Ep. 53 "How to Get Academic Freedom without Defunding" - Guest Matt Beienburg

Competition almost always increases product quality. And it’s no different with education. Some see school choice as a nefarious attempt to defund public schools. Others see it as a tool to hype academic quality in all schools. Which is it? Today on The State of Education with Melvin Adams, Matt Beienburg shares how states can (and should!) enact policies that give parents the academic freedom and transparency they deserve for their families while not defunding public education. 

Resources Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

• Visit the Goldwater Institute and find a model policy you can use in your state to help get the school choice and academic transparency policies you want! https://www.goldwaterinstitute.org/
• See if your state measures up on the Education Freedom Report Card. https://www.heritage.org/educationreportcard/ 

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Transcript

ANNOUNCER: People often wonder if school choice hurts public schools. A frequent question is: “Won’t that school suffer if the funds follow children elsewhere?” Today's guest, Matt Beienburg, shows us how districts can have school choice and sufficient public school funding. As a proponent of academic freedom and transparency, Matt shares how his home state of Arizona has built a system that benefits families and cultivates strong educational quality. Keep listening to learn more about model policies you can use to help bring these qualities to your state’s education system! 

ADAMS: Our guest today is Matt Beienburg with the Goldwater Institute. I had the privilege of meeting him a while back and decided that I wanted to hear his voice, and wanted to let you hear his voice, on this podcast that we are launching today. 

  So the Goldwater Institute, one of its main statements when you go to the website, is “Empowering all Americans to live freer, happier lives.” Well, that’s a great positive statement and one that probably all of us would like to see them be successful in. 

But three areas that I see them focus on specifically are: Ensuring school choice for every child, fighting in courtrooms across the country, and passing laws in states across the nation. So, Matt, we are delighted to have you with us today in the studio for this episode of The State of Education podcast. 

BEIENBURG: Thank you very much for having me on. 

ADAMS: Absolutely, it’s our pleasure. So to get started, please tell us a little more about yourself so our audience will know who they’re listening to. And then from there, you can kind of go into how you became involved with the Goldwater Institute and really what you do right now to make a difference for educational freedom for America’s families. 

BEIENBURG: Sure! So again, Matt Beienburg, I’m the Director of Education Policy here at the Goldwater Institute. I’m a native of Arizona, so glad to be back here in Phoenix where we’re based. 

The Goldwater Institute, as you mentioned, is focused on free market principles and advancing them throughout the country, as you said. Both legislatively and through litigation as necessary. 

So my focus in education (that means both K-12 and the universities) so not only as a parent, but somebody interested in politics and policy, it’s a great area to be able to help promote reform and solve a lot of problems that are facing students in the country as a whole. 

A little bit of my background is I worked in the state legislative budget office looking at actual finances, nuts and bolts, and all the dollar signs behind a lot of the education policies since that’s so much of what things come down to.

At the end of the day, what matters is educating kids, but so much of the conversation, the debate, tends to focus on, “Are we spending enough? Are we not spending enough? Are we spending it in the right ways?” and so to have an understanding of that is, I think, kind of important in a lot of these conversations. 

ADAMS: Yeah. 

BEIENBURG: Especially, I think, in a lot of these conversations, We’ll talk about school choice and making sure those dollars can follow the students and so having the ability to engage with that is critical for a lot of these conversations. 

So that’s our area of focus: looking at school choice, things like ESAs, but also pushing back on indoctrination in the classroom, providing transparency for parents, and promoting civic education for students. So we’re trying to take all that and push it in a way that aligns with parents and families and make sure that students are the priority. 

ADAMS: Excellent. Well, sounds like we got a lot to talk about. So everyone understands that COVID brought the classroom right into the living room and now parents are wanting change in their schools. What are the biggest issues at stake for our children and their families? 

I’m coming at this from two perspectives. So for our children and their families as well as schools and the nation? So kind of focus on the family and individual and then the organization, the Institute, and particularly then the future of our country. 

BEIENBURG: Yeah, and I think you framed that in a great way. Which, so many people, particularly on the Left, tend to focus on the schools as if they are the end product of what we’re trying to do. 

Whereas the schools are there to serve the students and their families, right? And so I think the fact that you asked about that is what’s key. And you know, it comes down to the fact that we need to make sure that’s what’s happening. 

That’s literally the fundamental issue at play. It’s to make sure our education system is serving and meeting the needs of students. And, as you alluded to, during COVID we saw that completely inverted. Where students were essentially treated as an afterthought. 

Schools shut down to in-person learning, we saw governors like DeSantis and others who took flack from the Left to say, “You’re not prioritizing this institution, you’re going against the experts and what they’re saying.”

And yet we found out that the data has since indicated that it was correct that those students should have been in class and learning. And so I think it’s important. We’ve seen teacher’s unions and a lot of those activist groups who have divorced the emphasis of education from students’ needs. 

And so, I think, to your question, the most important thing is to say, “How can we meet the academic needs of our students?” Right? At the core, the purpose of our schools is to provide academic enrichment for our students. 

And that encompasses not only English, Math, Science, and all those critical courses in civics, but also ensuring that students are progressing in well-rounded character. That doesn’t mean a bunch of progressive ideologies pushed in there but make sure that the students can grow and be civically minded citizens who have an appreciation of the constitution and our system here. 

And unfortunately, we’ve seen so much that tends to leave that behind. So I think that’s something that we need to make sure is always priority number one: that we’re pushing opportunities for students first. 

And obviously, we’ve seen the recent data that came out from the NAPE scores, which is the Nation’s Report Card. Essentially, the US Department of Education does a survey that has confirmed that students’ academic trajectories took a huge hit in the wake of COVID and all this distance learning. 

So I think restoring that and ensuring that students are actually prioritized is number one. And looking at the schools in the system, it’s to ensure there is flexibility in the options that are available, right? We have historically had this issue of having established school districts. 

Arizona and other states have shown that almost a quarter of our public school students are now in charter schools. And so these are highly functioning, high-performing schools of choice that have different emphases. 

Some may be on classical education, some may be on STEM, and allow a vibrant mix of schooling options. And to ensure that these same sorts of opportunities exist throughout the country. 

Because unfortunately, there are a lot of states with hardly a handful of such operators. And so the only schools you have are whatever happens to be your local district offering. 

ADAMS: That’s true. It seems like we would know this intrinsically, but the whole idea of focusing on our kids and our families… but what about the schools and systems? You mentioned different options. But a lot of people are concerned. 

They think that if you create choice, it’s going to destroy our school systems. And that’s a question I’d like you to dig into for just a moment. The other side of that is how important is what’s going on in education right now to the future of our country. 

BEIENBURG: Sure! Well to your first question, does having opportunities somehow sabotage the public school system? Is that going to hurt it? The Stanford Opportunity project has actually gone through there and looked at some of this national data over the last 20 years to see how students are doing in different learning environments, different districts, and different states. 

They found that Maricopa county, which is the county that Phoenix is in, a large urban county, has essentially the highest growth, particularly for low-income students, anywhere in the country, right? 

And so what we’re seeing is Phoenix, which is one of these hubs of school choice, actually tends to promote better outcomes. And the rationale for that is not so surprising, right? If there are more options, it says, if you’re a school provider, kids don’t have to go to you unless you are performing, right? 

So if you’re offering a good product, you’re offering a good education, students come to you, and the school gets that funding. If not, they’re going to go somewhere else. Whereas if you’re a monopoly and you’re the only game in town, you have no incentive to provide a better education. You have no incentive to bring in stronger leadership or to make sure your teachers are supported. 

All these things don’t exist if there’s a single player. And that's where I think that Arizona is a model to say, “This is a win-win. This provides opportunities for students, provides flexibility, but also improves the overall health and integrity of the education system.” 

And then to your second question, I think it’s foundationally important to the future of the country, right? I mean, you have quotes from Raegan and others about freedom only being a generation away… you know, we have to make sure that the next generation is taught things like math, English, and reading, but to also have an appreciation for our founding principles. 

That is something I think our public school system has largely failed to do. Again, the data there shows it’s about 1 in 5 students who are proficient in things like civics and history, right? We are failing our kids in a lot of these ways. And it's essential that we begin to prioritize these things again. 

ADAMS: Absolutely, I couldn’t agree with you more. And it is interesting, with the laws that were passed in Arizona here just this year, and Arizona has the most… I’m going to use a word that the Left uses all the time… the most progressive education freedom laws that any state has right now. Tell us about that process. 

BEIENBURG: Sure, so about 10 years ago the Goldwater Institute helped promote the idea of education savings accounts, or ESAs here in Arizona. And it essentially says that instead of the focus being on an institution, the focus is going to be on students.

And so instead of having the state of Arizona or any other state, spend what it’s going to on a public school student, which in Arizona, for reference, is about $13,000 per public school student each year. 

So instead of taxpayers spending that $13,000 to send a student to a public school, if the family thinks maybe their student would fit in better somewhere else, the state says, “We’re going to give you a portion of what we otherwise would have spent sending you to that public school. We’re going to put it into an account just for your student and now you can use that for any kind of educational purpose.

“Whether that’s tutoring, textbooks, private school tuition, special needs therapies, whatever educational use is going to best serve your student. Now you as the parent and the family can direct it there.” 

And so this program started in Arizona back in 2011-2012 and was open just to a subset of students in the state. So students with special needs, then it was expanded to include kids from military backgrounds or the foster care system, but it was still only open to about 1-in-4 students. 

And so this past legislative session, Representative Ben Toma from the House of Representatives here in Arizona, and Governor Deucy, and the folks on the legislature here in the Capital essentially put forward a plan and got enacted a universal expansion of this ESA program. 

And it says every student in the state, regardless of their income, or background (it doesn’t matter where you live), has nothing to do with you checking one box or otherwise. You as a student, just like you have a right to go to a public school, now have a right to, if you prefer, opt into this ESA program. 

So that says, “We have now made school choice universal for Arizona students.” Everybody qualifies if you’re a K-12 student. You get to choose what’s going to work best for your student.

So that’s in addition to our robust charter program. We’ve got ESAs that serve students who want to do at-home education, who want to go to a private school, who want to do micro-schools, pods, all these things. Arizona has made itself, like you said, very forward-thinking in terms of being a laboratory of opportunity for these students. 

ADAMS: That’s excellent. There’s a lot of language that’s been used around school choice. It was always called school choice and some of us are trying to get away from that language because it’s had successes and failures through the years, and the tendency to think school choice means, “I get to choose what school I’m going to put my child in.” with the concept that the funding is going to follow the institution anyway. 

And so that’s been the classic thing where, wherever the parent decides to put their child, that’s where the funding goes: to the institution. But I think with the shift that’s going on now in policy formation, it’s where the money follows the student, not the institution. Is that correct? 

BEIENBURG: That’s right! Yeah, and as you said, we’ve seen different versions of this throughout times where you may have the funding that follows the student to a certain school district or a certain charter school—something like an ESA. 

It says it’s going to a student and they now can use it towards textbooks or towards tuition. Those funds exist for the student. Now we’ve already seen things like health savings accounts… a lot of these policy ideas that already existed and have been fairly successful now apply to education too, exactly as you said. 

This is individualizing it for the student. It’s not about a particular institution or a particular brick-and-mortar facility. 

ADAMS: Okay, that’s great. Well, we’ve certainly seen lots of momentum in the last couple of years, particularly in this area. Numbers of states are involving this new kind of process. West Virginia recently passed some pretty significant changes that are very expansive for them. 

And then of course the signing that you guys did just this past year, you took the lead again in that whole situation. But this is being promoted now across the country in many, many states. 

I’m in Virginia and I know that’s a big focus for 2023, is to start making progress toward these education savings accounts where the funding follows the student and that gives more say to the parent.

We’re excited about it because we believe that more choice creates competition. And when we see competition, a basic free market enterprise concept, the bottom line is the providers have to compete for the market. They have to have a superior product, they have to have a lower price. 

They have to have various qualifiers that make the customer go to them. Whereas, when it’s a total monopoly, there’s no initiative to bring any real changes. That’s how here in Loudoun County over the last year or so we heard people saying that parents are just the troublemakers and that really started a major movement here in Virginia. Most people know that.

So you are based in Arizona, but you have a nationwide thrust, a nationwide impact that you’re working on. So what specific actions are you taking right now to advance the concepts that you’ve gotten through in Arizona and across the country? Where are you seeing success? Where are you seeing heavy pushback? 

BEIENBURG: So we are, as you mentioned, not only focused here in Arizona but around the country. And so we try to get reforms passed here and also using the system of Federalism that says each state is going to get to kinda decide what policies work best for them, to help them try that. 

So whether it’s promoting school choice, educational freedom, ESAs, this idea of funds following the student, also initiatives such as academic transparency that I alluded to that says we think that any parent in any state should materials are being used to teach their student. 

Whether that’s a list of the instructional materials, the lesson plans, or whatever it may be. And then also pushing back at the higher education level on a lot of the mandates that tend to be very Left-leaning: ones that prevent student free speech or faculty free speech. 

Of course a lot of this forcing CRT, DEI type of content on students. And so we have been working with partners in other states to essentially help provide some of this research and information but also provide model policies. 

So we put out model legislation, for instance, that helps legislators in any state take this and say, “I would like to implement this idea of educational freedom or academic transparency.” 

Or making it where their faculty don’t have to swear a loyalty oath to CRT or diversity, equity, and inclusion in order to get hired, right? So we put out this content, we work with partners in other states, and we help those ideas advance so they can take root across the country. 

We do see pushback. You know, essentially in all 50 states where the unions tend to be a dominant force and they oppose these things in almost every instance. 

Something like ESAs, you know, it took 10 years to get from Arizona being the first state in 2011, to know universal education savings account eligibility. So these are very much a process. 

We’ve gotten legislation, such as campus free speech, passed in several states. We’ve gotten policies even outside of education passed. Various things get passed at the state level, some of which get picked up at the federal level. 

So we’ve been able to help promote a lot of these ideas. Again, with the focus on free market principles and in this case of education to ensure that kids are going to have access to what they need, they’re going to have access to information, and that our education system doesn’t become a political tool of the Left to promote radical agenda.

ADAMS: That’s interesting, that last statement you just made. Because I don’t know a parent out there who doesn’t want the political initiatives and all the political stuff just pulled out of our schools. They’ve become increasingly weaponized through political ideology that’s being pushed right down into the schools. 

And whether it’s Republican, Democrat, Independent, or any other kind of political focus, when it comes right down to it, what parents and grandparents care about are their children. And they care about their children being taught well and being given those foundational concepts that are essential to thriving in today’s society. 

Reading, writing, mathematics, comprehension of history, and civics, all of these things that just were taken for granted were just part of what schools were about. But it doesn’t seem like that’s the case anymore. 

And so I think as we focus on these issues, it’s not a political thing. It’s almost an anti-political movement. Politics has gotten into everything and you can’t get it out fully. But the classroom should not be a tool of any political agenda to drive that ideology and indoctrination into our students. Is that where you guys are? 

BEIENBURG: That’s right. And of course, as you said, people are going to have a disagreement about what is political or what is appropriate but everybody should be able to agree that students should be able to graduate and have an understanding of the mechanisms and the rationale for our system of government, for instance.

Instead of having a civics class and being taught to go be activists for a certain cause and take a particular stance on it, right? That’s very different. So I think as you said, parents want to cover the basics. 

You can have certain issues brought up that may have controversy. You should provide the ability for those students to tackle those issues and not just be given talking points for the teachers’ unions or from the Left. But to be able to wrestle with that. 

And again, that’s where the idea of academic transparency comes in and says, “Look, we’re not going to try to arbitrate everything that you must teach, but you should be open about it.” So the parent can see that you’re teaching a unit on X, why does it look like it’s all stacked with this sort of research? 

Instead of saying this is a comprehensive, honest, full view of history as opposed to a kind of niche Left-wing ideological perspective that’s being used. So I think you’re absolutely right. Parents don’t want that and so we’ve seen a lot of parents who have opted for school choice and options outside of the system. 

They’re dissatisfied with it. A lot of families are pursuing home education. So we’ve essentially looked at this and said, “Look, we think these are two prongs that are related: having the opportunity to go to a school that’s going to serve you better but also having the information available to help make that choice.” 

And so even in states like Arizona where we’ve now passed ESAs, we still have parents who default to going to their neighborhood school district. But if those school districts aren’t forthright about what they’re teaching, those parents may opt into it and say, “Well this looks like a perfectly fine option.” 

And then their kids come home with a bunch of content in their backpacks and suddenly they’re stuck with this dilemma of, “Gee, this isn’t what I was sold on, but I don’t want to pull my kid away from their friends and established environment.”

So we said, “Look, parents should be able to have this information before they have to make an enrollment decision. They should able to go online easily and see the material that’s taught.” Is it a bunch of left-wing content or is it good, solid material that’s historically accurate or not? 

So we think that students and parents need the opportunity to go to the schooling environment that’s best for them and to be equipped with that information. We think these are two fights. 

And we’ve had national partners such as Heritage who’ve come out with their Education Freedom Report Card. They actually ranked each state and two of their measures are whether or not the families have access to things like ESAs and whether or not they have robust academic transparency or are working toward that. 

ADAMS: Yeah, that’s important because if you don’t know what the school is delivering or promising, it’s like if you’re buying some good at Walmart, for example, there’s something there that you can read about it and what it’s going to do and not going to do and then you make your choice about whether that’s what you need and want before you buy it. 

And the same thing should be happening in our schools and so that’s a very significant point. Now I want to ask you a question here. I’ve asked this question to a lot of different people and I get a pretty consistent answer from people who know something about it. 

But the question that we so often hear, particularly from people who are part of the government school system and basically are using the talking points of their unions and so forth. And when I say that, I’m not trying to belittle in any way, but that’s where we’re seeing this point. 

And that is every time you take dollars away from your public school, you’re ensuring the failure of that public school. Because every time you take a student out, you’re pulling dollars away and you’re finishing off the school. Is that true? Is that something you’ve seen in Arizona or other places? Or what are you seeing? 

BEIENBURG: Well, it’s an effective talking point, right? To try and say, “Hey look, if you’re going to have school choice it’s going to harm other students or the school.” And this idea about the finding not going there…

Well, what that side tends to want to sweep under the rug is the fact that we’ve essentially doubled education funding. If you look at it nationally, even adjusting for inflation, the funding for K-12 schools has dramatically increased over the past several decades.

We always hear about funding cuts and not enough funding for the schools. They’re getting dramatically more funding than they did in the past and yet we’re not seeing improvements in academic achievement. 

So this argument that says you’re going to have funding leave a school… Every year, even this year with universal ESAs in Arizona, public schools got hundreds of millions of dollars (almost a billion dollars) of new funding for public schools. 

So the legislature said, “We’re going to do both. We’re going to allow families to choose where they go and we’re going to give public schools more funding.” So yes, you’re going to have students who, if they opt out of a school, they’ll take their funding with them out of that district and go to an ESA. 

But that district at the same time is getting millions of dollars plowed into that same school system from taxpayers, right? And so it’s pretty disingenuous to argue that they’re being destabilized by programs like the ESAs that serve a small fraction of kids. 

And to somehow argue that this is not sustainable. When at the same time, their funding, every single year, goes up. We never hear, “How much is enough?” “What is the dollar amount at which point you would finally say, ‘Yes, we have the resources that we need, now we just need to steward them more effectively’?”

Instead, it’s always, “We need more funding.” And any opportunity to push that narrative is, I think, their goal. So again, it’s an effective talking point. It’s not what we’ve seen. Even in Arizona, again since we’ve passed ESAs, our per-people funding in Arizona for our public school system, adjusted for inflation, has gone up has gone up about $1600 per student. 

That’s at the same time that we’ve gone from 100 kids in the ESA program to over 10,000 this past year. So these can exist in parallel. Just like the charter schools, right? Any time a kid goes to a charter school, they’re not funding a district school. That funding follows the student there. 

We have a quarter of our kids in charter schools and yet we’ve still seen our district schools increase in terms of their per-people funding. And so yes, it does require some management and leadership on the districts to… we’ve seen a lot of poor decisions there about the way they’re spending their resources. 

And I think that’s part of the conversation about saying, “Let’s make sure that the dollars you are getting actually get into the classroom, get to teachers, and are used for the benefit of students. Not for administration and bloat.”

ADAMS: Yeah, that’s a big point, absolutely. Well here’s the other side of that, and that’s the message I’ve been hearing consistently from people that are in that space and actually tracking what’s going on, is that you can have both and it’ll work both ways. 

So it’s not really people losing money, everybody’s getting an increase. But here’s the other side of it. The state schools have the opportunity of getting both the increase and the increase of that student with their enrollment in their school if they will compete effectively for that student. 

And so it’s not really taking anything away. What it’s doing is creating more initiative for all school systems and options to compete effectively in the marketplace of students and those who do well and those who satisfy the customer, they’re going to do very very well. 

BEIENBURG: That’s right. And we have some areas even here in Arizona, we have some school districts where there are almost no charter schools near them because the families are very satisfied with the high-performing public district schools. 

And so there’s just not a demand for that. Whereas in other parts of the state, even in middle or higher-income districts, we can see these are schools that can’t argue that they’re underfunded in any meaningful capacity, right? They have plenty of funding. 

We’ve seen some of the district superintendents say with the COVID dollars, it’s terrifying how much they have to spend with this flood, this avalanche, of COVID funding. And yet, there are charter schools and private options all over the place because parents are not satisfied with ineffective leadership and academic offerings. 

And so you’re absolutely right. These schools can get higher funding per student and if they actually compete, keep those students. And then those parents don’t have the incentive to know that they’re going to get a quality and academically enriching education. 

So I think you’re right. It’s a lot of talking points from the Left, a lot of these are folks who send their kids to private schools or schools of choice. And then when they get called on as essentially being hypocrites, they say, “Yeah, but I paid to send my students there.” 

So now they’re just making an argument that as long as you have the funding, you should be able to buy your way out of a mediocre public school system but everybody else should be stuck there. That’s just not a particularly compelling message when taxpayers are on the hook to send students to mediocre public schools because that’s all that’s being offered. But then Left-wing politicians buy their way into a different option. 

Which we think that every student, every family, should have access to send those dollars to whatever provider it’s going to be. Whether it’s public or private. Whatever’s going to best suit the needs of that student. 

ADAMS: Well that’s great. So where can our listeners learn more? 

BEIENBURG: We have a website, goldwaterinstitute.org, we’ve got various policy papers on ESAs, academic transparency, and a lot of these issues, so they can visit that and find out more information and hopefully help bring some of these reforms to states across the country. 

ADAMS: Excellent. Matt, thank you for taking the time to join us today. We appreciate your work, we appreciate you joining us, and God bless you! 

BEIENBURG: Thank you very much for having me!