Jason Bedrick is research fellow in education policy at the Heritage Foundation.

He's co-editor or co-author of two books, Educational, remembering Andrew Coulson debating his ideas.

And religious liberty and education, a case study of yeshivas versus New York. We actually discussed

the yeshiva situation here on the podcast a while back. He sponsored or hosted a meeting of classical educators recently, which I attended out in Phoenix, out of which came something called the Phoenix Declaration. That's our topic today and general issues of education. Welcome, Mr. Bedrick. Thank you for having me.

All right. First, first, let's

Heritage. You're at Heritage now. You've been there for a few years, the classical education issue.

Heritage in the past has been somewhat libertarian leaning. On matters of education, it looked

really more at a lot of the logistics of schooling, not so much the content of the curriculum.

Am I right about that?

And if so, what is Heritage doing with classical education right now?

Yeah, I don't know that I would say you're right about that exactly.

Heritage for a long time has emphasized, you know, having a more conservative curriculum.

It has had curricular offerings on its website.

But I think that to the extent that it's a fair critique, it's that heritage and many other organizations have been primarily

focused in the K-12 education space on pushing for school choice. And frankly, I think there's a

good reason for that, which is that it is a necessary condition, in my view, for reform. That may seem odd that if you want to reform

the public schools, you should be pushing for private school choice. But it isn't really,

and I think we learned that lesson during COVID, when a lot of families were really upset about

what was going on in the public schools,

went to their school board meetings only to be shut out and learned that what they had thought

of as their local neighborhood school had actually been captured long ago by special interests,

the teachers unions, operating in those schools. And so when parents wanted schools to reopen,

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