Carolina Journal Radio No. 912: Supreme Court welcomes originalist Amy Coney Barrett

From Cherokee to Kuretuk, from the largest city to the smallest town, and from the statehouse to the schoolhouse, it's Carolina Journal Radio, your weekly news magazine discussing North Carolina's most important public policy events and issues.

Makers have different ideas about the best way to help small businesses coping with the impact of COVID-19. You'll hear highlights from a recent debate. Speaking of COVID, it's had an impact on public school enrollment in North Carolina.

An expert assesses that impact. And we'll hear highlights from a North Carolina senator's questioning of a Supreme Court nominee. Speaking of that nominee, now a new Supreme Court justice, Donna Martinez turns her attention to that topic in the Carolina Journal headline. Notre Dame Law School graduate and mother of seven, Amy Coney Barrett, has now become only the 115th person to be sworn in as a member of the United States Supreme Court. Justice Barrett is 48 years old and the fifth woman to serve on our country's highest court. So how will she change the court and will she change the court? For that, we turn to the director of legal studies for the John Locke Foundation, John Guzay, who has been taking a look at some of her previous rulings and joins us to talk about the new justice. John, welcome back to the show. Thank you, Donna. She is young, young just in general and young for a member of the court and potentially, John, that's 30 to 40 years of Amy Coney Barrett on the United States Supreme Court. You're talking about a generation of impact. Pretty interesting. Yes, it is. It's very exciting, I think. Why?

Well, I'm hoping and everything she said and written up to this point makes me believe that she's going to be a diehard originalist like her mentor, Antonin Scalia and like Clarence Thomas and at least until recently, Neil Gorsuch, which is just what we need on the U.S. Supreme Court and on all the courts in this country. Why do we need that? Because unfortunately, and it's a long story how it happened, but the courts have sort of abdicated what ought to be their job, which is to enforce the law. And they've become super legislatures. They make law. Now, there's some situations where that's OK, but it's not OK when they make law by reinterpreting and changing the meaning of duly enacted statutes.

And it's certainly not OK when they do it by reinterpreting and changing the meaning of the U.S. Constitution. You have listened. Well, you've not only read some of her rulings, but you listened to some of the things she said during her nomination hearings. She made some comments after being sworn in.

What do you make of her philosophy? How does she really explain to people how she views her role as a judge and now a justice? Well, much in the same way that some of our best Supreme Court justices have, she says that her job, ironically, this is something that Chief Justice Roberts said when he was being interviewed and when he was sworn in. But she really will do it. I think she's going to knock. She's going to call balls and strike. She's going to apply the law as it's written.

And she's not going to let her personal policy preferences get in the way, let alone anything like party affiliation. You just said something really interesting. And I want to talk about this. You mentioned Chief Justice John Roberts, and you made kind of a reference to some things that he said in his confirmation hearings. And he, as a non-attorney myself, at my interpretation of what he said, the balls and strikes comment, was that he was not going to bring his preferences or views to his decisions.

He was going to call balls and strikes. Of course, then when he essentially wrote the opinion that said that the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, was constitutional, a lot of folks kind of went back on their heels and said, hey, that's not exactly what you told us how you would view your job in your confirmation hearings. It gets me to this, John, which I think is a really interesting discussion as it relates to new Justice Barrett, because in his confirmation hearings a few years ago, John Roberts essentially said, look, I'm going to call balls and strikes.

My views don't matter here. But then he made a controversial ruling in the majority opinion on the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, saying that it is constitutional. So what do you make now of when you hear a judge and now Justice Barrett say, I'm not going to do that?

Can we take stock that she won't? Well, you certainly, I mean, we've learned this the hard way. You can't assume that they're going to do what they said they would do. And I don't think we should assume it's because they were lying or being hypocritical at the time. There seems to be something about power that changes people. And we've seen it happen over and over again where a justice moves to the left or at least to the center once they get on the Supreme Court. I think part of what happens is they start to see themselves not so much as judges, but as statesmen.

They're responsible for the total well-being of the country. And sometimes they've got to make some compromises to their judicial principles. Could happen to Justice Barrett, but I hope it won't.

And I don't really think it will. She's had good role models in Antonin Scalia, a good role model in Antonin Scalia. And everything she's written makes me think she's sincere. So my hope is that she'll stay the course some of them have, most notably Clarence Thomas, for year after year. And he's been there 30 years now. But he has consistently adhered to originalism and textualism. Now, Chief Justice John Roberts has been seen by a lot of folks over the past few years as the swing vote.

You weren't really sure. Is he going to go with the liberal wing or with the originalist conservative wing? Now that Justice Barrett is on the court, what does she do?

What does her philosophy do to the so-called back and forth? Or is there a swing vote anymore? Yeah, I've been thinking about this, and it's going to be interesting to see how it plays out. He certainly isn't going to be the swing vote in the sense that we're going to have two groups equally for each on the left and on the right that will put him in the position of being able to make the call. That being the case, it'll just be interesting to see whether he continues to side with the left on controversial cases or whether he decides, heck, I can't determine the outcome either way, so I may as well go with my conscience and my best judicial thinking. I've seen some analysts say, well, the court now is really six to three, six more conservative people and three more liberal people. Is that how you see it?

Not really. I mean, it's true, certainly, that we've got three Democratic appointments and six Republican appointments. And in terms of their political philosophies, I think we can say for certain that all three of those Democratic appointees are liberals and favor Democratic policy in general. And then we can say the opposite for the other six. But what's been interesting over the years, while the three Democrats, the three liberals tend to vote in lockstep and along ideological lines on these controversial cases, that really hasn't been true of the other six.

And the reason is originalism. If you adhere to the philosophy that my job is to apply the law as it's written, that makes it much harder for you to just go with your ideological preferences. So I think it'll be interesting, but my hope is that with six originalists or quasi-originalists in the case of Judge Justice Roberts on the court, we might start to see the whole court change its tenor and stop being so political, stop being so ideological and start really thinking about what the law says and how it should properly be interpreted. So we'll be watching to see how the justices behave and rule, et cetera. But, John, there is already backlash from Democrats and people who believe that, A, Amy Coney Barrett should never have been nominated at the point she was nominated, never been confirmed.

And also, they don't like her philosophy of originalism. There's been talk of what's called packing of the court. What do you make of that? Well, it's kind of horrifying, to be honest.

I'm worried, but I'm not terribly worried. There's a lot of institutional inertia. I mean, I think almost across the board, academic lawyers and judges of all parties will probably stand up and say this is a mistake. And we're talking about expanding the court, adding seats.

Yeah. When people talk about court packing, they mean adding seats to get the ideological balance you want. And this goes back to the administration of President Roosevelt when he threatened to pack the court and got the court to change some of its decisions. But if this happens, then everything is up for grabs. I don't know how it'll play out. Well, we're going to be watching going forward, of course, to see exactly how the new justice, Amy Coney Barrett, ends up ruling in some of these consequential cases. And our guest, John Guze, will be writing about all of those decisions, or many of them at least, at johnlocke.org. John, thanks for joining us to talk about this.

Thank you, Donna. Stay with us, folks. Much more Carolina Journal radio to come in just a moment. Tired of fake news?

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I'm Mitch Kokay. Many people believe American higher education needs major reform. What's the best way to make that reform happen? Our next guest has a new report on the topic. Jay Shallon is director of policy analysis at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal. And his recent report on this topic is titled Bolstering the Board. Trustees are academia's best hope for reform. Welcome back to the program, Jay. Thanks, Mitch.

The title kind of gives it away. You basically think if there's going to be reform, it's going to have to involve trustees or, in the case of the University of North Carolina system, the board of governors, people who are not actually on the campus day to day. Yeah. I mean, the current situation is what academia itself has produced. These are the people who have been in charge. Academics have been running the show. They control higher education's current governance is kind of an informal system called shared governance in which the board, the administration, and the faculty all have their own spheres of activity. The board is supposed to control the finances.

The administration controls the day to day operations and communication with the outside world. And the faculty controls the curriculum, the intellectual side of things. You mentioned at the very outset of this report that there are two conditions needed to effect large scale reforms. And both of them involve changing the way that the trustees and governors operate.

So you need two conditions. You need to have a hierarchical organization. If you're going to reform a situation, you need to have firm leadership at the top. You can't have a system where lots and lots of decisions are made at the bottom, or in the middle, and they filter through lots of different committees and organizations.

You need to have a firm grip on the reins and somebody who can make things happen. The other thing you need to have, once again, you need to have people in charge, or at least influencing, who are from outside the organization and have not adopted the ways of thinking of the organization and can take a fresh look and say, this has to change. I would imagine some people hearing this are going to say, wait a minute, that kind of goes against what we often say in the right of center perspective, that best decisions are made by the people who are closest to them and kind of decentralize things. But you're saying that to effect the changes that are needed in academia, you really do need some sort of person at the top, group at the top saying, this is going to happen, make it happen. Yeah, I'm all for, in many situations, I'm all for that Madisonian, let's have lots of different centers of power that balance each other out. But this is not the situation that existed when we were creating the United States.

This is an institution, rather self enclosed, that has become very badly degraded. To have the system that exists is exactly that. There's a lot of checks and balances, so nothing ever gets done. And because nothing ever gets done at the top, things seem to move in the direction that it's already moving in. And that's a disaster. We've seen the results. So to meet both of the conditions that you spell out, you need strong board governance is your conclusion.

Yes. And one of the problems is that the board kind of got shoved aside in the late 1800s late 1900s or early 1900s. They they still have legal control in most cases.

They either get it from the state assemblies in the case of public schools, or they get it from their charters, which makes the board the owners of the university in perpetuity. However, in practice, something very different goes along. And this is stifling any attempt to get anything done. And it is also degraded the board. They have become people who don't expect to do anything.

They've become the people who just are happy to be there and socialize. And if we treat the board as a more serious organization, we will get better people, hopefully. Another key thing is the board has to control its own people. And by that, I mean it has to control the training of people and it has to control the flow of information. The biggest problem is or one of the biggest problems is the asymmetry of information problem in which the administration is able to treat the board.

And I'll get a little earthy here like mushrooms. I'm sure many of you understand that they are kept in the dark and fed manure. And so by that way, the board has just been shoved aside. They are not fulfilling the duties that are legally theirs.

They are not fulfilling their fiduciary duty. A joke has been that members of these types of boards show up, vote yes, and then collect the football and basketball tickets. So you're talking about a very different way to operate.

How would you go about getting to the type of board that's needed? Well, first of all, I'm not so sure we can do it with a lot of the prestigious private colleges or universities. They are insulated by their massive endowments and their reputations. And they are run by self-perpetuating boards, which once they go woke, they don't come back. Plus if they're private, they get to set their own rules. At public universities, it depends on the politics. If you have good politics in your state, they will be able to make boards that are appoint boards that will get something done. But there has to be the will and the awareness by the politicians. And we've seen that even with Republican politics or states dominated by Republicans, that isn't always the case. The third thing is the less prestigious private colleges.

And I don't go into them much because they're sort of a different problem. But they are very influenced by market forces. And so there's some hope for them too. So one of the things you mentioned that I want to loop back to is this idea of the members of the boards controlling themselves.

I know that one of the ideas that has floated about with the UNC system in the past is having some new staff member or staff members who report only to the board and don't have any other connection to the university administration. Is that still something to look at? Oh, that is still very much something to look at. That's paramount.

That has to be done. In North Carolina, we actually have a law on the boards that allows the UNC Board of Governors to hire their own staff. So far, they have opted not to.

I consider that to be feckless. But yes, it has to be a high level policy person who is aware of what's going on in higher ed and can inform the board accurately. Today, there's a situation where the administration hires outside speakers to come in to inform them or people from the system to inform them.

So no alternative views are there. The other important thing is the training of new board members. They are being told that you are advocates for the system, you are to support the system, and they're not being told their full range of responsibilities and duties. The report on this topic is called Bolstering the Board.

Trustees are academia's best hope for reform. Its author is Jay Schallen, Director of Policy Analysis at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal. Jay, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you, Mitch.

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I'm Mitch Kocay. Confirmation hearings for a new U.S. Supreme Court Justice recently gave North Carolina's junior senator a national audience. Republican Senator Thom Tillis discussed more than just the nation's highest court.

He started by addressing a Democratic colleague's statements about guns. Senator Feinstein mentioned earlier that we've had a surge in applications for guns or purchases of guns. I wonder if a part of that is where we find our society right now. We're seeing great cities burned and looted and my highway patrol in North Carolina, 75% fewer applications to go into the Troopers Academy and record high request for retirement. We see that in New York. We see it across this country. I think people are afraid because many people, including people on this committee are unwilling to condemn the acts of violence and public safety out there and condemn violence against law enforcement, which is rampant.

I lost a sheriff's deputy just about a month ago who was shot protecting a family. So, yes, Senator Feinstein, I suspect that gun purchases are up, but I suspect the root cause behind a lot of them have to do with people's personal safety. Tillis discussed more than just guns and public safety concerns. He also turned his attention to health care, addressing Democrats' questions about the future of the Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare. I don't think there's anybody in the U.S. Senate that does want to make sure that every single picture that we've seen here, that those folks have affordable health care and that they can be cared for. But what we have here in the Affordable Care Act is something that is so flawed that the majority of the Democratic candidates for president all raised their hand and said it needed to be replaced with something they call Medicare for all, which could be Medicare for none. We know the broken promises of if you like your doctor you could keep it, if you like your health care you could keep it. What we're not talking about are the thousands of people who were already forced off of their job health care because employers changed hours and now instead of working one full-time job, you've got to work two full-time jobs because the businesses can't afford it. We've got a fundamental problem here. We need to protect every one of them, but we also need to make sure that people who have a health plan under the Affordable Care Act can actually afford to use it. In the catastrophic situations it's life-changing and thank God that it's there for them.

But what about so many other people that only have it and will only use it if they have a catastrophic situation because they can't afford the co-pays, they can't afford the underlying costs. We need to fix that. We shouldn't expect the Justice or the Supreme Court to fix it. That is our job. We should all show up here for work and we should get that done and we should also work on all the other things that this country is suffering from as a result of COVID. That's North Carolina U.S.

Senator Tom Tillis using the recent Supreme Court confirmation hearings to address other top public policy concerns. We'll return with more Carolina Journal Radio in a moment. We're doubling down on freedom.

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Both brought to you in the name of freedom by the John Locke Foundation. Welcome back to Carolina Journal Radio. I'm Mitch Kocai. The North Carolina General Assembly's latest debate about coronavirus relief prompted a discussion in the State Senate about help for small businesses. Democratic Senator Kirk Deviere called for his colleagues to do more. I'm here before you one more time, just like both previous relief bills that have spoke to you about support for our small businesses. While this bill has options for our small businesses, once again, we can do more. It's the same thing that I talked about last time I stood up and talked about support for our small businesses. This body ran bills to open small businesses across our state. I stood with many of you and voted to do just that because I believe in our small business community. But we have to do more. We ran bills for bars, for gyms, for bowling alleys and others. While this grant will help that we see in this bill, it doesn't do enough because it's not going to ultimately reach the businesses that have been hurt by this. The restaurants that have to shut down, the bowling alleys that have to have been shut, the bars that have been shuttered, they need help. So I want to offer another pathway forward on how we can help our small businesses.

And I hope this time it falls on positive note with the members of this body. Devere offered an amendment to the relief bill. We talked about a grant program, small business grant relief. What this does is reallocate, it basically says you take 30.5 million to that grant program and you allocate another 20 to a small business facilities assistance program and a $10 million to small business impact grant program. We've had restaurants, hotels that have shut down. The small business facility assistance programs will allow people to be able to pay their mortgages, pay their rents, pay the things that operating expenses that we as business owners understand and that no, no matter what's happening, they still have to pay those. The $10 million for the impact grant program deals specifically with historically underutilized businesses, those businesses that may have not had the opportunity to get the types of programs that were out there and they need it and they're struggling right now.

Republican Senator Carl Ford responded to his Democratic colleagues plan. We can do more for small businesses. It's called let them work, let them all get back open to fully doing the job that they want to do. That's how we can help small businesses.

Let them reopen. They want to work. They're ready to work. People are ready for them to open. That's how you help small businesses get the government out of the way.

Republican Senator Jim Perry also responded to the Democratic proposal. There are a lot of small businesses in this state that are hurting, and I'll remind everyone in this chamber why they're hurting. They were shut down. We tried to help.

Everyone in here had an opportunity to help at that time, but you chose not to do it. So now we're in a position that we continue to see documents floating talking about giving state dollars to businesses, and there are some constitutional concerns when we start talking about that. A lot of you have read the articles written by the school of government and concerns about exclusive amalgamates.

We've even heard rumors about new opinions being drafted coming out of the AG's office that disagree with earlier informal opinions that were given. We've got over 900,000 small businesses in our state, and there are a ton of them are hurting, and we all want to do something for them, but I don't think dangling things that are undeliverable in front of them, I don't think that's the way to do it. I think we need to help them get back open and get back to business. You're listening to highlights from a state Senate debate about helping struggling small businesses in North Carolina.

Democrat Kirk Deviere chimed in again. Let's talk about what we can control, because in the business world, you look at what you can control, not what's out of your control. The decisions that the governor makes or other bodies outside of this body make, whether it's judicial or the governor, are not in our control. What is in our control today is to put dollars in our small businesses hands.

Clearly, it's that simple. This again, we're not talking about what we can do to open. We're talking about saving businesses. Let's do what we can control. We have the power in this body, in this body to make this decision today to show that we stand with our small businesses and invest in them.

Republican Senator Paul Newton critiqued the proposal to throw more money at small business relief. Your intention is great, and it mirrors the intention we've had to help our small businesses through this pandemic, because there has been so much that they have not been able to control. We've done that in this bill.

I mean, $60,500,000 is already in this bill. We worked closely with Commerce to ensure that that money, with the criteria that are in place for these small businesses, could actually make it into their hands. So your intentions are good, but we don't even know whether administratively Commerce could deploy those dollars.

To my knowledge, you haven't talked with Commerce. It's one thing to want it or to try to will it to happen, but it's another thing for these dollars to actually get out the door and into the hands of small business by the end of this year. So there's a lot of unanswered questions about the amendment. Intention's good, but the nuts and bolts and details are not there that we need to know to know what would be effective. Republican Senator Ted Alexander echoed his colleagues' support for getting businesses reopened. I've heard today several folks has been said that the easiest and most obvious thing that we can do for health care and jobs and businesses is Medicaid or Medicare expansion. I just want to add my words to say that I am in total agreement that we need to do more. And that more is as has been said, that we need to have our governor open up these businesses that are dying, that are pleading with us, that are pleading with him and pleading with everyone that they know that they need to be open and that they are trying their best. They are willing to open with the CDC guidelines, the FDA guidelines.

They're wanting those things so that they can have a fighting chance. That's the way that we get our business open. That's the way we reopen our economy. And there are many folks in this room who voted for those very measures. And here we are at the very last day of the session. And we need to have our governor hear us that these businesses need to be reopened.

It's very late in the game to try to do other things at this point in time. Republican Senator Brent Jackson explained why he couldn't support the Democratic plan. We've got the $60-plus million going to this program, which is going to businesses that has already been put into place and that can be got out and the chamber has backed it. Senators ended up tabling the amendment, the final relief package earned broad bipartisan support. We'll return with more Carolina Journal radio in a moment. Real influence.

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I'm Donna Martinez. COVID-19 is having a profound impact on North Carolina school kids, on their parents, on teachers and administrators. As we all know, and while it really could take quite a long time to really fully understand just how much 2020 will change the future for these kids, we are getting a hint from some initial data about how parents are reacting. Dr. Terry Stoops is vice president for research, also the director of education studies here at the John Locke Foundation. He's been drilling down into the data and joins us now to reveal what he found. Terry, welcome back to the show.

Thank you. So we're looking at enrollment numbers, at least the initial enrollment numbers for the school year. And there are some changes that you're seeing.

What's happening? Yeah, absolutely some changes. And these are looking at the first month enrollment numbers compared to the first month enrollment numbers from last year. And the total decrease in public school population was more than 62,000 students. But that's a little deceiving because if you have to, you should break it down into charter school and district school. And the district schools lost about 71,000 students, whereas the charter schools gained about 8,500 students. So you're seeing part of the trajectory that we've seen in student enrollment over the last couple of years with charter schools making gains and districts losing students, except this year, district losses were much more pronounced than they have been in years past. I know its initial data, but do you have any sense at all, even if it's not from the data, but from your contacts across the public school world, the charter school world, et cetera, as to why parents might say a district classroom right now is just not good for my kid.

I'm going to try one of these public charters. We're seeing the most and the largest enrollment losses from kindergartners. And that is where I think parents are having to decide whether to sit their kindergartner in front of a computer screen for hours every day, which is what many school districts are forcing parents to do, or leaving that child out, so-called red shirting that child and delaying their entry into school until they turn six or seven.

Now, this is completely legal. I don't think many people know that you don't have to send your child to school when they turn five. The law allows a parent to keep their child out of school until they turn seven. And I think a lot of parents, once they found that out, would rather absorb the cost of having their child in daycare for an extra year or keeping them home for an extra year rather than having them go into an unpredictable and really a situation that's really not beneficial to kids. I mean, especially the youngest kids really are not built to sit in front of computer screens. The older kids really don't have much of a problem with that. But for these younger kids, I think parents understand that that's not an ideal situation.

And so one option is to leave them out. I can't imagine having a child, particularly a young one, where you're trying to make these decisions about what is best because it's uncharted territory. On the other side of the ledger, though, I wonder, Terry, if this isn't in almost a perverse way because of COVID-19, that parents are really starting to understand their kids and the importance of a learning environment and what their child's aptitudes are, what the challenges are, et cetera. Could we perhaps have some sort of silver lining out of this whole thing down the road that parents are a little bit more connected to their kids and education?

I absolutely think that's the case. I think parents understand the value of looking at the educational environment that's provided to their children and not just trusting that sending their child off to a school is always going to be what's best for them. And not only that, we have to recognize, too, that there are parents that have actively made the choice to send their child to a non-district school, whether it be a charter school, a home school or a private school, to provide a better educational environment, one that may not require that child to sit in front of a computer screen for hours. It's interesting when you look at the data, even pre-COVID data, about the breakdown of the choices that parents are making. It still is that the traditional public classroom in North Carolina is the education point for the vast majority of kids, but more and more people are looking at other options.

Tell us about your analysis of the data about those choices. Well, as I said earlier, the charter school increase is about 8,500 students. And so our charter schools across the state, and we have 200 of them this year, are going to enroll approximately 125,000 students. And we're seeing charter schools really in places where we haven't seen them in the past geographically. We're seeing them offer new grades, additional grades.

We're seeing them offer additional and new curricula and educational environments. So charter schools are definitely an option that a lot of parents are pursuing. We're going to see a substantial increase in homeschooling. My initial estimate for homeschool increase this year is going to be about 13,000 students.

Homeschooling is going to probably exceed 170,000 students when we get the final data at the end of the fiscal year. So homeschooling is definitely something that I think a lot of parents are considering in private schools. The interesting thing about private schools, at the beginning of the summer, there was a lot of concern about private schools because most private schools exist with parents paying tuition.

The vouchers are very limited in North Carolina, so they rely on out-of-pocket tuition payments. And with the economy, what it is, a lot of parents may find that they can't afford that private school tuition. So there was concern that private schools were going to close, but I think something wonderful happened in that private schools start offering a genuine alternative to districts, and that alternative was in-person instruction.

And parents decided that they would make the sacrifices necessary to send their children to private school because it gave them a superior educational environment. Homeschooling, I want to go back to that for a moment, because through this whole situation this year, I haven't really read or heard much about the homeschool population. So are things much different for homeschool parents? I mean, obviously with COVID, it's different, but in terms of actually educating their kids, has much changed for them?

Not too much. One thing to remember about the homeschool community is that it's very tight knit and there's a lot of co-ops and cooperative activities that homeschoolers engage with each other. So there have been adjustments in that sense that perhaps they're being a little more cautious in the co-ops and the field trips and the various communal activities that a lot of homeschoolers engage in. But homeschool just continues to grow in North Carolina. As a share of our student population, North Carolina has the largest homeschool population of any state in the nation. And that's certainly not going to change in light of COVID. In fact, it's just going to continue to increase with parents looking for alternatives like homeschooling that provide the best of both worlds where the parent can be engaged in the child's education, oversee the child's education, and make sure that that child receives the superior education that they desperately need.

That's fascinating to me. Number one in the nation for homeschooling, do we have any sense of why that is or the characteristics of a homeschool parent? It is organic. The growth of the homeschool population in North Carolina is completely organic and it's also diverse. At first, it was limited to evangelical parents who wanted to homeschool to affirm their values and their religious beliefs. But now, homeschool parents come from across the religious and ideological spectrum. And so we're seeing a real diversity in the homeschool movement, especially from parents that really want to give their child a rigorous academic education. So it's not just about values. It is about academics and parents are finding that their homeschooled child can far exceed the academic abilities of a lot of other kids because they're receiving that individualized attention they wouldn't otherwise receive in districts. And there's so many resources now and curriculum, et cetera. I mean, it's not like you would have trouble finding what you would need.

That's right. The Internet is a wealth of information and not just information, a wealth of support for homeschool families. So many go online and ask questions of their other homeschool families about how to conduct certain types of instruction. It is a true community in North Carolina.

I think the Internet has a lot to do with that. Well, these initial numbers that Terry has been writing about here, taking a look at are really pretty interesting. Dr. Terry Stoops is vice president for research, also the director of education studies at the John Locke Foundation. That's all the time we have for the program this week. Thank you for listening. Hope you'll join us again next week for another edition of Carolina Journal Radio. Carolina Journal Radio is a program of the John Locke Foundation. To learn more about the John Locke Foundation, including donations that support programs like Carolina Journal Radio, send email to development at johnlock.org or call 1-866-JLF-INFO.

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