The Learning Curve John Kirtley
[00:00:00] Albert Cheng: Hello everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Learning Curve podcast. I’m one of your co-hosts this week, Albert Cheng, co-hosting With me this week is my friend Shaka Mitchell. Hey, Shaka. What’s going on?
Shaka Mitchell: Hey, Albert. Great to be with you today.
[00:00:12] Albert Cheng: Yeah, yeah. We don’t usually get to do this together. I always love to do stuff. We, you know, we, we’ve crossed paths quite a bit, but hey, why don’t you, uh, introduce yourself to some of our, our, our listeners who might not know you yet?
[00:00:24] Shaka Mitchell: Yeah, thanks Will. In addition to being Albert Cheng’s friend, I am a senior fellow at the American Federation for Children, the nation’s leading voice for school choice.
[00:00:33] Albert Cheng: Yeah. And speaking of school choice, we’re gonna have, I guess, another friend who’s more than just a friend, I guess, John .
[00:00:39] Shaka Mitchell: Yeah. John is really tremendous. He has been in the school choice fight and really the broader educational reform movement for decades now. So he’s bringing a wealth of knowledge to the pod today.
[00:00:51] Albert Cheng: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Undoubtedly. And man, I, you know, I know we were just talking about him earlier and you know, you and I were just remarking about how the world would be a very different place today if he wasn’t doing what he did.
[00:01:02] Shaka Mitchell: A hundred percent.
[00:01:03] Albert Cheng: But before we get to that interview, let’s do what we usually do on this show and talk about some news. Shaka, I guess you found a interesting exchange between two folks on education next.
[00:01:15] Shaka Mitchell: Yeah, I sure did. So on education next, this past week, there was an article called What Can We Learn from the Nation’s Oldest Voucher Program? And it was two scholars kind of drawing some differing conclusions from Milwaukee’s 35 year voucher program.
[00:01:31] And so you had Michael McShane, who is known to. You and I, and a lot of folks you know who listened to this podcast. You had him talking about sort of the benefits of the Milwaukee voucher program and what we’ve learned, the positive things we’ve learned, and then you had Ashley Joko who was talking about some of the struggles in her mind, the struggles of the program.
[00:01:53] I thought it was a really good article in part because you sort of see. The different mindsets in how people measure the efficacy of these programs. You know, I think lots of times, frankly, opponents of choice programs tend to measure against some ceiling that is undefined. And then I would say proponents of school choice programs are often measuring against the status quo, which is closer to the floor.
[00:02:21] You know, they’re often measuring against the existing public school. Program. And so you see a little bit of that happening where you know Mike says, Hey, look at this program you’ve got. I mean, on the one hand, there are better academic results. Now many of the schools, it’s not like they’re shooting lights out on some of the academic measurements.
[00:02:41] This is the private schools I’m talking about, but kids are doing better. Parent satisfaction is high. There’s choice. There’s sort of some of these intrinsic benefits that come from just having the agency of choice. So Mike points to those things, which of course are absent in the existing public school system.
[00:02:58] Meanwhile, actually sort of says, Hey look, you’ve had a bunch of private schools that have closed over the years. Isn’t that an indicator that. Some of these things don’t necessarily work. You know, I would sort of say, and this won’t be a surprise to anybody, but listen, when schools close because they’re not serving kids well, that’s actually what we want to see happen.
[00:03:17] Yeah. And that’s what almost never happens in the existing public school system. So I thought it was a pretty good article. Definitely worth the look.
[00:03:25] Albert Cheng: You know, I appreciate the way you’ve described that, you know, the way you say that trace critics sometimes measure against a, a ceiling and then proponents against a floor.
[00:03:32] Yeah. I’ve actually never heard that. But as you said that, I’m like, yeah, actually, you know what? I do think that’s probably, you know, where we clash into each other. Um, yeah. And, and I think there’s, for some to say about and think about. Regarding, Hey, how do we measure this and what’s our standard here?
[00:03:46] But yeah, no, definitely important discussion. I know I said it quite a bit, and I know Mike McChain says it a bit, but the supply side, so to speak, of school choice and addressing that question of how do we, how do we get quality private schools and expand, you know, these options out there. You know, policy can do a little bit to kind of open that doorway, but man, it’s the hard everyday work of people in these communities Yeah. To make it happen. And so we really need to be focusing on that as well.
[00:04:13] Shaka Mitchell: Yeah, a hundred percent. You know, and it’s one thing to get the law passed and they note this in the article. It’s one thing to get the law passed. It’s one thing to advocate for it. It’s another thing to operate a school for 180 days. Yeah. It’s a different type of work. Yeah. But what about you? What kind of article did you find?
[00:04:28] Albert Cheng: It’s an op-ed that showed up in The Guardian, and the title is The Battle Over US History Reveals Our Education System’s Key Flaw and really the crux of the argument, at least the authors arguing here, is in education we’ve, we’ve devalued the liberal arts and that kind of is why students are unprepared for the demands of democratic life.
[00:04:50] I actually find myself agreeing with a lot of the premise here and the argument. I know that we’ve been calling for better civic education. I know Pioneer has, and a lot of different other players in the education space. We’ve just kind of lamented right, the, the NAP scores on Civics and, and how, why is it that students don’t know how our government works?
[00:05:10] And I think those are all important. Facts to point out, but I think what this article brings to the table is the fact that in our education system, we’ve kind of taken this instrumental approach where, look, if you ask people what the purpose of education is, I think the first thing that comes to mind for a lot of people, either explicitly or implicitly, is jobs preparation.
[00:05:31] This article alludes to that saying that, Hey, look, we’ve, we’ve poured in a lot of money and focus into stem. ’cause you know, that’s where the money is. That’s what we need. We need to invest in that area. You know, but what this author also says is like, look, our attention to the practical consequences of education and practical understood as you know, getting kids ready for employment.
[00:05:55] We’ve missed out on training kids to. Discern well to judge. Well, and you know, critical thinking isn’t simply just, Ooh, I’m gonna, you know, have some kind of skepticism over what I hear. At its core, it’s this ability to discern from. Good and evil right and wrong. Mm-hmm. And you know what this author is saying is that, look, that’s the heart of liberal arts education and we really haven’t helped kids exercise that discernment muscle enough.
[00:06:23] Yep. So, you know, obviously, I mean, if you listen to this show, I’m a big fan of liberal arts education and I think what this author articulates is one of the reasons why I’m such a big supporter, uh, of liberal arts education.
[00:06:34] Shaka Mitchell: Yeah. Really interesting, especially in the face of this massive. AI wave. Right.
[00:06:41] Because AI is so good, and I think it’s better by the day with regards to technical expertise. Mm. Right. AI is going to expedite coding and it’s gonna, you know, very quickly, it’s gonna read through textbooks and give us some hard facts. Yeah. Hard documented facts. But it’s not gonna help us with ethics, I don’t think.
[00:07:01] Right. That’s right. I think that’s right. It’s not gonna help us kind of Yeah. With the discernment, as you say. I like that. That’s a, a good way to describe it. Discernment.
[00:07:08] Albert Cheng: Yeah, no, I mean, it reminds me, we, we had a engineering professor do an honors course here at the University of Arkansas. Many, many, many semesters ago, engineer.
[00:07:16] Right. And the class was called, should We Build it? Yeah. And he made the point, this whole class was all about like, look, as engineers we’re always trying to figure out. Can we build it? How do we build it? Right? And then he was asking the normative question, should we build it? Which you need a whole nother set of knowledge and background and character formation really to deal with that.
[00:07:36] So anyway, I wanna commend this article for our listeners and thanks for sharing your article. I think there’s a lot of food for thought here, but we’ve got to move on to our interview with John Kirtley. So that’s gonna come up on the flip. Sydor the break.
[00:07:52] : My won’t be turned around and I’ll keep this world from dragging me down stand. My
[00:08:07] Albert Cheng: John Kirtley is managing partner and co-founder of Keswick Partners, a private equity firm based in Tampa. He is the founder and chairman of Step Up for Students, a nonprofit that manages state funded K 12 scholarship programs for the state of Florida that will serve over a half a million students this year.
[00:08:26] He is Vice Chairman of the American Federation for Children, a national nonprofit that works to advance educational freedom. He’s also the co-chair of Florida Federation for Children, a political action committee that works to elect people of both parties to the Florida House and Senate who support educational choice.
[00:08:45] He is also a board member of the James Madison Institute, a free market think tank in Tallahassee. Well, John, thanks for taking your time to be on our show. It’s a pleasure to have you here. It’s an honor to be here.
[00:08:56] John Kirtley: Thanks for having me.
[00:08:57] Albert Cheng: Let’s start at the very beginning about how you got into all this, I mean, your professional careers in the private sector. What’s the story of how you decided to dive head first into educational choice work in Florida in the late
[00:09:09] John Kirtley: 1990s? It’s an odd story, as I’m sure many are. I moved down to Tampa in late 88 with my best friend from college, who’s still my best friend. Business partner 45, now 45 years. We moved down to Tampa in, I guess it was January 89, to start a very small, back then we called it a, a venture capital firm.
[00:09:33] Now they call it private equity, but we focused on helping managers buy the companies that they worked for but did not own, and really for the next. Several years. I just had my head down working on that and working with him. And then I had a couple major life changes that were unexpected in the early to mid nineties and I, I really wanted to give back somehow and I didn’t really know how.
[00:09:59] I was kinda looking around for a cause. And another dear friend of mine from college, a guy named John Griffin. He knew that I was looking to give back, and he called me. He said, Hey, I’m gonna do this thing. And he lived in New York City. He said, I’m gonna do this thing. Called the Patrons program and it’s run by the Catholic Church and they match business people with individual Catholic schools in inner city, New York.
[00:10:24] And you give them money, but you also try to help ’em run like a business. ’cause they were often great educators, but not always great business people. And just because he asked me, I said yes. I had no background in education, no interest in education. I was a public school kid, went to public schools in Iowa and, and I moved to Fort Lauderdale when I was in high school.
[00:10:45] Went to a big urban public high school. Um, ham was a public school teacher. Again, no background. And we were matched up, John and I with this school called Christ the King in the Bronx, south Bronx. Very typical of an inner city Catholic school. K through eight, about 300 kids, all minority, probably 50% Catholic, so this was my first exposure to it.
[00:11:09] Private education and you know, of course my image of private schools was, oh, they’re all expensive, exclusive, leafy suburban academies. Well, welcome to the world of, of inner city Catholic education. The stated tuition was $3,000. This is in 1996. The average collected was probably. Low two thousands. The cost per kid was about 5,500.
[00:11:36] And of course the church was subsidizing the difference and these parents who were all very low income were killing themselves to come up with the tuition. And some of them had more than one kid in the school. And I would talk to them and I would say, Hey, there’s a public school across the street. Why are you killing yourself working two jobs, cutting off your TV to send your kid here?
[00:11:58] And it’s so funny ’cause they weren’t experts in K 12, they didn’t have the PhD in education. They were very pragmatic. They would say, well, my first kid. Went to the school across the street, public school, and he dropped out. My neighbor’s kid went here to Christ the King, and then he went to St. Whatever high school in the Bronx, and now he’s in college.
[00:12:19] So my kid’s gonna go here and said to myself, what is going on here? So I was a business person. I had no background in education policy, so I just did some research. And again, this is like 96, 97. And I discovered that the per pupil spending in the New York public schools at the time was well over $20,000 per kid.
[00:12:39] And as, as we know now, inflation adjusted, it’s now over 40,000. So again, as a business person, I’m thinking to myself, okay, these people are killing themselves to buy a product with their own money that they could get across the street for free and the cost of the product. Here at the Catholic school is less than a quarter of what it’s costing across the street.
[00:13:05] What is going on here? I, I was, honestly, I was mystified. And John Griffin, he’s, he’s a lot smarter than me. He’s like, Hey, dude, you should go read that book that you were supposed to read in college by Milton Friedman called Capitalism and Freedom Chapter eight or nine. I can’t remember which one. It’s on Education.
[00:13:22] And in that book, Friedman says, look, I understand why we raise taxpayer dollars to educate kids to have an educated populace. What I don’t understand is why we have a government run monopoly deliver that education. And I swear I was like the coyote in the Roadrunner cartoon. This anvil landed on my head.
[00:13:44] It hit me that quickly. It was a monopoly. And you know, Friedman says, Hey, you know, in my experience in the business world, monopolies have higher prices, lower quality for fewer choices than when there’s competition. Well, this hit home for me because. Jeff and I, one of our companies actually had a monopoly in a very small industry.
[00:14:05] And you might say, wasn’t that illegal? No. If it’s small enough, a small enough industry, the FTC, federal Trade Commission doesn’t care. So we had this monopoly of this little industry that was like 20 million nationwide. And because the customer controlled the purchasing power, they persuaded like the next level of management to leave and start a competitor.
[00:14:28] And we lost all of our money. So I understood this concept well and when I had this realization that this might be a monopoly affecting the outcomes, I really wondered how parents in my hometown, in my home, home area of Tampa, Tampa Bay, you know, I wondered if they wanted a choice, if they could have one.
[00:14:48] And I had just read a story in Forbes Magazine. This is like in 97, about a woman named Virginia James, and she in upstate New York. Started a private scholarship fund and she offered all the kids, every single one at an elementary school in a low income area. She said, I’ll give you a scholarship to go to a private school if you want.
[00:15:11] And like 30% of the kids, the parents took the, took the offer and it had this galvanizing effect on the public school to make all these improvements. It was just fa I I, I was fascinated by that. Mm-hmm. And so I decided to start at my own. Privately funded scholarship program in Tampa. Really? Tampa Bay. I did in two counties, Hillsborough and Pinellas.
[00:15:33] Essentially the Tampa Bay marketplace, and I only had enough money to help 350 kids for a very short period of time, like four years, and with not a lot of money. And when I had, was just getting this started, I was reading the Wall Street Journal and I read this article. Said Ted Forman, big Wall Street guy, and John Walton, the son of Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, were getting together and starting this nonprofit called the Children’s Scholarship Fund, and they were looking for people in cities across the country who wanted to start scholarship programs to help poor kids go to private.
[00:16:09] And I said, oh my God, I gotta go see these people. So I got on a plane without an appointment, flew to New York to the Offices of Children’s Scholarship Fund, walked in there, they’re unpacking their boxes, and I said, I’m doing this in in Tampa. Are you seriously? You can match my money. They’re, they’re like, yeah, it was that easy.
[00:16:29] And they actually, they actually said, well, I hope every other city is this easy. So all of a sudden we, we were able to help 700 kids and we had enough money to offer ’em $1,500 a year and inflation adjusted. That’s probably, I don’t know, three or 4,000 now. For four years, 700 scholarships, and we didn’t do any advertising.
[00:16:50] It was just myself walking around to churches and housing projects, talking about the pro. Actually, I got on black radio AM radio twice, and then I knew the host of a local TV morning show and I got on there once. And in four months, we got 12,000 applications for the 700 scholarships, overwhelmed with, and, and by the way, CSF similar reaction across the country.
[00:17:16] Like I, I remember reading that in the city of Baltimore, like 40% of kids in public schools applied for the scholar. So obviously this showed me that there was this huge demand for choice, at least in my area. And then my life intersected with Jeb Bush. Mm-hmm. Who had just gotten elected Governor Florida nine and since 98.
[00:17:41] And he ran on a platform of education reform, K 12 reform. One of the elements of which was a voucher program were schools that were graded f. If a public school got an F two times in a four year period, the kids at that just at those schools could get a voucher to go to a private school. And so I started working with his team, trying to help recruit schools to serve those kids.
[00:18:08] That particular program, even though it was an incredibly effective catalyst for reform, meaning these schools that got an F tried so hard to get off the list. And they did. It did not result in much choice for low income kids, even though it was very effective catalyst tool Tool for reform. So I started working with the state legislature and then in, so in 2001, the legislature created the first tax credit scholarship program for corporate income taxes in Florida.
[00:18:43] Mm-hmm. And the initial cap was 50 million a year, 15,000 kids at the same time. Well, in 1999, I was asked to be on to go on the board of directors of a national nonprofit. Called Children First America that was trying to pass these laws across the country. And then another nonprofit asked me to go on the board called the American Education Reform Council.
[00:19:08] Both of these entities were funded in part by John Walton, who was one of the patron saints of this movement. And I got to know him quite well. And then in 2001, he asked me to come and be the full-time president. Uh, chief First America, one of the two. So I actually left my business. I gave up my ownership position and I went and I worked, started in the movement full time.
[00:19:33] Uh, so I was running as president, children First America. I was also running all the Florida operations. Make a long story short, we ended up merging. The two entities. There was a wonderful woman named Susan Mitchell, who was president of A ERC. We merged the two together and then hired another president to take over who’s actually on the Arizona Supreme Court now.
[00:19:56] Mm-hmm. And later on we merged. So that entity merged with a political entity that Betsy DeVos had started. And those three entities were the predecessor for the entity that Shaka now works with. I’m now the vice chairman of that as the American Federation for Children. So, and then over the last, gosh, 25 years, we’ve grown from 15,000 kids in the first year of the state programs to this year we’re serving over a half million kids across several programs, so that’s, yeah.
[00:20:31] That’s the history.
[00:20:32] Albert Cheng: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, I really appreciate you taking the time to walk us through that. We often forget all the behind the scenes work that has happened over the past several decades to Yeah. To get to where we are. So that’s, that’s important for us to hear. I wanna. Probe you for some more, maybe wisdom and insight here.
[00:20:48] I mean, you, you mentioned starting a, you know, with the children’s scholarship on a very small program and, and now look Florida, you, you mentioned what, half a million students now, and apparently this was a kind of consistent and gradual effort for the past three decades. Can you talk about it, your strategy of incremental growth?
[00:21:04] Is that intentional rather than pushing overnight for like universal student eligibility? I mean, what were the, the impulses behind that strategy?
[00:21:12] John Kirtley: Well, honestly, there was never a long-term strategy for Universal, at least not for me. My goal in 2001 was to help poor kids, and as I said, the Children’s Scholarship Fund, the private program demonstrated just beyond a doubt that private philanthropy was never going to solve this problem.
[00:21:33] We had to in order to to scale and really to bring. Empowerment, all these families, you, you had to access public funding and the criteria for the initial tax credit program in Florida when they passed it in 2001, but it was for poor kids. The criteria was for reduced lunch and for many, many years, our average household income in the program was less than $30,000 for a household of four, including in like Dade County.
[00:22:04] In day county, it was less than $30,000 for a family of four, and and over 75% were minority families. For many years, the income criteria was free, reduced lunch. We always had a waiting list. We always had to keep going back to the legislature, you know, almost every year to raise the funding cap. And then finally, I think it was 2010, the legislature passed a bill to have an automatic.
[00:22:30] Every time we hit 95% of the cap, the cap went up 25%. Mm-hmm. So essentially there was no cap anymore. And so we continued to grow over steadily again, low income kids. And then at some point the legislative leaders in Florida said, Hey, what about working class families? What about a household where, you know, there’s a nurse and a cop and they don’t qualify for, for you reduced lunch, but maybe they’d like to have that opportunity and they cannot afford private school.
[00:23:00] So the legislature put in an escalator for household income to keep that rising, but they always had a preference. For poor the, the law always had a preference for poor kids, so that income escalator also grew very gradually, so that by 2022, the income limit was $75,000 for a household of four, which believe it or not, in Florida, that covered about 75% of all the kids in K 12 in the state.
[00:23:32] So we were 75% universal. By 2022, just by our gradual growth. And then as I’m sure you all know, well, it sort of became this Republican policy. Saying, you know, state started to go universal. That’s when in 2023, early 23, that’s when our legislature decided to go that way. So there really, it was really a gradual thing as opposed to a, and not really a strategic thing. It was just sort of a, a natural outgrowth of what had happened.
[00:24:03] Albert Cheng: Well, let me try to get some more wisdom outta you with this question as you’ve. Just kinda alluded to look like state legislatures are, are passing all sorts of private school choice programs today. Definitely. There’s a lot of momentum. You know, we’ve got Supreme Court decisions that are contributing to some of that momentum behind private school choice.
[00:24:20] But, you know, in the midst of that, I mean, look, Florida has by far been, you know, one of the states with the largest number of students served by these types of programs and you know. It took a lot of relentless work from you guys often in the face of heavy opposition. So my, you know, my question that I’d like you to kind of weigh in on for the listeners is what would you say are some core principles or factors by which you and, and the step up team, what did you guys rely on to guide your consistent efforts? Expand and strengthen really the programs that make them sustainable over the past quarter century.
[00:24:54] John Kirtley: Yeah, that’s a good question. It was incredibly hard for many years that there is, has been very strong opposition to this idea of empowering families to choose from so many places. Really from the day it passed the legislature.
[00:25:10] I mean, I remember the first company to. To participate in our program in 2001 was our local power company here in Tampa Bay. At the time, it was called Florida Power, and the teacher’s Union staged a protest against Florida Power where they took all the kids outside of the schools in Pinellas County to teach them outside this.
[00:25:36] Remember, this is like April or May, so it’s not. Pool outside and shut the lights off. And they said, well, we did that to protest, you know, Florida Power’s participation in this program because, you know, we wanna get that money back that they took from the schools. And I, I’ll never forget the, the union rep said, well, you know.
[00:25:55] If we had a choice, we’d switch power companies. I guess they didn’t realize the irony of that statement. We’ve always had almost universal opposition from the press, and really the media at large newspapers have always hated choice. Probably the best example of that, there was sort of a controlled experiment.
[00:26:14] One time in Tallahassee we brought like, well, yeah, we brought about 6,000 people. To help pass this big bill that we needed to get done in 2010 that I just mentioned. So there were 6,000 people. Primarily of color who were marching up this hill towards the capitol in Tallahassee. And there were all these reporters, probably like, I don’t know, 10 of them at the top of the hill.
[00:26:41] And I was doing, I was on crowd control, crowd management. So they didn’t know who I was, not that they would anyway. And when the reporters saw. This crowd coming up the street that looked like a civil rights march, their buzz was all po. Oh, look at that. That’s amazing. What is that? It’s so that’s cool. And then all I saw the shirts.
[00:27:02] And somebody goes, oh, wait a minute. This is a voucher rally. And all their comments went negative. Fascinating, again, like a controlled experiment. So we always have to have the power of the idea. You say, well, what was our strength? It was the power of the idea. Why shouldn’t a parent of limited beings have the same power to choose the right educational environment for their child as someone with more money?
[00:27:28] It always came back to that. We always had to have compelling human stories to illustrate that idea, and we had to be able to create really compelling images to demonstrate the justice of our cause at certain times when really we faced existential threats. The best example of that is in 2013, the teacher’s union in Florida filed a lawsuit demanding that the courts shut us down.
[00:28:00] Because they claim that our program violated the state constitution and it was not looking good for us because the State Supreme Court had previously knocked down Jeb Bush’s program a few years earlier, and so we had to help the court understand that history would not judge them kindly if they evicted at the time, 80,000 poor.
[00:28:24] Mostly minority kids from the their chosen schools. So this time we brought 10,000 people to the steps of the Florida Supreme Court led by Martin Luther King, third son of MLK Jr. The day after his father’s holiday. So it was obviously to me and I, and I’m gonna, I’m gonna send you guys a link that hopefully you can send to your listeners a link to a 62nd ad that we did around this day.
[00:28:54] That, to me, the, the 60 seconds of this video just captures what this movement is all about. And by the way, I bet no one in your audience ever read in a national publication or national media that 10,000 people marched that day. I guarantee you that if 10,000 people marched today somewhere for what climate change, you’d probably read about it, but you didn’t read about 10,000 poor, most, mostly minority people marching for their rights back in 2016.
[00:29:23] So the core message was always, don’t deny these parents the power to do the most important thing in their lives, which is to find the right education for their children. So we, we’ve always had to be very skilled. At grassroots organizing, we have to constantly counter a relentless effort in the media that was against choice, all the while being operationally excellent in terms of managing the programs because we cannot make a mistake with the execution or else that would’ve been avoided.
[00:29:56] Our opponents. Yeah.
[00:29:58] Albert Cheng: Well, let me let you weigh in on, on one last thing before I turn it over to Shaka with, with some questions. Look, we’ve got some new states with new programs. I mean, look, Arkansas here, 3-year-old program, Texas just passed one. Iowa’s got a relatively new program and, and so I’d like to get your thoughts on whether these new states that are joining the fray.
[00:30:17] Do you foresee them having to do the same kind of thing that you had to do in Florida to get a critical mass of, of families and political momentum? Or are there some lessons that these new states might be able to learn from Florida to accelerate their growth and strength?
[00:30:33] John Kirtley: Well, every state is different and will face different challenges, and that’s always been the case.
[00:30:39] I think there’s gonna be some common challenges that they’ll face. For example, Arizona is facing some misleading messaging that I think needs to be countered. The ESA, there is actually a fairly small part of the whole entire state budget, but you constantly read articles both inside the state and nationally about how it’s, you know, busting the budget.
[00:31:00] Mm-hmm. The state budget, you know, and legislators are human. They can’t face. Relentless messaging without eventually reacting to that. So the movement there needs to help their legislative supporters by getting facts in their hands and, and then themselves trying to help counter that narrative. We’re seeing something similar in Florida.
[00:31:21] Even. We have districts that are facing some budget issues, really because of a number of factors. There’s been. Florida, every county is a school district and we have some counties that are just getting very expensive for families. So you’re seeing some exodus in terms of that age population. This year, we’re seeing the effects of, you know, the national immigration policies.
[00:31:43] Fewer kids are showing up from immigrant families. Oh, oh, and by the way, COVID money ran out. So that’s a factor on budgets. But all you read about in the media here in Florida is, well, you know, the scholarship programs or the voucher programs are causing. The budget issues when in reality, since we went Universal, which was two years ago, there’s only been about 1% each year.
[00:32:07] Students leaving, the districts coming on our program. So we’re really not the big source of the Exodus, but that’s not what you read. But again, we have to help. Our legislative allies in both parties with facts and help them counter the narrative. The other, the other day I was with a, a legislator in this district and she said to me, John, I, I’m just getting killed in the district.
[00:32:29] You know, ’cause, you know, they keep saying that, that that scholarships are causing this huge loss of funds. And I showed her that her district. Had actually grown. Mm-hmm. Since the passage of the Universal program. So it, the fact just weren’t there, but she didn’t have the facts and we needed to get them to her.
[00:32:48] So I really think that the main battle in these other states. Are gonna be around budget issues. This phenomenon of declining student populations for other reasons is happening across the country for factors other than these ESA programs. But the blame will be put on the ESAs as they’ve been trying to do here.
[00:33:07] And, and again, the advocates need to help with that. So I don’t think they’re gonna face well, I know for a fact they’re not gonna. Face some of the judicial challenges that we faced here in Florida. You know, I think they’ve already been through that in Iowa and Arizona, and given the nature of the Texas Supreme Court, I don’t think that’s gonna be an issue.
[00:33:25] So I think it’ll be mainly countering that narrative of. These programs are the cause of budget issues and then making sure that the programs are run very well because they’re very hard to run, and if they’re not run well, then that will obviously be something that opponents will try to exploit.
[00:33:46] Shaka Mitchell: John, that’s a great answer.
[00:33:47] And yeah, you talk about lots of the things that are, are challenges in other states, and I’m based in Nashville, Tennessee, and we’ve got some newer programs. So of course we look to Florida and Florida’s like the Shangri Law, you know, the sort of school choice Shangri Law where you got half a million students participating on an annual basis.
[00:34:06] And it sort of seemed like everything seems to go right. But that being said, I know that. There are still challenges and you mentioned some of these kind of macro challenges that other states see. When you think about Florida and its continued K 12 success over the next five years, what are maybe the biggest one or two challenges or you know, is it increasing high quality supply?
[00:34:30] Is it increasing complexity of the ESA program politics? What do you think specifically to Florida are the biggest challenges?
[00:34:39] John Kirtley: I would say our two biggest challenges, one would definitely be managing the complexities of the programs, and we have more than one. We have one program that’s for full-time private school students, which has two funding sources.
[00:34:54] By the way. There’s complexity and we have a second program, which is an ESA for unique abilities, kids. We have a third ES A for homeschoolers. They’re all ESAs. Just to give you a sense of the complexity that we deal with, last school year, we made 1.5 million tuition payments to schools. We had over 2 million transactions on our e-commerce site.
[00:35:18] At Step Up in Florida, parents are allowed on ESAs, are allowed to buy something with their own money out of pocket and then asked to be reimbursed. We did over 2 million. Reimbursements last year, and we’ll do over 3 million reimbursements and over 3 million transactions on the e-commerce site this year.
[00:35:36] So that’s challenging. We are as much a FinTech company now as we are a policy and advocacy organization, and about 18 months ago, almost two year, yeah, about 18 months ago, Doug Tuthill, the president of StepUp, and I brought in a new CEO. Who came from the banking and technology world, and she has brought in people with experience in those worlds.
[00:36:02] Mm-hmm. Like we have a new chief information officer, we have new head of payments, a new head of reimbursements, and they are just doing a fantastic job. But it is, it’s definitely very, very hard. You have to have a hundred percent performance. Mm-hmm. Not 99.9% because every fraction of a percentage is a kid or more.
[00:36:21] So you have to remember that. So that’s the challenge. The first challenge is op operations. Yeah. And supply is now becoming a challenge. In Florida, we, we’ve now funded demand completely because now in Florida, every kid K 12. Regardless of zip code or income, if they want, can have an ESA. So we’ve covered the supply side and funded it.
[00:36:46] So there’s been a growth in supply over the years. It’s been wonderful to see. ’cause you, we’ve seen many, many outstanding public school educators, teachers and principals start their own schools primarily in low income areas. I mean, we have hundreds of examples. It’s fantastic. Yep. We’re starting to see barriers, and particularly just like micro schools, we need to clear away those barriers to innovation.
[00:37:16] And really help those educational entrepreneurs have an easier time to start their own projects because that’s where I think a lot of the growth is gonna come. But we’re seeing really encouraging things here in Florida, and I’ll just remind you that now in Florida we have roughly 3 million kids whose educations are paid for by the taxpayer, and over half of them now do not attend their zoned district school.
[00:37:45] By the way, in Miami-Dade, that figure is over 70% do not attend their zoned district school. But the biggest category of choice are district run schools of choice magnets, career academies, open enrollment. The districts are responding with choices. They’re responding to the competition. For example, Miami-Dade has over 100 magnet schools, some of which are some of the best schools in the country.
[00:38:13] And the really cool development that we’re seeing now is that the districts are understanding that this is now a marketplace for education. And we have districts now who are coming on to step up the platform and offering classes and services a la carte. One at a time, two kids with ESAs. We now have over 24 districts who have approved putting their classes and services on our platform and 11 that are awaiting approval to me, that that’s just the, the coolest development.
[00:38:48] Shaka Mitchell: Yeah. Yeah. It’s great to see all that innovation and, and hear about that, but we also need to be really mindful of the things that could throttle that down if we’re not careful. Right. So one of the things that. Often comes up and it’s something you and I have discussed over the years and I think a lot about this.
[00:39:05] I know Albert does too. And that is sort of the, a word accountability and what accountability means. And oftentimes, you know, different people have different definitions of of that, especially in parent driven. Choice programs. And so opponents always say that private sector options are not held accountable for their performance to students.
[00:39:28] How would you encourage Choice advocates to be thinking about measuring and managing the educational quality within their state’s choice programs?
[00:39:40] John Kirtley: Well, the first thing I would do is to make sure they talk about Easy question.
[00:39:43] Shaka Mitchell: Right? Super easy. Yeah.
[00:39:44] John Kirtley: No, no. Actually, I look at it very simply. There’s two forms of accountability.
[00:39:49] There’s top down regulatory accountability, trying to force change or compliance through regulation, laws and regulations. And then there’s bottom up accountability, which is through. The consumer making choices, you really have to have a balance of both. And in Florida, I think we do, we have regulatory accountability for choice programs, the ones that we manage.
[00:40:13] The private schools have to have background checks that are the same as as the public schools. If they take a certain amount of money of scholarship kids, they have to have a legit third party CPA look at their books and send a report to us and to the state. They have to have a DOE site visit. You have to prove that they’re in compliance with the fire codes, all that kind of stuff.
[00:40:34] And then we have required testing. Every year the kids in the, all the programs, except for the one for the, uh, unique abilities, kids have to take a nationally rec either state test or a nationally recognized test that’s approved by the state, and they have to send their results to Florida State. And Florida State actually publishes the results down to the school level.
[00:40:59] So there is very good account, I think, accountability from a regulatory point of view. And of course, there’s. Perfect accountability from a consumer point of view, from a bottom up point of view. And I think that works really well for us here. And I, that’s what I recommend for all states. I know not everybody agrees with that in our movement, but that’s what I recommend and I think that.
[00:41:21] We also really need to keep working on improving the information flow to families about options and how, how they’re doing. I think that will get better actually with new platforms and more families participating as we’ve seen in other industries, like in restaurants with the Yelp and such. But I think another emerging challenge is this, as parents customize.
[00:41:43] And really kind of curate their kids’ educations. How do you evaluate the providers who make up that experience? Now, for example, let’s say you have an ESA, and you buy district class for math, a district class for science. You buy a class from a faith-based school for religion. You do an online class from a college for history.
[00:42:03] You buy tutoring from a French tutor. Music lessons from somebody else, a sports league with the rest of the money. How do you hold that quote accountable? So we’ll need to figure out ways as we get more customized to help parents do that.
[00:42:20] Shaka Mitchell: That’s interesting. But I do love this idea that we’re balancing that top down, that regulatory piece, which is, you know, that’s reality.
[00:42:29] That’s living in a world where gravity exists and lawmakers wanna know how things are going. And also bottom up that ultimately parents are making these decisions for their children. And striking that balance, I think has obviously yielded tremendous results in Florida. So we can’t argue with that. I wanna just ask a few more questions, but one is related to NAP scores.
[00:42:50] As, as you know, John NAP scores in reading and math have. Stagnated in many cases declined over the past few years. Some folks have called it a lost decade. Obviously with COVID you saw a tremendous decline in in many states. That being said, there’s been this whole Southern surge recently and, and you’ve seen things that have kind of perked up and many southern states.
[00:43:14] But what are some of the state policies that Florida leaders in elected office and, and even in the private sector like yourself, should be advocating for to help drive. Academic improvements and that that would be evidenced in innate results.
[00:43:29] John Kirtley: Well, Shaka this, it’s funny, this is sort of a how would I, how would I put this a, a reformer, insider question to me, meaning I always go back to a very basic concept, which is do we have a free market or a K to 12 education, or do we not?
[00:43:46] Again, I, I do not come from the area of. K 12 policy. I didn’t study it ever. And I, I always go back to the analogy of Germany before the wall fell on one Sydor, the wall in East Germany, how did they allocate resources in the economy from the top down? They tried to figure out, you know, how many cars to make, what kind of cars to make, what color to make, you know, same with shoes.
[00:44:15] I’m sure they had a minister of shoes trying to figure out, you know, how many shoes to make. On the West Sydor the wall. How did they allocate resources? Well, it was billions of decisions made by consumers every day, allocating resources that way. And the best way to illustrate the difference between the two systems was the car, the sedan, east Germany had one.
[00:44:38] It was called the Brevan. And if you google that car now, one of the first images that comes up is a brat saw in half and hooked up to a donkey. And they also had a chassis that was made out of reinforced cardboard, believe it or not, on the west. Sydor the wall. What do you have? Volkswagen. Mercedes, Porsche.
[00:44:59] And it’s not because the people were smarter on the west Sydor the wall or the, the managers were better, or the engineers were better. On the West Sydor the wall. It’s just that it’s hard to manage a huge system from the top down and produce excellence. And I’m just a firm believer that education is no different.
[00:45:21] And I, and I realize there are people that strongly disagree with that, but I strongly believe that if consumers of education are empowered with true purchasing power, and then we have a. Hopefully frictionless, unencumbered market for education, products and services that you’ll see a growth in the performance of the product, which is the student’s performance.
[00:45:50] Student outcomes. We’ve really never had a free market in K 12 education in this country. Florida is the closest we’ve ever been, but we’re a long way from that still. But my true hope is that Florida can be the first truly free market. And that you’ll see the differences here that you saw between East Germany and West Germany.
[00:46:15] And our freer market will unleash the talents of all those people that were in, you know, in our East Germany education system to be as great as they can be. ’cause they can. I mean, I see it every day. Yeah. When we see, you know, as I said, public school educators starting their own schools, well now you’re seeing that happen in the districts where they don’t have, the educators don’t have to leave because they can go and start a magnet school or start a career academy.
[00:46:41] They can be innovative in the district environment. That’s what I’m seeing happening here, and that’s why I’m so hopeful. Yeah. Yeah. And we know that
[00:46:51] Shaka Mitchell: based on some research that’s come outta Florida, we know that exposure to higher levels of competition is beneficial to even the students who remain in.
[00:47:03] Public schools and even in their zone public schools. Right?
[00:47:05] John Kirtley: So this exposure to competition, there’s been, there’s been two, two really good Urban Institute studies. One on the kids themselves in our tax credit scholarship program that showed that they did better than their peers. But the really encouraging one is what you just mentioned, the Urban Institute discovered that even with a fairly limited, I mean our, our program was, was small when they studied it, but it showed that.
[00:47:27] The tax credit program had a very positive effect on the district schools that were affected the most by the competition. And so imagine if what would happen if that free market were more widespread.
[00:47:40] Shaka Mitchell: Yeah. No, I love it. I think most of us would, would love to be in a world where our options were, you know, BMWs and Mercedes and Porsche versus the, yeah, the, the ban was a, uh, is like a bucket with wheels is a, it’s so sad looking yet,
[00:47:55] John Kirtley: and there are very talented people in the districts.
[00:47:59] I mean, I used to rave about Alberto Carvallo down in Dave. He left and went to la but he was never afraid of competition. I remember when he, when he first became superintendent in 2008 in Miami, he said, I don’t have any problem with these scholarship programs because I’m gonna create options that parents want.
[00:48:17] And that’s exactly what he did.
[00:48:19] Shaka Mitchell: Yep. Well, John, this has been great. We just have one more question for you, and it’s a little speculative of course, but we would love to know, given your experience in the origin story really of some of the scholarship granting organizations in Florida, your work with Step Up over the years.
[00:48:37] How do you think Step Up. Intends to participate in the new federal tax credit program. And how do you see it working? You know, for others in Florida, obviously there’s lots of other SGO sort of agnostic about school type and, and religious affiliation, et cetera. Even charters can use it. So how do you see that going in the coming years?
[00:48:58] John Kirtley: Step Up is definitely going to be involved in a very big way. We are still developing our strategy right now and actually having discussions with potential partners to see if we can satisfy, you know, what they’re trying to get out of of the program. It’ll be a lot harder. To do than people realize, especially if you do it more at scale.
[00:49:20] So we’re hopeful that we can satisfy what they need while still removing the headache for them. But we’re still developing that strategy, I would say, both in Florida and nationally. My hope is that this new federal program will not leave behind schools that parents want to send their kids to. But the schools don’t have the ability to raise money.
[00:49:48] You know, you and I both know there, there are schools, you know, say in the black belt that parents are gonna wanna send their kids to, and you know, they don’t have the ability to raise money. Under this program, you know, they don’t have well-heeled alumni or access to financial advisors or CPAs that can put this, put this idea out there.
[00:50:07] Don’t, they don’t, they don’t have those kind of contacts. So I’m really hopeful that Step Up and others can find a way to help parents choose these schools that, you know, don’t have that fundraising capacity. And, and I’m very hopeful that that will, that will turn out to be the case.
[00:50:23] Shaka Mitchell: Well, fingers crossed. It’ll be really interesting to see. Thanks so much for that. Sure.
[00:50:28] Albert Cheng: All right, John, thanks so much for your time and all your insight, and we definitely appreciate all the work you’ve done and I’m sure our listeners do too.
[00:50:35] John Kirtley: Very happy to be here and thanks for having me on.
[00:50:49] Albert Cheng: What an opportunity to hear from, I guess, one of the pioneers really behind everything that we’re, we’re seeing today. I, I bet that was a treat for you to listen to.
[00:50:57] Shaka Mitchell: Absolutely. What a legend. So thankful for all the work and the time that John has put in over the years. It’s really benefited at this point.
[00:51:03] I mean, millions of kids.
[00:51:04] Albert Cheng: Yeah. Pretty amazing. Yeah. What a reminder, the arc of history, you know, stretches beyond any one of us. And so I couldn’t help but kind of maybe be a little bit small, but I think that’s okay and that’s healthy.
[00:51:15] Shaka Mitchell: Yeah.
[00:51:16] Albert Cheng: Yeah. Well, hey, thanks for joining. Me Too. Real great to have you on running the show with me.
[00:51:21] Oh man. It’s been a blast.
[00:51:22] Shaka Mitchell: I’d love to come back at some point. Thank you.
[00:51:24] Albert Cheng: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure. And lemme leave you all with the tweet of the week as well. This one comes from the Wall Street Journal, the roots of STEM excellence, finding and developing. One of our rarest and most precious human resources is a paramount goal.
[00:51:38] And as the author argues, it is a paramount goal. And, and he’s gonna weigh in on how do we do that? And he’s gonna discuss what is a controversial practice today to use standardized testing to screen for folks who would be likely to be successful in this kind of course of study. So I just wanna encourage folks to read up on that and consider what he has to say.
[00:52:00] And before we sign off, I do wanna tease next week’s episode. It’s gonna be with Dr. Katherine Hughes, who is an award-winning British author of George Elliot, the Last Victorian. And so as you can. Surmise from that title. We’re gonna talk about great literary author, George Elliot. So hope you join us for that episode as well.
[00:52:20] Till then, have a great day. Hey, it’s Albert Cheng here, and I just wanna thank you for listening to the Learning Curve podcast. If you’d like to support the podcast further, we’d invite you to donate to the Pioneer Institute at pioneerinstitute.org/donations.
