WTH is Going On with Iowa's Revolutionary School Choice Plan? Governor Kim Reynolds on Education Reforms in the Hawkeye State
What the Hell Is Going On
AEI Podcasts
4.4 • 633 Ratings
🗓️ 15 February 2023
⏱️ 45 minutes
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Summary
Parents are increasingly losing ownership of the right to their child’s education. Americans saw the effects from widespread school closures over Covid (nearly two decades of educational progress wiped out), and continue to see educational systems that promote partisan agendas, all leaving parents little recourse to choose where and how their child is educated. Not to mention, the Nation’s Report Card statistics released for 2022, which showed record low reading and math scores, with minority and lower-economic students faring the worst. What are parents to do, especially those who cannot afford to send their children to private, parochial, or otherwise quality places for education? Governor Kim Reynolds of Iowa recently passed one of the most sweeping school choice laws in the country to answer this very question. Her school choice bill gives every student in the state of Iowa an educational savings account of approximately $7,600 in per-pupil funding to facilitate placement in private schools. And no, it does not take resources away from public schools – it actually saves them money. No, this does not degrade the public school education quality, but rather fosters the competition we know to be necessary to help any establishment realize potential. And most importantly, it gives educational choice back to the parents of these students.
Governor Kim Reynolds is the 43rd governor of Iowa, with the distinction of being the first woman elected to the state's highest office. Previously, she was a Clark County treasurer before she was elected to the Iowa Senate. She was the running mate and lieutenant governor to Terry Branstad.
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| 0:00.0 | This podcast is brought to you by the American Enterprise Institute. |
| 0:03.0 | If you like what you hear, please subscribe, rate, review, and share. Thanks for listening. Here's our show. What the hell's going on? What the hell is going on? What the hell is going on? I don't know what the hell he's talking about. You don't have to know what the hell is on it. What hell's the matter with these guys? We don't know what's going on. What hell's going on? |
| 0:01.1 | Who in God's name knows what it's all about. |
| 0:34.8 | Hi, I'm Danielle Pletka. |
| 0:36.2 | Welcome to our podcast. |
| 0:38.3 | What the hell is going on? |
| 0:40.4 | Mark, what the hell is going on this week? |
| 0:42.9 | Well, Danny, this week we are talking to one of my favorite governors in America, and I think yours as well, Governor Kim Reynolds of Iowa, who has just enacted one of the most sweeping school choice laws in the country that is going to give every student in the state of Iowa an education savings account with just over $7,000 a year that they can use if they choose to go to the school of their choice to a private, parochial, or other school. |
| 1:07.8 | They're not going to be trapped anymore in failing public schools, but she's also, in the process, found a way to actually increase the amount of money going to the public schools as well. So she's going to strengthen them as well. This is a model law that should be enacted in every state across the country, and she's going to tell us all about it. What she's talking about, I think, is so important. And this, by the way, is one of the reasons why Governor Yonkin won in his race as well, which is that parents are sick and tired of being cut out of the business of their child's education. |
| 1:36.7 | So here's the thing that we're dealing with. When you think about all this wokeness, all this woke ideology is being pushed in schools, our kids are in crisis like we've never seen as a result of the pandemic school closures. |
| 1:47.7 | There was the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is known as the Nation's Report Card came out a few months ago. |
| 1:53.9 | And it found that the pandemic school closures wiped out two decades of progress in math and reading in our kids' schools. I mean, just think about that for a second. Two decades of progress in math and reading in our kids schools. |
| 2:01.7 | I mean, just think about that for a second. |
| 2:03.4 | Two decades of progress completely wiped out. |
| 2:06.8 | For the first time since the 1970s, nine-year-olds lost ground in math. |
| 2:10.8 | Scores in reading fell by the largest margin in 30 years. |
| 2:14.7 | So we've got kids in crisis in our schools, and the most damage has been done to kids |
| 2:21.1 | in majority black and Hispanic school districts. Those schools were closed longer than white |
| 2:26.6 | majority districts. They had reading losses and math losses and all these losses. And if you |
| 2:31.6 | don't teach kids at an early age to read and write, the damage is |
| 2:36.5 | irreparable because they can't do the work as they go up through the grade. One study found |
| 2:40.4 | that for some of these kids, the black and Latino kids in these poor school districts, a 25% |
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