School choice activist Corey A. DeAngelis joined Wednesday’s edition of The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy to discuss a rally he, Robby Starbuck, and Americans for Prosperity (AFP) held in Nashville supporting Tennessee Governor Bill Lee’s universal school choice plan, known as the Education Freedom Scholarship Act.
On Tuesday, DeAngelis, Starbuck, AFP, and other school choice advocates held a Rally for School Choice & Parents’ Rights at the state Capitol in support of the governor’s school choice plan.
DeAngelis said the rally was “a lot of fun,” noting how approximately 50 families attended.
“It was a lot of fun. We were at the capitol building right by the senate offices near the lounge in the senate area and we had a bunch of families, I’d say about 50, in attendance with school choice signs showing up at the capitol from across the state to show legislators that they’re here and they’re excited to expand school choice statewide to all families,” DeAngelis said.
DeAngelis said the leftist group Americans United for Separation of Church and State organized a counter-protest in response to the school choice rally and on X beforehand, called him and Starbuck “extreme right-wing Christian nationalists.”
“You can see their attempts to just label everything they don’t like is as a white nationalist, whatever that actually means, but in their call to protest our event, they put something online that called me and Robby Starbuck ‘extreme right-wing Christian nationalists,’ whatever that means. Does that mean American? I don’t know, but it just goes to show you, they just throw all the buzzwords at the wall when they start losing,” DeAngelis said.
Pivoting back to school choice, DeAngelis said the “whole point” of the voucher program is to “get away from the one-size-fits-all system.”
The whole point of school choice is to get away from the one-size-fits-all system where you have a special interest, a minority of the population, inflicting their values and their will on other people’s kids by trapping them in their schools. But for me, if you like the public school system, you should have that choice. If you like your public school, you can keep your public school. Unlike with your doctor, actually, the public schools get better in response to competition,” DeAngelis said.
Going on to note how the nation’s report card scores for school-aged students showed that only 13 percent of U.S. students are proficient in U.S. History, DeAngelis said, “That is abysmal.”
“That is a failure. We are an international embarrassment at this point where we spend more than any other country on the planet and we are nowhere near the top of the list in math or reading outcomes, probably because the activists in the school system that go through the Marxist higher education programs to be certified to become educators, they want to focus more on the LGBTs than the ABCs,” DeAngelis added.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
