Corey DeAngelis - Educational Freedom Institute Joins Houston's Morning News

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Right, Well, you may be true to your school, but
declining enrollment has more and more schools shutting down. Here,
experts believe declining public school enrollment could cause more districts
to close campuses. Certainly, locally, we have seen not so
much campus closures as much as we have seen the
school systems go from a five day a week classroom

(00:22):
to four days a week, you know, looking for ways
to cut costs. Corey de Angelis joined US Educational Freedom
is seeing how we brought that up. Let's tackle that
one first, Corey, do we have any data that tells
us whether or not a four day or a five
day school week makes a big difference in the education
of a child.

Speaker 2 (00:40):
It doesn't make much of a big difference because they're
not really teaching kids much to begin with. So when
you take a day away, they're not really losing as much,
but you are losing some of what you're paying for.
You're losing the time that you you know that the
kids spends at the school, so whether it's as your
curricular activities or otherwise. And but the big problem here

(01:03):
is that the property tax payers and the parents don't
get twenty percent of the money back if you're if
you're only getting you know, four days of services as
opposed to five days of services, you would think you'd
reduce some cost and some of that money would go
back into your pocket, but it doesn't. And this has
been tried in so many places across the country and

(01:24):
that hasn't really you know, improved academic outcomes or anything.
So you know, when when school's ultimately closed because of
so much enrollment being reduced, you know, that's that's a
that's a that's a feature, I would say, not a bug,
especially when you have something like school choice that just
passed in Texas. You know what I've said many times

(01:45):
before that when underperforming private schools do a bad job,
they shut down, and that's that's how markets work in
every industry. But when government schools do a bad job,
they typically lobby the government and say, well, we need
to get more money because we're failing. If you give
us more next time, we'll do a better job. And
that never actually works because it's throwing good money after

(02:10):
bad it's basically lighting it on fire, and the parents
get the short end of the stick when you don't
have choice, and taxpayers basically can never own their homes
because all of their property tax money is going to
fund school system. And we don't want to get in
Texas to be like places like Chicago, where they're just
a total dumpster fire. They've had schools get to like

(02:32):
three percent of their expected enrollment, so basically empty schools,
and they'll continue funding them for years and years. Like,
why are we funding these empty buildings? Well, it's because
the school system is a political apparatus that just employs adults.
It's become a jobs program for adults as opposed to

(02:53):
an education initiative for kids. And so it gets so
wacky when you don't have market pressures where they keep
these schools open even though they're not serving anybody well.

Speaker 1 (03:03):
To quickly ask you before we run out of time here,
the thing, the big beef I've always had with the
public school system is we are basically working the same
business model we've had since the eighteen eighties, and nothing
has really changed in how the public school systems are run.
So what point do we finally fail enough where people
finally decide it's okay to blow up the system and
start over again and try something different.

Speaker 2 (03:24):
Yeah, I think we've already gotten there. I mean, look
what happened with COVID, where it's just got so bad
that some of the schools they were refusing to open
their doors. It wasn't as big of a problem in
Texas because we had better leadership at the state level
to tell them, maybe you should provide the services that
people are paying for. But in states like you know,
California and New York, they were closed and families got
to see what was happening in the classroom. And we've

(03:47):
seen in undercover videos in Texas from groups like Accuracy
and Media that the problems aren't just you know, California
and New York. You have far left ideology in Texas
public schools too, gender ideology, divisive concepts, Marxist concepts like
critical race theory, pitting people against each other based on
their immutable characteristics. And a lot of parents said, you

(04:09):
know what, you know, I thought the schools were just
supposed to be focused on math, reading and writing. What
the heck are they doing? And so they pushed for
a school choice. We now have universal school choice in Texas.
It's rolling out next school year and everybody should go
apply for it. Starting at the beginning of February, applications
will start. You can take up to about ten thousand
dollars per student. You can get scholarships to go to

(04:31):
a private school if you don't like what's happening in
the public school.

Speaker 1 (04:34):
And all you have to do is find enough room
in a private school to have your kid go there. Corey,
thank you, appreciate it. Corey to Angelos Educational Freedom Institute.
It's five fifty seven