In Defense of Public Education

Speaker 1 Hello, and welcome to the Human Restoration Project podcast. My name is Nick Covington, and I'm the creative director here at HRP. And I'm a high school studies teacher here in Ankeny, Iowa, where I am broadcasting you from Ankeny High School. I'm also joined by our executive director, Chris McNutt. McNutt. Before we get started, I do want to let you know that this podcast is brought to you, by at least three of our supporters, Nadine Lay, Kenny Shiro Bernier, and Elliot Baer. Thank you all for your ongoing support. So today, we're joined by doctors Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider. Doctor Berkshire is a, journalist and an educator who focuses on podcasting and labor organizing at Boston College and UMass Amherst respectively. And doctor Schneider is an education historian focused on reform and school accountability. They also cohost the wonderful Have You Heard podcast, which focuses on, hot button issues and educational policy and current events. Both Chris and I would highly recommend checking it out if you aren't listening already. Thank you, Jennifer and Jack, for coming on here today. Thanks so much for having us. Of course. Our discussion today is is gonna cover a lot of ground, but really center on, some key issues of education reform, the issue of innovation, labor rights and unions, and this issue of change. There there's this odd dichotomy between progressive education and the assault on public education, a cognitive dissonance between the necessity for systemic reform during a free and accessible public education and recognizing the need for organized labor as a path to a strong working class, that teacher unions are among the largest and most powerful in the country. Yet there's a narrative, real or not, that unions are resistant to the change that that many progressive educators want. And, of course, more recently, this idea that they have become the the sole and major roadblock to full school reopenings in 2020. But before we dig into any of that, let's just talk about the idea of the book. The book, of course, is a wolf at the schoolhouse door, the dismantling of public education and the future of school out now as of November 2020 from the new press. So before we dig into all of that, what motivated you two to team up and write this book on this topic at this particular moment in time? Well, before I launch us into that, I just I want to start with a shocking confession.

Speaker 2 Before, I had not actually heard of the Human Restoration Project. I didn't know about the great work you were doing. And now I feel like, you know, the the more I learn, the more interested I get. And I haven't told Jack this, but you guys are actually gonna be featured in an upcoming podcast. And that's partly why I'm so excited about this conversation. The unique perspective that you guys bring is we're gonna be able to sort of go back and forth about issues that really haven't come up in our other interviews. The way that the book started, you mentioned that I'm a journalist and Jack and I do a podcast together. So part of what I love about the podcast is that I get to hit the road. And so I started going to Michigan and could really see that there was something going on there, that they were in the throes of really a three decade long effort largely led by a famous family that your listeners will be very familiar with, that would be the DeVos family. And that what you could see was that while everything was focused on these specific policy changes at the school level, often incremental policy changes, the overall thrust of all these changes was to weaken the structure of public education in the state. And really I mean that at every level, whether we're talking about school funding, whether we're talking about you know like a weird bill that would suddenly pop up that would make it illegal for school officials to publicize a bond measure. You know, things that like just an unending stream of these things. And so I would learn about these these issues and write about them, but I would bring them back to Jack Schneider. And, you know, we would sit down together to record a podcast and I would call upon his knowledge of education history to help me understand what it was that I was seeing out in the rest of the world. And I think over the course of many podcast episodes and many conversations, we started to come to the shared understanding that what we were seeing was really different from reform from from efforts, previous reform efforts, especially the reform efforts that we've grown so used to in the Obama era. And Jack will talk a little bit more about that, but he was the one that came to me and said, you know, I think I think we need to write a book about this. And I thought about it for about thirty seconds and I agreed it was a good idea. So Jack is that an accurate depiction of what happened?

Speaker 3 Yeah. I think most accurate here, are two phrases that you use. First, you said, you know, that you haven't told me that there's an upcoming, podcast planned with these guys, which is like a clue into our working relationship. You know, it's like I show up in the studio sometimes and Jennifer springs on me that I should have read an entire book that I haven't and and, well, I do the best that I can. And the other piece is, that, you know, Jennifer talked about hitting the road, and, that's another characteristic of our partnership with each other is Jennifer loves to hit the road, and I love to not hit the road. So I hit the books when Jennifer hits the road and, you know I think the thing that we bring together is a combination of a kind of journalistic instinct for a good story and a kind of relentless inquisitiveness about what's going on right now along with you know, an instinct to always fill in the backstory and to figure out what's the bigger picture, of which this present story is a part. You know, what I started to realize, across our podcasts together is that because of that partnership we were both learning from each other and we were essentially like creating a story as we went along. Know we were we were creating the path as we walked and looking back on the trail that we had sort of blazed together, of course with lots of help from you know scholars and investigative journalists and teachers, careful observers, what I began to realize is that there was a real story there, right, that that path was headed in a particular direction. For me, think I initially was prompted into action like so many people by the twenty sixteen election and my thinking was Betsy DeVos is a vulnerability for the Trump administration, that the things that she was pushing were so clearly either unpopular or destined to be unpopular with ordinary Americans that if we could tell that story really clearly, it felt like we could potentially make a difference in the twenty twenty election. And what ended up happening is that as we worked on the book, I think what I realized, what we both realized is that it wasn't a story about DeVos. It in fact wasn't a federal story after all. It was a story as Jennifer just alluded to about what's happening at the local level and the state level across The US. And as we connected the dots, we began to realize that it's not only a local and state issue rather than a federal one, but it's also an old one rather than a new one. So the effort to unmake public education really began to take shape in the wake of Harry Goldwater's defeat. In the wake of that, you know, you see all kinds of conservative organizations being built, movements beginning to take shape. And really, what we're seeing in, you know, DeVos's secretaryship is the tip of the iceberg emerging from above the water. Finally, this movement is,

Speaker 4 powerful enough that it's beginning to become visible. Yeah. And I I think it would be interesting to expand on that a little bit further and talk a little more about what it is to what what really literally is the wolf at the schoolhouse door. Introductory chapter of the book, you have a quote. It says, the present assault on public education represents a fundamentally new thread driven by a new kind of pressure group. Put simply, the overarching vision entails unmasking public education as an institution. Could you lay out a little bit of what what it means to unmake or unmask public education in this new vision for, like, school reform?

Speaker 3 I think, you know, the story that we tell is ultimately one that I think helps make sense of policy efforts that might otherwise seem unfocused and in some cases contradictory. You know, what on earth do vouchers or neo vouchers as we refer to them in the book have to do with you know virtual schools? What does that have to do with you know a war on labor or with efforts to deregulate education? That these efforts can seem arbitrary and and what we began to realize is that there are really four tenets of belief among those who want to unmake public education. They are first a preference for private values over public, right, the belief that education is an individual good rather than a collective enterprise. Something to get for yourself rather than something that we should all invest in because we all benefit from. Second is a deep and abiding faith in markets that markets work and government doesn't. Third is a relentless drive to cut costs and you can begin to see that some of these are overlapping, right? If you have a deep faith in markets then you know a part of your thinking there is that markets will through competition reduce costs. If you have a deep faith in the private over the public then why would you favor expensive public efforts like public education which has an annual price tag if you combine local, state, and national spending on it of $500,000,000,000. And then the fourth pillar here is antagonism towards organized labor which again relates to the effort to cut costs, right, teacher salaries account for roughly 80% of costs in public education, relates to faith and markets because of course teachers when they are organized together are a disruptive political force that counters the kind of free market activity that these folks would like to see shaping decision making and that collectively these tenets of faith lead people who subscribe to them to believe that public education is something that we never should have done in the first place and that we need to unmake as quickly as possible.

Speaker 2 So I think Jennifer can take that and run with it better than I can. I thought you did a really good job. I mean you made a point earlier about how this isn't a new story, it's actually an old story and in some ways it's really fitting that Chris and Nick that you're both coming to us tonight from the Midwest. Because in many ways this is a story about Midwest conservative Midwestern industrialists who get really mad after the New Deal. And what they're mad about is they see that the the pendulum shifts towards labor. Right? The industrialists in Michigan are furious about those auto workers who sit down and you know basically like kick off the organized labor in this country. And so the store this story is full of these these old industrialists with names like DeVos and Bradley in Wisconsin and Uline in Illinois and names that aren't widely recognized outside of the Midwest. And so I think what can be hard for for people to wrap their heads around is that a movement that's so focused on public education isn't ultimately about public education. It's about weakening the collective. And so that's why it's so targeted at unions. Can you think about what unions do? Right? They're not only the vehicles by which teachers demand things like higher salary for themselves, but they also demand things like higher greater investment in schools and worse yet they demand things like a more generous safety net for everybody. Right? And so if you're somebody who thinks that that business should really control, business should should run the show, that the tax burden on the wealthiest should be as little as possible, that government should either get out of the way or tilt the scales in the direction of making the first two things happen. Anything that enables a group of people to come together and make a collective demand is your enemy. And you think about what schools do, right? That like that's where by their very nature kids go to a school and the teacher is supposed to raise their sights. They're supposed to, you know, like encourage them to believe that they can be more, Right? And so if your goal is to shrink people's expectations, you can see exactly why why they would be opposed to schools. The way we fund them is more redistributionist than a lot of the other things we do in our culture. Even though you know I'm sure all of us would like to see school funding be far more redistributionist. And so I think that so much of this is focused on school policy but ultimately the goal is to get us to think of ourselves as consumers in a marketplace, ideally an unregulated marketplace, and to function in the most atomized way possible. It's pretty bleak vision And what we try to do in the book is to lay out how these sort of specific policies around school relate to this larger vision.

Speaker 1 It it provides, like, the unified theory, you know, to to go back to what Jack was even saying there. Instead of seeing these as all sort of disparate parts or or different attacks on sort of the same issue, it actually gives us a lens to understand the totality of it. And and to go from what you were saying there to to kinda see how the shift is is from viewing public education as as a public good and, a public, right that we all have to a free and accessible public education as, you know, constituents or as citizens to that perspective of us as customers to be able to sort of pick and choose the educational package that is going to to to best fit, you know, our our child in this case. So it really is that fracturing of of the public good, into all of these different consumerist parts and kind of force us to pick and choose from the pieces. And one of the things that that I found the most fascinating in the book and and, you know, if you go to our website and read the review of of said book there, which I'm sure we'll put in in the link to this, the one thing that I really grabbed onto as as being maybe a a prime example of this, even though they're they're they are are legion, was, like, this issue that you framed as neo vouchers. Because it was such a, I don't know, ingenious or, sort of infamous kind of way, I think, to to work around the the the the barriers that we've kept from having that public money flow, you know, particularly to sectarian religious institutions and just say, ah, to heck with all of that. Like, this is a direct backdoor from those things. So, yeah, you you described it in the book or somebody described it, you quoted in the book, as a laundromat for tax dollars. And I think that's what got to me right away is saying, hold up. What's this all about? So, you know, I don't know if there's any, you know, uninitiated folks in the chat or listening, but could could could either of you describe that idea of neo vouchers, and results of their proliferation in states like Arizona and Florida? So, yeah, if we flash back to the nineteenth century,

Speaker 3 what we can see is that a failed amendment to the constitution led states and it's a majority of states to adopt what are referred to colloquially as baby amendments named after, James Blaine, the congressman who made this his big cause. He was actually considering a run for president and I think this was a part of it. The Baby Blaine Amendments adopted in these state constitutions forbid public dollars from flowing to sectarian institutions. Now this is a major roadblock if you are a voucher proponent. Right? If what you want is to give every kid in your state or as many kids as possible a voucher loaded with a per pupil expenditure on it to take to a private school, then you've got a problem because 9% of kids who are in private schools are in sectarian schools. It's a huge percentage of private schools, that are religiously affiliated and, the way around this is as you said pretty ingenious. So you don't send the dollars directly from treasury to these private schools, in most cases religious schools. Instead, you let private donors give their money to scholarships for students who want to participate, and then you reimburse those donors. So for those following along at home, you would draw a box and you would write Walmart in it, and then you would have arrows labeled with dollars over those arrows to a scholarship, private school scholarship organization. Then you would have arrows with dollars flowing to individual students who would use those, and then carry those dollars right on over to a private religious school. Now, where does treasury come in? Coming in from a different angle, you would have dollars flowing to Walmart from the treasury. So treasury dollars never actually go to the private school, to the religious school. They reimburse the corporation, and it's usually corporations, that decided to, exercise its faith in private education and vouchers by giving its money to these. And right, this is this is just money laundering. There's no other

Speaker 2 phrase that is as apt to describe it. You know, another big part of the reason why they had to come up with this elaborate workaround was that whenever the public is given the chance to vote on whether public dollars should go to religious schools, they voted down overwhelmingly including in Arizona just a couple of years ago. This remains a deeply unpopular idea. And so that's you know like call it come up with this sort of convoluted system and make it about tax credit scholarships and suddenly you know it's a feel good thing. The other thing that's really happened is that in the you know over the past couple decades the Supreme Court has gotten increasingly friendly to the idea that we don't really need a separation between church and state. So for example over the summer there was a ruling about school vouchers in Montana and it's just one of a whole string of court cases that are coming down the pike to keep expanding the terrain on which religious institutions can claim public dollars but still continue to function as religious institutions. So just before the election the Supreme Court heard a case that really doesn't have anything to do with education per se but will have profound implications for it about a Catholic adoption agency, a foster care agency in Philly that wanted to take public money but wouldn't place foster kids with gay couples. Right? And so they're arguing basically that by that the city is discriminating against them by not allowing them to take the contract. So the court seems very amenable to that view. So you can see how this would play out. Right? So like a school like the one that Amy Coney Barrett sat on their board in Indiana. It was a school that where you couldn't attend if your parents weren't married, right? So that's a school that takes voucher money in Indiana which is already kind of questionable. But under this argument that the Supreme Court seems really amenable to, you know, it would be discriminatory not to fund that school. Right? And so you just you see how it's this kind of it's this process of atomization. It's leading to a pretty bad place and I think people really need to pay attention to these court rulings.

Speaker 3 And of course it's not just the, elevation of private interests over public interests because you also strip away transparency and oversight here. So one of the examples in our book is out of Florida where, you know, you've got schools blatantly discriminating against LGBTQ students and there's nothing that you can do about that, because you actually have no levers of control over these private organizations.

Speaker 4 Right. And it has an interesting build into, the accountability piece as well, which, is being brought up in the the chat, like the weaponization of accountability and the ties between these, like, neoliberal corporate efforts to basically defund public schools and its connection to also setting the rules for standardized testing and high stakes standardized testing. And I I wonder if you could speak to a little bit about basically how accountability has now become not a way to necessarily gauge what's going on and do better, but instead a way really to dismantle public institutions. We were just talking right before this, Jackie, you were saying, you know, like, the the private schools are still having school despite or or

Speaker 3 the public schools are not god. I'm gonna say this back. This is why this podcast is so I got it. I'll I'll help you out here. Yeah. You help me out. My kids daughter who attends the local public school got several emails, you know, to me to her mother, to her school account, and we got two phone calls reminding us that despite where the fact that we're about to have a foot of snow dumped on us, nobody should believe that there is going to be a snow day because school is virtual and it will be happening. Meanwhile, private schools in the area, many of which are in person right now, do have the ability to to move online, but they're telling families, you know, you deserve a snow day. So, you know, go on early into the the winter vacation. And I think, you know, what this speaks to is the way in which neoliberal reformers, centrist Democrats have unwittingly played into the hands of conservatives who seek to unmake public schools. So, you know, centrist Democrats like Cory Booker aren't trying to do away with public schools, but they have sort of, you know, naively cooperated with the hard right on efforts, you know, whether they be these corporate style efforts to manage schools through performance management systems, testing and accountability being the one that we see in education, or to expose them to the market through charters. The idea here is that, you know, what we can do is we can govern schools more effectively if we take this sort of top down approach. Meanwhile, what you're doing is you're reducing the aims of school, you're narrowing the mission, you're alienating families and young people. I'll tell you, my daughter loved school, until third grade, which is the first year that they are tested. And then began asking questions about, you know, why the emphasis on ELA and math over every other subject? What happens to art and music and social studies and science? And why are we focusing so much on MCAS, which is name of our standardized test here in Massachusetts? So the narrowing of ACE, the relentless negative rhetoric, the emphasis on choice and exit rather than on voice and, you know, democratic politics as a solution to any flaws we see has made public schools really vulnerable to criticism and attack, and that's exactly what those who are intent on on making public schools, you know, so at the federal level, most recently, it was Betsy DeVos, they they love that because that's an opportunity to tell a story about how this system has failed and how there's a better alternative that involves

Speaker 2 simply empowering consumers free market. I think the the, you know, the other thing that Betsy DeVos was really effective at is that she understood that parents really kind of hate that vision of accountability. Right? So the the Obama folks and Arne Duncan really doubled down on this, know, really very narrow instrumentalist understanding of what a school is and what a school does. And so a school is a place that raises math and English test scores. And a good school is the school that does the best job of that. And it didn't really matter what kind of school it was as long as those scores went up. And we were just going to take that vision and just keep extending it. So a good teacher was a teacher who was the best at raising math and English test scores. And a good teacher prep program could produce a teacher who could do that, etc. And Betsy DeVos understood that, you know, like this really does not resonate with parents, right? That there are all kinds of reasons that parents consider a school a good fit, right? And so her definition of a school that was failing was just a school that wasn't a good fit, right? And I think that actually resonates with people far more than value added or the kind of data dashboards that were being rolled out. So I think that we see this now with the school reopening fight around the country that ironically in some of these very conservative areas where parents have pushed really hard to get their schools open sometimes without masks, right? But their definition of what a school is is so much broader than this kind of desiccated definition that we settled on during the Obama Duncan years, right? We hear lots of talk about socialization and mental health, about the whole like sort of range of the curriculum. We hear a lot about sports too, right? But you don't hear people saying you've got to reopen the schools so that my kid can do better on her math and English standardized test.

Speaker 3 And of course that's why my daughter's school will be open on the snow day, right, to prevent learning loss because there will be testing this year, we've been told. So, you know, the school has an interest in cramming as much content into kids as they can regardless of, you know, the kinds of decisions they might make in a different, policy context.

Speaker 1 It it's it's absolutely heartbreaking too to think about that that narrowness of, of the purpose of education. And, course, then the measurements, you know, that we've talked about that the chat's talking about here too. Karen mentions over here, like, the need for a better, broader definition of what effective effective schools first. Right? But then successful schools and students. And and while you were talking, Jennifer, too, I thought back about Jonathan Kozol and how how he could sort of plays off these ideas of, you know, the desiccated curriculum opportunities are ones that would never fly, you know, in the in the wealthy suburb suburban public schools, but those are the ones that the, you know, high accountability regime of, you know, we we would consider, like, the liberal era, you know, Arne Duncan and Barack Obama would would have gotten us, the the race to the top, etcetera, after, you know, even I don't know about, about Essa so much, but in the wake of No Child Left Behind, certainly, like, that's that's the regime that we that we ended up getting. So so so many good questions floating around here too. So I think what I wanna maybe, shift gears towards is is is let's kind of like live in this in in the unmaking world for a minute, you know, and imagine that there are some people, listening to us who might be amenable to to to that notion or or or even just questioning like why would that be such a bad thing. I mean, we talked about how the private school infrastructure can maybe pick and choose students that the that the public school infrastructure, you know, either is required to take, you know, that their special needs or they might have, behavioral problems that would would, would keep them out of private schools. Sorry. Or, you know, they can just pick and choose because you have to sign a faith statement to join this Catholic school or or this other one. But, like, let's imagine for a second here, like, that we recognize the need for change within our education And and, like, the things that we're talking about kind of speak to to that need too. Inequitable outcomes, outmoded curricula, grading and assessment practices, whether we wanna talk about issues of police in schools too, the over policing of of bodies and, you know, increasingly of minds through Proctorio and some of those other things too that that we've talked about at HRP. But for for our listeners who might be amenable to these ideas of right libertarian reformers, vouchers, for profit schools, mass privatization, etcetera, who look at those things and say that that might not be a bad thing if we fully arrived at their vision, right, of educational utopia. Right? If we lived in a DeVos utopian era here, what what have we lost,

Speaker 2 you know, with the loss of the the public infrastructure? What has the cost been? You know, who are the winners and losers in that? I'm gonna steal a story that I heard Jack tell because we now spend so much time in various you know in Zoom rooms and now we're in a different kind of room. So we gave a draft of the manuscript to a colleague of his and the working title originally was The Dismantlers. And his colleague read it and he said, know, I don't know where I fit in this because I'm a dismantler, right? I want to dismantle structures of oppression. I want to dismantle police and schools. I want to dismantle standardized testing. And you know, so we really thought about it and we thought that you know, he's absolutely right. That our goal in writing this was not to say, you know, status quo is fine. Just leave it alone, right? It was to say that yes, we absolutely need to dismantle what isn't working and you know push for equity and all the things we want. But if you embrace an alternative that means treating individual treating education as an individual or a private good, you lose the capacity to demand the dismantling of those structures that you want that that you wanna change, Right? And so like you'll hear a lot of people saying right now, just give the money to the parents. Right? Like you're, for example, you're in you're in Iowa and that's a state where the your Republicans picked up some seats in the most recent election, you're gonna be hearing arguments like this in the in the coming session. And I think to a lot of people that seems kind of appealing. Well, if you just gave me the money, I could figure out what to do with it. Right? But you know what they leave out of that is that there's so many other things that we expect a school to do. We in The US expect our schools to function essentially as our only safety net. So what happens to all of those things? And so I think you know like that's what you really have to be focused on is to that the criticisms are being leveraged in a way to convince people to embrace a solution that makes the actual problems impossible to solve. And now I'm gonna hand it over to Jack because I feel like I I did such a good job that he's he's not gonna know what to say. That's right, Jennifer. I'm just chiming in to say I'm I'm at a loss.

Speaker 3 But while I scramble, to think of what to say, I'll add that, you know, what's lost here and to pick up on what Jennifer is saying. Right? So, her her argument, as she retells my story, is that, you know, our collective ability to improve public education. Right? To be the dismantlers that my colleague Jim Nearing, a former teacher and school principal, you know, a truly thoughtful educator who was a part of the Coalition for Essential Schools movement led by Ted Sizer, so thinks of himself as a Sizer disciple. Right? Our ability to collectively engage in the kind of work that he has spent his career engaged in withers if we don't have transparency, oversight, regulation, public governance. Right? Not only that, but of course then there's massive opportunity for fraud and abuse. So, you know, I just have very little faith that suddenly our problems are going be solved by taking the public education system and essentially dumping it over into the private sector. One of the points I often make to people is, sure, let's imagine that the entire public education system has become privatized because many people, right, there's this halo of exclusivity around private schools, which largely has to do with the fact that they have a more affluent clientele, a whiter clientele in most cases, native English speaking clientele, fewer special education students. And of course they turn people away. All of these things, right, and they charge money. These things make them seem like they're better. But of course, let's expand this system to scale and say, okay, well it's gonna be all the kids. Right? It's the 50,000,000 kids who are in the public education system. And where are the teachers gonna come from? Probably gonna be the 3,000,000 public educators, who are out there. And what's the curriculum gonna be? Well, private schools tend to not teach that differently except for the fringy ones, than their public school counterparts. So, you know, same teachers, same kids, same curriculum, we're probably gonna leverage the existing infrastructure, same building Right? It's just minus the existing transparency, oversight, regulation, public governance. The last point that I wanna make is one of you, I think, teaches economics. Is that right? Teaches an economics class? Okay. Right. So Yes. That's me. Great. Great. So then opportunity cost is something that your students will be familiar with. So let's think about what's the opportunity cost here. So as we spend all of this energy, right, all of this time, effort, and energy on making the public system, what are we not spending our time, effort, and energy on? So let's imagine we send, you know, tremendous human and economic resources to unmake the system. Are we going to be better off than if we had spent those same human and economic resources on strengthening the system? I think the answer is obvious.

Speaker 4 It seems like the space to really organize and fight back against these policies and to get to a space where we can demand reform that is meaningful is in one hand by incorporating more teachers' unions. However, there is a perception that teachers' unions actually fight back against the progressive changes that you all are talking about, that they are the ones that are holding everything up. And I think that that just kinda goes hand in hand with how teachers have been viewed since really the spring where you have people like Corey DeAngeles or Ben Shapiro, Dave Rubin, etcetera, really using this terminology of, you know, take your money, give everybody vouchers, go go to the the private school, teachers' unions are destroying schools, etcetera, etcetera. Is there, like, this tension between unionization and education reform and all the things that you're talking about? Does that exist, first off, more so now than ever, and and why would you attribute to that? But, also, would you advocate then for teachers being more prone to joining unions or advocate to start a union in order to get to the place that you would like them to be? I've I've been thinking about this question a lot because we're coming off of this period where you had this kind of, you know, extraordinary

Speaker 2 coalition, a bipartisan coalition, where the Democrats were all about weakening teachers for the right teachers unions for the right reasons. Right? That if you if you constrained their collective bargaining, you know, got rid of things like last in first out, you put in all these evaluation policies. So the idea was that students would be better off, right? That there would be achievement gains if you did, you intervened at this kind of policy level. So then you have, you go across the partisan divide to the conservatives and well they had their eye frankly on a bigger prize and that was to figure out how to constrain collective action and possibly even democracy. And so, you know, you see state after state that implemented what are called right to work laws and these are basically just laws that mean that like if you don't want to join a union, you can't be forced to pay for the benefits that you get through the union contract. And so basically these are they weaken unions and they've had a measurable impact on their membership rates. There was a Supreme Court decision but first we saw this happen at the state level. So we now have, you know, ten plus years of research on whether the policy interventions that I described, you know, about things like hiring and evaluation and, you know, it's at best the most mixed of bags, right? Like we could take the sunniest perspective on it and the best you could say that in certain cases you saw small gains, but where there's really no doubt is that what happened in these states that implemented these really sort of, you know, harsh measures aimed at weakening unions. That if you look at what happened in states like Michigan and Iowa, they served their purpose, which is to make it harder to elect Democrats. Voter turnout dropped. The it made it harder for people who come from the working class to run for office. And we have to leave the the realm of education policy to see this. You have to go to political science where they've been doing quite a nice job documenting this. And so I, you know, on the one hand the reason that teachers get teachers unions get a bad rap among Democrat reformers is because of their resistance to these policy interventions. But I think that the Democrats have been too slow to recognize that the Republicans and the conservatives have their eye on a a on a bigger prize that is delivering measurable results for them. I would, you know, do everything that Jennifer said and just add that with the particular example of school closures,

Speaker 3 I definitely am inconvenienced personally that my daughter is virtual. Right? And she is inconvenienced. She goes to school on a computer in a closet. Right? That's that's not what anybody wants. But what's the right thing for our society? I don't think, that opening schools right now, is something that we could necessarily do safely given the fact that, you know, bars and restaurants have been open. Look at spiking numbers across every single state. Right? I would love to live in a world where I could take a firm stand and say schools should be open, but I think if I lived in that world, then the unions would also have taken a different position on school closures. And I think one of the reasons that teachers unions have gotten a bad rap over the past couple decades is that they are a collectivist enterprise making decisions about what is good for the whole. Now, you know, certainly one can level a criticism about teachers unions, particularly in the seventies and eighties, maybe nineties, being, you know, a little bit less focused on, what's good for kids and their families. But right now, right, we live in a period when, teachers unions have, become one of the strongest advocacy groups for young people, particularly, you know, racially minoritized young people, low income young people, and their families through a strategy, you know, commonly referred to as bargaining for the common good. Doing a lot there in terms of advancing the kind of aims that would not get advanced if each of us were pursuing our own individual self interest. If I were pursuing my own individual self interest, yeah, my kid would be in school right now. And I'm not sure that's good for all of us. I hate to say it. I'm not sure. And I think that, you know, that's that's where we have to come down on some of this stuff is to say, maybe what we need is a little bit more conversation and deliberation, which of course is not something that either centrist Democrats, right, neoliberals, or, you know, right libertarians are particularly engaged in. Right? What they want is for people like teachers to be quiet and follow orders. I'm not sure that's good for education and I'm I'm not sure that that's good for kids.

Speaker 2 I would just add one more little piece to that. I wish that the unions had done a better job of making the case about their own safety concerns in kind of a broader pitch for you know that everyone should have the right to a safe workplace, right? Because they made the argument in a narrow way, it comes across as self interested and then it opens the door to what Chris was talking about. And so you'll often, you know, you'll hear people I see people tweeting stories all day long about Europe. Look at Europe. They've opened their schools. And what they completely missed is that the reason that Europe is able to keep its schools open is that it has this unbelievable social safety net thanks to the strength of its unions. Right? So they're closing everything else, paying workers 90% of their wages including freelancers, to stay home, making sure that their economy is able to reopen when the pandemic is finally over. And so to make the case here that somehow we would be better off without unions seems just you know like extraordinarily kind of dumb.

Speaker 3 Well and one last note that I thought of in listening to Jennifer is that you know of course in the American context so much of public perception of teachers unions is shaped by by the fact that people are exploited in The United States in the workplace more than they have been in a hundred years. Right? I think where a lot of people are coming from, well, didn't have that right. I didn't have the ability to say that. And I think the response is not to say, well, shame on the teachers. I think the response is to say, actually what do we need to do to make sure that everybody labors in safe conditions, that everybody has a kind of voice in the way that their work is shaped and managed and controlled, that everybody

Speaker 1 is adequately compensated for their work. Amen to that. So I I think that's a perfect place to sort of wrap up the conversation. It's interesting. Right? If we think about the the notion of labor solidarity as being a a net benefit, not just say to teachers, but, you know, those, you know, brothers and sisters in labor too who might be part of restaurant unions or, gosh, you know, other other public and private employee unions to electrical workers, like, across the board. And then imagine the attacks over the last, well, you know, since since the Goldwater era or or since the eighties on those groups. And then imagine that replicating itself now in public education to say, you know, like, well, we're gonna take that educational solidarity away and fracture you know, continue to fracture those things out too. And and let's take the, say, the the the wage gains or the wealth gap for the last thirty years, but then apply that to education as well. It's it's really difficult to imagine that replicating that formula in education would leave us in a better place than it did for labor over the last three decades too. So, yeah, I think I think the answer overall, right, is is more democracy rather than less. And also interesting to think about, right, attacks on those democratic institutions are not just a delegitimization of democracy, but also wanting to put barriers in front of the democratic process. So here at the same time that that we wanna remove the democratic accountability, we want to make it more difficult to have democratic accountability to elected officials and to, you know, your boss or to your working conditions and all of these other things. So, yeah, I I am definitely cool if if the message at the end of this is is solidarity and and and democracy in the workplace. Is there anything that we that we had that we had missed that that you think we should that we should

Speaker 2 talk about here at the end before we we do a plug in and start to wrap things up? Jennifer and Jack? No. I thought I think we really conveyed a sense of what the book is about and why we're worried, but also that just because you're sounding an alarm does not mean you're also

Speaker 3 saying that everything is great. Yeah. And I'll offer the the yin to Jennifer's yang there and say that this is a dark picture that, we paint in the book and that we do so in order to try to spur action. Right? That there are things we can all be doing as, you know, family members of kids in public schools, as educators, as community members, as voters. You know, you may have people listening who are school board members or who are, locally elected officials. Right? There's work that we can all be engaged in, but at the end of the day, I think the most important work is actually engaging in conversations that challenge the kinds of assumptions that are so problematic and that undermine the aim of excellent and equitable education for all young people. Right? So when people sort of just say as if it is an unquestionable truth that the, you know, the public schools are no good, or if people talk about the fact that, you know, teachers are self interested. I think that these are things that can be met with pointed polite questions because as soon as people are questioned on this stuff, you know, how do you know that the schools are no good? Tell me about the 98,000 public schools in The United States that your kid doesn't go to. Right? I think that's where there's opportunity for growth. Right? When we help people realize that a lot of the things that we take for granted, we actually need to begin asking questions about.

Speaker 1 Well, thank you both very much for this. A reminder, the book is a wolf at the schoolhouse door. The podcast is have you heard podcast. And, of course, you know, you can read the review, that that I wrote for the book on our website, humanrestorationproject.org. Follow us at at HumeResPro. Of course, thank you, Jennifer and Jack, for joining us here today. Do you wanna do you wanna plug a Twitter handle or, you know, for the podcast or for yourselves along the way too? You can find out more. You can subscribe

Speaker 2 to the podcast anywhere basically that you get podcasts now. And we also have a blog, haveyouheardblog.com. And my Twitter handle is b is for Berkshire.

Speaker 3 I'm edgyu underscore historian and the show's Twitter handle is at have you heard pod.