This week some of the topics we discuss include the following:

• Why are we making WonkyFolk
• Reactions to Nashville and trends we often miss at tragic moments like this
• The commonalities and differences facing public education in Los Angeles and Chicago
• Andy’s recommendation of the best read to prepare educators
• The changes that ChatGPT may or may not bring to public education

Hey Andy.

Hey Jed.

How are you?

I'm doing great.

Well, thanks for sharing this idea of creating WonkyFolk.

Absolutely.

It's something you and I have been batting around here for, I

don't know, several months here.

And just this idea that if there's anything that I crave

in the education space right now is just some sense of coherence.

There's just so many things that are happening, at such a pace.

And there's just so much variety at a national level.

And certainly one thing I've just valued in you, Andy, and your work at Bellweather

is just being able to bring coherence also with a perspective that's just nationwide.

And so, hey, maybe we end up talking amongst ourselves and

we think that there's some value that we're adding for folks.

But you know, I just appreciate you willing to take a try with it.

Yeah, I'm excited.

Look, I think we both, I mean everybody can agree like the world

needs more middle-aged guys with podcasts, a huge market gap there.

And so I think we're going to try to fill it.

You're one of those people I get on a call with you about something like you

end up having these conversations about what's going on in the sector, what's

going on in general, before you get to whatever the point of the call is.

And you're always like, that conversation like that might

make an interesting podcast.

So it's good to actually potentially try that out although I unfortunately, I

bet it'll be more stilted when we do it now then when you're just like getting

on a zoom to kick something around.

Well, we'll hope that we keep it fresh and who knows, we may

also invite some people down the road to broaden out the discussion.

Yeah, absolutely.

I'm looking forward to that.

Cool.

Well, and I also just feel like this nexus of, look I overweight

on charters in all sorts of ways.

Right?

And I think that's a good place for us to be generally.

But your knowledge on the wonk side, on the policy side, K-12, that's where I

think if we really can focus our energy here, I think there actually is value for

two middle-aged white guys to offer here.

Yeah, definitely.

I thought you were going to say, coming out of winter, I'm always

a little overweight, just period.

I thought you were going to go there right out the gate.

Yeah, I think that's right and charters are a big part and I think they're

illustrative of a lot of what's going on, there are bigger things in the

sector and obviously this week, like a big one that's on everybody's mind, is

just this horrific shooting last week in Nashville at the Covenant school.

Yeah.

I think these shootings have become so frequent that when you start

a podcast like this, it's almost off the news cycle already, and

we're just grown so immune to it.

But there are things that come up about this particular shooting that I just find

illustrative of the problems that we face.

And here it's a private school, right?

The community that was involved or that was affected, all different and

new, the political responses that we're seeing from policymakers, new,

but all sadly, not very to the point.

But I just think that these instances, these incidents of tragedy like this,

I just think they contribute to a lack of trust that so many parents have

in the public education system, or in public private education -- wherever

you want to focus at this point.

Well, I think your last blog entry talks about the relative safety of kids in

schools versus all these other settings, but the broader narrative is: kids may

not be safe at school and if there's anything that parents gravitate to, it's

that desire to keep their kids safe.

And so I see this potentially contributing to kid parents even pulling their kids

back even more and trying to find other settings within to educate their kids

where they feel like they're safe.

Yeah, but as we've seen over the last couple of years, these

can happen at any kind of a school.

They happen at traditional public schools, they happen at charter schools,

and they can happen at private schools.

Actually they're really rare.

I think we are sort of soaked.

You have to hold sort of a couple of things in your head at the same time.

One, just every one of these is awful and just unique in its awfulness.

And that they're also pretty rare.

I think most people are surprised when you ask how many people have

been killed in mass shootings at school since, say, Columbine.

You get some really astronomical numbers and it's actually fewer than

200, which is 200 too many obviously.

And again, everyone is uniquely horrible, but they're not as

ubiquitous as you would know if you spend a lot of time, if you would

think you spend a lot of time online.

Meanwhile, youth violence, particularly in out of school and communities

is an enormous problem, has been for a while and to your point,

things that don't get headlines.

It doesn't necessarily get a whole lot of headlines and it's just sort of a

grinding and sort of staggering toll.

And so I think we struggle to talk about these things and then when

something like Nashville happens with some of the circumstance around it,

everything kind of grinds to a halt.

What's I think really troubling about that is, you know, these

shootings in general, not everyone, but in general, they're preventable.

Four out of five school shooters say what they're going to do ahead of time.

We don't have all the details on Nashville, but this person, their parents

were apparently concerned enough about them to want to intervene around their

access to firearms and so forth, and so I think what's getting lost in a lot

of the rhetoric and the concern and the talk about hardening the target and all

this is if four out of five young people who do something like this tell you that

they're going to do it ahead of time.

Why aren't we heading that off more upstream?

To your point on trust also what's going on with trust in the school

with students where they can't engage adults around these things.

There's so much leaking ahead of time, and yet we're still not heading them off.

I think we need to have a hard conversation about school

culture and why that is.

Well, yeah, I think there are a lot of forces at play right now that are

keeping candor and agency out of schools.

And so we have a lot of adults and a lot of kids that can't talk about the thing,

and when you can't talk about the thing, well, of course you're not gonna be able

to talk about these kinds of things.

My wife's a clinical psychologist, she was just forwarding me some stories from

just social media about parents who are sewing school districts right now over

bullying and then suicides that have been happening associated with those.

And I think these shootings, they tend to crowd out, the attention

on many of these other things.

And so of course, the problem of gun violence in schools has to be taken on for

sure but also these other issues can't be crowded out from our attention such that

we can stay focused on what's really going on with our adolescent kids right now.

Because the psychological crisis that we have in this generation is

unlike anything we've seen previously.

And they're related though, right?

A few years ago, the secret service made an analysis on school shootings.

And one of the things they talked about was this leakage and this upstream,

kids basically saying, in many cases explicitly, what they were going to do or

having a lot of, in the case of Parkland, the shooter said explicitly what they

were going to do when they got the chance.

Or lots of like signs and indications that common sense would

tell you something's going on.

But a common factor the Secret Service found was bullying and that kid, the

people involved in these shootings, they were the victims of different kinds

of bullying and they actually called pretty explicitly for really vigorous

anti-bullying programs -- what you would call SEL programs, stuff like that.

And I thought it was interesting because SEL is getting sort of sucked into

this ongoing culture war vortex we have, and here you've got the secret

service, which I don't know that anybody's gonna describe the Secret

Service, like a hotbed of leftism.

And they're calling for you have to do this, you have to create that culture.

Because if kids don't have a trusting environment in school, they don't have

adults they're going to trust, they're not going to go to them and say, "hey, here

are these things we're seeing that are, that are worrisome" and you're just not

gonna have that kind of information flow.

It comes back to one of the reasons I know you got active in the charter

world, one of the things that attracted me to charters is just where a place

we can create a kind of intentional community where kids and adults just

interact in different ways than is sometimes the normal in schools.

I think kids are really tuned into whether or not there is authenticity

and agency in their environment, and if they sense for whatever reason,

that the adults in that space can't say what they want to say, or it's all

canned, or it's just completely and utterly predictable, they just disengage

and the only place the conversations will be happening is in the hallway

or outside of school, and or in social media where of course, a lot of these

bullying problems get to be only worse.

For me, I just feel like the problem of lack of agency in our public schools is

just much more profound than we recognize.

Yeah.

I think that's right.

So one of the things I knew we wanted to talk about today, speaking of challenging

public schools is what's happening in a couple of the cities and you're just down

the road from Los Angeles, which was in the news quite a bit with that strike.

Yeah.

I think this strike situation in Los Angeles and the problems we see in so many

urban schools doesn't get enough attention and perhaps in my writing at CharterFolk

just beats on it till people are just ready to cry mercy but, I actually think,

no matter how much I can focus on it, there's still way more problems that are

there than we're paying attention to.

And we're seeing an aspect of the urban education world, only

double down a path that we know is going to result in further demise.

And that's certainly what I see coming out of the Los Angeles situation.

I think things hang into balance right now in Chicago.

We are recording this on a Monday, the election results will be on Tuesday

and we'll release this on Wednesday.

But Chicago and Los Angeles have probably been the two hotbeds of teacher unions

taking on new levels of aggressiveness and new levels of political engagement

that's translated into them having virtual complete control of the Los

Angeles Unified School District right now.

And we'll see what happens in Chicago.

But should it go in the direction of the Chicago teacher union having

more control in Chicago, I don't see that doing anything other than

speeding the demise of the district.

Do you, do you see it differently here?

What nuance can you offer as it relates to the challenges we have

in urban education right now?

Oh man.

It's hard to know where to start and those two cities are...

there's some commonality and some distinct issues.

One of the commonalities is obviously just unsustainable fiscal structures.

I'm sort of struck we keep having these conversations and these entities,

we've got to figure out what we do to get them on a sound financial footing.

Whether it's, you know, and itcame up in the Chicago race some of the issues

around pension, retirement financing.

In LA, you look at the school district's own numbers on the percent of money

from the retirement that they're paying into retirement for people who

aren't even working in the system.

The percentage of classroom dollars that are now going to that it's staggering

and we're not sort of having any kind of an honest conversation about that.

Whatever the latest thing is ,the strike dujour, and the sort of

constant negotiation that the teachers unions have with the districts just

plays out in these different ways.

I was sort of struck that in the wake of the pandemic, all the avowed concerns

about learning loss and everybody saying they're gonna get serious, that in LA you

had this strike and there was just very little attention to, like, kids need to

be in school right now more than anything else and we're just gonna have a, another

school holiday essentially for politics.

And there was just like very little outrage, it just almost seemed like

it's business as usual, which was striking to me, given the context

and given the stakes right now.

Yeah.

What was shocking to me was that, Jackie Goldberg was, and the superintendent was

there saying there's no need for a strike.

We're willing to give you guys absolutely everything, essentially,

and yet they wanted to strike anyway.

And then at the end of the strike, when they talk about what the deal was

it was essentially the same as what they had been talking about for weeks.

So what really was the motivation here?

And do you really have to have another three days of student learning

loss in order to make that point?

That's a tactic and I think that's not always appreciated.

Like the teachers unions that having the strike, getting people out there, getting

people riled up, it's a membership tactic.

It reminds the members why they're there, all this stuff.

And they will strike even when it's not, even when we could actually

get to a deal without a strike.

We saw that in LA.

That was really the sort of thing that really I think changed with teacher

strikes in general, I think you have to go back to Karen Lewis in which she did

in Chicago in back in 2012, I think it was, where that point, the unions were,

you know, Randy Weingarten was talking much more about reform than she talks

about now and, was saying tenure shouldn't be a job for life and we need to like

reform teacher evaluation, much of stuff that now would be considered heretical.

But she was like going to the press club once a year to

talk about all these things.

And in Chicago, Karen Lewis was like, you know, no the hell with that?

We're going to fight on this, we're not going to get on this train,

we think there's another strategy we can fight and essentially

exactly what you're talking about.

The ultimate deal was pretty much the contours of the deal that was on the

table, but they were pretty explicit, they needed to be able to have a strike.

It was politically important and they did.

And they and, I mean, the senior people in the union were relatively

open about that was what was going on.

And here we are, this keeps playing out.

And the interesting thing about Chicago is it's such a stark choice.

You've got Paul Val, and you can tell the director, we can talk about him and what

he's done, and then Brandon Johnson and it's two very different choices facing

Chicago voters and it can be no illusion about which way things will go, depending

how that race turns out tomorrow.

Yeah.

The thing that I just think that we, in the charter world in particular,

need to spend more time thinking about what is our agenda, what is our North

Star as it relates to the evolution of these large urban school districts.

I think for a long time we just basically stayed under the radar screen.

Hey, that's not our job.

We don't have to worry about what this thing evolves into.

Let's just keep growing our schools and it'll work itself out on the other end.

Now we're at that other end and charter schools disproportionately have charged

into large urban school districts to try and serve as many kids better

than they've been served in the past.

And now we've got just massive numbers of people leaving major urban areas.

And so our schools are there.

They're fighting for enrollment in Los Angeles.

It's interesting, basically, charter school enrollment has stayed flat for the

last five years, around 110-115,000 kids.

But in terms of percentage of Los Angeles that is served by the charter

school sector, it's grown from 16% to 21%, just because we've stayed flat.

Okay.

Well, what is the future?

What's really going to happen here?

I don't think the charter school world can stay in a keep our head low mode anymore.

No.

We have to say, we actually think this is the future that all of public education

needs to move into, and this is the role that we think charter schools can play

in helping us get to that better place.

Yeah.

And I think the charter community has a decision to make about sort of

how it wants to play its politics.

Because one of the interesting things about Chicago is there's definitely

a race element to the political race -- there is a racial element to it.

And you're seeing that and civil rights leaders are talking about that.

But you've got some young progressives in the city, some reformers who

are African American coming down for Paul Vallas in part over the

school issues and the reform issues.

And again, I have no idea what's going to happen tomorrow at the ballot box.

That's not a prediction.

It's just you're seeing, but you're seeing some of that.

And I think that does, there is this idea of how do you create sort

of a multiracial reform politics that would include charter schools,

and used to include charter schools.

And then you've got this countervailing pressure, which is the broader pressure

in the country with the culture wars and everything where the party just

cleaving apart and charters feel like, well, we're going to go, their

heart is with the Democrats even though their political support is

increasingly more with the Republicans and you're seeing that tension.

And that could play out in some really dangerous ways for charters, particularly

if you decide these other issues that are sort of adjacent and tangential around

educating kids become the thing that you're going to put front and center.

So I think it's actually a pretty fraught time for charters.

I agree with you.

And I think that the rationale behind the creation of CharterFolk was the

idea that our charter people, you know, believing that they're a part

of something bigger than themselves and willing to do more than they, than

is typically expected, as has been our history will continue to happen.

Well, in our urban settings when our charter folk are hearing all of these

things about how we're on the wrong side of history and we're associated

with all these what, whatever, right wing interests or whatever it is,

our own base can become wobbly.

Our own base can feel like we're on the wrong side of history.

The only way, in my opinion that we can like communicate to them and to other

supporters and others that actually our values align with theirs, is to come

out and be more vocal about the way our school systems are set up, our redlining

attendance boundaries, our selective admissions that we know screen out

kids by race, our funding systems that suck money away from high needs kids

to subsidize more affluent families' educations, allowing schools to be

completely and utterly unaccountable, so that the kids that you know are most

vulnerable suffer most -- these are things that are counter to our values and the

way that charter schools are set up.

We are set up to operate schools in a completely different way, and we're

going to advocate not only for our students to be served in that way, but

all students to be served in that way.

In that moment, I think the progressives who you know have thus far heard silence

from the charter school world will need step back and say, wait a second,

what do I think about these things?

Yeah, I think so.

Look, you're an optimist.

I think what's happening now that's very striking to me is two sort of

related but somewhat discordant trends.

One is, among parents, you're seeing in the data, parents are more willing

than ever to move across party lines, at coming out of the pandemic.

They're frustrated, the old alignments don't make sense to them, and

they want results for the kids.

And so, the parental vote is up for grab.

It's much more, it's much more fluid right now.

And then at the same time, among elites you're seeing people are sort of chucking

all their prior education commitments out the window in the interest of partisanship

because things are becoming so hardened.

And so you've got Democrats who used to support charters who are now like,

yeah, you know, like that's two partisan of an issue they've gone quiet and

like those two trends, watching them play out, I think there's both an

opportunity there for charters, but also just enormous, enormous political risk.

Yeah.

And the disconnect between the public positioning and

what the polling data shows...

I mean, striking in 2019, when UTLA had their last strike, every left-leaning

person in Los Angeles, every democratic policymaker wanted to virtue project:

we are with the teachers, we're with UTLA, we support this strike, right?

And then UTLA thinks, okay, let's capitalize upon that by getting

this parcel tax approved that will fund teachers pay at higher levels.

Didn't even come close to passing.

Not even close.

Right.

Well, yeah, it gives a lie to this whole idea of like standpoint,

the epistemology and that we're going to listen to people and do what

they want, because the support for charters, I mean, you know, strong

majority support in the African American community, strong majority

support in the Hispanic community.

There's the idea that like charters are some sort of like unpopular

thing or political jump ball.

The only people who really aren't there on charters politically

are white progressivesm, right?

But white progressives and the teachers unions, that's a pretty powerful

coalition inside the Democratic Party and it's not an insignificant

political coalition in general.

And so here we are, but I do think charters are one of those, you know,

they pull back the veneer on some of this stuff and you can sort of see

where the more raw political power around some of these issues lies.

Let me ask you something out of white progressives, Andy, because

my sense is that their opposition to charters may be fragile because, It

can be shown that most of these white liberals have got themselves into very

favorable public education situations that they now structurally deny others.

But they're not being, it's not being shown to them, or they're not being held

accountable for the fact that they are reserving this special benefit for them.

And if they were forced, you know, to confront their own hypocrisy on this

issue, I don't see how they stay in their current mindset unless they're

willing to go to, okay, I actually oppose charters not for these great progressive

values, but for naked self-interest.

I'm not sure that the white progressives can actually pivot to naked

self-interest as their justification for charters opposition going foward.

I don't know.

I mean, look, the history of ed reform in this country, going back decades,

one way to look at it's a history of people with means evading whatever

sort of reform strategies put in place, whether it's busing or choice or anything

else more recently, to figure out how to make the system work for them.

I mean, I guess I do think there's something to charters made a strategic

error by focusing overwhelmingly -- obviously the highest need is in urban

communities and then rural communities -- but focusing overwhelming on urban

communities without having something there politically for the suburbs in a

country where the politics are pretty suburban driven and so you, but not

building that coalition so forth, I think they left an exposed flank that

is, is causing a lot of trouble now.

And so we should think about what does sort of a middle class

chartering strategy look like?

And I think that's, look, people want customization.

They want different kinds of schools.

They want Montessori and, and I think there's a lot of political

opportunities to make sort of public school choice in the public system

much more robust and attractive.

But the second part of it is that is also, I think, in some ways self-inflicted,

for your strategies, I understand what you just laid out, to work people have

to be kind of willing to take some hits, be a little bit contentious, point

out this hypocrisy and all the rest.

And I think one of the things that really happened over the last decade, and you

really have to give her credit for it, is Randy Weingarten kind of convinced

a lot of reformers that they were the problem, that they were too acrimonious,

they were too divisive, they weren't consensus oriented enough and so forth.

And that you heard lots of the rhetoric we have to collaborate and all this,

and why do you have to be in...

you know, a lot of reformers started to be like, oh yeah, why are we so contentious?

To the point where Michelle Ree would run a commercial pointing out that like, A

lot of our schools like, you know, huge achievement gaps, they don't stack up

well internationally, and everybody's like, oh my God, that's so mean.

Take down the ad and, and funders got nervous about it.

Your strategy, if we do want to point out that, yeah, of course,

everyone's kind of implicated.

We redline education opportunity in this country by where you lived.

Our colleague, Darrel Bradford, is I think probably one of the

most articulate people about this.

But there's other folks, Tim DeRoche has a new organization.

We do work on this at Bellwether.

Yeah, it's interesting, um, that like, you know, if you, you have to actually be

willing to take some hits and point that out and be like a little bit contentious.

Not just for the sheer hell of this isn't culture war stuff where it's just

like for the sheer hell of spinning people up, but just you have to be

willing to say some controversial things and make people uncomfortable.

And I just don't know if the appetite is there right now.

Or if the courage is there.

Yeah.

I mean, this is where my MFA playwriting comes back in.

Aristotle knew all the way back even then, right, what's the making of drama?

Conflict.

You choose your conflict and from that you can drive a narrative.

But that's why we get along Jed...

When people come into the sector, they're like, they wanna work in education.

They're like, what should they read?

And they're like, should I read like Dewey or E.

D.

Hirsch, or whatever?

I'm like, start with Aristotle.

Understand the nature of power and politics and like a lot of what goes on in

this sector will make more sense to you.

But see, I ultimately think our movement will be

defined by what we advocate for.

And I think that when we advocate for dumb things, that it's easy for somebody

like Weingarten to say, you've been too extreme, you haven't been thoughtful,

you don't have this all the way thought through, or you're just simply, cheaply,

bashing people, you know, without a real theory, we leave ourselves exposed.

So I don't by any means say, oh, let's go out and just willy-nilly

start taking a meat axe to red lines.

But I do believe that there are ways for us to thoughtfully start to erase

them such that the question is asked.

We're not talking about huge numbers, we're just saying, every school district

in America should have to reserve 5% of its seats for people that come

from outside the school district so that we can start to have more choice.

And, and see what people, how they start to respond at that point.

Yeah.

Little things on zoning.

There's a lot of stuff you could do.

I think choice is a piece of the solution set, but it's not the whole solution set.

There's the, your, yeah, your idea, there's something you can do on the

zonings, a whole bunch of stuff.

I actually think that's how you, it's as if, like, if you think about it, like if

you walk from -- you're in Los Angeles, I'm in Virginia, or you know if you walk,

you're in California, sorry you're not Los Angeles, we're just talking about LA but

you're in California, Northern California, and I'm in Virginia -- and if like we walk

to each other and our compass is off a little bit, we're not gonna notice, you're

not going to notice that when you're in Nevada and I'm not going to notice

that when I'm in West Virginia and Ohio.

But when we're trying to get where we're going, we'll suddenly

realize I won't get to your house.

I'll end up in Portland or down in LA, right?

And that's the way we think about.

How do you start to change the system?

You know, some of this is like the cast some ideas about nudge and so forth.

How do you change the system, so in 25 years, people are like, oh,

wow, that's totally different.

But they didn't see it.

You're right, I do think we have people who, and this is I think on both

sides, who just wanna be contentious.

There's people who just want to sue school districts and all this, and

lawsuits that aren't going to actually get anywhere given how the law works here.

And there's, you know, people just wanna come in and try to blow

things up and it's conflict for conflict's sake is not productive.

But there will be some friction if there's going to be progress.

That's a pretty well established principle as well.

For sure.

Yeah.

Well, we talked about keeping this to a around a half

hour, so we're getting close.

I wanted to just a ask you one last question.

What are you making about, and this could be another hour long

conversation, but just let's spend a couple minutes ruminating on this.

What are you making of ChatGPT and its implications for education?

Is it being overhyped?

Is it being underhyped?

Are we in a moment where we just don't know?

I'd just love to hear your thoughts about this because my daughter just, used

ChatGPT to help her on her first essay.

That's interesting, she's writing about ALS and ALS is at the origins

of Charter Folk too, my dear friend Brian Bennett, who passed away.

And ALS really matters in our family's life.

And now Tess is writing me from college.

ChatGPT has helped me understand ALS at whole other levels of understanding.

But that's just one example.

How are you thinking about it as it relates to K-12 stuff?

Yeah, I mean, look, Jed, I'm far from an expert on this.

I'm still learning.

I listen to people like John Bailey who are doing a lot of work on this.

There's others.

So my sense is it over-hyped or under hyped?

Yes, both.

Great.

I can see, every time there's a new technology around

learning, people freak out.

Paper was controversial at one point.

They tried to license printing presses.

So when something like this comes along, everyone's like, oh my God, we've have

to ban it and restrict it and so forth.

That's like an old human reaction to new knowledge technologies.

I mean, we even saw that a little bit with like, in the early days of like email

and the internet, there was some of that.

And so like that sort of reaction is both understandable, time-honored

and probably overstated.

On the other hand, look, this will change teachers jobs and so forth.

I worry it gives, you're starting to hear already again,

why are we teaching content?

Mere facts when kids are gonna have ChatGPT, which I think is a huge

misreading of how we learn and what you need to know to be able to understand

the world and make sense of it.

So like the excesses on all sides are sort of apparent.

I think some of it's very exciting.

And one thing I'm intrigued by, you look at some of the stuff it can do and I screw

around with it like everybody else does, everybody thought like automation and

all this, they were like, oh man, sucks if you're a cashier or a truck driver.

Turns out, like probably if you write like entry level ad copy, you work for

one of these websites that's basically a click farm and building listicles

and this kind of stuff, or maybe, and this is like hits close to home, maybe

you're a blogger like me, this thing can do some of the things that you do.

And I think that's interesting and maybe we'll occasion a slightly

different and less sort of class-based conversation about automation

and new technology and so forth.

And my last thought is just the speed of it.

I remember a few years ago, I was looking at some of this and messing around

with, and it was really bad, right?

It just was not ready for prime time and now, in a relatively

short period of time...

So I don't know.

And then of course, look, I've seen all the same movies you have like, so I worry

like are the robot's going to kill us all?

I have lots of thoughts, but no real answers.

It's really, it's really interesting.

What's your take?

I mean, so obviously your daughter's now cheating in college...

I appreciate you.

So, I patterned CharterFolk after Stratechery by Ben Thompson.

And I've just been so impressed by him over the last five

years of reading his stuff.

And he is just always so smart and he is always so measured.

And then he had a chance to see Chat GPT, and he just went over

the moon about what this meant.

He had never had an experience interacting with technology in that way.

And he wrote that, and that then led the New York Times and to BBC and all sorts of

others, quoting him and interviewing him.

What is so new about this?

I tend to think that since COVID and and racial reckoning with George Floyd

this is probably the most important thing that has happened in the world

and when we look back on something that happened during this decade.

And I also think it's happening at the same moment that trust in education

is evaporating and people want to be able to do different things, but they

don't feel equipped to do it themselves or in small groups or whatever.

And I just think this ChatGPT thing is going to give people the

confidence that they don't have to have any more trust in any other

schools that is absolutely necessary.

And so if there's anything I think this is going to do, it's going to accelerate

the forming of new educational models and ones that ultimately are going to

challenge our public education system much more so than it will empower.

All right.

Well, that's a bold prediction.

I'll be interested and we can revisit this.

I'm not going to be in the prediction business, but by the time this does

come out and this will be our first one, we'll see what people think,

we will know at least the answers to whether or not the Chicago cops

can all put their "Let's go Brandon" stickers back on their cars or not.

So we will pick it up with that and some other stuff very soon.

See you in a couple weeks.

See you.

Okay.