Transcript
Speaker: This podcast is made possible by supporters of the Human Restoration Project, three of whom are Paul Kim, Rachel Lawrence, and Trent Kirkpatrick.
Speaker: You can learn more about the Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org, or find us on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.
Speaker: Are pandemic pods just the latest tool through which white parents use their financial and political clout to separate out their children, thus increasing segregation?
Speaker: Well, again, tonight's resolution reads, to combat inequality, greater investments must be made in public schools so as not to accommodate the formation of pandemic pods by affluent parents.
Speaker: Pandemic pods are grounded in a racist history, and we have to consider the underlying racist principles that form pandemic pods.
Speaker: The money should follow the child, the money that already exists in the education system for that child should follow them to wherever they're getting an education.
Speaker: That can be in a private school to pay for tuition and fees, and that could be in a pandemic pod, which is the main point of this discussion today.
Speaker: This dual pandemic has exposed the ugly truth of racism,
Speaker: It exposes a deadly pandemic that has killed nearly 200,000 people after an administration even really practically denied that it was an issue.
Speaker: So it's requiring greater investment in communities that have been ravaged by that.
Speaker: Hello and welcome to episode 80 of our podcast at the Human Restoration Project.
Speaker: My name is Nick Covington and I'm a public high school social studies teacher in Iowa and the creative director here at HRP.
Speaker: Today, Chris and I are joined by John Hale, whose biography you will hear at the beginning of the interview.
Speaker: John was recently the guest of a SoHo Forum debate on the topic of pandemic pods, which you heard excerpts of at the beginning of this episode and can find in its entirety on YouTube.
Speaker: Since the Human Restoration Project has primarily been focused on pedagogy and changing the structures of school, I wanted to have John on to talk more about the history and ramifications of education policy and help us unpack what's really going on in our current conversations about pandemic pods,
Speaker: voucher programs, and the recently announced Bezos Academy.
Speaker: How can we simultaneously acknowledge that schools need to change while being critical advocates for the need for public institutions and employee unions?
Speaker: How have market-oriented takes on so-called school choice actually subverted the original intent of independent and charter schools?
Speaker: It's a really interesting conversation, and it was great to talk to John.
Speaker: I'm sure we'll have him on again to talk education policy, history, and organization in the future.
Speaker: So here's our conversation with John Hale, and I hope you enjoy it.
Speaker: So this is Nick Covington, and we're talking to John Hale, an associate professor of education policy, organization, and leadership at the University of Illinois, Urbana, Champaign.
Speaker: He's focused on the history of teacher and student activism and finishing up a book on the history of school choice with the working title, The Choice We Face.
Speaker: You can look for that on September 2021, just in time for next year's school year, assuming there's going to be another one.
Speaker: But hi, John, how are you doing?
Speaker: Hi, Nick.
Speaker: I'm doing well.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Thank you for having me.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Great.
Speaker: So for a little bit of context for our listeners, we asked John to be on today because he was involved in a debate a couple of weeks ago now on September 16th with the Soho Forum.
Speaker: And the Soho Forum was a libertarian space where they kind of get together and debate ideas of importance to that community.
Speaker: So
Speaker: Past topics have included things like who should libertarians vote for in the next presidential election?
Speaker: Or is there systemic racism in policing?
Speaker: What should the government do about lockdowns during COVID?
Speaker: And the premise that you were debating with Corey DeAngelis, and we'll talk more about him in a second, was, quote, to combat inequality, greater investments must be made in public schools so as not to accommodate the formation of pandemic pods by affluent parents, end quote.
Speaker: With you in support of the affirmative and Corey DeAngelis arguing the negative.
Speaker: So I just have to add in there, too, that Corey or that the Soho Forum, rather, is sponsored by the Reason Magazine.
Speaker: And Corey DeAngelis is the director of school choice at the Reason Foundation.
Speaker: and an adjunct professor at the Cato Institute.
Speaker: So it's not like you have to really guess where Corey's allegiance falls on that premise.
Speaker: And if you're interested, you can watch the debate on YouTube or listen to the podcast version of the debate, and we'll link that stuff in the show notes.
Speaker: So, yeah, at the Human Restoration Project, we really focused on like the pedagogical side of progressive education.
Speaker: And I'm not really sure that we've ever hashed out the problems with like market based approaches to so-called school choice and voucher programs.
Speaker: And where Corey argues that student funding dollars should be attached to students and not schools, you should be able to give that voucher to the with the per pupil amount.
Speaker: to take and spend wherever you think is in your child's best interest.
Speaker: So how do advocates of public education get that message across to people who are skeptical of the value of public institutions or view sustaining it as, in Corey's words, quote, throwing money at the problem?
Speaker: Or, you know, what's the fundamental case against market-based reforms like vouchers or these pandemic pods, John?
Speaker: Yeah, well, you know, I don't think there's, unlike, you know, I think Corey and others would
Speaker: give us clear, almost universal solutions, which is having the money follow the family and student and, you know, funding individually, each family, let them make the decision like that sort of solution.
Speaker: Unlike that, we don't have, there's not one way to combat, if you will, or to address people who have lost face in the public education system, because there are so many people who have lost face
Speaker: faith in the public education system for different reasons.
Speaker: The debate with Corey DeAngelis and libertarians was one of a, they have an economic theory or belief that schools should be run by as a business or like a business.
Speaker: You'll notice Corey kept on talking about Walmart and or Trader Joe's, right?
Speaker: Which our schools should be run like that, which, you know, is, is, um,
Speaker: it's disheartening and it's also problematic because our schools aren't grocery stores and they're not businesses.
Speaker: They're not for-profit entities.
Speaker: So I think in addressing that crowd, the major point
Speaker: It's not always affected because that, I mean, so many of us have already made up our minds, right?
Speaker: We're not willing to listen.
Speaker: I think you do see that in the debate, if I'm not wrong, that people, especially if you could see the chat box, they've already sold on this idea, right?
Speaker: But it's to argue that historically our schools have never been viewed as businesses and they've been viewed as social and political institutions that were directly connected to the health and vitality of our democracy.
Speaker: So,
Speaker: That requires a degree of investment that looking at schools like a business doesn't require.
Speaker: So the first part is to get people to sort of see that our schools are these very vibrant, dynamic, but yet challenging social and political spaces that are connected to the well-being of our country.
Speaker: in the wellbeing of our democracy, as opposed to either making money or making schools quote unquote more efficient.
Speaker: Or, you know, for instance, now lately the past couple of weeks, we see Jeff Bezos and Amazon in these preschools treating students like customers, right?
Speaker: Literally what the point of it.
Speaker: So it's getting people to see the much broader function and purpose of schools.
Speaker: Yeah, and that is so interesting to bring up the Jeff Bezos.
Speaker: What did he call this?
Speaker: Bezos Academy?
Speaker: Bezos Academy, yeah.
Speaker: Bezos Academy.
Speaker: The interesting part about that, right, is in like the press releases and things that I've seen for it, like talking about it as a Montessori-inspired preschool.
Speaker: That includes self-directed activity, hands-on learning, and collaborative play, which, you know, from like a progressive education standpoint, sounds like, yeah, why wouldn't we want to have more of those things in there?
Speaker: So, and that's the thing that I think is important.
Speaker: is sort of the problem with it.
Speaker: So how would you try to sell maybe somebody on saying like, what's the problem with Bezos Academy?
Speaker: Like, why can't we have a billionaire philanthropist opening up these free private academies that maybe serve their own economic interests, but provide free education for marginalized communities?
Speaker: What's the catch?
Speaker: to actually lead and build an entire system that fills that need.
Speaker: So, I mean, if we're in the medical profession, as you've just experienced, Nick, I bet you wanted someone with an MD or trained to be in that hospital to address and fix what was going on with you, correct?
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Why do we have in this field of education that just because if you have a ton of money that you are somehow qualified to say what's best for other people's kids?
Speaker: First, I think it's just problematic about who we allow to sort of run and build these schools and call that effective reform that we all need.
Speaker: That to me is just one of the most problematic issues with that, right?
Speaker: And then if I may just add on the second major issue is that, you know, there's nothing wrong.
Speaker: That's great that people want to change the system and that they want to make education a stronger field and a better system that's more attuned to the needs of all students.
Speaker: That's great.
Speaker: But why don't we work with the system that's right in front of us that I think everyone can agree, and I would agree with Corey DeAngelis and Jeff Bezos on this, that it does need to be fixed.
Speaker: But we've learned historically that the second you start
Speaker: pulling out of that system like these pandemic pods are doing and sort of doing your own thing, that benefits a few people on the margins, those who are able to get into Jeff Bezos Academy or whatever it's called, Amazon Preschool.
Speaker: And I'm sorry for forgetting the name, but you get what I'm saying.
Speaker: Whatever these separate schools are, because...
Speaker: You're investing in something completely separate and segregated from the public school system, which over 50 million students rely upon.
Speaker: And that's problematic because what do you do then with the mainstream of students who need that reform?
Speaker: Because you're exactly right.
Speaker: This Montessori method is proven to work.
Speaker: It reaches all students.
Speaker: It is a very sound pedagogical tool.
Speaker: It would be great to have that in the public schools as well if people wanted it.
Speaker: It takes a strong investment.
Speaker: It requires specialized teacher training to be a good Montessori teacher.
Speaker: It requires different types of classroom.
Speaker: You're scrapping a textbook and working with materials that students are actually literally building with.
Speaker: So,
Speaker: Just creating a separate system leaves behind the millions of students who don't get a benefit from this very small number of schools that adopt state-of-the-art or that build a state-of-the-art facility and have the best trained teachers out there.
Speaker: You're not addressing the problem.
Speaker: You're just sort of throwing a life raft out there for the few who can hold on to it while you're watching this massive system.
Speaker: ship sink right in front of you.
Speaker: I think that's a great analogy.
Speaker: And even to a certain extent, I mean, you're throwing water onto the other ship while you're making your exit on the life raft because, I mean, you're taking those funds and that money away from students who may have needs that exceed that of a so-called average student.
Speaker: And so in the conversation example with Corey, he's talking about these pandemic pods.
Speaker: I'm wondering, what does that look like for students with special needs?
Speaker: Are those parents also going out there and hiring paraeducators?
Speaker: Are they also going out there and hiring, you know, a team of specialists and people who can, you know, help assess their child's needs and then work to address it?
Speaker: I mean, I've got some students in my building in my public high school who...
Speaker: work with a team that's probably $250,000 worth of human capital in a given day just to help that student get through a day at school.
Speaker: And I wonder, for the price of a voucher, how far is that going to get somebody who actually does have really dramatic level two, level three needs in a public high school to
Speaker: where that's free for parents at like the point of service, switching to the market-based model leaves a whole bunch of people behind and it impoverishes the people who are there already and leaves them with fewer resources.
Speaker: So yeah, it's so interesting to hear Corey say, and he said it several times to say, oh, parents can choose the public school if they want to.
Speaker: That's totally up to them to choose that or they can take it elsewhere.
Speaker: But yeah, that's just one really interesting sort of thing about this too.
Speaker: Well, you undermine the whole field when you say something like that because of the point you're bringing up, which is such an important point to think about and to discuss and to work into our policy decisions because students with special needs require something that's quite different from a student without special needs.
Speaker: You just pointed to the human and professional capital that are invested in educators and the wraparound services that can help a student with special needs.
Speaker: That requires an investment that's far beyond our student needs.
Speaker: without special needs, right?
Speaker: And so it's not an evil, it's not a level or even playing field.
Speaker: The reality is that not every student learns the same way and not every family can make the same decisions.
Speaker: So if you're looking at parents who have a child with special needs, that requires a very different skill set.
Speaker: And pandemic pods, and when you start to take the money or when you start to adopt formulas where the money follows a student, something that
Speaker: you know, Corey and Reason and the Libertarians advocate, you're putting that pressure and that burden, really a burden on parents to sort of find what works best for them.
Speaker: And a lot of times, as we know, students and families with special needs don't have the time.
Speaker: You know, they're entitled to by law to go to the school and
Speaker: that's close to their house and be provided these services.
Speaker: When you disrupt that, you're disrupting the services that children need.
Speaker: And just quickly add in, research already shows that this market-based reform strategy is problematic and often detrimental to students with special needs because if you look at the charter example,
Speaker: Research studies time and time again have demonstrated that students with special needs and families who must provide or ensure that they get a good education
Speaker: are kept out of the best choice schools like charter schools.
Speaker: You know, when you apply to a school, a charter school, there's nothing about law that says they have to take them, students with special needs, but a public school does.
Speaker: So it just shows the inequity in the very system.
Speaker: So people can see that what it looks like from the perspective of a student with special needs, you see very clearly and quickly that they need investment in their public schools.
Speaker: And you can't just go ahead and recreate
Speaker: the Jeff Bezos Academy, because it sounds good or the theory's good, when on the ground you have students with special needs and, you know, millions of other students who require something different and more than just
Speaker: a voucher from the government.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And what I thought was really interesting, and I latched onto this too in Corey's argument to talk about, he mentioned something about preschool and it really got me going because John, you have kids, right?
Speaker: Yes, I have two kids aged two.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So, I mean, I have a two-year-old and a five-year-old.
Speaker: So we've had this preschool conversation going back before our firstborn was even born.
Speaker: And
Speaker: If you want to look at the landscape of school choice for preschools and how, A, inequitable and expensive and inaccessible it is for middle-class families, that's really the landscape for school choice that they want to project onto K-12.
Speaker: They want you to have to be on a wait list for six to 12 months or longer, and they want you to have to pay $1,800 a month, you know, for care for your kid in tuition.
Speaker: And I think, you know, by the time both of my kids get out of preschool, I will have paid for a college education for at least one of them.
Speaker: you know, just by the time they hit five years old and then can get into, you know, a public school program.
Speaker: So yeah, so Amazon preschool, like you called it earlier, doesn't doesn't sound like a like a great deal for me because it it sounds like stress.
Speaker: It sounds like it's not going to be affordable.
Speaker: It's not going to be accessible.
Speaker: It's going to mirror the exact experience that millions of parents have with with school choice and preschools for their, you know, newborns or for their unborn kids that they're trying to get into a quality preschool education.
Speaker: And people without means have zero access to those things.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: And that's just one of the points, too, is what you just said.
Speaker: You know, people without means don't have that access.
Speaker: And we really don't take into account those families without means to figure out this convoluted choice process or to find out, you know, where's Amazon preschool.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: I mean, that requires.
Speaker: So many people dismiss this fact, but that requires time.
Speaker: It requires capital to sort of understand the process.
Speaker: It requires all these elements that you're burdening families with.
Speaker: Those that have the means at times even struggle with that.
Speaker: You know, just talk to parents who are trying to figure out the choice system.
Speaker: It's stressful.
Speaker: It's, you know, you're on waiting lists.
Speaker: You know, you have to figure out.
Speaker: What's best for your child in a very short amount of time is putting a tremendous burden on them.
Speaker: It's not liberating.
Speaker: It's not freedom.
Speaker: It's burdening families with the task that constitutions have required states to make.
Speaker: It's allowing these state legislatures to pass that off on someone else because they don't want to do it, essentially.
Speaker: It's an abdication of that constitutional responsibility of the states.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: And that's what all these, you know, some people call them these Robin Hood cases, right?
Speaker: All these cases that are in nearly every state across these United States where state legislatures are being sued because they are not...
Speaker: you know, they're not fulfilling their constitutional obligation, right?
Speaker: Why these court cases exist across the country because of that very fact, right?
Speaker: So we know that these states aren't doing that.
Speaker: So at this moment, when we know that they're not doing that, they go ahead and turn it over to Jeff Bezos or charter school operators or other private school operators as well.
Speaker: You know, they're giving up on this responsibility to provide a quality public education for all students.
Speaker: just to kind of process that a little bit too, fundamentally, it's not just an abdication of the constitutional responsibility that states have, but it's like, it's an abdication of that entire democratic process.
Speaker: You know, as you think about school boards being elected by a democratic process, state legislatures being elected by a democratic process and having a stake in what happens in those public schools, it abdicates that whole thing towards what we've been talking about there with those market reforms and
Speaker: Sort of this like a la carte build your own school system.
Speaker: And there was a great podcast a couple of weeks ago from Have You Heard with Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire, where they had a guest on there.
Speaker: And he said, well, you know, what if what if we applied the same logic to airports?
Speaker: You know, I don't I don't like this airport.
Speaker: I want to go build my own airport and do that.
Speaker: Well, you can't do that because the infrastructure and the time and everything else takes continuous investment over decades to get infrastructure to a point where you can, like you were saying, fill it with the capital and then the people and everything else that makes a school system function.
Speaker: You can't attempt to imitate that overnight and expect it to be successful at all.
Speaker: Exactly right.
Speaker: And you're right to say that, you know, legislators and policymakers are, you know, advocated on their constitutional responsibility to provide a public education.
Speaker: At the same time, they're also ignoring this historic sort of precedent before them, which is to create public schools for the benefit of
Speaker: of everybody.
Speaker: And people have a hard time with that.
Speaker: They say, it's not a public good.
Speaker: It's not a common good.
Speaker: But we need, research and history tells us that that is the purpose of public education, to strengthen our democracy.
Speaker: And if we don't see that need now, especially for those of us who tuned into the debate,
Speaker: We're just missing the mark on that one in a criminal way to not see why we need these sort of shared common spaces right now, right, to learn how to participate in democracy.
Speaker: And you can't put a dollar sign on that.
Speaker: So about the airport, you know, that analogy is exactly correct, right?
Speaker: To expect individuals to build the separate system, right?
Speaker: But again, whether it's an airport or a Walmart, you're breaking down education to a very simple formula to provide a product, to inculcate and to share a curriculum with our students.
Speaker: But
Speaker: Nick, having gone in schools, we know that that is not the sole or only function or purpose of schools.
Speaker: Schools and teachers are asked to do so much and to reduce it to that and then take away their meager resources to actually do that undercuts the entire system.
Speaker: And it makes their quote unquote market highly unequal when you both
Speaker: abdicate, if you will, and give up that constitutional responsibility and break down and simplify education to a number or to a service, it misses the mark entirely about what public schools are supposed to be doing and that, in fact, quite honestly, that they need to be doing right now.
Speaker: And I think to add to that point, too, like I'm thinking about when I read Jonathan Kozal's book, and I forget which one right now, but he mentions in there how a lot of the accountability reform measures that were put on to urban schools, and in a lot of cases, what ends up happening is that –
Speaker: A big, big wig administrator comes in, turns over a bunch of teachers, gets a temporary or even a fake, you know, boost in test scores.
Speaker: They get they get headlines.
Speaker: They get a raise.
Speaker: They go on the speaking tour.
Speaker: They become education consultants and whatnot.
Speaker: And then in two years, when kids transition, say, from middle school to high school, the gains that that were supposed to be the miracle of whatever the program was expected.
Speaker: those gains vanish along with the administrator who's taken their money and run anyway.
Speaker: And then we're back to blaming teachers and we're back to blaming kids and we're back to blaming communities.
Speaker: And so I wonder, just kind of thinking, like looking at that critical role that we need to play to make our schools function better, right?
Speaker: Understanding the role that schools have played in perpetuating, you know, structural racism, in perpetuating those biases.
Speaker: And even with your work, you know, in the freedom schools of the 50s and 60s that, you know, we're born
Speaker: out of a radical democratic voice, which we would hold up as being, like, this is a hallmark of democracy right here, was training generations of students to be active in their communities and to fight for, at the time, what was radical change, especially in the black community.
Speaker: So I don't know if there's a couple questions in here, but...
Speaker: how can we acknowledge the dehumanizing aspects, the disengaging, the racist aspects of school?
Speaker: Maybe they even talked a little bit about in that dual pandemic framing of your argument in the debate, while also being critical friends and acknowledging that crucial democratic role that they play, even while we look at historical precedents of schools that have come from a different, more radical place and been successful, and they've been held up as examples.
Speaker: So like, how do the values of democratic schooling and those freedom schools, and even like some charter programs, how do those fit into our public school ecosystem?
Speaker: And how can we be defenders of that structure while acknowledging those things?
Speaker: Yeah, and that's why I really like how you frame that, because that's also why it's so difficult to
Speaker: not just to go into a libertarian lines then and to argue for greater investment for public schools.
Speaker: I mean, that's literally an impossible, it's possible, but you're not going to win that debate.
Speaker: But it has to be said.
Speaker: And it's also difficult because, like you said, you have to acknowledge the dehumanizing experience and aspect of public schools, while also making the argument that, well, this is, we still need to invest in these structures, right?
Speaker: And to go to
Speaker: families who have experienced generations of public school failure, that's very difficult to do.
Speaker: But you can do it and it has been done.
Speaker: So like you said, some charter schools are really, really successful and they work well.
Speaker: Some magnet schools work really well.
Speaker: We know these private schools where they're paying $25,000 a year to go to are working well, right?
Speaker: So what it is, and we know what works.
Speaker: You've been able to get degrees in education at the graduate level or above.
Speaker: for over 100 years.
Speaker: And that's a lot of people who have been educated to know what's going on and who have studied the problem professionally.
Speaker: The problem is one lack of willpower.
Speaker: So we have our willingness to be honest with what the system is.
Speaker: And it's also a problem of trust, because in order to really make this work, we have by acknowledging the structural inequalities, whether it's racism, misogyny, ableism, right?
Speaker: If you recognize how this is baked into the structure, and you really understand it, I feel like that also leads to an awareness that one of the solutions are empowering those who are closest to
Speaker: the um the quote-unquote problem right to actually invest in the the parents of students with special needs for instance not just with a voucher but with the actual say on this or a vote on the school board to to because parents are experts in what and knowing what's best for their children by empowering them to make decisions about where to spend the money about removing particular teachers or principal that aren't meeting the needs of their students
Speaker: working in what they suggest into the actual school structure itself.
Speaker: So by acknowledging, and you're actually acknowledging one of the solutions to it, which is to bring those who rely on public schools into that and allow entrusting people to sort of run the schools themselves.
Speaker: And I will say, I try to bring this up in the debate, of course, but if you look at the civil rights history, like freedom schools, like you mentioned,
Speaker: And you connect it to today, there's a lot of subarited advocates who are charter school founders.
Speaker: There's a lot of black power community organizers who support school vouchers.
Speaker: They're not supporting, in my oral histories and the research I've done, it's not so much supporting school choice per se like the Reason Foundation is doing because it's this economic theory that Milton Friedman puts out and, you know, for whatever reasons.
Speaker: It's for a very different reason is that it gives control and power back to the community who needs it.
Speaker: If you can start your own charter school and run it, that's community control and community empowerment, not school choice.
Speaker: If you allow a community to sit on a private school board and to determine admissions or something like that, what you're doing, you're empowering it.
Speaker: It's not choice that people want.
Speaker: It's just to be heard and to be respected by people.
Speaker: allowed the keys, if you will, to control and really have a heavy say in their own children's education.
Speaker: And it's really not that difficult.
Speaker: It's just people just have a hard time with relinquishing control, right?
Speaker: And going to these billionaire philanthropists in some very notable instances, as opposed to just going to the local school and working with the structures that are already there.
Speaker: Yeah, that's so interesting because there's nothing about what you just said about increasing community voice and having a say in that education that necessitates raising the public school to the ground and growing a bunch of Amazon preschools.
Speaker: There's nothing implicit in saying that.
Speaker: And I think that's a really interesting segue into maybe the last question.
Speaker: which is exactly about that.
Speaker: It's about that idea of collective voice and the power that's in that as opposed to the fractured market nature.
Speaker: Maybe we'd call that the neoliberal nature of the marketplace that is supposed to empower individuals in competition against each other.
Speaker: To what you said, communities don't necessarily want that, right?
Speaker: They want collective voice and collective action.
Speaker: But increasingly, that's viewed as a negative thing.
Speaker: And so one of the one of the talking points that Corey even had in the debate, and I've heard a lot of time as I mean, I've been a labor organizer myself, and I know you've done work in this, too, is that they're a menace to society.
Speaker: I mean, every time he talks about the California school system, he brings up teachers unions and and the inability to change because something about the teachers unions as this insidious organization.
Speaker: It's almost conspiratorial.
Speaker: The teachers unions won't let us fix the problems that are in the schools.
Speaker: But what is really interesting is that as I have advanced in my career and in both in labor work and in the classroom, the more that I learn about the way that these public institutions work, my inkling has never been to shatter them and break them.
Speaker: It's to strengthen that collective voice, you know.
Speaker: And Corey mentions that charter schools benefit from that lack of unionization and
Speaker: And what better way to say that bring Walmart and Amazon up as like the panacea for, I guess, retail choice.
Speaker: But there are also places that are just infamous for being anti-union and worker exploitation.
Speaker: I mean, you hear horrible stories about Amazon warehouses and Walmart wages, etc.
Speaker: I think that's maybe...
Speaker: I don't know if that's an ideological hurdle that we have to get over, but I think part of the PR of public goods is saying that collective things have value.
Speaker: So how do we bridge that gap and maybe what's going on there between the notion of having solidarity and
Speaker: you know, with communities and teachers and institutions and the collective power that I view as uplifting all people and the perception of unions, especially public sector unions, like as a menace to society.
Speaker: I don't know if you have any thoughts on that.
Speaker: That's like three podcasts worth, I mean, because the attack on teacher unions since their founding in the early 1900s, right?
Speaker: with Margaret Haley in Chicago.
Speaker: It's a lot to unpack.
Speaker: You know, I just, and I agree with you.
Speaker: I find it so curious that, you know, Corey DeAngelis and others will say, well, one reason charters are doing so well or why they're an attractive option in this market is that there are no teacher unions there.
Speaker: Well, then why did the city of Chicago witness the first charter teacher strike in the country?
Speaker: Because they're not working and they're not getting paid and their insurance is messed up.
Speaker: right then it's so great why are teachers in charter schools in in in chicago actually doing that in los angeles
Speaker: And you have to fact check it.
Speaker: They were talking about that, what you do with the charter teachers, because they are, you know, how they were being treated in the schools.
Speaker: And they also look at these right to work states, right, across the South and Southwest.
Speaker: I don't think those state education systems are doing that well.
Speaker: And I'm saying that sarcastically, right?
Speaker: This is a bottom of the barrel, and you can directly correlate that onto the
Speaker: Correlate that with the fact that there aren't any teacher unions there, that they are not allowed to collectively bargain to not only raise their salary, but strengthen the profession.
Speaker: And if you strengthen the teacher, you strengthen the school and you strengthen the working conditions, right, which allow professionals to effectively educate their students.
Speaker: So what you do about, I don't know what you do about, this has been a losing battle since, especially with Scott Walker, what we saw in the Midwest and the breakup of teacher unions and collective bargaining, right?
Speaker: But it's to see that through collective strength and through the professionalization of teachers by way of collective bargaining, right?
Speaker: That is one way to, of course, strengthen the public school system.
Speaker: Research shows the correlation between higher teacher salaries and standardized test score, stronger teacher retention, teachers actually staying in the schools.
Speaker: And if you look at some of the ideas of teacher unions, like Al Shanker, I'll put it out there, his original idea, which was based on Ray Buddy's
Speaker: idea, charter school idea, was that this was a teacher-controlled experiment where they went back to the public schools after five years to test what works.
Speaker: That was the original concept.
Speaker: Before it was bastardized, if you will, by corporations and millionaires and billionaires who didn't know what it was like to teach co-opted the idea.
Speaker: So, I mean, the idea of collective...
Speaker: strength by way of teacher unions is also baked into the system, right?
Speaker: And it's there, it's just we're ignoring it and then we're going in a very new direction without research to show that we're better off hiring teachers who aren't unionized as if that's going to work.
Speaker: History tells us it's quite different and far from reality.
Speaker: Yeah, man.
Speaker: And it is so interesting to think about that correlation since, you know, the 70s or maybe, you know, the rise of the Reagan conservatives in the 80s and really like attacking labor unions and attacking public institutions.
Speaker: It almost seems like the 20 year trajectory from that to say no child left behind and then the 20 years onward, that ideological side is in search of a solution to the problem that they caused.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Which is exactly that, right?
Speaker: Deprofessionalizing teachers, lowering wages, fracturing trust in public institutions, et cetera, and then having to provide the solution in these market-based things that aren't necessarily shown to work any better or worse, but just seem to sort by socioeconomic status, which maybe that's an inherent goal in what they want to do.
Speaker: I mean, I'll try to give them the benefit of the doubt there, but it's really interesting.
Speaker: And all of these experiments that we've said to have tried in education, going back for
Speaker: 40 years, maybe we haven't tried more unions raising teacher pay, putting more money into schools at the margins in an underserved communities.
Speaker: And you know what I mean?
Speaker: It's it just seems like we're always coming back to these market ideas that which again, to me, and maybe there's a there's a bias here, I, I just don't see that working.
Speaker: And I'm like, why don't we try the flip?
Speaker: Why don't we try it?
Speaker: Let's unionize more.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Let's let's do more of those kinds of things.
Speaker: Let's raise pay.
Speaker: Let's fund schools.
Speaker: And then let's see how test scores come out.
Speaker: And if it's if it's a disaster, then at least we will have tried it.
Speaker: But like what?
Speaker: Why not try more of that?
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: And it's also, you know, why do we trust people like Jeff Bezos, for instance, because it's so current right now?
Speaker: To reform these schools, he's never taught to what extent has he been in a public school, but we're trusting him or looking to that as the type of solution as opposed to ignoring professionals who sign off on a contract where they know they're underpaid because they love the position and they love their students.
Speaker: Why don't we listen to people who are making the decision to make it work as opposed to someone with no experience with it?
Speaker: What type of world is that?
Speaker: Where that's in fact logical?
Speaker: And then we keep going back to a market-based reform.
Speaker: I mean, it doesn't work well when people are organized to fight for more money to protect people.
Speaker: themselves and their health and their working conditions, right?
Speaker: That never works.
Speaker: So it is a direct, not even ulterior motive, it is a direct motive to eliminate that barrier, right, of teacher unions, because people can't get what they want done with these pesky teachers in the way, because they're going to make sure that things are done well.
Speaker: And on top of that, too, it's this idea that through collective bargaining and teacher unionization, that we have to
Speaker: Again, the solutions are in there because it's been passed down for so long that teachers are highly trained and they know what to do best.
Speaker: And it's so easy to blame the teachers because you were referencing before, it's ideological.
Speaker: It's cultural.
Speaker: It's in our movies.
Speaker: It's on our billboard, it's on the cover of Time Magazine with Michelle Rhee in the broom in 2008, like sweeping away these teacher reforms and attacking on these unions.
Speaker: It's worked itself into our collective consciousness, if you will, that teachers are bad, that teacher unions are evil.
Speaker: So we're fighting against this culture or this cultural idea.
Speaker: And it's so easy to do because we've sort of been socialized to see it.
Speaker: And it's so convenient for those who are interested in reforming schools by themselves, because if you can blame a teacher, that means you're not blaming, you're not looking at the system itself.
Speaker: The system policies need to be changed.
Speaker: Legislators need to be challenged and we can't allow billionaires to run things.
Speaker: It's sort of like, if you allow me to make a comparison or analogy here at the end of Al Gore's book,
Speaker: his first inconvenient truth.
Speaker: All the solutions at the end of the documentary are individual.
Speaker: Use less water.
Speaker: Turn your lights off if you're not using them.
Speaker: At the end of it, it'll be more conscious.
Speaker: Well, how about creating policies that companies can exploit the environment for profit?
Speaker: How about putting caps on emissions output?
Speaker: How about creating policies that don't allow countries to level forests
Speaker: in order to make a profit off the meat industry, right?
Speaker: I mean, we're trained to think that teachers are bad and we can handle this at the individual level.
Speaker: And we're trained away from thinking about the real problem, which is a structural issue, you know, that requires much more than individual effort.
Speaker: It requires a collective effort, which teacher unions can in fact bring.
Speaker: I think that's such a useful lens.
Speaker: I mean, just for looking at all of the conversations that we're having in society right now is exactly that, like individualizing systemic problems and either blaming individuals for systemic outcomes or looking to individuals to solve those systemic problems themselves.
Speaker: So whether we're talking about structural racism, the argument for people who...
Speaker: for whatever reason, don't believe that's a thing, will say, oh, if you just grew up in a two-parent household, or if you had just done this, then racism would not be an issue in your life.
Speaker: Same thing could be said about police shootings.
Speaker: For Breonna Taylor, the rally that you were at tonight, John, I've made myself sick watching people on the news or on Twitter talking about if Breonna Taylor or if this person had just done this, then this event would never have happened.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: It allows you to blame the victim and individualize those things.
Speaker: And in education, too, exactly.
Speaker: It says, let's not look at systemic underfunding for communities that need more than the suburban school to overcome generational divides in education and in funding and everything else that white middle-class suburban kids might not need.
Speaker: But no, they blame teachers in urban schools for
Speaker: for what?
Speaker: Not shouldering the burden of generations of systemic and structural inequality.
Speaker: So that's such a useful lens just to look at basically every structural issue right now.
Speaker: And maybe that's looking ahead or connecting to politics.
Speaker: Maybe that's the argument we're having.
Speaker: We're not having an ideological one because I don't know if that exists anymore or won by parties, but we're talking about whether you believe that structural problems
Speaker: have structural solutions or whether you want to defer those to individuals and never solve those structural problems.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, which is, you know,
Speaker: I hate this comes to mind, but a dilly of a pickle, if you will, right?
Speaker: Because the circle problems are immense and you do need individuals to do that, but it requires an understanding that moves far beyond a quick fix, right?
Speaker: And trusting individuals to lead the charge as opposed to a historical and collective approach.
Speaker: Yeah, but where's the money in the historical and collective approach in playing the long, slow game?
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: And that's just, and sometime, you know, then if we go down the question of these larger, deeper questions, our country wasn't built upon those principles, right?
Speaker: So, I mean, how do we expect, it's an uphill battle to say that because our country never really understood
Speaker: embraced or practiced those principles as other countries have done, to trust a long-term process, when in fact, solutions like that are why other countries succeed, or trust other people, professionals, and expecting parents to become involved in the process more as well.
Speaker: It's just not...
Speaker: part of our of the United States ideological, political and economic infrastructure.
Speaker: So I mean, it's really an uphill battle, unfortunately.
Speaker: So it's spaces like this, it's, you know, publishing where we can, it's talking, if we can do it at home at the holidays, right?
Speaker: It sort of changed that way of thinking.
Speaker: I'm sure you're familiar with like Deborah Meyer's work involving like school reform and school choice and kind of that co-option or differing of, for lack of a better way of saying it, like school choice versus school choice, like school vouchers versus the idea of schools within schools or public system where students get to choose based off of your expertise and writing and what you know from history.
Speaker: Does it make sense to structure a school system like that where
Speaker: parents have multiple options or students have multiple options, but they are all within a public system.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So that's, and Debra Meyer's work is really interesting too, because I'll say too, and I'm sorry, I'm just,
Speaker: trying to wrap my brain, that's a big question too.
Speaker: Debra Meyer, so for instance, would be part of the, you could call it the small schools movement, or we mentioned Jonathan Kozl before.
Speaker: We had a lot of union members or union sympathizers with you, or the left, if you will, for lack of a better, I don't necessarily always agree with that distinction, but
Speaker: people who believe in greater investments actually wanted to pull out of the public system because it was so bad, right?
Speaker: Like Deborah Meyer supported that Jonathan Kozl in the free school movement, right?
Speaker: And I'm forgetting the name of Deborah Meyer's school in Brooklyn, right?
Speaker: The community.
Speaker: Central Park East.
Speaker: Yes, Central Park East, right?
Speaker: And she actually publishes in the early 90s that school choice is a good idea.
Speaker: And, you know, she's made a more nuanced argument as you're pointing to, Chris.
Speaker: Now, so we have to recognize what people, how they actually are complicit in using choice as a model today.
Speaker: So I do think it's problematic to kind of turn over an entire district to choice because the way that
Speaker: those reformers are talking about because that assumes that everyone can make a rational, equal decision based on the choices in front of them.
Speaker: And we just know way too much now to say that there's no parity among people to even make that choice.
Speaker: So to turn it over to choice, we have to have an equal playing field to start with.
Speaker: And we just know in 2020 that that's not the case.
Speaker: So it is problematic.
Speaker: There are instances of what people call controlled choice.
Speaker: So we actually see that in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois.
Speaker: It's what they worked with in Boston.
Speaker: And you actually see this in Berkeley, where the entire district is actually
Speaker: a choice district, right?
Speaker: So in Champaign, much to my chagrin, I actually have to choose a school and you have to rank order them.
Speaker: And you have to do this in Boston as well.
Speaker: And if I'm not mistaken, I don't know if they're still doing it or not.
Speaker: And the idea is it's built on principles of racial and socioeconomic integration that you can't dip below a certain point to do that.
Speaker: And that works to some extent.
Speaker: It really does.
Speaker: I mean, they're less segregated than they would be with that system.
Speaker: The issue is white people still leave the city of Boston, right?
Speaker: Here they move to the next town over if they don't like that system.
Speaker: And also, if you look at what the Reason Foundation and Corey Dion just has published this idea before, then that controlled choice isn't choice because that mean old government is sort of controlling that system.
Speaker: So if you go down that route, Chris, long story short, I guess, it's to say if you do an equitable choice system, then you really can't call it choice.
Speaker: You have to call it community empowerment or something like that, because the way choice has been used and bastardized over time is really not choice.
Speaker: So I do think that the rhetoric around choice is harmful, and it just makes too many assumptions when you put out there on the public
Speaker: market, if you will, to try to co-opt some of their language, that we just know it's so unequal that the framing of choice now won't work.
Speaker: That's fascinating.
Speaker: That's a really, really interesting, very nuanced answer.
Speaker: I appreciate it because that's something that comes up a lot.
Speaker: There's so many different weird alignments between the language of neoliberal reformers and what I think many progressive educators see as like this
Speaker: like Mecca of like students kind of going off and doing their own thing and being able to do that for free in an equitable system.
Speaker: A lot of that language is very much over the top and shared.
Speaker: Yeah, it's just really, really interesting.
Speaker: They're very strange bedfellows, right?
Speaker: To say Deborah Meyer, Jonathan Kozal put in the same realm in some ways of Jeff Bezos in terms of belief of the power of starting your own school to improve the system.
Speaker: And that's where the rhetoric of choice falls short because it doesn't allow us that nuance to really say that, well, Jeff Bezos is not Jonathan Kozal or Deborah Meyer, right?
Speaker: Like they're very different and they come up with very different
Speaker: But what are they talking about?
Speaker: Pulling out of the public school system or creating your own system.
Speaker: Also, what gets me to, and I'll just quickly bring this up too, about
Speaker: Donald Trump, someone else's president, said it during the summer, right, where school choice is a civil right of our time period.
Speaker: This is something that he said over the past during his administration, and Betsy DeVos does as well.
Speaker: So here's someone like Trump and DeVos saying school choice is a civil right.
Speaker: And then you have someone like James Foreman Jr., son of the Black power organizer James Foreman.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Howard Fuller, based in Milwaukee, but he actually founded Malcolm X Liberation University in North Carolina in the late 60s.
Speaker: Like, true civil rights advocates making that same claim that Trump is.
Speaker: Now, in our right minds, we would never lump them together, but they're using the same rhetoric, right?
Speaker: So we need...
Speaker: So the term choice itself is so harmful because it doesn't allow us to see the nuance and it really doesn't allow us to see what people are after.
Speaker: Is it pure profit and privatization or is it more community empowerment?
Speaker: And that's what I'm, I guess I tried to do that in the debate.
Speaker: And thank you, Chris and Nick, for tuning in because I think I got two votes that kept me in the positive.
Speaker: But one thing is to see that it just doesn't allow us the space to really look at and parse out what people mean when they say choice.
Speaker: It's just a very muddled way to sort of talk about reform right now.
Speaker: It's almost like the label is so tainted.
Speaker: You can't use it without people having a neoliberal association with it when we're talking about something that's like truly democratic.
Speaker: Why should we chastise well-intentioned people grounded in the community who are in the schools when they say choice?
Speaker: But so many people are so against choice that they do.
Speaker: Howard Fuller shouldn't be criticized and publicly humiliated in some cases because he believes that.
Speaker: What he's getting at is choice is a vehicle to empower people.
Speaker: I never want to – I won't speak – I'm not speaking for him, but –
Speaker: My interpretation is what he really looked at.
Speaker: He worked with Derrick Bell in the 90s.
Speaker: I'm sorry, in the late 80s to come up with this plan that led to vouchers, right?
Speaker: Which then Tommy Thompson and the Wisconsin legislature took over and turned it into a privatization mechanism when it started out as a Black Power solution to failing public schools.
Speaker: So it just goes to show that, you know, choice is labeled just doesn't really work that well.
Speaker: It doesn't fit that well for the realities that we're facing.
Speaker: For sure.
Speaker: I mean, that's like a neoliberal one-on-one thing.
Speaker: You take a term and you warp it to the point where it no longer means what it meant, and then you spend all of your time discussing what the term means as opposed to talking about the actual reform that could occur that is particularly bad in progressive education.
Speaker: I mean, Jeff Bezos is calling his school Montessori-inspired school, which is all based around a free public education.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: It's fascinating.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And notice to him, I think in the press release, quick ad where he also then talks about students as customers.
Speaker: So he talks about a lot of story and this pedagogically sound technique.
Speaker: And then in the next sentence, refer to preschoolers as customers.
Speaker: You've got to be kidding me.
Speaker: You know, I mean, you're exactly right how people use that.
Speaker: And then literally the next breath, contradicts.
Speaker: the very notion of Montessori.
Speaker: It is very interesting though, how the tools that can be used for community empowerment can be co-opted and undermined by wealthy interests with those market things in mind, right?
Speaker: So it's like they wanna take those tools and those labels
Speaker: but then you use them for ends that actually end up concentrating wealth and power for them.
Speaker: Whereas it was originally a community tool meant to serve the majority of people.
Speaker: And now it just can't.
Speaker: But then what would really stop something like Jeff Bezos to go into a school district and say, you know, here's X amount of million dollars.
Speaker: And we have to have criteria for people who use it, that they have kids in the school, they're from the community, they're recognized community leaders.
Speaker: You go into any community and you can find out that network pretty quickly, right?
Speaker: Why don't people just sort of say, we're going to fund this with serious strings, right?
Speaker: but have criteria to sort of evaluate it.
Speaker: But that's rarely, if ever, tried.
Speaker: And I say, I want to stick to rarely because we actually see this.
Speaker: I don't want to get down a tangent rabbit hole.
Speaker: I know we're trying to wrap up.
Speaker: But if you have to look at what LeBron James is doing in Cleveland, the more I look into it, I don't want to
Speaker: come to this conclusion, yeah, because I have to do more research on it.
Speaker: But what he's doing is he took a school in a public school district and he maintained his public school status.
Speaker: And correct me if I'm wrong, but it's not a charter school.
Speaker: It's not a magnet school.
Speaker: He's working within its structure and just providing the funding and the space and the time and the sort of holistic investment, which includes financial investment.
Speaker: to turn around that school.
Speaker: I don't know why more people aren't, so far it appears to be working well and that principle is right and it's grounded in a history we know that works.
Speaker: So it's just to show that you can do it, it's just not being done.
Speaker: All right, well, is there anything that you wanted to talk about, John, or anything that you wanted to say that our questioning or the discussion didn't quite get to at all?
Speaker: No, I think, you know, I appreciate the invitation to speak with you.
Speaker: I appreciate the opportunity to sort of put these ideas out there and then also talk them through a little bit more, especially because my book manuscript was due yesterday.
Speaker: So I can always make changes in how we approach this very...
Speaker: really quite complex issue so i appreciate uh the opportunity and the time and thank you so much and nick you know getting to know you you know on twitter it's funny how you get to know someone on twitter you're very early on we're sharing sources which which you know um i appreciate it and in the lion's den you really kind of appreciate those who extended the helping hand so chris and nick thank you so much
Speaker: Very cool.
Speaker: Well, yeah, it's been great to get to know you too, John.
Speaker: And probably this, we won't just stop talking to each other after this.
Speaker: So let's keep the lines of communication open.
Speaker: I love to dig into these issues.
Speaker: Maybe when your book comes out, we'll have you back on again around this time next year.
Speaker: Yeah, thank you so much, John.
Speaker: That would be great.
Speaker: Great opportunity to keep the conversation going.
Speaker: Thanks for listening.
Speaker: If this conversation leaves you wanting to learn more about our fight for humane education, you can learn more about us and support our cause at humanrestorationproject.org.
Speaker: And of course, this podcast and all of our materials are brought to you by our donors and patrons.
