Phil Magness, senior research fellow with the American Institute of Economic Research, discusses the history of school choice and critics’ claims of segregationist roots. Magness delves into this and more in his co-authored essay, “School Vouchers, Segregation, and Consumer Sovereignty.”
Jason Bedrick: Hello, and welcome back to another edition of EdChoice Chats. I’m your host, Jason Bedrick, director of policy at EdChoice, and this is another edition of our Big Ideas series. I am delighted to be joined today by Phil Magness of the American Institute of Economic Research, who, along with Chris Surprenant of the University of New Orleans, wrote an essay in the Journal of School Choice in 2019 titled, “School Vouchers, Segregation, and Consumer Sovereignty,” which will be the subject of our podcast today. Phil, welcome to the podcast.
Phil Magness: Hey, thanks for having me.
Jason Bedrick: So, debates over school choice often center on their effects on test scores or concerns over for-profit operators, but in recent years there’s been a growing number of critiques concerning their effects on racial integration. What are the concerns that are being raised here?
Phil Magness: Right. So, there’s a two-pronged approach that’s really coming out of the academic literature, mostly on the political left, but general voucher critics. What they are doing is they’re attacking vouchers on a historical basis by claiming that a policy itself was basically dreamed up in the segregation era as a response to Brown v. Board of Education, and then they’re coupling that with a more modern day claim saying that vouchers have segregationist effects of moving students from schools that were previously integrated in the public sense and allowing them to racially separate.
Jason Bedrick: So, it’s not just concerns about what school choice is having in terms of an effect today, but they’re actually trying to undermine school choice by trying to tar it with the dark history of segregation in this country.
Phil Magness: Right. So, the gist of the argument is that school choice was invented as a way of circumventing, doing an end-run around Brown v. Board, mainly for white parents to remove their children from integrated schools and put them back into segregated private institutions. And because of this claimed link, it’s said to taint the policy in the present day, something that is a legacy that school choice needs to confront today as if it’s responsible for the racist events of the past.
Jason Bedrick: Right. Now, we’re going to have another podcast on EdChoice Chats with Drew Catt and Brian Kisida looking at the actual research effects of school choice today, which in some sense I think is actually the much more important of the two critiques. It’s the more important question because the effects of a policy now, I think, matter much more than what the intent of a policy was decades ago. For example, there’s lots of evidence that—you actually touch on this in your essay—that the minimum wage was initially implemented in the early 20th century out of a desire to keep African-Americans and recent immigrants out of the labor force, and so there was a real racist motivation in passing these laws, but nobody today considers, when they’re deciding to raise the minimum wage or not, nobody considers what the intent was a century ago. The question is, what is the effect of these policies today? Are they positive or negative?
So, we have a whole separate podcast that deals with that. I should just note, you do go in depth on the research in your article, and given that our public school system is so racially stratified, we actually find evidence that school choice leads to greater racial integration because it’s giving low-income, often minorities, access to schools they otherwise couldn’t afford. But we have a separate podcast dealing with that. Today, I’d like to, since you are a historian, get into the historical context, so maybe you could discuss a little bit more who is raising these objections and why?
Phil Magness: Right. So, this is a new form of argument for the anti-school choice movement, and really kind of burst onto the scene in the mid-2010s. The Center for American Progress published a lengthy report charging that basically racism was baked into the historical DNA of school vouchers, and that this is something that we have to consider in the present day, dating back to the civil rights era. This has been echoed by the usual litany of activists in the teachers union area, so Leo Casey of the American Federation of Teachers published an essay accusing Milton Friedman and the other economists that were involved in the early school choice movement of being… essentially carrying water for the segregationists and failing to properly oppose segregation when these policies were developed. This was picked up by Randi Weingarten, president of AFT, and she made this a major talking point of one of her speeches in 2017.
Jason Bedrick: Right. I believe she actually, she referred to school choice as the slightly more polite cousins of segregation.
Phil Magness: Right, right. So, it’s pretty bombastic language they use here, and it’s an outright attempt to taint the history of school choice with Brown v. Board, resistance of Brown v. Board. But then you have the major event of recent years has been Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains, which attempts to investigate economists that were involved in the early discussions around the school choice movement in the 1950s and ’60s, and she again tries to blame them for a segregationist connection and says that that filters through all the way to the present day.
Jason Bedrick: There’s a stronger version of the claim and then a weaker version of the claim. The stronger version you see in the Schermer and Apple that you mentioned, say, for example, the aggressive free-market education plans that DeVos, referring to Betsy DeVos, the secretary of education, has made infamous were rooted in racial segregation and elsewhere that the history of vouchers is, quote, “steeped in white supremacist ideologies.”
So, that’s the strong version of the claim. The weaker version of the claim, which is still quite strong, is that free-market economists like Milton Friedman, who popularized school choice in the 20th century, and also others who, at least outside of the world of economics are lesser known—although James Buchanan did win a Nobel Prize—but Buchanan and Warren Nutter and others in the public choice economics school were at least indifferent to racial segregation, so let’s take the stronger claim first. Is the charge true? What is the origin of school choice policies in the United States? Is it white supremacy and segregation, or is it something else, perhaps something earlier?
Phil Magness: Well, if you go into the deep history of it, it predates any of that by over a century. So, one of the first theorist to actually put out a concept of school choice and argument for it is a John Stuart Mill writing in the mid-19th century, and there’s even antecedents that go all the way back to Adam Smith in 1776 when he’s discussing competitive education on the college level. There’s very clear parallels of what’s going on there, but this is already theoretically on paper over a hundred years before the civil rights movement is even underway in the United States. The interesting thing is both of those theorists, Mill and Smith, are historically associated with abolitionism, so it’s very much on the other end of that issue that you’re seeing this kind of a connection.
Jason Bedrick: I should note Thomas Paine, as well, proposed something that’s similar to a voucher program.
Phil Magness: Absolutely. So, you have an intellectual history that goes back centuries, and then you have practical antecedents to it in the late 19th century in New England, especially Vermont and Maine, began almost accidentally developed into a precursor to the school choice system as a way of handling rural populations in a very sparsely populated part of the country and providing education. So, they set up institutions that allow students to move between different offerings in the public-school system, and the direct descendants that are here today.
So, that’s the deep history of it. What does happen around the mid-20th century is several movements converge about the same point in time, and that is the economist under Milton Friedman. It’s a seminal article in 1955 that just outlines a modern theory of school choice and what the economic functions would be behind it, but simultaneous to this, there’s also a mostly religious-led movement, and it tends to come from Catholics in particular in the northern states. A lot of the Midwest has a heavy Catholic population, but they are starting to push back against early 20th century xenophobic regulations that had been put into place to restrict religious schools as competitors to the public-school system. So, this is an emergent movement around 1950 to ’55 onward. You start seeing religious affiliated arguments for school choice. And of course, Protestants pick up on that as well. They start seeing this as an opportunity to bolster and strengthen alternative offerings to public education.
And then on top of that, what you have is the civil rights movement breaking out basically around Brown v. Board, which of course famously orders desegregation in 1954, and there are some elements in the southern states. They talk about privatizing their school systems as a way to get around federal intrusion, what they were arguing against with Brown v. Board. So, there is a strategic element in the south, figuring out ways to circumvent the segregation as ordered by the federal courts, but this gets into a really messy area of policy that’s not quite school choice in the way that the modern historians are claiming. Rather, it’s a mixture of both public and private funding schemes that are primarily designed for racial exclusion rather than educational choice.
It just so happens that all of these movements are coming together around the mid-1950s, early 1960s, so that discussion is playing out simultaneously for a whole bunch of different reasons, and what we see in some of these historians like Apple and Schermer and other scholars that are making this strong claim is that they’re latching onto the segregationist arguments against racial integration and some of the segregationist ploys to divert money out of the public school system and to private alternatives, or to use other restrictive measures to keep black students out of historically white schools. So, you see these theorists today are almost deceptively blending the arguments of that as if it were always part of the school choice movement. They’re trying to claim that the segregationists were really in league with the school choicers when this stuff was emerging in the ’50s and ’60s.
But if you go back to these articles, like Milton Friedman’s 1955 piece, he has this extended almost essay within an essay in the form of a footnote where he discusses the implications of vouchers for racial segregation and integration, and he notes first off with some alarm that southern states were starting to privatize or investigate ways to strip money out of their school systems, and he says, basically, make no mistake, if the choice is between segregation and integration but no vouchers, he would choose integration a hundred times out of a hundred, basically.
He’s saying that there’s no doubt that that would be a preferable institutional arrangement than an overtly segregationist one. But he’s also saying at the same time, we need to realize if we open up the school system to competition, it’s not going to attain what the segregationists are aiming for. In fact, it’s going to have the opposite effect of allowing both white and black students to migrate out of schools that were previously segregated and into integrated schools. So, you get a misrepresentation of the nuances of Friedman’s article for an explicit purpose of trying to draw him closer into the segregationist camp, at least in that more aggressive version of this argument that’s being put forth.
Jason Bedrick: Right. I was surprised when I read the essay accusing Friedman of being indifferent to segregation when he, as you note, very clearly points out that he is very much in favor of integration. Also, in his revised version that he published in 1962 in Capitalism and Freedom, in that same footnote, he says, “In addition, of course, we should, all of us, in so far as we possibly can, try by behavior and speech to foster the growth of attitudes and opinions that would lead mixed schools to become the rule, and segregated schools, the rare exception.”
So, even though Friedman preferred, as he noted, forced integration over forced segregation, he wanted freedom, but at the same time that he wanted freedom, he wanted people to use that freedom in order to foster racial integration, and I think this is born out by the evidence that that’s actually what happens when you do have the ability to choose a school. You do foster greater racial integration, whereas geographic assignment has led to greater racial stratification.
One interesting thing you point out is that there were integrationists and segregationists on both sides of the school choice debate. Could you talk a little bit more about that?
Phil Magness: Yeah, so the historical episode that’s gotten the most attention is the one that took place in Virginia, and Milton Friedman mentions this in Capitalism and Freedom. He was also aware of it because he had visited Virginia at the invitation of the University of Virginia’s economics department. Two other early voucher theorists, that’s James Buchanan and Warren Nutter, write a paper that’s basically an adaptation of the Friedman article and they publish it in 1959 in the midst of Virginia’s having an upheaval, a crisis of public education caused by the segregationists attempting to legally impede the federal government’s efforts to integrate Virginia schools.
The deep back history is in 1956. The segregationists had clear control of the state government, and they adopted a series of measures that said that if a federal court orders a local school district or specific school to integrate, the state would basically come in and take control of it and shut the school down, and basically force the school to not serve any students at all as an alternative to integrating. So, it’s a really radical, drastic, over the top segregationist ploy, and it’s referred to historically as the massive resistance movement after Harry Flood Byrd, senator from the state, gives a speech where he urges massive resistance against Brown v. Board, basically, by any means necessary, including shutting down the public schools, after which funds could be transferred into a private alternative that would maintain racial segregation.
So, it’s a really horrendous, kind of over-the-top policy that the segregationists do get heavily behind, but it causes a bit of a backlash in the state. And it also causes challenges in federal courts that, in 1959, basically strike down this policy. They rule it unconstitutional in a series of blows against the whole Byrd movement.
So, that really sets the scene for the debate that emerges in Virginia. In the spring of 1959, there is a huge legislative fight, a special session that’s called, and the question for the legislature is in the wake of this decision ruling massive resistance unconstitutional. The segregationists wanted to stay the course and plow ahead and get into a direct confrontation or showdown with the federal government. Some of the stuff similar to what we saw, like George Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door, that type of a radical approach, but then the moderates in the state, and this included everyone from moderate segregationists who were opposed to Brown v. Board but weren’t ready to wreck the public school system of the entire state over it, to the integrationists, and there’s a small number of them, mostly from the northern Virginia suburbs and Washington, D.C., and the state assembly, and what they do is the integrationists and moderate segregationists basically form a political coalition together to beat the extreme segregationists, the massive resistors.
One of the parts of that coalition is they devise a voucher system or tuition grant system to be implemented, and the idea is that it works like a safety valve to ease the process of integration. The underlying theory is that if you allow students to take a tuition grant from the state and choose whatever school they happen to go to, they will self-sort—and yes, that’s going to mean some white students are going to be leaving integrated schools—but it also means there’s an opportunity for black students to move into schools that they were previously barred from.
So, because of the federal court ruling that had come down in 1959, the legislature was mandated to make this a race-neutral policy, and that’s where some of the voucher theorists like Friedman and Buchanan and Nutter step in. They start making a pro-voucher argument that ultimately treats this as a better way to achieve racial integration than some of the alternatives, which might’ve been district zoning or forced busing or some of the political angles that really become controversial later in that decade.
Jason Bedrick: Right. So, in other words, segregationists and integrationists both used public schools or vouchers as tools for their own agendas. Segregationists had control of the public school system. Nobody says today, “Well, we should get rid of public schools because they were segregated for so long.” The intent was to keep blacks and whites separate, but the segregationists had control of the public school system. When Brown v. Board takes control away from them, some of them tried to use vouchers as a means to escape the now-integrated school system and to go to segregated private schools.
At the same time, on the other side you have integrationists that are trying to wrest control of the public school system, and you have integrationists that are trying to use vouchers as a means of fostering racial harmony and integration. And you also, it should be noted, and you discussed this… This was an eye-opening for me. There were segregationists who were opposed to school vouchers. Why were the segregationists opposed to school vouchers?
Phil Magness: Yeah, so there is a hard line group of segregationists, especially in Virginia, that emerges right after these court decisions in 1959, and these were the previous massive resistor camp, but they realize the federal court has knocked that down and they’re not so eager as to get into a George Wallace style battle with the federal courts, but they want to maintain segregation. They start to realize that vouchers, if implemented along the trajectory that the more moderate coalition was seeking, could pose an existential threat to the maintenance of segregation.
So, the main theorist behind this is an attorney out of Charlottesville, Virginia, by the name of John S. Battle, Jr. He’s the son of a former governor of Virginia, but also he’s the main litigator that’s fighting the NAACP and all of the local integration lawsuits in the state of Virginia, one of which was his hometown of Charlottesville. What Battle does in the immediate aftermath of this 1959 court decision, he says, “We need to come up with a new strategy to maintain segregation in the public schools,” and his approach says what they’ll do is they’ll use their control of the local school boards to adopt geographic zoning maps that very rigidly separate neighborhoods so the black neighborhood is automatically zoned to go to the black school, the white neighborhood is automatically zoned to go to the white school as the standard norm now that… especially gerrymandering the local school system to save and preserve segregation without calling it segregation.
Now, the admission there is that they’re going to say, “Yeah, if a black person moved into a white neighborhood, they could go to the historically white school,” but the existing racial lines in most southern cities at the time they were hoping to use as a way to gerrymander kids into schools that were defacto segregated, if not legally so.
On top of that, though, in order for this whole system to work, Battle realizes immediately that you have to cap schools, the number of students that can go into their classrooms, because every time a new seat opened up, you could potentially have either the district lines change to accommodate shifting populations, or it could mean that if black students were moving into a historically white neighborhood, they could be now admitted into the white school, and Battle is adamantly opposed to this, so he says, “We need to artificially restrict the supply of classroom spaces to maintain and ensure that only white students who are currently attending those schools can continue to enroll there.”
The problem for that in Battle’s mind is, if you open up a voucher system, well, what happens? Students start to leave the schools that they were historically assigned to, both white and black students. That means seats open up in the classroom that can be filled by another student wishing to transfer in, so it completely undermines the whole scheme. He refers to this in a series of papers he writes in 1959 as the Negro Engulfment Theory. He says that vouchers are going to open the door to the Negro engulfment of our southern white schools, and therefore need to be adamantly opposed.
So, this argument hasn’t gotten much historical attention, but it was actually picked up and disseminated across the south. I’ve traced it in newspaper reports as far as Mississippi. They’re saying that this attorney in Virginia has come up with an ingenious legal reason of why we should oppose vouchers and why they are a threat to the segregation system. The state teachers union, the Virginia Education Association, in 1959 picks up Battle’s argument and the director of it sends a copy of it to every superintendent in the state, basically as a wink, nod, this is how you maintain segregation without calling it segregation, but we also have to defeat this tuition grant voucher system that’s coming into place.
So, you have this whole argument that plays out over the next three to four years of the Virginia voucher system being implemented where the public school teachers’ unions that tend to be anti-voucher actually align with these hard line segregationists in John S. Battle’s camp to attempt to block and prevent tuition grants on the grounds that they would undermine this other local scheming they were trying to execute to keep segregation in place.
Jason Bedrick: So, in other words, the VEA, the Virginia Education Association—which is the state affiliate of the NEA, the teachers union—in the 1960s, is actively working to maintain segregation by opposing school vouchers, school vouchers which were made popular by Milton Friedman, who was an ardent supporter of racial integration. And then 50 years later, the teachers unions are accusing modern school voucher supporters of being the polite cousins of segregation, entirely forgetting their own history of supporting segregation, entirely ignoring Milton Friedman’s support of racial integration, and ignoring the fact that, today, school choice policies are more likely to lead to racial integration, and by and large, are used by low-income African-Americans and Hispanics to get access to schools that they otherwise couldn’t afford. It’s bizarre. It’s absolutely bizarre.
Phil Magness: The historical arguments they’re enlisting are so detached from the evidence and so detached from reality that you even wonder if they’re inhabiting the same universe. There’s a complete absence of historical memory of white teachers’ unions in the south, the VEA being the foremost example of it, actively aligning with the segregationists because they thought that tuition grants were an existential threat to maintaining all-white public schools. So, it’s basically they see tuition grants are undermining all these other schemes that emerge after Brown v. Board to keep segregation in place without calling it officially segregation. That’s the whole gist of the story that’s emerging in that sector in the late 1950s, early 1960s, and it’s been shoved down the memory hole, and instead now the accusation is being used to tar people like Friedman and Buchanan and Nutter, who were arguing for school choice in the ’50s and ’60s for economic reasons, and in Friedman’s case, very explicitly for integrationist reasons.
Jason Bedrick: And your essay even details that then, as now, those using the tuition vouchers in Virginia, were often African-Americans looking for schools that they otherwise didn’t have access to.
Phil Magness: Right. Right. So, there’s a keen interest that exists in the early 1960s after the moderates are able to help maneuver the massive resistors and they get this tuition grant program through, but again, because of the federal courts, to make it compliant, they had to meet race neutrality as a condition of the voucher. For the first few years that it’s operating, there are people trying to statistically map it and watch what’s happening, watch the experiment play out in real time, and Friedman’s among those who starts to get access to some of this data that’s coming out of the economists at UVA, and they’re noticing that regardless of whatever the intent happened to be when they enacted the law, the race neutrality provisions of it are basically showing that students are moving from segregated schools and into integrated schools. Or there was another instance that a couple of newspapers did some surveys of parents that signed up for the program and asked them, “Why are you doing this?” And the most common answers are, “Well, my children’s old school was deficient, decrepit. It wasn’t giving a good, quality education, so we moved to a better school.”
They ask them questions about, “Where does race figure into this?” And it’s a very distant, like third or fourth choice of the options there, so not as many students are leaving because they want to escape integration. Rather, they’re choosing it for the reasons you’d expect: to get access to better schools, to get access to closer schools, including some schools that had already been integrated. But the overall thrust of it is that the operation of the program is not propping up segregation as this revisionist historical narrative we’ve seen in the last few years has said, and in fact, several of the early continued court litigations of the segregation issue in Virginia, the federal government strikes down segregationists’ attempts to enlist these tuition grants to their cause.
The famous one is Prince Edward County, which is in the south-central part of the state. The county continued its massive resistance program of shutting down its public school system, which basically threw both white and black students out into the open where they did not have an educational provision. But the idea the county administrators wanted to use was say, “Well, the state just enacted a voucher program, this tuition grant. We’ll give all the white students tuition grants, and they can go to a private segregation academy that we’re going to set up with them.”
So, they attempted that in 1960. Federal court comes in and says, “No, you can’t do this,” strikes them down and puts a permanent injunction against the county from even having access to the tuition grants or vouchers. Basically says that… They cite the statute from 1959 to argue against Prince Edward County. They say the statute required freedom of choice between schools, and they said, “You in Prince Edward County, by shutting down your public school system, have removed that choice from the picture. Therefore, you are ineligible to have any access to this voucher system at all.” So, it just cuts it off at the knees immediately as the segregationists do attempt to work their way into the tuition grant system, and we see decision after decision like that playing out for the next couple of years that the program exists. It’s restricted every time someone tries to appropriate it or direct it in the segregationist direction. So, not even in its application is it playing out the way that these revisionist historians have attempted to assert in recent times.
Jason Bedrick: Yeah. I mean, once you look at these documents, you look at what Friedman actually said, you look at what the head of the VEA in Virginia actually supported and what he opposed, you look at how the program was being used, it’s hard to see these critiques today as being offered in good faith.
Phil Magness: Right. Right. It’s tendentiously argued, politically motivated accounts of history that are trying to weaponize it against vouchers in the present day. Nothing more than that.
Jason Bedrick: Now, Phil, since your essay was published, you’ve done some additional research and found some other interesting tidbits. Do you want to share those with our listeners now?
Phil Magness: Yeah. So, I’ve started to look at other ways that the school integration and segregation played out around the same time that this voucher debate is occurring in the 1960s, and one of them is looking to other counties that didn’t go down the voucher route that weren’t part of this program. So, famously, Arlington County, Virginia, is one of the first districts to integrate on paper, and they do this right after Brown v. Board by putting in a formal integration measure to open up certain schools. So, they said they set them on the track to that. So, they’ve gotten a lot of accolades historically for supposedly doing it the right way, but if you dig into Arlington County’s actual records of what happened next, you find out they have integrated on paper and said, “We’ll start accepting black students at historically white public schools,” but when students started to apply for those schools, black students started to register for those schools, they would come in and they’d start rejecting all the applications. They’d say, “The African-American students’ test scores isn’t up to par, therefore rejected.” Or they’ll come up with other specious reasons like that. They’d claim that the African-American students were psychologically evaluated but were deemed unfit to move into the white school.
So, even though they were on paper as having integrated, for the next several years, it’s a recurring pattern of throwing up all these roadblocks for anyone that’s actually trying to take advantage of the new integration policy. So, here’s a case that’s put forth as the supposed government-led, correct way to do things, but in actuality, you are getting instances where like 27 out of 30 African-American applicants to transfer into the white school are being rejected on specious grounds.
So, I’ve looked into some of the documentary evidence behind that, including some court cases that came out of Arlington, and what we find is over the next decade and a half to succession of these roadblocks, that the federal court has to keep coming in over and over and over again and overruling both the superintendent and the chairman of the school board, telling them that they’re not allowed to block African-American students on these wholly specious, discretionary roadblocks that they put up in place to prevent their transfer.
So, again, we see what’s supposedly the textbook case of the public school system doing things right is actually doing things horribly. They even set the stage in the early 1960s, there was overcrowding at a historically African-American school in Arlington, so the policy proposal to fix it was to build more schools in that neighborhood, to expand with the expanding population, but the school board director got really crafty and decided that instead of building a new school that serviced the border between a historically black and historically white neighborhood and therefore would be integrated just by its natural opening, what they did is they consolidated all the black neighborhoods into this one gigantic elementary school that they expanded out. Historically, all the white neighborhoods had about 200 students a piece per elementary school, and then they had this one massive school in the black neighborhood that served about 1,200 to 1,500 students that had all been forced in there through these backhanded tricks.
What this does is, a decade later, it sets the stage for the busing crisis in the early 1970s when the federal courts finally strike down the district and say, “Hey, we’ve had enough. You’ve been pulling these tricks for the last decade. You aren’t really integrating even though you said you have on paper, you need to fix this.” So, the busing crisis in the early 1970s is a direct fallout from public school bureaucrats that were generally anti-school choice in the early 1960s nominally integrating on paper but then maintaining segregation through trickery and other regulatory measures behind the scenes.
So, that’s been kind of the interesting point of comparison of what could have been with the voucher system versus what actually existed when you go the public school route, and that really confirms Milton Friedman’s argument. He says that politics tends to be corrupted by these types of interests. Politics attracts people that are trying to use the system for other goals beyond providing education, and one of those happened to be backdoor segregation. So, we actually have a historical vindication of something that he was predicting in the early 1960s actually did play out in Arlington County.
Jason Bedrick: Well, we can only imagine what racial integration would look like today had we actually fully implemented a school choice system. Thank you for coming on the podcast. My guest today has been Phil Magness of the American Institute of Economic Research. His essay, “School Vouchers, Segregation, and Consumer Sovereignty” can be found in the Journal of School Choice from 2019. Thank you, Phil, for coming on.
Phil Magness: Yeah, thanks for having me.
Jason Bedrick: This has been another edition of EdChoice Chats. If you have any ideas for authors you’d like us to interview for the Big Idea series, please send them to media@edchoice.org, and be sure to subscribe to our podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us on social media @edchoice, and don’t forget to sign up for our emails on our website, edchoice.org. Thank you. We’ll catch you next time.