Andy and Jed talk about the evolving landscape of education policy and its implications for both K-12 and higher education. They discuss recent developments, the complexities introduced by political dynamics and regulatory changes, the challenges faced by educational institutions, the impact of immigration on the workforce, and the necessity for reform in response to society's shifting needs.

Jed and Andy also explore the potential consequences of the Supreme Court's decisions on charter schools and the broader implications for educational equity and access. Ultimately, they assert the importance of fostering resilient educational systems that can adapt effectively to the demands of an ever-changing world. They wrap things up by wondering what kind of swag they should give listeners. What's your vote?

Takeaways:

• The conversation between Andy Rotherham and Jed Wallace delves into the complexities surrounding higher education and charter schools.
• Both speakers express concern over the current state of higher education, emphasizing the need for a reevaluation of its economic model.
• Rotherham highlights the troubling dependency of higher education institutions on federal funding and its implications for autonomy.
• Wallace shares a poignant story about former students overcoming challenges, illustrating the transformative power of education in the face of adversity.

Notes:

• Dana Goldstein at NYT on college for all:
• BPC Commission on the American Workforce
• Emily Yoffe at the Atlantic about Race and Sexual Assault Cases on College Campuses
• Education at Economic Mobility - Ron Haskins at Brookings.
• Eduwonk on the Trump EO event
• Klein's interview with David Shor at the NYT about post-election polling.
• Abundance book by Klein and Thompson
• Why Nothing Works book by Dunkelman
• Shapiro on Bill Maher
• Gavin Newsom Takes Criticism About His New Podcast
• CharterFolk post - Graph of Century.
• Margaret Spellings Comment on Department of Education 
• Oklahoma Governor's comments on audit of Tulsa schools
• Eduwonk post - Religious charter schools
• College is worth it - especially if you are low-income (Time article)

Good to see you.

Good to see you too. Since I saw you last, I mean, you are like a podcast phenomenon. I mean, I see.

I can't even keep up with all the great conversations you're having here. And now you show up, you got a jacket on, you got a collar shirt on, you got a new background. I mean, dude, you're going legit on the year.

I don't know.

I don't know. I don't know. I don't know about any of that. But yeah, there's been a lot going on. What I've been doing.

I've just been traveling a ton since I last saw you. I've been. I've been all over the place. Out west, New Orleans, all through New England.

And I got a little bit of time off and I got a little time in Colorado with one of my kids skiing. So what have you been up to?

Hey, I've been traveling a lot, too. I was in. After I was in dc, I got to Colorado and have been doing a lot of work in. In various places a lot of times. A lot of work in Texas right now.

A lot of interesting stuff, you know, going on in. In. In Delaware even, and, and Tennessee.

So there's a lot of good stuff going on in charter folk, these at Charter World these days, but also just craziness in the space.

Texas is just such an interesting state right now. Like, it's going in so many directions. Some that are really interesting, some that are concerning. Like, all.

It was like a bundle of contradictions and it's like, not exactly clear how it plays out and yet. And people are like moving there in droves. It's really interesting.

Fascinating, for sure. And then I'll be writing about this later. I had an amazing weekend.

I had students from Hooper Avenue that I had 25 years ago got together for reunion, had me come down. So I got to see a half dozen students, one teacher that we worked with all this time. And to hear these amazing, amazing stories, Andy, it's just so.

Yes, say a little bit more about that. What was that like for you?

It's incredible. I just, you know, these.

These kids have come through such challenges and a lot of them, about half ended up getting undergraduate degrees and others are on the cusp of finally finishing. They're all in. In strong relationships. They have kids, they found ways to buy houses.

One student is still living right near Hooper Avenue, so she is still renting. But it's just amazing to hear how they've pushed through so many things.

A particular student also not having his documents, had to go back to Mexico for some period of time before he came back. And I mean, gosh, what the tearjerker story was, he didn't tell his family that he had gotten his papers. He got them right before Christmas.

He literally showed up on Christmas Day back in Los Angeles. You know, he finally had his residency. He went on, got himself his undergraduate degree, is an accountant right now. It's just. It's just amazing.

Just absolutely amazing. So. And whatever. Some of this gets wrapped up into, like, immigration stuff and whatever people's politics, I just.

But I don't know, I feel like you get closer to these families and you get closer to these people, you're like, who would not want these folks as a part of our, our world right now? They're making such important contributions, and I take such inspiration from them.

Yeah, I mean, look, I think, you know, I think most people actually, our politics are divisive around this. Most people agree on two things. We need like a proper border and some order at the border. But also, like, immigration makes this country better.

It always has. And you know, that. That's. That's sort of been our secret strength.

And honestly, if you look at the data on the labor market, we also, like, even if you're not persuaded by sort of that immigration makes, then diversity makes this country stronger and better and more innovative over time. If you're not persuaded by any of that, you should just be persuaded by the numbers we need. We don't have enough Americans right now, and so we need.

We need people. It's a debate that does. I mean, I'm biased. Like, you know, my family not very long ago immigrated here. So I guess I'm biased.

But, like, the debate doesn't make, outside of the obvious stuff around, like border security and stuff doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

Absolutely. And then Claudia, I knew her as Claudia Granada. She's now married and has a different last name, but she was our kindergarten teacher.

We created a school within the school.

And our theory was when I was hired, and it was funny because Claudia and I were both reminiscing that the school principal that hired us hired in the same year. And he told both of us in the interview process that Hooper Avenue was the largest elementary school west of the Mississippi. But then he cut out.

He was never even there for our first days together. But Claudia now has stayed at hooper Avenue. She's 32 years of service at hooper. I was there for seven. Right.

What seen and the commitment that she has shown to that place. It's just, just so incredible.

That's fantastic. Yeah, those. We moved when my kids were really little to a neighborhood because it was a long time educator.

We really wanted them to experience and so forth. And then the district where we were in their infinite wisdom decided that was the time to. To make a change. After, after I took it to get these.

She had been there for years and it just built a culture and community and, and loyalty was great. So most people listen to this podcast wherever they get podcasts, and we'll introduce the podcast in a moment.

If you're watching, you'll notice I suddenly had to switch into podcaster mode. We were getting a little feedback, so I had to put on my actual podcaster headphones.

But that actually is fortuitous because we usually forget to introduce the podcast. And that will remind us to do it. This is Wonky Folk. I'm Andy Rotherham.

I'm Jed Wallace.

You can get us wherever you get podcasts. You can listen on YouTube. We urge you to like it. That apparently helps us.

And then you can find me@eduonk.com and eduwonk@ substack and you can find Jed at Charterfolk, where you can also sign up to make sure you get these episodes as they come out.

All good. All good. Well, you know, again, Andy, you're looking just so, so official now, man. You are a, you're a professional podcaster.

But.

I am really curious, though, to ask you about it. I mean, I understand. Look, I know how much I offended you by saying that you and Bellwether are so damn smart, you know, at our, at our.

In person in Washington. But, you know, there, I actually have these times in between our conversations where I say I really wonder what Andy thinks about this.

And you know, I'm really curious what you.

And then, and then the moment passes.

I know I'm gonna get. Get a chance to hear you, you know, bungle an answer to another question I have for you. So let me throw.

I mean, but look, what is happening in higher ed right now is just fascinating to watch.

And look, I get some more blowback, or not blowback, but I get some more criticism or people questioning some of my posts these days when I'm not blanket. More blanket protective of higher ed, more blanket protective of the department of Ed, that kind of stuff. I get it. I get it. But I also have.

I stand by what I wrote originally, which was I kind of feel like this is chicken coming home to roost when you are higher ed. And you know, you, you have a, this level of dependency on the federal government for your entire economic model.

And you've allowed your, basically the curriculum and the entire culture of your organization to veer very far left. That just seems like a disequilibrium that is waiting to be tripped. And that's what Trump has done in the last month or so.

Yeah, I mean, there's a lot there. I don't know, I think like it's, it's a really challenging time. So, for example, like, what's happening with Mahmoud.

I think I'm saying his name right. Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia or former Columbia student. Like, from where I sit, that's like a pretty core First Amendment issue.

There's due process questions there that are pretty just concerning from, you know, just from a basic, again, process, civil liberties standpoint.

And I think you can hold two ideas in your head at the same time that higher ed has in some ways made its bed with some of the things it's done and that that is like over the line.

And I do worry now we're in this point where people are feeling very sort of retributive and they want to push back on things and they're losing sight of things like due process and so forth.

Like when you say this might be a First Amendment or due process issue, I don't think an acceptable response is, well, look at everything higher ed's done. You could say, yeah, higher EDS made some mistakes and the way they handled some things is not great in the business model. And this is bad.

These are not like, this is not an either or, this can be an and and it feels like an end. So yeah, I mean, their business model is challenging and they are heavily dependent on federal dollars.

And also, I mean, the fact that they, the inability to stand up against not sort of sanctioned free speech first amendment activity, but stuff that crossed the line into violence and so forth, the inability to stand up against that. If you're not gonna stand up against that, then why are you going to stand up against Donald Trump?

So it's sort of like one way to look at it is just, it's just a mess. And I don't necessarily think Donald Trump's going to be the guy to, to clean it up. And in fact, he seems potentially to make it worse.

But yeah, higher ed has enormous problems at a time. I think people are questioning the value proposition a lot, particularly elite higher ed.

It seems like it's probably a great moment for sort of high quality state schools to really show why they're so important and, and such a, you know, instrumental part of the education system.

Well, I've seen the reporting that Columbia has 20% of their funding coming from the federal government.

I don't think that tells the whole story even close because you have the, you have other parts of this where you've got guaranteed student loans that are coming from the government that are basically subsidizing the entire higher ed market. And I think, you know, the elite schools probably benefit at least proportionately, you know, in that area too.

And then you've got the whole exposure of the higher ed institutions on their, their endowments and whether or not they're going to get taxed at high rates. And so I, I, I think it's very possible.

And the reason I think that Colombia is cutting the deal right now, everybody's saying, oh gosh, it's all about this 20%. I don't think it's about the 20%. I think it's about basically or enough to top.

The entire dang institution is actually wrapped into things that are subsidized, propped up by the federal government.

No, they clearly want to put this behind them.

But I think the thing you're raising is important if you, you know, it's the same thing thing that allowed, you know, the Biden and Obama people to come in with Title 9 guidance around sexual assaults. A lot of people said, again, huge due process issues. Federal court said huge, you know, don't take my word for it.

The federal court said multiple occasions, this raises big due process concerns.

Ended up, you know, by Emily Yoff's reporting in the Atlantic had a disparate impact on black guys, which, like, why, you know, if you think that that's an issue in sort of criminal justice and, you know, so forth in general, why wouldn't it be an issue here as well? But they were able to do that because no one could say no, because everyone's dependent on the money. And this is the flip side.

So now the Trump administration is coming in with a different set of priorities and they're going to be able to, to push on it.

I do think the one thing that, like, you know, you're starting to see the courts are getting involved, their, their executive order on DEI and, and then the dear Colleague letter that they sent out and so forth is sufficiently vague to raise questions.

And I think you, even people who have had some questions and concerns about DEI on campus and how that's manifested itself were also like, this goes really far in the other direction. So I think that's going to take some time, that's going to take some time to unwind.

But what do you think this means for higher ed longer term?

So we've, because look, I've been writing about, I've long argued about the higher ed economic model, its dependency on these guaranteed student loans. I mean, when I've written repeatedly about the graph of the century, which has been titled by some other person. Right.

And, and it's also, it's not just bad economics generally and it's warped, but it puts burden on the young people who are supposed to be benefiting from these places. I just feel like we've got this. I think this is just the beginning, Andy.

I think there's going to be much, much more impact as, as Trump continues to hammer away.

Well, it's been financed essentially in these various third party ways. So it was home equity and mortgages. When that kind of dried up, then it was student loans and that.

So we've always had these sort of third party ways to do it. And now that that's under pressure raises some questions.

I've always felt like you have to hold a couple of things in your head at the, at the same time. One is that it's a mess. To your point, economically it's, it's a mess. The cost structure and the price structure is crazy.

And particularly if you're a low income American, it's a, probably a good idea to go. It's, it's pretty important for social mobility.

And we can argue, you know, now we're creating degree inflation so people are going to, to grad school and so forth. But there, you know, there's, there's some evidence that the premium you get if you're low income and you go to a good school, that that's important.

And frankly, with the way schools are moving on, that if you're low income, a lot of these schools, your, your actual cost of attendance is going to be pretty low.

And I think one of the more irresponsible things this sector's done is sort of scare kids about the high cost rather than saying if you're, if you're situated where you're low income, it's actually not going to be very high cost for you. And I think we've done I think we've done a poor job there. So you have to sort of hold all those ideas in your head at the same time.

But yeah, I don't think it's sustainable. And I think you're going to start.

You're seeing these smaller colleges are closing and consolidating and you're seeing smaller colleges try to figure out what's their niche, if it's sports or whatever. And I think you're going to see a fairly substantial contraction.

But what I hope we also see is we've had this debate, this is completely driven by the top like 15, 20 schools and that we actually have like a whole tier of, of just fantastic schools.

And I'm a little bit of a homer here because, you know, Virginia, like we're really blessed with just fantastic public universities and everybody focuses on a couple of them, but there's like a much wider swath of them and we, that's. That to me is the kind of system that, that we need, that we need more of. We need and we need more investment in.

And what we tend to key on these, this, this handful of elite schools, which is, I mean, there's a reason those are the ones that Congress dragged in and sort of set this whole thing off, you know, post. You know, post October 6th.

Right. Well, I guess you're a little bit more optimistic than I am.

I just feel like the economics that are bad at the elite institutions are actually almost as bad in the colleges and universities that you're talking about.

I understand that the price points are lower, the state schools are lower, but the entire industry has just had artificial costs introduced into it and entirely artificial.

I mean, are you like some of it is the way they compete now? I mean, like you, I know you recently went through a college search. I mean, you just like spend time like these dining halls and these dorms.

They are not like it was when we went to college. They are competing on quality of life and other things. That's driving. I mean, I don't think anyone can defend like the lazy rivers and so forth.

But you, you do get, you do get competition around quality of life that students want. It's. The schools are. Schools are competing and they're, they're offering different things and just tastes have changed from when you and I went.

I mean, I'm sure. Did you see that, maybe you see.

That as a healthy expression of competition. I just see it as an industry that is out of whack. Yes.

I want to see universities have nice facilities and those kinds of things, but you look at like university facilities versus K12 facilities and stuff. I mean, come on. There's something that's fundamentally different here and I feel like these chickens are going to come home to roost.

And I see it as something where the country didn't have the courage to direct the subsidy and the support for the low income kids that actually needed it and decided to do it for absolutely everybody and for doing it for everybody, making it universal, they warped and distrenched, essentially destroyed the, the economy or the economics for an entire industry. That's what I worry about.

Universal.

You know, as well there, well, there's.

Some evidence and maybe it's analogous to, to the voucher. There's some evidence.

I'll give a shout out to a longtime education analyst guy named Art Hotman who sort of spoke some uncomfortable truths about higher ed and paid a, paid a price for that. And one of the things that his research showed was that you essentially with what you're talking about, you got a substitution effect.

So schools were taking this money for low income students and then were bumping their aid up the food chain to appeal to middle class students and yeah, he did.

And obviously one of the, one of the things I've never understood about higher ed finance is you assume of course that if you subsidize something you're going to get more of it and you're going to see, you know, distortions and effects on prices. But everybody just assumes for some reason that doesn't happen in higher ed. And we're now starting to get that in K12.

That argument too where you're like, well if you do this, private schools are going to respond. It's like, oh no, they're not.

It's like, you know, these, these like rules of economics seem to like, there's no reason to believe they don't generally, generally apply. And so I think you're right about the, the, the aid structure, I guess. I don't know if I'm, I'm more. You make good points.

I don't know if I'm more optimistic than you or just more like this is, it's just how it is. And I do think I'm a big believer in, I think I'm just a big believer in big public universities.

I think they're important and we have underinvested in them in some ways and we need to figure out, you know, how to rectify that in a responsible, in a responsible way.

Yeah. And I just think that when K12 has this exit point or one of Its primary exit points.

Higher ed continuation being so dysfunctional right now, I think it's going to ripple through in all sorts of ways. My daughter's going to be applying to graduate school programs shortly.

The number of graduate school students that are having their offers rescinded right now, also the whole, the whole Higher Ed PhD, you know, the students that are, that are receiving stipends as they get their PhD programs. A lot of the work that these research assistants are doing can now be done by AI.

You know, I just feel like there's going to be this level of disruption and then all that disruption is happening. And it makes it easy, I think, for K12 to sag back to this idea. Higher ed's not for everyone. College is not for everyone. And it's actually true.

Yes, it's true.

But you know, to like make it really simple and easy or even more compelling to make that argument without having to like confront some of the unfairness that's inherently cooked therein, I just think is not helpful for where K12 is right now.

Well, yeah, higher ed's not for everyone, but I feel like we've decided it's not for everyone based on markers that I reject. So income, race, things like that.

Like, we need to do a much better job exposing kids to different, different kinds of options than letting them make their own choices. And instead we decided to make these choices for them or again, tried to.

Like, we've gone from a movement that was about like making sure that poor kids who wanted to go to college could to a movement that's questioning whether that's a good goal. And I, I just reject that. The data is really clear.

It's a good thing to do from a social mobility standpoint insofar as it's something that you want to do. You're interested in those things. Obviously, if your interests lie elsewhere. But the data is pretty clear that in general you're better off.

And one of the things you see is even though people are like, well, you can make more money working as a plumber, H Vac. That's true, except we even see their wage premium.

College educated people working, plumbing and H vac make more money, there's something to be said for it. And it, it just shows up across the board.

And one of the most interesting things you look at like, and this goes back to like research like Ron Haskins at Brookings years ago, you, if you, if you're low income and you go to college, your economic mobility, the effect is going to be greater than if you're high income and you don't. And which is like that social like instructional inequality, like just, you know, laid, laid bare.

And so I've been just kind of dismayed at the sort of retreat from again, not no one. I didn't ever bump in anybody's college for all. Like everybody should go to college.

Yeah.

I bumped into a lot of people and I was one who are like the opportunity to go to college for all. And that opportunity is not at all equitably distributed.

And so regardless of your zip code, if that's something you want, you should, you should go for it. And I, I don't think we should back away from that.

There's a article in the New York Times the other day by Dana Goldstein getting at that whole question and I just think that is not something we should back away from. Sending low income kids to college, getting them to and through so they're prepared to get through.

It just seems like, you know, that seems like a core goal if you're in education.

Yeah, well, let's, let's bring it to Department of Department of Education. Let's bring it to K12 because I, I have gotten.

Do you have a Department of Education?

Well, I mean I find this whole conversation fascinating too because I've had a few readers send me emails saying hey Jed, you're, you're, you're not concerned enough about the damage that's being done to the department. And there's all these protections of, of our most vulnerable kids that we should be fighting to protect.

My, my statement on that was, yeah, I can understand us being concerned about protecting kids civil rights, but as far as I'm concerned, the way public education is done writ large in our country is one violation of civil rights. I mean, and who are we kidding that the Department of Education has been a very strong force to push things in a positive direction.

And I just feel like when the entire department has just become a enforcer of a blob of regulation that's just so disempowering to schools that this again feels like a disequilibrium that was just waiting to be adjusted to be corrected, to be toppled.

Yeah, it's interesting. One thing you say. Yeah, like what do you think? Because I've been struck how whatever you think, if we could talk about our views on the department.

The conversation about it seems is very decontextualized from these changes in education around the country to everything that's been happening.

It's like Washington off as an island rather than this is just downstream of this complete loss of faith and decline in achievement, all of it over the last decade.

Yeah. For me, the big things are, does special ed funding continue to flow? Does Title 1 funding continue to flow?

And hey, I want the testing and I want the research and the identification of best practices, but that's kind of, you know, secondary to the funding continuing to flow. So. And I don't care. Does a Small Business administration manage the trillion dollars of student debt?

You know, I don't have strong feelings about that. I honestly want there to be a continued investment in low income kids.

I thought it was interesting that McMahon was clear, hey, cut everything else, but I want to keep having the Title 1 money. So the question I have for, you know, my, my favorite walk here is the sub, the, the, the thumbnail is, hey, keep the money flowing.

Get, get the feds out of, Let the states do what they want to do. But all the regulations for Title 1 through 9 funds, they're all still there. So as far as I can tell, they're all obligated to adhere to those regs.

And even if the feds decide not to enforce those things, any court would, would happily say you can't spend money in a way that's not consistent with these federal regs.

So I mean, if I were to say what would, would be an important next step or an additional step or maybe what I would have preferred from the very beginning, keep more capacity within the department so that you can manage the administrative process of sunsetting or, you know, just narrowing all of these regulations on, on all these programs.

I'm afraid that they're gonna have so little capacity within the department that all of these regs are going to essentially stay in place and the idea of deregulation is going to turn out to be a fantasy in the end. You're the walk. So tell me, where am I wrong here?

Yeah, I mean, a couple of things. One, I do think I get the same thing I get. People are like, you're not freaked out enough.

And like, I think that you have to like, like what we're talking about in education. For the most part, these are policy questions.

I'm not a fan of moving student loans to Small Business Administration, but like, you want to move into the Department of Treasury. That didn't seem like a crazy idea to me. I don't think we should move HH or idea Special Ed to hhs.

Yeah, yeah.

But like, it's, I think, you know, in fact, I think we should probably move Head Start from HHS to education. But like These are, those are policy questions fundamentally, other parts of government. Right now we're having constitutional questions.

You know, we're having like, in the judiciary, there's like fairly substantial questions about, about executive authority, about Article 2 authority and so forth. Like that's constitutional. And we, we talked about one earlier in this podcast with like the, the, the Columbia guy in due process.

And so I feel like, like education, we need to be. I don't want to say this stuff doesn't matter. I don't want to say it's trivial. A lot of people have lost their jobs. It's all very consequential.

But I think, like, the, the degrees of what we're arguing about, it is important, it is important to keep, to keep in mind. I would watch for them. The short answer to your question is waivers.

I think they're, I think they're going to, in part because they seem to really like executive authority and want to push it as far as they can, that waivers are a way to get around some of those regulations and so forth, give flexibility. I think Trump would really like the spectacle of these governors having to come and ask for the flexibility.

And then you have some kind of a deal that seems to really appeal to his, his idea of how we should do government.

And so that's, that's what I would pay attention to because I don't think, look, there's, I don't think there's 218 votes or, or 60, let alone 51 in the Senate to really undo a lot of this stuff. And so they'll just be looking for other ways to do it. So that's what I would, that's what I would pay attention to.

And I do think you're raising a really important point. There is a sort of shoot, aim, load kind of quality to this.

And they've like gotten rid of a lot of the people they would have needed to do this in a more orderly, serious way. You're seeing that in particular right now on why they're trying to fix some of the problems that they've created at around the nape test and at ies.

They've just let go some of the people you need to do that work. I think you're gonna have the same, you're gonna have the same thing.

The way they decided to go do this at main ed means if you want to have sort of an orderly process around this, it's going to be difficult. And so it may end up being chaotic and, and, and sloppy.

Yeah, well, I feel like I don't Feel like this is a landing spot for us. And I kind of had a question.

For you just about how much something more, more uplifting.

But look, I mean, I do think.

Oh, go ahead.

Well, I mean, I just don't think that this is a set of policies built to last.

As soon as there is some national imperative, as soon as the Chinese do something that kick our ass in some way where it's felt like, you know, it's, it's an intellectual academic competency issue, you know damn well the feds are going to say we want to have a way to invest in education that's going to be able to keep up with these other countries. And so. And we're just waiting for that.

Right. That's the whole problem. That's the whole problem. Like the Chinese are not disinvesting or like totally just.

They're going in the opposite direction. Absolute opposite direction.

Absolutely. This is the rest. I mean this. I, I think we should be honest. Like, are there some states that gonna do really cool stuff? Yeah, absolutely.

That's always, that's always been the case. But we're also going to increase the variance.

And if you want to have sort of a national competitiveness strategy, we should be trying to figure out what are the ways we can shave some of the sharp edges off of that variance and, and have those guardrails. And so, yeah, I mean that's, that's where I sort of part ways on this is.

I don't know how you can talk about any kind of a national strategy for competitiveness and national strategy around human capital, any of it, without, you know, national leadership at a cabinet level. And I know people like, well, you could do it other ways. We could have a czar. We could do this.

Like, I just think like, you need this, this is important enough in the, in the modern world that you need cabinet level leadership on it. People can disagree. I mean, that's obviously a falsifiable premise. But I just, and I think you're right. As soon as you know, we'll.

History will repeat. We'll have some sort of a Sputnik moment and everybody will freak out.

And so it's kind of like, maybe let's skip those chapters and just get to the part where we get serious about a national human capital and talent strategy because it's so important.

Yep. So look, I want to keep going off on other things that concern me or other disequilibria. Disequilibria.

But you seem to want to, you had an, a more chipper notion to throw into the discussion here. So I don't want to get in the way of your, your, you know.

Like, it goes back to what you said. I'm not a fan of a lot of what's happening, but I do think it's been decontextualized.

I mean, you, you, you can't look at the last decade and be like, oh, my God, don't put all that at risk. Because what you'd be putting at risk is like a steady decline in scores. Then they went off the cliff.

This sector proved to be pretty unreliable during COVID after Covid and became hyper politicized.

And I don't think you, you don't have to like, look at that and be like, okay, the answer is choice or the answer is getting rid of the department, Department of Education.

People can disagree about all that, but I feel like we do need to have like an honest accounting of where we are and we need to try some different things because what we're doing now, if you are committed to whatever you want to call it, social mobility, equity, any of it, like, we're clearly not reaching those goals. And so we do need to have some conversations.

And even if you don't believe Donald Trump is a position to lead those conversations, I don't believe Donald Trump is in a position to lead those conversations. They're still important conversations to have.

And some of this is going to, is going to create space for, for some, for some important conversations about where, where are we trying to go? And I don't think the answer can just be, let's just rebuild all the stuff.

Like, it was like, I, I don't, I don't like what happened to ies, that IES did need reform, education needed reform as well.

And so I think it's hard to balance all those things, but you can be kind of appalled at the sloppiness in the way it's happening, but also be like, we do need some changes in how we do business.

Yeah.

And if I were to predict, I think there's more coming, we got the problems in higher ed, we have these problems now within the department and federal investment, all those things. I write a lot, you know, about the brokenness within our urban public school districts.

And I'm starting to hear more about Republican governors who are realizing that audits of large urban school districts reveal things that are just so appalling.

I mean, I mean, whatever Elon Musk goes looking for problems in usaid, imagine, imagine the same, same posture brought to our large urban school districts. You Know, and, and the, the underperformance of these school districts, the broken economics, the dysfunctional governance.

I mean, I feel like this is the next place that Republicans are very likely to turn, and I think they're going to have an easier time with, with those entities. Now that may be a little bit more difficult because there's, it's closer to kids.

And so the disruption could really be heartbreaking in its very tangible manifestation.

On the other hand, these school districts are doing such a crummy job serving these very communities that there may be real tolerance for disruption there in hopes of something better emerging soon.

I think you're right. And if we have an economic downturn, you'll have a number of these districts in fiscal distress, which will create a pretext for some of this.

And as we've seen in the social media age, I mean, you people can be sort of aghast at the way the Department of Education, they are, you know, finding these examples of things money is being spent on and then holding it up as exemplars. You can, you can say, okay, that's not accurate. And I think, like, we don't do, like, large numbers.

So you spend, you know, you know, you spend, you know, $500 million and you find a few examples. It doesn't discredit the entire 500 million. We don't do that.

But the fact is, in the social media age, that stuff goes around and no one, no one's accusing them of, like, making this stuff up. They're just finding these outlier examples. And in the social media age, the outlier example then becomes the defining example.

And we've seen that again and again. And you'll, you will find that in urban school districts, there'll be plenty of those examples. And they, they will, they will get held up.

And yeah, I mean, I don't think, I mean, one of the things that's been a little shocking to me is just the arguments for the Department of Education, the arguments against what the Trump people are doing are not especially sharp. And I don't think it'll be any different with urban districts.

And it behooves this sector to sort of figure out how to get into its fighting trim and actually have some arguments that are not just appeals to sort of lofty ideals about democracy and Horace Mann, but are much more politically salient, able to get political traction. I don't see those right now, and I think that's a problem.

The vacuousness of the Dems in particular, that are the key policymakers in urban school districts, but also in terms of protecting the education establishment itself. I, you know, I've been, I'm pretty, I've been very impressed by some things that Ezra Klein writes and by some of his interviews.

I thought his interview with the pollster. What, what's the pollster's name that he.

David Shore. Yeah.

Or, Yeah. I mean, I learned so much from that. That was just a great, great podcast.

But we'll put that on the, we'll put that in the show Notes. Yeah, I mean, that David's data, I saw a presentation he did a few months ago, and yeah, it's, People need to reckon with this.

And I don't think there has been yet a reckoning around some of this. And some of it's about Democratic politics, but some of it's about public schools and how we position them, and it's a problem.

So, and I think that Klein has been, by the way, you know, Klein's brother is a charter school teacher in Los Angeles, so he's got, you know, fairly good view into our world. But, you know, I went out and bought abundance. I've been waiting for it, and I'm just very disappointed by it.

Maybe other people will like it because maybe there are things in there that are specific to housing or maybe there are things in there that are specific to infrastructure building or to public health and this kind of stuff. But you cannot find the word education or schools anywhere in the index.

And, and in my reading of it pretty quickly over the weekend, I could not find a reference to education anywhere. I could find references to cities being broken.

And look at all these things are broken about cities and why they can't live, their cost of living and crime and blah, blah, blah. Not one mentioning.

I'll have to check that out because I've always thought, like, we, we can't dis, like, if you want to have, you know, a, if you want a part of address, I mean, there's a bunch of things to address. Housing, some of which don't have a lot to do with education.

But having a thriving middle class that wants to live in your cities is really important.

And if you want that, you need really good public schools and public options that people don't feel like they have to, like, navigate and thread a needle. So I haven't had a chance to, to read it yet. I just finished Mark Dunkelman has a great book on, on why Nothing Works.

That sort of, that's being paired with the abundance, this book, so that I, I, I will have more to Say once I've had a chance to read it, but that's the, the, the early Jed Wallace review is disappointing.

Look, I also care a lot about housing. I care about, you know, some of these other things and I really appreciate Klein doing that.

But I just feel as though from an education standpoint, given the overweight of influence that the teacher unions have, I think it's a good litmus test.

Are you serious about contending with the power dynamics within the Democratic Party, within progressive wing of the party, or are you just providing lip service? And I'm sorry if you cannot address issues of education within your conversation about abundance. You failed a litmus test.

Yeah, yeah.

And the abundance agenda, again, like I said, I haven't read the book, but the abundance agenda more generally, like school choice has to be a piece of that. And it's. We do not have to have a static supply of public schools.

And it goes back to what we were talking about, like with the context of the department. You've got all these micro schools opening and little independent options and different things.

And like, again, I think people get all hung up on whether or not they like those or not, or where do they stand or where do they think they should stand?

Because rather than like, this is something that's just happening and you have to, you have to engage with it and understand it as kind because it is happening. And I think it offers a way through some of these things.

I mean, the charter school referendum in Massachusetts, one of the reasons that it went down was people perceived charters as a scarcity thing that there weren't going to be enough of. And so like this general frame of we can actually have more and this is not just slicing up the same amount in different ways.

I think is really important to get to a healthier education politics.

I just don't think that the. Give the. The current Dems. Yes, Klein can say we need new thinking within the Democratic Party.

Almost all of the Dems that are currently in power are not. They are bought and paid for already by status quo interests. I just don't. And we're seeing that in Massachusetts turn down every charter.

You've turned out an incredible KIP charter in Lynn, you know, and yeah, that.

Massachusetts board meeting the other day was. That was something and not. And I just looked at that and I was like, okay, they have not gotten the memo yet.

And in Massachusetts, the political cost of that is probably more negligible, but that's not the case everywhere. And like the Democrats, problem is they need to be competitive in many More places.

So they're going to have to figure out how to be competitive on issues like this.

Because the crazy thing about the David Shore data is I, I would argue the Republicans, I mean, Trump said some stuff that he, you know, but like, they didn't really contest the issue that hard.

Right.

And like, if you look at how, like Republican governors can contest the issue and you look at what Trump did, there's a gap. And so the, so in Shore's data, we basically had a draw on who do you trust on education without the Republicans really contesting the issue.

And that, I think, should, that should wake the Democrats up.

Yeah, it's a draw now when Democrats have historically been 20 points or so. And, and so, yeah, I thought all that.

And it's a draw again without the Republicans coming forward. Some super compelling agenda which they could find there, which they could find their way to.

And so, yeah, no, I think the Democrats, they're out of position. We know, we know why. It's, it's institutional. It'll be interesting to see.

You've got some younger ones, you know, so you look at like, Polis, Pritzker, Shapiro. So those are the governors of Colorado, Illinois, Pennsylvania, like, they're all pushing the envelope. Will they continue to. I don't know.

I was listening the other day to Shapiro was on the Bill Maher show and like, yeah, yeah.

And Bill, Bill Maher went after him on the education questions about some of the stuff we're talking about here, and he kind of deflected and so forth. But, like, you know, we're a long way out for a primary. But how will that, you know, who's going to be the one?

Gina Raimondo has shown a willingness to, to take them on.

Who's going to be the person who realizes that actually doing that is how you show people that you're a fighter and you're tough, is that you're willing to actually take these things on.

I've always felt like people like, if you're not going to stand up to the teachers unions, why would people expect you to stand up to one of our, a foreign adversary or on other things? So it's a way to show, I'm a reformer, I will look out for your interests.

That this whole idea of, like, the people against the powerful, there's not like an asterisk on powerful, just the powerful who we don't like. It's like, I will, I will fight for you. And in a populist moment like this, which is really what we're living through that, that seems important.

Obama had kind of, as you said, as Trump has shown, that the emperor doesn't have clothes. I think you could.

Education politics is ripe for somebody ready to show that like a lot of these shy ballists about sort of Democratic politics and the teachers unions, like they can be disrupted. Yeah, I think Obama, there's a path there for a reformer.

Yeah, well, I mean, Obama did it masterfully. You know, he, he clearly came out and took some pro charter school positions that, that rankled the teacher union.

And Obama's like, that's exactly what I need in the public sphere. And I just think the people have essentially forgotten that Polis is.

But then he got tired. But then he got tired. Right.

I feel like, you know, Obama's line, he said about with Russia and he said, you know, they're never going to care as much about Crimea, we will never care as much about Crimea and the Ukraine border as the Russians do. Which was his reason for, for not defending that red line. Like, I feel like the same thing might end up being true often on education.

And I think it was like they're never going to care about some of these core issues around charter schools, teacher policy as much as the unions do. And, and I think that's a fixture of education politics we have to engage with too.

Well, I haven't been in the room for the governor's meetings, but I understand that Polis is standing up in front of all the governors and saying, how many of you guys have opened a charter school, you know, these kinds of things, leading his comments on charter. So that's really interesting.

Michael Bennett, you know, is apparently going to come home and run for governor in Colorado, which would be amazing in terms of like having another Dem governor supportive of ed reform driving an agenda. So I mean, I, I, yeah, I've.

Never understood why more senators don't leave.

Like, the traditional thing is you're a governor and then you go to the Senate and then they all sit there and when you, and they're frustrated when they get there, they're like, I can't do anything. I miss being a governor. I mean that's like, I mean, that's bipartisan for a long time. So I've never understood why more of them. So I'm very excited.

I think Michael is a fantastic politician, just, I mean, just a phenomenally smart individual and would be great.

And Jared has been, I think, a great governor and is a breath of fresh air, and I think it would be a fantastic entrant in the, in the presidential race. I think he's. He, in so many ways, he represents the future. So here's a little trivia question.

Do you know before Michael, do you know who the last school superintendent to serve in the United States Senate was before Michael?

Nope.

Strom Thurmond.

No way.

I introduced Michael once or twice with that. I don't think he thought it was funny, but, yeah, you have to go back. You have to go back a long way to have a superintendent in the Senate.

I think that also that he, the sensibility he brings to this stuff is great.

So let me just, let's, let's wrap it up here. I got, you know, one.

Well, hang on. Tell me, what other Democrats are you watching?

You're a California guy, so I expect we didn't talk about Rom, and Rom has come in pretty aggressive on the Democrats need to get better on education. And then I. You didn't. I figured you were going to speak up for, for Gavin Newsom like a pot. Another. A fellow podcaster.

Oh, my God. Yeah. I'll leave Gavin Newsom stuff until that guy's out of office. I don't, I don't. You know, I try to stay out of that one.

It'll be interesting on the Delaware governor. I mean, there's a lot of.

Of additional diligence being done because he, he comes from a chart school background, you know, was TFA himself then appoint Cindy Martin as his soup. But then, you know, just last week he went to the charter school conference. Unapologetic. Hey, you people are the future of education.

You should be suffered. You should be celebrated more. You know, sends out tweets, all that kind. So what's going to happen with this guy?

And I don't know, in the chattering among reformers, he's like a MEM stock. He goes up and down. Exactly. You know, like, everybody's like, oh, my God, this guy, he loves me. He loves. And then they're like, oh, he's not.

And then like, yeah, so, so I think, look, I mean, he, I, I think people always forget, like, once you go into that, you're a pol. He's a politician. And so we, we should expect him to conduct himself accordingly. And I don't think that chapter is at all written yet.

Yeah, well, here's, here's My last big category for you. I just, I feel like a lot of this stuff coming from the executive orders, it feels just chaotic.

My question for and, and so there's some intention, there's some intention to parts of what they're doing here. And as it relates to education, though, most of what we've been talking about right now is rip it down, rip it down.

Hey, there's some people on the school choice side and how they're designing their program. There's some intention there for sure. And they've been doing some thinking for a long time.

But aside from that, is anybody working on something intentional that if we ever get other policymakers in place that would be willing to act with courage, there's something for them to run with?

Yeah, you're gonna feel like you're teeing me up because I do think there's, I'll share. I do think. Yeah, look, I think they are moving very fast because they realize they don't have a lot of time. It will be a lame duck soon.

Like, I think you have to assume the Democrats are going to be well positioned to get the House even. Even as tight as the House margin is the number of competitive seats.

Like, unless, unless things really turn around, I think there's gonna be a backlash. The Democrats will, will benefit mightily from it. So they know they're time limited and so they are focused on tearing things down.

They are literally there's going fast and breaking things, which I don't think is a great way to govern. But you can certainly understand why they're, why they're doing it, given the context.

So Margaret Spellings, I think we've talked about this, has this bipartisan commission on education in the workforce, former Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam, former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick are co chairing it. You get a range of people, you've got, you know, you know, the head of the Lumina Foundation, John King, people like this.

And then like Mike Rogers who runs workforce, Katie Jenner in our workforce in Arkansas, Katie Jenner, who is a fantastic state chief in Indiana. So it's just a total mix of people. John Bailey, who's you know, known to the, to the wonk set.

Just a really interesting range of commissioners and the ideas to come up with a bunch of bipartisan ideas on education, workforce, human capital. And I think, like, yeah, there will be once we get through this first period, which again, courts are still working a lot of this stuff out.

Like, a lot of, you know, things are getting undone and, or getting changed and parsed. Some of the stuff they cut at education, they're going to have to put back out.

It's congressionally mandated, so they're gonna taken out the aspects of it they didn't like around, like DEI and whatever, and then they're gonna put it back out. So I feel like it's still, like, I mean, it's been an exhausting period, but it's still kind of early going.

And so I do think, yeah, they'll hopefully be an opportunity for some ideas and, and so forth. And, and, you know, so I, that's one thing I would, I would certainly keep an eye on. Well, if not, like, everybody's like, everything's lost.

Like, I don't know if, if ever, then, if everything's lost, we will, we will address that when we get there. But, like, we're not, we are, we are not there. We are not there at this point.

So, like, we should all continue to do the best we can to try to address the problems we care about.

Well, I wasn't going to go here, but I can't help just wrap up coming back to the Supreme Court case. You know, it's the thing I worry the most about in the landscape.

And, you know, I've had a chance to do a lot of work on the case now, and I've learned a lot about the legal arguments and some of the original intent for charter school. They can talk more about the work I've been doing probably in the, in the weeks and the months ahead.

But one thing that's become apparent to me is if you really read the religious liberty arguments, it's, it's, you don't have to have a charter school law, but if you do, you cannot discriminate against, you know, religious institutions wanting to operate there.

And they say it over and over again, and I think they say it over and over again because they think it's a winning argument and, and maybe it will be. We'll see.

Well, you can see the path dependence there with earlier decisions. You can, you can see why they're arguing it that way.

What it could very well end up, you know, translating into is a Shorthand that runs like this. If you're going to have public education, it has to be directly operated by the government. There is no way to have, you know, a.

In autonomous parties operating unless you're also going to have religious schools, which is just not tolerable to half of the political establishment, which will likely mean in all blue states, you know, charter schools will get absorbed back into the board.

In red states, they've got the complication of all of these state constitutions that say that they can't direct fund sectarian schools, in which case a lot of the red states could just say, ah, just make the charters vouchers, you know. So your idea, hey, charter schools are going to be left without a, without a chair in the game of musical chairs here.

Well, you know, maybe it turns out right, what it, what it, what it does though is it just creates a situation where either the government's going to do it or it's completely and utterly must be private, you know.

And so for all these conversations going on with Margaret and with John King and whatever, it would seem as though they're all going to be focused in this middle ground where like we got to be doing hybrid things we gotta have.

And it just feels like the Supreme Court could very well hamstring future reformers with this case in ways that they may be far more, far wider reaching than something specific to just charter schools or religious education.

I hope, Look, I mean we talked about this on the last one. I'm hoping the court realizes would really be crossing the Rubicon a bunch of ways and decides that you don't actually need to do this. But we, We.

We will see. It's be interesting case because again we, as we talked about, there's only eight.

Eight votes because Justice Barrett has recused herself and so it'll be interesting to see what happens. Yeah, I think it's pretty. I think it is potentially consequential in, in ways like what you're. The. The. The effects of it.

Unless I think it, it could really cleave things. I'm. I'm less worried about the, the idea that all the public schools are going to become religious and things like that. Then it's.

I think it could potentially really, really cleave things again. I think the dog that didn't bark. If you've noticed, the unions have been really quiet on this.

No, I think they think, I think they think it's really bad for charters. And so they are doing that old thing in politics where when somebody's like shooting themselves in the foot don't get in the way.

And I think that's really telling. You know, they're pretty smart on this stuff often. And I think that's really telling in terms of how they're reading the.

They're reading the potential outcome.

Well, we'll hope that they are careful about what they do here, but who knows? In this environment, careful doesn't seem to be an operative word in most contexts. So we'll. We'll just have to see.

Yeah, no, I mean the case. Yeah, it's like the timing of it is. These things sometimes are coming at the. When all the rest of this stuff is happening.

It's something again on the musical chairs thing. Look, I hope, I hope I'm wrong. I want. That's one I want to be wrong on. But.

So now does this mean next time I got to wear a collared shirt and I got to wear, you know, professional headphones and I got to have a new background? So I'm, you know, I don't know.

It's springtime. It's springtime. You may find me in a. You may find me in a T shirt for the next one. You just. You just never know. I had to.

I did a couple of presentations today on stuff so you could caught me. You caught. You caught me. You caught me dressed up.

Yeah, I'm, you know, I mean, I'm more used to seeing you in tacky Christmas sweaters and muscle shirts and whatever. So.

What? Muscle shirts? No, my. I spent the weekend. My wife.

No hoodies. We did hoodies one time. We did.

I was wearing a hoodie. I was wearing a hoodie this morning, actually, for my first meeting.

And then I had to get work out and get cleaned up and all that, so you're catching. So we'll see. We'll. Maybe we'll try to plan for the. For the next one. We need walkie folk hoodies is what we need.

Hey, good idea. I like that.

We actually give swag away to the listeners, which could be kind of fun.

Maybe we'll be doing an in person one in a backyard. That'll be fun. And if we had like three wonky folk sweatshirts for that one, that might be kind of cool.

Or we could do something different, like wonky folk tank tops. Could be fantastic.

All right. I like it. Always enjoy our time together. Andy.

Hey, it's great to see you, Jen. It's been too long. And I'll look forward to seeing you soon.

Okay, Take care.