This week, Andy and I are talking about the Supreme Court denial to hear Charter Day School, Inc. v. Peltier “(wherein the plaintiffs justified their restrictive dress code by asserting that girls are ‘fragile vessels)”, other Supreme Court cases, the science of reading, and Moms for Liberty.

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

• The implications for charter schools of the Supreme Court decision not to hear the case (00:01:16)

• The potential for religious freedom advocates and lawyers to continue looking at the charter school space as an opportunity to advance things (00:06:06)

• Implications of other cases before the Supreme Court, e.g., affirmative action, student and teacher freedom of expression (00:18:28)

• The science of reading and phonics (00:26:51)

• Giving props to Emily Hamford, the journalist, who deserves credit for shedding light on this topic, getting traction, and changing policy (00:38:31)

• Moms for Liberty, their Sword of Liberty Award, and their impact on board of education decision making (00:40:00)

Notes:

• Charter Day School, Inc. et. al. Petitioners v. Bonnie Peltier, as Guardian of A.P., a Minor Child, et. al. rom the Supreme Court docket: https://www.supremecourt.gov/search.aspx?filename=/docket/docketfiles/html/public/22-238.html

• You can use the following link to access Eva Moskowitz’s Wall Street Journal opinion article, “Phonics Finally Gets Its Due in New York”: https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-york-finally-gets-hooked-on-a-phonics-based-curriculum-school-system-education-students-teacher-public-f019bc45?mod=hp_opin_pos_6

Hey Andy.

Hey Jed.

How are you?

I'm doing terrific.

How are things?

They're good.

They're good.

We're easing into summer.

I think we've like relaxed our dress code it looks like a little

bit because it is summertime.

I like it.

Well we sure have a lot of stuff to tackle.

There's so many things that are going on, but I suppose we remind people what the

heck WonkyFolk is and who we are and, you want to take a swing at it to get started?

Well, yeah, you're listening to the Wonky Folk podcast.

That's me, Andy Rotherham.

I'm a co-founder and partner at Bellwether and Jed, who is an education

consultant, led the California Charter Schools Association for a long time,

long time leader in our space and was a school operator himself, when

I first got to know him down in San Diego and we generally it's us.

We had our first guest last week.

We had Macke Raymond from CREDO on to talk about the new CREDO charter study

and that data and that body of work.

And so we'll have some guests in the future too, we are going to

make that sort of a regular thing.

Good intro.

I like all that.

Decidedly amateur because we are amateur podcasters.

We're not yet professionals.

And we're excited to know about some of the guests that may come on here

shortly, so that, that'll all be fun.

But hey, let me just get started because right as we go to

recording, we have this announcement coming out of the Supreme Court.

I didn't foresee this happening and here it is happening literally an hour

ago or two hours ago, where the Supreme Court announced that they are not

going to take up the Peltier charter school skirt case in North Carolina.

This is a very big deal.

I've been writing about it at CharterFolk.

I know you're aware of the case, generally, Andy.

But I wanted to just dive into, and I also, I've done some

texts with some lawyers on this case already, I'm not a lawyer.

Within a week, or even a few days, there will be a lot of

lawyers with deep analysis of the implications of this decision.

So the issue was this dress code lawsuit and whether or not it

turned on whether or not charters are going to be considered under the law,

public schools or private schools.

But why don't you talk about the implications and what it means,

like what does it even mean right now that they passed on this?

So what is the law existing law going to look like?

Yeah, so there was a charter school day in North Carolina that was making

the argument that their dress code requiring boys to dress in a certain

way and girls to dress in another way, specifically to wear skirts, was something

that they were in empowered to enforce because they were not state actors.

And so the United States Constitution protections for public school students

did not apply to a charter school and the school was very upfront about

its arguments along these lines.

They said that the reason that they wanted girls to wear skirts is because

they believe that girls are quote unquote "fragile vessels" and they want

to teach the boys that they needed to protect the girls along these lines.

You don't need the Supreme Court for this.

They could spend a couple hours with my girls and I could debate some of the

idea that girls are fragile vessels.

There's no reason to bring in our well-traveled Supreme Court into this.

So there was a court in North Carolina that made a decision that

had a lot of people alarmed, which was that the charter school would be in

fact able to use its dress code arguing that the United States Supreme Court

protections don't apply to the school.

The school then a appealed up to the, I'm sorry.

The authorizer then appealed up to the appellate level.

And the appellate level, thankfully found that in fact the United States

Constitution does apply to this school and you cannot discriminate

against the girls on that basis.

So what happened is the school decided to seek an appeal from the United

States Supreme Court, and so many people were worried that the United States

Supreme Court might take this case.

And if they took it and deemed that charter schools are not state actors

and thus don't have the constitutional protections applicable to them, it could

have rippled through and had damaging effect across the entire charter school

movement because it could have undermined decades of jurisprudence about what

a charter school is and nevermind the political repercussions in all these

different contexts when people would learn that charter schools would supposedly have

some ability to discriminate against kids.

So today we learned that the United States...

yeah, it seems like it would've been a gift to charter critics, right?

They would've been incredible talking.

It would've been horrible for us.

And so for the United States Supreme Court to say: "No,

we're not touching that case".

For purposes of whether or not charter schools are state actors

and whether or not the United States Constitution protections are applicable

to their students and to their employees, they're staying out of it.

So this is a very big decision.

It's both good as in terms of relief in the short term, but it also has

some implications for potentially religious charter schools that are

decisions that are coming down the pike.

Yeah.

Is there any reason to believe maybe that in Supreme Court jurisprudence,

they call it a clean vehicle, so a case with like really a clean fact pattern

so it can be a very clear kind of precedent, they like clean vehicles.

Is there any chance they passed on this one just because it's not a clean vehicle

and we're going to see a different case come along and this all the concern about

this will start right back up again?

I've heard some religious scholar and lawyers argue, we shouldn't have

brought a case that had the term fragile vessel in it, isn't there a

better one that we could have brought?

But I don't know, I'm not the legal mind here, I don't know if there's a different

angle you can now take to charter schools not being state actors, it seems

fairly definitive what's happened right now, but clearly we're in a time when

religious freedom advocates and lawyers are looking at the charter school space

as an opportunity to advance things and we'll see if they continue to do so.

But if I can just throw in the additional implication here.

We have this religious charter school that's been approved in Oklahoma and

it's now being conducted in court.

And it seems as though if the United States Supreme Court says that charter

schools are in fact state actors for purposes of the applicability of the

United States Constitution and they cannot discriminate against kids on

various bases, it's going to be very difficult for religious charter schools

to remain in the space or to be able to operate as they might otherwise as a

private school and again, we would see that to be a very positive development.

I don't think anybody in our world should be counting chickens or thinking that

this is dispositive, but it's a very good day for charter schools right now.

But it seems like kind of confused, I mean, I'm watching like,

so Peter Doshi, who used to be a democratic member of Congress, he's

opening religious charter schools now.

And I think there's a tendency to see this as we see lots of things

to sort of a left right or liberal conservative kind of valence.

And it seems like it's actually more the politics on the ground are a

little bit more confused and unsettled.

And so like something you said just a second ago, so I think we

haven't seen the last of this.

It seems like we're having a set of conversations.

We'll talk more about some of them later, I think, on other issues where we're

sort of figuring out new definitions and redefining boundaries for things.

Yeah, there are things that I tend to be one to defend or support

the idea that charter schools should be given a great deal, more latitude, a

great more freedom and all that stuff.

There are certain things, Andy, that are just beyond where I think we can

go and the idea that US Constitution protections, kids could be kicked out

for some identity they may have or sort of some belief that they may have

or certain employees may no longer be able to work there, their beliefs.

This is just a bridge way, way, way too far.

It seems like it erases what is public about charters and in some

important ways, not only politically, but just substantively in terms

of the experience of what happens in to people in inside a charter.

So it certainly seems important that way.

What do you think about these other cases that the Supreme Court

is just about ready to act upon?

What about affirmative action?

What about some of the other implications of these recent decisions?

Yeah, I mean, look, the affirmative action case is going to

be interesting, and I do think we'll actually have an a, a sort of tangential

impact on charters and impact on K-12.

Look, we're recording this in the beginning of the week and we're

expecting a decision on that any day and so this, what I'm about

to say may not age well, right.?

But, like, it seems like the court just given that they wanted to take

the case in the first place, the composition of the court, it seems like

the smart money is that they're going to strike down affirmative action.

And so again, everything I'm about to say may be irrelevant

if something peculiar happens.

But that seems like the smart money bet.

A couple of things, It's going to reinvigorate a debate in K-12 about,

okay what kinds of things are going to affect depending how they write

it, it could actually impact certain K-12 admissions schemes and so forth.

Second, what's the role?

I mean, we do always do have to remember when we're talking about affirmative

action at the higher Ed level.

We're talking to some extent about redressing problems that

we could have dealt with in K-12.

So when you have these fights, whether it's eighth grade for high school

spots or at the end of high school for college spots, and the pipelines

aren't robust like we would want them to be, you have to ask why, and a

lot of that comes back down to K-12.

And then third, and I think this will be the unpleasant aspect of it.

Like, it's going to be just be really toxic, I think, and the interesting thing

about this one, I will say, this will be a chance to, to sort of, for people.

There is nuance here.

I mean, you live in a state where affirmative action was on the ballot.

It was defeated quite handily.

There's not support for it in public opinion, so whether or not you agree

with what the court if assuming the court strikes it down, whether or

not you agree with it, this is not like a counter majoritarian ruling.

There are things the court does that kind of go against majority opinion.

We've sort of seen the fallout of that with the Dobbs with the abortion case.

This one is not, people, people sort of value diversity.

They think it's a really important value.

You ask 'em that.

They say yes, but then when you ask them specifically about using

race and admissions, they're not real comfortable with it.

When you ask them specifically about affirmative action programs,

they're not real comfortable with it.

And then every time it's on the ballot, lately it, it is struggled, particularly

again in California of all places.

And if there's any good news there, it's that maybe when the dust settles,

we can have a conversation about, okay, if you really do care about diversity

in higher education and you care about higher education as being an engine of

social mobility, which when you look at some of these schools, it's hard

to argue that it is, that it's not just sort of reinforcing, you know,

existing class and social structures.

So if we actually believe it should play a more disruptive role in ensuring social

mobility, a level playing field, that will start to have a new conversation on, okay,

"what other kinds of remedies can you do there that would pass Constitutional

muster and still achieve those goals?"

And that could actually be a really fruitful conversation.

And again, with a big role for k12.

But I worry that a lot of people are going to just feed this into this narrative that

everything the court does is illegitimate.

Which it doesn't even make sense because you know, just last week they handed

down a really important ruling on rights for Native Americans, and I didn't hear

anybody saying that was illegitimate.

People, the only illegitimate rulings are the ones that, that you don't like.

But hopefully we won't just get caught up in that vortex so we can

instead be like, "okay, what now?

And what does this look like?"

Well, I think it'll be a very big decision if they decide that

private entities aren't able to do this, and I'm really interested in

what the ripple through effect will be on perhaps organizations that they

weren't first thinking about, "What does this mean for HBCUs?", for example?

What does it mean for other schools that have been set up specifically

to compensate for the fact that historically we haven't had the

same number of kids in,college from various races and backgrounds?

Um, are they no longer gonna be able to do these things?

But I also feel like the California Prop 29 experience is probably a wise one for

us to stay focused on, because if you look at what happened right after Prop 29, it

was startling the number of the drop in the number of African-American and Latino

students in California public schools and the UC system was really sobering.

And I think I remember seeing that at the UCLA law school, it might

have dropped to just a couple of black students being admitted.

And then the schools started to look at different criteria, not race

specific, but experience specific.

And it was really around had these applicants shown resiliency, had they

overcome this kind of thing or that kind of experience or whatever it may be.

And we've seen a rebound in the number of African-American and Latino students

that are being admitted to UCs.

I don't think it's achieved parity or gotten back to the point where

it was before Prop 29 came along, but it's also proven to be something

that was addressable via other means.

And it's very possible that we would see private schools do some

something similar if in fact the Supreme Court decides in this way.

Yeah, I mean, well there's two plausible scenarios there.

One is that they just evade it because it will be very hard.

You can just say, "Okay, we're not going to use objective measures anymore."

Like there's a way like college admissions are opaque and so there's

a way that opaqueness that this.

So one scenario is this ruling actually has less impact than

people think because the schools just kind of go do other stuff.

And like the real loser in the case is like the college board and you

know, it becomes like, cause people are just like, yeah so we're not going

to have any measure that can be used to compare students who're just going

to make these decisions as one-offs.

Yeah, that's that.

And then there'll be litigation if you see sort of disparate impact, but it'll

be very, that'll be very hard to prove.

And then the other scenario though is kind of what you're talking,

again, this could be a moment, let's separate the sheep from the goats.

You've got of people saying they care about diversity in higher ed, they

just don't like affirmative action.

We're going to be able to put that to the test.

"Okay.

How do we continue to, in a meaningful way, ensure that you do have,

have really meaningful diversity in higher ed these schools?"

Like how do you bring people together and that like again, will separate the

sheep from the goats, the people who are just they were saying that because

they were going after affirmative action and then the people who

really actually do care about that.

Obviously in our sector, a really noteworthy person that would be like a

Rick Kahlenberg who, you know, Rick has written books about this, he's a huge

proponent of economic, affirmative action.

He's a huge proponent of economic . He and I have actually butted heads

on that cause I think he oversells what's possible with that in, in K-12.

But he's got a very principled position on this, and in fact, he

testified for the plaintiffs in the case, and it like cost him dearly, but

he just thinks economic is the way.

And I feel like we can start to, whether you agree with him on that

or not, if we can start to have conversations about other remedies and

other things that, you know, and then you figure out who's actually going

to show up for those conversations.

And again, like, I think I got someone like Rick, like he shows up for that.

He cares deeply about diversity.

He also cares deeply about like effective policy wouldn't

his view as effective policy.

Well, one of the things that's important to keep in mind as you point

out, is what has been the experience of kids in the K 12 system such that

they're perhaps not able to gain admission without the use of affirmative action.

And what does it do to improve the K-12 system?

I want to go to the science of Reading thing.

Are there any other Supreme Court cases you wanted to highlight?

No, I mean, yeah, one other set of cases that are coming that aren't

here yet we should talk about just, but what you just said is so important.

We treat talented minority kids as a scarce commodity and we treat really

good schools as a scarce commodity and it leads to these really, really

screwed up politics like it when everybody's fighting over seats at

one really competitive school, you have to ask, why don't we have more?

And obviously charters are one way you can have enabling legislation states.

There's other stuff you can do, but it's said, it turns into this Holy War

over who gets to go and you see this is the story of San Francisco, Boston, New

York, Northern Virginia, and it's crazy.

And no other system where you're like, "oh, this thing's really popular, let's

make sure we don't have more of it."

And then we treat the pipeline the same way that these kids are, like

this scarce, rare thing rather than why don't we have more of them?

And what are the things we need to do to create more?

Which is, you know, there's a whole set of policy things there and

structure things in terms of schools.

And so it's sort of, the debate is kind of infuriating and then leads to

these really toxic politics, but the other cases you wanted to talk about.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, let me just throw in on the scarcity thing

because I agree with you.

I think that scarcity, especially around education supply,

should be our collective enemy.

There's no reason for it.

And there are things that we could be doing to, if schools have a certain

number of kids that are applying beyond, the spaces that are available, school

districts and states and whatever should be obligated to provide that

school with the additional facilities, the other support it needs to grow.

And the idea that we just do not do everything we can to grow those things

that are clearly successful already, that is a scandal and it's something

that we could address really quickly.

Well, it shows how potent the sort of special interest politics here

in the politics around this issue are, because in any other field you'd be

unleashing that energy, not bottling it up, but here it becomes politically,

you can bottle it up and it's just a very revealing situation in terms of the

politics and the power in the sector.

But these other cases, yeah.

I just have this feeling, and again, this is another one maybe it won't

age well in 10 years when people go through the Wonky Folk archives and

excavate them they'll laugh at me for this, but it seems like we're seeing

a whole set of student and teacher expression cases, free expression cases.

A lot of them focused on LGBT issues moving through the court.

So there's a case in Massachusetts about whether or not a kid could wear a shirt

that says there are two genders which sort of, obviously outside of school would be

just a very clear first Amendment issue, inside of school, it's more complicated.

You're seeing cases with a number of cases with teachers and pronouns and names that

kids have changed and pronouns that don't correspond with biologic sex, a bunch

of cases on that, where teachers are saying, "Hey, we don't have to do that".

"I have a right not to do that."

Now, traditionally compelled speech by teachers, it's been kind of a

cornerstone of how public schools operate, that's why you can't teach

the world is flat or whatever.

But we're seeing a bunch of these cases and so it just feels

like, again, this idea that like, we're sort of renegotiating

boundaries and things like that.

We, some of these cases, and I think there's gonna be some, potentially some

interesting cases around student rights and compelled speech and teacher rights

and compelled speech and potentially momentous cases, because everybody's

like, "Oh, what's the big deal?

It's just pronouns".

But if we start deciding that teachers have, you know, either right

of conscious or faith exemptions from certain school policies.

As soon as you get outside of the real narrow thing around religion and like

what you can wear and so forth, that is a Pandora's box that we will not close.

And we talk about redefining public schools and what does it mean?

Like that would be a huge one if teachers get, I feel like people on all sides

of these issues, regardless of what you think of them, need to realize

the precedence that this is laying bare and the potential consequences.

And again, it seems like in the next few years we're going to

see more and more of these cases.

The individual rights of the kids and then of the teachers, there's also

really the institutional rights to have a point of view on historical conditions

of the country or whatever it may be.

I think it's really fascinating.

Last year the Texas State Board of Education turned down four out of five

new charter school applications and almost everybody was of the opinion that almost

all five should have been approved, but it was just rejected for whatever reason.

This last week, there's been an election, the Texas Charter School Association has

been doing very effective advocacy and political work, and we have now a stronger

state board in support of charter schools.

So one year later, four out of five charters are approved, but the fifth

school, the one that was denied, is another school that almost everybody

believes is a strong applicant.

The reason cited by the state board for denying it was that they didn't like

the woke curriculum that supposedly they were going to be teaching.

And so it became a decision, not so specific to rights that you're

bringing up Andy, but it's a long, a very similar fault line there.

What degree of entitlement do institutions and individuals have

to take their own point of view on foundational matters such as these?

And my own point of view is that we should be receiving, we should be more receptive.

We have to allow a greater range here but it's obviously we're in a time where we're

narrowing more than we're broadening.

I think so, although, I do have to say there's an idea that's out

there in the school choice community that school choice is a solution

to this, that we can just sort of, everybody gets their choice and so you

don't have to have these big fights.

And I think at some level there's some merit to that in the sense of like,

why fight over whether we're going to have Montessori or other pedagogies.

Why fight over if we should have schools that like, are very arts focused versus

like pre-law, you know, STEM focused, whatever, like that, those seem like

dumb fights, and we should let you know, the parents can sort of let their

preferences be known, but I don't think you can be like, oh, we're just going

to choose which version of history we teach and we're just going to choose

about like, how we think about like seminal events in American history.

I feel like a healthy society, you have to have some kind of a consensus on some

of that stuff, and then you move forward.

Sometimes that consensus changes, but you can't have to choose

your own adventure on everything.

And so that's why, again, in public schools, like you can't teach certain

things in let's say, a biology class or a geology class or a history class, right?

You can't be, well, maybe the Holocaust didn't happen, guy in teaching high

school history, you teach a curriculum that teaches about the Holocaust in

all 50 states and I feel like it's fraught if we're not careful, and some

of this is just the hard conversations societies have to make decisions and

none of us will like all the decisions, but you have to live with them.

I hear you.

I also think there are certain foundational issues that are super

complicated and one can take a, there can be a variety of legitimate points of view

taken on something as broad as well, how do we, how are we going to teach slavery?

How are we going to teach the history of racial discrimination in our country.

There's just so many different orientations you could have toward that.

And I personally think a lot of them should be welcomed.

And I've seen just in too many contexts, like in textbook adoption like the

Armenian issue, I mean that the Armenian portrayal in textbooks was enough to

slow down the entire state Board of Education in California for nine months.

They couldn't make an adoption on the textbook cause they kept

having to come back on this.

So I just, you know, I hear you.

But I also feel like, and there are some things that are

outside the bound for sure.

But a lot of it I think also is, "Hey, we're going to have a wide

variety of opinion on these issues within society, and we need to have a

wide range of opinions that are, are welcomed within public education as

well as a foundational starting point".

Sure.

But you just said it, some stuff's outside the bounds and I feel

like we have to like, and the bounds will over time will change.

But you have to have those conversations.

And then personally, I feel like I balance like an appreciation for school

choice, let parents choose all of that with like a healthy society does

have consensus around certain things.

And again, at broad strokes, we're not indoctrinating people down to every

little detail, but at broad strokes, you have to have some kind of a broad

consensus around, just around how certain things happen and things like that.

You can't, people could take away their own meaning from it and all that, but

I don't know, it strikes me, we are on dangers ground, we start deciding there's

just all these different ways that you do have questions of societal cohesion there.

Yeah.

Well, something to come back to.

Yeah, absolutely.

I think we're going to.

I think the one thing, the last couple things we've talked about have in common

again, is it seems like we're in a time, it is a very fluid time in terms of

redefining things, changing boundaries, and that's interesting and things will

probably look different in 10 years.

As a teacher, we talked about this, I mentioned this before, my theory was

could I give multiple perspectives to the students and have them grapple with

them and challenge themselves to change their thinking and to recognize their

own patterns of thinking over time?

And it's really difficult to do.

It's really difficult to teach multiple perspectives as a teacher and I

think I got it wrong several times.

It is hard.

Yeah.

And we have to support teachers part of the problem is we don't support them,

so we're like, Hey, go teach about these like, really contentious issues and

just sort of figure out how to do it ,rather than like, here's really high

quality training and how to think about this and how to teach these questions.

So one of the things I wanted to bring up was this article or this op-ed

that Eva Moskowitz wrote about phonics and finally the establishment that has

resisted phonics for so long finally kind of getting its comeuppance and I think

it's just brought up this whole question.

There's a lot of words to say, "I told you so."

It was like 800 words.

Well, I mean, if there's anybody that's compelling a lot delivering

a message like that, it's Eva too.

Right?

But I think that it's brought up this whole issue of science of reading

that I've wanted to come to return to.

I mean we had Calkin, what's her first name?

Lucy Calkins.

The reading guru -- the guru in quotes.

Yeah.

Of whole language.

And I've got my teaching credential right when she was coming into ascendancy.

I mean, when I got my district intern credential through Los Angeles Unified.

It was just 100% whole language, whole language, whole language.

Fortunately, I had a mother who specialized in reading, teaching reading

to kids, and I had just gone and raided her closets and I had all of her stuff.

And plus I just had experience with my parents.

So I think I had very fairly good barriers going into the classroom.

I listened to all the stuff around whole language.

I was like, maybe it actually works.

I tried it for a few weeks.

I was like, oh, forget it.

And LA Unified was just so discombobulated, the

management was so ineffective.

No one knew what was going on in my classroom anyway, and so I taught

how I thought that I needed to teach.

But you know, the thing that we failed to recognize is this whole debate around

whole language and phonics, it happened within a political context where if you

chose one thing or the other, you were not choosing instructional practice.

You were not choosing pedagogical specificity.

You were choosing sides in a culture war.

There were people that believed that the old way of us teaching education with

phonics and with books that went back to the 1950s with kids of certain races,

all that and the way that we set up our classrooms and rows there, that was a

conservative way of operating a school.

And then there was the whole language folks that were like trying to discount

that the phonics mattered, but also we needed a bunch of new books and by the

way, these books are going to teach a whole bunch of different kinds of lessons.

And by the way, we're going to have a different kind of experience

that we want for our kids.

And so after the fact, we now start to like just parse to separate

out the pedagogical expertise from the cultural context.

And I think that's just a grave, grave mistake.

We should always be remembering maybe, I mean, clearly we made a

terrible mistake in deemphasizing phonics, and everybody can go back

and say, "Our schools of education let us down and somehow or another we

like failed to recognize the proper pedagogy", that's not what happened.

Its pedagogy got set up in a broader culture war and we made wrong decisions

in that highly contentious experience.

Let ourselves people check their brains and became partisan.

I mean, people would come in from outside the sector and be like, it seems like

there's a republican way to teach reading and a democratic way to teach reading.

And you were like, yes, it would.

I mean it, it totally would appear that way.

And that's deranged and has huge consequences.

People, this is what happens.

And I think like it's a lesson that should carry forward to

a lot of the debates today.

When you check your brain, for partisanship, like watch out and

you can see, and especially now when everything's so reactionary, and so

you've got people, you know, on both the right and the left, just taking

sort of really out there, reactionary positions just because of the other side.

There's a huge lesson there.

And to me, the frustrating thing about it, like going back to like project follow

through and all that, there's been like lots of evidence on this for a long time.

So this is, I think if it, if it helps it go down easier politically

be like, "oh, this is all this new information and new research, we

need to adapt to the new research".

If that's the narrative that's...

I get it.

That's the political narrative.

But like the fact is there was lots of evidence.

It was widely ignored.

There was a billion dollar reading program during the Bush years and

it fell prey to politics,right?

And we've had just over the years, we've had efforts around this and they just

get killed in this political crossfire, but I did write about this last week, I

think it was, or week before at EduWonk.

I do think we need the science of reading, people need to be careful.

Eva deserves her victory lap.

She deserves a lot of victory lap.

And now she was treated in New York, and people are like, well,

you can do a better job, go show us.

And she's shown them like, she's entitled to a lot of

victory, a lot of victory laps.

But the science of reading people want to be careful, and I worry they're now

like salting the earth behind them a little bit, if you will, and being a

little bit like, you know, and they need to be a little careful for two reasons:

* One, they were excluded from intellectual debate and they

were cast out and all that.

So why replicate that?

Because it just creates a backlash.

* And then second, just substantively, if we over index on phonics, there

will be a backlash from teachers, this will be common core all over again.

So you have to get this right.

You've to support teachers and you've got to allow people to have debate

because there will be mistakes.

Not every state that's implementing a science or reading laws

are going to be great laws.

It can be implemented well, and you need that kind of debate

and, that's how we learn, right?

You,see what's going well, we debate it, you try to learn from it.

And so I'm a little concerned there could be an overcorrection here.

There should be an examination for sure.

And I do think, like all these people who they see profit under every stone, were

like, Lucy Caulkin made an awful lot of money teaching kids to read the wrong way.

So, and it was, and all over.

So it's a poor reflection on the sector, but people should be very

careful how we move forward because there's backfire potential there.

And I am concerned about that.

Yeah.

We just failed.

We can look back and see how nonsensical it was outside our own context, but

then what's happening in the current moment, we can't see its applicability.

And I just think so many things around pedagogy and instructional

practice are being warped by our experience around the pandemic, by

the political wars that we have, by the pushback of the public education

establishment to reform generally and.

Very little, very little focuses on instructional practice.

Very little actually focuses on what generates student learning.

And I think we should all be sobered by that and to find some, to try to find some

anchors in these very difficult context.

Yeah, I think that's right.

I think that's spot on and so much of this.

I wrote a piece a few years ago called The Wild One, like the Wild One

Movement or everyone was about sort of some of the stuff that was going on.

It was from that Marlon Brando film, what are you rebelling against?

What do you got?

And I feel like that sort of really is like kind of where we are.

People are frustrated and there's data on this, like across both parties,

Republican or Democrat if people are upset about school closures, they're

more likely to be upset about a whole host of culture war and other issues.

People are just, They're angry and they're frustrated.

And they feel like they feel like they weren't taken seriously and that no

one's taken accountability for that.

It's why like people are like, why is everybody still

upset with Randy Weingarten?

It's because people feel like there hasn't been accountability.

There's a whole bunch of people who want, they want someone to acknowledge,

"Hey, that some bad stuff happened here".

And the fact that there are kids and no one's doing that.

And I feel like that is informing a very reactionary politics.

That will then get in the way of getting stuff done.

Because I think, I'm a sort of a congenital moderate, but like my view,

like you step back, you see stuff both parties are doing and you're like, what?

This doesn't make any sense.

Doesn't even make any sense with your prior commitments, right?

Yeah.

This is like stuff that you just thought up, you know, a week ago?

But it's because of how spun up everything is and there'll be some collateral

damage from that in our sector for sure.

I wasn't tracing the science of reading phenomenon early enough

to see when exactly they started it.

My guess is that it would've been pre pandemic and they would've chosen

science as some trustworthy foundation that we could go to, and of course we

get through the pandemic and everything around vaccines and all that stuff,

science has now been politicized.

There's nothing.

We all believe in science.

You can't swing a dead cat where I live without hitting one of these signs on

how in this house we believe in science.

But it's just crazy.

And we had Macke on last time and it's just amazing how she brings

this information to policymakers and to the general public.

There's not that much interest in it.

And if anything, people are taking away from her the data that she

will need to continue to have these kinds of studies in the future.

And her data has changed.

The most stunning thing about that study is the results have changed.

We talked about this at the last podcast, like people treat it like frozen and

amber from 2009, but it's because science is now this like ... science.

Science is not settled.

Science is like an investigative process of learning and refining and so forth,

but we have decided to weaponize.

And so the science is always settled and you remember like, who the hell knows,

like the origin of Covid, but it sure seems like maybe it could have come from

a lab that seemed plausible in 2020 too.

Right?

But back then, that was like against the science and you were basically, you know,

you were like a tin tinfoil hat person.

Right?

Like it'll soon if you thought that might be the case, you also believe

all this other stuff and like the science and the evidence has changed.

Right?

And that debate has now changed and us intelligence agencies

are split on that question.

And like that should like humble everybody a little bit.

And that's my point on like the science of reading.

There's definitely some stuff we should do the evidence points in a

direction we should train teachers based on the best available evidence.

But we should not then become like crazy illiberal and being like, this is

now settled and this is the way, and I worry some science of reading advocates

because I've heard people say things, you know, we have to make sure there's

no one in an Ed school who doesn't believe in the science of reading.

And like, that's just, I don't know.

I'm not there on that.

I think like, that's, to me that sounds like on something like

that, you want to know, "well where's the limiting principle?

What other things should we not allow?"

So it's a good time on a lot of issues people just sort of take a deep breath.

Well, and often it's determined by a small number of very impassioned people

who show up at a school board meeting.

And just it attempt to impose their will.

Yeah.

We should talk about Moms for Liberty.

But one other thing on this, someone we should mention before we get off the

science of reading is Emily Hanford, the journalist who sort of started calling

attention to this, did articles for American Public Media, did podcasts.

Did that whole series, recently sold a story.

I can remember a few different times over the years you'd get a journalist, usually

not an education journalist, because they bathe in all this and so they're sort

of caught up in it, like from outside the sector who would come in and write

an article that basically like, not to put too fine a point on, was like, "Hey,

reading instruction sure is fucked up".

And everybody would be like, "Yeah, that's right.

Like, look at that".

And then like that article would like evaporate.

Into the ether, right?

It would just bounce off and then everyone would get back to business as usual.

And Hanford, to her credit, I do think this is in like she didn't bounce off.

She was able to get traction.

I don't know if it was different modalities, if it was her just force

of will, whatever, but for whatever reason she's gotten traction on this in

a way that no one has a very long time.

And is changing, it's changing policy, as a result.

And that's just an enormous credit to her.

Absolutely.

We have to have somebody that can get through the noise and every once in

a while you have a journalist that can get to the bottom of things.

So yeah, she just, I don't know the skillset, the timing, whatever it

is, like she just deserves an enormous so amount of credit, because many people

have bounced off, before she got there.

So though, you said you want to talk about parenting , I mean,

I assume you're on your way to Philadelphia for the Moms for Liberty.

You're just like waiting to finish our podcast, then you're

going to head to the airport.

Got my plane ticket for tomorrow.

Nice.

I heard a story about them.

I did not know this apparently, and since this is a podcast, we don't

have to check our facts, so it may not be true, but I think it's true.

Somebody said they apparently give this award, it's called "The Sword

of Liberty", and I guess they gave it to Ron DeSantis not too long ago.

So there's a picture of him with like this sword.

Did you know about this?

It's Excalibur or something pulled out of the stone?

That was my thought.

Jed, we think alike.

That's why I go, my thought was what, like some Moms for Liberty person,

like pulled it out of a copy of gender queer or something and that's

like how this like all started.

That was exactly where I went.

This is what I learned about this.

Well, I mean it's barbaric, you know, strategies and tactics

of attacking the fortress straight out of the Middle Ages that seems

an appropriate comparison point, in terms of looking at some the tactics

of some of these groups these days.

I dare say they may have been more comfortable with appearing stuff in the

Middle Ages than some people are now.

But that's, neither nor there.

Yeah.

I mean, I'm struck, they're an interesting group.

You can't avoid them.

I think that you have to look at them along a couple of dimensions, like,

are they helping, hurting, on different things and different people are

going to agree or disagree on that.

And then the Southern Poverty Law Center recently labeled them a hate group,

which if I were them, I would probably be pretty psyched about, cause I'm

sure that's been good for fundraising.

I've got my issues with them to be sure.

And going back to science and reading, I think, yeah, they're creating some

real complications around science and reading and curriculum adoption, but

I don't think they're a hate group.

That's a pretty serious label and there are hate groups.

And I think when you start labeling groups like Moms for Liberty, hate groups, you

at once help their fundraising and you help all the other hate groups maybe

sort of seem a little less nauseous.

Right?

I don't want to overstate my criticism too.

I think that there's all sorts of legitimacy to many of the issues that

they care a lot about and to their tactics and what they're trying to do.

The thing I find troubling right now is that the venue within which public

education decisions are made are these public board meetings where if a small

splinter group comes in completely impassioned to take an extreme point

of view, they're not necessarily going to get the board to adopt that extreme

view, but they are going to be able to slow down the decision perhaps, you know,

stop the decision, create so much tension and ill will between the board members,

whatever it may be, that whatever they have to do to weather this challenge

that's been happening on this particular case degrades the board's ability to make

decisions on all sorts of other issues.

And I think it's time for us really to be thinking about what is the

ideal governance circumstance for a public education entity?

I really, I do believe that there are venues where we need the public of

whatever ilk to be able to come out.

I believe that.

I believe that's more at the authorizer level, not at the operator level.

If we had our public hospitals, If their boards were public meetings where people

were coming and basically insisting that the operation of the hospital, follow

whatever their dictate is or whatever is.

Our ports, our harbors, if they were governed in such a way that the operators

were subject to whomever it was that would sign up, show up at the meeting.

We would just simply have, imagine if our military, if our boards that are

running the Navy we're subject to a school board meeting protocol, we simply

wouldn't get the excellence that we need.

So I think we need to find a way to allow the public to have, its, its,

you know, its chance to engage with regulators, but less so with operators.

And the regulators, if they see the operators doing something

that's just not permissible, will they of course intervene.

But we protect the operators from just this chatter and controversy

that's clearly counterproductive.

Yeah, I watched this as a state board member because like

we, public comment's important.

I think, it's a first Amendment activity.

No, petition the government for redress of grievances, that's no small thing.

Even when they're saying things that I don't agree with, I love

that people can come and do that and they don't have to worry about like

retribution and, all the things.

If you've spent time elsewhere in the world and you've seen, you know, like

you, you realize how precious this is.

But at the same time, it can get in the way, it can become if it just becomes

theater, it actually in some ways works against the public interest in the

sense that people are just showing up cause they have something they want to

talk about and they're very sincere.

They get drowned out by whatever the sort of theater of the moment is.

So I do think, yeah, we want think about how do you balance all of

those things and lead to sort of both effective communication, so

boards actually are hearing from the public and know what's going on.

And also, when those rights are protected again obviously, but

then also sort of, Operation.

The other thing with this related to Moms for Liberty though, like that you

said in terms of, of how they operate.

I feel like I have a much better sense what they're

against than what they're for.

And I feel like that's what some of the, some of these new parent groups

who like you, I'm sympathetic to some of the issues they raise, and people

in our sector pretend like there hasn't been like an enormous leftward lurch

of the schools in the last few years.

Like it's obvious that they're every, it's one of these things like, you know, you're

not supposed to say, but everybody kind of knows like, why don't we just say it?

We have a healthier conversation.

And I don't think that's all bad incidentally.

I think some of that stuff's good, some of it is not, and we need to talk about that.

But I don't know what they're for I get it.

And they seem to be kind of all over the place.

So when I see them going after like the Ruby Bridges book in Tennessee

or, and also the other one there, which was a just a good book for young kids.

It's just a book about Martin Luther King's life that I think as I recall,

was keyed, like, at a second grade level.

It's just a good biography for kids to read.

You can obviously see where that would fit into to a curriculum,

especially certain times of the year.

And they're against that, and so I struggle with that because when

they say, hey, school shouldn't be transitioning kids in secret,

and that's happening a lot.

They have a point and we should talk about that, that's another one of these ones.

Nobody's like, don't talk about that, we should talk about that.

But then when it's hard to then when the next thing is like people saying, let's

get rid of teaching about Ruby Bridges, because it might make people feel bad.

And I feel like they have, you know, we'll see how this, their conference

is obviously they got a lot of juice.

They got like, you know, Donald Trump's there for goodness sake.

But yeah, how they translate that I think, is this the Tea Party?

And so it's sort of going to dissipate or turn into something else, or

can they build a actual lasting institutional dependent on how they

answer those kinds of questions.

Yeah.

Well, I always love talking about these things with you and we got a couple weeks

and it just seems like the volume of activity that's happening right now, just

the seismic changes that are happening.

I just find it challenge to stay on top of it.

Yeah, I do try.

Do you think it's because like the pandemic kept everybody so focused on

one thing, which was the pandemic that we're seeing, like, you know, there's just

a lot buildup and it's being released.

What do you thinks causing that?

We didn't even talk about the NA scores cause, at one level there's

all this attention and then at another level, is there really enough

attention to like these core things, like the catastrophic learning loss.

Yeah, I mean, I think that what we're seeing is just an acceleration

of the splintering of society.

I mean, just Facebook and, you know, partisan this.

And the consensus around how our schools operate is just

disintegrating before our eyes.

And so it's fine to say, oh, it's disintegrating, but that means as they

separate, each one needs to like begin to make decisions for itself again, and the

separation they can't help but criticize whomever they're separating from.

And it's just creating this period of just intense, intense controversy.

And I also think dumbing down of the discussion.

We're just not getting to the most important stuff right now.

And being at High Tech High or you know, a lot of charter school

organizations, I think do an incredible job around the structural issues.

It's very hard.

It's very difficult to do this incredibly well, and we need our boards.

In consultation with their staff members and with their parents or whatever in

their community, really talking about the right things, and some of these things are

going to be controversial and difficult.

And I'm just not sure that, you know, that conversation happening in a setting

where the next day you could find yourself on social media, the enemy of some right

large number of people that don't believe that is how we get the excellence of the

discussion that we need to go forward.

Yeah.

I think that's a good, and we didn't get to, we'll talk about another time,

like the whole thing on charters, and this goes to the science of reading and

they have control over their inputs.

That's all that makes them special.

They get to control who is doing the teaching and what is being taught.

And in a business that is a teaching and learning business, it is what

education is, that is no small thing and I feel like all the theatrics

around charters sort of ignore that core thing and it probably more than

anything else explains the improving results that Macke found, for instance.

Yeah.

I know we want to jump off here.

I just, I think that when there are problems within the traditional

public school system that become even more visible and more apparent.

Charter schools are looked to anew.

And we exist because there are those problems.

And we also have a status quo that's trying to sweep a lot of

those problems under the rug.

And what we're seeing right now is rugs are disintegrating.

Things are where they are and I think that charter schools will see a

resurgence and momentum along these lines.

But that's not all good because it's a sign of the fact that there're just

all these other challenges in public education right now that are not

being addressed as they need to be.

Jed, I'll just leave you with this thought.

If I were going to quit my job, which I don't plan to do cause I enjoy

podcasting with you and other things.

If I were, and I was going to become like a singer songwriter duo, like

playing coffee shops, the name of my band would be Fragile Vessel.

Well, could we bill ourselves as Click and Clack?

Click and Clack.

All right.

Great seeing you, Andy.

Take care.

Hey, see you buddy.

Have a good couple weeks.

I'll see you soon.