Public Education Crisis, Americans Leaving, and the Podcast Election

Philip DeFranco Show, Friday From the Bastards edition. This seventeen-minute episode covers three fan-submitted topics: the crisis in American public education, whether Americans are actually leaving the country, and the explosive growth of podcasting as a political force. DeFranco delivers it all with his trademark mix of data-heavy analysis and personal candor.

Section 1. The State of Public Education

The first question comes from Nick, a teacher in Dallas, who asks whether DeFranco would send his own kids to public school given the state of education today. DeFranco notes this one hits close to home since his wife is actually running for the local school board.

He dives straight into the data, and it is sobering. The 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the Nation's Report Card, shows that 12th grade reading and math scores have hit record lows. Just 35 percent of high school seniors were proficient in reading, while 32 percent scored below the basic level. Math was even worse with only 22 percent proficient and nearly half below basic. The gap between the highest and lowest performing eighth graders is the widest it has ever been. Experts largely blame the pandemic, but chronic absenteeism, more screen time, shorter attention spans, and a decline in long-form reading are all contributing factors. Making things worse, the Trump administration has cut roughly a dozen national and state student assessments through 2032, meaning we will have even less visibility into how far scores are falling.

The people inside the system are not optimistic either. A Pew Research Center report found that 82 percent of teachers say public K-12 education has gotten worse in the past five years, and more than half said they would not advise a young person to even enter the profession. A 2025 Gallup poll found 73 percent of Americans are dissatisfied with public education quality, the lowest satisfaction rate since Gallup started asking in 2001.

Then there is the curriculum debate. From 2021 to 2024, nearly one third of states banned K-12 curricula offering critical perspectives on racial history, and legislatures in at least 40 states introduced over 200 pieces of legislation to restrict what teachers can discuss. Supporters say it protects kids from political indoctrination. Critics argue it does the opposite, leaving students with a simplified and distorted picture of the world.

Many families are responding by leaving. Private school enrollment surged post-pandemic, with roughly 40 percent of private schools reporting enrollment increases. School choice voucher programs have gone from serving just over half a million students to above 1.3 million. But DeFranco is careful to add nuance: a 2018 analysis found that when you control for socioeconomic status, the achievement gap between public and private schools shrinks dramatically. Private schools often look better partly because they serve wealthier students who would do well regardless.

He also flags the downstream consequences. Between 2019 and 2023, enrollment declined by 20 percent or more at nearly 1 in 12 public schools, and around 1,000 public schools close every year. A Stanford analysis found that majority-Black schools are far more likely to be among those closures. The argument is clear: drain public schools of students and money, quality drops, more people leave, and eventually the school shuts down, disproportionately hurting communities with the fewest options.

DeFranco's personal answer? He and his wife have chosen public school for their kids. They have the money to go private and have done it before, but this feels right to them now. He believes the best school for K-12 is often the one closest to home, where kids can maximize their time outside of school for socialization and community. As he puts it, "I want to try and help build up something rather than strip something down and run away."

Section 2. Are Americans Actually Leaving?

The second question comes from Matti in Canada, asking whether DeFranco would consider leaving America if things got really bad. Again, DeFranco leads with data.

A 2025 Gallup poll found roughly 1 in 5 Americans want to move abroad permanently, more than double the number who said the same a decade ago. A Harris poll found 4 in 10 Americans have either considered or are actively planning to leave. The generational split is stark: two thirds of Americans aged 18 to 34 have thought about it, more than half of all parents polled said the same, and a record 40 percent of women aged 15 to 44 said they wanted to leave in 2025. Rainbow Railroad, a nonprofit helping LGBTQ-plus people escape state-sponsored violence, has received a record number of requests from U.S. citizens since Trump's reelection.

But are people actually following through? CBS Global Partners estimated 1,285 Americans renounced citizenship in just the first quarter of 2025, a 102 percent increase over the previous quarter. Relocation firms report a 400 percent increase in American clients. A record number of U.S. citizens applied for UK passports in early 2025, and Ireland saw American passport applications soar, with actual moves doubling that spring. Experts note much of this is "break glass in case of emergency" behavior, people securing options rather than booking flights, but the scale is significant.

There is also a domestic version DeFranco calls "the Big Sort." Americans are increasingly moving to states that match their political beliefs. Counties that voted Republican in 2020 saw net population gains of 3.7 million in the three years following the election. Florida alone attracted over 200,000 registered Republicans between the last two presidential elections. Meanwhile Democrats have made migration gains in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Nearly half of Americans considering a move cited the political climate as their primary motivation.

DeFranco says personally he is not going anywhere. He loves his country and wants to be part of the change. But he admits he would be lying if he said he did not get nervous sometimes, noting the government has been "weaponized against anyone who wants to stand against Trump or even speak truth to power." He mentions having a planned escape plan and a few canaries in the coal mine he keeps an ear open for, though he will not specifically name them.

Section 3. The Podcast Explosion and Its Political Power

The final question asks why DeFranco decided to launch new podcasts. He uses this as a springboard to paint a vivid picture of the podcasting landscape, and it is genuinely fascinating.

Despite stray headlines suggesting otherwise, podcasting is absolutely exploding. The pandemic hobbyist bubble burst, with launches falling 80 percent by 2022 from their peak of over a million new shows in 2020. But the audience never stopped growing. Roughly 584 million people worldwide now listen to podcasts, more than double what it was six years ago. In the U.S., more than half of all Americans over 12 have listened in the last month, and one in ten did it last week. Weekly listeners have more than quadrupled in the last decade. The global podcast market was valued at roughly 47 billion dollars in 2025, with projections nearly quadrupling to 171 billion by 2030.

Video is a massive accelerant. Over half of podcast consumers now prefer shows with video, and the number of shows posting full video on YouTube has more than doubled since 2022. YouTube reports over a billion monthly podcast viewers as of 2025, surpassing Apple and Spotify as the top platform for podcast consumption in the United States.

But here is where DeFranco gets passionate: podcasting is not just entertainment anymore, it is arguably the most influential media outlet in the country. A third of Americans now get at least some of their news from podcasts, up from 22 percent in 2020. The ideological makeup is shifting too: conservative listeners jumped from 23 to 30 percent between 2019 and 2024, and some 2025 data suggests conservatives now outnumber liberals among news podcast listeners.

The 2024 election was widely dubbed the "podcast election." Trump appeared on 20 individual podcasts between July and November, including Flagrant, Theo Von, and Impaulsive. Harris appeared on eight. Right-leaning podcasters were widely credited with helping Trump close the gap with younger male voters. More recently, the progressive candidate Zoran Mamdani appeared on 31 podcasts, including Flagrant, whose host Andrew Schultz had voted for Trump.

DeFranco makes an important point about why he covers figures like Candace Owens on his show. A lot of people still think of her as a sideshow, not realizing how much the right has taken over the podcast space and how these shows are informing millions. Owens and Ben Shapiro hit pop culture moments hard, use them as entry points, then slowly transition their audiences into political content or battle some sort of "big bad." The space is not shrinking, it is consolidating power, and that influence on culture and politics is only going to keep growing.

As for his personal reasons, DeFranco says it was a mix of emotional need and strategy. He launched "Crashing Out" with Alex Pearlman as a space to shoot the shit and go more opinion-heavy. His show "In Good Faith" started as long-form political conversations but is evolving into something broader, more like his old "A Conversation With" podcast. He says most of the time he would rather be asking questions and listening than talking, which may surprise people given he has been talking for a living for 20 years.

Key Takeaways

American public education is in crisis with record-low test scores, teacher dissatisfaction at historic levels, and curriculum battles raging across 40-plus states. School choice programs have more than doubled their enrollment but risk accelerating a death spiral for underfunded public schools, disproportionately hurting Black and lower-income communities. A growing number of Americans are building exit plans, whether moving abroad or sorting themselves into politically aligned states, in a trend that has accelerated sharply since Trump's reelection. Podcasting has become arguably the most powerful media force in American politics, with a 47-billion-dollar market, over half a billion global listeners, and an audience that skews increasingly conservative. The 2024 "podcast election" demonstrated this influence clearly, and the 2026 cycle looks poised to lean on it even harder.