing these laws again, but they probably won't have much success until Governor Hobbs has been replaced.

[00:21:37] As to why she's doing it, that's a good question for her. I think it's just clear that whether She's an ideologue herself or whether she's bending to where the activists are in her party. On the left right now, this is one of the driving forces. It's the reason that you're seeing classrooms that, that have rainbow flags and [00:22:00] gender unicorns.

[00:22:01] And at the earliest ages, they are teaching children that gender is not binary, that it's a spectrum. And I think things are only going to get worse before they get better. But parents are starting to wake up to this sort of thing right now. And they're demanding action. They're demanding that states pass things like the Give a Name Act and the Arizona Accommodations for All Children Act.

[00:22:23] And they're also demanding school choice. If, if they see that their assigned school is going in a direction that they don't want, and they are producing an environment that It's indoctrinating kids and ideas that they don't want their own children to be in. They want to have the ability to take their children out and send them somewhere else and have their tax dollars follow.

[00:22:44] Leyla Gulen: Jason, let me ask you this question. What if. You did not have a choice, and your children were having to attend these schools and having to adapt or be exposed to that type of ideology [00:23:00] and lack of protection, really, according to your familial principles. What would you do as a parent? What would you do?

[00:23:08] If you didn't, if you weren't able to send your children to the school that you want them to 

[00:23:13] Jason Bedrick: attend. In general, we only have two options, exit and voice. So I think the first thing you would try to do is exercise your voice, go to the school board meetings, go speak to the principal, do everything in your power within the system to try to change the system.

[00:23:27] And then if you couldn't, you would leave. So even if I didn't have school choice, there's no way that I would be putting my children in that environment. I'd either be paying for a private school. out of pocket entirely or I would be homeschooling. It's, it, your child's education is your child's future.

[00:23:41] And it's, it's an exercise, not just in teaching them various skills, it's really forming their character. It's forming its soul formation. So it's too important to just leave to ideologues and radicals. And I mentioned exit and voice. Your [00:24:00] voice is stronger when you have the exit option. In other words, When schools know that you can leave and take your money with you, they have a much stronger incentive to listen to the voices of families who are expressing displeasure with what's going on in the school system.

[00:24:18] This is what's driving, uh, when you enact a school choice program, this is what's driving academic performance in the public schools up. And also, I think it's a check on radical ideologues. The ideologues that represent only a small minority, but a very vocal minority of the population. can get away with this sort of thing in a system where you have a captive audience.

[00:24:40] But if you don't have a captive audience, it's a lot harder to get away with this sort of nonsense. 

[00:24:46] Leyla Gulen: Yeah, we saw it in Virginia when Governor Glenn Youngkin came on board and we saw parents raising hell. And I think that's some of the only ways in which you can actually see change. Now, as a scholar in this area, what's next now?

[00:24:59] What are we looking [00:25:00] to next on the horizon in terms of education, whether it's in Arizona or the country at large? 

[00:25:04] Jason Bedrick: I mean, not every state has school choice yet. Just a few years ago, not a single state had universal school choice. And now there are. Eight states that have universal school choice just in the last couple of years, and there are several that are on the horizon, several that are getting close.

[00:25:24] So I, I think that in the next 10, 20 years, we're going to see a majority of states in the country have followed Arizona's lead and are providing school choice to every single child in the state. I think that there's also a push for a back to basics approach in the public school system. There was the teachers union president in Los Angeles a few years ago was denying that there was any learning loss as a result of the school shutdowns.

[00:25:53] When the schools reopened and it became obvious that, uh, that there had been a ton of learning loss, [00:26:00] she said, well, our babies might not know their times tables, but they know what a coup is, they know what an insurrection is, and this was just sort of an indication that, yeah, we're putting the basics, things like learning your timetables, learning how to read, learning basic numeracy, But those are taking a backseat to our ideological goals and families are really fed up.

[00:26:22] They're saying, no, we're not sending our kids to school to be indoctrinated in a particular political ideology. We're sending them to school to learn things like how to read, how to do math, to learn about our nation's history and its context in the world. And so I think you're going to see more and more of this back to basics approach.

[00:26:41] And along the way, you're going to see a number of these other bills, like I mentioned before, give a name act, accommodations for all children act, save girls, sports act, various different bills that are trying to minimize some of the radical ideology that's been infecting the schools and get [00:27:00] them back to focusing on the things that are most important.

[00:27:03] Leyla Gulen: Jason Bedrick, you are a research fellow in the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation. You can find your books, Education Freedom, Remembering Andrew Coulson, and Religious Liberty in Education, a case study of Yeshiva versus New York, wherever books are sold. If listeners want to continue this conversation with you and they want to get in contact, where do they find you?

[00:27:24] Jason Bedrick: They can find me at heritage. org. Perfect. 

[00:27:26] Leyla Gulen: Jason, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having 

[00:27:29] Jason Bedrick: me.