Can't take yes for an answer: what the teachers' unions and DeSantis have in common.

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

• Can’t say yes to equity and excellence (00:01:10)
• Can’t say yes to providing parents with timely access to results or resources and tools to support their kids in mitigating pandemic learning losses (00:08:42)
• Can’t say yes to improving the way we teach history and civics (00:18:59)
• Can’t say yes to academic freedom and the full exchange of ideas (00:28:28)
• Can’t say yes to what is best for kids as a core value of collective bargaining (00:35:28)

Notes:

• Economist article about math reforms in San Francisco that have generated neither excellence or equity.
• Emerging Democratic Majority book by John B. Judis
• Recent NYT article about Ruy Teixeira and his views on the modern positioning of the Democratic Party on key issues
• The Meritocracy Trap by Daniel Markovitz
• NYT Op-ed by Tom Kane and Sean Reardon about parents not knowing how far behind their kids are.
• EdSource commentary by Steve Rees and David Osborne about the weakness of California’s new school dashboard
• The 74 article about dropping NAEP Civics results
• The Righteous Mind, Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt, 
• Tweet from Tom Loveless about the politicizing of NAEP releases
• Atlantic article by Conor Friedersdorf about recently passed Florida laws likely being deemed unconstitutional 
• Hemmingway quote (not Buffett) about going bankrupt gradually, then suddenly.

Hey Andy.

Hey, Jed.

How are you?

I'm doing terrific.

Great to see you again.

It's great to see you.

How's it been the last few weeks?

Busy, but good.

And I have to say, my optimism is actually increasing, I think there's

a lot of good stuff going on in ed reform, which I hope we can touch

upon some of those things today.

Yeah.

I think today we might touch on, there's good and bad, but yeah.

It's a busy time, there is a lot of stuff going on, particularly some

of the work you do is real close to the ground, some of the work we

do is real close to the ground, and that's what gives you the energy.

Yeah.

It's getting close to the operators, getting close to the advocates I think,

at least on the charter side, the closer that you get right now, you actually see

there's a lot more progress happening than perhaps the general public is aware of.

Yeah, totally.

And also just like anytime you can get in and around schools and

kids, it just gives you energy.

That was always my strategy on bad days, just try to find a place you can go read

to kids or just hang out at the school.

And it kinda makes you feel a little bit better about things.

So hey, we've managed to get through I think three episodes of this

podcast not ever saying the name, so we should: this is the Wonky Folk

Podcast, and I'm Andy Rotherham.

And I'm Jed Wallace.

Thanks for listening.

Jed, on our last one, I think we talked about how the Economist has

just been like hitting the cover off the ball on education coverage.

Just great stuff.

And I have not read the most recent issue, but you said there's an

article in there that caught your eye.

Yeah, I think The Economist is really interesting for a lot of reasons.

I just love the kind of outsider perspective, although, the Economist

has gotten so sucked into the American mainstream that they sometimes

lose that European orientation on our work, but still, I just

find them a very great pressure tester of some assumptions I have.

And the last article that they issued around education was around math reform

and in San Francisco, and they were really talking about how the quest for

equity by getting rid of AP classes and accelerated classes and having everyone

come together in the same class is actually not doing anybody any favors.

It's not helping the accelerated students, it's not helping those that are far

behind, but also just from an equity standpoint, they don't really see that

those models of schooling are resulting in kids ending up staying together anyway.

So it throws into question the whole math change that we've

seen in a lot of different places in the last five or six years.

And it also reminds me a lot of my High Tech High days because we had this

notion of common intellectual mission.

We didn't want to ability track, we didn't want to separate kids

into different groups of learners.

And so we ended up keeping all kids together and I think in some ways

High Tech High really changed the national discussion, or at least

influenced the national discussion on common intellectual mission.

But the thing that I think was lost in all of that was that while High Tech

High kept all the kids together in the same classes, they really specialized in

teaching to the individual student and allowing the most accelerated student to

get even more accelerated and to obviously remediate for those that needed it.

And I just think this is another example of, "is it one thing?, is it equity?

Or is it excellence?".

You have these binary options that are presented to us and when we

choose one or the other, we lose the common sense middle that I think we

just have to keep front and center for Ed reformers whenever we can.

Yeah, that makes sense.

And I think teachers also don't get a lot of support in training

and sort of, we talk a lot about differentiated instruction, things

like that, they don't actually get training and even having a theory of

action around like what level are you going to pitch to in the classroom?

How are you going to help struggling kids catch up?

This is stuff that teachers generally have to get on the job, you're not getting

it in a lot of teacher prep programs.

And so your article though reminds me of Ruy Teixeira, he's a

democratic, political demographer.

He wrote that book the Emerging Democratic Majority a while ago and more recently

has been sort of pushing the Democratic party on sort of culture issues and

so forth, and he had a piece about this issue in terms of merit and how

Democrats are increasingly not perceived as the party of merit, and the political

consequences that can flow from that.

And I think it that article resonated with me because one of the really interesting

things you saw in 2021, in the Glenn Youngkin election, was how many immigrant

parents and so forth were very frustrated with efforts to either restrict access to

advanced classes, stuff around selective high school, sort of all of this.

And to your point a second ago about reformers: I think the same thing's true.

Like, often the Democrats get caught up in this "are we for

equity, are we for excellence?"

And they become kind of all thumbs in ways that really alienate parents.

And what the point of Ruy's article, -- and I'Il put in the show notes -- was,

across all kinds of lines of difference, this idea of merit and excellence and

so forth is actually really popular and that there's an opportunity then to

use that as a way to advance education reform, make sure kids are getting

what they need to succeed and so forth.

But if you are seen as being against that, or if you actually are against that

with some of these policies, there's a price you're going to pay with parents.

Yeah.

I was regretting that our last recording, I forgot the name of Daniel Markovits,

who wrote this book, the Meritocracy Trap, and I think it's really an interesting

book, not one that I would say I agree with all of its findings, because it

basically lurches very far into the anti meritocracy, far left -- almost

San Francisco orientation toward things.

But the thing I think he does show that's very compelling is that the upper middle

class and the wealthy have figured out how important education is and they do

an incredibly great job of educating just their own kids and changing the

entire public education system such that those that are focused on meritocracy

get the great education that they need.

And so, it's just something that we have to keep front and center and keep pushing

because I think there are ways for us to push for all kids accessing more rigorous

instruction without compromising on equity and some of the other things that

are front and center for us these days.

But San Francisco just provides another just shiny example

of things just gone too far.

And we'll see what happens to San Francisco itself.

But for the rest of the country, I think, as the Economist presents for

us, there's a lot for us to learn here.

Yeah, I'm looking forward to reading that.

And look, we saw this in the election with the school board, right?

Like parents, even in San Francisco, parents have their breaking points, and

that should have been sort of a wake up call that you need to be careful about how

you approach these issues, and you need to remember where people are and not get

caught up too much in sort of politics that are really out of the mainstream.

The San Francisco experience I thought was just remarkable, in what happened there,

and also remarkable and those lessons seem to have still bounced off a lot of places.

Oh yeah, absolutely.

Well, I'll look forward to returning to this issue because I do think

that meritocracy and militancy from teachers unions together provide,

you know, when the upper middle class liking their separate education co

partner with the teacher union to keep a status quo in place, it's

very formidable, a political power.

And for me, the only way I can see us going forward is not to defeat it

outright, but to basically have something that is there for the meritocracy folk

and for the militancy folk, right?

We show them that ed reform is not actually a zero sum game, but it's

something that all boats can rise.

But it's also incumbent upon us Ed reformers just to be presenting

our work in different terms.

Definitely.

And there was a time not that long ago where Ed Reform was and was seen as

very disruptive around these issues.

Ed reformers have sort of allowed themselves to be painted into a corner in

terms of what they're about and so forth.

And there's probably some pretty serious conversations to be had

about getting back to that Ed reform.

Back in, in the early aughts for example, was highly disruptive

around accountability policies and so forth focused on the kids who were

most underserved and sort of really disruptive politics around that and

we've kind of gotten away from that.

Yeah, I thought on the second article I was thinking about bringing you up

today, was this the Kane editorial Op-Ed in the New York Times where he was really

talking about the parents not being aware of just how far their kids are behind,

and Paul Vallas, his first public gesture after losing the race in Chicago really

comes out and advocates for accountability systems and transparency systems so that

parents actually have the information.

The question I have for you Andy is how much do you think the question is, do

parents know how far behind their kids are, or have we gotten to the point where

maybe parents actually know but they're being trained not even to care anymore?

Do you have any view on that?

Because, it's sobering when you start thinking that maybe they

don't care as much as they used to.

Well, my first view is, you just referred as the Kane Paper,

I like that this is Tom Kane.

He's an economist at Harvard.

I like that he's reached sort of Madonna or Prince like, that's one name Kane.

So yeah, Tom Kane, he is a terrific, wonderful person

and just a terrific analyst.

Great researcher.

Yeah, absolutely.

I thought that Op-Ed was sobering.

I was glad the times ran it, we need to get more attention on this, we

still really are having arguments about how much this stuff matters

and learning loss and all of that.

That's a real reality on the ground, so people need to keep beating that drum.

I go back and forth on this.

I tend to be in the camp that, to the extent parents don't

care, it's cause they're unaware.

Most people want good things for their kids and so forth.

And then there's obviously some cognitive dissonance.

You don't want to think about your own kid being really far behind.

I know as a parent, like I think about things, I'm like, "oh man,

it's like hard to get my head around like mistakes you made" and so forth.

That's real.

But I think mostly parents want what's best, they are struggling to get

good information on what's going on.

There's not a lot of states...

are not, we're still fighting, in your state, California, it's still

throwing circles around when test results are going to come out and

how they're going to be reported.

New Jersey sat on results for a long time and there was no sort of outcry that,

like why would particularly like, it's a state led by a Democratic governor.

The party that reports to be for the little guy, why would

they be sitting on this data?

And one of the reasons cynically, I think, is it showed the charter schools

had really done a particularly good job on average, around some of this.

But what, for whatever reason, why is this data not getting out there?

And so parents are kind of left confused, and meanwhile they're just

trying to live their lives, right?

They're not the wonks that are like, "Hey, when's the data is going to be released?

What's going on?"

But parents, they're not sort of on the edge of their seat about that.

Life goes on, they're living their life.

And so I think a lot of it is, we just have not communicated very clearly.

This is a really serious situation, not for every kid, but for a lot of kids, you

need to figure out what's going on and here are resources and tools, and then

here are resources and tools for remedies.

And I think some states have done a good job with this, but I think just overall,

We have not had that kind of attention.

And to the extent, like the public debate, you look at the last couple

of weeks it's been this like, whatever version this is of the sort of Randi

Weingarden School closure debate has been what's consumed everybody's attention.

And they dragged her up to the hill for that hearing.

There wasn't a whole lot of talk about like, "what do we do now?

What does this mean?"

It was just like, "let's fight about 2020 again?"

And I think we need to figure out how do we sort of bring people together.

We should give a shout out to learning heroes who are, you know,

they're out there doing, trying to do public awareness work on this.

They're doing actually advertising campaigns, billboards, and so forth.

There's people trying stuff, but it's just not from our political

leadership, we're just not getting the kind of concerted effort that we need.

And I can tell you like just in Virginia, one state, every time we bring this

up, every time the governor brings it up, and the state board does anything,

you get a bunch of pushback about.

"t's a manufactured crisis," and so forth.

And we have the biggest NAEP drops of any state, that's not Virginia data, that's

national data, our own data confirms that.

But it turns into this political fight rather than "okay, like what now?"

kind of conversation.

So anyway, that's my read.

I know, I think you think a little...

you're starting to worry a little bit more and have some sleepless nights

that maybe people actually don't care.

I'm saying that a subset of people, the meritocracy folks, they'd

care and they know exactly where their kids are and they're in contact with

their private schools and maybe, upper middle class public schools that are

segregated out from other kids and they know, and they really care, because

they know that the wellbeing of their children depends on they are strong

in these foundational skill levels.

But I think across a growing percentage of the public education establishment,

I think there's more and more indifference or, perhaps they've been

convinced that these indicators aren't as important as social-emotional

health or whatever it may be.

And I'm not downplaying how important social-emotional health is.

But when you look at the dashboard in California of the garbley gook of whatever

it is, 16 indicators multiplied times 6.

It's incoherent, no one can know.

And in Chicago, they just adopted another one of these multiple measured pieces of

garbley gook that mean absolutely nothing.

And it could be that they're doing it in the face of parrots

that are saying, "oh, no, no, no.

You're denying me the access to what I really want to know", but I, we don't

see that really emerging anywhere.

And so, I feel like we may have to go through this cycle of people seeing

the skill levels of their kids get dropped so significantly that we'll

start to see the rebound at that point.

But at this point, I can't say I see early indications of that rebound.

Yeah,

the one thing to bear in mind, I guess on this is the public school

establishment, I mean, they approach all this stuff as a public relations problem.

I remember a superintendent once who, there was a sort of real big

reveal in the local paper that they'd basically been lying about

their graduation rates and so forth.

The superintendent was like, "we have to obviously get on top of this

and we're going to make sure there's never a news story like this again."

Right?

These people are public relationists sort of at heart often, and I get

it, because they're like, we have to preserve this institution, we have to

keep support for public schools, so you have to tell a good story and so forth.

And I've always been much more in the sort of just be a realist about achievement

and you can bring people along and you can show them leadership and there's

a theory of action there, but, so a lot of this is approached as a public

relations exercise and you sort of see that, it's how do we tell the story?

How do we point to the good stuff?

We don't want people to be demoralized and this kind of thing.

And so like that you see that reflected in a lot of the communications.

And so it's also, I think it's understandable that parents would

not realize the extent of some of the extent of some of these challenges.

And it's also, it's a hard problem to think about.

There's some stuff coming out of Macke Raymond's been vocal on this.

She's out at Stanford has been real vocal on the pace of catch up is not sufficient.

So there's also people are worried cause it's not as there is not like an easy

vaccine here or something like that.

Yeah I, well look, this is where my cynicism comes out and I just feel like

there are broad comparison points that can sometimes start to change public

opinion when we have some big foreign threat, that relates to education.

"Oh, we're following behind the Russians, we're following behind, the

Chinese, Japanese," whatever it may be.

Oh, okay.

We have to get our acts together.

I don't really think that we have some international comparison point

that's going to change the discussion.

I think the one that actually is going to change the discussion is when the

affluent and the elite kids, when their separation gets to be so pronounced from

what we're seeing in the rest of society, it's going to be a sobering moment.

But we've have to figure out a way, how do we make that emerging divergence

in skill levels of children and young adults even more apparent to people.

Yeah.

I don't know if I agree, though.

That gap has been there.

I think this is part of the problem, right?

When you talk to the meritocracy as you described, when you talk to

people who they think the kids where the schools aren't doing well, they

think they're like a little bit behind, it's probably not as good.

People don't realize you're talking about high school students reading at

like low elementary school levels and doing math at that level and so forth.

And I think that gap is like already there.

It's because we're already a fairly just segregated society in terms of where

people socialize, recreate, mix, all of that, people just aren't generally

aware of the extent of these gaps now.

Yeah.

But I think the general, I mean, whatever, there's so much variety in public opinion,

whatever, but I think there's a vast swath that assumes that all kids, rich and

poor, have suffered through this somewhat equally and we've seen a drop across them

all, and I don't think that's the case.

Right.

Yeah, I don't think that the Kane data and some other stuff...

and actually we can talk about the, Nate, you saw this on all the NAEP day that

keeps coming out --and it's now showing up on the history and civics data that

just came out earlier this month-- it's the kids for who are already furthest

from opportunity are hardest hit.

And I think you're right.

People aren't getting their head around that.

Yeah.

Let's pivot to this NAEP civic stuff.

You had talked to me earlier this week about your concerns on this.

Get me started.

Where are you thinking on this?

What's your thinking on this?

Well, it turns out we don't know a lot about history and civics.

What's interesting, it's a longstanding thing.

I found the reaction to it actually more interesting than the results.

The results on these tests haven't been good for a long time, and it

would've been kind of surprising.

The story would've been if they coming out of covid, if like they somehow were really

good, that would've been interesting.

It was more the reaction and almost like the unseriousness of it.

Like immediately, you know, Miguel Cardona, the Secretary of Education,

put out a statement where he just lumped in all this culture war stuff and you

were like, and then yeah, you had all these people who were tying themselves

in knots that he wasn't making causal claims but it's like, well then...

I think he missed a real opportunity for leadership.

But then like two days later, three days later, whatever, like Betsy

DeVos comes out with a statement and she's blaming a set of other things.

And the weird thing, these really low and unacceptable results on history and civics

predate both of their tenures, right?

Nobody has to, from the Trump administration or the Biden

administration has to own these things.

They're a much more longstanding problem.

And so it was just kind of interesting.

We have this situation where I think it's fair to say a lot of kids who are

graduating from high school couldn't pass the test we require of new citizens.

They don't know some basic knowledge.

And there was just sort of an unserious response when we know right in front

of us some real causes for this.

We don't teach this stuff, we don't spend enough time on it

and we don't teach the content.

And we're still sort of failing to talk about that.

I'm a big fan of Jonathan Haidt the guy that wrote, has written several

books, but his book, The Righteous Mind from 2015, where he really talks about the

metaphor of the elephant and the rider.

The elephant is your intuition, the rider is your intellectual ability,

and everybody wants to say that they are governed by their rider.

They are making their decisions based upon all the new data that's coming in.

But really when you unpack it, we're all guided by our intuition.

And so we're all guided by our elephants and whenever NAEP comes

out, all I see at that moment is all the elephants come together into

just a pack of pachyderms, right?

And they just run in their direction and say whatever the heck they want,

that aligns with their intuition or with their political agenda.

And I think it's important that we have NAEP.

Absolutely.

For Pete's sake, we have to have NAEP.

But the fact that we can draw no causal connection to anything, within NAEP

just speaks to, it's not sufficient.

We have to have more data so that we can start to make causal connections.

Otherwise all of our pontificating on these ed reform issues or whatever is just

going to end up in cacophony for forever.

Well, NAEP's a treasure trove of data.

You get all this data, they survey students, you get all this data on

what kids are up to and all this.

I think it's more like so many things, like the winners always sort

of mono causality and it tends to be that cause tends to like curiously

completely align with whatever anyone's priors are on anything.

NAEP isn't causal and we should be careful, when you look at it in total

and contextually you can start like if you look at the way we teach history in

civics and then you look at the results, like I think a reasonable person can

crosswalk and make some inferences there for perhaps why we're seeing

those results, and it's not the kids.

The debate becomes highly political.

Tom Loveless, who is a longtime analyst of NAEP, you know Tom, he thinks that with

the way we're doing the releases now, that this is like the way it's going to be,

I sort of hope he is wrong about that.

Some folks have sort of pushed back and been like, no, we're

going to handle this and make it.

But like Tom's kind of thinking that this sort of politicalization of every

release is sort of going to be the new normal, which would be unfortunate.

One thing about the civics component to NAEP is that I tend to encourage

us to focus most of our testing...

for me, like I've written that piece around the eight words that

define a high quality school.

And those are schools that positively affect the rate at which children learn.

Positively affect the rate.

And when it comes down to that, usually I want to think about

basic literacy and basic numeracy.

Are you accelerating growth in those two areas?

And then what happens is when you start testing all the different curricular

areas, now the testing regime gets to be so big, we create the option for the other

side to start attacking over- testing.

On the other hand, if you only test in basic literacy and numeracy then

you're open to the accusation that, "oh, you're narrowing the curriculum

to only care about those things".

Do you have any idea about what's a good balance here for us to be focusing on?

I think this was something the civics and and history results put

up, particularly the history results.

You have to ask when people are like we're teaching reading and we can't teach

history or social studies, you have to ask them, what are these kids reading?

And the answer is, honestly, often really low level garbage.

Good schools can combine these and we know that like you need a knowledge

rich curriculum that the knowledge is a predicate for learning, it's

predicate for literacy and reading.

And so I think good schools sort of tie this together and don't get

caught up in this false choice.

The problem is we just don't have as many of them.

And I think we talked an episode or two ago about, like this new study on

Core Knowledge schools was a lottery study of charters, in the Denver

area using core knowledge, and not surprisingly much better results.

Yeah.

Well, my sense is that, I've been trying to keep track of how

many school visits I've made.

I'm definitely north of 850 and I'm thinking, well, the next

5 to 10 years, but what I make sure I get to a thousand, right?

But the reason I made these visits is what you pointed out at the beginning of

the episode, which is just, the closer that you get, the more you realize you

remember the work and you can just come out with a little spring in your step.

But that also, it gives, it gave me a chance to observe a lot of things in

charter schools and other schools as well.

And there certainly were during the NCLB days a subset, a fairly

small subset of charters that really pressure cooked focused on the reading

and math that would bump up, their API scores, at least in California.

But generally that's not what happened.

Generally, the charter schools were standing on their heads and using every

everything that the kids were passionate about to increase the basic scores.

But in the traditional public school system, in the school

districts, that's where we absolutely saw the narrowing happen.

And I also think that the teacher unions, they recognize that if they continue to

push into that narrowing, they were going to get more allies from parents, so even

though it was counterproductive for the kids learning in the short term, they

chose that from a political standpoint.

And I don't think we've gotten outta that cul-de-sac yet.

We could do a whole episode on sort of the passive aggressive

responses to policies that people don't like to effectively sabotage them.

So like during No Child Left Behind you saw places where canceling field trips

and stuff because of budget reasons.

But everybody's just like, "oh, it's the testing", and that could

be a whole episode that we could do.

And we could call it like the passive aggressive episode.

We could do like a whole thing.

I think you are right about that.

I also think it's just, it is a lack of capacity and I think one of the mistakes

that was made with no Child Left Behind it, I was certainly guilty of this, was

this assumption that if we started to put in place the accountability, it would

create the context and conditions where states would invest, you'd build capacity.

And instead you did get a little bit of the beatings will

continue to morale improves.

And so schools were doing unproductive things cuz they

just didn't know any better.

They didn't have better strategies.

And that's a place where I think we do have to think about how

do you build that capacity.

And that's where some of this more systemic reformers who were the broader

standards based reform, they always talked about this, and I think some,

it was easy to be dismissive of that.

Again, I think that was the thing I was guilty of.

And it turns out like, they had a really good point that schools were going

to react in counterproductive ways.

We've certainly seen that.

Yeah.

They learned one of the best strategies against all boats

rise is sabotage your own ship.

And I think we've seen that played out on several fronts.

But in terms of like, I don't know, sure if this is passive aggressivity,

but it's certainly reactionary.

Walk me through what's going on with DeSantis and some of his latest stuff

because all this stuff seems like I do something because I've seen the other side

do something that's even more ridiculous.

Where are we?

I don't even know that it's that.

I mean, so education has sort of been dragged into this because it's an issue.

I'm not actually sure, it's hard to tell with a guy like Ron

DeSantis does, how strong his opinions about education even are.

But he clearly gets, it's a convenient political cudgel so, higher ed

and K12 are getting dragged in.

I think it's more, he doesn't seem to have sort of any limiting principle.

He just doesn't seem like a guy who will take yes for an answer.

And so he's done some stuff that's actually more popular than

people realize politically, but then he doesn't stop there and he

just goes and takes it further.

And you see it on sort of issue after issue.

And it's kind of an unattractive way to practice politics.

And the week we're recording this, they just passed a whole bunch of new laws,

several of which are just clearly not going to pass Constitutional muster.

Some of the stuff done it's already in court and DeSantis, he's a lawyer, he

is clearly smart enough to know that.

And so it's this sort of political theater with no limiting principle and I think

it's aimed sometimes less at the Democrats and just how far can I push this stuff

with, to make a name for myself within my own party, but it's causing chaos.

It's causing you real wreckage in some cases, and it's just turning education

into this complete sort of culture war foil for what seems like sort

of electoral theater in large part.

To what extent do you think that education's challenges long-term are a

function of the fact that, from a public policy standpoint, it's just a canvas

for people to make their statements and their statements always undermine

consistency, coherence, long-term strengthening, whatever it may be.

And that as long as we keep our public schools in a circumstance

where they are the primary canvas for these kinds of political gestures.

We're not long going to, we're not going to see the kind of improvement we want.

Well, I think actually at the rate we're going with this stuff,

you're going to see more and more people want to just pull out of the

public schools, for different reasons.

I think that's more the direction that goes.

And it will become, because you're seeing like now...

and on the pronoun thing is interesting where, I think...

a lot of people like you don't want to do coercive things, and so telling

people they have to say things that they don't believe and so forth,

particularly kids in a public space is a First Amendment issue there.

But it's different with employees of the school system.

We, teachers engage in coerced speech all the time: it's why you

can't teach that the earth is flat.

You can't, like we have a curriculum.

You can't teach both sides of the Holocaust.

We have teachers do this, and now DeSantis is starting to push on this

and no teachers have, we're going to say that agents of the state can and

can't say certain things and so forth.

If that's struck down it's theater, if that's upheld, it will unravel

the public schools because the whole enterprise is predicated on this idea.

And I think people have been a little dismissive, like," oh, that stuff

will never happen" and so forth.

But that's where we are, that's where they're pushing down there.

So that's the first thing.

And then I think the second, that's just interesting to me, Jed, with

education, part of the thing that I think is going to run into some trouble

in the courts, is they want to out...

States have more control over schools than people realize.

So they can say, "Hey, we're not going to have degrees in this".

That's actually under your purview as a state.

But they went much further than that and said, well, also you can't

teach certain theories and so forth, and that's going to be contested.

And I feel like you have to strike a balance.

Academic freedom and inquiry is important in this, and the whole scientific process

is different ideas getting tested and accepted and rejected and so forth.

And we should be very cautious when we get to the point where we're

like, we're not even gonna allow you to engage in certain theories.

First of all, it's a little medieval, but it's also just counterproductive, right?

It's interesting and we're seeing this where this plays out more substantively,

K-12 is we're moving, I think, and this is a good thing to acquire

you, teacher prep program science of reading in a way based on the evidence.

But you don't want to get into a situation, if you're a professor at an

ed school, you can't criticize science of reading, you can't say that you think

there's merit, the whole language, there's a distinction between actually training

and certifying teachers and sort of the academic freedom to continue to pursue

different kinds of theories and so forth.

So I think there's a lot happening here around these things and it does,

I think, put pressure on some pretty important things, including like just

the role of academia as inefficient and everything else as it can be, to have

that role of being a place where you still have like real free exchange of ideas.

So I think Florida is hopefully not sort of coming attractions on what

this is going to look like, but if this style of politics works,

politics is a monkey see monkey do business, so we'll see more of it.

Yeah.

I think we've just had generations of, there's really been no other option

and the political wars on the public education canvas have not been as

extreme, but you put the two things together, the wars are more extreme,

that canvas is as in attractive as it's ever been and parents have options

to just like, get out, forget it.

This is just completely and utterly dysfunctional, puts the education

establishment in a fundamentally different place, I think at risk and

we'll see what happens between now and the end of the decade, but we

can see a significant increase in the number of parents that choose to

educate their kids in private settings.

Yeah, and it'll be interesting because my theory on this right

now is you've got like 10 to 15% of people on the left and 10 to 15% of

people on the right who are going to struggle to be in public schools.

They can't be in community with others because of just these

strong beliefs that they have.

And it will be ironic if instead of those people needing to go to private

schools, so they can get the different things that they want, it ends up

being this hollowing out of the middle cuz people are sick of the political

theater and this kind of thing, would be sort of an ironic turn of events.

So let's bounce it back.

We've gone left, right.

We started in the Bay area.

We went to Florida.

Now I don't want to bounce back to the Bay Area, into Oakland.

Let's wrap it up there.

This is your backyard Jed.

Tell us, what's the matter with Oakland?

Well, the thing is, I wrote about this at CharterFolk for so long that

no one wants to hear me start on this.

So let's, let me start with you.

As a person observing from a distance, what do you make of the strike?

What do you make of the resolution?

What do you make of the idea that the teachers are advocating on not just

their own issues, but on the common good.

Any starting point analysis of that?

Yeah, look, it told me Ron DeSantis does not have a monopoly

on political theater, right?

There was no the strike was clearly avoidable.

They clearly wanted to strike.

It was a membership engagement thing, to make a point.

We're seeing more and more strikes like that.

Everybody got what they wanted except the kids who lost untold learning and so

forth, how their education's disrupted.

Kids in Oakland, who can least afford it.

And so the whole thing's unfortunate, I thought.

And the common good bargaining, it's a fancy way of saying anything goes

and it just expands the universe.

It's completely preposterous and why people don't just be like,

well that seems preposterous.

We should be focusing...

if you're going to bargain, you should be focusing on these core issues,

not this expansive definition of it.

And you saw this during the pandemic when the teachers in LA.

At one point the union down there was like, we'll go back, one of

our conditions for going back is a moratorium on charter schools, which

I mean is obviously like you can be for or against a moratorium on charter

schools, but as like a covid policy, that's obviously completely absurd.

And you know that this sort of expansion, there aren't enough people just to be

like, "Hey, this is ridiculous", and we're so sort of hardened as a partisan matter

that when you say this is ridiculous, people are like, "oh, then you must be

like a union buster Republican", when in fact like the median position is, this

is kind of ridiculous, but too few people are willing to sort of get out there

and the kids are taking on the chin.

So that's my, that's my read that the whole thing was theater and avoidable.

And I was stunned that like folks like Lakeisha Young and so forth, who

were out there arguing against this, trying to get kids back to school,

that there was not more national attention on them and their efforts.

Yeah, I thought Lakeisha did an awesome job.

And when the Los Angeles Unified Strike was recently resolved, I tried

to show how there was virtually no difference substantively between

where the parties were before the strike and where they were after.

So what was this thing all about?

Same thing in Oakland.

From a substantive standpoint, there's no difference, and the union

was on these common good things.

They were negotiating over procedural things, make a committee and it

has representatives of the teacher union and certain numbers, and but

there's no substance there, right?

They have majority control of the board of the whole USD to begin with, right?

They're not even getting any substantive progress on there it matters.

So I just think these things, they again shake the confidence of parents

and the general public that our public schools are on the right track, or

are anything other than completely and utterly broken and something that

you wanna avoid if at all possible.

And they're just folks, whether it's DeSantis, maybe he hears that

--he just keeps doing his stuff with impunity-- the teachers union in

Oakland and in Chicago and in Los Angeles, they may hear that, but they

keep doing their stuff with impunity.

And it just it reminds me of Warren Buffett talking about bankruptcies, right?

Bankruptcies happen very, very, very slowly and then all at once.

I thought that was Hemingway.

Yeah.

Oh really?

It may.

Well, I don't know.

I think it's on The Sun Aso Rises.

We'll put in the show notes.

All right.

Okay.

Good.

Well, Buffett probably said it too.

So it seems right.

All right.

just that I think we are making incremental

damage to our public education efforts that are really putting us

at risk and it's a time for us to be more sober if at all possible,

in terms of looking at these things.

Yeah.

A little less theater and a little more sort of...

Again, I think the media has a role to play in that and

is falling down on the job.

And I think leaders in our sector have a role to play in

that and are too frequently...

the tribe has allure and the comfort of the tribal politics is real and it's

hard for people to step out and say, "now this is nonsense and we can do better".

And like Oakland seemed like that seemed like nonsense, and

really unfortunate nonsense.

Well, on that sobering note we'll have to make a mental note to start off

with some positivity on the next call.

But always does my heart good to see you, Andy.

Yeah, great to see you, Jed.

You smartened me up.

Likewise.

I look forward to talking to you in another couple weeks.

Yeah, me too.

See you.