Season 2, Episode 13: Testing, learning loss, and the CDC guidance on reopening schools

Foreign.

Hey, Michael.

Hey, Diane. It's good to see you. It's that time of year here where parents with kids my age when we have to decide what we're going to do for schooling for next year. And I'll say, given all the uncertainty right now out there in the world, it's still not easy for us. I know we've talked about a lot of folks who are sort of set it and forget it parents, they pick the school and sort of that's it. But that's obviously not my wife. I. And so we're having a lot of active conversations right now about school. What's on your mind?

Well, I don't think you're alone on that one, Michael. It feels like it's. It's an ongoing conversation for. For me, the first day of March, you know, honestly, comes as a reminder that it's been almost exactly a year since what feels to me like the beginning of the pandemic, when I sort of market by the day we went in, shelter in place and close our school buildings. And basically life has been profoundly different for the last year. And unfortunately, this isn't the type of anniversary that feels naturally good or celebratory. And I've been thinking a lot about how to both manage my own emotions around that and to lead through it. And so that's heavy on my mind. One of the reasons that I think about this stuff, Michael, is because I get to be in regular conversation with you. We started this class disrupted podcast at the beginning of the pandemic to help parents make sense of what was happening as a result. And I hope that we've done that. I think we get some feedback suggesting we have. But as we hear from more and more folks, it isn't just parents, but sort of everyone in our society who kind of feels touched by what's going on in education or connected to the impacts of it. And so here we are, Michael, once again with so many things we could discuss. What are you thinking for this week?

Yeah, it's, you know, you're right. It's a monumental time in the country's history, and it's a monumental time, I think, in education because so many big news items have happened in the last few weeks that impact what's going to happen in schools for the rest of this year and frankly, set a tone for going forward. So if it's all right with you, I'd love to do something a little bit different this week, which is given all these news items and three in particular, two relating to tech Tests and student outcomes in the form of the Biden administration announcing that spring testing will indeed happen. A bunch of research showing just how much students have indeed lost in terms of academics during this period. And then the third, the CDC guidance around opening schools. I would love to bundle those three topics, if you will. And I just thought it would be helpful for people to hear from you, Diane, about what this means to you as an educator and how you're thinking about it, but maybe even how you'd think about it with your old district hat on, which you don't wear anymore, but you used to before you started Summit. And I thought I would take the role of interviewer as best as I can. I'll put my old journalism hat on for this episode. How does that sound?

Well, it sounds fun, Michael. I am up for it. Who knows where we'll go, but let's do it.

Sounds good. So let's start with topic one, which it was telegraphed before Betsy DeVos, when she was secretary, said, look, I think that schools should administer tests in the spring. And now it's official, the Biden administration has said school testing will happen in the spring. Just a little bit of context before I dive into sort of what's percolating in my brain and curious about. But, you know, out of that guidance there, they did leave the door open for innovation and some waivers around how the testing is done, which I thought was interesting, maybe hopeful, hard to say, but I'm curious. And then secondly, they did very clearly decouple assessment from accountability. So theoretically, these assessments are supposed to provide us with data and insight about where students are and where they need support. So theoretically, again, because as you and I have both talked about, traditional assessments don't necessarily do this, but theoretically could pinpoint where instruction needs to occur, where dollars need to be allocated and things of that nature. So I guess I'd love to start high level. What were your thoughts when you saw the announcement?

Well, Michael, honestly, my initial thought was, and I will say I had different thoughts, one when I read the headlines and the news stories and another when I actually read the announcement. And I would say, in my view, as an educator who's actually charged with implementing this stuff, what I read about in the news stories didn't feel like an accurate summary to me. Certainly not for someone like me who's having to make these decisions.

That's an important insight.

Yeah. And I think on a couple of levels. One, there's no clarity or certainty. Yet you alluded to it. States have the option for not applying for full scale waivers of no testing, but for a variety of different possibilities, scenarios. And we work in two different states, as you know. And just as one example, the Washington State Board has signaled that they're going to ask for sampling testing. So somewhat like what we do with the NAEP assessments, they'll just sample and test in some schools. And California has signaled that they're going to apply for a waiver that would allow local districts to use different assessment systems than the state, like an alternative, which is this sort of innovative piece you've, you've suggested. And so in both cases, I have no more clarity this week than I did last week about if I'm giving these tests when, how, what that looks like. So that's my initial.

Well, I'm intrigued by both, though I will say in terms of the different ways that they might interpret waivers and so forth. But what was the reaction of, you know, you're obviously not just yourself, you have teachers, administrators, parents, students. Did they have reactions that were noteworthy?

Here's, here's for me, what's happening on the ground. All those people that you're talking about are really consumed with A, just trying to make the most of this year. And in our case, we are still in virtual school in all of our buildings. And B, for the first time, some of our schools moved into what is, quote, the red tier in California, which means we can actually open schools both in Washington and California, and so really focused on what it means to get our buildings back open. And so honestly, not a lot of attention on this right now. Michael, this is not top of mind for parents and kids and teachers. And I think that that is a really important signal about these tests.

Quite frankly, I think that's really fascinating as well. And frankly, there are a lot, you know, as you just said, you've been remote for the whole year. We're going to talk about how that might evolve. But, you know, one of the big concerns has been how do you administer standardized assessments which are meant for in person, remotely. But how do you even think about the logistics when students haven't been in the building and then they're going to come back and say like March, April maybe, and try to build a school culture for learning and then all of a sudden put in assessments for some part of that? It seems just like a lot to me, which I guess makes me more curious to sort of glide over that and think about what are the opportunities for innovation that you're exc about and what could that look like if it were up to You.

Yeah, great. And maybe I will certainly glide over that, but give you just three sentences. Currently we are administering a specific test to a small number of students. It's the English Language Learners Assessment. It is offered now online because kids aren't in buildings. But just from an on the ground perspective, that's easier said than done. And it is literally requiring a, an adult who's trained in the testing doing one to one support of every student who's taking that assessment. So just try to think about that at scale. I mean, it just.

Wow.

I don't. Yeah, it's hard to conceptualize. So that's one thing. The second piece, in terms of the innovation, I mean, Summit is very set up for the potential innovation. And I will actually say, Michael, I've been in several conversations recently with state level folks and district folks who are thinking in the same way that Summit is and actually have built some infrastructure around that. So I don't want it to seem like it's just a thing that we can do. But as you know, Summit is built on a common assessment framework and plan. We have a valid and reliable rubric with performance tasks that we can evaluate against it that are cover in many ways the skills that the state tests are trying to go after. We literally have our own alternative internal, viable assessment system that we've been using all throughout the pandemic that we would certainly offer up to use if we were able to under this waiver. So fingers crossed. I'm hopeful because I think you and I both believe that if people can start seeing some of these assessment systems that exist, exist and validating them in the way that they should be validated, we might be able to move to a more innovative space. So I'm hopeful.

And just to double down briefly on my editorial before my next question, which is the sampling that the state of Washington potentially could allow, would allow you also to sort of have that validated and reliable check on the assessments because you just have a small subset of your students taking a portion of the larger assessment, so not taking up a huge chunk of time for every single kid. And if the correlation between what your local assessments in effect predict with what the sample says are wildly out of whack, then you'd say, okay, there's a problem here, we need to dig in deeper. But it's, it's kind of a cool mechanism to lift the onerous burden of testing while getting actually potentially more insights from it. So shift to my question, I guess, which is the assessments that you're talking about now, the local ones that are valid and reliable that you all have. How, how is it different from what the traditional standardized summative assessments do? Like, what do you get from it that the traditional system doesn't allow you to do?

Yeah, I think there's a number of advantages, but for me, Michael, it goes back to that first question of why are teachers, parents, kids, not super into or paying attention to? This is because the big state tests have really no impact on their day to day experiences and aren't useful for them. Where our assessment assessments, these are performance tasks that all of our students are doing in the course of their learning. And so it's part of their grade, it's part of how they're assessed for their work in school, in addition to being sort of a valid and reliable assessment against outside standards. So it matters to them in that regard. But most importantly to me is that it's actually useful in terms of helping teachers understand where their students are and what moves they make next and how they help them build and improve their skills. And it provides immediate, actionable feedback to students and parents about what they need improvement on and then they get another chance at it in the next performance task and the next project. And so it combines, without getting too wonky, it combines the feedback and the formative work that leads to better student outcomes and involves teachers and students and parents productively in that process versus just giving some big poster that's like you're doing a terrible job and you don't know these things. But we, that's it, that's all we're

going to do, right? So, and I think you're pointing at one of my big pushes, which is psychometricians. And for those that don't know, those are effectively people that study tests and make sure that they are valid and reliable. They are often fond of saying an assessment can't be for formative purposes and summative purposes. But my pushback has always been that's true if you believe in the time based system where we're just going to keep marching. But the moment we move to a mastery or competency based system, assessments actually are naturally serving both roles because they're doing exactly what you say. They give feedback, hey, you need to keep working on this. And they give feedback, hey, you've mastered this, which is a transparent signal. So they're actually doing both in ways that I don't think most psychometricians or people making these policies think about. But that helps me shift, I guess to the last set of questions on this topic that I'M curious about. Put yourself now in a district where you don't have a competency based system that you've designed like you all have and you're in this factory model. Right. What should district leaders or parents be thinking as they see this coming and the opportunity for innovation or not? What should their role be vis a vis these assessments?

Well, first of all, I don't want to write all of those places off because a lot of districts actually have over the last decade or so created benchmark assessments. So maybe it's not their system, but a couple times a year they're giving a benchmark assessment. Or even my district that I was in 20 years ago before I started Summit, we, I was part of a team who created an intra inter district writing assessment that is still given to this day. And so that's one time a year, but still like these systems truly do exist in most places at some level. And we just need to, you know, dig into them and think about how we can use them and make them better and improve them. And so I would be looking for, I would be mining for all of those potential opportunities of what exists and how we could improve it and make it better.

Yeah, that's great. So let's shift, I think, because it starts to say, you know, what is, what are we measuring and what are we trying to learn about? And this gets into the learning loss conversation. And you know, look, I, along with you have been pushing for us to rethink the academic learning loss conversation in particular, not necessarily thinking about it as a loss, but research recently emerged showing that not only was time loss, so the number of days of instruction, which we know, but students actually backtracked in their learning or lost learning. And so just to give the results of one study that came out in Education next looking at students in Ohio, students writ large lost a third of a year of learning and Black students fell 50% more than their white counterparts. And so out of that I think we're seeing understandably some big concerns. And part of those concerns from my perspective are because they're born out of a time based education system we have today where it views learning as something that happens at certain discrete parts in time. So if you miss the important unit on X too late, you're never going to get it. You keep moving down the conveyor belt and at some point you get sorted into some part of that and that's sort of where schooling ends for you. Right. And so, and that obviously has huge ramifications for college and career choices and the like, but it does exist, even if it's a human made system, if you will. But some of the other reactions it's provoking are things like let's redshirt everyone or extra summer school for all or year round schooling. Not a bad idea, I'd say. But given how our system does function and not how you and I specifically wish it would function, I guess I want to push us, which is just to ask, do you have concerns over the loss of learning in some of the results that we're seeing? And you know, specifically like for a low income student in an inner city or rural district without other great choices, this does have huge implications that are going to be tough to overcome, it seems to me. I'm curious your thoughts.

Yeah, Michael, I, I'm going to register my skepticism and then I'm going to set it aside. Just I got to do a little red flag and then I will really try to engage like productively on this topic because you know, I'm a pretty significant critic of what of this concept of learning loss. But my red flag I'm going to register is, and you know, people probably don't want to hear this, but it's true and real. As a school leader, someone who led schools in the accountability era for many, many years and now leads a system, what is fact is how I as the adults in the building sort of frame testing for the students, set them up for testing, have them understand the why behind it. All of those pieces have a dramatic impact on the results of those assessments. I mean those assessments rely on, they don't take into account all of those pieces. And so I am just really skeptical that when they gave these standardized assessments to kids in this moment in time, that the kids actually tried to do their best. I don't even know if those are valid or you know, and, or the adults cared about it. So I'm just really skeptical of those outcomes. Number one, I'm going to flag that, set it aside, let's say they're real. A couple of thoughts here. One, obviously I am concerned about students who are not learning what they need to learn and aren't being set up for life. But honestly I was worried about that before the pandemic. And so what is confusing to me in this moment is for the last 20 years we have had annual data on these tests that have shown time after time that tons of kids were not, quote, they had learning loss every single year. And what have we been doing about it? We have not effectively done anything to remediate that issue or remedy that issue. And so I'm not sure why everyone's freaking out right now when it's literally the same problem we've been having for 20 years. And then the second piece I would just say about that is I love this quote by Albert Einstein. If you always do what you always, always did, you will always get what you always got. And what is so uninspiring to me about this conversation is what's being thrown around as possible remedies. Summer school, I mean, these are proven non starters for helping. Every idea that's out there right now is not, we know, doesn't actually work. And oh, by the way, it doesn't work in normal times, let alone own in this time when I must just register. How does the, how does society expect that we're going to run some magical summer school in this year that is somehow going to address, you know, it just, it's, it's not real. It's just not real.

It's such a good point because it basically a lot of the remedies out there right now are doubling down on the existing system with just more time in it and.

Right.

You know, anyway, we could go on and on, but I think it's a really good point. But maybe it's an opportunity, right? Maybe this is the moment that says, yeah, doing the same thing over and over again is insane and we need to actually change the system. So I guess that's my other question on this topic, which is how do we as a society make the reframe to, to move, you know, move beyond the current solutions and systems that we have in place, but also perhaps value some of what's been gained in this year because it's been a tremendous year of loss for so many. But there have been things that students not in the academic curriculum that they've gained also opportunities in this that we're probably not going to value in the traditional system. So how do we make that reframe?

I think that's exactly the right way to go, Michael. And so when I switch to my more sort of productive approach to this, here's kind of how I think about it. First of all, I start with the idea that the children are watching and they're listening and they know what we're saying. I think that right now the entire conversation on our country is about all what has been lost. We say simultaneously that we're worried about the academic progress or lack thereof on our students. And we're also simultaneously worried about the social, emotional and mental health elements of our Children's experience. And in fact the biggest drive around getting kids back into buildings besides childcare is for mental health, social, emotional way more than academics.

That's what's driving this conversation is the stories. Totally.

So I hold both of those things as equally important and equally valuable. And I don't want one to. I want them to be in balance when I think about this. And so when I think about kids are watching what we're saying, we care about both of those things. I don't want these studies to become self fulfilling prophecies. I don't want this to be our destiny. And so I asked myself well how do I change that outcome if that's the path we're headed down, how do we actually change the trajectory? And you know I go back to my teaching days Michael and what good teachers do is they back up plan, they identify where they want to be by when and then they backward map to how do you get to that outcome. And you know, I think that's what we need to be thinking about and doing. And I am failing to see in this conversation anyone actually identifying well this is where we'd want to be. These are the things we're going to value. And let's just take. I don't even do elementary school as you know but to me we should just be thinking about reading for kids third grade and under our entire country should get obsessed with making sure every one of those kids can read right now. And how do we make that happen? How do we use the science to do that? How do we put all of our energy into that? You don't have to necessarily be in a school building for that. You can recruit all sorts of. There's so many opportunities but that's not the conversation we're having. We're not having an inspiring like national call towards every third grader you know is reading and how can we enlist grandmothers and libraries and whatever like a million different people to get to that. And that's what I feel like we're missing. Yeah is it is a clear vision and the leadership that would be the call to the action as opposed to this like you know, this is our destiny and we're just waiting to report on it as it unfolds.

What I'm struck by your response is you know, to your point mastery of say you know, fluent reading. Right. For third grader at which point shift you read to learn and not to say it can't happen earlier but the point is by that, by that point let's make sure we can check that mastered. Right. And what that implies from my perspective is not looking at this as a bunch of cohorts, which is what so much of the conversation from my perspective has been around so far, but instead looking at each individual child. And one of the reasons I'm so bullish about say what a place like Cleveland Metropolitan School District is trying to do is in trying to move to a competency based or mastery based way of looking at things, they're trying to say, okay, each individual child, we know where you are in your learning. We don't need to do the testing. It's actually built in. And so we're going to then design a plan for you. And then what I love what you, you've said is, and it enlarges beyond school so we can actually think about all the resources that are in society that maybe don't get directly funded towards school because it would be a herculean task for schools and the funding that they're given to, to be able to do this. And the thought, this stretches back to the first item for a second. The thought that somehow we're going to get this, these test outcomes and all of a sudden resources are going to be found from all these other areas of government functions that are going to say, oh yeah, take our, pour them in here. Defies the imagination. And so I think what you're saying is individual and think way more comprehensively around each of those individuals.

Right. Michael, let me just maybe give one more idea in this that is very practical and pragmatic. And so like here's a fundamentally different way for us to approach what we're doing in education right now. Think about, we talked briefly about what it will take to logistically do these assessments, right? So why wouldn't we as educators in schools, why wouldn't we actually do what you said? Why would we not literally survey every single child in every family? It is not that hard. We do it all the time. It's significantly easier than what we're talking about on the test testing front. And why would we not ask them, what has your child learned this year? What matters to you? What are you worried about your child actually not knowing or missing? What. What do you want them to be able to know and do that they aren't able to do now? What are you expecting from us as a school? How do you think we could best do that? We literally never ask parents or kids what they want from us, what they want from to learn what they value, what matters to them. And right now we have a Major backlash in this country from our families. This is the moment to engage them and ask them that question. Why isn't that the data we're trying to gather and look at as politicians and policymakers and system leaders? We could do that in the next month if we put our minds to it. And at the same time, we would be tending to their social, emotional, and mental health, because what we would be doing is saying, we actually value you. We actually care what you think. We actually think that you bring knowledge and experience that's valuable, and we're listening to you. And that's just not a thing our system normally does.

Yeah, no, it's a powerful thought, and it could lead into so many interesting directions at the individual level. That would be, I think, fascinating from frankly, even stretching back a couple episodes to the podcast where we talked about the children who were not getting learning support as dyslexics or et cetera, et cetera. Right. And so I think it would go in surprising, but really important directions. Segues into the last topic as we wrap up today, which is, you know, the CDC issued guidelines a few weeks ago about. It was literally actually, as we were laying down the previous episodes, so we said, okay, we come back to this. But around building reopenings. And this is a topic that has likewise provoked a myriad of responses. Just on your point about parents and families, we're seeing in the survey data that there is not consistent desire. Right. On what families and parents and students want out of this. Right. There's not an answer by any means, but I think people want the option. I think that's a fair thing to say. And so the CDC released its most specific and concrete guidelines to date, and they've been both praised and criticized at the same time. And so the quick summary, I think, of why they've been such a lightning rod, from my perspective, is that they've clearly suggested that schools can safely reopen without teachers getting vaccinations, which is a big point. Without teachers getting vaccinations, so long as property precautions around masking, social distancing, et cetera, are followed. And even in the most high transmission areas, except for middle and high schools. Now, the flip side of this is exactly in those same words that I just uttered, which is when they talk about things like social distancing, they're saying 6ft, not 3ft, which a lot of schools seem to have found that 3ft works great. So a lot of people have looked at that and said, well, given the space that a lot of buildings have, that means Most schools are going to be hybrid or virtual for the rest of the school year. So you get this guidance. As you said at the top of the episode, you, you all just came out of a zone where you can actually now be in person for the first time for someone actually operating schools. How did you look at this guidance? What does this mean to you?

Yeah, Michael? Well, a couple of thoughts that might be helpful from people who aren't like on the ground trying to navigate all of this. One, I would say, you know, we're in the locations that literally closed buildings first in the country last year, and we're in locations that are going to open them towards the end of the line. So I've had the experience of both being first and then being later. I will tell you, it's much better to be later. And the reason is we are just really benefiting from the knowledge and the experience and the growing information that we have. And so one of the ways we looked at that guidance is in combination with both our local state and then the federal guidance. And this is one thing people don't understand is every school has that, that matrix of guidance and they don't line up well.

That's been a huge piece. Right. That upset people was the CDC's guidance literally flew in the face of how the states were thinking about these.

Right, right. And so we are, we have spent the last year, A, becoming expert in all of this guidance. B, it changes constantly. So we have a whole team that's constantly updating and then three, bringing in all those difference of sources. We've taken the approach that we look at all three and then we take the most conservative of the collective and that becomes like our bottom line. We think that that's the, you know, the best way to go. And, and so that's kind of how we make sense of it on the ground. I think that, you know, so I think we welcomed the CDC guidance. First of all, it was nice to not have the Fed sort of out in this other place or fighting. It was just sort of nice to be moving in that direction. The other thing I just, I want to say, and you know, I have some thoughts on. Well, I have a lot of thoughts on a lot of things. But you know, Michael, one of the important things is that all the conversation in the country seems to be about teachers. And what concerns me about that is just there are so many people in education who quite honestly have never stopped working in buildings. So even though the building shut, there's a whole group of people who have been Working in the buildings. All along they've been distributing lunches, they have been distributing supplies, they're working on the technology. Like there's a whole infrastructure of people who are supporting what is happening. And we never talk about them, we never acknowledge them. The other thing is most places, certainly my organization has a phenomenal operations team that have literally come up to speed and educated themselves. And what I don't think people know is how collaborative these folks are. We are in multiple networks across the country. People are sharing plans. There's, I mean the level of collaboration and information sharing and sense making that's happening across schools, across states, across districts, across networks, charters, like is really phenomenal. And so I just don't want to overlook all the people who are not teachers who are doing truly everything that's needed to be done in order to even have a chance to have buildings open. And so I think that's important. I would just give a very specific example of like what the benefit of going later is. You know, we were having a conversation the other day about our opening plan and someone asked, well, I don't see any temperature taking in this plan because you know, we're all have grown familiar with like those, you know, forehead things. People may not realize that really at this point, after a year, what we now know, the guidance does not suggest temperature taking anymore. It gets a lot of false positive. It's actually not a good read. We have all these other things. So like I just need people to understand how this stuff is evolving rapidly and the folks are having to build responsive plans and iterate on them as we're going along. Those are some initial thoughts.

No, those make sense and we don't have to go too much deeper. I guess I'm just curious because there's been so much tension and emotion around all this. And so I'm just curious your reflections on that and what that says about where we are right now.

Yeah, Michael, I spent most of the weekend thinking about this and we are both really clear that this is getting pretty ugly and neither of us think this is healthy for anyone. I really have been trying to unpack what's at the heart of these rising tensions. And I have an idea which is most, many a significant portion of our population has over the past year had to make personal decisions with very significant impacts regarding their work. This is obvious for essential healthcare workers who've had to balance their own health, their family's health with the calling of their jobs and the financial implications of their choices. But you know what, it goes way past healthcare workers, it goes into essential service providers, food industry folks, delivery people. I mean, there's a whole set of people who've truly kept our society going and put themselves at risk during the time and had to make real choices about economics and the viability of their families. There seems to be growing evidence in addition to that that many women have left the workforce in order to care for their children. Yeah. And so again, women are balancing finances, career opportunity, job security, health, the well being of their families, and they're making all of these traits trade offs no matter which way they go. And so Michael, I think one of the things that is really at the heart of the frustration with teachers and has begun to boil over is that people don't perceive that they've had to make the same choices. So teachers have for the most part retained their jobs and their pay and their benefits through the pandemic, even when they aren't performing a significant function of their job, which is to provide this kusk custodial care of students. And for the most part, I think everyone's been really understanding and supportive of this and recognize that all of the challenges teachers have had to deal with. And so we sort of thought, well, the extra work, you know, kind of comes out in the wash. But, but things start to get misaligned when teachers make the argument that they should not have to do the in person part of their job until they decide they're comfortable doing doing it. And, and I think making matters worse, the criteria for their decision are sort of all over the map and kind of seem to be changing, especially every time one of the criteria is met and then there's like a new one crops up. And so I think this is where the support starts to crumble because it just doesn't seem fair to people and you know, moms and dads and healthcare workers and delivery people and food providers, you know, if they had to risk their health so they could continue to get paid and also had to figure out care for their child. And the person who would normally care for their child is saying, well, I'm not going to do this until I'm 100% safe or I feel completely safe and still get paid, get full benefits, et cetera. Well, I mean, I think you just land in a place where people think it's really unfair. And I think that might be where we are right now.

I always learn something from these conversations with you, Diane, and I, I, that's a, I think that's a really important insight. So let's wrap the conversation there. Those were three really meaty topics that I'm glad we went through because they've been weighing on both of us. But let's, let's wrap. I'll, I'll share. You know, we, we like to get away, if we can, from the schools and education a little bit and talk about what we're reading or watching. And so I, I, I'm, I've gotten back on my goal to finish reading all of Walter Isaacson's books, that is, before his next one comes out, which I hear is on the horizon. But I'm almost halfway through Kissinger.

Wow.

And just as an aside, you know, I actually have loved reading history during this because I find it helpful to put the present in some perspective and help me think through implications and sort of a sense that it's tough, but we can get through it. And so if about almost halfway through Kissinger, if I can finish it in the month of March, I'll feel good. And that'll leave just Ben Franklin as the last one for me. So. Small triumphs, Diane. Small triumphs.

Michael. I've seen the size of those books, so that was like a big triumph to me. I personally had to take last week off from reading all of the news and nonfiction just for honest, honestly, my own emotional health. I had some pretty significant Covid losses in the last week, and, and I did make space to watch some things. So my husband and I watched Amend, which is a newly released Netflix series. I know it's on a bunch of people's watch lists. I highly recommend it. Michael. It's a very doable six or seven episodes, and it's all focused on the 14th Amendment and its profound meaning and impact on what it means to be an American. And I will say, in this crazy time, I learned, I reflected on where we are and where we still have work as a country and how far we've come and so many things that honestly make me proud. It was inspiring. I highly recommend it.

No, it's a good one. That's a, that, that's a really good one. And I'll, I'll add it to our queue off of that. So let's leave it there. This has been a media episode. Learned a ton. I appreciate you, Diane, and appreciate all of you for listening, and thanks again for joining us on Class Disrupted.