Hey, this is James Lindsay. You're listening to new discourses, Bullets, where I give a bullet

point summary of a single issue topic that people ask me about so that they can understand

it, you know, kind of frequently. And today, the topic is a very controversial one. It is

a school choice. I have a very controversial view about school choice because it's a very

simplistic, it's approaching a very simplistic way that I think is dangerous. So I'm not like

a full-throated school choice advocate, but that said, as I've said repeatedly, I think that

school choice is a necessary but insufficient condition for solving the problem that we face

with our public schools and in particular with the incursion of the woke problem with our

public schools. It's a complicated issue in its own right. When I say necessary but insufficient,

I think that we will not solve the problem in schools without it, but if we go into it blindly,

it won't solve the problem and in fact might backfire on us. And so what I want to talk about is

very briefly why it's a complicated issue so that people won't get so upset when you see

Republican legislatures in various states not necessarily passing it. And then also why it has to

be thought through very carefully so that we can make it work to solve this problem while also

making it of letting us avoid the traps that are being set for us with school choice because the

woke are going to weaponize school choice to their advantage and if you don't understand how

you're going to walk into the trap. So why is it complicated just to very briefly touch on this?

A lot of rural districts which are usually going to have very red legislators representing them

have a problem which is that the only major employer in the area is actually the school.

And so if you introduce something like school choice and you start creating this problem

that school system could actually lose enough money where it collapses which you think oh well if it

collapsed it deserved to collapse that's the market principle blah blah blah but this is a problem

...