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80: Pandemic Pods, School Choice, and Combating Inequity w/ Dr. Jon Hale
14 Plays4 years ago
Today, Chris and I (Nick) are joined by John Hale, whose biography you will hear at the beginning of the interview. 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 confined in its entirety on YouTube.
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, voucher programs and the recently announced Bezos Academy. How can we simultaneously acknowledge that schools need to change while being critical advocates for the need for public institutions and employee unions? How have market oriented takes on so-called school choice actually subverted the original intent of independent and charter schools? It's a really interesting conversation and it was great to talk to John. I'm sure we'll have him on again to talk education policy, history and organization in the future.
GUESTS
Dr. Joe Hale, professor of educational policy, organization, and leadership at the University of Illinois, Urban-Champaign, and author of the forthcoming book, "The Choice We Face" (working title)
RESOURCES
- Jeff Bezos is opening a tuition-free preschool for underserved children (CNN)
- Savage Inequalities by Jonathan Kozol
- Small Schools and Choice Revisited by Deborah Meier
FURTHER LISTENING
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Acknowledgments
00:00:00
Speaker
This podcast is made possible by supporters of the Human Restoration Project, three of whom are Paul Kim, Rachel Lawrence, and Trent Kirkpatrick.
00:00:08
Speaker
You can learn more about the Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org, or find us on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.
Impact of Pandemic Pods on Segregation
00:00:20
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?
00:00:31
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.
Education Funding and Pandemic Pods
00:00:48
Speaker
Pandemic pods are grounded in a racist history, and we have to consider the underlying racist principles that form pandemic pods.
00:00:59
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.
00:01:06
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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.
00:01:14
Speaker
This dual pandemic has exposed the ugly truth of racism,
00:01:23
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.
00:01:34
Speaker
So it's requiring greater investment in communities that have been ravaged by that.
Insights from John Hale on Education Policy
00:01:41
Speaker
Hello and welcome to episode 80 of our podcast at the Human Restoration Project.
00:01:46
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.
00:01:54
Speaker
Today, Chris and I are joined by John Hale, whose biography you will hear at the beginning of the interview.
00:01:59
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.
00:02:09
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,
00:02:26
Speaker
voucher programs, and the recently announced Bezos Academy.
00:02:30
Speaker
How can we simultaneously acknowledge that schools need to change while being critical advocates for the need for public institutions and employee unions?
00:02:39
Speaker
How have market-oriented takes on so-called school choice actually subverted the original intent of independent and charter schools?
00:02:47
Speaker
It's a really interesting conversation, and it was great to talk to John.
00:02:51
Speaker
I'm sure we'll have him on again to talk education policy, history, and organization in the future.
Public Investment vs. Exclusive Pods
00:02:56
Speaker
So here's our conversation with John Hale, and I hope you enjoy it.
00:03:06
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.
00:03:16
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.
00:03:24
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.
00:03:31
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But hi, John, how are you doing?
00:03:33
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Hi, Nick.
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I'm doing well.
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All right.
00:03:35
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Thank you for having me.
00:03:36
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All right.
00:03:37
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Great.
00:03:38
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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.
00:03:49
Speaker
And the Soho Forum was a libertarian space where they kind of get together and debate ideas of importance to that community.
00:03:57
Speaker
So
00:03:57
Speaker
Past topics have included things like who should libertarians vote for in the next presidential election?
00:04:02
Speaker
Or is there systemic racism in policing?
00:04:05
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What should the government do about lockdowns during COVID?
Critique of Market-Based Education Reforms
00:04:08
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.
00:04:23
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With you in support of the affirmative and Corey DeAngelis arguing the negative.
00:04:27
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So I just have to add in there, too, that Corey or that the Soho Forum, rather, is sponsored by the Reason Magazine.
00:04:34
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And Corey DeAngelis is the director of school choice at the Reason Foundation.
00:04:39
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and an adjunct professor at the Cato Institute.
00:04:41
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So it's not like you have to really guess where Corey's allegiance falls on that premise.
00:04:47
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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.
00:04:55
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So, yeah, at the Human Restoration Project, we really focused on like the pedagogical side of progressive education.
00:05:01
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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.
00:05:10
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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.
00:05:20
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to take and spend wherever you think is in your child's best interest.
00:05:23
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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?
00:05:36
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Or, you know, what's the fundamental case against market-based reforms like vouchers or these pandemic pods, John?
Schools as Democratic Institutions
00:05:43
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Yeah, well, you know, I don't think there's, unlike, you know, I think Corey and others would
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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.
00:06:03
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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
00:06:15
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faith in the public education system for different reasons.
00:06:18
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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.
00:06:29
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You'll notice Corey kept on talking about Walmart and or Trader Joe's, right?
00:06:34
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Which our schools should be run like that, which, you know, is, is, um,
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it's disheartening and it's also problematic because our schools aren't grocery stores and they're not businesses.
00:06:45
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They're not for-profit entities.
00:06:47
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So I think in addressing that crowd, the major point
00:06:51
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It's not always affected because that, I mean, so many of us have already made up our minds, right?
00:06:55
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We're not willing to listen.
00:06:56
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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?
00:07:05
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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.
00:07:19
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So,
00:07:21
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That requires a degree of investment that looking at schools like a business doesn't require.
00:07:27
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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.
00:07:42
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in the wellbeing of our democracy, as opposed to either making money or making schools quote unquote more efficient.
00:07:51
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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?
00:08:01
Speaker
Literally what the point of it.
00:08:02
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So it's getting people to see the much broader function and purpose of schools.
00:08:10
Speaker
Yeah, and that is so interesting to bring up the Jeff Bezos.
00:08:14
Speaker
What did he call this?
00:08:15
Speaker
Bezos Academy?
00:08:17
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Bezos Academy, yeah.
00:08:18
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Bezos Academy.
00:08:20
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The interesting
Influence of Billionaires in Education
00:08:21
Speaker
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.
00:08:30
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?
00:08:42
Speaker
So, and that's the thing that I think is important.
00:08:46
Speaker
is sort of the problem with it.
00:08:47
Speaker
So how would you try to sell maybe somebody on saying like, what's the problem with Bezos Academy?
00:08:53
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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?
00:09:08
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What's the catch?
00:09:28
Speaker
to actually lead and build an entire system that fills that need.
00:09:32
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?
00:09:44
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:09:45
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Yes.
00:09:47
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?
00:09:56
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.
00:10:04
Speaker
That to me is just one of the most problematic issues with that, right?
00:10:09
Speaker
And then if I may just add on the second major issue is that, you know, there's nothing wrong.
00:10:14
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.
00:10:28
Speaker
That's great.
00:10:30
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.
00:10:39
Speaker
But we've learned historically that the second you start
00:10:43
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
Montessori Method in Public Schools
00:10:55
Speaker
Preschool.
00:10:55
Speaker
And I'm sorry for forgetting the name, but you get what I'm saying.
00:10:57
Speaker
Whatever these separate schools are, because...
00:11:00
Speaker
You're investing in something completely separate and segregated from the public school system, which over 50 million students rely upon.
00:11:09
Speaker
And that's problematic because what do you do then with the mainstream of students who need that reform?
00:11:14
Speaker
Because you're exactly right.
00:11:15
Speaker
This Montessori method is proven to work.
00:11:17
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It reaches all students.
00:11:19
Speaker
It is a very sound pedagogical tool.
00:11:21
Speaker
It would be great to have that in the public schools as well if people wanted it.
00:11:26
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It takes a strong investment.
00:11:28
Speaker
It requires specialized teacher training to be a good Montessori teacher.
00:11:31
Speaker
It requires different types of classroom.
00:11:34
Speaker
You're scrapping a textbook and working with materials that students are actually literally building with.
00:11:39
Speaker
So,
00:11:41
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.
Impact of Pods and Vouchers on Special Needs Education
00:11:56
Speaker
You're not addressing the problem.
00:11:57
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.
00:12:05
Speaker
ship sink right in front of you.
00:12:07
Speaker
I think that's a great analogy.
00:12:08
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.
00:12:26
Speaker
And so in the conversation example with Corey, he's talking about these pandemic pods.
00:12:31
Speaker
I'm wondering, what does that look like for students with special needs?
00:12:34
Speaker
Are those parents also going out there and hiring paraeducators?
00:12:38
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?
00:12:46
Speaker
I mean, I've got some students in my building in my public high school who...
00:12:50
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.
00:13:01
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
00:13:12
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.
00:13:25
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.
00:13:32
Speaker
That's totally up to them to choose that or they can take it elsewhere.
00:13:36
Speaker
But yeah, that's just one really interesting sort of thing about this too.
00:13:40
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.
00:13:58
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.
00:14:08
Speaker
That requires an investment that's far beyond our student needs.
00:14:13
Speaker
without special needs, right?
Burden of School Choice on Parents
00:14:15
Speaker
And so it's not an evil, it's not a level or even playing field.
00:14:19
Speaker
The reality is that not every student learns the same way and not every family can make the same decisions.
00:14:27
Speaker
So if you're looking at parents who have a child with special needs, that requires a very different skill set.
00:14:34
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
00:14:42
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.
00:14:55
Speaker
And a lot of times, as we know, students and families with special needs don't have the time.
00:15:02
Speaker
You know, they're entitled to by law to go to the school and
00:15:05
Speaker
that's close to their house and be provided these services.
00:15:08
Speaker
When you disrupt that, you're disrupting the services that children need.
00:15:14
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,
00:15:28
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
00:15:40
Speaker
are kept out of the best choice schools like charter schools.
00:15:43
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.
00:15:52
Speaker
So it just shows the inequity in the very system.
00:15:55
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.
00:16:05
Speaker
And you can't just go ahead and recreate
00:16:08
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
00:16:21
Speaker
a voucher from the government.
00:16:22
Speaker
Right.
00:16:23
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?
00:16:34
Speaker
Yes, I have two kids aged two.
00:16:38
Speaker
Okay.
00:16:38
Speaker
So, I mean, I have a two-year-old and a five-year-old.
00:16:40
Speaker
So we've had this preschool conversation going back before our firstborn was even born.
00:16:46
Speaker
And
00:16:47
Speaker
If you want to look at the landscape of school choice for preschools and how, A, inequitable and expensive and
Public vs. Private Education Responsibilities
00:16:56
Speaker
inaccessible it is for middle-class families, that's really the landscape for school choice that they want to project onto K-12.
00:17:07
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.
00:17:18
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.
00:17:25
Speaker
you know, just by the time they hit five years old and then can get into, you know, a public school program.
00:17:31
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.
00:17:39
Speaker
It sounds like it's not going to be affordable.
00:17:41
Speaker
It's not going to be accessible.
00:17:42
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.
00:17:54
Speaker
And people without means have zero access to those things.
00:17:58
Speaker
Exactly.
00:17:58
Speaker
And that's just one of the points, too, is what you just said.
00:18:01
Speaker
You know, people without means don't have that access.
00:18:03
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.
00:18:12
Speaker
Right.
00:18:12
Speaker
I mean, that requires.
00:18:15
Speaker
So many people dismiss this fact, but that requires time.
00:18:17
Speaker
It requires capital to sort of understand the process.
00:18:21
Speaker
It requires all these elements that you're burdening families with.
00:18:24
Speaker
Those that have the means at times even struggle with that.
00:18:28
Speaker
You know, just talk to parents who are trying to figure out the choice system.
00:18:30
Speaker
It's stressful.
00:18:32
Speaker
It's, you know, you're on waiting lists.
00:18:34
Speaker
You know, you have to figure out.
00:18:37
Speaker
What's best for your child in a very short amount of time is putting a tremendous burden on them.
00:18:42
Speaker
It's not liberating.
00:18:43
Speaker
It's not freedom.
00:18:44
Speaker
It's burdening families with the task that constitutions have required states to make.
00:18:53
Speaker
It's allowing these state legislatures to pass that off on someone else because they don't want to do it, essentially.
00:19:01
Speaker
It's an abdication of that constitutional responsibility of the states.
00:19:05
Speaker
Exactly.
00:19:06
Speaker
And that's what all these, you know, some people call them these Robin Hood cases, right?
00:19:10
Speaker
All these cases that are in nearly every state across these United States where state legislatures are being sued because they are not...
00:19:22
Speaker
you know, they're not fulfilling their constitutional obligation, right?
00:19:27
Speaker
Why these court cases exist across the country because of that very fact, right?
00:19:30
Speaker
So we know that these states aren't doing that.
00:19:32
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.
00:19:45
Speaker
You know, they're giving up on this responsibility to provide a quality public education for all students.
00:19:52
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.
Role of Public Schools in Democracy
00:20:03
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
00:20:19
Speaker
Sort of this like a la carte build your own school system.
00:20:23
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.
00:20:30
Speaker
And he said, well, you know, what if what if we applied the same logic to airports?
00:20:34
Speaker
You know, I don't I don't like this airport.
00:20:36
Speaker
I want to go build my own airport and do that.
00:20:38
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.
00:20:56
Speaker
You can't attempt to imitate that overnight and expect it to be successful at all.
00:21:02
Speaker
Exactly right.
00:21:03
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.
00:21:11
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
00:21:19
Speaker
of everybody.
00:21:20
Speaker
And people have a hard time with that.
00:21:21
Speaker
They say, it's not a public good.
00:21:22
Speaker
It's not a common good.
00:21:23
Speaker
But we need, research and history tells us that that is the purpose of public education, to strengthen our democracy.
00:21:31
Speaker
And if we don't see that need now, especially for those of us who tuned into the debate,
00:21:37
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.
00:21:50
Speaker
And you can't put a dollar sign on that.
00:21:52
Speaker
So about the airport, you know, that analogy is exactly correct, right?
00:21:57
Speaker
To expect individuals to build the separate system, right?
00:22:01
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.
00:22:15
Speaker
But
00:22:16
Speaker
Nick, having gone in schools, we know that that is not the sole or only function or purpose of schools.
00:22:25
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.
Systemic Issues vs. Teacher Accountability
00:22:35
Speaker
And it makes their quote unquote market highly unequal when you both
00:22:43
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.
00:23:04
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 –
00:23:24
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.
00:23:33
Speaker
They get they get headlines.
00:23:34
Speaker
They get a raise.
00:23:35
Speaker
They go on the speaking tour.
00:23:37
Speaker
They become education consultants and whatnot.
00:23:39
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.
00:23:49
Speaker
those gains vanish along with the administrator who's taken their money and run anyway.
00:23:53
Speaker
And then we're back to blaming teachers and we're back to blaming kids and we're back to blaming communities.
00:23:57
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?
00:24:05
Speaker
Understanding the role that schools have played in perpetuating, you know, structural racism, in perpetuating those biases.
00:24:12
Speaker
And even with your work, you know, in the freedom schools of the 50s and 60s that, you know, we're born
00:24:17
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.
00:24:32
Speaker
So I don't know if there's a couple questions in here, but...
00:24:35
Speaker
how can we acknowledge the dehumanizing aspects, the disengaging, the racist aspects of school?
00:24:44
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.
00:25:03
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?
00:25:12
Speaker
And how can we be defenders of that structure while acknowledging those things?
00:25:17
Speaker
Yeah, and that's why I really like how you frame that, because that's also why it's so difficult to
00:25:26
Speaker
not just to go into a libertarian lines then and to argue for greater investment for public schools.
00:25:30
Speaker
I mean, that's literally an impossible, it's possible, but you're not going to win that debate.
00:25:36
Speaker
But it has to be said.
00:25:37
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?
00:25:54
Speaker
And to go to
00:25:55
Speaker
families who have experienced generations of public school failure, that's very difficult to do.
00:26:01
Speaker
But you can do it and it has been done.
00:26:05
Speaker
So like you said, some charter schools are really, really successful and they work well.
00:26:10
Speaker
Some magnet schools work really well.
00:26:12
Speaker
We know these private schools where they're paying $25,000 a year to go to are working well, right?
00:26:17
Speaker
So what it is, and we know what works.
00:26:21
Speaker
You've been able to get degrees in education at the graduate level or above.
00:26:25
Speaker
for over 100 years.
00:26:27
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.
00:26:35
Speaker
The problem is one lack of willpower.
00:26:37
Speaker
So we have our willingness to be honest with what the system is.
Collective Voice and Union Strength in Education
00:26:43
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?
00:26:58
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
00:27:12
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
00:27:39
Speaker
working in what they suggest into the actual school structure itself.
00:27:45
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.
00:27:57
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,
00:28:08
Speaker
And you connect it to today, there's a lot of subarited advocates who are charter school founders.
00:28:12
Speaker
There's a lot of black power community organizers who support school vouchers.
00:28:19
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.
00:28:34
Speaker
It's for a very different reason is that it gives control and power back to the community who needs it.
00:28:42
Speaker
If you can start your own charter school and run it, that's community control and community empowerment, not school choice.
00:28:50
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.
00:28:58
Speaker
It's not choice that people want.
00:29:00
Speaker
It's just to be heard and to be respected by people.
00:29:06
Speaker
allowed the keys, if you will, to control and really have a heavy say in their own children's education.
00:29:12
Speaker
And it's really not that difficult.
00:29:14
Speaker
It's just people just have a hard time with relinquishing control, right?
00:29:19
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.
00:29:28
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.
00:29:45
Speaker
There's nothing implicit in saying that.
00:29:47
Speaker
And I think that's a really interesting segue into maybe the last question.
00:29:52
Speaker
which is exactly about that.
00:29:54
Speaker
It's about that idea of collective voice and the power that's in that as opposed to the fractured market nature.
00:30:01
Speaker
Maybe we'd call that the neoliberal nature of the marketplace that is supposed to empower individuals in competition against each other.
00:30:08
Speaker
To what you said, communities don't necessarily want that, right?
00:30:11
Speaker
They want collective voice and collective action.
00:30:13
Speaker
But increasingly, that's viewed as a negative thing.
00:30:18
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.
00:30:28
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.
00:30:39
Speaker
It's almost conspiratorial.
00:30:40
Speaker
The teachers unions won't let us fix the problems that are in the schools.
00:30:44
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.
00:30:57
Speaker
It's to strengthen that collective voice, you know.
00:31:00
Speaker
And Corey mentions that charter schools benefit from that lack of unionization and
00:31:04
Speaker
And what better way to say that bring Walmart and Amazon up as like the panacea for, I guess, retail choice.
00:31:12
Speaker
But there are also places that are just infamous for being anti-union and worker exploitation.
00:31:18
Speaker
I mean, you hear horrible stories about Amazon warehouses and Walmart wages, etc.
00:31:23
Speaker
I think that's maybe...
00:31:25
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.
00:31:35
Speaker
So how do we bridge that gap and maybe what's going on there between the notion of having solidarity and
00:31:42
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.
00:31:54
Speaker
I don't know if you have any thoughts on that.
00:31:56
Speaker
That's like three podcasts worth, I mean, because the attack on teacher unions since their founding in the early 1900s, right?
00:32:03
Speaker
with Margaret Haley in Chicago.
00:32:06
Speaker
It's a lot to unpack.
00:32:08
Speaker
You know, I just, and I agree with you.
00:32:10
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.
00:32:22
Speaker
Well, then why did the city of Chicago witness the first charter teacher strike in the country?
00:32:29
Speaker
Because they're not working and they're not getting paid and their insurance is messed up.
00:32:32
Speaker
right then it's so great why are teachers in charter schools in in in chicago actually doing that in los angeles
00:32:41
Speaker
And you have to fact check it.
00:32:43
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.
00:32:49
Speaker
And they also look at these right to work states, right, across the South and Southwest.
00:32:55
Speaker
I don't think those state education systems are doing that well.
00:32:59
Speaker
And I'm saying that sarcastically, right?
00:33:01
Speaker
This is a bottom of the barrel, and you can directly correlate that onto the
00:33:06
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.
00:33:14
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.
00:33:28
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?
00:33:42
Speaker
But it's to see that through collective strength and through the professionalization of teachers by way of collective bargaining, right?
00:33:50
Speaker
That is one way to, of course, strengthen the public school system.
00:33:55
Speaker
Research shows the correlation between higher teacher salaries and standardized test score, stronger teacher retention, teachers actually staying in the schools.
00:34:04
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
00:34:15
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.
00:34:24
Speaker
That was the original concept.
00:34:27
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.
00:34:37
Speaker
So, I mean, the idea of collective...
00:34:41
Speaker
strength by way of teacher unions is also baked into the system, right?
00:34:45
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.
00:34:56
Speaker
History tells us it's quite different and far from reality.
00:35:02
Speaker
Yeah, man.
00:35:03
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.
00:35:16
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.
00:35:27
Speaker
Yeah.
00:35:28
Speaker
Which is exactly that, right?
00:35:29
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.
00:35:48
Speaker
I mean, I'll try to give them the benefit of the doubt there, but it's really interesting.
00:35:53
Speaker
And all of these experiments that we've said to have tried in education, going back for
00:35:58
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.
00:36:08
Speaker
And you know what I mean?
00:36:09
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.
00:36:18
Speaker
And I'm like, why don't we try the flip?
00:36:20
Speaker
Why don't we try it?
00:36:21
Speaker
Let's unionize more.
00:36:22
Speaker
Right.
00:36:22
Speaker
Let's let's do more of those kinds of things.
00:36:24
Speaker
Let's raise pay.
00:36:25
Speaker
Let's fund schools.
00:36:26
Speaker
And then let's see how test scores come out.
00:36:27
Speaker
And if it's if it's a disaster, then at least we will have tried it.
00:36:30
Speaker
But like what?
00:36:31
Speaker
Why not try more of that?
Critique of Billionaire Influence
00:36:33
Speaker
Exactly.
00:36:34
Speaker
And it's also, you know, why do we trust people like Jeff Bezos, for instance, because it's so current right now?
00:36:42
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.
00:37:02
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?
00:37:08
Speaker
What type of world is that?
00:37:09
Speaker
Where that's in fact logical?
00:37:11
Speaker
And then we keep going back to a market-based reform.
00:37:13
Speaker
I mean, it doesn't work well when people are organized to fight for more money to protect people.
00:37:19
Speaker
themselves and their health and their working conditions, right?
00:37:22
Speaker
That never works.
00:37:23
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.
00:37:37
Speaker
And on top of that, too, it's this idea that through collective bargaining and teacher unionization, that we have to
00:37:47
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.
00:37:54
Speaker
And it's so easy to blame the teachers because you were referencing before, it's ideological.
00:38:02
Speaker
It's cultural.
00:38:02
Speaker
It's in our movies.
00:38:04
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.
00:38:15
Speaker
It's worked itself into our collective consciousness, if you will, that teachers are bad, that teacher unions are
Misattribution of Systemic Problems
00:38:21
Speaker
evil.
00:38:21
Speaker
So we're fighting against this culture or this cultural idea.
00:38:26
Speaker
And it's so easy to do because we've sort of been socialized to see it.
00:38:31
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.
00:38:43
Speaker
The system policies need to be changed.
00:38:45
Speaker
Legislators need to be challenged and we can't allow billionaires to run things.
00:38:49
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,
00:38:58
Speaker
his first inconvenient truth.
00:39:00
Speaker
All the solutions at the end of the documentary are individual.
00:39:04
Speaker
Use less water.
00:39:08
Speaker
Turn your lights off if you're not using them.
00:39:09
Speaker
At the end of it, it'll be more conscious.
00:39:11
Speaker
Well, how about creating policies that companies can exploit the environment for profit?
00:39:17
Speaker
How about putting caps on emissions output?
00:39:19
Speaker
How about creating policies that don't allow countries to level forests
00:39:26
Speaker
in order to make a profit off the meat industry, right?
00:39:28
Speaker
I mean, we're trained to think that teachers are bad and we can handle this at the individual level.
00:39:35
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.
00:39:43
Speaker
It requires a collective effort, which teacher unions can in fact bring.
00:39:49
Speaker
I think that's such a useful lens.
00:39:50
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.
00:40:07
Speaker
So whether we're talking about structural racism, the argument for people who...
00:40:12
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.
00:40:22
Speaker
Same thing could be said about police shootings.
00:40:25
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.
00:40:40
Speaker
Right.
00:40:41
Speaker
It allows you to blame the victim and individualize those things.
00:40:44
Speaker
And in education, too, exactly.
00:40:46
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.
00:41:03
Speaker
But no, they blame teachers in urban schools for
00:41:07
Speaker
for what?
00:41:08
Speaker
Not shouldering the burden of generations of systemic and structural inequality.
00:41:13
Speaker
So that's such a useful lens just to look at basically every structural issue right now.
00:41:18
Speaker
And maybe that's looking ahead or connecting to politics.
00:41:22
Speaker
Maybe that's the argument we're having.
00:41:24
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
00:41:34
Speaker
have structural solutions or whether you want to defer those to individuals and never solve those structural problems.
00:41:42
Speaker
Yeah.
00:41:42
Speaker
I mean, which is, you know,
00:41:45
Speaker
I hate this comes to mind, but a dilly of a pickle, if you will, right?
00:41:48
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?
00:41:59
Speaker
And trusting individuals to lead the charge as opposed to a historical and collective approach.
00:42:04
Speaker
Yeah, but where's the money in the historical and collective approach in playing the long, slow game?
00:42:11
Speaker
Exactly.
00:42:12
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?
00:42:20
Speaker
So, I mean, how do we expect, it's an uphill battle to say that because our country never really understood
00:42:26
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.
00:42:45
Speaker
It's just not...
00:42:47
Speaker
part of our of the United States ideological, political and economic infrastructure.
00:42:54
Speaker
So I mean, it's really an uphill battle, unfortunately.
Challenges of Implementing School Choice
00:42:58
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?
00:43:06
Speaker
It sort of changed that way of thinking.
00:43:10
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.
00:43:34
Speaker
Does it make sense to structure a school system like that where
00:43:38
Speaker
parents have multiple options or students have multiple options, but they are all within a public system.
00:43:44
Speaker
Yeah.
00:43:44
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,
00:43:51
Speaker
trying to wrap my brain, that's a big question too.
00:43:53
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.
00:43:59
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
00:44:10
Speaker
people who believe in greater investments actually wanted to pull out of the public system because it was so bad, right?
00:44:15
Speaker
Like Deborah Meyer supported that Jonathan Kozl in the free school movement, right?
00:44:18
Speaker
And I'm forgetting the name of Deborah Meyer's school in Brooklyn, right?
00:44:22
Speaker
The community.
00:44:22
Speaker
Central Park East.
00:44:23
Speaker
Yes, Central Park East, right?
00:44:25
Speaker
And she actually publishes in the early 90s that school choice is a good idea.
00:44:27
Speaker
And, you know, she's made a more nuanced argument as you're pointing to, Chris.
00:44:32
Speaker
Now, so we have to recognize what people, how they actually are complicit in using choice as a model today.
00:44:39
Speaker
So I do think it's problematic to kind of turn over an entire district to choice because the way that
00:44:49
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.
00:44:58
Speaker
And we just know way too much now to say that there's no parity among people to even make that choice.
00:45:07
Speaker
So to turn it over to choice, we have to have an equal playing field to start with.
00:45:11
Speaker
And we just know in 2020 that that's not the case.
00:45:14
Speaker
So it is problematic.
00:45:15
Speaker
There are instances of what people call controlled choice.
00:45:20
Speaker
So we actually see that in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois.
00:45:22
Speaker
It's what they worked with in Boston.
00:45:24
Speaker
And you actually see this in Berkeley, where the entire district is actually
00:45:29
Speaker
a choice district, right?
00:45:31
Speaker
So in Champaign, much to my chagrin, I actually have to choose a school and you have to rank order them.
00:45:37
Speaker
And you have to do this in Boston as well.
00:45:39
Speaker
And if I'm not mistaken, I don't know if they're still doing it or not.
00:45:42
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.
00:45:53
Speaker
And that works to some extent.
00:45:55
Speaker
It really does.
00:45:55
Speaker
I mean, they're less segregated than they would be with that system.
00:46:00
Speaker
The issue is white people still leave the city of Boston, right?
00:46:03
Speaker
Here they move to the next town over if they don't like that system.
00:46:06
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.
00:46:17
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.
00:46:27
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.
00:46:37
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
00:46:47
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.
00:46:55
Speaker
That's fascinating.
00:46:56
Speaker
That's a really, really interesting, very nuanced answer.
00:47:00
Speaker
I appreciate it because that's something that comes up a lot.
00:47:03
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
00:47:15
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.
00:47:23
Speaker
A lot of that language is very much over the top and shared.
00:47:26
Speaker
Yeah, it's just really, really interesting.
00:47:28
Speaker
They're very strange bedfellows, right?
00:47:31
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.
00:47:43
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?
00:47:53
Speaker
Like they're very different and they come up with very different
00:47:57
Speaker
But what are they talking about?
00:47:58
Speaker
Pulling out of the public school system or creating your own system.
00:48:03
Speaker
Also, what gets me to, and I'll just quickly bring this up too, about
00:48:08
Speaker
Donald Trump, someone else's president, said it during the summer, right, where school choice is a civil right of our time period.
00:48:16
Speaker
This is something that he said over the past during his administration, and Betsy DeVos does as well.
00:48:21
Speaker
So here's someone like Trump and DeVos saying school choice is a civil right.
00:48:26
Speaker
And then you have someone like James Foreman Jr., son of the Black power organizer James Foreman.
00:48:32
Speaker
Right.
00:48:33
Speaker
Howard Fuller, based in Milwaukee, but he actually founded Malcolm X Liberation University in North Carolina in the late 60s.
00:48:39
Speaker
Like, true civil rights advocates making that same claim that Trump is.
00:48:44
Speaker
Now, in our right minds, we would never lump them together, but they're using the same rhetoric, right?
00:48:48
Speaker
So we need...
00:48:50
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.
00:48:57
Speaker
Is it pure profit and privatization or is it more community empowerment?
00:49:01
Speaker
And that's what I'm, I guess I tried to do that in the debate.
00:49:05
Speaker
And thank you, Chris and Nick, for tuning in because I think I got two votes that kept me in the positive.
00:49:11
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.
00:49:21
Speaker
It's just a very muddled way to sort of talk about reform right now.
00:49:27
Speaker
It's almost like the label is so tainted.
00:49:29
Speaker
You can't use it without people having
Jeff Bezos's Educational Rhetoric
00:49:33
Speaker
a neoliberal association with it when we're talking about something that's like truly democratic.
00:49:40
Speaker
Why should we chastise well-intentioned people grounded in the community who are in the schools when they say choice?
00:49:47
Speaker
But so many people are so against choice that they do.
00:49:49
Speaker
Howard Fuller shouldn't be criticized and publicly humiliated in some cases because he believes that.
00:49:58
Speaker
What he's getting at is choice is a vehicle to empower people.
00:50:01
Speaker
I never want to – I won't speak – I'm not speaking for him, but –
00:50:05
Speaker
My interpretation is what he really looked at.
00:50:06
Speaker
He worked with Derrick Bell in the 90s.
00:50:09
Speaker
I'm sorry, in the late 80s to come up with this plan that led to vouchers, right?
00:50:14
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.
00:50:25
Speaker
So it just goes to show that, you know, choice is labeled just doesn't really work that well.
00:50:28
Speaker
It doesn't fit that well for the realities that we're facing.
00:50:32
Speaker
For sure.
00:50:33
Speaker
I mean, that's like a neoliberal one-on-one thing.
00:50:36
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.
00:50:51
Speaker
I mean, Jeff Bezos is calling his school Montessori-inspired school, which is all based around a free public education.
00:50:58
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:50:59
Speaker
It's fascinating.
00:51:00
Speaker
Yeah.
00:51:01
Speaker
And notice to him, I think in the press release, quick ad where he also then talks about students as customers.
00:51:06
Speaker
So he talks about a lot of story and this pedagogically sound technique.
00:51:11
Speaker
And then in the next sentence, refer to preschoolers as customers.
00:51:15
Speaker
You've got to be kidding me.
00:51:16
Speaker
You know, I mean, you're exactly right how people use that.
00:51:19
Speaker
And then literally the next breath, contradicts.
00:51:24
Speaker
the very notion of Montessori.
00:51:26
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?
00:51:38
Speaker
So it's like they wanna take those tools and those labels
00:51:42
Speaker
but then you use them for ends that actually end up concentrating wealth and power for them.
00:51:48
Speaker
Whereas it was originally a community tool meant to serve the majority of people.
LeBron James's Community-Based Education Model
00:51:54
Speaker
And now it just can't.
00:51:57
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.
00:52:06
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.
00:52:14
Speaker
You go into any community and you can find out that network pretty quickly, right?
00:52:19
Speaker
Why don't people just sort of say, we're going to fund this with serious strings, right?
00:52:25
Speaker
but have criteria to sort of evaluate it.
00:52:27
Speaker
But that's rarely, if ever, tried.
00:52:30
Speaker
And I say, I want to stick to rarely because we actually see this.
00:52:34
Speaker
I don't want to get down a tangent rabbit hole.
00:52:37
Speaker
I know we're trying to wrap up.
00:52:38
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
00:52:45
Speaker
come to this conclusion, yeah, because I have to do more research on it.
00:52:47
Speaker
But what he's doing is he took a school in a public school district and he maintained his public school status.
00:52:53
Speaker
And correct me if I'm wrong, but it's not a charter school.
00:52:55
Speaker
It's not a magnet school.
00:52:56
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.
00:53:07
Speaker
to turn around that school.
00:53:09
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.
00:53:20
Speaker
So it's just to show that you can do it, it's just not being done.
00:53:24
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?
00:53:36
Speaker
No, I think, you know, I appreciate the invitation to speak with you.
00:53:40
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.
00:53:48
Speaker
So I can always make changes in how we approach this very...
00:53:54
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
00:54:13
Speaker
Very cool.
00:54:14
Speaker
Well, yeah, it's been great to get to know you too, John.
00:54:16
Speaker
And probably this, we won't just stop talking to each other after this.
00:54:19
Speaker
So let's keep the lines of communication open.
00:54:21
Speaker
I love to dig into these issues.
00:54:24
Speaker
Maybe when your book comes out, we'll have you back on again around this time next year.
00:54:29
Speaker
Yeah, thank you so much, John.
00:54:31
Speaker
That would be great.
00:54:32
Speaker
Great opportunity to keep the conversation going.
00:54:37
Speaker
Thanks for listening.
00:54:38
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.
00:54:48
Speaker
And of course, this podcast and all of our materials are brought to you by our donors and patrons.