welcome, everybody.

great to have you with us today for conversation. education, the right. what we're going to dig into is at a time when there is evident polarization, enormous polarization across the country, fierce debate about many issues, education is no different, whether we're talking about what we see in college and on college campuses are fights about policies over critical race theory and school and school choice. in k-12, how to tackle challenges in childhood. we enormous energy in terms the right versus versus the left and what the sides should be for part of the challenge here is that on the right as mike and i

talk about in our new book, getting education right, the right has often been at explaining what we're against or what's than sketching a vision, what we're for, what we want to about today is how the right has gotten to this point on education, where this point is and what a principled conservative vision of educational should look like going forward. when we talk about early childhood, k-12 or higher education, today's event is going to proceed in two parts. on the first panel, we're lucky enough to have virginia secretary of education amy goodman to hear who's going have a conversation with me and mike about what's in our new book, getting education right after about 2530 minutes, we're going to switch out we're going to bring up a couple of distinguish scholars who are going to join the panel. i'll move into a facilitator role and. we'll have a broader conversation about where we are

in the question to the moment towards the end of the event or move to q&a online questions can be sent to greg that for a at aei dot org on the spelling you'll have guess or it's greg dot for you are an ipr at ed at org or at the or the hashtag hashtag getting it right you can find the book at the teachers college press website if you enter the code api at checkout get 20% off and for those of you who are with us in person today after the we invite you to join us in the hallway for a drink and refreshments. we've got mike mcshane, national director of research at choice and my fellow author on the new. as i mentioned, we've got virginia secretary of education amy goodman and again, i'm rick best, director of education policy studies at aei. delighted to have you with us today. and i'm going to go take a seat. and amy, if you could get us

started on the conversation. all right, thanks. we are now awesome. good afternoon, everyone. it is such delight and a pleasure and an honor to be and to be with all friends and to see so many friends in the audience here and hopefully online as well. i of all start by saying, thanks. thanks for writing this book. it was really fun to read knowing you both. it was also really fun to hear your voices come out so much. there's couple lines in there about comparing an ocean, hearing to the experience in the super bowl that i really loved. so you all have to go find that. make sure you go pick up the book and read. and i also just want to say thank you also for writing it. in this moment when there feels like so much tension in the world to create such a positive and clear and compelling message about why conservatives, we believe that it's really important to get education right. so thank you. it means a lot. and i just want to leave that my first question, which is why now you're reading this book felt like personal history in lots of ways, going back, remembering

when i was younger and thinner and seeing all my friends in the audience there as well and looking back and saying, we got right things i wish we had done differently and we could have written this at lots of points in time. but why now? why does it matter now that story is out there. and then a second, follow it to that. what do you hope changes as a result of this book being out there? i think the the why now could be that. well, it started we got bored during the pandemic. now. so some people baked sour dough bread and we had this great idea to write a book. and it's really been it's been a wonderful project that rick and i worked on in a very kind of different than how you and i often write things. we really kind of ruminated this on a long time and passed a lot of drafts back forth. and it was really a lovely a lovely thing to be able to do. but i think the why now, you know, it's tough to not start with something like the which was such a kind of dislocating effect. it caused so many people to rethink their relationships towards schools, whether that's early childhood education, daycare, whether that's about k-12 schools, that's about

higher education. and, you know, i think a lot of what happened there just brought to the fore trends that were already happening. some of the stuff that we trace in the book is that it was some of these things were rumbling and it just took the last, you know, pick your metaphor the straw that breaks the camel's back to sort of break all of this open. and so we were obviously coming out of that. we see all the things that are happening in higher education nowadays and not the people in in the congressional hearings and others, but things that are happening on college campuses. and i think, you know, there's that old saying you can curse the darkness or you can to light a candle and i think there's been lots of opportunity to curse the darkness and lots of opportunity to say, oh, here's this goofy thing that this school is doing or isn't it terrible that those schools are doing that? but we thought it was really important to try and put forward positive vision. well, what might schools look like if they were guided by principles, not just we want to be against this or against that, but what might be that that better a better future for our our children, our nation? yeah, i think that's all beautifully said. the other reason why now is, as

you know, amy, for a lot of our professional lives, education in the k-12 world felt purple. the big question was not, are you conservative or progressive, but how do you feel about accountability or how do you feel about choice. well, i think what hap what we've seen happen over the last half decade or ten years is that has fundamentally shifted. i think what used be a conversation dominated questions of how do you organize school, serve kids, has become a conversation in which were many of our friends on the left have made it first and foremost about a series of what i suggest are pretty extreme dogmas and therefore, in order to engage and respond effectively, it can't just be stopping those dogmas. it's got to be starting from a place of principle. what are we for? what is what is the role of schools? and so in some sense this is a response to the break up of that

education, marriage and an attempt to offer a of how do we move forward in its aftermath. and i should i should say i didn't answer second question. i was going to hold you. there you go. i appreciate that accountability already has a transparency to it, just like here we go. i love it. well, i'll give you some choice. we could keep playing this game. we won't. but think, you know, what do we want to be different? i think part of it is that we want particularly on speaking sort of for our friends on the right and, you know, a movement that we're both part of. i think we want to see a bigger i think oftentimes we can look quite narrowly of well, how does this one policy or even this one area of children's lives, how can we figure out the best policy to increase reading and math scores on this or to raise graduation rates because of that? i think what we try to do with this book by articulating these broader principles and thinking about how principles might whenever we're talking about education, the child is three or 23. what are the constants that exist across all of those? it might give us this broader

way to have a bigger conversation about what are the ends that we are trying to pursue. like what are we trying to here? what is the point of all of this? and then that leads to questions like, well, then who do we want doing that? who do we want teaching our kids? how do we want them to be prepared, etc.? and then how do we want to organize a system to achieve those ends? but part of it we've had a series of very narrow conversations. i think we wanted to take step back and broaden the lens, add on to that, know a little bit. okay, awesome. that's what i like. derek, you brought up principal. so let's talk about values. tell me what you think about conservative values in education. why do they matter? what are they? and in the book, i know you go through them a lot and again, everyone should go get this and read it, but tell us some of the highlights. sure. i mean, partly defense. what do you mean by conservative? obviously, we live in an era when politics is often defined by personalities. you know, i you know, if you're a republican, the question is how do you feel about donald trump? but by conservative, we're not talking and we're educators.

we're not we're not politicos. so we have the great luxury of when we talk about conservatism, talking as we explain in the book, talking about a set dispositions, a set of of thinking about the world that have been handed down to us by thinkers like burke and kirk and a number of others. and so for us, the what did you know, then we can have good faith. there's, you know, as many definitions of conservative as there are people who wanted to find it. but for us the key principles here are a sense of personal responsibility, a sense of gratitude, a respect for things that work, distrust of utopian schemes. and so when mike and i are talking about a conservative vision, it's a vision that's anchored in respect for the role of parents in the family, the importance of communities, the importance of affection for our shared history, our shared for our shared humanity.

it's a, you know, anchored in a belief in rigor and unapologetic embrace of things like excellence and merit and accomplishment. keep saying this is everything in our terms. and, you know, and then very much about the responsible party, the responsibility of educators, but also the responsibility of learners the responsibilities of schools and colleges, but also the responsibility of the families that are sending those kids school and now what happens is even we talk about these things today, one, we don't talk about a lot of this. some of these things which we think of as no brainers in certain precincts in education are treated as bad ideas or ideas, which is to us, frankly, bizarre. and we think to most americans. but even folks who are embracing some of these things have wound up embracing them in a performative way. or we talk about parental rights, but we don't hear much about parental responses, all of these. and so for us, again, not about

whose side are you on? it's about these ideas, it's about these principles, these precepts, and frankly, whether folks call themselves republican or, democrat or something else, if these ideas resonate with them, that's great. we don't think of conservative as conservative as belong to this or that political camp. we think of it as a set of habits of mind and of the one of i think our great joys have been has been having people read the book and react to it and say, well, this doesn't actually feel that conservative to me. and we're like, well, that's wonderful you know, you are welcome to anything that you would like to embrace, including endorsements from people who are definitely not republican. that's a great statement. so let's get my view on anything. it was brilliant it was great. and thank you for helping us out. so the conversation's already begun the discussion has taken off and in twittersphere or whatever we call it now and online and on blogs and, that's what books do, right? they create conversation.

and i really think that and hope that that's what this book does. it gets people talking and, discussing and debating. and so let me bring one of those debates here. so one of our friends wrote and said, really great. but there are some things that i wish you talked more about. and so, you know, check with this morning said, wow, i'd really love to have seen more about what is the conservative agenda within schools that most americans want to have their community school be their home school of choice? and why didn't you all talk more about and improving curriculum and about teachers? so i may give you a shot now to lay out what is the conservative viewpoint inside of what we should be believing and working for within schools. but i also want you to talk about why does this need to be an either or? it doesn't need to be either nor. i mean, first off, you i love checker dearly, but know we did 70,000 words. i think that's beyond most people's attention span and we have on every one of them rarely do people say we want more and on every one of those topics i think it i you know we addressed them all pretty forthrightly. so.

sure. so, you know, first off, great. i love when people are saying, well, what else can you tell me? that's great. but also the idea of writing. i think any volume is to engage readers and move the conversation. i think mike or i for a moment suggest we either have the answer to what conservatives should embrace or the application for how each of these things should play out in 100,000 schools or 6000 colleges and universities. that's part of the beauty of the american system, is there's lots of ways to apply these things in lots of places. but look more fundamentally, some of this is pretty straightforward. i think one of the things mike and i talk about is that you there's the real world in which decisions get made. in that real world, there's always compromises, and that's natural and healthy. but i think one of the challenges for conservatives have been that in the compromises have been made over, say, the last 25 years, we frequently wound up not just

compromising on tactics and particulars but compromising on principle. so for a big one for me, for instance, is that when we talk about school discipline, there's questions about the fundamental problems with notions of restorative justice, with the way this stuff has been applied. our colleague max eton has written elegant about these questions, but there's also the fundamental question of are parents responsible for making their kids, making sure their kids behave. when i started in this stuff and i taught high school in the 1990s when i was training student teachers, there too much emphasis on the role of the parent and not enough on the responsibilities of the educator. it was good and healthy that we have learned to pay much more attention to insisting that. educators not make excuses, not blame families, but conservatives stop talking about the family rule. i mean it is hard to find republican officials even, you know, outspoken table thumping

republicans who want to say should be taken away. a kid, their kids phones at 8:00 at night. parents should making sure that virginia it's hard to fight if it's a possible thing. you know it's hard to find folks who are saying, you know what, we've got to talk about parent rights to see those parents. right. to see that curriculum. but we got to talk about whether or not parents are making sure their kids are going to school. we've got to make sure parents are checking their kids homework to make sure it's done. so for us, a lot of this is not just about the policies we embrace, but as we argue in the book, those policies need to be anchored in values and principles. and i fear that we made the mistake over the last 25 years of growing nervous, of growing hesitant, to talk about principle and what we actually see is a problematic reaction from asian and the other way where we've seen all of these online, you know pajama nutjobs tick tock who want to launch

kind of cultural grenades but don't actually want to have a serious conversation about the responsibility side of the equation. yeah, i think we have clear stuff in the book about think policy ideas for existing schools. we talk, we have a big section about teacher pay and how eliminating bureaucracy so we could pay teachers more. we have a lot about school discipline that's in there as well. but i think as rick was saying, i mean, a big part of this is and it's a tension like when we're conservatives thinking about how policy is made is that we have a bias localism, right? we want 14,000 school districts or those 50 different states to create that are right for them. so no book that we're going to write that says, well, this is the student discipline policy that all 100,000 schools should have. but what we can do is articulate these principles so that when that school board is meeting or when that state board of education is meeting, or when state legislators are meeting, they can have in their mind, okay, how should we thinking about this problem? how can we solve this problem?

what are the tradeoffs are inherent in all of that because because of the peculiarities of all different communities that exist in our country, they might come up with very different solutions that are guided by those same principles. and so it's tough when you're conservatives writing book about education in america. people are like, well, you're not prescriptive enough. it's like, well, that's because that's not really our thing. but then it's like, oh, well, you're too of foggy on the other side, but that's what we're trying to do, is give these principles so that people can think through these problems when they're them in their own communities. i think i see a volume two coming in. so there we go. so, so i take us to higher education. so i think one of those compelling statements you make in your section on higher ed is say that conservatives need to engage in higher education, not abandon it. and you also make it really clear you think that there is an upcoming era where we need to launch new models and actually develop new colleges. so i want to ask you to talk more about that, given that we are entering or are in this great upheaval right now where we're having demographic over half the country does not see

value in a four year degree right now. and we are also having plethora of ways to deliver knowledge and skill development. so why is there a age of college around corner and what do you think the conservative values are? yes, i'll take the first half. you'll you'll get the second half. but part of it's of not not sort of making colleges the or others know one of the quotations that we use in the very beginning, the book when we're talking about what it means to be a conservative, is a quote from the british philosopher sir roger scruton, which i wish more americans knew about. scruton i think he's fantastic. he has a great book called how be conservative. he has another book. what's a conservative ism? an introduction to the great tradition. they're both very slim, they're good. but in his book how to be a conservatism, how to be a conservative, he says this great line that conservatism comes from a sentiment that all readily share, and that's that good things are difficult to build. but easy to destroy. and i think when i look at higher education, like i'm from the midwest, right? so i'm from i'm from kansas city, missouri. and when i would travel west on

i-70 to go out, you know, snowboarding in or whatever, as you're going across the great plains there, there's a whole of nothing. but after, you know, 40 minutes or so outside of kansas city rising up on this hill, off to the left side is this massive complex. you're like, what the hell is that? oh, that's the university of kansas. that folks, because of the land grant act and others created these institutions 150 years ago, you keep going a little bit farther again. you're in the middle of farmland but what rises off to the right in manhattan kansas kansas state right these incredible and the thing is like you cannot just make out of whole cloth 150 year old institutions. no one ever holds harvard 380 years or something. you can't just make new 380 year institutions. and so part of being a conservative, what rick will, do great things, talking about all the new things we need to create. but you can't just abandon those types of places and it will be difficult. and it's an uphill battle and you're outnumbered and all of those that are true. but there's certain facets of

that and there's certain capital that exists. deep wells that have been dug over hundreds years that you can't just start. so those you our land grant universities and others are such a great testament to american ingenuity. and many of the great institutions that exist now were from a kind of previous age of creation that existed. but those are still worthy of our affection. they're still worthy, our support. it ain't easy, but something that we still need to be committed to trying turn around. yeah, you know, i mean, mike, mike's a catholic. it is easy for him to kind of separate the sin from sinner and i think, you know, when you look at these institutions, you know, the, you know, the, the legacies, the alumni networks, the influence and the reputation, the research, these are remarkable agglomerations in the fact that they have been current seized by folks are hostile to the the formative of

the institution people for whom the guiding principle is not a free inquiry or of sharing the good in the beautiful or the pursuit of truth, but for whom it is about politics and ideology that is a profound problem and one that it is. i think, you know, for me, heartwarming to see conservatives on a policy radically calling this out and pushing back. i thought the december 5th hearing in washington, d.c., despite the coverage in the mainstream media and the education press, was one of the highlights of my professional. i thought the questions asked by members of the house were powerful, important, and they had the appropriate consequences for the presidents of upenn and harvard. but that's not enough. it's got to be what are we for? what do we want these institutions to? because i think the sad truth is mike and i get enough emails from faculty, friends who feel held hostage at these elite institutions that they're like, you will never believe what i saw this meeting or rick, you would be the only person to

believe because reality is that it's not like faculty at ivies have bought into political and social agendas. the problem is that these folks with undue influence and power internally and externally have bought into these things and are browbeating i think lots of people who want to take the work of the seriously. and so part of our mission as conservatives is to liberate them, to set them free to change the paradigm. one way we do that is by making sure we fight for the health, those institutions and to liberate them. a second, though, is to say that look we have gotten into this unusual into this problematic habit of imagining that the only we need are the ones we happen to have today. well, this was not always so a long time in america for the whole of the 19th century. we had a proud tradition of institution formation. we launched close to a thousand colleges and universities, most of them private in the course,

the 19th century, over half today's top 20 institutions, including places like hopkins and stanford and university of rochester, were formed in that era. what's happened, though, is we've gotten out of that habit even conservatives with a lot of money to give wind up giving it to where they went to school or want to give it or write a bribe tax tech, a bribe to institution that they hope will admit their kid or grandkid. they give it to famous. this has been in happened therefore is all of these resources have flown to existing apparatus that no longer serves our purpose well. look what's changed. universities, colleges and even our more recent community college system where an answer to particular problem it was when it was hard to get books, hard to get people together with the professor hard to find space where people could learn. today, those are the easiest things in the that challenge today is to make sure that people have actually learned what they were supposed to learn, to actually offer a

coherent and lucid program of study. these are things that universal and even community colleges actually do pretty poorly. so it's not like we lose anything by exploring new models by steering these funds in the folks who are figuring out new ways to do this work. the university of boston is high profile example. if you're not familiar minerva in the san francisco bay area in which students spend college and six or seven different continents, six different continents, i believe right over the course of their four years remark noble kind of exploration of the liberal arts. these are things that we ought to be looking into in a more models besides for everything from coding bootcamps to elite research institutions. great i know we have 5 minutes and be really fast. i got two quick questions. one is the section that i want to talk to you. the most about over a drink and maybe we'll do it after this is on early childhood. you make statements about, you know, three principles, four conservatives are about for the purpose of early childhood

education, to provide relief for working families, keeping connected to families, and maintaining a supportive array of learning environments. i agree with all of those. but i also believe a huge advocate of quality early childhood is we've also got to prepare kids be ready for success in school. and so talk to me about why that wasn't included. and i have all kinds of things i want to tell you why i think it should be, but i want to hear from you all. well, i think it's a it's sort of implicitly included because what we're talking about is trying to find these environments that are not as sort of centrally controlled in some of the were responding that there was, you know, some of our friends on the left when they talk early childhood education are oftentimes just talking about sort of upending another year or two on to k-12 education. and part of what we see is there's lots of these private providers that are already in that space and there's also other sort of adjacent types of institutions where we don't have to even think about them in the same way of the classes are organized or others. so i think that school readiness is important. but but look part of it is i wonder sometimes if this of

school readiness tail wags the dog of early childhood education. one of the stories that we tell in the book, it was actually i think here at aei, we were at an event and maybe some of you all have if you have kids that are in preschool or something now, you know, you get the note home. at the end of the day, that's like 40 different data points of like we did standard 40.1 or whatever. and i mean, my reaction to that is like that of sounds dystopian and terrible, right? like they're three like, like, so i'm with you i'm with you. i'm with you on school preparedness and things, but i wonder if we've of overcorrected in that area and we're not preparing kids for school across all these other dimensions that are really important around selfridge and discipline and respect and all of that sort of stuff because we're really super these particular academic indicators. so i think we maybe had this kind of holistic picture. i don't know if you're the same on that one. yeah. and i think partly i think again, to mike's point, mostly

think our pushing back against is bill de blasio, you know, land mark expansion of early childhood was putting four year olds in big of decrepit institutional buildings. for 180 days a year and, shipping those kids home at 2:00. whether or not the parents workday was actually done it, too, which us as bizarrely institutional, impersonal and inconvenient and what we're actually asking is, are there ways for those of us not the pocket of the teacher unions to offer better, more agile, more family friendly alternatives? and we think there are awesome. i'm going to call my last question for the drink afterwards, but i want to end cause i want to keep us on time just with a thank you. i started, you know being now in the arena as a policymaker it is amazing to see so often how there is not values based leadership and i happen to believe that there is a huge vacuum of leadership right now in education are willing to

stand up for anything and especially to stand up for what they believe in and what i hope with this book. but i hope happens, is that inspires more to actually grapple with what they believe in. on this note, the piece that i was most heartened with is that every single thing you talk about is centered on students. and too often today, the conversations that we're having in education talk about so many other, but don't actually talk about what we should be talking about, which is students and. how does this policy or this practice actually support student learning, student achievement, student well-being. and so i want to thank you for putting a pin strongly the conversation that it matters to believe something and we need to believe in our kids. thank you for doing that. and i look forward to the conversation, not just here at aei, but also one of the things i hope everyone does is not just clap right now for these two for authoring this, but going out, getting this book and then having the conversation around, your dinner tables, having the conversation in your and talk to your neighbors about this because this is what matters so much just to have the conversation about what we believe and how do we make sure

that we're living our values every single day as we fight for a better education system. so thank you to both of you. thank you. all right. that i'd to allow and i'll ahead some while we do a little bit of rearranging here. let's see, do you guys know what feature in does matter? i have no idea. so there we go, etc.. all right. so we have ramesh ponnuru, editor of national review magazine, and for the washington post, we have back canetti, author of the right, the history of contemporary conservatism, the u.s. and if you haven't read

it, it a book you really will find worth reading as well as the chief of domestic policy studies at the american institute and. we have ian rowe, senior fellow at aei and author of agency. hey, great to have all of you with us. with that, matt, going to ask you actually to kick us off as the guy you i want this conversation in particular, mike and i just spent a lot of time talking a little more granularly about educational questions. i want to make sure now we're thinking more broadly about the relationship, education and the right. and matt, i'd like you to kick off. you know, if you talk about at length in your book, william f buckley many ways, founded american the contemporary american conservative movement. and of course, the book launched him into preeminence was him

into yale, in which he talked about what his concerns about higher education and what it meant for the nation more broadly. kind of curious from where you sit at this point where he where how have we gotten here in terms the conservative relationship to education and how is education factored in as we look back in the history of american conservatism? well, thank you, rick. and it's great to be here and to be a part of this event. in your book launch with mike. it's a great book. i it to everybody. you know, as you mentioned, the relationship between american conservatism and american k through 12 and higher ed is, very integral. and in many ways, the story of the american conservative movement in the 20th and 21st centuries is the story of attempts to address problems or perceived problems in the education system. and that was even before william f buckley published his famous

got a man at yale in 1951. one can look at some of the antecedents to the american concert movement in the 1920s and thirties figures. like albert, jay nock figures paul elmer moore and irving babbitt. and you can see in their texts, in their writing, a deep concern with education. what's interesting is that their take on the education system was very elitist and very skeptical or critical small d democracy. and so these pre-world war two thinkers on the right were very much in the eye of the belief that education was not for everyone that you to educate an elite to naturally aristocracy in jeffersonian terms, some type of leader or elite that will emerge and that those are the people to whom education should be addressed. what's interesting about postwar

american conservative ism is the broadening concern among conservatives to include all americans and small d democratization of the idea of education. and so when i think about the history of education and the right over the last 75 years or so, i think it really takes to two parts. it's form and substance and so there have been major debates and concerns, the form or the structure of education, and there have been major debates and concerns over the substance of the content of education. so when we think form or structure, we think of other debates, choice over charter schools, whether we should have a department of education at all, what should the relationship between the federal government and state local education departments be? should we expand home school options? who sits on our school boards?

all of these concerns are with the former the structure of education. how education is delivered to students and? they've been dominant throughout, but also sometimes fade in importance. if you think about the the 20 years in between reagan's election. 1980 and george w election in 2000, you see form was slightly diminished. right. reagan came into office thinking, what we're going to end the department of education and he couldn't do it. and in fact, his second education secretary, william j. bennett, was responsible for shifting the focus of conservative educational thought and action toward the substance of the education. talking about character education, do we build character? what are the values and morals teaching to students? talking about curriculum.

what are we teaching? not in elementary school, but also in higher ed? that's the beginning of our debates over. political correctness happening at the tail end of reagan era and then when we get to the bush administration, of course, it's about accountability. it's about standards. right. so just to close when i think of the right now in education, i see a heavy stress on form and structure. i see a lot of efforts being put into the educational freedom movement, into expanding options, into combating the public sector unions. think a lot of that may be the result of. the pandemic, like mike was mentioning in the earlier panel. but i'm also beginning to see, especially on the state level, efforts to address substance. efforts to go after the curriculum. efforts to talk about what materials are available to say. students in early childhood up to third grade. and the real will be what is the agenda that the right puts forward in the next presidential

administration or in the next congress? is it going to be some mix of form or content? is it going to be weighted more heavily to another to one or the other? but i think fundamentally, you have to address both. just as the tradition of american conservatism has addressed both commercial for where you sit, especially the approach of national review, give a broad sense of the political landscape of, you know, the the panoply of domestic policy issues. where does conservative where. where does education sit in there right now? how much energy attention does it feel like it's getting versus, say, five or ten years ago? and how much of that attention feels like it's productive or principled versus more something more performative. well, i think that there's an enormous amount of energy, excitement in states and,

localities surrounding school choice because we've just had this huge expansion, particularly in 22 and 2023. those are best years. that school choice has had so far. so not surprising that that people sort of feel like they are pushing on an open door. at the same time, i think because of that excitement, conservatives do run the risk of losing sight of the fact that, you know, something like 90% of american school kids attend public school and that number is is going to change only at the margin, even as school choice continues to succeed. and so i'm seeing maybe a little less attention than i would like see on what we can do as conservatives. to support public schools and to make public better. with that said, you are also seeing debates. one of the one of the great

things about the sometimes heated and sometimes shedding more heat than light debate over critical race theory is that it really has put at the forefront some questions about the teaching of history. i don't know that we have yet gotten a popular or compelling answer that both acknowledge is the country's tarnished history, but also its glorious. but think that those sorts of things are also important and we shouldn't sidestep them in favor. an exclusive focus on things like school choice. you know, last week tucker carlson obviously went to russia to, you know, teach us how much better moscow is than any city. and it's got grocery scores and it's got grocery carts all of stuff. i mean, when we talk about history and the relative, you know, kind of the america's in the world, one of the things that i think, you know, i've always taken for granted is that

there was a whole wing of campus left that, you know, idolized howard zinn and despised america. and it feels now, obviously, that there are elements in the populist right who have made this bipartisan. how does that efforts to think about kind of a true history that you know is open eyed about both america's and flaws. well, we have to that coin operated shopping carts are the pinnacle of civilization a a reliable marker, a high trust society. you know, i think that it's important to restate american principles and their inclusiveness because we are seeing a turn against them on the left and on the right. don't think it's a turn that. it has pulled in most of the u.s. population.

however, and i think we do always to keep in mind that there is, you know, a large of normal people, even they do not always make themselves heard. and in stand for those people because the the alternatives are are far inferior and sometimes crazy, maybe even in the clinical sense. you know, ian, one of the things that this all brings up is something that amy asked about in the first panel is this relationship between and practice or policy of education. i mean, you're somebody who has run schools that were unapologetically, you know, immersed in teaching kids about virtue and the success sequence. you've got a lot of scars to show for that experience. how do you think about where we

have gotten that balance wrong in terms of thinking both about value and practice of policy and what does it look like to get it, right. yeah. well, first of all, thank you, everyone, for being here. you know, i agree a lot with matt and ramesh. it might be that our focus as conservatives from perspective on things like choice and accountable we have overshadowed in many ways the virtues which i'm very excited to talk about. and it might be that we're actually victims, our own success. you know, the accountability front, obviously, no child, no child left behind. every state is obsessed with standardized test scores, but it's almost led to a perverse response. in terms of accountability, i mean, just a couple of months ago, the new jersey state board of education because they were unsatisfied with the demographic makeup of the kids that were

demonstrating proficiency for leave high school, you know, only 39% of kids demonstrate proficiency. and they were dissatisfied with, you know, black and hispanic. so what did they do? they just they just changed the cut score. they just changed the proficiency level in now close to 80% of kids are. you know voila. you know, student achievement. so so there's been this sort of perverse response to accountability. and on the school front, you know, as ramesh, just said, i mean, this is a golden era for school choice. i mean, more than 30 plus states have some version of the essays, charter schools, vouchers. but it's great if you now have choice. but most of your choices, are schools that are either ideologically immersed in things like equity and diy or anti-racism, or they're privilege walks and i think

what's starting to happen, which i think is good, is that based on what we've been achieve, been able to achieve on policy front, how can we actually now start getting back to things like core virtues? there's a reason the classical education movement, i think has had such a huge resounding resurgence. i in the last few years because i think a lot of parents and students just want to go to schools that are focused on core values. i mean, we just launched our high school in the bronx and we are organized around the four cardinal virtues of courage just temperance and wisdom and and that that affects every aspect of our curriculum, the canon, the rewards system. and we have i statements associated with each of the the cardinal virtues. so courage, for example. and these are words that all of students have to memorize. but courage is i reject

victimhood and boldly persevere even in times of uncertainty and struggle. i think are words that our kids learn and master temperance. you know, i lead my life with self because i am response of all for my learning and my behavior. these are powerful words, messages that first kids learn in their head, but ultimately they learn it in their in their heart and they adopt that behavior. and i think, i think there's something very powerful, especially in the face of a lot of the equity conversations and your your values is, you know, determined based on your skin color. no, no, no. i think a lot of people want to reject that and get back to the inherent dignity of each individual, the common humanity. and that's what virtues based schools and values based schools are all about. so i think that's that's part of the answer. and one other thing i want to say, because we haven't really talked about it, we talk a little bit higher, ed, you know,

the wall street journal has a great story today, burning glass put out a really interesting study that says that nearly. 50% of college graduates ten years later are in jobs that don't require a college degree. i think about that. that's amazing, right? and so the implication for me and again something we're doing at our high school is that we're embedding apprenticeship and internships during the junior and year so that you earn industry credentials with labor market value. so it may be that at the end of high school, college shouldn't be the only option that we're pushing most kids to do instead. maybe there are opportunities in certain industries where you can work for a few years before you go back to if that's what you so choose. so these are the kinds of things i think when we're now talking about the substance of what kids are actually doing in school

virtues based education, more multiple pathways in secondary experience. those are the kinds of things i think are on the horizon and what we should be for more versus just against amy. you know, one of the things that that that that suggests is is, you know, if we're going be for empowering parents and giving more options among schools and giving them more options, good programs against them, that's great. i mean, i think but i think that's a pretty easy. yes. you know, one of the questions i that's often asked is, okay, what are you going. what are you what are you you being as conservatives going to do about good reliable early childhood options, going to be about what happens actually inside schools, going be about affordable or higher ed. so, you know, you spent a lot years trying to help states build out data systems to look at these things. and now you spent the last

several years working with governor youngkin to try to tackle some of these curious. what are some of the opportunities, the low hanging fruit that you see kind of where you're sitting, especially given that you have in your role, you touch the early childhood and k-12 and higher ed systems in virginia and where are those opportunities and where are some of the pain points and kind of moving on that. so i say the hanging fruit and the most important thing that we can do, all of us, is to remind people what your book says is to remind people what we believe in and what governor youngkin came into and what he did on the campaign trail, that he had the audacity to remind that we need to restore excellence to education. and i would argue that that is the most important message that we can all give is that our children deserve to have high of them. and the adults in the system all of us need to be held accountable for actually meeting students where they are and getting them where they need to go. that is a very premise. it's one that we used to take for granted that all kids can

learn, and it's one now that we keep changing everything thinking, oh, it's too hard, makes them feel bad. and so we're in a position of virginia where much like the new jersey state board did, we're living and reaping the horrific results of having a culture of insidious, lowering expectations. and guess what? a system gets the results for which it's built. and so the easiest we can do, the most important low hanging is to remind people that we know what it looks like when we have high expectations for every child at every level, and that we sure we meet them where we are. and so that's why in. virginia under governor youngkin, everything we do is focused on that and we have three, three purposes of education, right? it is and it's again, part of your book. one is to prepare people for success, to be a productive member of economy. one is to be an informed member our democracy and one is to be an engaged member of our communities. those are values statements about what we believe in and, why they matter. but it's about providing that transparency of where every

student is. it's making sure that we also show where it's working and where it's not working, and that we create a demand things that work because we do know what. we have evidence across this country asking why it's important to gather in these rooms, learn from each other, and it's to create an appetite to say, how do we show that this one size fits all system, whether it be in early childhood, whether it be in k-12, whether it be in higher education is not working for the vast majority of our students. and how do we encourage a spirit of innovation at all levels to make that we are creating the learning opportunity is that our children deserve at all levels and that we make it possible to unleash that energy and that innovation to get different results because they deserve it. so could go on for miles about every single of them. but the things that we're doing is reminding people through transparency and data, for example. and ramesh, i would say that we do have an example. i like to say in virginia that i think we do have the nation's best history and civic standards now where we're able to tell the good in the bad and to also inspire. and so i invite everyone, look

at those history standards. you might have heard that there was some conversation about them, but they're really, really good. and the time we leave office, we will raised expectations of all of our students in virginia in history and civics and english and math and science and computer science and governor and i can just ask us to expedite some more of those because the first step is to say what we believe and what we believe is that we are not asking enough of our students. the second step is to say, how do we have better information and how do we empower everyone, students, parents, teachers and the public with information about how well our schools at all level are serving? and then three, how do we make sure people have quality options that they can take care of, whether it be in early childhood or k-12 and in early childhood? i'm proud to say in virginia we have one of the greatest public private choice systems that exists. we just launched a campaign called blocks for families in virginia december with a funding cliff coming with the recovery dollars going, you know, we're

able to transition and make sure that not a single child will lose services. and at the same time, we are committed to that. there's public dollars being spent that we also will have quality options, families that they get to choose whether at a home based care, whether it's in public school or whether it is in a church basement. but what we're doing is empowering families with good information, quality options and accountability for results. and that, to me, as a conservative, is what we to do at every point in our education system. you know, back to this tension you alluded to between kind of the aristocracy of merit and the small d democracy shows up a lot of these things. for instance, in the choice conversation. one of the things we know from the research including from mike's team ed choice is that when you ask families what do they focus on when they're picking a good school, they don't necessarily focus on the things that the folks building, the accountability systems want them to focus on test scores

tend to come in 15th, 20th among all the criteria. one argument is that the parents wrong. another argument is that parents actually don't think those test scores or is telling is other things they care about. when we think about of these tensions of how do you build systems that are responsive to what consumers or parents want. but you're also public funds through entities. has our thinking on how we wrestle with these changed over time? is is this a new dilemma that's due to the way we're thinking about operating schools or is this something that we can look to antecedents? well, i think it's become more complex and it also relates other developments on the right in terms of the judiciary in, the conservative legal movement. so when milton friedman proposes the idea of school choice in capitalism and freedom in 1962,

it is, of course, a very marginal idea. it has to fight its way into the center of education discourse even before it can be implemented as public policy. and when conservatives are in a position to begin implementing it, as in public policy in the eighties, the nineties, it immediately runs up against judicial opposition, especially the idea of taxpayer dollars being spent to religious, educational. but because similar developments within the conservative legal movement and some original thinking, the public policy world, it's become much easier now to for to provide parents a variety of options. and that's why we've seen this incredible growth in the education freedom movement in just the past several years. so the fundamental tension, though, about, well, what are conservatives for what is the what and what should

conservatives think about government's role in education that hasn't changed that hasn't that hasn't really been resolved. and when i think about recent developments in the right's thinking about education, you see the turn toward a more anti-elitist populism, more toward a great suspicion of bigness and big institutions. and there the turn was really visible with common core debate during obama era, where suddenly would go to these tea party rallies and what the man as the colonial patriot wanted to talk about wasn't anymore. it was about common and it was about bill gates, his plan to corrupt our children, the education system. and so that became, i think, a spur toward a renewed on structure as opposed to content. but it also emblematic of a shift on the right toward an

anti-elitist and a suspicion of expert opinion and the sense that we don't want the government telling it's telling schools to teach. i think we've come to maybe regret that a little bit in the wake of 2020 and in the wake of revelation that many parents experi about ways in which social ideology has been in incorporated into school curriculum. and so now we see a renewed on, well, how do we how do we for that. so it is very much a pendulum. i would say, that swings back and forth contingent on events and continuing as always and what the left does. the right is always responding to left. and so as the left changes, then the right has to rethink and renew and reform. ramesh this is, you know, in light of what masha said, i mean, it's interesting question when we look at the common core and, you i remember talking to you at points through that it

interrupts. is that something in retrospect that the case of the right effectively rising up, or is this something the right order regret? or what are the takeaways from that experience? so i think that the main takeaway is not so much about the right or the left. it's about the institutional set up of american k-12 education, which just does not lend itself to national overhauls, however well or ill conceived. and i think that one of the so one of the things i like about this book, if you look at the index, the department of education, it comes up exactly one time. and i think that that is an accurate depiction of its place in the national landscape. i'd prefer federal education at prefer less federal education policy, frankly. but i that things like getting hung up on the department and and trying to get rid of it even

are in many ways a distraction from would a sensible educator agenda could be. and i think that conservatives liberal, as everybody is putting more focus on what goes on in localities because that's where the action is in the federal government provide too small a share of the funding of american education for it to drive the train when it tries to do it. what it finds is that states and localities get very creative in undermining and getting around those strictures. now. the exception to that, obviously, is ed, but sadly, yes, k-12 is very different. it's and i'm curious. so, you know, the dilemma in light, you know, casual observers may not realize that the biden administration is continuing to pursue loan forgiveness through different statutory attempting different statutory loopholes than it tried when it got shot down at the supreme court last year. they've put through new on

income driven repayment, which was supposed to be a fair shake for taxpayers and borrowers. that's going to cost taxpayers 500 billion over the next ten years of, you know, they're still impulses for conservatives. if conservative were to say, you know, if there was a conservative in a position of responsibility in 2025, one is to say we don't want to do too much out of washington. and the other is that we have to correct this stuff. how do we think about kind of the right response to that tension? i think that you you can correct a lot of things that the federal government should be undoing, damaging things that it does by or at least making its policies better. it just shouldn't have this idea that it's going to revolutionize and improve american education centrally, because that's that's just not going to happen in the attempt to pursue that goal is going to waste a lot of time and energy and probably produce other kinds of perverse consequences and, you know, you

sit on a school board in addition everything else you do, you know no man gets enough punishment in his life. so bless you. you know, we're wearing that hat. i mean part of this conversation, you know, weren't a d.c. think tank. so there is a tendency to talk about policy, whether or not it's a useful response to the challenge at hand. but when we think particularly about, you know, 14,000 school boards about the way these debates are playing out, what are conservative moves. and, you know, again, anybody fighting for some of these really broadly shared values, the idea that excellence is a good thing, that it's a mistake for california to try to eliminate advanced math classes for kids in grades 1 to 10. the idea that it's not racist to ask kids to show their work in math, some of these things which seem broadly broadly well-received. but in school districts they've become remarkably controversial in many cases.

how can parents or educators or citizens engage in a way that's going to feel constructive and actually move the ball forward? yeah. good. two things. one is just quickly on the federal department of. if if if one does if a department does have to exist, we should figure out what is what is the right role for it. so, for example, shouldn't there be disincentives to jersey for just simply lowering their proficiency score? the governor of oregon on a late friday saying it's no longer necessary to take the the high school exam to be able to graduate. so we should figure out what the federal department, if has to exist, what it should do proactively. and as far as running. so, yes, i ran for the local school board in my own hometown because. we started to see that we were not focusing on excellence. and there, you know, all sorts of activities around equity. and it was was actually it's a

great laboratory of democracy because at the local level, at least at our school board, it's not so much about conservative versus progressive. it's about what works for our kids, where we're neighbors, you know. you know, there's a lot of issues for around transgender ideology now. and a few months ago had a 13 year old girl in a female locker room at a you know, at an athletic event and suddenly a guy walks in and that was problem medic. and so this girl walks out and and the feedback that she got is that well this thinks that he is of a different gender and so your options were you know go change in the stall. but when most parents heard about that they said that doesn't make sense. we can be sensitive to the the concerns of this man but maybe there are other solutions like

creating changing areas. i use it as a simple example but it didn't become this huge battle ideologically. it's just what's the practical solution for our kids? and that's why education is so powerful because i think when you get closer in neighborhoods what works for kids, what do parents want? you know, most parents are choosing schools based safety, right? geographical proximity, you know, is are the teachers decent. so i think sometimes we get so caught up in a lot of the political ideology we forget that most parents just want their kids to have a good shot at good, decent education. and in a couple of times mentioned equity sounding like it's, you know, like you flagged that it's a problematic. are you antiquity? what do you mean by that? well, equity in practice, like the way the folks the proponents of equity will usually use the

definition like, well, equity equity is just every kid gets what they right. that's a very benign definition when truly that's what equality of opportunity means that equality of opportunity means you get differentiated instruction or supports so that you can now compete on an equal playing field. right? that's what equality of opportunities in practice, equity means. you're no longer looking students as individuals you're just looking at them as avatars of their race. so, you know when when you know that you're fighting for equity because there's inequity between different demographic groups, right? so if there's differences between the reading scores for black students and white students, that difference be due to structural racism. and so therefore, we need some top down solution that equity that that forces that levels the playing field. i mean, in san diego this literally happened they did an analysis and they found 20% of black students were got failing

grades in san diego, 7% of white students got failing grades. and rather than look at the performance of the 80% of black students that were doing passing or the 3% of white students that were passing, they said that 13 percentage point difference means structural racism. and we've got to look at these black kids. they do homework, you know, their lives so terrible. so guess what? in the name of equity, let's remove the requirement to submit on time for all hundred 10,000 kids in the san diego school system. so typically, equity mindset is, usually one focused on leveling the playing field or leveling group outcomes in such way in which you're diminishing standards. so you're not treating folks as individuals. it leads to things like just eliminate the the de blasio in new york wanting to eliminate the specialized high school exams. it's absolutely horrible.

most children. amy, you know, obviously the the call for equity is something that see in every state, state equity plans, the rest, the federal department education directives on this. be curious your thoughts, but also, you know, one of the things you talk about is a need for excellence and rigor. we talk about this strictly in k-12 and college instance. not everybody is aware that we actually have many of the same challenges still. you know, the folks who study this, the survey data that students are only doing about half much work as they were 34, 30 or 40 years ago in college full time students. students are also less while they're in college. we've also seen massive grade inflation in college. so you see less work higher grades. the anecdotal accounts from professors about, the difficulty of setting expectations or demanding on time work just to fill up chronicle of higher ed or inside higher ed. when you look at the virginia university system, which is nationally renowned, are these

problems evidence? how do you go about addressing them? so part of the i love this job that i'm in is i get to work in the whole system because these are related issues across k-12 and in post-secondary, because we've lowered our standards, our kids are not ready to on and do college level work and we have now changed all of our admissions requirements in the name of equity. and so we have tons of people going through our college systems are actually not capable of doing college level work. and yet in the name of having a fair shot, we're doing that and we're pouring millions, if not billions of dollars into then trying to do remedial asian at age 20, 21, 22, 28, rather than doing the hard work when we should be doing, which is in early childhood education and in elementary school and. if we would focus on that, that is a core for me is let's this smart and do it the right way. and it's the right way for everybody. but what we're seeing is we're trying again to have more transparency about what's happening. a couple of things. we, the governor meets every

single and i meet every single quarter with all of our 15 presidents of our four years and representatives of our 23 community colleges. that's never been done before. and part of it is a ceo to ceo and saying our college really matters to prepare people for a vibrant virginia and that we have to get this right. and we know we also need to be leading state. our goal is for attracting, growing and retaining talent because we all know the race for talent is on. and so we're going to grow own. so we have a really strong system. that being said, there's great upheaval is happening and there's going to be lot of change. and i think that virginia is in a really strong position to on that change. so we are embracing transparency and accountability in a whole new way in higher education. one of the calls that the governor has made to all the is for them to play a more active role and to take it on as part of their mission, to work in partnership with to ensure that they are doing work in partnership to prepare students

to actually get into their institutions to do college level work that like that should not be revolutionary. and yet it is not. throw out one statistic in virginia and this is have data i said council of higher education 10% of our first year students in our colleges and our public colleges do not persist on to second year of 10% of students that don't persist. 40% of them have debt of $10,000 or more. just think about that life changing debt. as an 18 year old, a 19 year old. that's immoral we are lying to people about their readiness. and i would claim we've been doing this in education all levels. we are letting people that and telling them that they'll be ready and they'll catch when they won't. and then we are sat selling them with debt and with opportunity. and that is the exact of what we should be doing with education. so what we're trying to do in virginia is to get greater transparency. we are trying to very much bring back definitions and an applauding of merit and, saying

we are going to start asking our institutions to start using measures of of college readiness. it matters actually, say, and to send a message the system that it hard work matters and excellence matters and achievement matters and that we're going to make. sure, we're signaling that at every single point in working, we also we're going to rethink of our advanced work in gifted and talented programs, following up 40 institutes done with their great work on gifted and talented and making sure that also our colleges are working in partnership with our school divisions to do a better job of identifying students who have traditionally have not identified as being capable of doing more advanced earlier on. so that we make sure that our virginians situations look like virginia. not because we've changed the goalposts. but our students are ready for the rigor of college work. and my last thing i'll say is and no one that knows me will be surprised. we took a compliance exercise called the six year planning process in higher education which traditionally has been really a big fancy way to create

a biennium budget for higher education. and we turned into a true strategic planning where we literally created data packs of all the publicly available data. what's happening in our colleges, every one of our institutions. and so i you to go onto the state council for higher education on our website and you can look see an overview of where virginia in a comparable way across every one of our institutions on inputs in terms of looking at the changes in cost, the cost that is being spent on administration what's being spent in the classroom but also in my mind, equally, if more important on outcomes for the time ever, you can go on to a single website in virginia and find out the top 20 programs of study in every institution and find out what percentage of students are getting jobs in the industry which they prepared at what wage over ten years time, but also the labor market in virginia values. the graduates of that program, we're trying to do a better job of create of really reinforcing the connection, earning and learning and. as i said earlier, it's not just

about getting a job. there's a lot of other good things we can talk about in terms of free inquiry and democracy and civics and all those things. but one of the key things is we're preparing people well to fit the over production of degrees and, folks that don't have those and aren't in jobs that require them. we've got to talk about this because the debt levels are huge and the amount of money we're spending on higher education and not getting results that are our our commonwealth deserves and our states deserve is a major, major issue. ramesh, our colleague levin did a terrific national review piece probably last year on how the right what would do well to think about itself as a party of parents. you've written about, you know, the promise of new programs launched at state universities as new centers for study of virtues and civics and western civ. when you think about what looks like to put stuff forward other than abolishing the department of ed, what are three or four

ideas that feel like they have traction that they actually could go somewhere that they could actually make a difference and start of change? it's starting to change some of the expectations norms. well, the the simplest way to get that is just flip randomly through the pages of the book and you'll you'll find such ideas. i do think that the of creating new centers in universities to try to disrupt the idealized monoculture that too many universities have become is a promising. we are seeing that effort take off as well. i think it makes a lot more sense. the idea of trying to sort of regulate faculty behavior so that they will sort of, you know, provide multiple points of view when they're all overwhelmed singly on one side of these debates. i'm not saying that such regulations are wrong, but i just don't think that this is a

strategy that can actually work. i do think that is the school choice efforts that are that are that are underway in different states. i don't mean to suggest that the that i don't share the enthusiasm for those efforts, because i do think that is a kind of sclerotic tendency in the public schools that to be taken on. but more broadly, i just think that there's an opportunity that was brought us by this horrible plague of covid that has that is opened up possibilities partly by people out of complacency about the school system saw got to got a better parents got a better look inside the schools and what was happening in them than they had previously had an a lot of people saw that these

were not built to prioritize the needs of students and parents, but they were responding to other priorities entirely. that, i think, is what has made the school choice revolution possible. and i think it creates an opportunity for us to just take a fresh moment to, say, you know, is working to go to jail, do something that was talking about the fat burning glass study think suggests that our entire k-12 education system is really working as intended for about a sixth of all of our young people. right. the archetypal success story that our system is designed to create is the kid who graduates school, goes to college, gets a college degree, and then gets a job that requires a college degree. well, that is the experience of the of one sixth of our population. and it's the one sixth of our population that already has, in general, the most advantages and

is doing the best. is that where we to spend most of our money and need to ask ourselves those of big and systemic questions and then at work at the local level too, and in particular with higher ed at the federal level to see we can change that. if i could just jump in that. i mean, that goes to what matt said, the beginning, right? the education was for the elites originally and the system we've built is still for that elite track and we are failing all of these. so one of the things that we're trying to do in virginia is to break up this one size fits all. and the same expectation every child and instead say, do you make sure that we are providing a much clearer understanding earlier for families and students about the multiple ways to success and to be prepared for life, and that there's not one definition of what success looks like in this country. and we keep trying to fit everybody into the same elitist view of everybody needs to go get a fancy four year degree. and part of what we're trying to do is start making that expectation that every student should have the opportunity of doing post-secondary.

i also think this is part of the whole rethinking of the last few years of high school so that our of virginia that we're working on is ensuring that when you graduate from high school, you not only walk the stage with a getting a high school degree, but you also get an associate's degree. and she recognized credential some workplace experience and internships that you've been exposed to the world beyond school. you've had experience in the world beyond school walls. and if you're really have done something great, you've got expertise, something beyond the world of the school walls. you know, one of the things that just will be seared in my brain on my last is something when i was working at the national lines of business and trying to it was a campaign making academics count. it was about to get employers to use transcripts to send a message that how they do and in high school, an academic makes a difference. and to the rest of your life, to those messages of hard work and merit achievement matter. and there was a york times article on the campaign, and it was a quote from a young man who just graduate from high school and his comment was, if someone had told me, i needed to take

algebra to get a job, i would have taken algebra and think this is one of the greatest failings that we are doing in this country. and it's so simple. it's informing people. it's giving them information. it's sure people have, especially our youngest students and our families who don't know the rules and don't know the opportunity is that they have access to this information. that's where discrimination is, right. as some people get the memo, what you're supposed to do and some people don't. and we need to start making sure that we are communicating to everybody and making sure everyone understands that there's dignity in work. and there are there are many, many pathways to go and that our system right now why in the past talking about higher education it's no longer a pipeline. it's really about the fact that we're going to have to go in and out and get training and education throughout the life, as our world of work changes. and we need to prepare our students to how they how they get smart about doing that earlier and understand those pathways. this is information i can really use because i'm going to find that quote about algebra and

read to my daughter because because she is a skeptic on this point. aig case and believes in the intersection of policy and actual teenagers. let's go ahead. we'll take a few questions. as always, i'll ask a that you be kind enough. identify yourself. be that you it reasonably brief and see that you actually ask a question. if we get 15 seconds in and i can't spot a question coming, we'll give somebody else a shot. yes, sir. so i'm thinking about content. who are you? oh, my name is ben huff. i teach at randolph-macon college. i am really interested in civics education, and i'm wondering what we should call it because think western civ sounds kind of old and dusty and elitist and culturally narrow and the cutting edge of freedom today is in eastern europe and in asia in places like taiwan and kong.

but i'm not sure what else to call it. well, i'd love to hear what you think. citizenship education may be. i mean, i do think that there's there's a there's a point here in that to get back to what i was saying earlier, the point the k-12 system isn't to produce college students. it's to produce responsible adult citizens. and and so it's not just a question of this program, but really a question of, the entire mindset. you could call it american studies and try to take that back from the people who have stolen it and, i actually would try to lean to virtues based education. typically, you think about civics education, what comes to mind is participate in in the the extrinsic democratic do you understand the the three branches of government? do you voting the electoral process. all of those things leaping over the virtues upon which a

self-governing society depends. right. so we have more and more young people that understand this idea of courage justice, temperance, wisdom. those are the core human virtues for which a civil society is based. so sometimes i think we do ourselves a disservice when we say civics. in most people's minds, they're thinking about democratic institutions versus the intrinsic values and habits that we need to exhibit to a self-governing society. the other piece implied by the question is, you know, is it a problem that we are so nasal and navel gazing, our critiques of the united states that it's, you know, american history looks much more checkered if. you're not familiar with the millions slaughtered by stalin or mao or with the experience of, taiwan or eastern europe. so, you know, florida, for instance, now required of the victims of communism. is this the kind thing that we

ought to be pushing incorporate in the historic history and or citizenship instruction more? or does this feel like something that's just not going to make sense to, you know, most american parents, voters? i do worry about heaping too much response on schools and on instructors and when i was thinking about this, is this general story we've been telling, we've seen that as other. form eight forming, formative institutions have weakened more burdens, been placed upon the schools. and that was kind of revelatory for me during the pandemic was. all of the problems generated with the school meals program when the schools were down because of covid and was just revealed it was it was a kind of a moment of recognition me that our public schools are just places of instruction for so

many students. they're places for a meal that in many cases that the only place where they have adults them for any given amount of time. there's no religion allowed in them anymore. in place of religion, they receive a certain type of political education. right. so i as much as i agree with the decision put to incorporate the victims of communism material into florida textbooks, i am still very much worried that one, we're putting too much on the public schools and two, that conservatives will simply abandon them thinking that choice or these other structural reforms will an out when in fact as we know and as has been stated in this panel, most americans will continue to go to public schools and the most vulnerable are going to public schools. and we can't just let them we can't just pretend that that's not going to be a problem. so i would just again, commend the virginia standards, history and civic standards. thank you for being here from randolph-macon. we it's really hard to put

everything into standards. but i'm really proud of what we did because were able to capture the good and the bad in history. well, world history, we strength in civics education and topics at every single grade and i think is most important. the civics piece we didn't just talk about it as government. we talked it as personal responsibility. in addition to rights. and i think that is what is missing in american more than anything else. we about the rights. we do not talk about the response abilities. next question question. yeah. thank you. hi, paulette. i direct wheatley institute at brigham young university. i'd love your thoughts about accreditation and its role in this. do you talk about it all in the book? what began as sort of a private quality control system has become a government license cartel for.

you know, federal funds to flow. so just how does that play into thinking about potential changes? yeah, we are we do discuss it in the book and yeah, you know, first in steve leslie's post-secondary commission is an attempt to create a new model of accreditor which is actually focused on outcomes and earnings for students shouldn't be the model. i'm not sure, you know, an earnings based accountability is the best approach for every. but the idea you know, the way accreditation works today is it's basically a pay to play system in which colleges pay money to have the accreditors come out and then they count the books and they count the credentials. and after build enough stacks of paper and report them, you get the permission to spend a lot more federal funds and have your student take out a lot of federal money that doesn't get repaid under the new order. and yeah, this is a fundamentally broken cartel and

you know we argue in the book, you know, there is the conservative impulse is both to be hesitant to break things because things that have been with us for a while are frequently done so for a reason but conservatives are also very conscious of self-interest and the way in which self-interest entities will to engage in conduct that's necessarily good for the larger public. and i think you certainly see that in the behavior of unions and the education space and absolutely see that in some of these behaviors. the college cartel and particularly about around the use of college for hiring in ways really ought to be legally problematic. absolutely. next. yes, sir. behind you, sean. thanks. i'm ben world of ski visiting scholar at the university virginia, author of the career arts. the question is i love the mandate end it theme that if that is the where conservatives are going to go for rick's, you

know, look, do you have any concern at all that all of the concern about college wars, erosion of classical liberal principles on campus, that that is leading people on the right to have a real distrust, disengagement in college when there is really a very robust evidence base that the economic benefits of college, despite all the concerns about, debt and so forth, are really close to an all time high. the wage differential remains very high. a record number of americans have four year degrees. i there's a lot of disinformation out there. and is there a danger we'll get into a situation where the right says. nope, college isn't for the conservatives and they end up hurting a lot of people. ramesh well, yeah, i think that that one of the negative side effects of, the sort of thorough politicization of the universities that we have seen is that it encourages an anti intellectual ism on the right that is already in a certain sense encoded into our since, you know, certain skepticism and

suspicion of expert control is part of our creed. but it's also something that can be taken too far and and can become certain just kind of philistinism. so absolutely, i think that that is problem but it is a problem that can't be corrected just on one end. so you can't just sort of lecture conservatives that they shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater, although that's important to say. but you also have to reform these institutions so they don't simply look like sort of factory for leftism that are paid for by people who don't want to pay for that. i just would also say that there's. thank you for being here from uva that that the return on investment for post-secondary education and training irrefutable right it's getting it's more it's that but i argue that the evidence is getting less it needs to be a four year

degree. so one of the things that i'm really excited about is our community colleges. right. and we have some increased mobile data right now in virginia on a program called our workforce credential grant, which a skin in the game for student the institution and state to encourage people to go in and get short term credentials in the most intimate end areas and jobs that we cannot fill in virginia and it is a win win win. and what we're finding is right now over a year ago, enrollment in, those programs is up 20% in virginia. so talk about a working where we incenting to get the knowledge and skills that are most in demand in virginia. we can fill the jobs and keep the economy going. they're gaining the skills and we're finding is that people taking advantage of these of this program are, 25 to 65 year olds who have never had any interaction with higher education before. so that to me is about how do we start getting more creative about meeting the needs of employers of the state, and of individuals who weren't ready

for college at age 18. and, you know, the majority of people in college today. you know, again, elite view is everybody's 18 to 22 and they're going to frat parties right? that is not the majority of people in higher ed. we need to actually start changing that narrative and changing our public policy to catch up with the reality of who's going to school today. yeah, and and i'd say it's not hostility towards college. se it may be hostility to the idea that. college has to be the only option immediately out of high school. there's great studies on academies where again, students are doing a apprenticeships internships in high school or soon thereafter where they're getting credentials able to work for a few years. and the data is pretty amazing, especially for low income men who oftentimes end up going back to school a little bit later, more mature, a little bit of money in their pocket, much lower rates of non-marital births. right. because these men are have more of a clear purpose of what it is that they're seeking to accomplish. so i think that's part of it's not hostility towards college.

the the data is irrefutable but it's not the right answer for every student. certainly immediately coming out of high school. matt, i'm going to ask you to take a final question. you alluded a little earlier to bill bennett tenure as secretary of education. and bill, was, you know, magnificent using the bully pulpit among among his other gifts is we look forward. you were to point to one in conservative leaders, state official or national figure who has spoken of most effectively or most effectively on this whole bucket of issues over the last 30 or 40 years, or is there an individual two that you would point to as kind of a role model for folks trying to get this right? well i think the bennett department of education was extremely innovative and extremely effective using the bully pulpit as one of the things you can in the federal government in as well as break up the accreditation cartel. that would be on my to do list

for next conservative department of education. but. i would say bennett, i would say you we mentioned william f buckley jr got him in at yale. the other big conservative book on education was the closing of the american mind right. and alan blum and there to a focus on the content not not the structure of what are we actually teaching what do we expect of our schools and especially our institutions of higher education. and then finally, i think the foundation for individual rights and education has been doing incredible work. we haven't speaking spoken too much about viewpoint diversity, but it is interesting to me when you just take the two bookends of this story been telling their and got him in at yale in 1951 was an attack on academic freedom. and now so of the right and the efforts of institutions fire is to protect academic and to protect viewpoint diversity in order to continue to the

original mission of the university, which was the pursuit of truth. so i think we can look all of those figures as models follow in the years ahead. hey, thanks much. had i to thank the panelists for a terrific conversation.