The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
Thu, 13 Mar 2025
Jordan Peterson sits down with bestselling author, commentator, and researcher, Dr. Corey DeAngelis. They shed light on where 50% of all state budgets are spent, the surprising stack of monopolies that strangleholds public education, the partisan lies surrounding school choice, and the truth every parent needs to know: school choice uplifts all students. Dr. Corey A. DeAngelis is a senior fellow at the American Culture Project and a visiting fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research. He has been labeled the “school choice evangelist” and called “the most effective school choice advocate since Milton Friedman.” He is a regular on Fox News and frequently appears in The Wall Street Journal. DeAngelis is also the executive director at Educational Freedom Institute, a senior fellow at Reason Foundation, an adjunct scholar at Cato Institute, a board member at Liberty Justice Center, and a senior advisor at Accuracy in Media. He holds a Ph.D. in education policy from the University of Arkansas. He is the national bestselling author of “The Parent Revolution: Rescuing Your Kids from the Radicals Ruining Our Schools.” This episode was filmed on February 28th, 2025. | Links | For Corey DeAngelis: On X https://x.com/DeAngelisCorey?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor Read his most recent book “The Parent Revolution: Rescuing Your Kids from the Radicals Ruining Our Schools” https://amzn.to/4h3wAeK
Chapter 1: What are the monopolies affecting public education?
So there's a geographic monopoly and there's a state mandated monopoly because you have to send your kids to school.
And then there's a teacher certification monopoly. And that trickles down from the university level into the K through 12 system.
The findings were less pregnancy, less crime and higher probability of graduating.
I'd also say on the teenage pregnancy thing, we found a reduction in crime, but also a 38% reduction in paternity disputes, which could be caused by out-of-wedlock births or teenage pregnancies. Another separate study in New York City was a charter school experiment.
They found that winning a lottery to go to a charter school in New York City decreased the likelihood of crime for male students by 100%.
Republicans don't have a hope in hell of ever winning the culture war if they allow faculties of education to maintain their hammerlock on teacher certification. Everything else, as far as I'm concerned, it's blowing in the wind.
Thank you.
Hello, everybody. I'm speaking today to Dr. Corey DeAngelis. He has a PhD in education policy, which under normal circumstances wouldn't necessarily be a good thing. But he graduated from the Department of Educational Reform at the University of Arkansas, and that's one of the rare schools, maybe the singular schools, that isn't terribly bloody Marxist in its fundamental orientation.
With, you know, a smattering of incompetence thrown in there just for good measure. I've been following Dr. D'Angelo, Corey, on X for a good long time. He's one of these one-man wrecking balls, one-person wrecking balls, like Layla Micklewaite, who's fighting the good fight against Pornhub, and Robbie Starbuck, who's a complete bloody army guy.
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Chapter 2: How does school choice impact student outcomes?
for many people in the United States. In any case, we delved into the rationale for school choice from the free market and libertarian perspective, but also from the perspective of parents' rights. I suppose a cardinal question of our time is, well, just whose children are they? And I think the right answer to that question is,
children should be watched over by those who have their best interests most firmly at heart, and that's inevitably going to be parents. And so it's in this service of children that parents have the right to determine the educational pathway that they can pursue.
And even though parents might not be able to do that on their own, because educating children is a difficult job, they're certainly in the best position to make intelligent choices about the direction to take if those choices are available to them. And so Corey's been working very hard on making that possibility a reality for parents. And so that's what we talked about today.
Well, Dr. DeAngelis, hey, I got to make sure I'm pronouncing that exactly right.
Am I pronouncing that exactly right? Yeah, DeAngelis like Los Angeles, but I'm not a real doctor. I'm more like a Jill Biden doctor. Got a PhD in education policy. Oh, yes. Where from? University of Arkansas. I see. When did you get that? Pretty recently, actually. Well, I'm getting older now. It's 2018 or so. I got the PhD. And I studied school choice policy. How come you didn't get brainwashed?
I didn't. It was actually the Department of Education Reform. So 99% of education PhDs are Marxist institutions. Yes. This one was housed in the College of Education, but not a lot of people liked us there because it was the Department of Education Reform. Just the very name of the department implied that we're trying to shake things up to try to improve the education.
99.5%.
Yeah, definitely. The rest of them are socialists. Yeah, yeah. Okay, and so how did that institution come to exist, and why does it still exist?
I think it originally was funded by a grant from the Walton Family Foundation, and it still exists. There's professors there. My advisor is named Patrick Wolfe. And the Journal of School Choice is actually housed in that department. And Patrick Wolf did a lot of the early evaluations of voucher programs, like in D.C., for example.
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Chapter 3: What role do teachers' unions play in education?
I mean, just imagine if you had to shop at a government grocery store that you were assigned to based on where you lived and they had empty shelves, no food. And when they did have food, imagine if you got food poisoning where it was expired.
And if you wanted to go somewhere else, they'd tell you to go complain to the grocery board who wouldn't listen to you and would try to cut off your mic, which is what happens with the school boards right now. And if you had to just move houses to get access to a better grocery store, that would make zero sense.
Or if you had to pay twice, basically once through taxes for the government grocery store you're not using, and then again out of pocket for a grocery store that actually provided you with healthy food, that's what we have with the government school system today.
You cannot go somewhere else unless you pay twice, essentially, and low-income families are basically just screwed in the worst failure factories that we call public schools today. In places like Chicago, they have like 33 public schools with 0% math proficiency rates. And they spend about $30,000 per kid. And guess what?
Their teachers union boss, Stacey Davis Gates, she sends her own kid to a private school. She knows better than anybody else that their schools are not working for kids. And that's the main problem that I see. And everything else trickles out from that monopoly issue. They don't have an incentive.
There's a number of different monopolies operating that you just described. There's geographic monopoly, right? And that's a good analogy. So there's no competition. The problem with no competition is that when there's no choice, there's no real incentive to do the hard work that produces improvement. And there's actually no possibility even for comparison between different systems, right?
So without competition, you don't have any possibility of really head-to-head evaluation, and no necessary incentive for innovation. So there's a geographic monopoly, which you just described. You send your kids to the school that's in your location, and that's that. And then there's a state-mandated monopoly because you have to send your kids to school.
And then there's a teacher certification monopoly. And that trickles down from the university level into the K-12 system.
Right, right. Okay. And now, so you fundamentally concentrated, and does this include your doctoral research, you fundamentally concentrated on the issue of choice per se? Yes. And were you interested in choice as an economist might be interested in choice? Or why were you interested in choice?
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Chapter 4: Why is school choice important for parents?
The public schools are Marxist. We don't want gender ideology. We want schools that teach you that America is a great country, not a horrible country. And so you can make all these different types of arguments, but
When you go into a red state making blue state arguments, these lefty arguments, you might alienate some of the Republican legislators who might say, this isn't my issue, so I'm not going to lead on it. And then the Democrats, they're controlled by the teachers' unions anyway, so you're not going to make much ground with them
Regardless of the argument you're making, they respond to power, not logic. And then if you alienate the Republicans, we weren't really getting school choice passed in blue states or red states in a meaningful way. But now it's become more of a GOP litmus test issue. Voters have gone to the ballot box and held the Republicans accountable for being against school choice.
In Texas, my home state, we failed on school choice last year because we had 21 Republicans join all the Democrats in the House to kill school choice. And they came up with their arguments about how they were in rural areas and they didn't need to vote for this. But after the primaries, now 14 of them are gone. That was a political earthquake.
And now for the first time in Texas history, the House has 76 co-sponsors to pass a school choice bill. which has never happened, and you need 76 votes to pass a school choice vote.
What did you have to do with what happened in Virginia?
Well, in Virginia, we had Mr. Terry, I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach, McAuliffe on the debate stage. He was the former governor of Virginia, and he said that at the final debate. He was up in the polls by a lot. It flipped right after that because parents were pissed. Virginia closed their schools just about more than any other state.
They were as bad as California when it came to reopening the schools in Virginia. And Glenn Youngkin turned that into an opportunity. He laid out a blueprint for success for Republicans going forward. And Glenn Youngkin ended up winning that election by six points with education voters.
And that was the number two issue in that election, which is a big deal because education is usually at the bottom. Voters, they rank jobs, the economy, crime at the top. Education was number two. And a Republican won on that issue in
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