In this episode of WonkyFolk, Jed Wallace and Andy Rotherham do what they do best—speculate wildly about the forces disrupting public education today and what might lie ahead.

Prompted by Marlon Marshall’s recent insight on the need to “make progress amid the disruption,” the boys take on some of the biggest questions facing schools and policymakers right now. Will the St. Isidore Supreme Court case redefine what it means to be a public school? Could religious charter schools become a new frontier—or a new fault line—in education policy? What happens when AI enters the classroom faster than we’re ready for? And will federal funding keep pace with an increasingly decentralized education landscape?

As always, Jed and Andy mix sharp analysis with insider perspective, offering a candid and occasionally irreverent take on where things stand and where they could be headed. Whether you’re a charter school leader, policy wonk, or just trying to make sense of the headlines, this episode delivers insights, laughs, and a few eyebrow-raising predictions.

Takeaways:

• In this episode, we discuss the implications of the Supreme Court case regarding AI's role in education advocacy and school funding.
• We reflect on the challenges faced by school districts amid budget constraints and the increasing complexity of educational policies.
• The conversation emphasizes the need for education advocates to navigate the evolving landscape of technology and its impact on learning outcomes.
• We explore the potential consequences of the SCOTUS ruling on charter schools and the broader educational landscape across the United States.
• As we analyze the current state of education funding, we highlight the critical importance of maintaining equitable resources for all students.
• Finally, we express cautious optimism about the role of artificial intelligence as a transformative tool in education, while acknowledging the challenges ahead.

Notes:

Article from The Dispatch on SCOTUS decision on charter schools: https://thedispatch.com/article/supreme-court-religious-charter-schools/

EduWonk on SCOTUS: https://eduwonk.substack.com/p/wednesdays-department-of-education

US News on the changing role of States in education: https://www.usnews.com/opinion/knowledge-bank/2015/12/10/new-education-law-is-bad-news-for-accountability

Hey, Andy. Hey.

Hello, Jed. How are you?

I'm doing alright.

You know, do you think it's possible that we could actually start a recording one time, the way we are advised to over and over again by saying what this podcast actually is from the very first moment?

No. Maybe. But not this episode, apparently.

All right, then let's jump back into other stuff. Like we're always talking. I mean, you have been all over the world. I've been trying to keep track of how many places you've been recorded.

And, you know, I've also been swapping some emails. I mean, have you. I mean, you keep a busy schedule, but this has got to be even crazy for you, isn't it?

Yeah. And before I answer that, why don't we actually do. Jed, what is this?

Okay. All right, so this is the WonkyFolk podcast. This. We got two hosts here, myself, Jed Wallace and

Andy Rotherham.

And, you know, the idea of WonkyFolk trying to put together a focus on policy that's not exclusively on charters, but touches a lot upon charters, but brings Andy's expertise on all things K12.

Yeah. Fantastic.

If you're watching this on YouTube, you can download or over yet your podcasts, and if you download it wherever you get your podcast, and you're a glutton for punishment, you can actually watch us on YouTube. Okay. So, yeah, I've been traveling a bunch. Some cool places. I've been in Denver, Boston. I'm back up in Boston here soon.

And just lots of panels and podcasts. I think there's, like, it's a crazy time. Anyone who tells you know exactly how it's all going to go, you shouldn't trust them.

But I think people want to know, like. Like, what are people watching for? What are you. What are. What are people seeing? What are some likely outcomes and less. Less likely outcomes?

You know, the President said last night that it was highly unlikely we would attack Canada. So that's like. That's refreshing. That's refreshing. That's an unlikely outcome last year for.

You to do the Canadian Rockies or something. You got some fishing you want to do up there, you better do it fast.

Yeah. You know, like, yes, we have ties to Canada on both sides of our family. Pretty, pretty strong ties. So we are. Yeah. If you know, And.

And I should note, I mean, the last time the US And Canada went to war, they, you know, our capital ended up getting burned. So Trump should probably, like, think this. That elbows up thing is no joke. He should probably think. Think twice about how he want.

How he wants to approach this.

Well, I mean, whatever you acquire Canada, maybe we acquire expertise in portfolio management from Ontario or something like that. Maybe there'd be some education win out of it all.

But we get, we get hockey players.

I mean, half of their women hockey players are down here playing in the NCAA anyway, so we, you know, there's definitely, there's definitely some upsides to closer cooperation.

Well, we'll see.

I mean, I know your travel just been crazy, and I think it's a function of, well, I don't know, it's probably a wide range of stuff, but a lot of it is just the environment is so confusing and people wanting some sense to be offered or some recommendations, and so it's natural that they turn to you.

Do you have any, just from the preponderance of, of conversations that you're having, are there any themes that you might be picking up, given the fact that you're traveling as much as you are talking to as many people that perhaps the rest of us, you know, mere mortals might not be as keyed into?

Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I think, like, it is always in this work, getting to travel and go places is such a, such a gift.

Like, I feel like, like I've been able to go to go to schools in different parts of the world and all over the country. And, like, that's just such a great thing about what we do. And so getting to travel and just hang out.

I mean, I think a couple of things, One, how much of this is Washington centric and not the, the effects of it and the consequences, I think, are pretty substantial, both nationally and globally.

But, you know, when you go talk to people around the country, like, the level of concern, the level of, like, oh, it's this, it's high time something like this happened. I think people, I think people underestimate that. There's a, you know, Trump's approval ratings are going down.

Some aspects of this people are frustrated with, particularly the tariffs. But there is a reason he got elected.

And I think, like, it's important not to lose sight of that, just in terms of understanding kind of what's going on. So that's. And then second, again, like, all this stuff, people in Washington, they follow it, you know, dayto, day in, in and out.

And most people, they just tune in episodically.

They hear sort of little pieces of, oh, the budget's getting cut, or, you know, they're lunating this agency or that agency, and, and, and they hear that differently. And they're not nearly they're not nearly as spun up. And so the challenge for the Democrats is going to be to help people actually understand that.

Not the kind of people who right now are going to protest and stuff like that, but your average voter to help them understand why some of this matters, because some of it's not, not real visible. And I think that's so in Washington, you talk to people, everybody knows people who have been disrupted by this and laid off.

And I certainly don't want to minimize just the, the effects of that just on people's lives. But that's not the case when you go around the country. A lot of this stuff I, I've talked about has a real long fuse on it.

And so people aren't seeing it. So you have to figure out, okay, how do you, how do you make the consequences of this real?

How do you make the consequences of like, disruption to some education research? Right. Real. And then the third thing, just people are so frustrated with government not being responsive and all that.

And this is just the latest chapter in that. And I think it's super important to see it sort of downstream of all these.

Trump didn't just sort of wake up one day or just parachute into the scene. Like, there's, you know, this is the result of like a lot of stuff. And, and people are just really frustrated and that's why they toggle.

That's why they roll elected Republicans. And like, that didn't work. So they elect Democrats. And I go, that didn't work.

And, you know, and these elections have been close and that I think, very pronounced.

I don't know if you saw, I had Marlon Marshall on a, on a charterfolk chat about a month ago, and he was really sharing, hey, let's make progress amid the disruption. And I think it's.

When I think about almost anything else going on in education, there really, isn't it, from my perception, that much opportunity to make progress in this, in the commotion right now? But it is now, and you might disagree on that. I'd love to hear if you do.

But like, in terms of charter schools, charter schools are making a lot of progress right now. The policy wins that we've seen in Tennessee in the last month that we saw in Georgia, the game changers in Indiana, it's just really striking.

And also I just feel as though charter people, we still have our moments where we need to check in on our values and Trump drives us crazy and all that stuff. But there's just this sense of don't get distracted by things that are completely out of our control.

And there are things that are within our control we can make a lot of progress on. And I think fairly commendably charter school world's doing that. So we'll, you know, we'll see if we can continue on that.

Yeah, I mean, here's like, yeah, I think that's, I think there's a lot truth to that. And look, if Trump, I mean, their basic idea is they just want to push as much of this stuff out to the states as they can.

You see that on just a range of programs. And so even like on Head Start, you know, there's a question, we'll talk about the budget later.

There's, you know, a question of, like, is that going to get folded into something else, folded into more general childcare or just pushed out to the states? And that will create opportunities for sure. And you'll see some interesting, innovative stuff if that happens.

It will also, though, and I think this is sort of the story of it. I haven't had time to write this, and I've wanted to write.

I wrote a piece during the essay era that, like, we were basically saying variance is going to be what we're going to deal with and we're not going to really try to mitigate that. I thought that was bad. I think it was a federal role of trying to, trying to mitigate that. But that was where we were going with essa.

And this just like triples down on that. And so you will see some. There'll be opportunities. There'll be some very interesting stuff that will happen for sure.

And then you'll also see a bunch of places that stagnate, fall behind or worse.

And like, if, if you're a movement that believes, like, the, you know, the quality of the education you receive shouldn't be linked to your zip code, that is what that is a worrisome prospect. It was worrisome under ESSA with the limited accountability there. And this will be less so. I think that's the story here. It's variance.

And depending on people's priors and where they sit politically and how they sort of look at government, some people think variance, that's the price you pay for progress.

Some people think that's something, I think a lot of us think that's something you want to try to mitigate without just completely squelching innovation and dynamism. And that's the balance. You try to get right. And then some people want to just get rid of that through sort of leveling, leveling down, I would argue.

But you've got those camps and they're all going to. Whatever camp you're in, you're going to, you're going to look at this. You're going to look at it through that lens.

Well, a question I'd like to ask you back because, look, I have no perspective on this. I'm just like so deep in the SCOTUS case and you know,

I want to ask you about the SCOTUS case.

But I want you to start.

I want you to start because, I mean, I'm nose down and I've been writing a lot on this and I've been trying to get deep on this -- charterfolk also submitted our own amicus because we were essentially asked to be the agent on behalf of the legislators that passed, you know, original charter school law.

Amber and some other people.

Yeah, yeah, it was actually a pretty interesting crowd because it was, it was just a few more Dems than Republicans.

There were, you know, Governor Owens from Colorado, you know, the lovers who passed the, the original law in Indiana, the Michigan sponsor, who also was, you know, a Republican. So, you know, it was, it was encouraging to see still a bipartisan group together in terms of getting the movement started.

But, you know, I've just been down on the detail of this. I of course listened to every moment of the Supreme Court case last week. I've written about it again.

I can go into whatever you want to go into, but I kind of feel like a good starting point was, hey, I'm all, I'm so deep into it. Maybe I'm blind mind or maybe I can't see stuff. What's your take? You know, looking at it from your, your vantage point here that you should.

Never try to predict these things. But people going into it were like four. Four seems really possible. Maybe, you know, you could even pick up two justices. There was talk of that.

There was. So there was a lot of speculation and after the arguments and again, you never know with the arguments what gets asked you only.

But like it seems like the momentum is the other way and that Oklahoma is going to lose this case and that the court will in a fairly expansive way pave the way for this. Now there's some arguments I want to ask you about that Roberts on the end want to do a more narrow kind of decision.

It could be a really complicated decision with lots of concurrences and dissents in part and all that But I don't know. People who are feeling pretty good that Charters might dodge this bullet are not feeling as good about that.

And people who, who think this is great, like Andy Smarrick wrote a piece in the Dispatch which I would recommend. He thinks this is great and he's feeling very bullish.

Yeah.

I think that the tenor of the discussion outside the court, as I've heard it described from close friends who were there, was the religious liberty crowd high fiving, feeling very good about things our world, not as excited about how the conversation had gone. Upon more reflection and going back into the case or into the, into the transcript, I think we more come back to this.

Things that were hanging in the balance going into the case seem as though they're still hanging in the balance. It really comes down to Roberts. It's, I mean we, we know.

I mean it was a little bit surprising to see Kavanaugh as decidedly in the religious liberty camp as he, as he was. I also think it was a little bit surprising for us to see Gorsuch perhaps not as firmly, you know, in it as, as we might have presumed.

But that was, that was the inverse of what people were saying ahead of time. They thought Kavanaugh was maybe more in play. Of course it's not. I keep going. But that's. I think.

Yeah.

And we should also. Reviewer for Re. You know, for anyone who hasn't been following this closely, we're not talking about Justice Barrett because she's recused.

And so there's only eight justices voting on the case.

But if you look at the, the key thing here, it we've been know we've known this for a long time. Given that Barrett is recused, that it all comes down to the Chief justice, what is Roberts going to do?

Roberts has basically been the architect of the three cases that get us here. The Espinosa, the, the main case. And clearly he's going to want to write something that preserves those cases.

But I mean he started out his first question to those arguing for same Isidore was hey, those three cases were about a far smaller level of involvement of the state in the oversight in the whole program whatsoever. And this is different. So. Or tell me that it's not and why it's not. And I don't think they answered that. I really.

And I think the way that he chose, he could have phrased that question however he wanted to. He went to the case where it was a, you know, the, the, I think it's Trinity Lutheran.

This is the one where they were going to surface a playground, right? And he could have phrased that however he wanted to, but he was like, hey, in that case, the state's involved in sharing wood chips on a playground.

You know, this is not sharing wood chips, at least from a program standpoint. So why, why do these three cases prove to be the analog for this one? And I think that they, that, that the esp. The, the.

I'm sorry, the Isidore people just punted that they were like, it does not matter what the program is. It does not matter what the level of involvement of the state is going to be in all this stuff.

It all comes down to does, is the entity a religious entity or not? And is it being, you know, excluded because of its religious status? And, and they just refuse to answer it. So. And he came back to it multiple times.

And I even think that Alito prompted, you know, the, the third. Actually, it's the, you know, it's the US Attorney Attorney General, you know, hey, come on, answer the Chief Justice's question here.

And again, they balked at it. So that's a good starting point for us.

And why do you think they balked?

Because I think that they don't really have an answer because it's clear that, you know, providing, providing wood chips, you know, or providing a voucher to parents who can then choose from there, where they're going to go. There's. The level of involvement of the, of the government in those programs is much, much lower. Wait a second. You're going to be an authorizer.

You're going to decide what schools get to open and which ones get to close. You're going to be, you're going to have to decide when school's performance is so low.

And you're going to have to, you know, make an argument for your decisions that are not like, you know, religiously biased or something. Like, obviously the level of involvement here is much, much higher. And, and I just don't think they wanted to get into.

Isn't that, though, is there, I mean, is there a path where the state where you essentially get a ruling that says if you want to keep this arm's length, you can, if you want to get more involved, then you're going to have to change, you know, you have to change your laws and so forth. Like, do we get it? Is there a chance we get a decision like that?

I don't know.

I mean, I think, I mean, the people from the religious liberty side really want to bring this back to Amtrak and LeBron and the definition of State actor. It's not the great frame for us, frankly. And hey, if you apply Amtrak's governance requirements to the charter school. Governance requirements.

Charter schools fail. You know, the Amtrak test. I just.

And, and, and our world gets squeamish about saying that there's anything different about our governance and Amtrak's governance. But that's one where I feel like some nuance.

I think we definitely, we don't want to say, hey, Supreme Court, we need you to make up a whole new body of law or a whole new framework. No. Okay. LeBron and Amtrak works. There's a five prong test.

But let's talk about a couple of ways that we pass two of those prongs that are unique to charter schools. Because if you asked us to pass it, like Amtrak, Amtrak is a federally, you know, created thing and it only needs to be created in statute one time.

Right. So when one of the arguments is, are you directly created in statute?

The idea that each charter school that exists in the United States, we would have had 4,000 statutory decisions to, to create each school. It's nonsensical on its face. Right. But that's not to say we have to throw out LeBron for each of those.

You can like, make the argument about this is the way that we pass each of the prongs with slight adjustments that I argued in, in what I wrote over the weekend, you can say is actually a level of, of, you know, government involvement that's beyond what Amtrak lives with. We're at a standard beyond not to. But I didn't really feel we made that argument, you know, as, as, you know, crisply as we could have.

I think that was a strategic choice. I think, you know, they were like, maybe this is waiting in a minefield. Let's, let's leave it unspoken.

But it speaks to what I think is a potential solution for us here.

Well, and talk about like the public private thing, because it seems like charters are a little bit like we have Schrodinger's charters now. Like no one knows. Are they public, are they private? And that, that came up in the, in the case. And it's a, it's a complicated issue for charters.

So talk a little bit about that.

Yeah, I think a lot of this just comes down to is, is the, the, the dis. The difference making thing, the governance status of the entity in, in, in.

And that's where they want, that's where the religious liberty people want to keep it. Hey, if it, if you don't pass the LeBron test, okay, then you are not a state actor. And if you're not a state actor, then you're a private actor.

And I'm sorry for, for us, for religious institutions to be discriminated against in that context is impermissible. I think the, the piece, and I think somewhat you could say that Roberts was going in this direction.

Hey, we're not, we're not providing wood chips here. We're providing public education. And it's perfectly reasonable for a state to decide what public education is.

So, you know, a solution I suggested could be the, an ending point here is that, you know, Roberts ends up siding with, against the approval of this, of this case, saying that it's perfectly reasonable for Oklahoma to say that public education shall be non sectarian.

But he can also signal that the three cases that he's already decided upon make clear that a religious institution cannot be excluded solely because it's religious.

So, hey, if you've got religious players in Oklahoma that want to operate a charter school and are willing for it to be non sectarian, you cannot exclude them.

And by the way, you know, you get your charter and you want to do things before and after school or whatever, that's going to be within your purview to decide what to do then. But within the context of the delivery of public education, it's reasonable for Oklahoma to have its non sectarian requirements. I don't know.

What do you think?

I don't know. I'm curious. Like, give us the range of outcomes that you see are possible here. So from the most expansive to the most limited.

The most expansive ruling for St. Isidore and the most expansive ruling for Oklahoma.

I think the least, you know, what the worst could be for us is something saying it's discrimination against a religious entity.

And not only must you give them a charter and allow them to operate a non sectarian school, no, you must allow them to be sectarian and do whatever they, whenever they want.

And the only excuse you can have for not giving institutions, religious institutions, that authority to be in the space is if they are, if they are government controlled. And they've got to pass the LeBron test, which means their boards have got to be majority controlled by the school district, by the.

This is a nightmare scenario for us. It's a nightmare scenario for us.

And if you look at what, you know, General Sauer said, I mean, whatever, I don't want to say it was, you know, a conscious, a willing deception, but when he said that California is already in a situation where its charter schools would pass that test that was not accurate. It absolutely was not accurate. And the religious liberty people, you know, are saying this over and over again.

There actually isn't that big a risk we can do this thing, and there's not gonna be that much needed change. Not true. Not true.

In California then, and lots of other places, blue states, you know, we would see then all this work being put toward how do the charter school entities come back under the direct control of government to the same degree that Amtrak is directly under the control of the federal government? That's really bad.

What are some other possible outcomes?

I think there are. Well, I'm doing a lot of speculating here, and I want every.

Yeah, but I think just to help people understand, like, why they should pay attention when this case, you know, comes down. A month or six weeks.

It could be that we could have a 44, which leaves the answer unsolved. And do the religious liberty advocates come back again when they feel they have a context that would not require Barrett to recuse herself?

That's a possibility. We could have. We could have Roberts write something that says you must decides with the approval of the.

Of the case, but puts new limitations on what would the religious entity have to live with. And this is where a lot of people have just been saying, hey, this is what Mike Petrilli's been saying, right?

Hey, if you're going to say this is, okay, fine, but make it explicit. What is permissible for the religious institution to do and not do in terms of who it employs?

Can it discriminate kids that aren't of the same religion? Can they, you know, all sorts of other things like that?

Can you penalize kids, you know, if they choose not to participate in the religious, you know, activities of the school, these kinds of things. So it's possible. It's possible that Roberts could do Petrelli's homework. I'm kind of skeptical that he will, but you know, what I.

What I fear is he does it. It's not clear. And so then the Supreme Court ends up litigating on this over and over and over again.

And meanwhile, the damage will have already been done in blue context, and we'll be dealing with completely different issues than what the Supreme Court would take on further down the road.

Yeah, I mean, that seems like, you know, I don't want to speculate because that's irresponsible, but it seems like it's. It certainly seems the polit. If this goes against Oklahoma, the politics are not good for charters.

I mean, you can see the church state arguments there and, and that. That path. But the politics aren't good for charters and it's just not a great political trade as we've talked about.

So it does seem like there's actually a fair amount of downside. A fair amount of downside risk.

Yeah, yeah, we will see. There are, There are all sorts of prongs of governance control that are short of the having majority appointment rights to your board.

And the national alliance has been exhausted in terms of identifying. I think they've identified 21 prongs.

It could be that Roberts will pay attention to some of that and perhaps himself create a status for government control that identifies which of those 21 needs to be in it.

A 21 pronged test is crazy.

I mean, because, no, it's not meant to be a 21. It's meant.

It just says like, we had a three prong test for years on this and it fell apart because it was like, yeah, it got eroded away. And so, I don't know, it just seems like. It just seems like a very difficult situation. If you have that.

Yeah, no, no, I'm not, I'm not in any way suggesting a 21 part test. I'm just saying there are 21 things I could pluck from and say these are actually the three or whatever it may be.

But your sense in your conversations outside of Charterland, I mean, if you're.

If you're outside of Charterland, you look at the New York Times, look at the Wall Street Journal, you look at, you know, the people that have generally just summarized the argument and you say, hey, get ready something. Approving a religious charter school seems to be in the works. And I mean, are you hearing anybody?

I were to say, just a matter of politics. It's going to get.

It'll be very difficult to describe what is a charter school because there's going to be so many caveats, whereas it used to be relatively straightforward and the branding was pretty good as a result. And this will just be, you know, it'll be very difficult. Like, what is. What is one. You know, the.

Of course, the charter foes, we should note, are excited about this because they think one outcome here is charters. We get completely brought back under district control and so forth.

And so they think this could be great from a different perspective and that it would just like basically strangle charter schools out.

What would you think the implications for public education, not just for the charter school movement, but hey, you know, Ted Coldery and Joe Nathan and those that got it going in the first place, they were just so frustrated school districts are just not reformable. I don't know if you saw Terry Ryan writing his piece at Education Next about school districts just not being reformable.

And so Coldery was really looking for a new recipe. The districts aren't going to do it themselves. We need to find a new way to introduce autonomous, semi autonomous entities within the system.

He spent a. I mean that, that's really his intellectual gift, right? That's contribution of his lifetime. Right.

And he thought this mix and the concept of chartering coming from English, you know, common law, blah, blah, blah, all the way back, he thought that he had come up with a construct that would hang together. Now it's possible that the Supreme Court says, yeah, it was nice thinking, Ted, but ultimately, no.

If you're going to have, you know, any third party here, then you gotta, you gotta break down the wall between church and state that essentially says, we.

Should note, Ted could not have seen coming because he was writing about that in the 90s.

Totally.

And you didn't even have Zelman yet. So you didn't have the, the beginning of the real piercing of the.

The church state wall was getting eroded in some of these cases in terms of like, stuff that made sense. Like you could use, you know, you could give books to.

And.

And Title 1A to Catholic schools. You could give books, you can even give technology and computers. But we hadn't yet crossed the line of, of tuition and we certainly.

There was nothing like the cases you mentioned, you know, Espinosa and Trinity Lutheran and Carson and you know that. So Ted was writing in a completely different context from the one we're in now, just from a point of view of like Supreme Court precedent.

So he couldn't have seen this.

But if the court is.

I'm a TED fan, so I'm gonna, you know.

Well, but if the court says, sorry, the only public schools are ones that are directly operated by the government, what do you think the consequences are for public education more broadly?

I think public education has kind of an existential crisis here because that is a problem for public. The scenario you just laid out is a big problem, but so is this general sort of unbundling we're seeing.

And there's a second case we can talk about a little bit, Mahmoud versus Taylor on opting out and, and then just the general. Just declining enrollment, parental frustration, all that.

I think public education faces an existential crisis regardless of which way this case goes. This case could potentially hasten it, depending how it turns out. But there's no, there's no outcome where they're like, who we dodged a bullet.

They, they have a, they have a broad set of really big problems and then some more near term, you know, Trump caused problems and other stuff, but they've got some big long term problems as well. And I don't, I mean, I don't think school districts are irredeemable. I'm not in that camp.

They're certainly troubled and they're really hard to reform and all that. And I do think Ted had, you know, had it right when he said like, they shouldn't be the only people who can operate public schools.

You can have public education can be delivered in different contexts. Like I'm, I'm, I like that. And so I think he had, I think he had an elegant solution. It's just circumstances have, have changed.

The appetite for choice has changed. You and I've talked about it. I mean, it's just, it's, we're living at a different time.

It's, you know, back when Ted was writing that like, like giving 2,000 kids in Washington D.C. vouchers was hugely controversial. Right. And was, you know, just, you know, the subject of, you know, presidential vetoes and all of it.

And now, you know, like Texas passes this huge program. It's not really, it made news, but it wasn't, it didn't get the attention you would think a program of that size would get.

So we're just operating a different, in a different time now.

Yeah, I, I hear you. And I mean, I think I'm basically saying the same thing. I'm just throwing a little bit more nuance on it.

I just feel like the instability beneath so much of public education is more pronounced than is being recognized. And so you throw this into the mix and I just feel like we are mispredicting the pace of change and it's just because we humans just can only rapid.

Over the last five years, for sure, the pandemic sort of really accelerated it.

And so what this could mean, I just, and I do, to your point, I mean, are, are, is it possible for school districts to be okay or pretty good? I think in more affluent areas, in smaller school districts and those kinds of things, I believe it may in fact still prove workable.

I, I'm not convinced that those schools are as good as people in the burbs tend to think that they are. But what we could find is the throwing up of walls. We talk about these red lines and attendance boundaries and all that kind of stuff.

I mean, if, if, if our, if our school districts Our big urban school districts just implode at the pace that could happen right now. That the flight to safety and, and the walls that could be thrown up. Yeah, we could have public education.

Public education is going to be in, in suburbs only, in more affluent areas only, and it'll just be free for all. Perhaps in a lot of other places.

Well, it'll be residential based, which we have now, but that'll become even more exclusive. I do think, like, scale is the enemy. The bigger these things are, the harder it is.

I mean, you think, and you think of these large districts, the scale of the things they have to do before they even get to teaching and learning. But that's a function of the way we fund schools.

And so you've got to have these large systems, otherwise you don't have the property wealth to fund these things. And so some of this is just like these basic sort of foundational sort of issues.

If we had a better way of financing schools than local property wealth, then you could do something about some of these scale questions in a more thoughtful way.

But like, LA is a, is a really great example that the district, you know, the district, if you broke it up in any sort of rational way, just like looking on a map, it would be devastating for parts of the city.

And so you're, you're, you know, and, and, and so, and that's because we, you know, California does a uniquely bad job funding schools, but in general, we do a poor, we do a poor job. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, it, it provides a great segue because, you know, we, we have all these dynamics about just parents not happy with the offerings and our entities just struggling from a pure implementation standpoint. I don't think from a resources standpoint, at least not through Covid. I mean, our problems in Covid was not that we didn't have enough resources.

Right. And now we're going into a period where the punch bowl is being pulled back. Covid funding is going away.

We're already finding a lot of states whose budgets are under pressure.

We're seeing a lot of states who are also feathering in extremely expensive private school choice programs, choosing to educate, pay for the education of more affluent people who they had not been paying for in the past, which is going to strain budgets further. And now we see the starting point of the Trump administration budget.

There's a lot more detail that's needed, but last week we saw in more detail than we've seen before. What did you make of what the administration revealed last week?

It's theater. They're under pressure to say something.

And so, and, and literally like the, the appropriators, they call them the, the who chair the various subcommittees overseas of age, they call them cardinals, which particularly, I guess, depending on your view, particularly appropriate or inappropriate right now. But like the administration hadn't been meeting with them and they were frustrated and so forth. And so they were demanding like we want numbers.

But you get this thing like in the old days, like I'll tell a funny story. In the old days you used to get the President's budget request would come out and would come out like nor on normal time under the budget act of 74.

The procedures are laid out there. And then they would do this thing called the budget and brief, which would be like the summary of like a high level.

And that would like go out and you know, and that's what most people would read. But then there was the actual, you know, really thick substantial budget documents.

And they would make T shirts for kids of people who had worked on the budget that said budget in brief. Like for little T shirts for little. For little kids. It was all a joke. But the budget was actually serious and you paid attention to it.

And then they negotiated. We're so far from that. I mean, the budget process is completely broken down.

The Trump people are saying that you don't have to follow it anyway, the Impoundment act and so forth. And the skinny budget, it is not a, that's not a thing. The old thing that you might have said was the skinny budget was the budget in brief.

It was an abridged version of a full piece of work. The skinny budget is just like this new construct. Everybody's like, oh, it's a skinny budget. But like that's not a real thing.

And so I say that by way of saying, first of all, you gotta wait to see what, what is their full budget and what are they up to. And second, the Hill gets a say here.

And I think it's really notice notable like the Hill, they are now like, like the chairman of the Appropriations Committee is saying, hey, you know what? Like he pushed back the administration very explicitly. When they're like, we can get this through Congress. He's like, you know what?

I think Congress actually has a better sense of the tensile strength of Congress politically and what's going to get through or not. So there's open pushbacks. I don't mean to, like, I don't want to dismiss it and like I shouldn't pay any attention to it.

And obviously given the Republicans fealty to President Trump. If there's an account or a program you care about, it's better to have it on the nice list than the naughty list. For sure.

If your program zeroed out, that's not good because that sends a signal. And if your program is, and we can talk about the charter school program, you know, that's, that sends it, that sends a different signal. That's good.

But fundamentally what the Hill does, you know, they, they generally disregard the president's budget request. That's not just Trump. That's a lot. Yeah, lot, lot. They, they, they take it under advisement.

I think they're going to do their own thing and, and they've got, you know, they're trying to pass this big reconciliation bill, tax cuts. They've got enormous pressure.

So I think, I think it's be hard and the first thing I would watch to see how much difference is they've got a rescissions bill and it's not impressive. In the first term they had a big rescissions bill, $15 billion and Congress didn't pass it.

And then the administration kind of gave up and just went on with business as usual with other stuff. I think you may see the same.

I would watch that if they can't get the rescissions built through and there's a bunch of stuff in there that there's a fair amount of opposition in the Senate and some would struggle in the House. You know, I think that'll, I think that'll be a tell. That's the kind of stuff I would pay, that, I would pay, that I would pay attention to.

Can you, can you describe the relationship between rescissions and the reconciliation process? I mean if it gets into reconciliation, do they have to follow up with the specific. That would be consistent with reconcilia. How does this work?

Rescissions is a separate, separate, it's under the Budget Act. It's a separate procedure. The president can ask and members of Congress can too. They ask for rescissions.

They get voted on under special rules that I hope you won't ask me to explain because I can't remember them all. But there's some special rules and basically if it doesn't pass, the president can't come back and ask for again. It's a one time thing.

Now here's the part of the problem. The administration is arguing that parts of this, the Empowerment act is unconstitutional, which they can say that. No, no court has ever said that.

So they're, they're pushing a whole set of arguments and they're sort of spoiling for a fight. They want to impound money and get, and get challenged and take.

They have this, they have this idea that the executive has much more authority than, than has traditionally been assumed. So that'll all get, that'll all get fought out in the courts. Reconciliation is a separate process.

They pass the budget resolution, it allows them to pass a bill under special rules. It cannot be filibustered in the Senate. There's rules on how the amendment process works and so forth, and what can be in and out of it.

And so that's how they're trying to move. That's how presidents traditionally move these days because Congress is so hard to get things through. That's how, like, Obama got health care done.

That's. You generally, you see that on, on these large domestic packages, and that's where the Trump people are focusing.

But you could get, it's very easy to see a scenario where like last time they sort of do this stuff and then they kind of lose interest. They don't get a ton of stuff through Congress. So they continue to do stuff by executive action. But executive action is very temporary.

It's limited in its scope and it's very temporal. And so, like, one potential scenario here is like, there's been lots of chaos and damage and people have lost their jobs.

They got their jobs back and all this stuff. But they're going to struggle to get large, robust, durable change through, through Congress.

I guess I would take this the same starting point, that analysis that you do.

Hey, this trial ballooning or whatever we're going to call this skinny or skinny budget, whatever it was last week, but should not be paid too much attention to, but in the context of reconciliation is coming and they've got, that's where the tire hits the road. And so I looked at, you know, what was communicated last week as something of a trial balloon.

Are people going to be throwing a total fit about the cuts that are, that are contained in there? And I don't know. I'm sure.

I mean, if you look at Indian education, you look at el instruction, you look at, you know, teacher training and recruitment, I mean, I don't really see people throwing total fits on those things right now.

And ell thing is substantial. I mean, one thing you said that's important is you said the tire is going to meet the road like that.

If that tire costs twice as much because of the tariffs, that's also going to be an issue in the sense of like, yeah, how much they can get through and what people, the pain people are willing to bear politically is going to have a lot to do with how they think things are going.

And if they think things aren't going well and the wheels are coming off, they're going to want, they're going to be running for the exits and want to, I mean, you know, they're being asked to do.

The Republicans we asked to take like a lot of tough votes and their appetite to do that will, will wane both the closer we get to an election and the more, you know, Trump's polling, it's down for sure. I'm always a little reluctant to count him out because he is proven to be like a Weeble.

Yeah, well, I guess in the macro, it depends on how cynical we want to be here.

It could be that this whole reconciliation process, that will just be a total complete fiction that it will not add anything to the budget deficit or whatever.

And if they, if they need, if they need to have another, you know, need another trillion dollars of spending, they'll figure out some way to say, well, there's this other trillion dollars in debt reduction. That's, that they'll pretend is in there.

I do, though, think that the dire financial situation of the federal government is really going to start to play here.

And I don't know if I would be counting on a bunch of hand waving on, on debt reduction being enough to keep robust funding for education coming from the federal government. If I were to predict, I would be saying there's going to be some kind of significant cut.

And, and I think, you know, they've been, they've been anchored to keep the Title one number the same, keep the IDA number the same but everything else, almost everything else is like fair game. And you add it all up and that's going to be, you know, a very long, very large overall cut.

They're proposing substantial cuts already even in the skinny budget and we haven't seen the whole thing. The question though is like, is Congress going to go again? Going to go, are the appropriators going to go along with those cuts?

And again, I'd watch the rescissions and you're already starting to see some resistance on some of this stuff. And you know, these are real like block granting head start, like to the average person, like, what difference does it make?

But the fact is, like, these are jobs in, in communities. Like there's real impact to this stuff that will start to play out politically.

You're already seeing, you know, various Republicans are asking for, for special dispensation on different things for universities. We've talked about this.

Yeah, universities in red states still get, you know, University of Alabama, I think it's close to a billion dollars in federal research dollars. Ohio State gets 750 million.

You know, even like West Virginia University, smaller state still gets, you know, well, north of 100 million, which, I mean, that's real money in a, in a, in a small state. And so you're gonna like the, the normal rules of politics haven't been, haven't been totally upended here.

And as the president, if he, if he is running into political trouble and so forth, they're gonna have to pay attention to, they're gonna pay attention to that. And the other thing I would just watch is he's very good at, he gets you all. So he puts out this skinny budget. Everyone.

You know, there's a bunch of cuts in National Park Service in there, which I don't like.

But what I like less is they want to make it easier to sell public lands and they want to make it easier for various kinds of extraction activities on public lands. That stuff's happening sort of separate, right. And that stuff's happening through administrative rules and so forth.

And he's very good at, on a bunch of these issues, you can all focus on the one thing, meanwhile there's a bunch of stuff happening somewhere else. And so I think it's also just really important to kind of keep your eye on the ball. There's so much happening, it's easy to get distracted.

So am I reading your prediction is the federal government is going to maintain a level of investment in k, in k 12 Comparable to what it's been doing historically? Because there's just not going to be enough votes in the Congress to support significant.

Well, here's the thing. Comparable to what? You know, so like, you know, these baselines are sort of pick yours and they're sort of a little bit of that.

You can choose your own adventure. So comparable to the pre Covid baseline. Comparable to the.

And if you want more spending, you always, whatever gets spent, you then build that into your new baseline. So are we talking the pre Covid baseline? Are we talking the post Covid baseline? Because we threw in a ton more money. Right.

And so when you say it's traditional level, do we mean post Covid? No, I'm talking.

I'm talking pre Covid.

Yeah, no, I think we'll stay. I actually think we'll stay somewhere in that ballpark. There will probably be cuts.

But again, this money, like states need this stuff, they're not going to be able to be weaned off it very quickly. And so far, two things to watch in the first term. These guys were not big budget cutters.

In fact, the deficit and the debt grew on their watch even before the pandemic. And Trump, I don't see him. That's not the hill to die on.

He wants other stuff and he seems much more interested in government restructuring, programmatic restructuring.

You even see, like they said on the Indian education construction grants, they said, we're going to like, there's problems with this program, we're cutting it. And then we want to figure out different ways to do it, which I think is really important to.

I don't have great confidence in their ability to execute based on what we've seen. But they do have a plan where they're like, we're going to rebuild some of this stuff. It's going to look different.

Like, I think it is, it is, it is cavalier to assume they just don't have any kind of a plan. They do.

Again, I don't have, I don't have a lot of confidence in it myself, but they think, okay, we can cut some of this stuff and then rebuild and make this more efficient. That's, that's, that's what they're operating from. If they were here, that's what they would say.

So I would summarize that you're more optimistic than me. You think the federal investment in education is going to stay about the same? I don't. I think it's going to drop fairly significantly under pre.

You think it's gonna drop probably under pre. Covid levels?

I do, yeah.

I think that and a part of this is because the red states are changing and they're going in voucher and other directions, and people are going to realize that funds can't be used for those purposes. And if that's the case, in the end, they're going to say, forget it.

You're not allowing federal funds to flow to what we consider our priorities in the aggregate. It ends up shrinking.

And I also feel like just there are other priorities at the federal level around just some of these geopolitical things and what's going on with our debt and what's going on with the military and these kinds of things. And I think when push comes to shove, I think the Republicans are going to care more about that stuff than about this other education stuff.

And I think they feel as though your forms that they're releasing, you know, are, are ones that are their answer to why didn't you keep the funding at the same level? Whatever. We'll see if it, Yeah, I mean.

Look, purple thing, there's a black swan. All bets are off.

And there could be, I mean, we could, you know, like, there's, there's a number of situations around the world that could spiral out of control relatively quickly. You know, not just the situation with, in Taiwan, you've got India and Pakistan, you've got the Mideast.

So there's a, there's a number of ways things could, could spiral. And in that case, all bets are off. I think it's just, it's contingent on how, on, on Trump's numbers.

I just don't think Congress, the last thing they all still agree on, they like to spend money. And so I just think it's going to be, you know, I hope you, you might be right. I certainly hope not. But I, I, I have a hunch.

These guys have never had a lot of fiscal discipline. And if Trump's, you know, struggling politically, I don't think they're gonna, I don't think they're gonna get it now.

Okay, well, we should watch, we should come back and like, put this in Amber and come back and, and, yeah, let's see.

I mean, you know, where I wanted to go is somewhat, going full circle here. We're going to get to the state levels, and I think the state budgets are under pressure.

And I thought one of the most interesting articles that I saw was at the 74 about a month ago where Marguerite Rosa was. She's done all this analysis of how much time school districts spend on the budget.

And I mean, they get together once a month, they have these 15 hour meetings and they'll spend just a few minutes, just a few minutes on the financials.

And I think there are all sorts of reasons why that is the case, but I just think it reflects a broader reality that I think Marguerite was trying to drive home here, which is we're really not paying attention to the economics of our major urban school districts, really to all of public education, of course.

And when we're not paying attention to it and there are these problems that are eating at the very foundation of it and there are places where resources could be extracted, perhaps at a federal level, who knows? It just seems like such an uninformed basis.

I think the base thing is it's worth watching. If we have any kind of an economic downturn. I think it's really worth paying attention to the effects that could have on the states.

That, that's, that's. I think that's a more volatile situation. And then again, like, like I said, these guys don't huge uptick for cutting.

I'm not sure they have a huge appetite for increasing spending. So would you get the sort of countercyclical spending you usually get from Washington? Not with this Congress, probably not. So I don't know. It's.

There, there's a lot. But I think that's, you're, you're on to something there and the like.

It's hard to argue with Marguerite's point about the general fiscal dysfunction. I mean, I mean, seriously, I'm not trying to be put.

There's no, there's no accountability and, you know, expenditures equal revenue and like, in an environment like that, why would you pay attention to any of that stuff?

You're gonna, you know, when you're with the, you know, a lot of these large superintendents, they have to, they're just doing their politics and there's that. Yeah, the incentives to actually get serious on that other stuff are, are not great.

So I feel like I'm all doom and gloom on this call. Hey, can you, can you finish us up with a reason for optimism?

Anything you've come across that's really impressed you, excited you in all your travels here of late?

Well, I'll just say I don't want to, I don't want to give any spoilers. I don't watch.

But Bella Ramsey in Last of Us had just a fantastic line about optimism just in the fourth episode that was on the newest one as of when we're recording. Just had a absolutely very dark, very dark, but very funny line about optimism.

Well, come on, you're Gonna share it. Come on. I don't know.

Spoilers. No spoilers. I only watched it. My wife was like, you better catch up. Because, like, she doesn't even watch it. She hates violent shows.

But she's like, you better catch up or there's gonna be a spoiling. You're gonna be. You're gonna be unhappy. So. Cause for optimism. Look, I'm always optimistic until you. And until you're not.

Like, we, the American people, like, we. We often get it wrong, but then we get. We ultimately, in the long run, we get it right. And so I'm always like, I'm bullish. I'm bullish on. On America.

I'm bullish on the American people. I mean, these are not easy times. I don't mean to minimize it. I don't like how the government's being run. But like, I'm. I'm always fundamentally.

I'm fundamentally an optimist about this stuff. Over. Over time, you look at the arc of our country, like, over time. We always. We always.

It's not always as fast as anybody would want, as clean as linear, but we always. We always move in the right direction. I just think of, you know, I think the progress I've seen. I like to think I'm not that old.

The progress I've seen just in my lifetime. So, like, that's my. That's my general pitch. I got asked about this. We didn't ask with form at this on. At Harvard recently.

And I just feel like you can really get into all this presentism and get like. Like, in general, I mean, we're. Yeah, it's. It. I don't. Again, I don't want to minimize this. We're lucky to be alive at this time. Would you. Would you.

I mean, would you trade places with anybody in history?

Absolutely not. And I just.

I mean, I feel like let's get on the other side of this SCOTUS case because I actually feel like the charter school world could be a reason for optimism, but whatever. We also have this question mark hanging over us right now, so let's park that one.

But I also just feel like one of the ten most important discoveries in the history of humanity has happened in the last few years. I mean, there's nothing like artificial intelligence, and I don't know what it's going to be.

It's just so freaky and so weird to spend time with ChatGPT and find out how much smarter than us it is and how great a teacher it is. I have not learned as much Spanish anywhere as I've Learned talking to ChatGPT, the best tutor I ever had by far, by far.

And I just feel like it's just the beginning.

I saw that Israel just announced that, you know, it's a smaller country, it's more manageable, but every kid is going to have their own AI tutor in Israel next year. And I feel like yes, the haves and have nots around technology, you know, it's going to break in that direction like it always does.

But there's just something so foundational about it this time, you know, and, and, and so accessible to everyone that I don't know, it's, it's possible that learning can really accelerate.

It's exciting. I'm not as bullish as you are. I'm also not, I'm not as. There's some people who just think it's, it's all bad. I don't think that either.

But it's an okay tutor. It, it has its limitations by subject, type of learner and so forth.

I mean I use it for a lot of stuff too, like that, but you and I are adult learners, right? So it's different.

I, I, I am not yet convinced of its sort of unvarnished efficacy in the, in the classroom, even some of the, living up to some of the, the claims. And Bill Gates the other day said he thought like we wouldn't have teachers in 10 years.

And I'm like pretty confident that prediction will go the way all the other predictions about ed tech historically have gone. I do think in terms of the workplace and the economy and all that, it's going to have huge impact.

And coupled with sort of automation and so forth, I mean we have like a major jobs kind of issue coming because of some of the tasks that it can do and is quite good at. And I think in education it's going to have huge impact.

Some of the stuff we were talking about efficient, I mean, oh my God, turn it loose on urban, you know, a bunch of urban district functions, finance, efficiency, spending, transportation.

And it can find all sorts of like, it's, it's, it's, it's very effective and is gonna, you know, education sort of data 101 kind of revolutionized how we started to think about school. When you remember wasn't that long ago you couldn't compute graduation rates.

We had to estimate them because you couldn't, you couldn't get a, you know, you couldn't get a proper numerator and denominator to even like make that estimate. And so it's going to revolutionize that the way education data to some extent already has. But just that at another level, I am excited about that.

I think it's good. I think it's going to bring us back to a very, very central question, which is how curious are people? How curious are our young people? And.

And if that. If you can maintain a posture of curiosity, you know, such that the thing teaches you and you get smarter rather than you're not curious.

I don't give a damn about this stuff. Please do it for me so my brain can like go back to me.

Well, that productive struggle is a problem with it and that's a concern about how it learns is productive. Struggle is important. That's how. That's one of the ways we learn. It's one of the limitations of it. It does make things really easy.

And I mean, look, the Internet we're struggling through politically and in life. What has happened when you sort of de. Emphasize knowledge and emphasize.

You can just look stuff up randomly and you get decontextualized facts like that is part of the problem with our politics right now is it's being. It's being fueled by that. So I think kids are naturally curious. I have no.

And I think they stake one of the great tragedies of our public education system and our education system in general. Frankly, bubble pride water is. It's very effective at beating the curiosity out of them over the course of the years.

So I'm less concerned about that than I am this issue of product. How you actually learn stuff is really important. And the quest for sort of efficiency and fast could minimize that. And we're already seeing.

I mean, I don't know, we're seeing the generation of kids who didn't have to get knowledge or was told they can look it up and it shows up in sort of writing analysis, all of that. It's not great education. I'm actually concerned a little different than you that we won't have that the digital divide will be.

The affluent will continue to get really good authentic instruction and it'll be like let, you know, let Claude teach the kids kind of thing. And that'll be really bad for poor kids. It'll be more efficient, they'll get more of that and that they will lose out on those.

Because like one other thing that's been true for a very long time is like that teacher student.

We haven't figured out how to replicate or really effectively duplicate that there's something to that interaction as humans and we fuck with that at Our peril.

Yeah, well, charterfunk's been going for five years and looking forward to the next five. And I think the next five years.

Congratulations, Jeff. That's a big deal. That's the real big deal.

It's really cool. I mean, I was at a national gathering and I was just struck by, by, jeez. Everybody was talking about CharterFolk.

They reference CharterFolk all the times. But you know, I was going to bring it more back to our boards meeting in July.

And we got a plan for the next five years and I think we're going to see more change in public education in that five year period that we've, that we've seen maybe forever. And you know, to have you as a, as a thought buddy through all of this, hey, once a month. I mean, somebody I can process all this stuff.

Stuff with, you know, I'm just grateful for the time we spent together and the relationship we've built and the fact that we're going to keep talking about these issues for, for years to come now.

Yeah, no, thanks. I really enjoy this a lot and five years. I'm really impressed. I didn't know, I didn't know it had been. I knew it had been a couple years. That, that.

And yet I agree with you. I think it's gonna be a very fast.

I don't disagree about the pace of change and I do think it'll be good, as you said, to get the one thing with the Supreme Court case just getting a little bit of clarity on it one way or the other. Well then, you know, once you know what's going on, then, then you can, then you can plan.

All right, well, listen, take care till next month.

You too.

Okay, bye.