Show-Me Institute Podcast

The Father of the School Choice Movement with James V. Shuls

In this episode, Susan Pendergrass speaks with James V. Shuls, Director of Research and Senior Fellow at the Show-Me Institute, and Associate Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, about the history and impact of the school choice movement. They discuss Shuls' recent paper, "The Father of the School Choice Movement," which highlights the often-overlooked contributions of Father Virgil Blum alongside the well-known Milton Friedman. The conversation explores Blum’s legal, moral, and religious advocacy for educational freedom, his role in founding Citizens for Educational Freedom, and how his work laid the groundwork for modern school choice policies.

Find the paper here: https://bit.ly/3zKTGXH

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

Duration:: 29m
Broadcast on:: 18 Jul 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

(upbeat music) - Welcome to the podcast, James Scholes. You wear many hats. One of them is a senior fellow and director of research at the show me this too. That's right. Also professor at OMSOL and a incredible font of knowledge when it comes to Missouri public education and the notion of school choice. And you have a new paper out that will be coming out in the Journal of School Choice on the father of the school choice movement. And I've worked in school choice for decades and I've never heard of the guy that you write the paper about Father Virgil Bloom. So there's something there and I always assume that Milton Friedman sort of is the first person who put out the idea that perhaps the public sector could be responsible for paying for a public, for an education for all children not necessarily providing it, be the provider. I thought that was his idea but you have a new paper out and you highlight somebody who came just before him. So welcome. And why don't you give us all a little idea about this guy, Father Virgil Bloom? - Yeah, thank you so much. I'm a huge Virgil Bloom fan and like you, I discovered him sort of by happenstance or sort of late. Like I came to school choice sort of the Milton Friedman route. I was introduced to Friedman and this argument for choice and competition. And like many others called Milton Friedman sort of the father of the modern school voucher movement or something along those lines. It was several years ago. You know, I started at the Show Me Institute in 2012 and I met this guy, the older gentleman who used to come to our events called, his name was Herman Krigshauser. And at Harvard was just this delightful old gentleman who told me about this organization Citizens for Educational Freedom. And I sort of blew him off because he was getting up there and he, you know, sometimes as you see from some octogenarian see, they start losing a little mental faculty, not to say anything politically here. But, you know, sometimes Herman would say some interesting things and sometimes he would say some off the wall things but he mentioned this group Citizens for Educational Freedom. And then one day as I was doing research on a different paper I was writing, I came across a paper that mentioned Citizens for Educational Freedom. And it was like a thread that I started to pull. And I actually found out that the archives at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, where I work can they held the papers for Citizens for Educational Freedom donated by May Dugan who was a St. Louis school choice activist who helped start that organization. And so I went through the archives, I wrote a paper about Citizens for Educational Freedom. And the interesting thing you'll find is that I actually never mentioned Virgil Bloom, an entire paper that I wrote about Citizens for Educational Freedom. But again, as I started pulling at these threads, what I found was Virgil Bloom was the inspiration for Citizens for Educational Freedom. He was writing about school choice in the 50s and was pulling levers behind the strings to put these people together to form that organization. I discovered that his archives were held at the Marquette University Library and spent days going through those archives and just found a treasure trove of amazing information and it led me to write this paper. Not saying that he necessarily is the father of school choice, but at least establishing that he deserved some credit alongside Milton Friedman as one of the early pioneers and a guy who made different arguments than Milton Friedman makes. And I think that's incredibly important for us to point out. - Yeah, I mean, I want you to explain his arguments, but it is true that public education as we know it in its current form is really maybe 100 years old. This idea that public schools somehow are non-religious that we can't have prayer in public schools, we can't have baccalaureates before graduation. Like somehow there's something about a public school building that makes it like a religion-free zone. And I think folks assume that that must be the most natural way of doing things and that it's how it's always been done. But that is not the case actually for our public schools in this country, right? - Right, this is the point that Father Bloom makes. It's Father Virgil Bloom. And he was a Jesuit priest, earned his PhD in political science at St. Louis University and taught for many years at Marquette University in political science. But Bloom was a Catholic who believed that Catholics should have the right to the educational assistance dollars that we give to public school students. And part of the reason he argued for that was that public schools were not a religious. They weren't neutral on religion. And at his time, I mean, we started to see a pushback on the Protestantism that was in public schools, but as you alluded to, the public school system did not start out trying to be neutral. It was very much a Protestant institution that had Protestant Bible reading. They oftentimes would punish Catholics for not reading the Protestant Bible. So it was an institution that was very much set up in opposition to the massive waves of Catholic immigrants that were coming in. And that's part of the reason we see such a strong Catholic school system that you don't see as much with the other Protestant denominations. We have a bit of a Lutheran denomination set of schools, but not nearly as strong as you do for Catholics. And it's again, goes to this, the way in which our public school system was established to be nominally Protestant. And so Bloom comes along and says, listen, even though we've pushed the Protestant religion out of public schools or are trying to do that, the schools are not neutral, because when you try to remove God from education, you're saying he's not important. And that's a position. And so Bloom advocated for school choice partly because, he called it educational freedom really, because he believed that it was important for Catholics to be able to obtain, and not just Catholics, but all religious people to obtain the type of education and the religious education that they wanted for their kids. And that was a key part of his argument. - And not have to pay for it. - Right, not have to pay for it. And this was a piece of his argument that I think has been somewhat lost today. He argues that educational benefits are a welfare benefit, that it's a benefit to the public to try to improve the quality of their lives. And that we cannot discriminate in welfare benefits because someone's religious. And so if you choose to go to a public school or you choose to go to a private school, he says that welfare benefit should follow you wherever you go. It's funny that he says that 'cause critics of school choice today will say, oh, school choice is welfare for the rich. Bloom would say, well, it's welfare for everyone. It's welfare for, we're trying to improve the lives of everyone. And if you choose a public school, it doesn't matter if you're rich or poor, you get the public dollars. You shouldn't be discriminated if you choose a private school, just because you choose a private school, he says that's discrimination and it shouldn't be allowed. - Well, somebody a long time ago had a really good idea then, by so essentially when Europeans settled this country, Protestants came here first, right? Then they built the schools, they were Protestant schools. It was very natural. And then as waves of Catholics came, they were like, okay, we'd like to also have a system of schools, right? And they're like, we're gonna call the ones that we started the public schools. And really it's a nomenclature thing, right? So now it's in our mind that the public schools somehow separated from private schools, but they were kind of privately financed through local taxes. I mean, not, that makes no sense, but by the local citizenry where financing their schools, and there was no state department of education, let alone federal department of education. And then they just became known as public schools. And now we have this idea that, I mean, it is very easy to find someone to argue with on this point that there's no way that public money should go to Catholic schools. It's just is unconstitutional. And Father Bloom makes the opposite argument, right? That to deny it is unconstitutional. - Right, well, he was arguing in the '50s when he wrote his doctoral dissertation, which came out before Friedman's seminal work that sort of introduced the public to the idea of vouchers. He was writing about funding for religious schools. Now he didn't say voucher. He didn't use the same terminology. He was really talking about money for buses or money for textbooks or arguing that these things are not unconstitutional. And then he, of course, over time changed his argument when people started rallying around this concept of vouchers or sometimes they would call it the certificate plan. I mean, he did talk about that and how it was constitutional. But what Bloom was saying, and this is kind of the argument we're seeing now with religious charter schools, is that you shouldn't discriminate just because someone is choosing something that's religious. That these welfare dollars, this welfare benefit of public education should be for everyone. And we shouldn't discriminate based on people's choices. And your point about the public education system, eventually being called public and eventually becoming secular is a very good point. It's an evolution over time of our school system. And we sometimes, we look at the system today and assume that that's the system that's always been. And it's just simply not the case. I mean, they purged Protestant Christianity out of the schools because it was there, right? Like the reason for all the lawsuits, the scopes monkey trial, these other things that tried to push prayer and Bible reading and all of those things out of schools because it was there, because it was founded as inherently a Protestant institution that has evolved over time. And Bloom's argument is that we shouldn't only fund students who want to go to that secular institution. It shouldn't matter the type of institution you wanna go to those dollars are intended for the benefit of the child to get an education and they should follow the child wherever they wanna go. As I point out the paper, I said, Bloom was the fund students, not systems guy before Corey D'Angelo's made it popular. - Right, right, right. And Andy does make the point which is really thought provoking that the current system is like a humanist system. Like you said, it's not that it doesn't take a stance on religion, it takes a humanist stance which is that God is not important and doesn't belong in education, right? For the masses, so that's a stance. And we've chosen to publicly finance that approach and not the others. I mean, our colleague Mike McShane has made this point and as well as many others, Ashley Berner, that we could have a pluralist system. We don't have to take a stand on which one is worthy of public funds and which ones are not worthy 'cause we've had this thing forever like, "Okay, fine, you wanna send your kids to a religious school? "You have to pay for it." And that is, I think just fundamentally, especially when we've kind of picked out the ones, fundamentally doesn't seem to provide equal protection to me. - Yeah, I loved, I came across this quote from Virgil Bloom on this very argument, people were saying, "Well, you can have religious education, pay for it yourselves." He says, "When government demands the surrender "of freedom of choice in education, "as a condition for sharing in state educational benefits, "it enforces conformity to the philosophical "and theological orientation of government schools. "Under such conditions of coercive conformity, "can that freedom and diversity of thought essential "to the establishment and conduct "of voluntary associations endure?" That's right at the point of what you're saying. People say, "Oh, pay for yourselves." It's like, well, that's a use of government force where you're subsidizing one viewpoint and not other viewpoints that he's saying that that is not good for our society. Like we talked about at the beginning, I came to school choice through the freedman sort of lens. And I think what we see when Virgil Bloom and the arguments that he made disappeared from our landscape, they disappeared from our school choice conversation, we saw all of the focus in the school choice movement be about choice and competition on academics. And this is a criticism we get that throughout the 90s and even early 2000s, that the school choice advocates just kept pointing at test scores and pointing at failing schools and saying school choice is the answer. Choice and competition, rising tide lifts all boats. And again, I like school choice as a competition mechanism like I don't disagree with those things, but we were so narrowly focused on those things that I think we forgot about some of these pluralistic arguments that Bloom's making. And I think the pendulum has swung, or maybe it's not a pendulum, maybe we've expanded now where we're seeing much more of these type of arguments being made. And I think that they're partially responsible, not to say Bloom's responsible, but these types of arguments are responsible for the really dramatic expansion of school choice today because people are seeing that they want different types of schools, not just that they want better schools at producing test score outcomes, but they want different types of schools that will meet their needs, whether they're religious or secular or whatever they are, they like that pluralistic system. - Yeah, STEM or the arts that can be in there too. And also I think, you know, and I'm not trying to make a blanket statement here, but the system at large and many public schools individually appear to be moving a little bit to the left in a way that parents who are assigned to a single school and that school they find out through reading lists or whatever has kind of moved to the left and they're like, well, wait a minute, I haven't moved to the left, you know, I don't know that this is the one I want for my child now. Or, you know, the obvious example of you have to wear a mask and have a vaccine and parents are like, well, wait a minute, you know, like, well, it's mandated and this is the public school and this is the only one you're allowed to go to and you've been assigned to it. So you actually have no options other than to get behind what we're saying you have to do and think a lot of parents, I think that's another thing driving this like 12 states passing universal school choice where parents can pick any public or private school with state dollars is a lot of parents saying like, I kind of got the idea of being assigned to a school until the school my kids were assigned to didn't match me anymore. - Mm-hmm, yeah, sort of you're tapping into the sort of culture war aspects of this and Virgil Bloom was very much a culture warrior, you know, fighting for Catholic rights. I mean, part of the thing that I, one of the things that I saw as I read through his copious letters to other people was him advocating that Catholics need to stand up for their rights. You know, I'm not Catholic, I'm not Catholic but I am a huge proponent or a huge fan of what he was saying because he's advocating for citizens to defend their beliefs and their rights and to take action, to step up, to argue for their cause. And I think that's not just limited to Catholics. I mean, he was adamant that when citizens for educational formed that it not just include Catholics, that it include Jewish families and secular families and Christian families who wanted to advocate for school choice. And what we're seeing today is a similar type of thing. We're seeing people saying those values don't represent my values. I want a school that's in alignment with my values and it may not be necessarily Christian, but whatever those values are, people have the right to advocate and try to seek out the thing that's most in alignment with their family. Now, I was actually talking with a teacher, a high school teacher, just on Friday. And we were talking about the profession and he's teaching in a classical school. And he said, I think that I have the ability to do more good here because I'm in alignment with the parents. And I thought that was such a good and profound point that is so true. When we get schools where the ideology of the school and of the teachers and of the parents are in alignment, they're able to work together in common cause to serve the kids and move. Like it's a fabric that's woven together. And when the teachers or the parents or the schools are not in alignment, there's a rip in that fabric and they're not able to do as good of a job working in common cause. - Yeah, I mean, to my, what I was just saying about some schools moving to the left, there's a lot of parents who love that. It's perfect for them and it's a great fit for their family and they're thrilled. I'm just saying it kind of, if a school moves one way, oh, I mean, you've studied this topic so very much in the last few years, if a school goes to four days instead of five days, then there's just opportunities for them to say, okay, that doesn't fit for us anymore. This idea of just you're assigned to one thing and you have to roll with it as it moves around, I think is where, we sort of lost parent support on school assignments and they're like, I don't know, you can't just change the whole schedule, you can't change, you can't decide you're not putting out the reading list, you can't just change curriculum and not tell us, I think that that is what has created, I think, a groundswell among parents to be able to choose. And I believe in the 12 states with universal choice and the almost 10% of kids who go to charter schools, I think we're getting second and third generation parents who are like, no, no, my parents chose my school so I'm gonna be choosing my child's school. But real quick, I would love for you to tell us more about the CEF, was it a CEF? - Yeah. - How did it get founded? What did they do? What happened to it, does it still exist? - So citizens for educational freedom, that was the group that I told you, Herman Kriegsazar told me about. So the organization doesn't exist today. It was one of the longest serving school choice organizations that I've ever found. I mean, it was around for, I think, 40, 45 years, maybe 50 years before it stopped being in action. But it was founded, my first paper on this topic, I said it was founded by a letter to the editor. So May Dugan wrote a letter to the editor of the St. Louis Globe newspaper. And after that, a meeting happened where May Dugan and Martin Dugan and Vince Corley and a few other people got together and founded this organization that quickly ballooned over 20,000 members in just three years and was tremendously active throughout the '60s and '70s, advocating for school choice policies. - In St. Louis only or St. Louis group? - No, I mean, it expanded nationally. They were very active in Washington, D.C. Right now, private schools can get public dollars for special needs students. So if a student has special needs in a private school, they can get part of the federal dollars for those students to serve them. Well, that's because of Citizens for Educational Freedom. And they were one of the primary organizations that were advocating for that. So that organization started right after the federal government started pushing for federal education subsidies. And they were pushing them exclusively, the NEA, the National Education Association was advocating there exclusively for public school students. And so these parents got together and formed Citizens for Educational Freedom and said, that's not right. If the federal government is going to fund education, it should fund all students, regardless of their in public or private. So when I wrote that paper, as I mentioned earlier, I focused on those individuals that were involved. And what I found was before they started, they were all in correspondence with Virgil Bloop. He was writing to each of them independently, saying, you should form a group. And they followed through on his advice. - Travel trouser. - Right. You know, he was perfectly happy to be behind the scenes, pushing people, cajoling people, encouraging people. To do it, he didn't want the focus to be on him. He didn't think a Catholic Jesuit should be the person leading the cause. He thought it should be a lay movement. And so Citizens for Educational Freedom was that movement. I mean, Milton Friedman, again, he inspired lots of people. But to my knowledge, there was no organization that sprung up in the '50s, dedicated almost exclusively to his work. That's what we saw with Citizens for Educational Freedom. He was the inspirational leader. Bloop was the inspirational leader for that movement that was tremendously active, pushing for school choice. And I highlight this in the paper, that the first modern school voucher movement ends up happening in Milwaukee, in exactly the place where Bloom had been working for decades. And unfortunately for him, it happened right as he passed away. So he didn't see the fruits of his labor. But I think it's such a poetic moment for that program to start in the very place where he had been advocating for school choice his entire career. Yeah, I mean, do you see that we're at an inflection point with this? Do you think we are on the verge of really, truly experiencing what Virgil Bloom was espousing? Well, we're certainly getting there. I mean, as you mentioned before, we are seeing tremendous expansion in school choice. And it's funny, I sent this paper out to a lot of you. My school choice friends and several of them responded and said, I was just about to write something on values or something along these lines, this is timely. And so the paper is partly to give credit back to Virgil Bloom and the work that he did, because I think he really deserves some of that credit. But it's also to highlight these other arguments that he's making, that the market arguments of Friedman choice and competition, I absolutely love and believe, but the values based arguments, I think are incredibly important as well. And I think that they have resonance with people. And I think when you look at school choice and you realize that not only are the market based arguments right, but these values arguments are correct as well, that it allows individuals to choose the type of thing, the type of education that aligns with them, that allows for the better formation of school communities. I think that these are winning arguments and we are absolutely seeing the winning arguments of Friedman and Bloom coming to pass in the expansion of all of these choice programs. Now, I hope that we see more and more of this in Missouri. We've seen some expansion of Missouri's program, the most scholars program, but it's not universal yet. It's not funded by the state yet. It's funded by tax credit donations. So it's not quite to where Friedman or Bloom were arguing, but we're getting there. And I think ultimately we're going to arrive. It's just a matter of how quickly we get there. - Yeah, I mean, we have these intermediary groups that have to fundraise for them, but a couple of them are Catholic Artisticies. And one is a Hebrew school related group. One is a Christian school related group. And I think that we're going to see, I hope that we learn more about the parents who are participating in that program because I think in the case of some of them anyway, they had parents who desperately wanted their children to go to a certain type of school based on their family's religion and simply couldn't afford it. And they've been trying to get scholarship dollars out to these students and allowing people to take a full tax credit for their donation to these scholarships just makes it a lot easier for them to raise the money. But these are parents for whom that is a very important decision, even if they don't have the money to afford it. So I hope that the state does acknowledge that there's a lot of ways more to come on about this, but there's a lot of ways that could be revenue neutral for the state to just pay for it, like Iowa, Arkansas, Alabama, Louisiana, West Virginia, Utah. So, I mean, there's a lot of ways to stake a pay for it and it wouldn't actually cost more money and it would serve this other purpose of having a more pluralist system of schools. I mean, it's not like the Catholic schools have a terrible record of educating children. We all benefit from the educated Catholic citizen where you do, right? In the same way that we do. The P.L.O. coming out of the students, coming out of public schools. So, yeah, that's really fascinating. I mean, I learned a lot and I think that he had, he was a really good thinker and he thought about things from interesting new angles. And I really appreciate that as somebody who I thought I knew just about everything there was to know on this topic. And it's like, I really appreciate that I learned some new angles because it is thought provoking. - Well, I think he pushes, I think he pushes, you know, we talked earlier about the whole, you know, if you want a private education, you want a Catholic education, pay for it yourselves. That sort of idea or argument that people have. You couldn't make that argument when it was a poor inner city family who said, "I want a better school for my kid." Well, if you want a better school, just pay for it yourselves. So what we saw with you sort of historically, people advocating for school choice, it tended to be, we want to get kids out of people trapped in failing schools. And again, that's a good and worthwhile argument to make. What Bloom is saying is those people who want a private education or a Catholic education, a Protestant education, a Montessori education, whatever the education is, we can't rule their arguments out either. They should be also advocating for their case. And you know, St. Louis used to be a leader in terms of advocating for school choice. Like I said, Bloom got his start here with his doctoral studies. Citizens for Educational Freedom started here in St. Louis. We were at the vanguard of pushing for school choice in St. Louis, and we've fallen behind. Other states have surpassed us when it comes to getting school choice, but I think also for advocating for school choice. And so I think that this paper that these ideas really help us understand that it's not just about failing schools, trying to help people in those areas, but it's about everyone. It's about allowing everyone to find the right school for their kids at expanding educational opportunities for everyone. It's about the pluralistic system that you mentioned. And so hopefully we'll get there. - If people want to read your paper, how can they read it? - Well, it is a paywall. So I mean, you can look it up, the father of the school choice movement. It's in the Journal of School Choice. - If you need a PDF, I would say reach out to me by show me it's to email it. I'll be happy to email you a copy of the paper. - Great. Well, this has been super informative. Thanks so much for coming on and chatting about it. I know you like, you're, you enjoyed digging into the history of it. So I appreciate you coming and sharing that with us. - Thank you. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) [MUSIC PLAYING] [BLANK_AUDIO]