Dr. Matthew Ladner: What Can Arizona Teach Mississippi about empowering parents?

In this episode, Dr. Matthew Ladner, Senior Advisor at the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation, shares about Arizona’s journey with school choice. Arizona passed the first education savings account (ESA) program in the nation in 2011 for students with special needs, expanding it multiple times over the years, and in 2022 made it a universal eligibility program, so it’s now open to every student in the state and 70,000 students participate. In 1994, a full 19 years before Mississippi, Arizona passed a robust charter school law and today 22 percent of the student population are enrolled in a charter school. Additionally, Arizona has a strong open enrollment program so that students can choose any public school they want to attend even if that school is in a neighboring town or school district. All these options for parents have made Arizona an education destination for families. Tune in to see what Mississippi leaders can learn from The Grand Canyon State.

Transcript 

Grant Callen: Welcome to the Empower Podcast. The show where we talk about Mississippi's big challenges and big opportunities. Each episode, we'll talk with lawmakers, policy experts, and community leaders about how we can break down barriers together to create a Mississippi where everyone can rise.

Welcome back. I am super excited for today's guest, my longtime friend, Dr. Matthew Ladner. He is senior advisor at the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation. He's also served in leadership at the Arizona Charter Schools Association. He is the executive editor of the blog Reimagined. He is also, a contributing fellow at Empower Mississippi, and he has written numerous studies on school choice, charter schools, special education reform, and really when I think of some of the leading national voices on school choice, Dr. Matthew Ladner is one of those voices. He lives in Phoenix, Arizona with his wife and children. His parents live in Oxford, Mississippi. So he gets back to the Magnolia State every once in a while. Welcome to the show, Dr. Ladner.

Dr. Matthew Ladner: Thanks for having me.

Grant Callen: I've been looking forward to this conversation, and we could take this in a lot of different ways. But I want to focus particularly on your home state of Arizona. As lawmakers in Mississippi are talking about passing a universal education savings account, and your state was the first state in the nation to pass an ESA. Your state also has the benefit of one of the most robust charter school laws in the nation. And I'm particularly interested in how both of those programs, the ESA and your charter landscape has impacted traditional public schools in your state. So let's jump in. You were one of the architects of ESAs. Let's start there. What were the conditions that created the demand for an ESA in Arizona?

Dr. Matthew Ladner: So the choice coalition here in Arizona was very determined that we were going to get school choice for children with disabilities. And in 2005, we passed a voucher program for children with disabilities. And choice opponents sued us, sued the program and took it all away by the Arizona Supreme Court. And the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that the state's Blaine Amendment, which is a relic of anti Catholic bigotry from the late 1800s and early 20th century disallowed school vouchers, but they in their ruling, they said there may be a way to structure a program like this it would not violate the Arizona constitution, it's just not this. So following the trail of breadcrumbs, our intrepid scooby gang developed a whole new form of school choice. We passed it in 2011, expanded it several times over the years, and then in 2022, it was made universal to all students. Currently, there are about 70,000 Arizona students participating in the ESA program.

Grant Callen: That's great. For people who may not know, how is an ESA education savings account different from a traditional voucher?

Dr. Matthew Ladner: Sure. A voucher is basically a coupon, right? Like you can take your money and go to school a, or you could take all your money and go to school b. An ESA is actually an account and one of the uses under an ESA program is to pay for private school tuition. But in addition to that, you can actually have your students enrolling in community college or universities. You can hire private tutors, children with special needs are able to hire therapists. There's a wide variety of uses and the exciting thing about the structure of the program, is that it creates an incentive for parents not just to ask is this possibility, this possible vendor, this possible school is this a good thing or a bad thing? It's more like, is it worth the opportunity costs of me investing my money in this? So it makes the choice programs more like a person spending their own money. So parents are actually able to, and a lot of parents just go to private school. But some are using it for a multi vendor, multi tutor experience that is really build your own education adventure.

Grant Callen: And in Arizona. I don't know a lot about your public school system before this passed, but was this a reaction to broken public schools? And this was seen as the remedy? Or was choice seen as a good in and of itself?

Dr. Matthew Ladner: So in 1994, Arizona's lawmakers passed the nation's most robust charter school law, 22 percent of Arizona students attend charter schools. They also passed an open enrollment statute and basically all school districts in Arizona participate in open enrollment and it's the largest form of school choice, people don't understand that. We passed scholarship tax credits in 1997 expand eligible.

So you asked about the impact on the public school system. It's actually not well understood, but Arizona students actually learn at the fastest rate of any state in the country. This was established by a group from Stanford University. They have a project called the Stanford Educational Opportunity Project, where they linked state testing data from across the country. And Arizona students learn faster in grades 3 through 8 from 2008 to 2018, which is the period they cover currently learn at a faster rate than students in any other state. Arizona has the fastest learning low income students. Their rate of learning is 17 percent above the national average, which is way higher than anyone else's. This does not mean that Arizona has the highest test scores. Arizona's student population has the short end of the stick on several achievement gaps. That's a proficiency matter but as fast as the generally agreed that the rate at which your student learn, is the best indicator of school quality and Arizona has the fastest rate. No one can really explain how this would be. There's nothing really remarkable about our K 12 policies, except for we're relatively low in spending because we have lots of retirees and large average family sizes or per pupil funding is not very high. And, we have a great deal of school choice. It does seem to be the straw that stirs the drink here.

Grant Callen: You breezed over this piece, but I think it's really extraordinary, and I want to make sure I heard you right. You said 22 percent of your students are in charter schools. You have about 70, 000 students in the ESA program. And how many in Open Enrollment?

Dr. Matthew Ladner: We can tell you that here in Maricopa County, where 64 percent of students live, Open Enrollment students are about 30 percent of the total student body, so there's actually more open enrollment students in Maricopa County than there are charter school students, almost twice as many as of a few years ago. And so here school choice is not being done to the school districts, but rather is being done by the school districts. And it is much to their credit.

Arizona would have no chance whatsoever to be leading the nation in academic growth without the full participation of our school districts. Our school districts have gotten a lot better. Parents hold them accountable too, because they have exit options. The school districts have not withered up and died under school choice, they have remarkably improved instead.

Grant Callen: So yeah, what you hear most of the time as a reason not to do these programs. Are that they will negatively impact traditional public school. And, just for comparison so you've got 22 percent of the kids in Mississippi. We have a total of 10 charter schools open in the entire state. And admittedly you've been open longer. You've had a charter law longer. But we've now had it for 10 years and we have 10 charters in the whole state. We have some of the most restrictive laws around open enrollment, which for those who may not know that's just open enrollment is like public school choice the ability to choose a school within your district or outside your district another district, and we make it really hard in mississippi and then of course, we have a small special needs ESA program serving about 400 and something kids. So how as these programs grew? Did you already have a great high achieving public school system, or has the growth in achievement correlated with the growth in numbers in school choice enrollment?

Dr. Matthew Ladner: Yeah, Arizona's academic achievement before the era of choice was not great. Especially if you broke it down. The state has undergone a lot of demographic change in the student body. If you go back to say 1990, when the day began at the state level. Arizona looked a lot more demographically like Idaho or Wyoming or something back then, right? It was smaller student body. It was much more predominated by a large majority of students being Anglos. The demographic achievement gaps favored Arizona back then, but the achievement was low. Today, we have a majority minority student population. We've obviously had a very large increase in our Latino and Hispanic population. We also have the nation's second largest Native American student population after only Oklahoma. So today we don't look like Idaho, but we achieve a lot higher than we did back in the early 1990s and there's only one way you can do that. And that is for all student groups to rise up. When you look at student subgroups for instance for several years running, Arizona had the highest African American eighth grade math scores in the nation's report card. People don't really know that, we actually have a very small African American population in Arizona, it's about 5 percent of the total. Our Anglo students again on eighth grade math, they're in the top 10 of compared to Anglo students around the country. So it's not that everything is perfect here. We have challenges here just like everywhere else, we took a big hit during COVID just like everywhere else. But the fact of the matter is that, if you want to test the, lay waste to public school hypothesis, you don't have a better place to test that than here in Arizona. And our public schools are strong and they are stronger than they used to be with a more diverse and more challenging student population. And our students are the ones leading the nation in academic growth. If some place like Massachusetts or New York were leading the nation in academic growth, New York spends maybe twice as much per pupil as we do in Arizona, by the way, you'd never hear the end of it. We clobber New York in academic growth, and we do it on a more constrained budget and, we're pretty proud of it.

Grant Callen: We also hear a lot in Mississippi school choice might work in New York or D. C., but we're a rural state, where people are spread out here, but so is Arizona. How is that work there?

Dr. Matthew Ladner: Yeah, Arizona has a lot of rural school districts and in fact, everybody you go to any state, everyone will always tell you about we've got the unique rural districts so I'll tell you my unique rural district stories. Arizona has a school district 28 miles down unpaved roads up the side of a mountain to a place called Crown King. And there is 1 teacher and 2 students. Mostly vacation homes around a closed mine. We also have a Bureau of Indian Affairs school that is at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. That school is actually probably until recently been the most isolated from school choice, and they spend high and they have really bad academic results but now we found ways to help those kids down there through choice. So the bottom line is that if school choice was going to destroy rural school districts, this would be the place you would look for evidence of that.

Our charter sector reaches far more into rural Arizona than any other state's charter school sector, we've got tax credits, we've got ESA's, you name it. Every single school district that was educating, rural school district or otherwise, that was educating students in 1993, the year before we began our journey of school choice, is still there today. They are still educating students today in 2023.

Grant Callen: So you're saying, let me make sure I hear you, you're saying not a single public school has closed because of school choice?

Dr. Matthew Ladner: No district, there may have been at some point there was some consolidation of districts in a rural area but that was like been not had nothing to do with school choice. Basically all the school districts are still there. The kids are still playing football on Friday nights, right? The districts have not died, including the rural school districts, right? And the reality is that kids in rural areas, they can benefit just as much from school choice as kids in any other community. Schools are like shoes, right? If you only have one size, it fits few. If you have more sizes, it fits more feet, right? And the benefits to students seem very clear in the Arizona data, but I think it's also important to realize how important this is for teachers. Grant, anytime I get around a gathering of public school teachers and I have public school teachers in my family and most people listening to this probably do as well, you get around the table at Thanksgiving and listen to the conversations, and I'll put the over under it 5 minutes, right? It is 5 minutes as to start to hear folks say you're crushed by bureaucracy, the administration, this and the administration that, and if they had the chance to be in charge, everything would be different. Okay, and you know what? They're right. Starting in 1994, the state of Arizona took them up on that. And the policy makers here said, okay, you show me. Show me don't tell me, right? If you have a vision of a high quality education. If you think things would be better if you got to run the show, you go and do that, and so what is developed over time here in Arizona? Is a demand driven K 12 system. And the way that I like to think about this is it's like a potter at a potter's wheel, and the two hands of the potter are teachers and the second hand are families. And together. They shape the clay, and they shape the K 12 system into what they want, when parents in Arizona want more classical education, they get more classical education, right? The pluralism and the diversity of options is really the key. There is no source of top down technocratic better living through better administration that can ever replace a family, who can match the individual needs of their child with the strengths of a school and what they're offering. That's a decentralized process, it happens with families and with teachers. And we should have enough confidence in our teachers and in our families to select the schools because the track record here in Arizona has been quite extraordinary on that front and it's the sky is the limit on this, we're really just getting started and a lot of people especially back east, have a real hard time in the East Coast trying to wrap their heads around Arizona, I get a lot of that can't possibly work. It's been working since 1994 and the benefits for teachers and families are profound.

Grant Callen: So I love that analogy of teachers and families. It just so happens that those are the two roles that are the closest to students. So they actually interact daily with kids they know the kids, they know their strengths, they know their challenges. So it only makes sense to me, and I think to most people, that we ought to let the people closest to the customer, in this case students, make the decisions that are in the best interest of those kids. But for good or ill, there are a lot of teachers that are concerned about school choice. And some of it is a concern because they've heard from their administrators and their superintendents and teacher unions and others saying this is going to destroy public school. But some of it is just the unknown. So how have you actually given teachers a greater role over the education system in a choice system?

Dr. Matthew Ladner: Yeah, Arizona is you remember the old commercial about, you won't like it, oh, let's give it to Mikey, right? Hey, he likes it, right? Arizona has, step by step, expanded choice, expanded opportunities for teachers and educators to create their own schools. It's popular with families. It's a godsend to the teachers that take the state up on the opportunity. And the overwhelming evidence shows if this stuff was going to destroy public education, Arizona public education would already be destroyed instead, we find it much improved and we find our students leading the nation in academic gains, right? Whenever someone like, accuses me of trying to destroy public education, I tell them that. No, it's right there in the Arizona constitution guarantees public funding for K 12 education. And exactly no one has ever proposed doing away with that and if they did, they would get laughed out of the legislature. Public funding for K 12 is about the most permanent institution we have in our society. That however, does not mean that we have to structure the enterprise in such a way that we heard students to schools by their zip code. There is no reason in the world to have our K 12 system work that way. It is injurious to students. It shortchanges taxpayers, and it's not good for teachers either, right? Now teachers you're right, Grant they get bombed with propaganda from their unions non stop and a lot of our friends in the superintendent community can't quite imagine a world where maybe we cut out the middleman and the teachers take control of themselves, the Silicon Valley have a term for this, they call it disintermediation. Cutting out the middleman. We can't cut out the middleman, but the overwhelming evidence is the districts don't go away. If I had the Thanos infinity gauntlet and I snapped my fingers and abolished school districts tomorrow, there wouldn't be anywhere for those 70 percent of kids to go. We need our school districts, our school districts are getting better. Our school districts themselves are leading the way. I'll give you an example, there's a school district here in Phoenix named Madison, and Madison has 50 percent of their students are open enrollment. The Madison school board is every single member of the Madison School Board was endorsed by their education union. But 50 percent of their students don't live in the Madison district. That would put the Arizona Education Affiliate in Madison in the school choice business, right? Now, the districts aren't anxious to advertise this fact in Arizona. But the incentives work for them too, and I think the next generation of reform we need to do in Arizona is actually deregulating the school districts.

Parents vote with their feet. Parents hold districts accountable through school choice as well. In that kind of an atmosphere, the need for the state to have some 9, 000 page rulebook and mandating this and mandating that and bossing people around. It's antiquated, and we should set our district people free, too. A lot of the people that have founded Choice schools here in Arizona, were originally district teachers, right? They've taken advantage of the opportunities. They've been able to found schools that have, there are performing arts schools. There are the basic schools are like super strong in math and science and kids graduate with 64 hours of college credit by exam, there is a flavor of school for most everyone's, especially here in the Phoenix area. And then the next generation of things are these micro schools, because micro schools are super important for rural communities. The old fashioned way of doing school choice where you might borrow $30 million and build a 500 seat charter school, that has some problems in areas that don't have that many students, right? It doesn't really fit. Micro schools are ways that rural teachers, or maybe sometimes teachers that have left the profession in frustration are now returning and because they get to set up their own schools, have very tight knit communities and strong relationships with their families and their students. And it's being done in a way here in Arizona and rural communities that is increasing the pluralism of the system, but it's not destroying the districts, the districts are stronger than they've ever been.

Grant Callen: So micro schools is a fascinating new topic that it's been really exciting to watch grow in Mississippi, and we've had about 15 micro schools take off here, and that's without any essay. That's without any public funding, most of these are tuition funded. Most of them here are actually former public school educators, who are frustrated with the handcuffs, they're frustrated with being told how to teach and what to teach and doing more paperwork than actually instruction and teaching to the test. And another interesting fact that we had no idea when we started looking at this, in Mississippi most of the micro school founders are african american moms. So I'm curious how, you've got this long established charter school sector compared to Mississippi where it's really challenging to get a charter school. It's a lot easier to get one in Arizona. Are you finding now that you have an ESA that people are pulling more towards opening private schools rather than charter schools because it's a little less regulated?

Dr. Matthew Ladner: Yes. In fact, there are a number of practical difficulties to opening a charter school now with the higher interest rates, the building supply chain issues and labor shortages that the momentum for opening new charter schools has slowed down almost everywhere, including here in Arizona. So we do have a lot of innovators actually opening micro schools. We've got a group in downtown Phoenix called the Black Mothers Forum. They've been running micro schools and they've announced that they want to get to 50 micro schools, right? And they're fantastic and there was a great story in the Texas Tribune the other day about a group of former public school teachers in Dallas, who had been in contact with the Black Mothers Forum here in Arizona and we're being supported by them. Because and really and I think it is safe to say that in every human heart, there is this yearning to be free. And the idea that the only way to structure education is in some way where we have to go through some top down bureaucratic, command and control system or somehow something bad is going to happen. There's bad things happening in the command and control system every single day. And if we want to make it better, setting teachers and families free is a very important part of the formula for improvement.

Grant Callen: We've heard rumors and plans where lawmakers are looking to expand our charter law. Currently, charters are limited to DNF rated districts, so failing districts. It's a really cumbersome, really onerous process to open a charter. And there's also this growing momentum to pass a universal ESA. Arkansas, our neighbor to the northwest, has passed a universal ESA, louisiana's working on it. Alabama's working on it in fact, Kay Ivey, governor of Alabama came out a couple of weeks ago and said, we're going to make Alabama the most school choice friendly state in the nation. She's got a lot of ground to make up, but kudos to her for throwing the gauntlet. So what would you say to lawmakers who are looking at expanding both of these programs, we already have a charter law, we already have a small ESA, why should we expand them dramatically from what we already have?

Dr. Matthew Ladner: Yeah, I want to address the charge school point 1st. Arizona's charter school law has basically functioned as a universal choice program from the beginning in 1994. And we do have a lot of urban charter schools, but we have charter schools in all parts of our state. We have suburban charter schools, we have rural charter schools, right?

Grant Callen: You have them in good districts and bad districts?

Dr. Matthew Ladner: Absolutely. And what this has done, Is actually to the reason that every single pretty close to every single school district, there are a couple of exceptions out in rural Arizona where some of the rural districts collude with each other and don't, but hardly any kids in those districts. Every school district for the most part in Arizona participates in open enrollment. The reason why and that's very strange, around the country most fancy school districts do not participate in open enrollment they will not touch you It's either you can afford to live in our district or it's too bad to be you.

Grant Callen: That sounds familiar.

Dr. Matthew Ladner: It works. And it's very strange that we view this as normal or just, so here in Arizona, Scottsdale Unified, which is one of our fanciest suburban school districts, right? Scottsdale Unified has about 20, 000 students and about 4, 500 of them are from outside Scottsdale Unified. Why is that? The open enrollment law in Arizona only says that districts have to have an open enrollment policy, it doesn't say what that policy needs to be. So the policy could be, yeah sorry you don't live here you don't get to come. Scottsdale Unified brings in 4, 500 kids because 9, 000 kids that live within the boundary of Scottsdale Unified, go to school somewhere else. They go to charter schools, they go to private schools, they go to other districts. So Scottsdale Unified lowers the moat and allows kids to come into Scottsdale. And so without having a diverse and geographically included inclusive charter school sector, you don't get open enrollment to take off like that. And there is a feedback mechanism into the charter sector as well. If you're living here in Phoenix, any kid in Phoenix can actually go to school in Scottsdale if they want to. So if you're some fly by night operator who opens the charter school and lose the confidence of families, you close and you close quickly and you close without the state getting involved. This is what I was getting at earlier with the demand driven education system. In Arizona, if you don't gain the confidence of your families and that doesn't mean that they like sit around and like technocratically examine your test scores, right? Parents have a pretty good nose for you can pretty much go to a school and visit it and within five minutes, you can tell, right? Is this a good fit? Is this a place where I would trust to educate my children? Sure, you should consider test scores as part of that decision as well. But most of this is decided through, social networks and almost like folk knowledge social networks of parents. It turns out that parents do a far far better job of holding charter schools accountable than any state bureaucrat ever will. The kind of competition I'm describing, Grant is brutally efficient. The average charter school that is closed in Arizona, Arizona gives 15 year charters. And this is something that the national groups always complain about us. They give 15 year charters because, it might help you to get a loan and to afford a building.

Grant Callen: We do 5 year charters and renewal is often less than that, which makes it really challenging.

Dr. Matthew Ladner: It's ridiculous, and I've asked the national groups, I've said they say five years is the best practice. And I'm like it's the best practice based on what? And they say it's the best practice. It's practice. Matt, don't you get it? I'm like, no, I really don't get it. So we get 15 year charters and the people back east are like, who cares that's terrible. Let me tell you something, the average charter school that closes in Arizona has been in operation for 4 years. They will never even get to a reauthorization. A conversation because that's years in the future. Four years, 62 students enrolled in the last year of operation on average. This is the families of Arizona giving the thumbs down to a school. It's almost like a failure to launch. That kind of quality control it's some of the people back East to use the phrase Wild West Oh, Arizona is a Wild West. We've decided to adopt this as a badge of honor and the Wild West accountability where you get gunned down in the street, it's very efficient.

Grant Callen: So your point is the state is not having to shut down these charters. The parents are by walking away.

Dr. Matthew Ladner: Absolutely and it's very rarely as the state will close a school down, sometimes they mess that up too, right? We actually had a school in Tucson that did not get renewed about a year and a half ago. The strangest thing is they got turned down because of like just silly things like, their recess periods were not spread out long enough and, there's some statute about every flag has to have an America tag on it or something. So they didn't get renewed. Now, the Stanford Educational Opportunity Project data I told you about earlier. That school was making academic gains 44 percent above the national average, 44%. These schools do not grow on trees, even here in Arizona. They didn't get renewed because of silly bureaucratic operational things, but they also didn't close because now they are a private school and they don't have to put up with anyone's bossy McBossy pants stuff. And as long as they retain the confidence of their families, they'll do just fine thank you very much. And that is the way the K 12 system should work, in my opinion. So there's a lot of people with their levers on that imagine themselves to be indispensable, and there would be disasters if we don't have the right bureaucrats in charge of bossing schools around. And I'm here to tell you, you can do better on your own. Put confidence in your families, and in your teachers and you will be rewarded for it.

Grant Callen: So trust parents, we can trust them to judge the quality of education, their kids are getting and the quality of the schools.

Dr. Matthew Ladner: Yes.

Grant Callen: So when we think about are expanding an ESA. So like I said, we've got a small special needs ESA, there's this growing movement to create a universal ESA. There's already been some that would say if we do expand let's only allow kids in failing districts or let's only allow kids that are at this income level. What would be your recommendation to lawmakers or what would you say to lawmakers to stiffen their spine to encourage them to pass a universal eligibility program, rather than picking and choosing which categories of students we serve.

Dr. Matthew Ladner: The reality is that what you describe is actually the worst kind of school choice program that you can possibly pass when pursuing the interests of disadvantaged children. And this is counterintuitive, but it's exactly what is played out here in Arizona. If you want to give them greatest opportunity possible for disadvantaged students, for urban students, for students of color, to pull themselves up by their bootstraps with an education system that is going to help them do that, if that is what you want, yes you want them to have access to private schools, yes you want them to have access to charter schools, but you also want a vibrant open enrollment system. You want your school districts to be functioning as choice players, right? And when all of these things work in concert this is how Arizona, which again, our charter school program is basically a universal choice program. Our tax credit program that we passed in 1997 is universal, right? Our ESA now is universal. But which state is it that has the fastest rate of academic growth for low income students? That's also Arizona. It's not a coincidence. If you want to do the best possible thing you can to serve university, and by the way, polls indicate that this is what the public supports as well.

Grant Callen: But why do you, I agree with you completely and I need to, I've got one more question after this, but why do you think that is? Because so many people would think if you want to help low income kids, let's make them the focus of the program and let nobody else have access to it.

Dr. Matthew Ladner: It's the polls show that low income parents themselves don't want that. They don't want this to be, a welfare model. Everyone pays their taxes and everyone should be able to participate in choice, just like going to university there's nothing else in education that says little Billy, I'm sorry, your parents pay too much in the way of taxes so you're not allowed to attend Mississippi State or Ole Miss, sorry. Or you live in Gulfport, Mississippi so you only get to go to Southern Mississippi. What? There's not anything else that you would possibly in a sane world think, yeah, let's do that. But it's very common in K 12 and it's deeply misguided.

Grant Callen: So what is the future of education look like and what is it going to take to get there? What is it going to look like in 10 years? 15 years? 20 years?

Dr. Matthew Ladner: I think that the future is brighter than the present. I think that we see a huge wave of states embracing choice. I think that our experience is going to teach us is going to get it through our six goals that we need to have confidence in our teachers and confidence in our families and we when we do that, we will begin to correct a century of folly. There is no reason for us to herd families into schools based on their zip code. There is nothing about changing that will destroy public education, and it will certainly improve it.

Grant Callen: That's a great place to end it. I am continually inspired by your work and the work that Arizona has done over the years to give every kid the access to a great education. Thank you for what you're doing. Thank you for being on the show today.

Dr. Matthew Ladner: Thanks for having me on Grant.

Grant Callen: Thanks so much for listening to today's episode of the Empower Podcast. To learn more about how you can get involved, and we can work together to make Mississippi a place where everyone can rise. Go to our website at empower ms. org. Please or subscribe on your favorite podcast app so you'll be notified of future episodes.