Ep. 283: Abolish the Department of Education

[00:00:06] If you're a California conservative, a libertarian, a moderate Democrat, believe in common sense, or just the sane person, this is the political podcast for you. It's the California Underground Podcast.

[00:00:27] What's going on, everybody? Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the California Underground Podcast. I'm your host, Phil. Along with me, as always, is the best and fastest researcher in the West. And tonight, we have a good friend of the show. He's been on before. We're glad to have him back tonight to talk all about education.

[00:00:44] We're going to be getting into the Department of Education, as we said in the title, should it be abolished? Our good friend, Lance Christensen. Lance, welcome back to the program. How are you?

[00:00:55] Lance Christensen, Lance, I am living the dream. It's been a good month, so I'm happy to be back with you guys and chat.

[00:01:00] Always good to have you on.

[00:01:02] Yeah, this was, Camille had texted me and said, I was talking to Lance about abolishing the Department of Education and he's going to come on the show this week. And I was like, oh, okay, sure. That sounds great.

[00:01:13] I think your response was wow.

[00:01:16] So I think the last time we talked to you was, were you running for superintendent, right, for California?

[00:01:22] Yeah. So in 2022, I think it's when we met and I had been in a pitched battle for superintendent of public instruction. It's a statewide constitutional office with the incumbent Tony Thurman. He ended up winning. I got 3.2 million votes, but in California, that's still not enough to put you over the finish line.

[00:01:44] And, but I met a lot of people and had a lot of incredible conversations about how inadequate government produced education is in California.

[00:01:53] And it's been a, it's been an interesting two years since that time to just watch how much it hasn't improved. And in fact, in some places has become worse.

[00:02:06] So what, what have you been doing since between those two years, what have you been up to?

[00:02:11] So while I was running, I was at the time presently, it was the vice president of California policy center. I did education policy and government affairs type work that built upon the 17 years.

[00:02:23] I worked in the state legislature and for a short period of time years ago for governor Schwarzenegger when he was in office.

[00:02:31] But California policy centers, a 501c3 educational nonprofit, or as some people call it a think tank.

[00:02:38] Our job is to consider public policy issues, complex ideas, and try to make life better for Californians in a free market sort of way.

[00:02:47] Uh, we focus a lot on government transparency, on government unions, on education policy.

[00:02:55] And, uh, while I was running for office, I was still doing that job full time.

[00:02:58] I was, it's kind of like having two full-time jobs.

[00:03:01] Um, and when I got done with that, I only had one full-time job.

[00:03:04] So, uh, still doing that, still producing a lot of writing and research on, uh, our inadequate education system in California and trying to move the needle.

[00:03:15] At the local school board level.

[00:03:17] And, and we can talk more about that, but I think that what we've done is we've concentrated too much power at the top.

[00:03:23] And we've forgotten that most of the real decision-making happens at the, at the basic level, the school district and the school sites.

[00:03:31] So I'm trying to talk about all that stuff.

[00:03:32] Can I could tell a really, really, really quick story?

[00:03:35] Because I have your pin for when you ran.

[00:03:39] Wow.

[00:03:40] Yeah.

[00:03:41] Now this, this all comes together.

[00:03:43] So I believe I want to say her name is Mary, Mary.

[00:03:48] Mary Barky.

[00:03:49] Yeah.

[00:03:49] Okay.

[00:03:49] So I met her at a screening of uncle Tom too in orange County.

[00:03:55] It was like July or August of 2022.

[00:03:58] And that's when you were running and she was wearing one of your pins.

[00:04:03] And I walked up to her and I'm like, I know that name.

[00:04:05] I'm still researching.

[00:04:06] Tell me, tell me about him.

[00:04:08] And, and so she was like telling me all the reasons why she loves you and she's voting

[00:04:13] for you.

[00:04:13] And she offered me one of your pins and she had, you know, she had a few.

[00:04:16] And so I took this, I still have it.

[00:04:18] I'm saving it forever.

[00:04:19] But that particular day, Phil had texted me that morning and asked me, will you be tuning

[00:04:26] into the show tonight?

[00:04:28] And he said, no, I have that screening for uncle Tom.

[00:04:31] Um, it was like a special, I had VIP tickets through a connection.

[00:04:36] And, um, and so that was like kind of important.

[00:04:38] I was taking my mom and he's like, Oh, I was going to see if you could co-host the show

[00:04:42] tonight.

[00:04:43] I was not on the show that night.

[00:04:45] And like, literally I had secretly wanted to go host the show forever.

[00:04:50] And then I like wanted to cancel.

[00:04:52] Like, I was like, Oh my gosh.

[00:04:54] Like, so it was like asking me to co-host the show and, and I have other plans.

[00:04:59] And I literally was like, I wanted to call my mom and be like, something better came up.

[00:05:04] But then it was funny.

[00:05:05] Cause I went that night and then learned more about you and was like, okay, this is definitely

[00:05:09] the guy that I'm voting for.

[00:05:10] That's awesome.

[00:05:11] The stars align.

[00:05:12] So now, yes.

[00:05:13] Now here we are.

[00:05:14] Now here we are.

[00:05:14] All three of us are on.

[00:05:16] Yeah.

[00:05:16] So yeah.

[00:05:17] Yeah.

[00:05:17] Um, yeah.

[00:05:18] I mean, we might as well jump right into it because we got a lot to talk about tonight.

[00:05:24] Obviously on the federal level, and we can talk about California as well.

[00:05:28] Um, we, before we hopped on, we were talking about, uh, how poorly California is doing as

[00:05:33] well in terms of education, but this has become sort of the new trending topic.

[00:05:38] Now that president Trump has been elected, uh, the idea of abolishing the department of

[00:05:44] education, it's something he has promised to work on.

[00:05:48] Um, I don't think it's as simple as him snapping his fingers, but, uh, you know,

[00:05:54] I've read some articles about how they can go about kind of dismantling the department

[00:05:59] of education.

[00:06:00] Um, but I think you would have more insight into what that would look like and what does

[00:06:06] that mean if we're getting rid of the department of education on the federal level?

[00:06:10] So a little bit of history on this.

[00:06:13] I actually spent a better part of last week, just researching this issue because there's

[00:06:18] been a lot of conversation and I've been a proponent for years, probably decades about

[00:06:22] getting rid of the department of education.

[00:06:24] Uh, it was one of these things where in 1979, uh, president, uh, you know, Jimmy Carter

[00:06:31] had promised the national education association with the largest teachers unions out there

[00:06:35] that he would ensconce in DC and official department of education to have a secretary and make it

[00:06:42] official.

[00:06:43] And so they passed laws in 1979.

[00:06:45] Well, of course, all that kind of came to pass as Ronald Reagan's coming into office afterwards.

[00:06:50] But what I found interesting was that's not the first department of education that happened

[00:06:54] in the country.

[00:06:55] Uh, there was a previous democratic president, Andrew Johnson in 1867 who had done the same

[00:07:02] thing, but it didn't last that long because everybody realized it was a bad idea.

[00:07:07] And so yeah, it existed for a short period of time and then they basically got rid of

[00:07:12] it.

[00:07:12] They had this office.

[00:07:13] And so it was in, you know, it was housed in different departments, department of interior

[00:07:19] and other places.

[00:07:20] And so when Jimmy Carter did it, this is as the federal government really is growing in

[00:07:25] terms of entitlements and in terms of, uh, you know, uh, bureaucrats and the bureaucracy

[00:07:30] is just massive.

[00:07:32] And as that's all happening, you have a department that will not go away.

[00:07:38] And so, uh, they of course have to bring things upon themselves and start piling responsibilities

[00:07:44] and programs and, and how do we help poor school districts and the such.

[00:07:49] I can understand the impetus to have a federal conversation about education.

[00:07:55] What I don't understand is how you can justify it through the constitution of the United States.

[00:07:59] There's nowhere in the constitution that talks about having education or education being a

[00:08:04] primary responsibility of the federal government.

[00:08:07] Right.

[00:08:07] Um, and in fact, it pretty much says, you know, all the things that doesn't are, aren't discussed

[00:08:11] in here should go back to the States and then to the locals.

[00:08:13] Right.

[00:08:14] So if you look at the whole department of education, it is a huge fiction that's created to support

[00:08:22] a mob.

[00:08:23] And the mob is the teacher's union.

[00:08:25] And there is no other reason to have the department of education except to hire 4,400 bureaucrats

[00:08:34] in Washington DC to tell everybody else what's to do, but not teach a single individual child.

[00:08:40] And so when president Trump comes out with, this is not original to him.

[00:08:43] This has been talked about for decades.

[00:08:46] Literally.

[00:08:47] Um, you are correct.

[00:08:49] It is not going to be a snap of the fingers and it's all done.

[00:08:51] There are some things you have to peel back and roll back.

[00:08:54] However, he has a mandate.

[00:08:56] And with the new Congress, both in the Senate and the house, I think they're going to move

[00:09:01] fast on some of these things.

[00:09:02] And when you've got a guy like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy who have said they're going

[00:09:07] to come in and dismantle the federal government, I can see some big changes happening fairly

[00:09:12] quickly in the 18.

[00:09:13] I don't want to say it was like the 1860s and the decades may be off, but in, in England,

[00:09:18] there was a problem with the corn laws they had, um, that were really impeding the ability

[00:09:24] for people to, uh, you know, agriculture and farmers and people to eat.

[00:09:30] Parliament came in and basically wiped out all the laws and started from scratch.

[00:09:34] And a lot of people said, well, you just can't do that.

[00:09:36] Well, they didn't.

[00:09:37] Guess what happened?

[00:09:37] Things improved dramatically.

[00:09:40] And if you look back a year ago or so, a year or so ago in Argentina, we had the same

[00:09:47] sort of experiment happen where Javier Malay came in as president.

[00:09:50] Basically he had that big, you know, thing where we're just going to rip all those departments

[00:09:53] away and we can't get rid of them.

[00:09:55] He did it, but he's like, no, it's going to take some time.

[00:09:57] Um, they have actually shown that the growth in Argentina is up to eight and a half percent

[00:10:04] growth, which is unheard of for a lot of federal governments.

[00:10:07] Their budget deficit is near the bottom lowest it's ever been.

[00:10:13] And the country's actually surviving.

[00:10:15] Uh, not to say that the department of education at the federal level in DC is going to have

[00:10:20] the same sort of simplistic, you know, deconstruction, but I honestly am in the camp that it's not

[00:10:26] that complicated.

[00:10:27] And if it really has to be, we can talk more about this too, about like, how would you

[00:10:31] do it?

[00:10:31] I would just simply say year one, year two, all the funding that goes into it's going

[00:10:35] to stay the same, not going to change.

[00:10:37] What we're going to do though, is we're going to block grant per, per kid in the schools

[00:10:43] to all the States, whatever money would have gone into the department of education and

[00:10:46] gone out of it.

[00:10:48] And then basically you turn it over to the state departments of education and you tell

[00:10:51] the bureaucrats there, we're not going to give you a raise.

[00:10:55] We're not going to, you know, prolong your contract in a year or two, you're gone.

[00:10:59] So you might as well find another job, but this can be done literally with an AI, uh, program.

[00:11:05] You plug in the money coming in, you plug in the money going out for, for two years, you

[00:11:09] just block grants, everything.

[00:11:11] And yeah, you wouldn't shut it down immediately.

[00:11:13] You could still work out the kinks and the other laws that are attached to the funding,

[00:11:18] but it would give you a runway to do it.

[00:11:21] That's not immediate.

[00:11:22] It doesn't happen in January or February of next year, but it also says to people, listen,

[00:11:28] we're not being careless here.

[00:11:29] We've just decided we're not going to do this stuff in DC anymore.

[00:11:32] You're going to have to take care of it in Sacramento, Salt Lake city, uh, you know,

[00:11:36] Austin, whatever capital you have, and it's not going to happen in DC.

[00:11:40] There was a article I was reading, uh, from the Washington examiner and it was a quote from

[00:11:45] Frederick M Hess.

[00:11:47] He's a senior fellow director of education policy for American enterprise.

[00:11:52] Smart dude.

[00:11:53] He described the department of education as quote, the department of education,

[00:11:56] extraordinarily bureaucratic creates extraordinary amounts of red tape for the nation's schools,

[00:12:01] especially relative to the money it actually provides.

[00:12:04] Um, he says that under the Obama by administration, the department's become a political entity

[00:12:10] frequently engaged in promoting particular ideological nostrums, which he calls massively

[00:12:15] problematic.

[00:12:17] Um, so it does, it seems like the department of education is not actually worried about education

[00:12:23] as much as it should be.

[00:12:25] It seems like it's more worried about forcing an ideology from the top down to schools in the

[00:12:31] States.

[00:12:32] Right.

[00:12:32] Are you even surprised?

[00:12:34] Yeah, no, not surprised at all.

[00:12:36] There was a futurist.

[00:12:37] His name was Jerry Purnell years ago.

[00:12:39] He wrote what he called the iron law bureaucracy.

[00:12:42] And I don't know if you've heard of this, but it's my favorite thing.

[00:12:44] He basically said there are two groups inside of bureaucracy.

[00:12:48] There's the people that believe in the end or the purpose of that bureaucracy.

[00:12:52] And the people in the second group is the people that believe in the bureaucracy itself.

[00:12:56] And in the end, number two, group number two always wins.

[00:13:00] And that's where we are right now.

[00:13:02] We're in the death.

[00:13:02] We're in the final death breathing of the department of education.

[00:13:06] It has not functionally been an education department at all.

[00:13:12] It's been a, uh, very much a treat and a treasure to the teachers unions.

[00:13:16] And so I actually wrote a piece this last week, again, when I was doing my research, basically

[00:13:21] trying to convince Democrats and progressives that getting rid of the department would actually

[00:13:26] further their goals.

[00:13:27] Right.

[00:13:28] If you have a quarter of a trillion dollars, which is how much money goes through the

[00:13:32] department of education every year.

[00:13:33] Now that's in grants and scholarships and other stuff too, but a quarter of a trillion dollars

[00:13:39] that doesn't have to go through the hands of 4,400 bureaucrats, you know, thousands of miles

[00:13:44] away, but it can go straight to you and your bargaining unit.

[00:13:47] Again, appealing to their senses.

[00:13:50] Um, why would you want, not want that more money coming to you?

[00:13:54] You know, and, and again, I'm not saying that we should waste that money or just throw

[00:13:59] it at the unions.

[00:14:00] What I'm saying is why would anybody justify a federal department of education at all when

[00:14:07] it doesn't produce any outcomes?

[00:14:08] And in fact, if you look over the last, you know, 40, some, almost 50 years that it's been

[00:14:14] in place, the, the decline in test scores is pretty, it's a pretty, uh, downward, fairly

[00:14:22] consistent downward trajectory.

[00:14:24] And so if more money, more federal intervention is supposed to improve things, right?

[00:14:28] No child left behind by president Bush.

[00:14:31] That's just, it's all gamesmanship.

[00:14:33] So why perpetuate that?

[00:14:35] Why not bring that money back to the locals and let the unions hash it out with her, their

[00:14:39] people in California, rather than argue with some bureaucrat who's going to give you pennies

[00:14:44] in the dollar instead.

[00:14:45] Well, that goes to two of my favorite, uh, principles that I stand by are localism and

[00:14:53] competition.

[00:14:54] And the idea that people closest to those constituents know what's best for those constituents.

[00:15:02] So the idea that someone in DC knows what Montana students need is crazy to me when people

[00:15:11] in Montana know what people in Montana need, or even, you know, filtering down farther and

[00:15:16] farther to school boards.

[00:15:18] And this idea of, well, if we just let, if we stop having a overarching department federally

[00:15:25] and let the States try out things on their own, it becomes this kind of like state laboratory

[00:15:33] where maybe one state tries a different way of doing education and it works really well.

[00:15:40] And the other States look at it and go, oh, that's working really well.

[00:15:43] Maybe we try it.

[00:15:44] Or, you know, it creates the sense of competition and creativity where States then get the ability

[00:15:50] to go, okay, we're not burdened by this overarching federal bureaucracy.

[00:15:55] We can now do what we need to do and see if it works.

[00:16:00] Especially in a state like California, so big and so diverse.

[00:16:03] It feels like each county school board, like they know what's, you know, best for their

[00:16:11] students because like I'm in Orange County and I know that that could differ greatly from

[00:16:16] where it fills in San Diego and then you're up north.

[00:16:18] And I'm sure it's just a whole different ballpark of each school district, even within San Diego

[00:16:25] County and Orange County.

[00:16:26] And it feels like, like what you're describing is kind of along the lines of shop local.

[00:16:31] It saves, you know, it cuts down all these, this time and expenses if you shop local and

[00:16:37] there's, there's, that's such an encouragement thing that we've heard over the last several

[00:16:40] years, you know, shop local so that you can, you know, the money goes into these businesses

[00:16:45] and you save this time and this money and this packaging and like go green and all that

[00:16:48] like, just, it feels like we'd be packaging it that way.

[00:16:53] Like dismantling the Department of Education would be.

[00:16:57] So this is kind of like the Green New Deal, right?

[00:16:59] Yeah.

[00:17:00] We're saving on, you know, all these costs for transporting, you know, education from

[00:17:05] the federal, you know, seat of government to our local school districts.

[00:17:11] Another thing that's interesting too is, and back to your point, Phil, competition is real

[00:17:16] as a component of education proficiency.

[00:17:20] If we want to have academic excellence, you don't get that by having the status quo or

[00:17:25] by putting kids on a conveyor belt in a, in a warehouse and just pushing go, right?

[00:17:30] You've got to every kid's different.

[00:17:32] I have five kids.

[00:17:33] All five of my kids are different.

[00:17:35] My oldest is not like my second.

[00:17:37] It's not like my third, fourth or fifth.

[00:17:39] They're just different.

[00:17:41] And so what might work for one or two or three or four might not work for the fifth.

[00:17:45] Right.

[00:17:45] And so even within households, you've got to have some sort of competitive mechanism because

[00:17:51] that's important.

[00:17:52] In 1992, California was the second state in the nation to put out or put forward the model

[00:18:01] of charter schools.

[00:18:03] They decided that it rather than appeal to a lot of the parents who were tired of what

[00:18:10] was happening to the public schools and were pulling their kids out to homeschool them.

[00:18:14] The teachers union freaked out and they said, okay, well, we're going to do something.

[00:18:18] It'll do like a hybrid, right?

[00:18:19] It's not really private school.

[00:18:20] It's not homeschool, but it's not really our traditional neighborhood public schools.

[00:18:24] We'll do charter schools and see if that experiment works.

[00:18:27] We'll give charter schools some freedoms.

[00:18:28] They don't have to negotiate with teachers unions, a little less bureaucracy, but we're only

[00:18:33] going to give them 75 cents on the dollar to do their job.

[00:18:36] We'll see how this works out.

[00:18:37] So actually homeschooling kind of slowed down at that point in time.

[00:18:42] Charter schools grew pretty dramatically, but if you fast forward 30 years from 1992, so

[00:18:48] it was right after the invention of the Department of Education in 79, but you fast forward 32

[00:18:54] years in 2022 when I was running for school superintendent.

[00:18:58] What we found is that charter schools were actually doing really well and the teachers unions

[00:19:04] hated it.

[00:19:05] And they hated it during COVID because a lot of parents were frustrated.

[00:19:09] They couldn't get their kids in schools.

[00:19:11] So it was thrown to charter schools.

[00:19:13] So the legislature went and basically said, okay, this is what we're going to do.

[00:19:16] Not only are we only going to keep giving you just 75 cents on the dollar, but we're not

[00:19:20] going to give you any additional dollars from the money we gave you this year in case you

[00:19:25] get more students next year.

[00:19:27] This will prohibit schools from accepting more kids because you can only, you can only decrease

[00:19:32] your marginal costs so much.

[00:19:34] And so they actually handicapped these charter schools.

[00:19:38] That's the sort of bureaucracy right now that we have in DC.

[00:19:41] Anything that is good or promising or, you know, that might work in the local districts,

[00:19:49] DC is going to find a way to handicap or to kneecap people.

[00:19:53] And that's exactly what they do.

[00:19:55] So the sooner we get rid of that department, the more abilities that local districts will

[00:20:00] have to experiment, to do different things, to compete with each other.

[00:20:04] And there's other reforms we could do that are short of like an education savings account

[00:20:08] that would allow parents to actually, you know, go between school districts and try different

[00:20:13] things.

[00:20:15] Competition will help us find a way out of this education malaise to take a phrase from,

[00:20:20] from Jimmy Carter.

[00:20:21] But it won't happen unless and until we don't have to ask mommy, may I for everything we

[00:20:27] want in DC.

[00:20:28] Yeah.

[00:20:28] It's one person I'm sure you follow him on X as well as Corey DeAngelis.

[00:20:34] And he's a big proponent of obviously he's always pushing for school choice in different

[00:20:40] states.

[00:20:41] And he's always giving people updates of, well, this state, I think it was just North Carolina

[00:20:45] today.

[00:20:45] They overrode the governor's veto on school choice.

[00:20:48] So that's moving forward.

[00:20:51] That kind of idea, I think, is how it should be to let the electorate go, OK, we want school

[00:20:58] choice or I think Arizona is another one.

[00:21:01] It should be left to the localities in that state to say, yeah, we want to try school choice

[00:21:07] choice because, hell, it can't be worse than what we've been seeing so far when it comes

[00:21:12] to public education.

[00:21:13] So why not try these new things?

[00:21:15] And school choice is definitely one of them.

[00:21:17] Well, one of the premier free thinkers of our time, Milton Friedman, was the kind of the

[00:21:22] grandfather or the godfather of the school choice movement.

[00:21:27] And he was one of the people that thought about vouchers was an early version of this.

[00:21:34] Vouchers are different than education savings accounts.

[00:21:36] And without getting into all the minutia, basically, vouchers, you pay the school directly, whereas

[00:21:40] an education savings account is you give the money to an account that's controlled by the

[00:21:44] kid or the parent, and they can then decide whether they're going to send it, whether it's

[00:21:47] a school, tutoring, computers, bus rides to school, that kind of thing.

[00:21:52] And so we've had the innovation happening in places like Florida and Arizona and Iowa and

[00:21:59] West Virginia, North Carolina, Utah.

[00:22:02] There's, I think, about a dozen states over the last two years have been very aggressive

[00:22:08] in education savings accounts.

[00:22:10] But you don't even have to do that in all places to get better bang for your buck.

[00:22:16] I mean, one of the easy reforms is very simple.

[00:22:19] It's open up school district boundaries.

[00:22:22] So you still have school districts.

[00:22:24] They still are governed by a board and trustees.

[00:22:27] But if you can get your kid to a school that might not be within your neighborhood or community,

[00:22:32] but you can get them there every day, then why not?

[00:22:37] And allow the schools to compete a little bit between each other.

[00:22:41] When they have a captive audience, it makes it more difficult.

[00:22:44] And as Corey says, we should be funding students, not systems.

[00:22:49] And I think part of the challenge is most of the money that comes in goes into another entrenched

[00:22:54] bureaucracy.

[00:22:55] And about 94, 95, 93% of the money that comes into each school, by the time it gets to the

[00:23:05] school, it's already sucked up within overhead costs and salaries and pensions and benefits.

[00:23:13] So you're dealing with a small margin.

[00:23:17] Once that money gets to the school, there's going to be very little innovation at a neighborhood

[00:23:21] public school, just very little.

[00:23:23] They're not going to do it.

[00:23:24] But if you can allow a parent to take that commensurate amount of money, it doesn't have

[00:23:29] to be the full threshold that you get to the public school per kid.

[00:23:33] Right now, I think we're at around $24,000 per kid this year for all state resources coming

[00:23:39] down on average.

[00:23:41] With 5.8 million kids in the public schools, it's hemorrhaging.

[00:23:45] We're losing kids like crazy.

[00:23:46] We've lost 425,000 students out of our public schools in the last three years.

[00:23:53] That's a lot of people to just disappear.

[00:23:55] And I think that number is actually undervalued.

[00:24:00] I think it's probably closer to half a million or more, but that's how little confidence people

[00:24:04] have in the education bureaucracy.

[00:24:06] And if you remove DC from that thread, the state can quit blaming all their problems on

[00:24:13] DC.

[00:24:13] The school district can stop saying, well, we have to comply with all these federal mandates.

[00:24:17] No, mandates are gone.

[00:24:19] Now you're responsible.

[00:24:20] And this is how we're going to make sure that we hold you accountable.

[00:24:24] So I have two more questions.

[00:24:27] I want to keep talking with you, but there is breaking news that is incredibly pertinent

[00:24:31] to this episode literally right now.

[00:24:33] Trump has named Linda McMahon to be secretary or the head of the Department of Education.

[00:24:39] Yeah.

[00:24:40] Yeah.

[00:24:41] She's no nonsense.

[00:24:42] I mean, obviously the old WWF slash WWE escapades of our youth, her husband, Vince, and she had

[00:24:51] become very wealthy on that whole enterprise.

[00:24:54] She ran the small business administration in Trump's previous administration in the last

[00:25:02] time around.

[00:25:02] And she's a no nonsense business woman.

[00:25:04] So I actually think this is really positive news and I think that it will add a sense

[00:25:13] of seriousness about the proposal to eliminate the department.

[00:25:16] So I think that's a perfect segue, what you just said into explain to people how you think

[00:25:23] that looks to actually maybe not abolish, but how do we trim the Department of Education

[00:25:30] or gut it or what, like explain to listeners what that looks like in reality.

[00:25:36] I usually encourage people before we get to the specific department, I usually say, hey,

[00:25:41] check out the constitution, article one, section eight and section 10.

[00:25:45] Most people have probably read it at one point in time or another, but those are the sections

[00:25:50] which, which elaborate on the powers of Congress and what they can do from a federal level.

[00:25:55] And then when people notice in there, there's no, there's no mention of education policy because

[00:26:01] back then our founders knew that education was a foundational thing that was done in the

[00:26:06] home and the community, often through churches and local charities.

[00:26:11] They knew that to be a good citizen, you had to be educated.

[00:26:13] It was important to do that.

[00:26:15] So usually what I'll say is, listen, let's start at the base level.

[00:26:19] This isn't even contemplated within our education or within the constitution.

[00:26:23] Once we move from there, then I say, okay, if you have a department that's massive, it's

[00:26:28] still, it's actually one of the smaller departments, but it's still huge with thousands of bureaucrats.

[00:26:33] You have to ask a question.

[00:26:35] One, what do you do with all these people if they're gone?

[00:26:38] And some people would say, oh, I got to get them different jobs or maybe slow things down.

[00:26:42] I talked earlier about maybe holding on to a period of time.

[00:26:47] But if you concentrate on the people, you forget about the purpose of, of, of,

[00:26:52] of what you're trying to accomplish.

[00:26:54] So you kind of have to take that without being terrible and inhumane and set the, that component

[00:27:00] to the side.

[00:27:01] Then you have to go and you have to look at all the programs that it administers.

[00:27:05] And so it does a few things.

[00:27:06] Title one's a big program that it runs and that helps with kids that have special circumstances,

[00:27:11] uh, often with immigrants.

[00:27:13] Um, so there's that program.

[00:27:15] You have things like, uh, your, uh, uh, kids with learning disabilities.

[00:27:21] There's different processes there that the federal government's really ensconced itself in.

[00:27:25] The department of education also had a big piece and, and the post civil rights movement

[00:27:30] about, you know, race relations.

[00:27:31] So you have to set that kind of to the side and say, okay, is this really important?

[00:27:36] One of the big pieces that it takes care of are the money, the, the vast majority that moves to

[00:27:40] the department is your Pell grants and, and other, you know, money for higher education.

[00:27:47] So once you've kind of separated these things out and you can go to the budget, which I did,

[00:27:51] and I checked out the different programs, you can say, okay, what are the priorities of this

[00:27:56] Congress?

[00:27:57] If they really want to have an educated populace, is it appropriate that the federal government

[00:28:02] have some sort of policy that way or legislation?

[00:28:05] I would say you could, but it doesn't have to be a department.

[00:28:09] It could be certain laws that could be housed underneath another department.

[00:28:13] For instance, our department of defense actually has its own school system.

[00:28:19] And they do that because military officers who transfer and go to different places around the

[00:28:23] world have to send their kids to school somewhere that, you know, they speak the same

[00:28:28] language and have the same culture and values.

[00:28:29] So you can look at that as a model and say, okay, the department of defense does it this

[00:28:33] way.

[00:28:34] They're actually pretty good with these schools.

[00:28:36] The department of defense schools are actually excellent.

[00:28:39] And so, okay, there's a model where you could move it to a different department and it might

[00:28:43] work.

[00:28:44] Maybe it's the department of the interior place where previous offices have been.

[00:28:50] And so you can say, okay, is there a core group of policies that a department or an office

[00:28:56] or a bureau we need to deal with that needs to be underneath, you know, an actual department?

[00:29:02] If you can identify those things and plug that into a certain place, it doesn't have to

[00:29:07] be its own distinct department.

[00:29:09] When it comes to actually distributing and distributing money to the different states through the different

[00:29:14] programs, again, the idea of a block grant where you can say, okay, California is actually

[00:29:19] a donor state, California and Massachusetts and Connecticut and Illinois, New Jersey, New

[00:29:27] York.

[00:29:27] And there's one other one that's not coming to mind right this second.

[00:29:30] They're the top donor states.

[00:29:32] They're all center left Democrat states.

[00:29:35] They give more money to the department of education than they receive back.

[00:29:40] And what's interesting is they actually are donating money to red states that they really,

[00:29:45] really hate.

[00:29:46] So again, this is another sort of like reason that I, that I listened in my, my editorial

[00:29:52] I've, I've been working on.

[00:29:53] Why would you give money to other states to take care of problems, which you think you have

[00:29:58] no, you shouldn't have any hands in.

[00:30:00] So any of the, this money that's coming in and coming back, if you have a block grant program

[00:30:06] and you, you X out a huge majority of the different bureaucrats, you're going to get more

[00:30:14] money that comes out through that system, at least for a period of time.

[00:30:18] I don't think you should do it all at once.

[00:30:20] You should phase these things out, but you don't have to phase out underneath the department

[00:30:26] itself.

[00:30:26] In other words, I think, and I've seen some very smart, smart people talk about this the

[00:30:31] last week, but I think you could take and eliminate the department.

[00:30:35] You could put these people on hiatus for a period of time, ramp them down, no hiring, no

[00:30:41] clear out all the vacancies, encourage people to find different jobs, either throughout other

[00:30:45] bureaucracies or just out of the system entirely.

[00:30:48] You take the programs that are just sending money back to the States and you block granted

[00:30:54] that way.

[00:30:54] The scholarships, you could, again, house underneath another department or agency, and that

[00:31:00] can be almost run by a bot.

[00:31:02] I don't like, you know, AI.

[00:31:04] We don't really need a whole bunch of people, you know, typing behind computers and approving

[00:31:08] things all the time.

[00:31:11] And what's left, there's very little left at that point in time.

[00:31:14] One of the pieces that is left that some of our friends, my friends are concerned about

[00:31:18] is this law called FERPA.

[00:31:20] It's the Educational Rights and Privacy Act from the federal government that gives parents

[00:31:25] the ability to actually leverage local school districts when they decide to disobey state

[00:31:30] law.

[00:31:31] That to me is a little more interesting in how we can deal with it.

[00:31:35] But again, you don't necessarily have to tie that to money.

[00:31:39] You can.

[00:31:40] We are now.

[00:31:41] The president or the administration can withhold funds to a school district that doesn't

[00:31:46] obey FERPA and violates these rights, which is happening in California, right?

[00:31:51] With these parental notification policies.

[00:31:55] That's kind of a backstop.

[00:31:56] But you can move that to the Department of Justice.

[00:31:58] You can move that to a different place to where they could actually litigate these things

[00:32:02] and hold other monies hostage or the power of the purse by Congress that doesn't have to

[00:32:09] happen underneath the Department of Education.

[00:32:11] Now, again, there's a lot of devils in the details.

[00:32:14] And there's going to be some time to think this out.

[00:32:17] But frankly, I'm excited about the smart people that are going out to do this.

[00:32:21] I think that they're going to get a lot of really good solid input from people like Fred

[00:32:26] Hess and Cordy Angeles.

[00:32:28] I've heard other names talked about giving really good insights and background.

[00:32:34] James Lindsay had a really good thread about this the other day, which I thought was thoughtful.

[00:32:38] I don't agree with the whole premise and everything he lays out.

[00:32:42] But he actually tries to at least block these things out and talk about them in an intelligent

[00:32:45] way.

[00:32:46] So we could do that.

[00:32:48] In the end, I believe it's going to happen.

[00:32:51] And I think it's going to happen pretty quickly.

[00:32:55] And so when people look at these promises that a lot of politicians make and they think,

[00:32:59] ah, you know, whatever, they're not serious.

[00:33:02] Remember, Trump didn't come back just to play around.

[00:33:06] He's not bringing back the people that almost got him killed, literally and figuratively.

[00:33:11] He's bringing back people that are seriously going to do the job.

[00:33:14] And when I watched Elon Musk take like Twitter and just basically tear it apart, get rid of

[00:33:21] a lot of the waste.

[00:33:21] He got rid of like what, 90% of the people at Twitter.

[00:33:24] And yeah, there was some hiccups along the way and some challenges.

[00:33:27] But my gosh, it is literally the best platform on the planet to have free speech.

[00:33:32] So we can argue about the process and the things along the way.

[00:33:37] In the end, I think this is going to be done rather quickly.

[00:33:40] But the phase out is going to take some time for all the different component parts.

[00:33:44] Yeah.

[00:33:44] If there's anyone who knows about efficiency or innovation, it's Elon.

[00:33:49] I was watching the SpaceX rocket land in the Indy Ocean.

[00:33:53] I don't know if anyone else saw that.

[00:33:55] Totally off topic.

[00:33:55] But the way it did its own flip, like it looked like Star Wars.

[00:33:59] It literally like came in like this and then went boop, boop.

[00:34:02] So it was pretty cool.

[00:34:03] It's a mind blowing way he can do.

[00:34:05] The man's a genius.

[00:34:06] And I think when you unleash him on these departments, it's going to be – I'm going to cry tears of joy as I watch this happen.

[00:34:16] So I think of it – we're talking about moving this program over here, this program over here to effectively kind of make the Department of Justice or Department of Education like a empty shell.

[00:34:29] So my concern – and walk me through this.

[00:34:36] We're still effectively – the money is still there in the federal government and it's still going to the federal government.

[00:34:43] It's just coming back out through other ways, which I think seems inefficient to me.

[00:34:48] And it feels like why – well, at that point, why even do we phase out this block grant system to states and the money just ends up in the state coffers?

[00:35:00] Like that's a question I have is, is it always going to go back to the federal government and it just gets distributed out?

[00:35:05] Or is it going to be eventually we're going to phase it out and it's just not going to end up getting money and it'll just stay in the states?

[00:35:13] No, it's a great question and at least in my head and in my plan, if I were doing this, almost all those programs would be phased out entirely from the federal government, which means that you save, like I said, a quarter trillion dollars a year that's not going to the federal government.

[00:35:30] And whether they have those savings in other federal bureaucracies or not, to me, it doesn't matter.

[00:35:35] But you would definitely have to realign how you do things like Pell Grants.

[00:35:38] I have a son who's in college right now.

[00:35:42] He may – I can't remember if he's got a Pell Grant or not, but he may be a beneficiary of the whole FAFSA process.

[00:35:49] That's a challenge.

[00:35:50] We tried to save up money and pay for his college at least for his first year.

[00:35:54] So I don't know that he's gone through the whole federal government applications or whatever.

[00:35:59] But there's a lot of people on our side that have to worry about that and have kids in places where they're dependent upon a structure that works.

[00:36:07] And frankly, it doesn't work that well right now.

[00:36:10] But I think as a part of this whole wind down, there are certain things that should absolutely go away, go away entirely from the federal government.

[00:36:17] So we're not block granting money for that thing just to redistribute.

[00:36:21] I'm only saying use the block grant at least as a temporary sort of like tourniquet, right?

[00:36:28] It's the ability to do something.

[00:36:30] You're still – you're stopping the bleeding, but you can't do the full surgery yet.

[00:36:34] But – and so there are still certain expectations.

[00:36:37] It's like retirement – so for a couple of years, I ran the pension reform project at Reason Foundation.

[00:36:43] And when I would talk to people about pensions, the first thing people would say is don't take my pension.

[00:36:48] Don't take my Social Security.

[00:36:50] And I would say to them, I believe that if we promise somebody something, you should at least deliver on that promise even as you're phasing that thing out.

[00:36:58] But you should never reverse that promise.

[00:37:00] In other words, you shouldn't take people's pensions.

[00:37:03] The same thing should be said too with kids who have planned out for their entire life how to get a college education.

[00:37:09] And part of that might have gone through the federal whole process, Pell Grants or other scholarship opportunities.

[00:37:15] We can find a way to deal with that and either phase it out or, which I'm in favor of, put it on the backs of these universities that have these massive endowments but use the federal government as a piggy bank.

[00:37:28] I mean places like Harvard and Yale, the Ivy Leaguers, they have hundreds of billions of dollars.

[00:37:34] And yet who is the one responsible for all the stuff that goes sideways?

[00:37:38] It's us.

[00:37:40] So reverse that.

[00:37:41] And Trump's actually talked about that as one of his platforms is to get all the wokeness and the DEI stuff out of those universities.

[00:37:47] But you could use the same principle.

[00:37:49] If you're going to take students in and you're going to promise them a job, then you should be able to cover that with your endowment if it doesn't work out.

[00:37:58] I ran into a guy a couple of years ago at a conference who insures colleges.

[00:38:03] He goes to the college and he says, this degree we estimate will result in this amount of money when this kid graduates.

[00:38:10] So if they're liberal arts, it's lower than like an engineer.

[00:38:14] But you could rate these things out.

[00:38:16] And what happens is the university wants to attract students.

[00:38:20] So they'll say, we will guarantee you a salary of X number of dollars when you graduate based upon what degree you had.

[00:38:28] And we will promise that to you.

[00:38:30] And if it doesn't happen, then the insurance kicks in.

[00:38:33] And that way you have some sort of parity.

[00:38:35] There are innovative ways that we can deal with college costs that don't require the federal government.

[00:38:41] And another thing, too, is we have an opportunity.

[00:38:44] Tim Scott in the United States Senate has introduced a tax credit, which will allow people to donate towards scholarships for kids that want to go to private school or other alternative education opportunities.

[00:38:57] That's a federal tax credit that can be used anywhere.

[00:39:00] It doesn't require a certain program in any states.

[00:39:03] Certain states will develop programs that make it easier to do that.

[00:39:07] But if you were to make that law now and nationwide, you get rid of a lot of the money needs that come for the federal government.

[00:39:16] In other words, the money would come out of the private sector instead of at the point of a gun, which is basically your taxes.

[00:39:22] So block grant for a short period of time.

[00:39:25] Let's hemorrhage.

[00:39:27] Stop the hemorrhaging.

[00:39:28] Let's figure out where the different little component parts that should or are better used at a federal level but don't have to be underneath the Department of Education.

[00:39:36] And the rest of the stuff, guess what?

[00:39:38] California has to learn how to fend for itself.

[00:39:42] And if we can't do that here, well, then shame on us.

[00:39:44] But guess what they can't do?

[00:39:46] It's like your kids.

[00:39:47] When you go and you punish them, they're like, oh, well, Jimmy made me do it or Sally made me do it.

[00:39:51] Well, no, you can't blame anybody else.

[00:39:53] It's on the backs of now the California legislature and their bureaucracy.

[00:39:59] Either they put up or they shut up.

[00:40:00] There's nowhere blaming the people in D.C.

[00:40:02] I have one quick question.

[00:40:03] I do want to talk about California because I was telling you before the show, I just read an article you published on the California Policy Center.

[00:40:09] Which, by the way, for our listeners, californiapolicycenter.org.

[00:40:13] Go check it out.

[00:40:14] It's got some great writing on there.

[00:40:16] Federal student loans.

[00:40:18] By getting rid of the Department of Education, would we be getting rid of federal student loans?

[00:40:24] Which I think has caused universities and colleges, their prices to explode because of these guaranteed dollars.

[00:40:31] There's a great chart.

[00:40:32] According to Angelus and others have shared this chart.

[00:40:34] But basically, if you look at the increase in bureaucracy and costs, it is not commensurate with the number of students, which is about here.

[00:40:44] And then their grades.

[00:40:45] It's like a flat line.

[00:40:46] There's been no improvement.

[00:40:48] And so when you have a federal government that shoves a whole bunch of money in the system, the administrative costs become exorbitant.

[00:40:55] And going to any university, like if your kids are doing a college tour, we've done this recently, you walk in and you ask, well, how many administrators are there here?

[00:41:04] And a lot of universities now have more administrators than they have professors, which is ridiculous.

[00:41:09] To do what?

[00:41:10] Right?

[00:41:11] Right.

[00:41:11] And so I 100% agree.

[00:41:14] The fewer dollars you're going to shove into the federal government scholarship grant system is actually better for universities.

[00:41:22] And back to the point I was making earlier, they can then adjust for what their student population needs to do.

[00:41:27] There are innovative ways to take care of those costs.

[00:41:30] But if you have a, you know, multi-billion dollar endowment, my goodness, you should be responsible for the kinds of promises you make to these kids for the future.

[00:41:39] I have a question before I move on.

[00:41:41] Sorry.

[00:41:42] Sorry.

[00:41:42] As far as special education looks, I know that that's a concern.

[00:41:46] Obviously, if, you know, the Department of Education is abolished or however you want to say it.

[00:41:54] But people are very concerned about how then will, for their, you know, they have the IEPs and the other programs that I'm forgetting what they're called.

[00:42:04] But how do you think that would look?

[00:42:06] Well, I just asked him how it's working right now.

[00:42:09] So that's true.

[00:42:10] I mean, honestly, like, and I don't mean to be flippant, but I had a daughter who had a speech impediment as a younger child right during COVID.

[00:42:18] She had an IEP.

[00:42:20] And I'm telling you, I don't remember any federal help at all for that.

[00:42:23] It was miserable.

[00:42:25] And so we had to work it out, right?

[00:42:27] We had to work it out through the school district and the other pieces.

[00:42:30] Yeah, there might have been somebody that would come in.

[00:42:31] But I would encourage anybody who complains about that to go read any of the reports or any of the reviews that are done at the end of the school year that are sent off to the bureaucracies.

[00:42:46] And then ask them to interpret for you how federal intervention helped their child at all.

[00:42:53] And the only thing they would tell you is warm money.

[00:42:56] You can do that already through the state.

[00:42:59] Right.

[00:42:59] And if the state is not sending billions of dollars to the federal government to come back as pennies on dollars, then maybe the state can invest in those things.

[00:43:08] But also maybe the state will quit blaming the federal government for not providing funds to do that stuff when it's not there in the first place.

[00:43:15] Right.

[00:43:15] At some point in time, I have a lot of actually special ed teacher friends.

[00:43:19] They're all leaving the profession in droves.

[00:43:21] Why?

[00:43:22] Because the federal government has made reporting such a disaster for them.

[00:43:27] It's so difficult to go through the process.

[00:43:29] And the state's not made it any easier as well.

[00:43:31] But you have two different systems that are working often in conflict.

[00:43:36] They're not really hand in glove.

[00:43:39] So when people say to me, oh, what about these special ed kids?

[00:43:42] I'm like, actually, this might be a lot better for them.

[00:43:45] That's not to say there won't be some adjustment or pain in that adjustment.

[00:43:49] But we have relied on the federal government to take care of these problems for far too long.

[00:43:54] And they have not gotten better at all.

[00:43:58] Name one metric.

[00:43:59] I ask people one metric by which the federal government has improved anything at your kid's school.

[00:44:05] One metric.

[00:44:06] They can't make it.

[00:44:07] Speaking of throwing more money at the problem does not always solve it.

[00:44:12] California, not doing so well.

[00:44:14] And we've thrown more money at the problem.

[00:44:17] And as I alluded to, you did write a whole editorial on this.

[00:44:21] Tell us, pun intended, what grade California gets for its test scores in the past year and how much money we've spent on public education.

[00:44:31] Oh, it's an F.

[00:44:33] So I was in the legislature working for John Warlock at the time as his chief of staff when the whole pandemic happened.

[00:44:40] And so I watched as the legislature panicked, shut down the schools, kind of let the governor run roughshod over them as he had his emergency powers for two or three years.

[00:44:51] And when they did that, I thought, oh, this will be interesting.

[00:44:55] You know, we'll see what happens.

[00:44:56] I had kids in school.

[00:44:58] At that point in time, I had four of my kids in school.

[00:45:01] And I remember the teacher saying, we're not going to give assignments or homework out anymore.

[00:45:04] And I was like, what are you talking about?

[00:45:06] And one English teacher was really progressive, crazy person in my son's high school.

[00:45:11] He was a sophomore at the time.

[00:45:12] He said, well, the state, the legislature has told us we can't take tests anymore.

[00:45:16] And I wrote him back.

[00:45:17] I said, I work in the legislature.

[00:45:18] That's not what we said.

[00:45:20] And he's like, oh, like he didn't know, you know.

[00:45:22] And so I think the teachers kind of gave up.

[00:45:26] And I'm not, this is not impugning the teachers.

[00:45:28] This is just a fact.

[00:45:29] They went with a really dramatic shift in focus.

[00:45:33] A lot of them didn't want to do the online stuff or virtual classes.

[00:45:36] There was the mass and the in-class stuff and the six feet spacing, all the other garbage.

[00:45:42] But when that all went through, people thought, okay, we're out of the pandemic itself.

[00:45:46] Whatever you want to call that phase.

[00:45:49] Hopefully things will improve.

[00:45:50] We've thrown hundreds of billions of dollars in these ESSER funds, the federal funds that came in.

[00:45:55] Again, another opportunity for federal funds to come in to mitigate COVID in the classroom,

[00:46:01] new air filtration systems and whatever else.

[00:46:04] Well, guess what?

[00:46:04] All that money came in with strings attached and scores didn't go up.

[00:46:08] In fact, they got worse in a lot of places.

[00:46:10] And a lot of our kids are one or two or even three years behind where they should be.

[00:46:15] And you can blame some of that, again, on the governor shutting the schools down.

[00:46:20] But the rest of that can be blamed on the unions who have not allowed for any competition within the public school system.

[00:46:27] And so we're actually – it depends on what metric.

[00:46:30] And we can go through a thousand different metrics.

[00:46:31] But basically, less than 50% of kids are literate or numerate at grade level in California.

[00:46:39] And when you compare that throughout the rest of the country, we're in the bottom tier, the bottom quartile of all school districts – or of all states, excuse me.

[00:46:48] And one of them shows us to be number 49th in the nation in literacy.

[00:46:54] Now, we were number 50 when I was running for state superintendent.

[00:46:57] We improved, quote unquote, to 49th.

[00:47:00] But we didn't improve.

[00:47:01] New Mexico just simply got worse than we did, right?

[00:47:04] And so we went from spending $127 billion in 2022 to $129 billion in 2023 to $134 billion in 2024.

[00:47:18] But here's the kicker.

[00:47:20] All those school years, we were losing population.

[00:47:25] So we have lost, again, like I said earlier, 420,000 kids out of the public school system.

[00:47:33] They've gone to different places.

[00:47:34] Some have – and this is – those numbers include charter schools too.

[00:47:38] So some of those have gone to private schools.

[00:47:40] Some have gone to homeschool.

[00:47:41] And some have just left the state entirely.

[00:47:43] But when you lose that number of students and yet you increase the amount of money you're throwing into the system.

[00:47:48] And you had all these federal pandemic funds that came in.

[00:47:53] Where did that money go?

[00:47:55] I seriously want to audit the California books.

[00:47:58] Where did it go?

[00:48:00] And so when you ask different school districts, they're very cagey about those dollars because they couldn't use them to take care of pension unfundled liabilities or other personnel costs.

[00:48:11] It had to be very specific.

[00:48:13] And a lot of progressives love to do this.

[00:48:15] We want to do this special program and it can't be like anything else you've done before.

[00:48:19] It has to be innovative.

[00:48:20] Except it is not innovative.

[00:48:22] They drew something up on the back of a napkin and the kids suffered in the meantime.

[00:48:29] And so that's a problem.

[00:48:30] So in this new world where the Department of Education could be eliminated or downgraded, what is a state like California?

[00:48:41] I mean, it just seems like it comes back to this state level where California just has to get its act together.

[00:48:48] And that's up to voters and putting the right people in place, right?

[00:48:52] Like it's up to us to figure it out.

[00:48:54] One of the things I learned in 2022 when I was running statewide is that there were 2,500 local school board candidates running at the same time.

[00:49:05] And so I started to just collect and adopt, you know, connect with a lot of these candidates.

[00:49:14] And through one of our programs at California Policy Center, we had what we call CLEO, California Local Elected Officials.

[00:49:22] And Mary Barkey, who was at the time the president of the Orange County Board of Education, there's 58 county boards of education.

[00:49:29] There's 944 school districts in the state.

[00:49:32] She and I were sitting one day talking about the elections coming up.

[00:49:37] And she said, we've got to do something to train these people.

[00:49:39] I said, I agree.

[00:49:40] So we created this candidate academy.

[00:49:42] We started training people.

[00:49:43] We trained over 400 people.

[00:49:45] Out of that 400, over 200 took out papers to run for office.

[00:49:49] Out of that 200 that ran, 106 of them won.

[00:49:53] Wow.

[00:49:54] And OK, that didn't sound like a lot out of the 2,500, but 106 who went through our system, who we trained and mentored and we held their hand.

[00:50:03] We didn't run their campaigns.

[00:50:04] We're a 5-1-C-3, so they did their own thing.

[00:50:06] But we gave them the tools to be successful.

[00:50:09] When you fast forward, most of those people that won are the ones you see in all the headlines.

[00:50:13] The Chino Valley, the Temecula, the Marietta, the Rockland.

[00:50:16] Like, go down the list.

[00:50:18] All of Dry Creek.

[00:50:19] These school districts were the ones that were going out and doing the work to reform their systems.

[00:50:25] Parental notification, curriculum, discipline, school safety, teacher tenure, graduation requirements.

[00:50:33] These are things that we help them with.

[00:50:36] And so this last year, we were not as intentional on the training candidates.

[00:50:40] We had the program.

[00:50:41] It's online, so people can go to calelections.org.

[00:50:44] You can check it out.

[00:50:45] We created another what we call academy called Leadership Academy, which would train people once they get to office how to be good public servants.

[00:50:54] And it's for local government officials generally, but school board trustees are in that bucket.

[00:50:58] But recently, Mary and I created another academy.

[00:51:01] We call it our Strategy Academy.

[00:51:03] What's the first 100-day plan?

[00:51:05] And so all these people that got elected last time around, we have a whole new cadre of people coming in now.

[00:51:11] And they're going in now with tools and resources necessary to take on their entrenched bureaucracy, their superintendent who has been doing things his own way for a long time, the crazy union leaders that have been running roughshod for the district, for the complacent other administrators.

[00:51:30] They're coming in and they're moving the needle.

[00:51:33] And I was a little depressed after watching a few recalls happen this last year.

[00:51:37] I had six friends, six of those people I helped get elected.

[00:51:40] They got recalled.

[00:51:41] It was terrible.

[00:51:42] And you would recognize some of the names, but a few of them ran again.

[00:51:47] And a few of them had people who ran behind them.

[00:51:49] And I was watching the results come in.

[00:51:52] We flipped a lot of school boards this year.

[00:51:56] And I'm excited and heartened by that.

[00:51:59] So, yes, will the federal department leave some holes?

[00:52:02] Will putting it on the back of the California state legislature and the superintendent of public instruction and the state board of education, will that be a good idea?

[00:52:09] I don't know.

[00:52:10] They're all crappy, right?

[00:52:12] But I'm really satisfied with the tone and tenor, the strength and resilience of these local school board trustees that are coming in to do a good job.

[00:52:24] And I think that once we have full ownership over this stuff, I really believe that our school boards will be vastly improved.

[00:52:31] And if they don't, guess what?

[00:52:33] People will have other systems.

[00:52:34] I see micro schools become a bigger part of our lives.

[00:52:38] Charter schools are still continuing to grow and to thrive.

[00:52:41] There are options here in California.

[00:52:43] I'm not a doom and gloomer for this state.

[00:52:45] I think it can work.

[00:52:46] My kids, the four youngest, are all still in public school.

[00:52:50] And we love our district.

[00:52:52] We're very involved there.

[00:52:54] My wife and I both have the principals and the superintendent on speed dial.

[00:52:58] We have relationships there.

[00:53:00] We know the school board trustees.

[00:53:02] We have a relationship.

[00:53:03] So I encourage people to think about it that way instead of the if the federal government's not there, then how are my kids going to educate it?

[00:53:11] Well, we're coming up on the hour.

[00:53:13] And I was going to ask for your final thoughts, but I think that that what you just said is a great summation of like looking forward on, you know, where education could go here in California and without the Department of Education.

[00:53:29] And yeah, well, thank you for coming.

[00:53:31] I mean, time flew.

[00:53:33] It's already been an hour.

[00:53:35] But final thoughts anyway on Department of Education, where we go from here and then also where can people reach you, read more of your stuff and basically learn more about you?

[00:53:47] Well, we have been doing education wrong for 150 years in California since the progressive movement started.

[00:53:54] I think we're on the verge of a whole new generation of education.

[00:53:59] And it requires people to be thoughtful and to release the nostalgia of yesteryear.

[00:54:05] I'm a public school graduate myself.

[00:54:07] So is my wife.

[00:54:09] The schools in the 80s and 90s are not what they are now.

[00:54:12] So as soon as we can release that and then also encourage our older generations, our grandparents who don't have their kids in school, but their grandkids are in school or their neighbors are in school to encourage them to get more involved and participate in ways they probably didn't think about years ago.

[00:54:29] I think that will move the needle in California.

[00:54:31] And California is actually a very conservative state that's being ruined by, you know, 20,000 loudmouths.

[00:54:38] The squeaky wheels get the grease.

[00:54:40] And unfortunately, they're annoying.

[00:54:43] But we have a good, decent, hardworking, resilient people in California.

[00:54:48] They're innovators.

[00:54:48] They're dreamers.

[00:54:49] They're thinkers.

[00:54:50] They're renegades.

[00:54:51] I think we can make things happen.

[00:54:53] And so people can find more about me on Twitter at Lance Lance.

[00:54:57] They can or X, whatever you want to call it.

[00:54:59] They can go to California Policy Center dot org.

[00:55:02] And this next year, we're going to be very involved in watching the legislature and grading them on the decisions they make about education and budgets and other things that are happening in our state.

[00:55:14] So please pay attention.

[00:55:16] People are welcome to follow me on Twitter and reach out through DMs or my email address is also on our website, too.

[00:55:23] I'm going to use that line from now on.

[00:55:25] I'm going to steal that line about 20,000 loudmouths who would just ruin it for everybody else because that's a great line.

[00:55:31] It's true.

[00:55:32] So, Lance, thank you for coming on.

[00:55:34] Always a pleasure.

[00:55:35] Whenever you want to come back on, open invitation.

[00:55:38] We like to end every show.

[00:55:40] Make sure you like, share, subscribe, review all of that stuff.

[00:55:44] And the best way to support this show that is 100 percent free is share it with someone who would love to learn about California politics and Department of Education being abolished.

[00:55:53] So with that, we'll see you all on the next one.

[00:55:56] Later.

[00:56:08] Thank you for listening to another episode of California Underground.

[00:56:11] If you like what you heard, remember to subscribe, like and review it and follow California Underground on social media for updates as to when new episodes are available.