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PODCAST: | “Freedom to Learn:” Is AI yet another seductive and “innovative” edu-fad that will harm students?

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Andy Smarick calls for a two-year moratorium on AI in K-12 and higher education

Andy Smarick is the author or editor of four books and a member of the University of Maryland System’s Board of Regents. He has served as president of the Maryland State Board of Education and held various roles at the White House, Congress, the U.S. Department of Education, and the New Jersey Department of Education. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

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Below is an edited and abridged transcript from our conversation. Please follow or subscribe to Freedom to Learn on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes are released every Thursday!

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You recently wrote that “the rush to allow AI in the classroom will harm students and schools for decades… State leaders should require their educational institutions to suspend today’s unconsidered rush into AI use for two years.” In calling for this AI moratorium, are you responding to something in particular that you’ve observed or just a general sense of growing concern?

Andy Smarick: Both. So let me take them in order. The first is just the data. I kept reading articles about how quickly this was spreading among young people. And I’m probably going to go back and forth between high school, middle school, and college, but in general, the data seems to show that it’s all the same. Students, as of two years ago, were using it a lot, and now it’s virtually taken over.

And it’s not just that students are using it to help put a calendar together or help manage time. It’s “I don’t feel like reading Pride and Prejudice. Will you tell me what happens in chapter one?” Or the list goes on and on. So the ways that they are using it, it’s worrying the heck out of me. And I think it’s bad for their cognitive development. It’s bad for schools and the purpose of education. So that’s part one, that it’s being used a whole lot and way more, and in ways that is troubling and just bad for the development of people.

The other issue is that it’s as though the education community doesn’t know what’s happening or doesn’t care that it’s happening. And so I feel like I’ve been just banging on a gong saying, “guys, our mission is to form young people so that they read a lot, so they think a lot, so they write a lot, so they can be a better, more effective, more thoughtful, more contemplative grownups. And we are now allowing them to delegate the stuff of learning to AI.” We can even put aside that AI often isn’t reliable. It can just make things up. It can be bad for your mental health. I’m willing to put that aside for a moment. I’m just more concerned that the purpose of education is the development of people. You don’t do your kids’ math homework for them because they need to learn math. You don’t read their books for them because they need to learn how to read and put ideas together. And the way that students, according to the research that’s being done, are using it in all of these ways that is going to hurt their development as learners. We’re going to in five years, 10 years from now look back and say, “Why is it that none of our 24-year-olds can read or write or put ideas together?”

Because we did the same thing we did with social media, we just blithely allowed it to happen. And then 10 years too late, we say, “We ought to reconsider it.”

You wrote that it “steals their learning.” It’s theft. When they’re supposed to be spending all of these years learning, it’s stealing it from them. Can you elaborate on that a little?

Andy Smarick: This is so obvious to me, and I don’t understand why there are more people who aren’t alarmed. As I wrote in this piece, good elementary school math teachers know that they just have to give students not dozens, hundreds, and over time thousands of problems to do. Not because they just want to waste a student’s time, but by doing five plus six, by doing six plus seven, by doing 11 plus four, you start to notice patterns, you develop a way of thinking about math, and then that leads you to be able to do algebra because you know how to manipulate numbers. Or they don’t make you read a short book just to waste your time. They do it so you can see how ideas go together or so you can think about how to outline a paper.

Learning isn’t just the outcome, the paper you turn in, it’s all of the work you do in order to turn the paper in, or to finish that essay on the exam, or to be able to do your problem set. The magic is in the work itself. I thought that was just intuitive, that we knew that, but evidently it’s not intuitive because I think there are a lot of educators who are either being silent or aren’t saying anything and often it feels like the conventional wisdom now is, “well, if AI can do it for them AI can do it for them forever so why do they actually need to read all 500 pages or all 300,000 words of Crime and Punishment if they can just ask AI to summarize it for them?”. That just seems like a poverty when it comes to our understanding of schools and learning, and people aren’t nearly alarmed enough about it, I think.

So much of the learning is in the work, not the output. I love how you talked about the need to do all of those math assignments. My younger daughter just finished at a K-8 school where they had 30 math problems every single day. And the first year in that school, she hated it. And then she realized, “I’m developing this skill. I’m learning. I’m developing this muscle. Look at what I can accomplish.” But when she hit ninth grade this year and didn’t have that anymore, she could tell that they’re just skating through the concepts. When she’s doing her homework online and it’s some sort of software that coaches you towards the answer, she’s like, “I’m not learning this like I used to.” You can tell when you’ve done it the right way. Maybe it’s boring, maybe it’s not innovative, but it’s the work.

Andy Smarick: Well, for sure. There’s a reason why when you do apprenticeships, you have to do hours and hours and hours worth of the work before you become a master at it, because the magic is in the fact that there isn’t magic. You just have to do it over and over and over again. Your brain gets rewired, you see patterns, you get the habits and dispositions in order to do the work. And there are all these small things, like we’ve gotten rid of handwriting, penmanship. But now it turns out that there’s research saying that the slow work of writing things by hand gives your brain time to think as you’re writing, as opposed to just typing. So there was utility in that. There’s utility in having to outline a paper because you have to think, “how are my thoughts going to be organized in order to carry this out?” A good teacher knows that if he or she gets students to study hard for a test, the test itself becomes immaterial because what the teacher wants is for you to have done all that work. Yes, we have to assess whether or not you learn the stuff. But if all of the students worked hard and they did their reading and they wrote the papers, the test is just there at the end, it’s an ornament. The magic is that you did all this work and you’re smarter now.

I’m not just imagining that this is a crisis. There’s survey data now showing that if you ask students who have used AI, whether or not it was good for them, they’re coming back and saying, “No, I learned less. It is stealing my learning from me.” And this new MIT study that came out showed, using brain scans, surprise, surprise, if you use AI, less of your brain is being engaged. You don’t remember as much of the work that you’ve done. And it’s addictive. You become dependent on it. And you’re less able to do work without AI. All of these things are so obvious to me. And it just suggests we’ve gone wrong.

The story to me is like the dog that didn’t bark in mystery stories. Sometimes a dog should bark, and you have to ask yourself, “Well, in the story, why wasn’t the dog barking?” And it’s the same thing here. Why is it that no one is alarmed by this? This is a threat to our teaching, our learning, and the development of students. And we’re just letting it happen. Like giving millions and millions of kids social media in school and just saying, “It’ll be fine.”

It feels like it’s Groundhog Day, that the same thing is happening. And a decade from now, you and I are going to say, “What in the world were we doing?”

You give examples of this phenomenon in education policy of chasing whatever the latest fad is. You mentioned open classrooms. My parents, when they were putting me in kindergarten, decided to move to Orange County rather than Seminole County, Florida, because Seminole County was doing that open classroom thing. And my mom was very grounded in common sense, and she said, “No, too loud, too chaotic. My highly sensitive kid’s not going to be able to manage it.” And then it turned out that was the case for a lot of kids!

Andy Smarick: Of course. We shouldn’t date ourselves, but I went to an open classroom elementary school, and it wasn’t until I was in middle school that I realized that there were schools where you actually had doors, and I realized how much quieter it was. I think that my elementary school was built in 1976, and that was the era when the fad of the moment was open classrooms. This is how I begin this piece that you’re referencing. For some reason, education, both higher education and K-12, seems to be susceptible to these kinds of fads. Someone says, “Oh, online learning for six-year-olds is perfect. We can do customized learning.” And then five years later, we do the research and say, “No, no, no, that’s not how learning actually happens. Maybe that doesn’t make sense.” Or, whole language learning or like this blended approach to reading, which became a fad and hurt the way that millions and millions of kids, especially low-income kids, develop reading skills. For some reason, education just wants to latch onto these ideas, and they think that it’s going to revolutionize things. But the truth of the matter is that schooling and learning and teaching are very similar to the way it was at its best 2000 years ago, 2500 years ago: a grown-up who knows a lot with a group of students, face-to-face working through really tough ideas repetitively doing the types of exercises that are necessary. A great classroom doesn’t have to have all this fancy stuff, and we don’t have to offshore our learning to computers. Get kids to do the work themselves so they’re ready to do the work that’s even harder when they’re 22 or 32 or 52.

It’s obvious to me and I just think that we’re going to regret this unless we just start to pump the brakes.

We haven’t used a word that my older daughter uses: cheat or cheating. Her concern, as she sees her peers using AI, is that they’re using it as an opportunity to cheat. So they have to prepare for a debate, and they’re not using it like a super Google. They’re using it to write their debating points. Yes, it’s stealing their learning, but it’s also kind of cheating, right?

Andy Smarick: Yes, so I want to talk about both of those things. AI, as it’s being used by students, is not super Google. Search engines, as long as they’re not AI-enabled, actually facilitate learning because it doesn’t do your thinking for you. It says, “Here’s the article that you ought to read in order to learn about things.” Or, “here’s the book that you ought to read in order to learn about things.” AI is quite the opposite. It’s “here’s the answer.” Or in the case that you’re giving, it’s “let me do all of the thinking for you, all of the organizing for you, all of the writing for you, all of the editing for you, so then you can just be plug and play and maybe stand up in front of an audience and read this thing.” But like we were talking about earlier, the purpose behind doing a debate or taking an oral exam is all of the work that leads up to the debate itself.

“What are the subjects I should study? What are the good arguments for and the good arguments against? How do I structure my argument so it’s most convincing?” That’s where the learning happens. And so yes, AI is being used to do all of that.

To the question of cheating, in most universities, in most schools, it’s not clear what constitutes cheating using AI because we don’t generally have statewide policies on this. A university might not have a clear policy. They may allow their colleges, their departments, or individual professors to decide what constitutes cheating, what is an allowable use. “Well, you can use it, but you just have to tell me that you used it. You can use it to do study guides, but you can’t use it to replace readings.” And so there are a lot of students who want to learn, who do all the work themselves. And it takes hours and hours and hours. And another student just has AI do all their work for them. They get a similar grade on the exam. And so those who were doing the work, ultimately, have to think, “Was all that work worth it? Is this really what schooling is all about? Were they cheating, or was I just being dumb for doing the stuff myself?” So the lack of clarity about this is another part of the problem.

Why are we being told that “AI will prepare students for the jobs of the future” when we know that they’re using it to outsource the work that they’ve been assigned, when they’re using it as a way to not learn?

Andy Smarick: Well, the cynical part of me would say that this is exactly what tech enthusiasts always say. This is precisely what they told us five, 10 years ago when coding boot camps were everything. ”The jobs of the future are going to be in coding,” and everybody spent money to do that because it was going to be good for the tech community. But it turns out AI can do it for you. So maybe that was a giant waste.

There are people who love technology who are always going to say, “You have to do this technology because this technology is going to change the world. And if you want a job, you’re going to have to know this thing.” This is old hat. This ain’t my first rodeo. You and I’ve been around for a long time. So we know that people say, “This social emotional learning is the key,” or “don’t take calculus, you have to take statistics.” There’s always this new thing that people think is needed for the jobs of the future, that’s obvious to them and them alone. And it just turns out to be a coincidence that the thing they really care about is going to prepare students for the future.

So I’m very skeptical of all of the companies, all of the organizations that are pushing AI, telling us that it’s necessary for our kids. I think they do it more for their benefit than for the students’ benefit. But we must remember all along that what matters the most is developing good citizens, good, smart, moral young people, people who can do the work themselves.

And you don’t have to have a PhD, you don’t have to be a genius to know that if there is some program out there that is doing your kids’ learning for them, it’s probably not good. And I just don’t know why there aren’t more professors who themselves who spent years and years and years reading books and writing and thinking, trying to get students interested in their subject, why they are just laying down and saying, “well, I guess if students are using this to read the Odyssey for them and put together a study guide and instead of doing the work themselves, I guess that’s okay. That’s the wave of the future.” I just don’t know why there hasn’t been an uprising among professors, among teachers who should be the ones knowing better, who should be the ones saying, “No, this is not what teaching and learning is all about.” I’m waiting for that to happen. And I just don’t know why it hasn’t yet.

I’m seeing glimmers of it. You see the occasional professor being quoted here and there in articles or think pieces about this, but there just aren’t enough quotes and articles yet.

Andy Smarick: Yeah, which makes me wonder, do they speak for the majority, and the majority are just afraid to speak out? Are they the outliers? But then, everybody who knows about higher education knows this concept of shared governance, that there are faculty senates and department chairs, and deans have a whole lot of power. If our faculty at higher education institutions wanted to do something about this, they could; they organize to do things about funding levels or layoffs, or the core curriculum all the time. They have built in shared governance models where they could push an opinion on this. And the fact that they haven’t done so is a very, very curious part about this.

When I’m advocating for a pause, a moratorium, it’s not a forever thing. It’s just so policymakers and faculty leaders and presidents and deans, but then at the high school level, school board members and parents and teachers can say, “Does this make sense?” Certainly, the technology has outpaced our thinking about the technology. And this is just trying to give us a chance to catch up because we’re going to regret this if this continues as is.

Are we really gonna be happy if all of our 25-year-olds have read fewer and fewer books, have written less and less, have studied less and less? Is that a world that we think is going to be good for us and good for them? Of course not. So let’s just pause. We’re going to regret it if we don’t.

Is a two-year moratorium possible? Can AI be rolled back? You wrote that 90% of higher ed students are using AI, and that has significantly increased recently. I read somewhere that 85% of teachers and 86% of K-12 students used AI in the 2024-25 school year. Andy, is it too late?

Andy Smarick: No, it is never too late. A big chunk of my essay is dedicated to this very subject because when I’ve talked to other people about this, they often will squint at me and act like I’m a Luddite – someone who’s afraid of technology – or like the horse has already left the barn, it’s too late to close the door. The truth of the matter is, and if anyone’s interested, I dedicate two or three paragraphs to this, in example after example after example, societies have been introduced to a new technology, realize that it is not right, and then they stop it. They decide that we either need to roll this back or we need to put guardrails on it, and this is everything from medical interventions to things like cloning and eugenics, atomic weaponry, and atomic nuclear power.

We always do this. The scientists go far, bless their hearts, and then we say maybe this isn’t good for society, and so we pull back some. We can do the exact same thing here.

Keep in mind that for 2,500 years, we have written records in the West of how to teach and learn. We’re going to be fine if we don’t use AI for another couple of years while we figure this thing out. We just need moral clarity. We want students to be involved in the business of learning, and that requires hard work, not offshoring it to programs. We want teachers, educators to be involved in the job of teaching. Set clear standards: do your own reading, do your own writing, do your own outlining, do your own research, and put together all of this work yourself. If you need some help on Google style things, you can still use Google, but you cannot use programs to do your thinking for you. Then we can start to have conversations about what constitutes cheating, what are honor code violations, what are programs that can catch whether or not you’ve been cheating. Those are technical problems that I am absolutely sure that we can figure out, maybe not perfectly, but darn well.

I just worry that there are people who talk about the technical challenges because they’re afraid to engage in the first question, the one that I’m raising, which is, do we have the moral clarity? Do we have the backbone to say, “this is wrong for our kids”? Let’s figure out how to stop it, but let’s first say, “we need to stop it.” It can be done, we’ve done with other technologies. We just need to be tough enough to say that we need to do it here.

We should have done this with social media. We should have done this with iPhones 10, 12 years ago. We didn’t. And so now we’re in the position of Jonathan Haidt and the others saying, “Well, we made a big mistake,” and everyone agrees. Yes, this was terrible. Let’s go to screen-free schools. Imagine if we had just done a two-year moratorium a decade ago. We could have saved a generation of kids from a lot of the anxiety, a lot of the bullying, a lot of everything that they went through with social media. If we had just had the courage to say, “wait, this doesn’t seem right, why don’t we do that with AI?”.

There was so much pressure and so many promises that this new infusion of screens and cell phones in the classroom was going to be a way to truly engage students; this innovation was going to “revolutionize education.” There was no call for a moratorium. There was this pressure that you had to get on board. “This is the new way. This is the new trend. This is the innovation that will finally make things better when it comes to education.” So we’re seeing that again with AI, and there are a few of us who are the Eeyores out there saying “no.”

I do want to talk a little bit more about policies and ways to implement what you’re envisioning on this moratorium. But how do we push back on those edu-fad folks?

Andy Smarick: Well, the first thing is to point out to them and point out to the broader community the long list of things that you and I are familiar with just because we’ve been toiling in the vineyards of education policy for a long time. People told us that a new design of a school building was going to revolutionize schooling, or having teachers go through a certain training module was going to revolutionize schooling, or doing blended reading assignments, or whole language learning was going to revolutionize education. If I had a nickel for every revolution in education that was going to change things, I could probably build a new school district myself. This is just like standard fare. We’re accustomed to people telling us things are going to be revolutionized, and it never pans out, but some people make a lot of money, and they get to write think pieces about this new revolution.

It’s having the backbone to say that this is just like everything else, and those other things didn’t work out. So let’s pause. We just need people who are courageous enough to point this out and not be afraid when people call you backward or a Luddite afraid of technology.

Yes, I think that learning doesn’t need all these screens. And I’m fine if people who work in Silicon Valley think that I’m backward. Oh, well, my life is going to go on. So we just need more people to do that.

Now, on the policy side, the simplest thing to do is something like Ohio did, where the state says, “this is going to implicate K-12 or higher education, an industry that we, the state, spend literally billions of dollars on. We want to make sure that this makes sense. So we are going to come up with a statewide policy that you can use and adopt if you want to, or over this two-year moratorium period. Your school board or your board of visitors or whatever it might be needs to come up with a policy that at least aligns that answers certain questions that shows that you’ve been thinking about this, so you can govern your school systems better.” That kind of policy is sensible. It’s easy. It’s what we’ve done in other domains. Think of the regulations that we’ve put on all kinds of industries just to make sure that it’s safe. And we don’t have to dictate what the policy is, but at a minimum, get the governing entities to think about what the policies ought to be.

There were over a thousand AI-related bills introduced in state legislatures this year. How does a proposal like this get across the legislative finish line?

Andy Smarick: There is nothing more powerful than parents and teachers saying that we have gone too far too fast and we need to get back to basics on this. Yes, Google or Facebook may send some lobbyists to say how wonderful their new devices are. But if you get a group of moms and dads and teachers saying our kids aren’t learning anymore, that is a whole lot more powerful than any kind of think piece. Be willing to do that before your local school board, go to the state board of education, or go to the state legislature. A lot of state legislators went through the public school system. A lot of them have family members who are teachers. A number of them have been teachers themselves. They will have an instinct about this. And if you can just make the case that this is stealing learning, and it’s pretty clear that people are going to continue to question the purpose of education if we’re just acting as though assignments don’t matter because you can just plug a question into ChatGPT and get an answer, and that’s the equivalent of learning. I think that undermines thousands of years’ worth of lessons about the formation of young people. So it’s obviously wrong to me.

We just need teachers and parents to get out there and say, “No, we’re not going to change schooling in this way just because some new technology says that we should.”

Parents are certainly making their interest in a non-tech-saturated way of learning known by sending their children to classical education schools.

Andy Smarick: Yes, you know as much about this as anyone, thanks to all of your work on school choice. When you give families choices, you start to see they vote with their feet. What I always like to say is when the Berlin Wall came down, we could tell whether the East or West was better just by the direction that people moved. Not a whole lot of people in West Germany were eager to go into the Soviet Bloc. The people from the East were going into the West. In the same way, when we give families choices, do you want the kind of schools that you’ve had? Or if you have like options for things like classical education where kids are doing their own reading, their own writing, where they’re not having screens in front of them. That’s what families are gravitating toward. So, yes, we know that families want this and all of the fanfare now that is tied to these new programs, which just seems so simple and so straightforward, no screens, or don’t bring your phone into school, or screens have to be limited to certain kind of classes. Families love this. Teachers love it. I think a bunch of parents are recognizing that we’ve gone too far on technology. If we can just harness that energy and apply it to AI, things are going to start to go in the right direction. I just wonder if parents realize the extent to which their own kids are using AI to do their work for them. I don’t think they do.

Definitely not.

Andy Smarick: Yeah, so you and I just say it as though it’s a matter of fact, but look, we should pause on this. Survey after survey after survey is being done showing that 80% then 85% in these two recent surveys, 88 or 90% of college students are using AI for their coursework. Just think about that for a second. In the span of five years, we have fundamentally changed the way that higher education students are learning without any discussion of it at all, without any policy whatsoever. And so now we have students who just think that it’s natural to not do their work. That is unhealthy for them, but it’s also unhealthy for policy. This is staggering. I never would have imagined that it would get this far this fast, but it has. And at least trying to pump the brakes right now seems to make sense to me.

The technology industry spent $250 million on just federal lobbying last year. And that was just some simple Googling on my part that found that number. So it could be much higher. That doesn’t count all the state-level lobbying that’s happening. And you’re calling for a state-level moratorium. There are some serious obstacles here to getting something like this done.

Andy Smarick: I don’t want to be too sarcastic about this, but no, the tech industry is going to be upset. Good.

Do we, honest to goodness, I’m being sincere about this, do you believe that the tech, after everything we’ve learned about social media, after everything we’ve learned about so many of these programs, about TikTok, do we really think that tech companies wake up in the morning thinking about the best interest of our kids? Who thinks that?

As they’re trying to sell new programs and expanded contracts with gigantic school systems or with the state, we just need legislators and parents to say, “I understand you’re trying to make money. I get it. You’re going to sell us all this bill of goods about the wave of the future. We get it. But we care about our kids a whole lot more than you do.” So yes, to your point, absolutely true. There are going to be a lot of well-paid lobbyists with really nice shoes and really nice suits in the hallways trying to sell this stuff and trying to protect their interests. I get it. Good for them. I’m a capitalist, no shade thrown at them for doing their jobs. But that’s different than being in the business of trying to make sure that students are formed the right way. Anyone who has followed what Instagram and Facebook, all of these social media apps did to our kids’ brains and their attention spans and their anxiety, all of us have to be mindful that the people pushing AI aren’t thinking about the best interests of our kids.

There are certainly things that can be done in the interim while we’re waiting for something bigger, like a moratorium to happen. I’ve heard that Blue Books are becoming popular again.

Andy Smarick: I taught a class this summer for Pepperdine, and I told all my students at the beginning, “This is going to be like old school teaching and learning, and be prepared for a Blue Book for your final exam”. A couple of them rolled their eyes at the beginning, but all of them were prepared for it. All of them did great. Use a blue book. We had to find them online, where we could buy them, but I’ve heard that they’re now running out of stock because so many teachers and professors are using them.

What our students complain the most about is that their hands got sore, that they’re not accustomed to writing by hand. But if you don’t allow them to type, allow them to use screens; they have to read and write themselves.

Bring back the blue book. That’s an exciting development. So there’s some good news. We were a little negative here the last 30 minutes, so I wanted to offer that good news. I’m noticing at my daughters’ high school more in-class handwritten writing prompts and acknowledgements in the syllabi at the beginning of the school year that “I know AI is out there and it’s a no for me.” Great to see individual teachers taking these steps. I’d love to shine the light on more of that happening.

Andy Smarick: We do need to celebrate them because they probably feel lonely, and people are going to make them feel like they’re going backward by using number two pencils and blue books when, in fact, they’re going back to the way things probably ought to be more than they’ve been for quite some time. I do not own any stock in Blue Books. I don’t think you do either. So we are not trying to get rich on this. We’re doing this for the best interest of education.

Yes, yeah, right. We’ll go out now and invest in pencil companies. Quick!

Andy Smarick: Insider training, thanks to your podcast.

Perhaps I should have started with this instead of ending with it. You’re making a distinction here between AI as part of learning versus industries, employees, workers using AI as part of their job, right?

Andy Smarick: I try to draw this distinction in the piece, and much more needs to be said about this, but I’m as hopeful as anybody that the right kind of AI can help doctors, can help physicians identify cancer sooner. They can help us understand the way that water works in the Chesapeake Bay or in the Mississippi River, like how water flows and submerged aquatic vegetation, and the role of nitrogen. AI can do things quickly and in ways that the human brain can’t with the speed. At least not yet. And so there are lots of different ways that professionals can use AI to make the world a better place. What I’m trying to draw the distinction between is those kinds of uses by professionals who have already done all the reading and all the writing and all the outlines. So they are prepared to use AI as adults in their professional role. That is different than allowing AI to do your work for you. So, so you ultimately don’t learn how to do geometry or chemistry or learn how to outline your paper. Those are two very different things.

Yes, use it in your professional world if it’s going to enable you to make the world a better place. No, do not allow kids to offshore their learning to these programs because they need those skills.

As we wrap up, I’m going to jump to a totally different topic because we like to dispel myths here on the podcast. 18 years ago, you and I worked together to plan a White House summit on inner city children and faith-based schools. Technically, you planned it, and I helped with bureaucratic navigation at the U.S. Department of Education, where I worked. President George Bush spoke at the event, and then you issued a report from the Domestic Policy Council on the topic. I’m springing this walk down memory lane on you, but are there any myths around faith-based education that you’d want to tackle today?

Andy Smarick: Interesting question. So you enabled that event to happen. You just like soft-pedaled your essential role in it. I had the blessing of being able to convince the president and others that we should do it. And then I was a dog that caught the car and then had to decide what happens now and plan this gigantic event. And so you were indispensable, including finding money in the U.S. Department of Education budget, bless you.

Thank you. I literally do have bureaucratic navigation on my LinkedIn profile. It’s a skill.

Andy Smarick: I wish people knew how many times I would call you and you’d be like, “Andy, don’t worry about it. We have this covered. You just go, you find the speakers for this, and you deal with the White House.” At that time, the president gave a speech at the National Prayer Breakfast and to some Catholic groups about the disappearance of Catholic schools. And as a Catholic, as someone who believes in faith-based education, it hit me that we ought to do something on this.

And at the moment, what seemed to be the myth, and still in some corners the myth today, is that faith-based schools are a relic of the past and we don’t need them anymore. And so they can just disappear, and we shouldn’t shed too many tears about them. But it turned out that the research showed that these schools had something magical about them. That Catholic schools, for example, have done a really good job of getting kids to do hard work through repetition and telling all kids that they have a duty and the ability to learn because they are children of God, and achievement gaps are smaller in general in Catholic schools, and low-income kids end up doing better. So there’s something great about faith-based institutions when they commit to the best interests of kids. But despite all of that, a lot of these schools still struggled over time because of charter schools and because of political pressure and the lack of school choice. But, so the myth is that these schools are disappearing, and we shouldn’t shed too many tears because they are disappearing. But the truth of the matter is they’re still indispensable. Many millions of families are still choosing them because of school choice programs. New schools are being created and are getting new enrollment.

And maybe the most interesting thing is Gen Z appears to be the most religious generation in America right now. So the younger generations are returning to faith because I think they desire a sense of community. They desire a sense of big important concepts and principles of leading the good life that often secular worlds or institutions haven’t been giving them and some of the craziness of our world. They’re looking for answers beyond that. So not only are a lot of churches seeing increased parishioners today, increased donations, more people identifying as members of religious communities, but I think we’re going to see one of the consequences of this. Another, let’s just say a resurgence in different types of faith-based schools. Given that we’ve had 10 great years of school choice policies, we now have the policies to be sort of like the gasoline and the engine that now that we know where we want to go, a lot of these schools are going to be able to be created and then grow thanks to tax credit programs or whatever else states may decide to do.

There we go. We’re ending with even more good news. Blue books and education freedom. How can people follow your work?

Andy Smarick: I work for the Manhattan Institute. I write a Substack weekly on Tuesday mornings. It’s called Governing Right. You can subscribe to that for free. Find me on Twitter. Would love to hear from any of you.

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