Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome to episode 98 of our podcast at Human Restoration Project.
Speaker: My name is Chris McNutt and I'm a high school digital media instructor from Ohio and I'm joined by Nick Covington, a social studies instructor from Iowa.
Speaker: Before we get started, I want to let you know that this is brought to you by our supporters, three of whom are Sally Orm, Dan Kearney and Efrem Hussain.
Speaker: Thank you for your ongoing support.
Speaker: You can learn more about the Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org or find us on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook.
Speaker: In this podcast, we decided to experiment a bit with our programming.
Speaker: To be honest, right now, there's a ton of burnout in the education world from the pandemic to ongoing struggles of teacher power and support, and the culture war once again resurfacing in the classroom.
Speaker: As educators by day and nonprofit workers by night, we totally get that struggle.
Speaker: Therefore, we are putting a slight pause on our typical interview format to try out something new.
Speaker: That frees us up from the workload of scheduling, researching, and working with guests, and it opens up the door for us to produce more casual content.
Speaker: If you like the guest stuff, don't worry.
Speaker: We'll come back to that in early December.
Speaker: But if you like the new stuff, please let us know.
Speaker: Before I dive into the format for this, Nick, any thoughts for what we're about to do?
Speaker: No, I'm excited for this because it's just, it's kind of a take on what we're already doing.
Speaker: We're always reading.
Speaker: We're always looking for new things.
Speaker: This just kind of gives us a new, clever, creative, fun way to be able to talk about that in a really informal way.
Speaker: So I'm hoping listeners, you know, if you like this, let us know on the Twitter account.
Speaker: And we'll talk too about, I think we want to have the last segment of this, if this is ongoing, be more of a question and answer section too.
Speaker: So if you want to send us just anything that you want Chris and I to talk about, ed pedagogy, ed policy, or completely unrelated things,
Speaker: We'll kind of take those requests at the end as well, but I'm excited to do this.
Speaker: There it is.
Speaker: And we have this amazing soundboard.
Speaker: Oh, new content.
Speaker: That's pretty good.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: So that was the transition sound.
Speaker: In this podcast, we're going to go through four things.
Speaker: First, we're just going to give an update on what we're doing in HRP, a brief update.
Speaker: Two, Nick and I have brought some articles that we're currently reading that we thought were interesting that we're going to talk about.
Speaker: Next, we're going to talk about what we're doing in our classroom, some interesting things.
Speaker: Then finally, a pop quiz to see who exits this podcast alive or something like that.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: I didn't know what to write there, but I wrote something.
Speaker: Let's first start by talking about an update.
Speaker: What's going on at HRP, Nick?
Speaker: Man, what isn't going on?
Speaker: It's been a pretty awesome couple of days, to be honest with you.
Speaker: Friday morning, I had a meeting with a group out of Krakow, Poland called the Holistic Think Tank.
Speaker: And yeah, we're kind of looking forward to seeing how our work can complement each other and yeah, kind of build a partnership going forward.
Speaker: There's not a whole lot of other information we have on that right now other than
Speaker: that contact has kind of been made.
Speaker: Um, I have some really, uh, what serendipitous contacts to Poland.
Speaker: I studied there, um, for a semester way back in 2008 and I've kept in touch with, um,
Speaker: with a professor at the Yagilonian University there ever since.
Speaker: I mean, we've talked about life events and everything else for the last 10 years post-graduation.
Speaker: And it turns out she actually knows one of the lead researchers at the Holistic Think Tank.
Speaker: So she was the first person that I reached out to.
Speaker: We got a meeting set up and we were able to talk on Friday.
Speaker: So just one of those crazy things that was over a decade in the making, but could be really exciting for us.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And as a reminder, if you know any grant opportunities, HRP is a nonprofit.
Speaker: We're always looking for folks that can help us out.
Speaker: That is one of our primary goals this year.
Speaker: And if you're wondering like, hey, HRP, what are you doing after the learning laws handbook?
Speaker: To be revealed very soon.
Speaker: We're putting together a bunch of folks, a bunch of different ideas together.
Speaker: It hasn't been board approved yet, so I don't want to share it.
Speaker: But there is a big, major announcement on the horizon.
Speaker: So look out for that.
Speaker: There is work being done.
Speaker: Somebody take the soundboard away.
Speaker: No one's going to, these are all going to get cut.
Speaker: Those are horrible.
Speaker: They're terrible.
Speaker: I can't find a good one.
Speaker: Like, they're all, like, zero star here.
Speaker: You're reading a magazine.
Speaker: You come across a full-page nude photo.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Let's not do that one.
Speaker: Let's run Blade Runner.
Speaker: I know.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Well, anyways, so that's just a little brief update.
Speaker: That's just a little brief update about what's going on at HRP.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: More to be said.
Speaker: So let's move into section two, Nick.
Speaker: Article shareouts.
Speaker: What's something you're reading?
Speaker: What interests you?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So this one, I don't want this to be like a downer, but it's like super serious.
Speaker: It'll be a definite tonal change, but it's actually Joel Westheimer's Pledging Allegiance, the Politics of Patriotism in America's Schools.
Speaker: And what's really nice about that is it's kind of an anthology.
Speaker: It just has
Speaker: over a dozen kind of small chapters, each one from a different author.
Speaker: But almost anybody, if you've been involved in education or you teach the social studies or anything like that, you'll recognize some of the names.
Speaker: I mean, the forward is by Howard Zinn.
Speaker: It has excerpts from Studs Terkel in there.
Speaker: It has a chapter from James W. Lowen.
Speaker: It's got Deborah Meyer.
Speaker: Gloria Ladson-Billings is in there.
Speaker: Diana Hess.
Speaker: I mean, I could literally just read off the back and you would know a dozen other people that are in there.
Speaker: So what I think has been really interesting about this read is how it kind of maps onto our current conversations about
Speaker: this issue of patriotism, except this book was written in 2007.
Speaker: So I'm kind of transported back to, you know, my own experiences then of post 9-11 in high school, you know, the ramp up in the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, my experience in college as well, when this book would have come out in 2007.
Speaker: And so it's just been a really interesting read, kind of from that historiographical lens about what does it say about the context of
Speaker: in which it was written less so about the content that everybody's writing about, but how they're hammering those same points about how the Patriot Act, say, required schools to be the hosts for military recruiters in schools.
Speaker: And I guess I hadn't realized that.
Speaker: I'll pull up a couple of sections here and just quote them if that's cool.
Speaker: Just because it maps so perfectly onto the conversations we're having now.
Speaker: But
Speaker: The conversations in 2020 and 2021 have been about these divisive concepts, so-called critical race theory.
Speaker: Don't even get me started on that.
Speaker: But then every sort of culture war conflict that you were leading in with that's mapped onto this.
Speaker: But then I think, okay, what were those culture war conflicts 20 years ago?
Speaker: I mean, we just this year last month celebrated, celebrated, commemorated the 20th anniversary of 9-11.
Speaker: We ended a 20 year war in Afghanistan, the longest in American history.
Speaker: And so it's just, you know, what's that saying?
Speaker: History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes.
Speaker: And I'm picking up a lot of the rhyming scheme in this book.
Speaker: But
Speaker: You hear about teachers who are getting under the gun, getting fired, getting in trouble for teaching certain essays, you know, that dude that taught Ta-Nehisi Coates and was fired for maybe putting up some resistance to changing that in his curriculum.
Speaker: But hear this from Joel Westheimer.
Speaker: He says, in New Mexico, five teachers were recently suspended or disciplined for promoting discussion among students about the Iraq War.
Speaker: and for expressing among a range of views anti-war sentiments.
Speaker: One teacher refused to remove art posters created by students that reflected their views on the war and was suspended without pay.
Speaker: Alan Cooper, a teacher from Albuquerque, was suspended for refusing to remove student design posters that his principal labeled not sufficiently pro-war.
Speaker: Two other teachers, Rio Grande High School's Carmelita Roybal and
Speaker: And Albuquerque High School's Kentavish posted signs about the war, at least one of which opposed military action.
Speaker: And a teacher at Highland Hills School was placed on administrative leave because she refused to remove a flyer from her wall advertising a peace rally.
Speaker: Roybal and Tavish were suspended, and all of the teachers in these cases were docked two to four days' pay by the Albuquerque Public Schools.
Speaker: Yet, each of these schools posts military recruitment posters and photographs of soldiers in Iraq.
Speaker: So again, like you hear that rhyming scheme about the debates that we're having, I mean, in Iowa today about the Pledge of Allegiance, now that it's required in schools by state law, about the so-called divisive topics bills.
Speaker: And around the country, what we just heard out of Southlake about the administrator who was
Speaker: encouraging them to teach both sides of the Holocaust.
Speaker: And, and right.
Speaker: So you're thinking these were, these were educators in New Mexico nearly 20 years ago who were experiencing those exact same things.
Speaker: So I don't, I don't know.
Speaker: What are you thinking about that?
Speaker: It's just fascinating because especially in the education world, how often these exact same debates come up.
Speaker: Like we pick up a lot of books.
Speaker: I was reading, um,
Speaker: Gloria Ladson-Billingsworth from like the 90s and 80s.
Speaker: And it's not the same thing, but she's talking about homework policy, about standardized testing, about democratic classrooms.
Speaker: And you could just take the exact same quotes and put them into an article today and it would sound no different.
Speaker: Another really good example, the Neil Postman book, Charles Weygeier, the Teaching as a Subversive Activity.
Speaker: Great book.
Speaker: Was that like 1960s?
Speaker: 50 years ago.
Speaker: Yeah, it's the same exact stuff that comes up every single day.
Speaker: And the culture war is probably not going away anytime soon.
Speaker: It's just so interesting to see how it has been mapped onto these different things, right?
Speaker: You think about like the context of the Bush administration in the country as it was in that post 9-11 period.
Speaker: And then
Speaker: Flash forward to, you know, I think now is just a completely, again, not completely different, but the context is just so much more chaotic because at least with the Bush administration, there was sort of that unified theme, right?
Speaker: And that unification of at least one part of the country around that idea of war and patriotism and what that looked like.
Speaker: Now today, it's completely subverted by conspiracy theorists.
Speaker: And there's another bit of this too.
Speaker: Deborah Meyer's piece in here obviously is pretty great.
Speaker: I found myself underlining hers kind of more often than not just because of the...
Speaker: Of the implications, I think, for talking about it in the classroom, and she has a bit on here that reads, in the name of the war on terror or the war in Iraq, we have experienced the narrowing of our national understanding of patriotism.
Speaker: Is this version of education easier to sell at a time when school practices that draw from military models seem particularly relevant and easier to understand?
Speaker: And she says, probably, probably.
Speaker: The glamour of soldiery is creeping back into our culture, especially for young men, increasingly for young women, and above all for those at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, and it's bound to impact schooling.
Speaker: And she goes on to say, a little bit later in that section, because even as democracy is not inborn or natural, it is not unnatural either.
Speaker: It must be learned.
Speaker: So too, the forms of patriotism that are compatible with it must be learned as well.
Speaker: And like, those are just things that have resonated with me as I've been reading through the book in the last week and, and seeing, seeing as I have, you know, the return kind of of the, of this casual militarism into the culture.
Speaker: You know, you see what black rifle coffee kind of things you see a lot of like, like
Speaker: the Punisher logos on the back of trucks.
Speaker: And some of that stuff is just like creeping into the mainstream culture and has really taken, I think, taken for granted then what it means to be a patriot or to practice patriotism.
Speaker: And I think too about my own experiences last year when the biggest part of the culture war issue started for me is when I was asking my kids this question of what does it mean to be an American?
Speaker: And we were exploring that through a variety of lenses that included white nationalism.
Speaker: Um, and that was back in March, uh, of this year and launched, you know, six months of, of strife and everything else too.
Speaker: So I don't know, it's just swirling around in my head about, um, again, the, the kinds of things that, that look similar, that really have never went away.
Speaker: Um, thinking about the ways in which they have changed and how we can, we can better, I don't know, do a better job in classrooms of, um,
Speaker: of having those conversations with kids and where they're happening.
Speaker: The militarism piece is especially interesting for the students we have in our classrooms today, because although America has essentially always been involved in foreign countries, pretty much since imperialism, these particular students have never been alive in a period that hasn't been the war on terror.
Speaker: So that book is written kind of as a counter narrative to that war on terror.
Speaker: But now it's a presumption.
Speaker: The students that have grown up just know that as their reality.
Speaker: So they are probably connotating that militarism.
Speaker: There has to be how it is.
Speaker: You know, this was written in 2007.
Speaker: Here we are 13 years later and this thing is wrapping up.
Speaker: Here's Deborah Meyer reflecting on
Speaker: you know, the consequences or the potential consequences then.
Speaker: But here we are now, we have to think, right, what are the consequences of 20 years of war on, you know, our mindset as far as education and what it means to be educated and preparedness and the cost of higher education and what it means for kids who do go on to get involved in the military, perhaps to pay for college, perhaps for other things too.
Speaker: And
Speaker: And I just don't think that that's, that's not a conversation that we have anymore, right?
Speaker: It was really salient 15 years ago, probably when this book was written, but now it's just, again, like, like so many things, it's just become part of the air that we breathe in schools, just becomes part of our habits and routines to have military recruiters in our buildings and to
Speaker: kind of take war for granted.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And there has to be consequences.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: One more thing on that, that, I mean, it's been a conversation and we've been having it for so long, but with the increasing costs of college, how readily we accept the narrative and preach the narrative that, oh, military is an option where you don't have to pay for school.
Speaker: That's the incentive to go fighting in the military.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: I mean, what you're saying is that because our education system has failed us, you should go risk your life potentially.
Speaker: You might die and fight in an occupation of a foreign country in order to go around that barrier.
Speaker: It's a very problematic way that we look at the future of education and what our young learners value, especially when we connect it to financial gain.
Speaker: I'm glad you brought this up because it connects a lot with the first article I wanted to share, which is actually a book.
Speaker: So I recently wrote, I guess, part three of this unpacking neoliberal schooling thing I've been doing, where I've just been kind of like looking at the connections between capitalist forces, marketing of educational resources, and folks who are just trying to make a buck off of public ed.
Speaker: It's kind of a fringe topic, but I came across this author, researcher, his name is Nicholas Stock, and he wrote an article that connected Mark Fisher, who wrote Capitalist Realism, and Education Theory.
Speaker: I'm not going to dive into that right now because it will take too long.
Speaker: But he pointed me over to a book called John Baudrillard and Radical Education Theory Turning Right to Go Left, which is by Kip Klein and Christopher Holland.
Speaker: So Baudrillard is the guy most people know as the basis of the matrix.
Speaker: He wrote all about simulation theory and about hyperreality and the blending of technology and the world around us.
Speaker: But the book dives into the fact that, one, if you've seen The Matrix, the depiction of The Matrix is not really what Bajrard's concept is.
Speaker: But also, how could educators use what he actually was saying in their practice?
Speaker: And now, I'm going to attempt to explain this.
Speaker: Please stop me if this does not make sense.
Speaker: Because this is the reason why I haven't done a book review in a while.
Speaker: Because I did this, and it drained everything from my brain.
Speaker: This book was only like 60 pages long.
Speaker: And it is like...
Speaker: deciphering paragraph by paragraph by what exactly are you talking about.
Speaker: It makes sense to me now.
Speaker: So Baudrillard has four orders of the simulation theory.
Speaker: First, there is where representation of the real is obvious.
Speaker: This is first order, where you know something is not real.
Speaker: You just engage in it.
Speaker: For example, if you go to a theater performance, you know you're at a theater performance.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: Um, the second order is where reality starts to blur.
Speaker: So maybe you're watching like the latest Marvel movie and you can't tell what is CG and what is like actually acted.
Speaker: And then like when you see what it actually is, it's like all green screens.
Speaker: That's second order.
Speaker: So like, you know, it isn't real, but it's hard to tell what is real and what isn't.
Speaker: Then the important part is the third order.
Speaker: So the third order is what Baudrillard calls hyper-reality.
Speaker: The best way to explain this is the authors talk about Disneyland's main street.
Speaker: So everyone knows like you go down the street and it's like hometown America and it's like this idealized, like perfect storefront, like cool restaurants, etc.
Speaker: And when we visit Disneyland and we tour Main Street, we engage with that as a real space, even though we know it's not real.
Speaker: But what makes it hyper real is that Main Streets now across the United States have gentrified their own Main Streets and replicated Disney's Main Street.
Speaker: So Disney has informed and changed our reality through a simulated experience.
Speaker: Now what we're idealizing, the thing that we think is really cool and this thing that we think way should be is based off of a historical knowledge.
Speaker: It's an idealized corporate interpretation of what it used to be.
Speaker: That's hyperreality, where it's like the simulation has replaced what exactly reality is.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: And then fourth order would be, th is is the newest one.
Speaker: It's like the Disneyverse.
Speaker: So it's where you start taking all of these different things that inform how we live our entire lives.
Speaker: I think about like Disney princesses.
Speaker: So it's no longer that Disney creates the space that we visit and bring back with us, but that everything around us actually is our reality.
Speaker: It's described as life imitating art.
Speaker: So in the same way that like maybe politicians talk about the market.
Speaker: Well, what is the market?
Speaker: But yet it has so much power over our daily conversations.
Speaker: So this fourth order is where we're so surrounded by these ideas and it's so taking control of us that that's just the way it is.
Speaker: We're not imitating a specific simulation we visited.
Speaker: We are itself the simulation.
Speaker: Like everything has informed each other.
Speaker: Does that make sense?
Speaker: I think it does.
Speaker: And honestly, I don't know if that was intentional to like make a connection to that patriotism book or whatever.
Speaker: But like I'm thinking about that third order, especially when you were talking about the hyper reality and the ways that we change reality to maybe be more like the fiction or I guess or the simulation.
Speaker: How much is our current culture wars sort of the reflection of that reality?
Speaker: seemingly desire to have our reality match with what internet conspiracy theorists are living.
Speaker: I don't know if that's necessarily the intention, but it really comes down to a different interpretation of reality, not just necessarily terms like what it means to be a patriot, but
Speaker: In these COVID days, whether or not you believe that the virus is real, that it's worth taking mitigation to protect yourself from it, or whether you think the president's legitimate.
Speaker: I mean, I don't know how deep that rabbit hole goes, but it seems like there is an increasing...
Speaker: that hyper-reality is increasingly in conflict with the reality.
Speaker: And perhaps that's like at the center of where our political, cultural, whatever divisions are.
Speaker: Is that fair to say?
Speaker: I think so.
Speaker: Some people have persisted in the hyper-real and other people are looking at reality in its own terms.
Speaker: So what's interesting is that I think, but I'm pretty confident that Bajriar would say that everyone already lives in hyper-reality.
Speaker: So it's not that there is a group of folks who live in the hyper real and a group of folks who don't.
Speaker: It's almost like that group that you're talking about, these folks who no longer believe in science, that no longer go along with these things.
Speaker: They actually have moved into fourth order.
Speaker: It no longer matters what's real and what's not real.
Speaker: Hyper real is more like, I recognize this thing is happening, but I'm okay with it.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: I wanted to bring about this article and it connects to your, your patriotism stuff.
Speaker: Baudrillard's like final thing that he was talking about was this concept called fatal strategies.
Speaker: So this was before this was like a mainstream conversation.
Speaker: He spoke about this idea called post-truth.
Speaker: Basically, the truth does not matter.
Speaker: And he brought up this idea that we research and we research and we research, for example, on climate science, and we show it in different ways.
Speaker: We present all these different models of it.
Speaker: The problem isn't that the research doesn't exist or we don't have access to the information because we have more access now than we ever did to information.
Speaker: He argues that the problem is the truth doesn't matter at all.
Speaker: So people that have bought into that hyperreality and people that have moved into that fourth order, it doesn't matter for them before.
Speaker: It's just a larger growth of post-truth.
Speaker: Basically, the more you make the argument that this is the way things are and present that research, the more people dive into that simulation, the more they dive into their reality.
Speaker: And he basically talks about how exactly do you counteract that?
Speaker: How do you...
Speaker: Do something where you don't fight fire with fire.
Speaker: And he calls this concept fatal strategies.
Speaker: So listen to this quote.
Speaker: Let's see if you can make sense of it.
Speaker: So he says,
Speaker: We will seek what is more ugly than the ugly, the monstrous.
Speaker: We will not oppose the visible to the hidden.
Speaker: We will seek what is more hidden than hidden, the secret.
Speaker: Does that make sense?
Speaker: Do you understand what he's getting out there?
Speaker: If you repeat that to yourself in the mirror, do you get pulled out of the Matrix?
Speaker: Is that how...
Speaker: You'll wake up with Morpheus on the Nebuchadnezzar.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So here's a better way to explain it.
Speaker: So even though the argument by the authors that the Matrix is a terrible representation, I do think there's a part of the Matrix that makes sense.
Speaker: So this will only make sense to Matrix fans.
Speaker: So bear with me.
Speaker: But there's a scene in the second Matrix about the architect.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: You know, the architect, the dude.
Speaker: So it's iconic scene.
Speaker: He's sitting in the chair.
Speaker: There's all these images of Neo, the main character behind him.
Speaker: And the premise is that Neo is supposed to be the savior of the Matrix, this computer program that's been designed to keep humans subjugated.
Speaker: And the architect tells Neo basically, well, you're actually part of the code.
Speaker: Like you are intentionally programmed to act as the savior narrative to keep humans under control.
Speaker: It's a control for the control.
Speaker: And he offers Neo two choices, either to basically like let everyone die or to preserve the matrix.
Speaker: And the... Spoiler alert.
Speaker: The decision that Neo makes is not to take either path.
Speaker: He does both.
Speaker: That is the argument that Badriar makes surrounding Fatal Strategies.
Speaker: That the goal of...
Speaker: combating post-truth is not to present truth.
Speaker: The goal of combating post-truth is to present a different option, like an entirely different reality.
Speaker: It doesn't turn in any direction.
Speaker: It turns up.
Speaker: It's completely different.
Speaker: It makes me think, Bell Hooks, actually, and she talks about with her pedagogy of hope, she says,
Speaker: when we only name the problem when we stay stay compliant without a constructive focus or resolution we take hope away and this way critique can become merely an expression of profound cynicism which then works to sustain dominator culture
Speaker: So where I'm getting at with this, and I don't want to spend too long on this article, is that it's all about kind of embracing the chaos of progressive education, where, because Bajriar also loves chaos theory, but it's all like...
Speaker: You just do the thing.
Speaker: Like stop trying to do research about it.
Speaker: Stop trying to combat these folks that no longer believe in it.
Speaker: You just do weird stuff.
Speaker: If you think it's going to work or even if you don't think it's going to work, it doesn't matter.
Speaker: You're breaking out of that rat race of like, can I do this?
Speaker: Can I do that?
Speaker: Should I research this?
Speaker: What things could support it?
Speaker: Could I defend myself doing it?
Speaker: You just shift it to just being, hey, I'm going to have this radical idea and I'm just going to do it.
Speaker: That's breaking out of the cycle.
Speaker: You're presenting an entirely different narrative instead of trying to fight back at all.
Speaker: It's really interesting stuff.
Speaker: You got to cue the, uh, the rage against the machine song that plays at the end of the, of the first, right?
Speaker: You're right.
Speaker: That's gotta be our transition to, to get to the next, to the next piece.
Speaker: I'm going to show them a world without you, a world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries, a world where anything is possible.
Speaker: Where we go from there is a choice I leave to you.
Speaker: That's such a good movie.
Speaker: I love The Matrix.
Speaker: That is so good.
Speaker: I saw that movie twice in theaters.
Speaker: I'm so excited for the next one.
Speaker: I even like the second and third one.
Speaker: I love The Matrix.
Speaker: So let's then shift into talking about our classrooms.
Speaker: What's going on in our classroom space?
Speaker: I can start this one if you want.
Speaker: I want to talk about what we're doing with PBL.
Speaker: So we're fortunate in the last couple of years, we've shifted to be a cohorted space.
Speaker: So I have a PBL period during the day, which does not necessarily have to connect to any standards whatsoever.
Speaker: The goal is that we make the project first and then connect it to everyone's standards, whoever can get involved with it.
Speaker: So we still do PBL in the class, but that's besides the point.
Speaker: Then during the PBL period, one of the options the students had that I am in charge of is creating a video game.
Speaker: Years back, five or six years ago, I did the same project, but it was a little bit more tailored.
Speaker: We did like this thing with veterans and actually talking about the same things we were just talking about earlier, like patriotism and what it means to be a veteran, that kind of thing.
Speaker: This time through, we're focused more on game theory and what does it mean to create a good game.
Speaker: So it's less topic based and more psychology based.
Speaker: And we've been using Will Wright's masterclass.
Speaker: But Will Wright, the creator of The Sims, has this amazing masterclass on the masterclass website where he talks about game theory.
Speaker: Kids are watching that.
Speaker: They're making their own art assets.
Speaker: They're making their own sound design.
Speaker: We're using RPG Maker, which is a good introduction to.
Speaker: And the English teacher is helping out with the writing elements.
Speaker: I'm obviously doing the designing things.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: It's cool.
Speaker: The kids are super excited about it.
Speaker: We've had a long break because of parent-teacher conferences.
Speaker: And I got these Discord messages from kids asking me about, like, hey, what's my username and password into the account so I can work on this at home?
Speaker: They are very excited to work on.
Speaker: It's always cool when you can break kids up into small groups where they can just do something that's completely around their interests.
Speaker: Because I have about 25 kids in there and they are all obsessed with video games.
Speaker: That is so awesome.
Speaker: Dude, we've always talked too about writing that article about how does good video game design mimic good instructional design?
Speaker: um because if you think about the the best they don't even have to be open world games but like we've always talked about breath of the wild or maybe mario odyssey you know the games that just understand game design really well um that kind of structure and the way that it sort of it trains the player in in kind of the the skills and the attributes um and kind of the way that that world works without running through a tutorial right it
Speaker: it teaches you how to play the game through playing the game that not only sets up like an incentive structure for, for the player to then want to be able to use those skills in new and challenging ways and really like push the limits of that world, but then discover what else that world has to offer.
Speaker: And it was, it was kind of video games that, that,
Speaker: that had me thinking a lot about questioning my classroom practices back when I was kind of making the transition from, you know, what I, what I, I was a good educator when I first started too, I believe.
Speaker: It's just, I hadn't quite made the pedagogical leap maybe to some of the progressive, the progressive side.
Speaker: But it was because I would see the way that students would be involved in games, whether, whether it's like athletics or video games or anything else like that.
Speaker: And then just see, you know, why, why are they intrinsically motivated to want to do something that, that, that looks asinine, right.
Speaker: That looks ridiculous from the outside that gets no conceivable reward, you know, because the line is always kids only do stuff if they get a grade or, you know, um,
Speaker: They won't do it if there's not any points attached.
Speaker: Then you'd see them put hours into things that have no real connection to the outside world.
Speaker: But you just want to know, like, what's the next thing?
Speaker: How can I do this thing faster?
Speaker: How can I just get a little bit more points?
Speaker: Depending on whatever the game is, how can I beat that next level?
Speaker: And it's kind of about creating that structure that lets it do that.
Speaker: And I think there's a lot of progressive pedagogies and kind of structures and research theories that help support that now.
Speaker: But back then, it's just like, hey, what makes games great?
Speaker: How can I make my classroom more like that?
Speaker: So you're having kids just make that stuff.
Speaker: That's a really good point.
Speaker: And next week, we're talking about gameplay loops.
Speaker: And depending on the challenge of your game, how do you keep a player playing if your game is challenging?
Speaker: Like how do you make the lose state exciting?
Speaker: Because there's nothing worse than when you're playing a game and it's too hard and then you just quit and give up, which I think has a lot of pedagogical connections because in the best games, if it is incredibly challenging, like if it's designed to be that way, to get back into it is usually super fast.
Speaker: And I think about that in the classroom sense.
Speaker: Well, if you have a very challenging lesson or a very challenging unit,
Speaker: How do you have students get back into that lesson if they don't know what's going on?
Speaker: What is your failure state to ensure that they're not lost?
Speaker: Because if it sucks to get back into it, they're just going to stop playing.
Speaker: Yeah, and if you make the consequences too high, then you're not going to want to continue because you would have lost whatever progress that you had just made.
Speaker: Think of the mechanics from old school games, some that really get criticized, like Resident Evil, the first Resident Evil games.
Speaker: You'd have to collect those ink ribbons, and then wherever you found it, you had to find a typewriter, and you had to make sure that you would save your ink ribbons because it could be the case that you could run out of saves and then be stuck in a position where you just have to...
Speaker: you know, basically start your game over.
Speaker: And a lot of old school games, that would be the case where you could get into a place where you could either just be stuck interminably dying over and over again or have no way out of the thing.
Speaker: And then what?
Speaker: That just discourages you from playing the game.
Speaker: So I think game designers have come a long way too in realizing that the things that
Speaker: used to punish the player for making mistakes, now rewarding them for exploration and to pushing those limits and making sure that they can get back on their feet with as little setback as possible and to be in the best position just to pick up the controller and want to keep going.
Speaker: And that's not to say, not to be exploitative, maybe gameplay loops is different from maybe dopamine hooks, where we think of the most addictive parts of mobile gaming, kind of the most damaging bits of that.
Speaker: That's not what we're talking about here.
Speaker: We're talking about things that can get you back into the learning faster.
Speaker: So how can we make our classroom structures look more like the best kind of video game design, right?
Speaker: How can we give kids the ability to be in the driver's seat of the decision-making process and kind of set expectations?
Speaker: what we might call kind of low floor, high ceiling play experiences within our classroom walls, right?
Speaker: How do kids know that when they can save their progress or what happens if they fail?
Speaker: And how can we just increase the amount of feedback that kids get that's useful for them to improve on the next thing right away instead of having to wait the next day or a week or a month to get that paperback or whatever.
Speaker: So I don't know, that's always a good conversation.
Speaker: One more thing about games.
Speaker: which is these three different types of win or lose states.
Speaker: So early retro games were designed not to be beaten.
Speaker: That was the whole reason why the lose state was so extreme.
Speaker: So when we're designing our class, we have to consider, is the class designed in a way...
Speaker: perhaps unintentionally that students are almost kind of ostracized for doing poorly.
Speaker: So if you don't do well, is your class designed in a way that's almost intentional that they are not going to do well and be able to catch back up?
Speaker: Like if there aren't those things there to make that possible,
Speaker: then it's sort of the design of the class because that's just what's going to happen.
Speaker: There's no way to get back on.
Speaker: In terms of the win state thing, though, to tease apart the exploitative version versus the good version, great games will do storylines, so the narrative of the lesson, discovering the next thing.
Speaker: Or maybe it's a point system that is no pressure.
Speaker: Most great point systems are not like you have to get a certain number of points or else you don't get to move on.
Speaker: The points are there to challenge yourself to do something different than everybody else.
Speaker: It's just for fun.
Speaker: It's just a low stress thing.
Speaker: Maybe it's a great game where it's just fun to play it.
Speaker: You don't care if you win or lose.
Speaker: It's just like, oh, this is cool.
Speaker: I enjoy this.
Speaker: Failure is not seen as a bad thing.
Speaker: It's just like part of the part of the thing.
Speaker: And then kind of separating that from the dopamine enhancer.
Speaker: Well, what's the end goal of those games?
Speaker: It's to make a lot of money.
Speaker: So if our goal is this extrinsic thing, getting someone to have their peas and carrots, which in our case is making as much money as possible, then I'm going to exploit that system so that it fits around what I want to earn at the end.
Speaker: So if we're teasing apart gamification, a lot of gamification strategies for classrooms, sadly, are very corporate in nature.
Speaker: They're all about like, well, how do we get kids to get good grades?
Speaker: So the design of the class is more, well, how do we get them to do all this dumb stuff?
Speaker: Well, we're going to gamify it and they'll get as high as scores as possible on the test.
Speaker: Versus gamification, that's just how do we design a learning experience that's fun and has good coming back states and kids enjoy the narrative of it and they're doing it because they think it's cool and it's exciting.
Speaker: Yeah, that latter state that you mentioned there too, maybe the more exploitative gamified version of that completely ignores too the willingness of students to enter into those spaces.
Speaker: You know, like, is it a game that kids would pick up voluntarily or is it just there kind of as an incentive structure?
Speaker: I think in terms of classroom, an incentive structure to get kids to comply.
Speaker: You know, is it just another extrinsic kind of behaviorist
Speaker: tool to manipulate kids, or does it help put them in the driver's seat of, you know, telling their learning narrative, you know, are they able to make choices about what they're doing next based on the feedback that they get?
Speaker: Are they able to apply what they're learning in, you know, new and novel ways that are interesting to them, you know, or again, is it just about, to your point, you know, getting them to do as much stuff as fast as possible,
Speaker: So that way they can get a good grade on the test and move on.
Speaker: Yeah, that's that's more of the mobile game.
Speaker: You know, that's the cookie clicker candy crush version, Mike, the micro transaction version of gamified classrooms instead of there's our next book, the Breath of the Wild.
Speaker: Yeah, there it is.
Speaker: Anyways, moving over to what's going on in your class, Nick.
Speaker: Oh, man, nothing nearly as cool as yours.
Speaker: I'm kind of in a lull right now.
Speaker: I did all my cool stuff just within the last couple of weeks, right before the holiday, right, the indigenous people's holiday, as announced by the Biden administration.
Speaker: we actually did spend a week answering the question in class, should we continue to celebrate Columbus Day or does the holiday need to change?
Speaker: And I think it's a great way not just to seat and contextualize some of the content in my European history class about, right, that age of exploration and conquest and all of that stuff too, but also to reflect on...
Speaker: reflect on how we commemorate people, events, time periods in public spaces.
Speaker: So, so we looked at a lot of current events.
Speaker: I didn't know if you were aware of this, but in Mexico city, they actually voted to take down a statue of Columbus fairly recently.
Speaker: And then just in the last week, they replaced it with a statue of an indigenous girl or an indigenous woman.
Speaker: I'm not quite sure of the age.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: But it's a really striking thing, right?
Speaker: Not just having Columbus replaced here with an indigenous person to kind of change that narrative, but again, to like put a female presence where once, you know, it was a very male-dominated space and just looking at how we commemorate those things.
Speaker: So we did a lot of learning around that.
Speaker: We did, we took a vote on like, yes, we should continue.
Speaker: No, we should change it at the beginning of the week.
Speaker: Then at the end of the week, we voted again after, you know, doing all the learning and context building.
Speaker: And we had a
Speaker: We had a really cool kind of, I don't, it's almost like a discussion board, except I did it on Jamboard because I didn't want to use, you know, I don't, I don't, I didn't have like a Reddit subreddit or a discord or anything else like that.
Speaker: So we kind of had a silent debate on the Jamboard, which that was, which was very productive.
Speaker: Kids asked a lot of great critical questions.
Speaker: They really did a good job engaging with each other.
Speaker: And at the end of the debate, they,
Speaker: More often than not, in each class, the side of change got more points at the end than it had at the beginning.
Speaker: And kind of the consensus was, in some way, shape or form to recognize an Indigenous Peoples Day, as we do in Iowa, by proclamation of our governor in 2018.
Speaker: Or to expand the notion of Columbus Day into be a more inclusive holiday for, say, explorers or discoveries.
Speaker: So that way you could incorporate, you know, you can incorporate the 20th century, you know, space race.
Speaker: People who have been lost or explorers who have been involved in that.
Speaker: It's a little bit more international because...
Speaker: Obviously, you know, space kind of is beyond any particular nationalistic context, or at least probably it should be.
Speaker: But also, right, you can throw in explorers in that time period from other nations as well.
Speaker: I mean, to get in there and hear kids just going over their notes that they've taken, using textbook resources, you know, Googling, like, what is a galley?
Speaker: You know, like, oh, what's a galley?
Speaker: And they'll be like typing up.
Speaker: They're like, oh, I don't think it's a galley because of this.
Speaker: Um, so I'm done just giving a test and having kids sit in silence and waiting for me to grade it.
Speaker: I mean, we turn that into an, an experience, a conversation, and I don't know, I don't know how the hell to grade it.
Speaker: I don't know how to grade anything in an AP class anymore, but, um, but we're learning.
Speaker: And I think that's, it'll be evident to anybody who comes into that space, you know, that we're, that, that kids are learning.
Speaker: We're talking about the content.
Speaker: I don't know what else you want from them, you know?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Speaking of fatal strategies.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: One side might argue that we need to have a lot of rote memorization.
Speaker: Here's what you need to do and now take a test over it.
Speaker: One side might argue, hey, we need to focus on critical thinking skills.
Speaker: They make this cool rubric and then you get good points and you get bad points and you work to improve it.
Speaker: Maybe the fatal strategy is, well, why make anything great at all?
Speaker: Or why even have a performance at the end?
Speaker: Why not just do practice?
Speaker: I have a test.
Speaker: Even if you're going to have a test, why make it great?
Speaker: Just learn through it.
Speaker: It's just another assignment.
Speaker: Treat a quiz like, I don't know, watching a movie and answering questions about it.
Speaker: Just another thing that you could do.
Speaker: If kids want to do it, you can do it.
Speaker: That's it.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: And I think, you know, it's a great way then to just build, not just build up competence, but like the kind of collaborative learning community that you want kids to have.
Speaker: Because
Speaker: It just builds our collective capacity to do better together because the kid who doesn't know it on the test and then just sits there, right?
Speaker: And just, they're not experiencing growth and learning and understanding.
Speaker: They know that they are not going to do well.
Speaker: And then they just have to sit there and wait for the grade.
Speaker: And what?
Speaker: It just confirms what they, it confirms what they knew themselves about their lack of understanding in that moment.
Speaker: And what a waste of, what a waste of time that is, you know, the test.
Speaker: I'm so over the test.
Speaker: Let's get kids talking.
Speaker: Let's get them using their resources.
Speaker: Let's get them working together.
Speaker: That's called spaceship whoosh by.
Speaker: Anyways, there's no sound in space.
Speaker: There's no spaceship whoosh by.
Speaker: We're going by sci-fi rules, so it doesn't matter.
Speaker: Anyways, that builds us into the quiz.
Speaker: Uh-oh.
Speaker: So we were talking about, well, how do we design a, I don't know how much of this clip I can use.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So the theme of our quiz today, and you can play along at home.
Speaker: The theme is College Board is a nonprofit.
Speaker: And it's all related to nonprofits and education and making money and weird stuff surrounding that.
Speaker: So each of us have prepared three questions.
Speaker: We have decided that the loser gets kicked out of the airlock and that's how it ends.
Speaker: Kind of dark, but science fiction.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Is there a better way to introduce that?
Speaker: I think that sounds good.
Speaker: Sounds good.
Speaker: So we'll take turns and we'll keep track.
Speaker: You can ask your question first, Nick.
Speaker: So as I, I recently had a conversation with Michael Crawford and Jane Shore, and I warned them that I'm addicted to context and this is no different.
Speaker: So while I believe, and I don't know the content of this, of Chris's questions, but
Speaker: Well, I believe he's going to talk about the College Board as their nonprofit organization.
Speaker: I could be wrong.
Speaker: I chose to go a different route.
Speaker: And I selected, I built my series of questions about a nonprofit educational organization you may have heard of called Teach for America.
Speaker: So if you don't know who they are, they were founded in 1990 by Wendy Kopp.
Speaker: She developed the idea in her senior thesis at Princeton in 1989.
Speaker: I had no idea Teach for America was that old, honestly.
Speaker: I had never heard about it until the early 2010s.
Speaker: So its original mission was to, and I'm quoting from their website here, generate a longer term leadership pipeline that advances the education movement, providing a source of talent for policy, advocacy, and politics,
Speaker: as well as quality schools and new entrepreneurial ventures.
Speaker: TFA claims on their website as well that they have over 58,000 alumni in over 50 regions around the country, more than 14,000 alumni teachers, over 1,000 school leaders, 600 school system leaders, 1,100 policy and advocacy leaders, more than 280 elected leaders, and 238 social entrepreneurs.
Speaker: And my first encounter with them, honestly, was during the Obama era, because I graduated into the Great Recession.
Speaker: And where I was living in Lincoln, Nebraska at the time, actually had a hiring freeze during that time.
Speaker: So they were not even hiring any new teachers, even though I was certified and newly out of college.
Speaker: So I actually got in touch with Teach for America and had a couple of phone interviews and conversations.
Speaker: And the conversation was about me working in the Kansas City area, since that was kind of the closest to me then.
Speaker: And the only reason that that went through is because my wife, or then my girlfriend, but it was now my wife, that's a happy ending.
Speaker: But she was gainfully employed and did not feel like giving up her job and moving to Kansas City.
Speaker: So yeah.
Speaker: So I instead found other unemployment or I did find unemployment, but I found employment as well.
Speaker: So so, yeah, we'll talk about the criticisms and things here, Chris.
Speaker: But these are set up as fact or fiction questions.
Speaker: So you need to figure out if this the statement that I'm going to read to you is is fact or fiction.
Speaker: OK, you're ready for question one.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: When public school districts hire teachers from Teach for America, they pay a greater upfront cost than if they hire traditional entry-level teachers.
Speaker: Oh, that's definitely false.
Speaker: I know that's a false.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: That's fiction.
Speaker: That is a fact.
Speaker: That's a fact.
Speaker: That is actually a fact.
Speaker: They pay more?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: I did not know that.
Speaker: I thought for sure they could pay less.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Because you have to be certified.
Speaker: you do not have to be certified.
Speaker: The goal is that by the time that you finish your two-year contract, then you will be certified.
Speaker: That is interesting.
Speaker: So I actually got this, a little bit of this from a 2015 article from the American Prospect called The True Cost of Teach for America's Impact to Urban Schools.
Speaker: This is...
Speaker: This is it.
Speaker: So they said, when public school districts hire teachers from Teach for America, they pay a greater upfront cost than if they hire traditional entry-level teachers.
Speaker: This is because TFA charges finders fees for every core member they supply.
Speaker: This is such a trick question.
Speaker: Wait, wait, wait.
Speaker: But does the teacher make more money?
Speaker: Like their salary?
Speaker: The teacher doesn't.
Speaker: The district.
Speaker: I thought that's what we were asking.
Speaker: So district is a higher up.
Speaker: I think that's a trick question.
Speaker: So hear me out here.
Speaker: In addition to the salary and benefits, the school districts pay the teacher districts also must pay the net TFA typically between 2000 and $5,000 per core member per year.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: So those finder finders fees are there.
Speaker: So for example, if one city has 200 core members, and the finders fee is $4200 for each teacher, then that costs a district an additional $1.7 million in fees to teach for America.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And what's really interesting is I was reading another article about this, and they were talking about a TFA alum who actually loved the program, stayed in education, went to become a charter school leader later on.
Speaker: But then when he became an admin for the charter school network in Los Angeles that he was working for, and we'll talk about those charters.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But then he realized he wasn't interested in hiring Teach for America core members.
Speaker: Hmm.
Speaker: Because they didn't have the context.
Speaker: They didn't know, you know, the area, they were less experienced.
Speaker: And he said, I'll take that money and put that towards hiring teachers from the community that have more experience, or then take the resources and put that into professional development for training current staff.
Speaker: What an idea, huh?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, okay.
Speaker: So wait, nice.
Speaker: Really quick.
Speaker: I think, I think that it's interesting to note based about that is that I think it's worth mentioning the difference between an individual versus a systemic problem.
Speaker: Cause there are a lot of people that go through the TFA program that are great people that are trying to make a difference.
Speaker: The issue is, is how the large nonprofit scare quotes is using that as an exploitative measure to generate income quickly and easily.
Speaker: You'll probably get into who they're funded by in one of your later questions.
Speaker: But I think it's worth noting that like individuals acting within a system to try to do the best they can is not the same thing as a systemic problem that exists.
Speaker: In the exact same way that like
Speaker: I think McDonald's has incredibly unethical policies towards its workers, but I had a McDonald's coffee this morning.
Speaker: It doesn't make me a terrible person per se because it's the coffee shop that's available in my town.
Speaker: I guess I can buy and make my own coffee, but not all of us are perfect.
Speaker: So that's just how it is.
Speaker: That's the, that's the old, that's the meme that's like, oh, you're, you're critical of society and yet you participate in it.
Speaker: Curious.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: We all have to participate in those structures, even as we're fighting to change them.
Speaker: So my next question is about TFA retention and funding.
Speaker: So we'll get there.
Speaker: So listen carefully here.
Speaker: So let's look at the five year teacher retention rate, you know, so like kind of situate whatever you have for that in your mind.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: So the five-year teacher retention rate, so that's to say TFA teachers who keep teaching after five years, even if they're not in their initial placement school.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: The five-year teacher retention rate for TFA teachers is higher than compared to all new urban teachers.
Speaker: Fact or fiction?
Speaker: So in the back of my mind, I know I've read stories about, like horror stories about TFA.
Speaker: where like they're under supported, they don't have the right resources, they're typically placed in schools that are underserved and they don't get paid.
Speaker: Even though your previous question was a trick question, they do not get paid as much.
Speaker: Just like Teach for America makes more money.
Speaker: And I know they don't make a lot of money.
Speaker: I would imagine that their retention rate is lower.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So then my statement would be fiction.
Speaker: Yes, fiction.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: You are correct.
Speaker: That is fiction.
Speaker: So, nice.
Speaker: So you're one for two here, 50-50.
Speaker: Now, I did just post some tweets this morning because I was doing a little bit more research on this.
Speaker: TFA is very open on their own website about saying, like, you're not a Teach for America employee.
Speaker: You're going to get paid whatever salary and benefits teachers in those areas make or teachers at the charter school that we place you at make.
Speaker: you know, $33,000 to $58,000 or whatever the case is.
Speaker: Charter schools typically pay less than public schools do.
Speaker: But let's talk about this.
Speaker: So the truth behind this statement is that only about 25% of Teach for America teachers remain in teaching after five years, compared to about 50% of all new urban teachers.
Speaker: So that rate is brutally high regardless.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: But it's about only half as much for Teach for America.
Speaker: But it's even worse by the fact that TFA gets paid for their contracts with districts who then, once those teachers leave, have to pay to hire and retain once the Teach for America teachers leave.
Speaker: So basically, yeah.
Speaker: And when they leave, they go on to other things.
Speaker: So I've got some more data for you.
Speaker: So here's a
Speaker: 2008 Harvard study says that only 35, about 35% stay in teaching for more than four years.
Speaker: So that's to say after that, they go into other fields or they go on to policy and advocacy and lobbying or whatever the case might be.
Speaker: Yeah, so TFA's numbers are actually pretty good within the first couple of years.
Speaker: So about 60% of TFA teachers stay for a third year after their two-year tour is up, which I think that's pretty good.
Speaker: And about 85% of TFA recruits who keep teaching, they actually transfer out of their original placement school.
Speaker: So while they go in and they teach in underserved communities for lower pay,
Speaker: once those two-year contracts are up, they jump into probably wealthier, more suburban districts and things like that.
Speaker: Makes sense.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Isn't that interesting?
Speaker: Last one.
Speaker: Is it possible this story is true?
Speaker: There you go.
Speaker: Fact or fiction, Chris?
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: TFA reported nearly half a billion dollars in net assets in 2020.
Speaker: I feel like it's more fiction.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Nope.
Speaker: That one is a fact.
Speaker: I'm surprised.
Speaker: That's it?
Speaker: That's it.
Speaker: I feel like they could do better.
Speaker: How much does the executive director make?
Speaker: About half a million dollars.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: That's what I figured.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: So, yeah.
Speaker: So I was just looking at their... It never happened yet.
Speaker: I was looking at their 990s this morning.
Speaker: So according to their 2020 financial statement, TFA reported net assets of about $456 million.
Speaker: So, you know, what that means, the nonprofit world.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So basically...
Speaker: Well, yeah.
Speaker: So that's if they sold off everything, right?
Speaker: That's like equity in a for-profit company, right?
Speaker: So, yeah, the reported total revenue was about $273 billion between 2019 and 2020.
Speaker: Now, the bomb I'm going to drop on this here, too, is that, in fact, the Walton family is the largest single donor to teach for America.
Speaker: Now, if you're not familiar with the Walton family, if you've ever shopped at Walmart, like we all have, you
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: That money has gone to the Walton family or, you know, a portion of that money has gone to the Walton family who founded Walmart.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Now, what's interesting is they announced in 2013 they were donating $20 million to Teach for America.
Speaker: What they didn't release with that grant proposal there was that they were actually going to end up paying $4,000 for teachers placed in traditional public schools, but $6,000 for every teacher placed in a charter school.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Directed at nine cities where charter schools were sprouting up, including New Orleans, Memphis, Tennessee, and Los Angeles.
Speaker: So, you know, famously, the Walmart employees are among the highest, the largest recipients of, you know, food benefits, SNAP benefits, Medicaid benefits, because they are famously underpaid by the company that employs them.
Speaker: And Walmart is very also infamously union busting as well.
Speaker: So not a surprise that they would fund charter schools that I found out this morning have a 7% unionization rate.
Speaker: So about 7% of charter schools are unionized.
Speaker: So there is a direct Walmart to the Walton family, to the Teach for America, to the Charter School Network pipeline right there for you, Chris.
Speaker: And all tax-free, nonetheless.
Speaker: Oh, and all tax-free.
Speaker: Yeah, they probably get a wonderful deduction for donating that $20,000.
Speaker: Fantastic.
Speaker: $20 million, right?
Speaker: So yeah, you were one for three.
Speaker: That seems like a number to beat.
Speaker: I think we're going to end up blowing you out the airlock.
Speaker: Oh, we'll see.
Speaker: We'll see how difficult these questions are.
Speaker: So I'm not going to lie.
Speaker: Mine have a little bit less context than yours.
Speaker: I'm addicted.
Speaker: Because originally this was, hey, Chris, we should do a lightning round at the end.
Speaker: Your definitions of lightning round are very different.
Speaker: Your lightning is like more of a slow roar.
Speaker: It's ball lightning.
Speaker: It just... So I'm going to attempt to add more context on the fly, which I have not written down.
Speaker: So this might come across as very sporadic.
Speaker: My theme is not as clear.
Speaker: Mine are kind of random.
Speaker: Two of them do relate.
Speaker: I have the same fact or fiction thing.
Speaker: So here's the context.
Speaker: We're going to start way back with Horace Mann.
Speaker: You know Horace Mann.
Speaker: The guy that he kind of has like a mythos surrounding him.
Speaker: He's known primarily as being the guy who went to Prussia and was logging how how organized the schools were.
Speaker: He came back to the United States.
Speaker: Critics would say that he is the founder of kind of the standardization movement.
Speaker: However, if you read his work, it's more centered on the growth of just public education.
Speaker: It's just the idea like we should have a free public education everywhere.
Speaker: And he was looking at from the lens of, well, how is that feasible?
Speaker: So I think it's fair.
Speaker: I think the criticism can be fair, but at the exact same time, it's kind of a product of the era.
Speaker: It was just like a planning thing.
Speaker: He was not interested in necessarily the long-term pedagogical outcomes of standardizing everything.
Speaker: Anyways, the organization ACT in 2019 generated $300 million a year on that leadership team.
Speaker: You'd actually find a really interesting position that's not listed on its website.
Speaker: They have all of their leadership team listed.
Speaker: But here's the fact or fiction.
Speaker: You'd also find the position of the Horace Mann Research Chair, which in 2019 was paid $429,000.
Speaker: I totally believe that.
Speaker: That's fact.
Speaker: That is fact.
Speaker: So if you were to do some research on this, if you were to go back into the 909 form for the nonprofit, you will find... The 990.
Speaker: The 990 form, right.
Speaker: You will find a gentleman, his name is Wayne Kamara, which sounds like a fantasy villain name.
Speaker: He also, previously, speaking of College Board, he was one of the head directors for the College Board at one point.
Speaker: His claim to fame is you'll find...
Speaker: But I can only find out two articles he's actually done.
Speaker: Two articles that prove that standardized testing is equitable.
Speaker: He previously was the senior researcher for ACT.
Speaker: He basically writes these really long, drawn-out articles.
Speaker: Actually, ACT is equitable because it gives marginalized students the tools to escape poverty, even though there is a plethora of evidence that says other... I mean, it is a pretty well-known fact that SAT and ACT tests mirror income brackets.
Speaker: So this whole concept is ridiculous.
Speaker: In 2019, I believe it's 2018 or 2019, he served on this, I don't know if this is a corruption thing, it's really weird.
Speaker: I used the Wayback Machine and I tried to find this position because I couldn't find it existing.
Speaker: It doesn't exist now and it didn't exist apparently in 2019, but he was getting paid for it.
Speaker: Almost half a million dollars to serve as the unknown Horace Mann Research Chair.
Speaker: There is a senior research chair position.
Speaker: So there's already a head of research.
Speaker: This is an additional position called the Horace Mann chair.
Speaker: So you're already being here.
Speaker: That one was so ridiculous.
Speaker: There was no way that was not true.
Speaker: So it's just also very funny, like Horace Mann research chair.
Speaker: Really, ACT?
Speaker: Like that's the name that you're going to evoke for your standardized testing company.
Speaker: What's that about?
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: Question two.
Speaker: Oh, wait.
Speaker: Here.
Speaker: I'll do a...
Speaker: Yes, it is.
Speaker: You're right.
Speaker: Okay, there's that.
Speaker: Here's question two.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: In a lawsuit settled in 2021, the University of California can no longer factor in ACT and SAT scores in their admissions.
Speaker: There was a case a group of high school students successfully sued the university because of their test optional policy.
Speaker: So UC went to be test optional, which means that you can either submit scores or not submit scores.
Speaker: And that's good on paper, but the problem is that if you don't submit scores, you are not on an even playing field with those that submit good scores.
Speaker: So you're better than those that do bad scores, but you're worse than those that submit good scores.
Speaker: And there was a group of high schoolers.
Speaker: One of them was like a great athlete, had a perfect GPA, who was a volunteer, was like an entrepreneur, like all these, like everything that you would want to see typically in a college-bound student.
Speaker: And they were denied because they are not good at taking standardized tests and their school just, it wasn't a big focus for them.
Speaker: So they sued the University of California.
Speaker: And as of May 2021, UC is not allowed to factor in at all.
Speaker: So as in test optional is actually not allowed.
Speaker: Is that factor fiction?
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So the question is whether...
Speaker: Yeah, whether they're test, it's not test optional, it's test blind.
Speaker: Yeah, it's just completely.
Speaker: Oh, test blind.
Speaker: Okay, that's the.
Speaker: As a result of students suing and winning.
Speaker: I want to say they're still test optional.
Speaker: The test blind thing, because I think they just most recently went test optional.
Speaker: The test blind seems like maybe a bridge too far, which maybe makes me think that that is fiction.
Speaker: So this is actually fact.
Speaker: What?
Speaker: A group of students really did band together, hire a lawyer.
Speaker: So here is a direct quote from one of the attorneys for the students.
Speaker: The region's stubborn insistence over generations upon usage of the ACT and SAT, despite indisputable evidence these exams only measured family wealth, cost hundreds of thousands of talented students of color a fair opportunity to, what was that, matriculate?
Speaker: Matriculate, graduate.
Speaker: Oh, I never used that word.
Speaker: Matriculate in their state's system of higher education.
Speaker: Here's the catch, though.
Speaker: Because there's always a catch.
Speaker: There's always a way to get around it.
Speaker: So as of 2022, 2023, it is test blind, but only for California students.
Speaker: So if you apply from a different state, it does matter still.
Speaker: And by 2025, UC is developing their own standardized tests that students will take in lieu of the ACT and SAT scores.
Speaker: As a way to get around this case, they basically said, hey, we're just going to make our own test that's better than the other tests.
Speaker: There's no information on this.
Speaker: I looked it up.
Speaker: No one said anything.
Speaker: Even this article says, like, no one knows exactly what this test is.
Speaker: They just said, hey, by 2025, this will be fixed because we're just going to make our own test.
Speaker: They've got a couple of years to figure it out.
Speaker: It's very interesting to me that if you want to talk about student voice, student activism, this group of kids actually did it.
Speaker: It's a real thing that happened.
Speaker: It's a piece of good news in the educational world.
Speaker: Okay, so it's like, let's imagine a world where they're going to have their own test.
Speaker: I like that option for states more than I do having the ACT as sort of like a national...
Speaker: It trickles down into what we're teaching in all of in classrooms, too, so kids can be successful on whatever standardized tests.
Speaker: I mean, I like the states maybe having more control over what that looks like as far as that goes compared to, you know, a national testing company like the College Board.
Speaker: having just that much more influence and control over that admissions process.
Speaker: Because that could be different for students in New York and California and Iowa and Ohio.
Speaker: My fear would be, though, if I were the billion-dollar, scare quotes, nonprofit college board, that I would just develop a state test in every state.
Speaker: Like, it would have to be, like, you would need, like, an oversight committee.
Speaker: Like, there would need to be a lot of things that I'm not doing.
Speaker: confident would actually occur.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: I'm kind of in the mind that there shouldn't be the test at all.
Speaker: Because then what happens if you have a student who is already overworked and stressed that has to take a different test for every state that they have to apply to?
Speaker: Oh, okay.
Speaker: Because like, to me, that's like, we have a lot of kids that go out of state.
Speaker: Does that mean that they had to have like Kentucky specific knowledge to go to school?
Speaker: Like, it's just like really weird.
Speaker: Yeah, that's okay.
Speaker: Scratch my idea.
Speaker: That's terrible.
Speaker: To me, it should be shifting to a system that doesn't value test data at all.
Speaker: Like if you can prove like through a portfolio, perhaps that you have done all these awesome things and someone has taught to review that thing like mastery transcript,
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: That to me just works a lot better because if these students can successfully band together and use an attorney and do all this work, they are more than ready to be college bound.
Speaker: I mean, it's fascinating that that question I had heard about this lawsuit, but I hadn't followed up with the with with how it ended.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I was like, oh, I remember this, but I don't I did.
Speaker: I didn't catch the tail end.
Speaker: So I mean, the senior.
Speaker: So the person that was kind of like in charge of this, I guess, like the high school senior that's in question had a three point five six GPA.
Speaker: three associates degrees from Los Angeles Southwest college, plethora of leadership positions, the community service activities.
Speaker: But he always bombed SAT practice tests because he had no money for breakfast.
Speaker: He was distracted by hunger.
Speaker: His mother only earned $23,000 a year.
Speaker: They couldn't afford test prep courses or tutoring or anything.
Speaker: So this, in spite of all of these amazing achievements, because the SAT wasn't a thing that could happen,
Speaker: they just automatically fail.
Speaker: What's so fast, if you want to juxtapose that back to question number one, you have this Horace Mann research head publishing articles for making $430,000 a year saying that, oh no, it's not discriminatory at all.
Speaker: It's actually a way to escape poverty.
Speaker: But really what it does is it acts as a barrier for those that don't have access to this because you can do awesome things in school or awesome things in general in your life, even outside of school that can prepare you for college.
Speaker: This article is really good.
Speaker: It even talks about like,
Speaker: Going back to Carl Brigham, the old school guy, where he talks about, quote unquote, the prowess of the Nordic race group.
Speaker: Oh, God.
Speaker: He was a eugenicist.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Standardized testing is a farce.
Speaker: No, and I think, I know there's still one more question for me to redeem myself and to beat you on this, but what I think is so interesting is, right, the things that you described about this particular student, like the work ethic and
Speaker: Their ability to be successful on a college campus is self-evident from that description alone.
Speaker: What kind of information does a test score add that isn't already evident in the fact that this student has three associate's degrees?
Speaker: So like having put in the time and effort to master a set of skills around, I don't know what those are in, but around the subjects that they want to go into.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And then having those leadership roles, I mean, those are the kinds of kids, if I was, you know, if we were going to hire them to do work for us, that's what we would look at.
Speaker: We wouldn't look even probably at a GPA or an assessment score.
Speaker: So why do we think that college is somehow different than that either?
Speaker: Like, what employee would you hire based on an assessment score compared to the resume of experiences that they're going to have?
Speaker: And when I talk to my kids about that question, that's what I ask them.
Speaker: I say, if you had to give
Speaker: a resume, or if you had to talk about your experiences at Ankeny High School and you couldn't use an assessment score or a GPA, how would you do that?
Speaker: What would you be able to emphasize?
Speaker: What would you say, be able to say that you've accomplished in your time here?
Speaker: And a lot of them say, I couldn't do that, Mr. Covington.
Speaker: I say, that is a problem.
Speaker: So yeah, it's about kind of shifting that language, isn't it?
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: That builds us into our final question.
Speaker: Redemption.
Speaker: Neither of us are going to release and we spend it still next time or I'm about to die.
Speaker: We'll find out.
Speaker: So final question here.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: So fact or fiction, all of the following are true facts about the KIPP, otherwise known as Knowledge is Power Program, public charter school network, which I say in giant air quotes, a nonprofit organization.
Speaker: All right, so before I even dive into this question, you and I, probably everyone listening is probably familiar that KIPP has had some serious corruption scandals.
Speaker: And it's not that public schools have not.
Speaker: There are certainly a lot of examples of public schools also having corruption scandals.
Speaker: KIPP seems to be very prone to it.
Speaker: And perhaps that deals maybe with some of their funding sources and ethics surrounding education in general.
Speaker: Okay, so the fact or fiction is all of these are true.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So there's five things.
Speaker: One, in one tax filing year, they spent over $1 million at Walt Disney World Swan and Resort.
Speaker: Two, they've redacted its amount it raises via U.S. government officials, of which one of their biggest investors was found out to be from the Robertson Foundation.
Speaker: That's led by a gentleman named Julian Robertson, who made his initial fortune by shorting subprime securities and credit default swaps.
Speaker: oh my god three they give more than one million dollars a year to a stats company that analyzes uh the work that they do and how successful they are named mathematica four the stats generated by that aforementioned company mathematica are heavily redacted and not shared publicly and finally
Speaker: Mathematica was founded by Princeton University professors in 1969 and has engaged in a variety of different topics, but they're most well known for being the leading developer of the state lottery system.
Speaker: Oh, great.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Okay, so when you got to the Mathematica thing, I started to chuckle because I was like, that sounds too silly to be like the real one, right?
Speaker: Like in the realm of foolishly named education things, you know, I was like, that's got to be the Chris McNutt one.
Speaker: But the Disney one, I'm also suspicious of.
Speaker: But I also have the feeling that perhaps the absurdity of all of these is the point.
Speaker: Hmm.
Speaker: And so I want to say, get it queued up here.
Speaker: I want to say that this, all of those are true facts.
Speaker: Final answer.
Speaker: It's fact.
Speaker: You bet it is.
Speaker: It is fact.
Speaker: All of those things are actually true.
Speaker: This one, I actually started laughing when I got to the Mathematica thing because that sounds so absurd.
Speaker: So Mathematica, progress together, which is their subheader.
Speaker: Mathematica built on its initial study of KIPP middle schools with a five-year project designed to address the question of whether KIPP can maintain its effectiveness as the network grows.
Speaker: And they have like these evidence and insights from the project and like you could scroll through them.
Speaker: However, they've been asked at various points to share all of the findings of their studies and it's redacted.
Speaker: So like you might question, well, wait, I thought this was a public school.
Speaker: Like public schools have to publish all their data unless it deals with like, like FERPA stuff.
Speaker: The actual data, like your test scores, your report card information, all of that is complete public knowledge.
Speaker: You can look up everyone's employee status and how much they get paid because they're public.
Speaker: That's the whole point.
Speaker: It's also the point of nonprofits too.
Speaker: Nonprofits have to share, like you could look up and see that HRP makes no money.
Speaker: That's available online.
Speaker: You're completely able to do that.
Speaker: Somehow.
Speaker: I bet Chris would send it to you if you emailed him about it.
Speaker: If you want our 909 or 990 form, we'll send it to you.
Speaker: It's a postcard because it can fit on one line.
Speaker: But, uh,
Speaker: Basically, Mathematica seemingly, th is is Chris op-ed hat, has been contracted at $1 million a year to paint success stories for the KIPP network because journalists and researchers have looked at KIPP and found some really disturbing stats surrounding, there's been so many different abuse scandals.
Speaker: The place is really messed up.
Speaker: There are a lot of serious problems with the KIPP network.
Speaker: But the mind-blowing thing to me, one, the whole Robertson Foundation thing, it was their primary funder, I believe, in 2016.
Speaker: I need to double-check that.
Speaker: But in one year, this Julian Robertson, I don't even know who that is.
Speaker: Apparently, he founded Tiger Management, I think that's what it's called.
Speaker: I'd never heard of the guy.
Speaker: All of his money comes from shorting subprime securities, like the loan crisis, like the housing crisis.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So he's one of the guys who crashed the economy.
Speaker: The aforementioned Great Recession that I almost had to go work for Teach for America for.
Speaker: It's almost like it's a big club and we're not in it.
Speaker: Like all these things seem seemingly related somehow.
Speaker: They do spend a ton of money at Walt Disney.
Speaker: That was a thing.
Speaker: Yeah, none of this is to say, because it kind of seems like we're picking on charters, that public schools are not without their own faults or that there aren't good charter schools out there.
Speaker: It's just...
Speaker: Man, the ecosystem for those schools and for those networks is so unaccountable very often, so shady and shadowed.
Speaker: But also, you know, we can also be critical of their goals and their means of acquiring them, of them.
Speaker: not of acquiring them, of pursuing their educational goals as well.
Speaker: Because if their goal, say, is test performance or college and career readiness or whatever they purport to do better than the public schools, those pedagogies often tend to be fairly carceral, fairly rote.
Speaker: And so it's really not surprising to me that their college admission rates are fairly low because in such a highly structured environment,
Speaker: Not just are kids going to be less likely to get into college, but we've talked so often ad nauseum about the things that cause kids to drop out of college more often than not is not like your academic background knowledge.
Speaker: I mean, yeah, if you don't know how to read, you're going to have a real tough time in college.
Speaker: But on the flip side of that, it costs a lot of money.
Speaker: you might be able to afford it for a semester or a year or two.
Speaker: But when you start to add up those costs, they build fairly quickly.
Speaker: If you have any circumstance in your life that's going to prevent you from attending contiguously for, say, four or five years, that's going to make it even more tricky for you to jump back into your studies.
Speaker: So, yeah, I mean, those schools are...
Speaker: And they're not set up as like money laundering factories, but there is like this hidden network of dark.
Speaker: It's almost like dark money in politics, right, is what it is.
Speaker: Yeah, that is unaccountable.
Speaker: Yeah, the Waltons.
Speaker: The Robertsons or whatever, they get to donate vast amounts of money to charter school networks or to places like Teach for America that then go to the charter school networks.
Speaker: But then the people on the ground teaching in those schools, right, they make less money than people in public schools.
Speaker: They have less workplace democracy.
Speaker: They're often in worse positions.
Speaker: And then since that works not sustainable, often they leave and they go elsewhere.
Speaker: So it's not surprising that teachers leave TFA and go into other industries or that teachers don't stick around at charter schools very often.
Speaker: Now, obviously, there's exceptions.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, they're not tools that are designed to be successful in the long term.
Speaker: They're responsible to a whole different set of incentives because they know that they might not exist in a year or two unless they can juke the stats.
Speaker: So now we get to blow you out of the airlock.
Speaker: Now we get to blow me out of the airlock.
Speaker: Cue the airlock sounds.
Speaker: There it is.
Speaker: No.
Speaker: There it is.
Speaker: That was not very convincing.
Speaker: Well, it'll be convincing once I edit it.
Speaker: Oh, okay.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I'm going to, I'm going to make that work.
Speaker: You're going to fix it in post.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's going to be fixed in post.
Speaker: It's going to sound way better.
Speaker: So I guess, you know, if people have made it this far, if this is something, if this is something that has appealed to you, when we were thinking about this, it really is like, you know, we're all in the doldrums of deep October, kind of heading into a fall and winter, the season's changing and
Speaker: The workload is piling up.
Speaker: So we thought we would just take, well, I didn't expect it to be this long, but we just thought we would take an hour or so and just, you know, just have a loosely formatted conversation that maybe connects to some things that you might be doing or get you interested in doing some learning on your own, start you down some interesting paths in the work that you're doing.
Speaker: So it's just an extension of, like I said, the stuff that we already do on a weekly basis.
Speaker: Anyway, we're reading, we're talking, we're sharing articles and reading books too.
Speaker: So this is a little bit of a community connection into that, a relaxed fit HRP.
Speaker: So we want to for next time, if there is a next time, first and foremost, but if you want us to do this again, like let us know, or feel free to email or tweet at us at Humor is pro, you know,
Speaker: if this was garbage.
Speaker: And you're just like, don't ever do this again.
Speaker: We will take that with, you know, we will accept that fully.
Speaker: But if you want to hear it again, let us know.
Speaker: And also send us questions that you would like to hear us talk about or topics that you think, you know, if we did five minutes of research or maybe 50 minutes, we could have some kind of grasp on to give you some response to or point you in the direction of something too.
Speaker: So
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: Send us some emails or send us some tweets at HemRezPro.
Speaker: You know, you can follow me at CovingtonAHS and you can follow Chris at, or wait, at CovingtonEDU is where I am.
Speaker: Wow, I flashed back to 2019.
Speaker: Or Chris McNutt at McNuttEDU.
Speaker: So we've really made that pretty easy in the last couple of years.
Speaker: But other than that, you know, thanks for sticking around this long.
Speaker: And I guess I just have to run the organization now that we blew Chris out of the airlock.
Speaker: So we'll have to see next week what happens.
Speaker: But that was a lot of fun, Chris.
Speaker: I think I had a good time.
Speaker: wake up that's i i'm i am 1000 certain that that same matrix clip and that rage is the machine music is probably in some conspiracy theorist like q anon podcast you know like that's their intro oh for sure
Speaker: Thank you again for listening to Human Restoration Project's podcast.
Speaker: I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to push the progressive envelope of education.
Speaker: You can learn more about progressive education, support our cause, and stay tuned to this podcast and other updates on our website at humanrestorationproject.org.
