Co-editors of the book, School Choice Myths: Setting the Record Straight on Educational Freedom, unpack just a few of the 12 school choice myths you will find in the book.
Jason Bedrick: Hello, and welcome back to EdChoice Chats. I’m your host, Jason Bedrick, director of policy at EdChoice. And this is another edition of our Big Ideas series. Today, I’m delighted to be joined by two special guests. First, we have Dr. Neal McCluskey, the director of the Cato Institute Center for Educational Freedom and my former boss. He also has the distinction of being the first second timer on the Big Ideas podcast. And we are also joined by Dr. Corey DeAngelis, the director of school choice at the Reason Foundation and an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. They are the co-editors of a new book, School Choice Myths: Setting the Record Straight on Educational Freedom. Full disclosure, I co-authored a chapter with Dr. Lindsey Burke of the Heritage Foundation for this excellent book. Gentlemen, welcome to the podcast.
Neal McCluskey: Thanks.
Corey DeAngelis: Hey, thanks.
Jason Bedrick: Before we read the contents of the book, why did you decide to embark on this project?
Corey DeAngelis: Yeah, we were all at the Journal of School Choice Conference in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, just a couple of years ago. And we all just came together and decided that there’s been a ton of myths that have been going around in the school choice debate recently, and a book on the school choice myths would be great to refute a lot of the falsehoods in the debate. And we actually had a tough time limiting the book to 12 myths, just because there’s so many going on in the discussion.
Neal McCluskey: I need to fill up that answer a little bit, because first of all, it’s the International School Choice and Reform Conference, which is hard to remember, but I’ve committed it to memory. And I don’t remember exactly all the specifics, but Corey was chairing a panel, and I think somebody on that said, “I don’t know why there isn’t one place where you can go to get the answers to all these myths that we see keep popping up.” And I was like, “We need books coming out of the Cato Institute. Let’s do that.”
Jason Bedrick: In this book, you have assembled an impressive group of scholars, policy wonks, historians, and even activists to address these 12 different myths about school choice. We don’t have the time to address all of them today, so I encourage our listeners to go out and get a copy of the book, but I would like to address a few of them. So, Neal, you wrote the first chapter on the myth that school choice balkanizes, and you hear this a lot. Public schools are where everyone of different races and religions and worldviews come together. And without public schools, parents would raise kids in their own parochial worldviews. And that would divide society. Isn’t there some truth to these claims?
Neal McCluskey: So, this is one of my favorite myths to deal with because I think it’s particularly concerning, and in part it’s concerning because intuitively it actually makes a lot of sense, which is if we were to allow people to choose where they go to school, they’re going to tend to go to school with people who are in one way or another like themselves. Because quite frankly, people are more comfortable when they’re around people who speak their language, enjoy the same sort of food, maybe have the same ethnic background. And the reality is, we do see people, not just in education, but in all sorts of different things they do, tending to self-segregate, tending to do things with people like themselves, again, because that often just makes your life easier.
So some of these myths I don’t think are because people are trying to destroy school choice. I think they are talking about them because it makes sense to them and they haven’t had a lot of time to really delve into the reality of, are they myths or are they true? So, given that there’s reason, good reason, to think that this is a problem, I thought we needed to have a chapter that talks about, does school choice tend to pull us apart or does it tend to bring us together? And really important for this and just about any other myth is you can’t compare it to the ideal world, you’ve got to compare it to reality.
And when we look at public schooling versus school choice, what we see is, yes, there’s lots of stratification, people choosing to do all sorts of things, including schooling with people like themselves. But choice actually has less, especially in the U.S. context, less stratification than public schooling, and when you start to think about it, you can understand why. Because choice enables people to go to a school that gives them something they want. And that may bring them together with people who in other ways are different, but are bonded by that thing they want. So if you think maybe people of different race may choose a school that teaches a particular religious viewpoint, and that helps them to transcend racial differences. So even more important than the physical integration, it gives the building material for bridges among different groups. There’s not perfection there, but the research and the theory actually points to school choice as a better way to bring people together.
Jason Bedrick: Related to this, I think is this idea that public schools are necessary for a stable democracy, that you need this one institution to instill the civic values that our nation stands for and the pluralism that our nation stands for. And that’s another reason why you need them, all these different people to come together in this one institution. We even hear public school is described as the cornerstone of democracy. So what’s wrong with this argument?
Neal McCluskey: Well, there are a lot of problems wrong with it. The first is that quite clearly, if you look at American history, these schools didn’t bring people together. In fact, they often intentionally and legally segregated. But we have a terrific chapter. I’ll just go out on a limb here, because everybody’s going to love every chapter, but this may be the most important chapter in the book, although all the chapters are great. But Patrick Wolf has supplied us with a chapter, which is really sort of an update to his 2007 Education Next article called “Civics Exam,” which I know I use and refer to constantly and I think lots of other people do. And it was a literature review that looked at all sorts of different findings of whether our schools of choice produced students and eventually graduates who had more of the sort of attributes we want of a good citizen.
Are they more tolerant of people with other views than themselves? Would they let those people speak? What was their knowledge of civics? Did they understand the separation of powers and things like that? And that was a terrific study that showed that schools of choice have, the findings, the research findings consistently show they do as well or better than the public schools. He’s now updated that. That was a 2007 article. This is going to be a 2020 book and he has more findings, more studies, but again finds, even more powerfully, and this case only looking at private schools, so not charter schools, just private schools, that private schools have a huge advantage in creating citizens. And that is including with sort of the best statistical controls we can have for the variability and the people who go to those schools. So we’re pretty sure that it’s the effect of going to a private school that leads to better citizenship.
Jason Bedrick: So, private schools are not leading to balkanization and they’re actually doing a better job perhaps of instilling civic values in children. But, there’s another argument that you often hear, which is that, okay, education just shouldn’t be left in the market because that would treat children like commodities. And markets are great for producing widgets, but children aren’t widgets. So Corey, your chapter takes us on, why should we leave education to the masses?
Corey DeAngelis: Yeah. This particular myth, as I lay it out in the chapter, is a non sequitur. And we see a lot of this in the school choice debate where opponents of school choice will make a stance that makes a lot of sense and that everybody agrees with, but then their policy proposal leads to the opposite results. So my chapter is children are not widgets, therefore education shouldn’t be left to the market. And this reminds me of an exchange that I got into with someone recently on Twitter. I get into a lot of those. But someone pretty recently who’s affiliated with the teacher’s union in Texas, think he might be a president of a teacher’s union there. He said something along the lines of education’s not a board game, and he used that as an argument against school choice. And I said, yeah, I agree.
But I’m not the one here arguing for a monopoly, which is a board game. So there’s a lot of these non sequiturs here. And I agree that children are not widgets. They’re unique individuals, they have unique things that they’re interested in and background characteristics and needs as students. And so that’s an argument as to why we shouldn’t leave it to the government. A similar myth is that education is so important that it can’t be left to the market. My response is, well, no, it’s so important that it shouldn’t be with the government because the government isn’t very good at essentially anything that it does. And the stakes are higher when it comes to things like education. So things being important are just a stronger argument as to why we should have choice. If the government loses my mail, that kind of sucks.
But the result is that I just lose a piece of mail. But when the government screws up my kid’s education, the result is that my child ends up with a bad future. So I’d much rather have choice in more important things and a market involved in more important things like education. And let’s face it. A market already exists for education. The question isn’t should a market exist or not, because it already does. The real question is who should have access to that market? And in the current setting, most people that have access to the market are people who are well off. School choice advocates, like the people on this call want all individuals to have access to this market, through either a private school voucher program, education savings account program, or even through public charter schools. We want more choices for a larger segment of the population than is able to partake in the market today.
A similar claim here is that education or schooling is a public good, which I refute in the piece. According to the economic definition, schooling is not a public good. It holds both conditions being required of a public good, and that you can exclude non-payers. So it’s excludable and rivalrous in consumption. I think the bigger point here is that people, when they say that education or schooling is a public good, they actually aren’t talking about the economic definition. What they are claiming is that education benefits all of society, that if I get a better education, you guys are better off too, because that’ll make me a more informed voter.
But as Neal just talked about, in Patrick Wolf’s chapter, the evidence actually suggests that we actually get better educated citizens and a more tolerant society and more democratic citizens if we allow for choice and competition and the market for education. So it’s true that children are not widgets. But the conclusion there is that, well, because of that, we should have school choice because governments typically don’t do a good job of providing a good education or providing the education necessary for a stable democracy. And so we should allow people to choose their schools.
Jason Bedrick: And I think one of the other problems with that framing is yes, kids aren’t widgets, but kids aren’t the product, right? Kids are the customer, or at least their parents are. So, yeah, they’re not widgets, but that’s entirely a non sequitur for that reason. So the framing is just backwards. Now you’ve got a lot of myths in this book. So out of all the remaining myths, we’ll start with Neal. Which myth do you find to be the most pernicious?
Neal McCluskey: Got to be this idea that school choice is rooted in racism and segregation and therefore can only be about racism and segregation. Phil Magnus has a chapter about that in the book. Many people who are listening probably know Phil. He’s done a lot of great sort of historical work, the questions of integration in segregational schools.
Jason Bedrick: Just quickly. We recorded a podcast which has already been released with Phil Magnus on exactly this topic in which we dive deep on this subject. So, he’ll give us a brief overview on this one. But if you want a longer treatment, then definitely tune into the Big Ideas podcast with Phil Magnus. But Neal, go ahead.
Neal McCluskey: So, definitely people should go back and listen to Phil’s podcast because like in this chapter, there’s a lot of detail in particular about how sort of different people, especially in Virginia, we’re looking at the impact on potential sort of school choice and eventually what became known as segregation academies, but how really segregationists looked at school choice. And there’s no question that some segregationists wanted school choice or vouchers so that people could escape integrated schools. But what’s really interesting is, there were a lot of, or a significant number of segregationists who were really worried about vouchers. They were afraid if people can leave to other schools that would lead to integration of public schools and that some people were choosing actually to use their school choice to go to integrated schools. So, the story itself that we hear about vouchers and their relation to segregation after Brown v. Board of Education in the 1950s is itself way more complicated than people realize, and much more important, as this is part of the genetic fallacy, that well, because some people at some point wanted to use school choice for bad reasons, school choice must itself be bad.
And of course, Phil talks about no, actually the idea of school choice goes way farther back then segregationists trying to avoid Brown v. Board of Education. So, it’s a really comprehensive way of dealing with this pernicious myth that, well, because somebody wanted to use school choice for bad reasons, school choice must itself be bad.
Jason Bedrick: Right? And I would just point out too, that, some of the other myths, you can have well-intentioned people that believe these things, and that spread them because it just intuitively makes sense that if people are choosing their own schools, maybe you would balkanize. And if you want a civic education, it makes sense that it would be the government school that provides it. And the reality is somewhat counterintuitive. In this case, though, this is actually an active lie that is spread by people who know better.
And I’m thinking in particular of people at the Century Foundation, the teacher’s unions, that keep repeating this lie over and over, even when they are corrected by historians, even when people bring it to their attention, hey, this is a lot more complicated than you’re making it. There were integrationists and segregationists on both sides of this issue. School choice can be a tool that is used for integration. It can be used for segregation. They don’t care about the history. They are intentionally spreading a lie. So that’s why I actually agree. I think this, of all the myths that are covered in the book, is the most pernicious of all the myths. But there are others as well that are fairly pernicious. Corey, what’s your top pick?
Corey DeAngelis: Well, I have a bunch of them that are my top picks because there’s so many. And two of them are really related so I want to hit on them really quickly. But one that we hear all the time is that school choice drains money from government schools. But the reality is that government schools drain money from families. The school choice programs just return that money to the rightful owners. So Marty Lueken from EdChoice and Ben Scafidi from Kennesaw State University teamed up together and took on this myth in their chapter.
And one of the things that they point out is that, on a per pupil basis, when government schools lose students to school choice competition, they actually end up with more money and financially benefit because less than 100 percent of government school funding is driven by student enrollment. So mathematically, they end up with more money per child. But on a related note, another one is that, which I got into an argument with someone just earlier today as well on Twitter, is that they argued that the children who are left behind or the kids who remain in the government schools will be worse off somehow.
But the evidence suggests the opposite. And this is one of the clearest strains of evidence in school choice. We have tons of studies on this. The EdChoice 123s have very clearly documented the research finding that there’s about 27 or 28 studies, I think EdChoice summarized 27 of the studies, finding that on the topic of school choice competition. And they find that 25 of 27 studies find statistically significant positive effects of school choice competition on the children who remain in the government schools. So, children can benefit from school choice competition without even using the programs, because the government schools, when they start to see that they can lose some students, they scratch their head a little bit and shape up if they don’t want to shut down. So they start to improve their curriculums and they start catering to the needs of their customers.
Again, this is a pretty clear line of research, 25 to 27 studies. Since the EdChoice review came out, another one of these studies came out in Florida by, I think David Figlio and a couple of other authors in 2020, finding that the Florida private school choice program had competitive positive effects on the government schools on outcomes like better test scores, better attendance and better school climates. So again, there’s just another study finding positive effects here. And then also there’s a meta-analysis that was published in Educational Policy in 2019, finding the same result, that private school choice tends to lead to better outcomes in the government schools because of those competitive pressures. And I would just say further that, even if the evidence was the opposite, this isn’t a legitimate argument to take that choice away from low-income families who do want the better option for their children.
I like to compare this to food stamps and grocery stores, for example. Let’s say I was shopping at Walmart or Whole Foods, and I wanted to take my food stamps to Trader Joe’s. If Walmart or Whole Foods did not shape up and improve because of my choice to leave, that wouldn’t be a good argument to force me to just use my food stamps at Whole Foods or Walmart. I should still be able to pick the service that works best for me. Similarly with the education system, my freedom to choose my children’s education shouldn’t hinge on whether the government schools respond positively to my choice to leave. But regardless, as we show in the chapter, I think Matt Ladner did this chapter, the evidence is overwhelmingly positive that when people get the freedom to choose their children’s education, the government schools tend to improve and a whole host of different outcomes as well.
Neal McCluskey: Can I nominate one more chapter for pernicious effects? There’s a really good one on school choice needs regulation to ensure access and quality is a myth. That’s by Lindsey Burke and someone named Bedrick. And that’s actually a very important one because the idea that regulation can solve a lot of problems that people perceive in school choice is actually not uncommon among school choice supporters. So, this may be a more inside choice, baseball kind of chapter, but that really needs to be addressed. And I think it’s really important that we have that chapter in there. I’m sure it’s mainly Lindsey Burke’s work and then this Bedrick dotted an i or crossed a t or something. But that’s really important, especially when we get into the weeds of policy.
Corey DeAngelis: Yeah. And I want to point out that it’s great that Jason and Lindsey point out a lot of the unintended consequences of these regulations, such as what we’ve seen in the Louisiana voucher program, one of the most highly regulated programs in the United States and it’s the first negative experimental evaluation of a private school choice program in the world to find negative effects on test scores. And look, only a third of the private schools participated in that program in the first year, whereas in other private school choice programs that are less heavily regulated, about double that proportion. About 70 to 80 percent of private schools tend to participate in other programs in the country. And some of the other unintended consequences are that the higher quality private schools are the ones that are more likely to say, no, thank you, because I already have a type of school environment that’s working for my students. And I don’t want to accept these regulations that are going to make me look like the schools that those families are trying to leave.
Jason Bedrick: I think the standing on one foot version of that chapter is that the claim is made essentially that, if you’re going to have school choice, great, but you need certain regulations to guarantee access and quality. You need things like open admissions requirements and price controls and mandatory state testing that has some sort of teeth, where you would kick out a school that doesn’t perform well. And that that will guarantee access and quality. And what Lindsey and I show is that this is neither necessary nor sufficient. And we used basically Louisiana and Florida to show this. In Louisiana, you have a very high regulation environment, and those regulations were not sufficient to guarantee access. Most of the private schools didn’t participate nor guarantee quality because, as we saw, there were actually negative results from multiple studies. And yet, over in Florida, which is a very low regulation environment, you actually have very, very high access and you have much better performance on test scores and other metrics. So we just show, not necessary, not sufficient to guarantee those two things.
And then we show some very suggestive evidence that actually some of these regulations are not only unnecessary, but may even be counterproductive and may be not only failing to prevent these quality issues, but actually are fueling them. So, that’s the preview of that chapter, which ties into another chapter you have in the book by Dr. John Merrifield, where he debunks the myth that any school choice is welcome school choice. Look, there’s a lot of people in the movement who argue plausibly that any expansion in choice is a step in the right direction, even if it isn’t the gold standard as defined by Milton Friedman or our late colleague Andrew Colson, or choice advocates today. But Merrifield, and presumably both of you, think that some school choice policies are more harmful than helpful. So why is that the case?
Neal McCluskey: You know, I’ll just go first real fast because, what’s interesting about the Merrifield chapter is, it’s actually very hard to determine that some amount of school choice may be so hamstrung that it has negative effects because it is so important to get people more school choice. And so, I think that Professor Merrifield and anybody who starts to think about this really ends up struggling because for the kids who could get something better right now, you always feel like, well, we should get them whatever choice they can because having some choice is better than having no choice. So, this is a chapter that people will really have to sort of wrestle with to understand why, for instance, the fact that we have a charter school, but we don’t have enough charter schools, can actually lead to problems because that means if there’s a big group of people who are waiting in line for a charter school, the existing charter schools cannot produce as good a service as they otherwise might, because look, even if people leave, they got people to backfill that.
And so, it’s bad to have school choice where we seriously constrain the supply of that choice. It can have lots of negative ramifications. But it’s ultimately hard to say, well, so do we just not have that choice? So he really grapples with this sort of conundrum of, you want to save people right now, but what if that ends up ultimately hurting school choice because school choice gets a bad reputation because you have schools that are schools of choice that don’t do well because there’s such demand for their product. So it’s really something people have to think about a lot to recognize that it may be a net loss to future school choice to have bad school choice right now.
Corey DeAngelis: Yeah, Neal, you’re absolutely right. And I just want to point out that John Merrifield points out that a lot of the problems with certain forms of school choice, and I’m thinking that I’m looking at charter schools, could be that they don’t have a pricing mechanism. And since their tuition is quote unquote free at the point of the consumer, this could lead to a lot of those shortage problems with the wait list and how you talk about how that leads to a lot of monopoly power, essentially, for the charter schools. If they have a lot of people waiting in line and you have a dissatisfied customer, well, the charter school doesn’t really have a very strong incentive to improve because they can replace the unhappy customer with the happy one waiting in line. So, I think Merrifield kind of argues to have other forms like private school choice that have that type of pricing mechanism that could eliminate those types of shortages and in the long run lead to better outcomes for students.
But yeah. One of the issues is a potential reputational error, if you know these hamstrung forms of school choice get negative results that could prevent more school choice for others in the long run. And then also, yes, it depends on what your option set is here. And I think there’s some studies that find that the charter school market kind of eats away at the private school market. So, that’s another one of the unintended consequences that private school families could, without a private school choice program, they could switch to charter schools because they could look at the two options and say, well, this is kind of like a private school option, but it’s quote unquote free and I don’t have to pay anything out of pocket. And so you can kind of see and theorize how the charter school market could take away from the private school market. If we don’t have private school choice options alongside charter school options. So, yeah, it’s a complicated chapter.
Jason Bedrick: So, there’s an issue with how policymakers design school choice. And we have to be careful with how these programs are designed. But some people also have concerns about who’s doing the choosing. And so, over the summer, a New Hampshire legislator expressed during a committee hearing that she opposed school choice because she didn’t think less educated families would choose wisely. This was state Senator Jeanne Dietsch from the House Education Committee. And she said, quote, this idea of parental choice. That’s great, if the parent is well-educated. There are some families that’s perfect for, but to make it available to everyone? No. I think you’re asking for a huge amount of trouble. End quote. So are we asking for trouble if low income or less educated parents are allowed to choose their children’s schools?
Corey DeAngelis: No. And yeah, I just want to point out that we actually had Virginia Walden Ford who is portrayed in the [movie], Miss Virginia, write this chapter. I think this is our final chapter. And I think it’s one of the most important chapters here. Of course, all of the chapters are pretty important. But this is one of the big arguments that’s made in the school choice debate that we can’t have those people choosing schools for their kids. And it’s a completely paternalistic idea that low-income families, for whatever reason, just aren’t capable of choosing schools for their own children. So, Virginia Walden Ford takes on this myth and I think it’s really important. And Jason, you and I co-wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal on this that even low-income families have been shown to make really good choices for their kids when it comes to their education.
They care about their children’s education more than anyone else, and they had the most on the ground knowledge when it comes to choosing educational services for their children. They know a lot more and care more about their children, in general, than bureaucrats sitting in offices hundreds of miles away. And that’s why we’ve seen in different studies looking at low-income populations, doing a good job choosing schools. And more recently, Eric Bettinger, from a study in Colombia, which is a very low per capita income location. He did a voucher program experiment finding that children who won the lottery to attend private schools in Colombia actually ended up earning more later on in life. And I think he also found a significant reduction in teenage childbearing as well. So the families over there did a good job too, despite having lower per capita incomes.
Neal McCluskey: Yeah. And what I think was really interesting about Virginia’s chapter is she certainly mentioned some of the research, Patrick Wolf had done a lot of research on the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program which she was instrumental in helping to start crusading for it. And that’s what you learn about in Miss Virginia. But she talks about just a lot of people that she met while she was talking about and advocating for the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program after it started, people she was helping to enroll. And she talks about some people who most people just totally write off and say, well, that person has so many problems. There’s no way, even if they wanted to, they could help their kids choose a school. And not only were they able to do that, but it actually empowered a lot of those people in their own lives because they now had agency to affect how their children grew up, how their children were educated, and that was empowering to them.
So it really puts a lot of real faces on these group of people that too many folks look at from afar and say, oh, well, they couldn’t possibly make these choices. And this fits into kind of a recurring theme for all the chapters which is, a lot of these myths are things that people just intuitively feel. They’re like, well, if somebody is poor, they’re probably not nearly as on top of things as I am. And so they couldn’t make a choice. And, it’s really important to illustrate for people why their intuitive feelings, even if they’re well-intentioned, don’t ultimately make sense.
Corey DeAngelis: This also reminds me in Arizona a few years ago, there was a lady who testified against the school choice expansion in Arizona. Jason, you might remember this. But she said something along the lines of, we all know what happens when poor people get a choice. And she was talking about accountability of public funds and implying that low income individuals just weren’t competent enough to make good choices for their children. And we see this over and over again in the public debate. And I think more and more people are understanding that this isn’t a good line of reasoning and it’s an elitist line of reasoning. And I think most people see this and kind of are taken aback when they hear people say these things out loud.
Jason Bedrick: Certainly it’s those comments that, when they hit social media, draw the most ire from parents, especially low-income parents. So one final question. You have 12 excellent chapters. But are there any myths that you had to cut for space that you wish you could have included or that you just didn’t think about until after the book was ready to go to print?
Corey DeAngelis: Yeah, I have one. And yes, there’s so many myths, but only 12 chapters. And one of the biggest ones though, that we left out, was that school choice for whatever reason is bad for teachers. And the evidence suggests the opposite. There are about five studies on this, empirical studies on this, that look at what happens when there’s school choice competition comes into play into an area. And that all five of these studies find some evidence that teacher salaries actually rise in the public schools as a result of school choice competition. And the reason for this is pretty obvious, that when government school monopolies have the incentive to spend money wisely in the classroom, well, teacher salaries actually go up.
And this is made pretty clear from EdChoice’s reports by Ben Scafidi from Kennesaw State University that he highlighted, found that between 1992 and 2014, the United States real education expenditures, inflation adjusted, increased by 27 percent in the United States, whereas real teacher salaries, after adjusting for inflation, actually went down by 2 percent. So we’re pouring more and more money into the system, but because there’s not strong pressures for the system to spend that money wisely on the teachers, the teachers aren’t seeing a lot of that money.
Neal McCluskey: I think that’s a good one. There are so many other myths that you see pop up from time to time. But I’m just going to defend the book right to the very end and say, we got the 12 most important myths and everybody needs to read it. And if you read that, there’s only one other chapter we maybe should’ve added about empowering teachers. But this really captures just about everything you’d need. Shameless plug.
Jason Bedrick: Well, I highly recommend the book. I hope everyone goes out and gets a copy. The book is School Choice Myths: Setting the Record Straight on Educational Freedom. Co-edited by Dr. Neal McCluskey and Dr. Corey DeAngelis, our guests today. This has been another edition of EdChoice Chats. If you have any other 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 at EdChoice. And don’t forget to sign up for our emails on our website. Gentlemen, thank you for joining the podcast.
Corey DeAngelis: Thanks, Jason.
Neal McCluskey: Thanks.