Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome to the Human Restoration Project podcast.
Speaker: My name is Nick Covington and I'm the creative director here at HRP and I'm a high school studies teacher here in Ankeny, Iowa, where I am broadcasting you from Ankeny High School.
Speaker: I'm also joined by our executive director, Chris McNutt.
Speaker: Before we get started, I do want to let you know that this podcast is brought to you by at least three of our supporters, Nadine Lay,
Speaker: Kenichiro Bernier and Elliott Baer, thank you all for your ongoing support.
Speaker: So today we're joined by doctors Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider.
Speaker: Dr. Berkshire is a journalist and an educator who focuses on podcasting and labor organizing at Boston College and UMass Amherst, respectively.
Speaker: And Dr. Schneider is an education historian focused on reform and school accountability.
Speaker: ability.
Speaker: They also co-host the wonderful Have You Heard podcast, which focuses on hot button issues and educational policy and current events.
Speaker: Both Chris and I would highly recommend checking it out if you aren't listening already.
Speaker: Thank you, Jennifer and Jack, for coming on here today.
Speaker: Thanks so much for having us.
Speaker: Of course.
Speaker: Our discussion today is going to cover a lot of ground, but really center on some key issues of education reform, the issue of innovation, labor rights and unions, and this issue of change.
Speaker: There's this odd dichotomy between progressive education and the assault on public education, a cognitive dissonance between the necessity for systemic reform, ensuring a free and accessible public education, and
Speaker: and recognizing the need for organized labor as a path to a strong working class, that teacher unions are among the largest and most powerful in the country.
Speaker: Yet there's a narrative, real or not, that unions are resistant to the change that many progressive educators want.
Speaker: And of course, more recently, this idea that they have become the sole and major roadblock to
Speaker: full school reopenings in 2020.
Speaker: But before we dig into any of that, let's just talk about the idea of the book.
Speaker: The book, of course, is A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door, The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School, out now as of November 2020 from the new press.
Speaker: So before we dig into all that, what motivated you two to team up and write this book on this topic at this particular moment in time?
Speaker: Well, before I launch us into that, I just, I want to start with a shocking confession.
Speaker: Before I had not actually heard of the Human Restoration Project.
Speaker: I didn't know about the great work you were doing.
Speaker: And now I feel like, you know, the more I learned, the more interested I get, and I haven't told Jack this, but you guys are actually going to be featured in an upcoming podcast.
Speaker: And that's partly why I'm so excited about this conversation, the unique perspective that you guys bring is we're gonna be able to sort of go back and forth about issues that really haven't come up in our other interviews.
Speaker: The way that the book started, you mentioned that I'm a journalist and Jack and I do a podcast together.
Speaker: So part of what I love about the podcast is that I get to hit the road.
Speaker: And so I started going to Michigan and could really see that there was something going on there, that they were in the throes of really a three decade long effort, largely led by a famous family that your listeners will be very familiar with.
Speaker: That would be the DeVos family.
Speaker: And what you could see was that while everything was focused on these specific policy changes at the school level, often incremental policy changes, the overall thrust of all these changes was to weaken the structure of public education in the state.
Speaker: And really, I mean that at every level, whether we're talking about school funding, whether we're talking about, you know, like a weird bill that would suddenly pop up that would make it illegal for
Speaker: for school officials to publicize a bond measure.
Speaker: Things that like just an unending stream of these things.
Speaker: And so I would learn about these issues and write about them, but I would bring them back to Jack Schneider.
Speaker: And we would sit down together to record a podcast and I would call upon his knowledge of education history
Speaker: to help me understand what it was that I was seeing out in the rest of the world.
Speaker: And I think over the course of many podcast episodes and many conversations, we started to come to the shared understanding that what we were seeing was really different
Speaker: from reform efforts, previous reform efforts, especially the reform efforts that we've grown so used to in the Obama era.
Speaker: And Jack will talk a little bit more about that, but he was the one that came to me and said, you know, I think we need to write a book about this.
Speaker: And I thought about it for about 30 seconds and I agreed it was a good idea.
Speaker: So Jack, is that an accurate depiction of what happened?
Speaker: Yeah, I think most accurate here are two phrases that you used.
Speaker: First, you said, you know, that you haven't told me that there's an upcoming podcast planned with these guys, which is like a clue into our working relationship.
Speaker: You know, it's like I show up in the studio sometimes and Jennifer springs on me that I should have read an entire book that I haven't.
Speaker: And, um,
Speaker: And, well, I do the best that I can.
Speaker: And the other piece is that, you know, Jennifer talked about hitting the road.
Speaker: And that's another characteristic of our partnership with each other is Jennifer loves to hit the road and I love to not hit the road.
Speaker: So I hit the books when Jennifer hits the road.
Speaker: And, uh,
Speaker: You know, I think the thing that we bring together is a combination of a kind of journalistic instinct for a good story and a kind of relentless inquisitiveness about what's going on right now, along with the
Speaker: you know, an instinct to always fill in the backstory and to figure out what's the bigger picture of which this present story is a part.
Speaker: You know, what I started to realize across our podcasts together is that because of that partnership,
Speaker: We were both learning from each other and we were essentially like creating a story as we went along.
Speaker: You know, we were, we were creating the path, um, as we walked and looking back on the trail that we had sort of blazed together.
Speaker: Of course, with lots of help from scholars and investigative journalists and teachers, careful observers, what I began to realize is that there was a real story there, right?
Speaker: That that path was headed in a particular direction.
Speaker: For me, I think I initially was prompted into action like so many people by the 2016 election.
Speaker: And my thinking was Betsy DeVos is a vulnerability for the Trump administration, that the things that she was pushing were so clearly either unpopular or destined to be unpopular with ordinary Americans, that if we could tell that story really clearly, it felt like
Speaker: we could potentially make a difference in the 2020 election.
Speaker: And what ended up happening is that as we worked on the book, I think what I realized, what we both realized is that it wasn't a story about DeVos.
Speaker: It in fact wasn't a federal story after all.
Speaker: It was a story, as Jennifer just alluded to, about what's happening at the local level and the state level across the U.S.
Speaker: And as we connected the dots, we began to realize that it's not only a local and state issue rather than a federal one, but it's also an old one rather than a new one.
Speaker: So the effort to unmake public education really began to take shape in the wake of Gary Goldwater's defeat.
Speaker: In the wake of that, you see all kinds of conservative organizations being built, movements beginning to take shape.
Speaker: And really what we're seeing in DeVos's secretaryship is the tip of the iceberg emerging from above the water.
Speaker: Finally, this movement is powerful enough that it's beginning to become visible.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I think it would be interesting to expand on that a little bit further and talk a little more about what it is to what, what really literally is the wolf at the schoolhouse door.
Speaker: The introductory chapter of the book, you have a quote.
Speaker: It says the present assault on public education represents a fundamentally new thread driven by a new kind of pressure group.
Speaker: Put simply the overarching vision entails unmasking public education as an institution.
Speaker: Could you lay out a little bit of what it means to unmake or unmask public education in this new vision for school reform?
Speaker: I think the story that we tell is ultimately one that I think helps make sense of policy efforts that might otherwise seem unfocused and in some cases contradictory.
Speaker: You know, what on earth do vouchers or neo-vouchers, as we refer to them in the book, have to do with, you know, virtual schools?
Speaker: What does that have to do with, you know, a war on labor or with efforts to deregulate education?
Speaker: That these efforts can seem arbitrary.
Speaker: And what we began to realize is that there are really four tenets of belief
Speaker: among those who want to unmake public education.
Speaker: They are first a preference for private values over public, right?
Speaker: The belief that education is an individual good rather than a collective enterprise.
Speaker: Something to get for yourself rather than something that we should all invest in because we all benefit from.
Speaker: Second is a deep and abiding faith in markets that markets work and government doesn't.
Speaker: Third is a relentless drive to cut costs and you can begin to see that some of these are overlapping, right?
Speaker: If you have a deep faith in markets, then, you know, a part of your thinking there is that markets will, through competition, reduce costs.
Speaker: If you have a deep faith in the private over the public,
Speaker: then why would you favor expensive public efforts like public education which has an annual price tag if you combine local, state and national spending on it of half a trillion dollars.
Speaker: And then the fourth pillar here is antagonism towards organized labor which again
Speaker: Relates to the effort to cut costs, right?
Speaker: Teacher salaries account for roughly 80% of costs in public education.
Speaker: Relates to faith in markets because of course, teachers when they are organized together are a disruptive political force that counters the kind of free market activity that these folks would like to see shaping decision making.
Speaker: And that collectively, these tenets of faith lead people who subscribe to them to believe that public education is something that we never should have done in the first place and that we need to unmake as quickly as possible.
Speaker: So I think Jennifer can take that and run with it better than I can.
Speaker: I thought you did a really good job.
Speaker: I mean, you made a point earlier about how this isn't a new story, it's actually an old story.
Speaker: And in some ways it's really fitting that Chris and Nick, that you're both coming to us tonight from the Midwest.
Speaker: Because in many ways, this is a story about Midwest, conservative Midwestern industrialists who get really mad after the New Deal.
Speaker: And what they're mad about is that they see that
Speaker: that the pendulum shifts towards labor, right?
Speaker: The industrialists in Michigan are furious about those auto workers who sit down and basically like kick off the organized labor in this country.
Speaker: And so this story is full of these old industrialists with names like DeVos and Bradley and Wisconsin and Uline and Illinois and names that aren't widely recognized outside of the Midwest.
Speaker: And so I think what can be hard for people to wrap their heads around is that a movement that's so focused on public education isn't ultimately about public education, that it's about weakening the collective.
Speaker: And so that's why it's so targeted at unions.
Speaker: Can you think about what unions do, right?
Speaker: They're not only the vehicles by which teachers demand things like higher salary for themselves, but they also demand things like higher, greater investment in schools.
Speaker: And worse yet, they demand things like a more generous safety net for everybody, right?
Speaker: And so if you're somebody who thinks that, that,
Speaker: business should really control, business should run the show, that the tax burden on the wealthiest should be as little as possible, that government should either get out of the way or tilt the scales in the direction of making the first two things happen.
Speaker: Anything that enables a group of people to come together and make collective demand is your enemy.
Speaker: And you think about what schools do, right?
Speaker: That like,
Speaker: that's where by their very nature kids go to a school and the teacher is supposed to raise their sights they're supposed to you know like like uh encourage them to believe that they can be more right and so if your goal is to shrink people's expectations you can see exactly why why they would be opposed to schools the way we fund them is more redistributionist than
Speaker: and a lot of the other things we do in our culture, even though I'm sure all of us would like to see school funding be far more redistributionist.
Speaker: And so I think that so much of this is focused on school policy, but ultimately the goal is to
Speaker: get us to think of ourselves as consumers in a marketplace, ideally an unregulated marketplace, and to function in the most atomized way possible.
Speaker: It's a pretty bleak vision.
Speaker: And what we try to do in the book is to lay out how these sort of specific policies around school relate to this larger vision.
Speaker: it provides like the unified theory, you know, to go back to what Jack was even saying there, instead of seeing these as all sort of disparate parts or different attacks on sort of the same issue, it actually gives us a lens to understand the totality of it and to go from what you were saying there to kind of see how the shift is from viewing public education as a public good and a public right that we all have to a free and accessible public education,
Speaker: as constituents or as citizens to that perspective of us as customers to be able to sort of pick and choose the educational package that is going to best fit our child in this case.
Speaker: So it really is that fracturing of the public good into all of these different consumerist parts and kind of force us to pick and choose from the pieces.
Speaker: And one of the things that I found the most fascinating
Speaker: in the book and if you go to our website and read the review of said book there, which I'm sure we'll put in the link to this, the one thing that I really grabbed onto as being maybe a prime example of this, even though they are legion, was like this issue that you framed as neo-vouchers.
Speaker: Because it was such a, I don't know, ingenious or infamous kind of way, I think, to work around the barriers that we've kept from having that public money flow, you know, particularly to sectarian religious institutions and just say, ah, to heck with all of that.
Speaker: Like, this is a direct backdoor from those things.
Speaker: So, yeah, you described it in the book or somebody described it, you quoted in the book as a laundromat for tax dollars.
Speaker: And I think that's what got to me right away saying, hold up, what's this all about?
Speaker: So, you know, I don't know if there's any uninitiated folks in the chat or listening, but could either of you describe that idea of neo-vouchers and the results of their proliferation in states like Arizona and Florida?
Speaker: So, yeah, if we flash back to the 19th century, what we can see is that a failed amendment to the Constitution led states, and it's a majority of states, to adopt what are referred to colloquially as baby amendments, named after James Blaine, the congressman,
Speaker: who made this his big cause.
Speaker: He was actually considering a run for president, and I think this was a part of it.
Speaker: The Baby Blaine Amendments adopted in these state constitutions forbid public dollars from flowing to sectarian institutions.
Speaker: Now, this is a major roadblock if you are a voucher proponent.
Speaker: Right, if what you want is to give every kid in your state or as many kids as possible a voucher loaded with a per pupil expenditure on it to take to a private school, then you've got a problem because 90% of kids who are in private schools are in sectarian schools.
Speaker: It's a huge percentage of private schools that are religiously affiliated.
Speaker: And the way around this is, as you said, pretty ingenious.
Speaker: So you don't send the dollars directly from Treasury to these private schools, in most cases religious schools.
Speaker: Instead, you let private donors give their money to scholarships for students who want to participate, and then you reimburse those donors.
Speaker: So for those following along at home, you would draw a box and you would write Walmart in it, and then you would have arrows labeled with dollars over those arrows.
Speaker: to a private school scholarship organization.
Speaker: Then you would have arrows with dollars flowing to individual students who would use those and then carry those dollars right on over to a private religious school.
Speaker: Now, where does Treasury come in?
Speaker: coming in from a different angle, you would have dollars flowing to Walmart from the treasury.
Speaker: So treasury dollars never actually go to the private school, to the religious school.
Speaker: They reimburse the corporation, and it's usually corporations, that decided to exercise its faith in private education and vouchers by giving its money to these.
Speaker: And, right, this is just money laundering.
Speaker: There's no other phrase that is as apt to describe it.
Speaker: You know, another big part of the reason why they had to come up with this elaborate workaround was that whenever the public is given the chance to vote on whether public dollars should go to religious schools, they voted down overwhelmingly, including in Arizona just a couple of years ago.
Speaker: This remains a deeply unpopular idea.
Speaker: And so that's, you know, like, call it, come up with this sort of convoluted system and make it about,
Speaker: tax credit scholarships and suddenly, you know, it's a feel good thing.
Speaker: The other thing that's really happened is that in the, you know, over the past couple of decades, the Supreme Court has gotten increasingly friendly to the idea that we don't really need a separation between church and state.
Speaker: So for example, over the summer, there was a ruling about school vouchers in, uh, in Montana.
Speaker: Um, and it's just one of a whole string of court cases that are coming down the pike to keep expanding
Speaker: expanding the terrain on which religious institutions can claim public dollars, but still continue to function as religious institutions.
Speaker: So just before the election, the Supreme Court heard a case that really doesn't have anything to do with education per se, but will have profound implications for it about a Catholic
Speaker: adoption agency, a foster care agency in Philly that wanted to take public money, but wouldn't place foster kids with gay couples.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And so they're arguing basically that by that, uh, that the city is discriminating against them by not allowing them to take the contract.
Speaker: So the court seems very amenable to that view.
Speaker: So you can see how this would play out.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So like, uh, uh,
Speaker: school like the one that Amy Coney Barrett sat on their board in Indiana, it was a school where you couldn't attend if your parents weren't married.
Speaker: So that's a school that takes voucher money in Indiana, which is already kind of questionable.
Speaker: But under this argument that the Supreme Court seems really amenable to, it would be discriminatory not to fund that school.
Speaker: And so you see how it's this process of atomization.
Speaker: It's leading to a pretty bad place.
Speaker: And I think people really need to pay attention to these court rulings.
Speaker: And of course it's not just the elevation of private interests over public interests because you also strip away transparency and oversight here.
Speaker: So one of the examples in our book is out of Florida where you've got schools blatantly discriminating against LGBTQ students and there's nothing that you can do about that because you actually have no levers of control over these private organizations.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And it has an interesting build into the accountability piece as well, which is being brought up in the chat, like the weaponization of accountability and the ties between these like neoliberal corporate efforts to basically defund public schools and its connection to also setting the rules for standardized testing and high stakes standardized testing.
Speaker: And I wonder if you could speak to a little bit about basically how accountability has now become not a way to necessarily gauge what's going on and do better, but instead a way really to dismantle public institutions.
Speaker: We were just talking right before this, Jackie, you were saying,
Speaker: The private schools are still having school despite, or the public schools are not, God, I'm gonna say this back, this is why this podcast is- I got it, I'll help you out here.
Speaker: Yeah, you help me out.
Speaker: My daughter who attends the local public school got several emails to me, to her mother, to her school account, and we got two phone calls.
Speaker: reminding us that despite the fact that we're about to have a foot of snow dumped on us, nobody should believe that there's going to be a snow day because school is virtual and it will be happening.
Speaker: Meanwhile, private schools in the area, many of which are in person right now, do have the ability to move online, but they're telling families, you know, you deserve a snow day.
Speaker: So, you know, go on early into the winter vacation.
Speaker: And I think
Speaker: And, you know, what this speaks to is the way in which neoliberal reformers, centrist Democrats, have unwittingly played into the hands of conservatives who seek to unmake public schools.
Speaker: So, you know, centrist Democrats like Cory Booker aren't trying to do away with public schools, but they have sort of, you know, naively cooperated with the hard right on
Speaker: on efforts, you know, whether they be these corporate style efforts to manage schools through performance management systems, testing and accountability being the one that we see in education, or to expose them to the market through charters.
Speaker: The idea here is that what we can do is we can govern schools more effectively if we take this sort of top-down approach.
Speaker: Meanwhile, what you're doing is you're reducing the aims of school, you're narrowing the mission, you're alienating families and young people.
Speaker: I'll tell you, my daughter loved school until third grade, which is the first year that they are tested.
Speaker: and then began asking questions about, you know, why the emphasis on ELA and math over every other subject?
Speaker: What happened to art and music and social studies and science?
Speaker: And why are we focusing so much on MCAS, which is the name of our standardized test here in Massachusetts?
Speaker: So the narrowing of the relentless negative rhetoric, the emphasis on choice and exit rather than on voice and democratic politics as a solution to any flaws we see has made public schools really vulnerable to criticism and attack.
Speaker: And that's exactly what those who are intent on making public schools, you know, so at the federal level most recently it was Betsy DeVos,
Speaker: They love that because that's an opportunity to tell a story about how this system has failed and how there's a better alternative that involves simply empowering consumers free market.
Speaker: I think the other thing that Betsy DeVos was really effective at is that she understood that parents really kind of hate that vision of accountability, right?
Speaker: So the Obama folks and Arne Duncan
Speaker: really double down on this really very narrow instrumentalist understanding of what a school is and what a school does.
Speaker: And so a school is a place that raises math and English test scores.
Speaker: And a good school is the school that does the best job of that.
Speaker: And it didn't really matter what kind of school it was as long as those scores went up.
Speaker: And we were just going to take that vision and just keep extending it.
Speaker: So a good teacher was a teacher who was the best at raising math and English test scores.
Speaker: And a good teacher prep program could produce a teacher who could do that, etc.
Speaker: And Betsy DeVos understood that, you know, like this really does not resonate with parents.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: That that there are all kinds of reasons that that parents consider a school a good fit.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And so her definition of a school that was failing was just a school that wasn't a good fit.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And I think that actually resonates with people far more than, you know, value added.
Speaker: or the kind of data dashboards that were being rolled out.
Speaker: So I think that we see this now with the school reopening fight around the country that ironically in some of these very conservative areas where parents have pushed really hard to get their schools open,
Speaker: sometimes without masks, right?
Speaker: But their definition of what a school is is so much broader than this kind of desiccated definition that we settled on during the Obama-Duncan years, right?
Speaker: We hear lots of talk about socialization and mental health, about the whole range of the curriculum.
Speaker: We hear a lot about sports too.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But you don't hear people saying you've got to reopen the schools so that my kid can do better on her math and English standardized test.
Speaker: And of course, that's why my daughter's school will be open on the snow day, right, to prevent learning loss because there will be testing this year, we've been told.
Speaker: So, you know, the school has an interest in cramming as much content into kids as they can, regardless of, you know, the kinds of decisions they might make in a different policy context.
Speaker: It's absolutely heartbreaking, too, to think about that narrowness of the purpose of education and, of course, then the measurements that we've talked about, that the chat's talking about here, too.
Speaker: Karen mentions over here the need for a better, broader definition of what effective education
Speaker: effective schools first, right, but then successful schools and students.
Speaker: And while you were talking, Jennifer, too, I thought back about Jonathan Kozol and how he sort of plays off these ideas of, you know, the desiccated curriculum opportunities are ones that would never fly, you know, in the wealthy suburban public schools, but those are the ones that, you know, high accountability regime of, you know, what we would consider like the liberal era, you know, Arne Duncan and Barack Obama would have gotten us
Speaker: the race to the top, et cetera, after, you know, even, I don't know about, about SS so much, but in the wake of No Child Left Behind, certainly like that's, that's the regime that we, that we ended up getting.
Speaker: So, so, so many good questions floating around here too.
Speaker: So I think,
Speaker: What I want to maybe shift gears towards is let's kind of like live in this in the unmaking world for a minute, you know, and imagine that there are some people listening to us who might be amenable to to to that notion or even just questioning, like, why would that be such a bad thing?
Speaker: I mean, we talked about how the private school infrastructure can maybe pick and choose students that that the public school infrastructure, you know,
Speaker: either is required to take, you know, that their special needs or they might have behavioral problems that would keep them out of private schools, sorry, or, you know, they can just pick and choose because you have to sign a faith statement to join this Catholic school or this other one.
Speaker: But like, let's imagine for a second here, like that we recognize the need for change within our education system and like the things that we're
Speaker: talking about kind of speak to that need to inequitable outcomes, outmoded curricula, grading and assessment practices, whether we want to talk about issues of police in schools to the over policing of of bodies and, you know, increasingly of minds through proctorio and some of those other things to that that we've talked about at H.R.P.
Speaker: But for our listeners who might be amenable to these ideas of right libertarian reformers, vouchers, for-profit schools, mass privatization, et cetera, who look at those things and say that that might not be a bad thing, if we fully arrived at their vision, right, of educational utopia, right?
Speaker: If we lived in a DeVos utopian era here, what have we lost, you know, with the loss of the public infrastructure?
Speaker: What has the cost been?
Speaker: You know, who are the winners and losers in that?
Speaker: I'm going to steal a story that I heard Jack tell because we now spend so much time in various, you know, in the Zoom rooms.
Speaker: And now we're in a different kind of room.
Speaker: So we gave a draft of the manuscript to a colleague of his in the working title originally was The Dismantlers.
Speaker: And his colleague read it and he said, you know, I don't know where I fit in this because I'm
Speaker: I'm a dismantler, right?
Speaker: I want to dismantle structures of oppression.
Speaker: I want to dismantle police and schools.
Speaker: I want to dismantle standardized testing.
Speaker: And so we really thought about it.
Speaker: And we thought that he's absolutely right, that our goal in writing this was not to say, status quo is fine, just leave it alone.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: It was to it was to say that, yes, we absolutely need to dismantle what isn't working and, you know, push for equity and and all the things we want.
Speaker: But the the when if you embrace an alternative, that means.
Speaker: Treating education as an individual or private good, you lose the capacity to demand the dismantling of those structures that you want to change.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And so, like, you'll hear a lot of people saying right now, just give the money to the parents.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Like you're, for example, you're in you're in Iowa and that's a state where the your Republicans picked up some seats in the most recent election.
Speaker: You're going to be hearing arguments like this in the in the coming session.
Speaker: And I think to a lot of people, that seems kind of appealing.
Speaker: Well, if you just gave me the money, I could figure out.
Speaker: what to do with it, right?
Speaker: But, you know, what they leave out of that is that there's so many other things that we expect a school to do.
Speaker: We in the U.S. expect our schools to function essentially as our only safety net.
Speaker: So what happens to all of those things?
Speaker: And so I think, you know, like that's what you really have to be focused on is to that
Speaker: The criticisms are being leveraged in a way to convince people to embrace a solution that makes the actual problems impossible to solve.
Speaker: And now I'm going to hand it over to Jack because I feel like I did such a good job that he's not going to know what to say.
Speaker: That's right, Jennifer.
Speaker: I'm just chiming in to say I'm at a loss.
Speaker: But while I scramble to think of what to say, I'll add that, you know, what's lost here, and to pick up on what Jennifer's saying, right?
Speaker: So her argument, as she retells my story, is that, you know,
Speaker: our collective ability to improve public education, right?
Speaker: To be the dismantlers that my colleague Jim Nearing, a former teacher and school principal,
Speaker: a truly thoughtful educator who was a part of the Coalition for Essential Schools movement led by Ted Sizer, so thinks of himself as a Sizer disciple.
Speaker: Our ability to collectively engage in the kind of work that he has spent his career engaged in withers if we don't have transparency, oversight, regulation, public governance.
Speaker: Not only that, but of course then there's massive opportunity for fraud and abuse.
Speaker: So, I just have very little faith that suddenly our problems are gonna be solved by taking the public education system and essentially dumping it over into the private sector.
Speaker: One of the points I often make to people is, sure, let's imagine that the entire public education system has become privatized because many people, right, there's this halo of exclusivity around private schools, which largely has to do with the fact that they have a more affluent clientele, a whiter clientele in most cases, a native English-speaking clientele, fewer special education students.
Speaker: And, of course, they turn people away.
Speaker: All of these things, right, and they charge money.
Speaker: These things make them seem like they're better.
Speaker: But, of course, let's expand this system to scale and say, well, okay, well, it's going to be all the kids, right?
Speaker: It's the 50 million kids who are in the public education system.
Speaker: And where are the teachers going to come from?
Speaker: Probably going to be the 3 million public educators who are out there.
Speaker: And what's the curriculum going to be?
Speaker: Well, private schools tend to not teach that differently, except for the fringy ones, than their public school counterparts.
Speaker: So, you know, same teachers, same kids, same curriculum, we're probably going to leverage the existing infrastructure, same buildings, right?
Speaker: It's just minus the existing transparency oversight regulation and public governance.
Speaker: The last point that I want to make is one of you, I think, teaches economics.
Speaker: Is that right?
Speaker: Teaches an economics class?
Speaker: Okay, right.
Speaker: So... Yes, that's me.
Speaker: Great, great.
Speaker: So then opportunity cost is something that your students will be familiar with.
Speaker: So let's think about what's the opportunity cost here.
Speaker: So as we spend all of this energy, right, all of this time, effort and energy on making the public system,
Speaker: What are we not spending our time, effort, and energy on?
Speaker: So let's imagine we spend tremendous human and economic resources to unmake the system.
Speaker: Are we going to be better off than if we had spent those same human and economic sources on strengthening the system?
Speaker: I think the answer is obvious.
Speaker: It seems like the space to really organize and fight back against these policies and to get to a space where we can demand reform that is meaningful is in one hand by incorporating more teachers unions.
Speaker: However, there is a perception that teachers unions actually fight back against the progressive changes that you all are talking about, that they are the ones that are holding everything up.
Speaker: And I think that that just kind of goes hand in hand with how teachers have been viewed since really the spring, where you have people like Corey DeAngelis or Ben Shapiro, Dave Rubin, etc.
Speaker: Really using this terminology of, you know, take your money, give everybody vouchers, go to the private school, teachers unions are destroying schools, etc., etc.
Speaker: Is there like this tension between unionization and education reform and all the things that you're talking about?
Speaker: Does that exist?
Speaker: First off, more so now than ever.
Speaker: And why would you attribute to that?
Speaker: But also, would you advocate then for teachers being more prone to joining unions or advocate to start a union in order to get to the place that you would like them to be?
Speaker: I've been thinking about this question a lot because we're coming off of this period where you had this kind of, you know, extraordinary coalition, a bipartisan coalition where the Democrats were all about weakening teachers for the right teachers unions for the right reasons.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: That if you if you constrained their collective bargaining,
Speaker: You know, got rid of things like last in, first out.
Speaker: You put in all these evaluation policies.
Speaker: So the idea was that students would be better off, right?
Speaker: That there would be achievement gains if you did, you intervened in this kind of policy level.
Speaker: So then you go across the partisan divide to the conservatives and, well, they had their eye, frankly, on a bigger prize.
Speaker: And that was to figure out how to constrain collective action and possibly even democracy.
Speaker: And so, you know, you see state after state that implemented what are called right to work laws.
Speaker: And these are basically just laws that mean that, like, if you don't want to join a union, you can't be forced to pay for the benefits that you get through the union contract.
Speaker: And so basically these are, they weaken unions and they've had a measurable impact on their membership rates.
Speaker: There was a Supreme Court decision, but first we saw this happen at the state level.
Speaker: So we now have 10 plus years of research on whether the policy interventions that I described about things like hiring and evaluation.
Speaker: And it's at best the most mixed of bags, right?
Speaker: Like we could take the sunniest perspective on it.
Speaker: And the best you could say that in certain cases you saw small gains,
Speaker: But where there's really no doubt is that what happened in these states that implemented these really sort of harsh measures aimed at weakening unions, that if you look at what happened in states like Michigan and Iowa, they served their purpose, which is to make it harder to elect Democrats.
Speaker: Voter turnout dropped.
Speaker: It made it harder for people who come from the working class to run for office.
Speaker: And we have to leave the realm of education policy to see this.
Speaker: You have to go to political science where they've been doing quite a nice job documenting this.
Speaker: And so I, you know, on the one hand, the reason that teachers unions get a bad rap among Democrat reformers is because of their resistance to these policy interventions.
Speaker: But I think that the Democrats have been too slow to recognize that the Republicans and the conservatives have their eye on a bigger prize that is delivering measurable results for them.
Speaker: I would, you know, everything that Jennifer said and just add that with the particular example of school closures, I definitely am inconvenienced personally that my daughter is virtual, right?
Speaker: And she is inconvenienced.
Speaker: She goes to school on a computer in a closet, right?
Speaker: That's not what anybody wants.
Speaker: But what's the right thing for our society?
Speaker: I don't think that opening schools right now is something that we could necessarily do safely given the fact that bars and restaurants have been opened.
Speaker: Look at spiking numbers across every single state, right?
Speaker: I would love to live in a world where I could take a firm stand and say schools should be open.
Speaker: But I think if I lived in that world, then the unions would also have taken a different position on school closures.
Speaker: And I think one of the reasons that teachers unions have gotten a bad rap over the past couple decades is that
Speaker: They are a collectivist enterprise making decisions about what is good for the whole.
Speaker: Now, you know, certainly one can level a criticism about teachers unions, particularly in the 70s and 80s, maybe 90s, being, you know, a little bit less focused on what's good for kids and their families.
Speaker: But right now,
Speaker: We live in a period when teachers unions have become one of the strongest advocacy groups for young people, particularly racially minoritized young people, low-income young people and their families through a strategy commonly referred to as bargaining for the common good.
Speaker: doing a lot there in terms of advancing the kind of aims that would not get advanced if each of us were pursuing our own individual self-interest.
Speaker: If I were pursuing my own individual self-interest, yeah, my kid would be in school right now.
Speaker: And I'm not sure that's good for all of us.
Speaker: I hate to say, um, I'm not sure.
Speaker: And I think that, you know, that's, that's where we have to come down on some of this stuff is to say, um,
Speaker: Maybe what we need is a little bit more conversation and deliberation, which of course is not something that either centrist Democrats, neoliberals, or right libertarians are particularly engaged in.
Speaker: What they want is for people like teachers to be quiet and follow orders.
Speaker: I'm not sure that's good for education and I'm not sure that that's good for kids.
Speaker: I would just add one more little piece to that.
Speaker: I wish that the unions had done a better job of making the case about their own safety concerns in kind of a broader pitch for, you know, that everyone should have the right to a safe workplace.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: That the because of the way because they made the argument in a narrow way, it comes across as self-interested and then it opens the door to what Chris was talking about.
Speaker: And so you'll often you'll hear people.
Speaker: I see people tweeting stories all day long about Europe.
Speaker: Look at Europe.
Speaker: They've opened their schools.
Speaker: And what they completely missed is that the reason that
Speaker: Europe is able to keep its schools open is that it has this unbelievable social safety net thanks to the strength of its unions, right?
Speaker: So they're closing everything else, paying workers 90% of their wages, including freelancers, you know, to stay home, making sure that their economy is able to reopen when the pandemic is finally over.
Speaker: And so to make the case here that somehow we would be better off without unions,
Speaker: seems just, you know, like extraordinarily kind of dumb.
Speaker: Well, and one last note that I thought of in listening to Jennifer is that, you know, of course in the American context, so much of public perception of teachers' unions is shaped by the fact that people are exploited in the United States in the workplace more than they have been in 100 years.
Speaker: I think where a lot of people are coming from, well I didn't have that right, I didn't have the ability to say that, and I think the response is not to say, well shame on the teachers.
Speaker: I think the response is to say, actually what do we need to do to make sure that everybody
Speaker: labors in safe conditions, that everybody has a kind of voice in the way that their work is shaped and managed and controlled, that everybody is adequately compensated for their work.
Speaker: Amen to that.
Speaker: So I think that's a perfect place to sort of wrap up the conversation.
Speaker: It's interesting, right, if we think about the notion of labor solidarity as being a net benefit, not just, say, to teachers, but, you know, those, you know, brothers and sisters in labor, too, who might be part of restaurant, you know,
Speaker: unions or gosh, you know, other public and private employee unions to electrical workers like across the board.
Speaker: And then imagine the attacks over the last, well, you know, since the Goldwater era or since the 80s on those groups.
Speaker: And then imagine that replicating itself now in public education to say, you know, like, well, we're going to take that educational solidarity away and fracture, you know, continue to fracture those things out too.
Speaker: And
Speaker: let's take the, say, the wage gains or the wealth gap for the last 30 years, but then apply that to education as well.
Speaker: It's really difficult to imagine that replicating that formula in education would leave us in a better place than it did for labor over the last three decades, too.
Speaker: So, yeah, I think the answer overall, right, is more democracy rather than less.
Speaker: And also interesting to think about
Speaker: attacks on those democratic institutions are not just a delegitimization of democracy, but also wanting to put barriers in front of the democratic process.
Speaker: So here at the same time that we want to remove the democratic accountability, we want to make it more difficult for
Speaker: to have democratic accountability to elected officials and to your boss or to your working conditions and all of these other things.
Speaker: So yeah, I am definitely cool if the message at the end of this is solidarity and democracy in the workplace.
Speaker: Is there anything that we had missed that you think we should talk about here at the end before we do a plug in and start to wrap things up, Jennifer and Jack?
Speaker: No, I thought, I think we really conveyed a sense of what the book is about and why we're worried, but also that just because you're sounding an alarm does not mean you're also saying that everything is great.
Speaker: Yeah, and I'll offer the yin to Jennifer's yang there and say that this is a dark picture that we paint in the book and that we do so in order to try to spur action, right?
Speaker: That there are things we can all be doing as family members of kids in public schools, as educators, as community members, as voters,
Speaker: You know, you may have people listening who are school board members or who are locally elected officials, right?
Speaker: There's work that we can all be engaged in, but at the end of the day, I think the most important work is actually engaging in conversations that challenge the kinds of assumptions that are so problematic and that undermine the aim of excellent and equitable education for all young people, right?
Speaker: So when people sort of
Speaker: just say as if it is an unquestionable truth that the public schools are no good.
Speaker: Or if people talk about the fact that teachers are self-interested.
Speaker: I think that these are things that can be met with pointed, polite questions.
Speaker: Because as soon as people are questioned on this stuff, how do you know that the schools are no good?
Speaker: Tell me about the 98,000 public schools in the United States that your kid doesn't go to.
Speaker: I think that's where there's opportunity for growth, right?
Speaker: When we help people realize that a lot of the things that we take for granted, we actually need to begin asking questions about.
Speaker: Well, thank you both very much for this.
Speaker: A reminder, the book is A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door.
Speaker: The podcast is Have You Heard Podcast.
Speaker: And of course, you can read the review that I wrote for the book on our website, humanrestorationproject.org.
Speaker: Follow us at humerespro.
Speaker: Of course, thank you, Jennifer and Jack, for joining us here today.
Speaker: Do you want to plug a Twitter handle for the podcast or for yourselves along the way too?
Speaker: You can find out more.
Speaker: You can subscribe to the podcast anywhere, basically, that you get podcasts now.
Speaker: And we also have a blog, haveyouheardblog.com.
Speaker: And my Twitter handle is B is for Berkshire.
Speaker: I'm edu underscore historian.
Speaker: And the show's Twitter handle is at haveyouheardpod.
