Tackling All That K12 Schools Try to Do: The Challenges (Part 1)

Foreign. Hey, Michael.

Hey, Diane. How are you?

I'm well, it feels like it's been a minute since we've been together here, but I am really excited for how we're coming back together. We, we are so pleased to be welcoming back Stacy Childress to the podcast. What fun.

Great to be here.

We are getting the band back together again. For those of you who've been following along this season, the three of us spent some, two pretty extended episodes talking through the elements of higher education and the problems there and potential solutions. And we did that sort of in response to a podcast that the Mark and Ben show. So Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, and we were all pleasantly surprised at how much great feedback we got from our listeners that they loved those episodes and really enjoyed them and really wanted us to do a parallel experience for K12. And, you know, we couldn't say no to that. So here we are again. And I'm really, really looking forward to this conversation. The last one was quite rollicking and so I suspect that this one might be fun as well.

Agreed, agreed. And I'm glad, Stacy, that you chose to, against your better judgment, I'm sure, rejoin us for this.

Listen, I'm, I'm thrilled to be here and I had such a great time with, with you guys last time and like, you heard some feedback from people I know and some people I didn't know through LinkedIn would send me messages. That's just been happening in the last week, which is interesting. And so, so I'd love to, love to do it again. And I also just left that conversation feeling certainly challenged, but also like really energized from the quality and the dynamism of the, of the conversation. So I look forward to doing it again.

Well, we are glad you are back. Go ahead, Diana.

Michael, I, I should just say, I guess I'm assuming that everyone knows Stacy, but let me do 30 seconds for those of you who may have missed those episodes and don't know. Stacy, who is a good friend of ours and a good friend to education. So we on the she has this long, amazing history of being a teacher and a very popular professor at Harvard and at the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation and New Schools Venture Fund and Air Def. And I could go on and on and on and on about her credentials, but I think most importantly, she just deeply cares about what happens for our young people in America and really has been on always in the center of what we can do to serve them better. And so we're super grateful for her rejoining.

Yes, indeed. And with that, let's frame the episode today and we'll get into the meat of it because again, for those that remember the Higher Ed episode, we did two responding to the Mark and Ben podcast about the challenges facing Higher Ed, and we reacted to those challenges that they had identified in the first episode, and then we reacted to their solutions in the second episode for this one, because we are doing it from scratch ourselves. Diane has been willing and generous enough with her time to come up with the core functions that the K12 system, and I'll put it in air quotes, right. Is sort of tasked with providing in this country and go through her list of. I think it's nine areas at the moment. And then Stacy and I might supplement a little bit, but then we're going to dive into each one. And Diane, you'll tell us why you put that on the list and the, the problems or where the shortcomings are right now. With each of those, we will withhold solutions and thoughts about how we can make it better until the next episode. So with that as prelude, Diane, dive in. Tell us what are your nine areas? Just give us the overview and then we'll go from there.

Great. Well, and thanks to both of you for some comments and feedback and help in, in organizing, because, as you know, the original list was very, very long. And so we've done some group whatnot. But so there are nine. The first six, broadly, are about related, I think, to the student experience and so more about their actual education and learning. The next two after that are more about the function and role of schools in the community and sort of the local environment. And then the final one is more about the role that schools, K12 schools play. Play in America. And I think it's fair for us to say that we're really focused on public schools here in this conversation. Obviously, there'll be some, you know, overlap with private school, but really that's. We're. We're here talking about public schools. And so just quickly, those first six include what we're calling just the core education. The, the. The role of teaching characters and. Or val. Character or values to. To young people. The role of the school in terms of custodial care. Michael, we've talked about this several times on the podcast, as well as security of those young people that you're charged with caring for. Number four, we're labeling it a social services agency. So school as social services agency, five as policymaker. And I think this one's really interesting to dig into. In terms of the policies that schools. Schools and school systems make. And then six as what we would call evaluator or recommender. And, you know, we could start with six, or there's a big argument there of. Of, you know, what comes first, chicken or egg. But nonetheless. So those are our first six. And then in terms of the local community sort of role, the first is really schools and school districts are in many ways local government agencies. And so that's a very important role they're playing. They are also a community hub. And so seven and eight for us. And then finally we're calling it social reformer as sort of this national role. But I'll be curious as we get into it. I think we probably might come up with a different name as we. As we talk about it. So those are the nine that we've landed on for today.

It's a good list of nine. I'm not sure I would add much to it. Stacy, how do you think about that list before we dive into each one?

Yeah, I think it's a good list. I can't really think of things that aren't contained in those categories, and. So excited to dive in.

Let's do it. So, Diane, why don't you take us through that first one, which was core education. Talk to us about what's in this grouping, what's maybe not in this grouping, if that's relevant, and then let's start to go deep in the problems before Stacy and I react.

Great. So I think when people think of schools traditionally that, you know, in the most traditional sense, they think of the three Rs, reading, writing, arithmetic. And so this really. It starts there, I think, and then grows a little bit. Obviously, over time it has grown, but it is what I think most people think of as probably the most core function of a public school is to teach kids to academic skills and knowledge, including reading, writing, and arithmetic. And, of course, we've expanded to history and science and second languages. And I mean, I couldn't even begin to list all of the elective courses and, you know, interest courses and whatnot that have come into schools. But there's still that sort of core set of knowledge that is. Is, you know, generally tested and assessed and. And common across schools. And then there's. Is how that is done. And so there's a social component to it. By definition, schools are places of. Where lots of people are coming to learn together. This is not individual tutoring. And so how. How are you part of a community, a group, a classroom? What do those skills look like, and then obviously a big part of schools has become extracurricular activities and interests and all of the activity that happens in school, young people. And then again on the part of core education, which is a little bit more of how we do it, we have a very significant and robust, what is called special education component to our system. And this is really driven by federal legislation providing supports and resources and accommodations for young people who qualify for having a learning disability and therefore an individual learning plan. And that is, is a significant part of what happens sort of in the core program now in terms of resources, people focus, etc. So that's kind of the, the what's in this bucket? You know, I would say I really try. I mean I started listing problems and you know, when I was at the micro level, I was getting into hundreds of them. I rolled it up to one big problem from my perspective, thank you both for laughing at me, is that I would argue that the core education model in America, in the vast majority of schools, is just not aligned with the current science of how of learning. And I would say really on two fronts. One, both what we teach and what we, we preference to teach, but then very much how we teach it and how we expect people to learn. And as I went through my laundry list of all the things that were wrong, it it every time I thought about what was wrong, I was like, well, it's because we're not following the science. And, and you can take this all the way down to the lowest youngest kids where we literally as, as the country is waking up to. We have not been using the science of what we know about how learning, how kids learn to read. We haven't been using that in our schools. We haven't been doing that in most of our schools. So it's everything from that all the way up to, you know, something that we've all are very passionate about and spend a lot of time about how you actually personalize learning as young people get older and enable them to self direct their learning and drive their learning and have, you know, build those skills around it and sort of everything in between. So I'll stop there, but that's my macro problem.

Stacy.

Yeah, I definitely agree Diane, with that as a way of thinking about an umbrella category for lots of things that we might list in more detail. And I think alongside that kind of at the same level of granularity or altitude would be maybe is not

always

the choices that folks are making in the system and in schools, within the system about the academic program and the kind of the social aspect of schooling and all the other things you mentioned, there's not always agreement at the community level or if you think not quite that broadly about it and say at the family and families level about the so what where are we headed? What's our overarching idea as a community or kind of bundle of ideas that school is for and how we ensure that what we're doing every day for 12 years for young people, for kiddos, all the way through young adults or late teens, is actually driving towards some common vision of what it means to leave our system ready to do whatever's next. And I think sometimes that either lack of, let me say it differently, either an ambiguity around that or perhaps where there's more specificity, but maybe some tensions and disagreements about to what end kind of filter then back through, especially at the high school level. But I think it goes all the way can go all the way back through what frame within which are we making choices as a community and a group of professional educators about academic programs and how we're approaching the social learning aspect of school, how much emphasis and what's the mix of interest in extracurricular kinds of things and how do those tie back with some longer term view of purposes and skills and mindsets that kids might leave their experience with? I think that either super ambiguous, not well considered, or maybe try to put some stakes in the ground, but not in a way that brings some some, you know, coalescence or agreement around some purposes makes that bat makes it really hard to balance all those things, Diane, on your list, all of which I think are absolutely functions of school within its core education mission.

It's really interesting to hear you say that, Stacy, because my head went one way when Diane was giving the list, which I'll say was I was noting that as you look through particularly the extracurricular or non core classes through so much of American schooling over the 1900s, it was just an ever expanding list of classes. Right. The proverbial shopping. Right. The grocery store analogies. Q Here. That were so prominent in Nation at Risk, of course, in 1983. And then at some point it became, well, actually the definition of school is how much you are learning, which shifts much more to the how we teach and learn. Right. That Diane was referencing. And I would argue those schools continue to expand in scope just along perhaps the other eight dimensions that you have listed here, Diane, that we're going to get into later on. So I was just sort of reflecting on that point. A second piece is though, within the core education of course, special education has continued to expand in terms of using up of resources, identifying students who are special education. Diane, you spoke quite passionately and persuasively, I think, last season about how our incentives in special education are not around innovation and efficiency and really delivering, but around more and more and more resources and a lot of box checking and things of that nature. And so I reflect, you know, there's that expansion theme. And then I guess, Stacy, when you jumped in, then the third thing that I thought about, I, I love where you went with the purpose conversation. What's the purpose of this education? And as you both know from my, you know, most recent book, like, my big argument is communities need to have that conversation almost tabula rasa. Right. Like, what are we trying to go for here? And they don't. They instead just accept the four math, four social studies, you know, three or four science, whatever it is. Right. And. And just sort of accept these structures that have been handed down without really getting behind intent. And it strikes me that so many of the food fights, even within the camps that, that try to find their way through the. What the science is teaching us about how and what we learn, they're still we. I mean, we should acknowledge. Right. There's still food fights in those camps as well, of course, because that's the process of science. But I think it's often because we're guilty of not having an and conversation. And we're all too often having an OR conversation when we sort of. And we end up talking past each other in some of these rooms and miss the changes we could be making if we started with Stacy's conversation around what are we driving toward here and why. And so that's. I think those are my three reflections out of this list that I think you're right, Diane. At the end of the day, it means we're teaching a bunch of things that don't have a lot of coherence we haven't given a lot of thought behind. We're not quite sure why we've privileged this branch of math over another one, et cetera, et cetera. And we're, you know, just not following all of the lessons that we are learning from, from the science of learning and incorporating them or at least trying them out with different populations and learning what works and why and so forth.

Yep. And so we're off to a rough start, friends, because that's the thing we're supposed to be really good at. Oh, boy.

All right, well, then tell us your second one. Maybe we'll Surprise you.

Okay, here we go. So this one we've labeled as, you know, the teaching of values and. Or character. And you know, I, I almost hesitate to even just say those words, but I do think some of this conversation is defined, designed to be provoke a little bit. And those are provocative words in our country as we know. You know, it's confusing to me. Why? Because at some role and level, look, young people are in schools a good amount of time, as you said, for 12 or 13 years and for significant parts of their days. And so it seems logical to me that a school should be helping them figure out, you know, basic norms of being a person and being in a community and, and beyond what we just said on the learning side. But like, how are you actually preparing to be an adult and to be a participating member of our democracy? And certainly, you know, when, when public education was, you know, conceptualized, these were, these were huge aims of what we were trying to do. We could go back in history and talk about some of them were, you know, sort of ill intended in some ways in terms of foreseeing certain groups of people to adapt to, you know, other norms and whatnot. But at a macro level, just the idea of being like a, a citizen of our community and our country and our nation and how you actually do that and be an adult, it certainly seems logical that the school would play a role in helping in partnering with families and helping that to come about. And I think there's very significant challenges here. I've expanded to two this time, but they're still pretty broad. And so the first one, for people who've been listening will they will not be surprised for me to hear, to hear me say this, which is, I think it's the college for all push. I'm going to go to recent history where we have really gotten away from as a result of driving towards college for all we've gotten away from and disconnected as a K12 system of thinking, it's our responsibility to help prepare people for career, employment, life outside of school. And I think we're so focused on preparing them for the next educational institution, we've sort of lost any sort of responsibility or focus on that front. I'm being quite general here. Obviously lots of schools and lots of people think about generalize. It's all good systematically. Right. So I think that's problem number one. And then the second one is the, the obvious one in the society we're living in right now, whose values and like, whose role it is to do these things. And there are you know, these are not small, little, you know, bickering going on about this. These are big societal questions, I think, right now, and schools are caught right in the middle of them. And, you know, I think school systems, if you. If you use the sort of fight, flight, or freeze analogy, I think school systems do one of the three of those, and they all do something different. You know, some of them are just going at it and duking it out, and others are, like, literally running as far away as possible. And we're like, we're only going to teach the three Rs, and some are literally frozen and don't know what to do. And so there you have it. Category two.

Stacy, you get to go first again.

Great. Okay. I love that. Flight, fight, freeze.

Yeah, that's a good analogy.

I haven't thought of it in this context, and I think it's just. You're right, Diane. And, you know, I'll go back to something we talked a little bit about on the higher ed episodes, because, you know, the original podcast that we were responding to, it talked about, they called this moral instruction. Right. And we've. We weren't crazy about that phrase. And then they had a particular. The podcasters had a particular point of view about it that we didn't entirely share. Shared some of it, but not all of it. And I'll just kind of go back to part of my, you know, answer there or part of our discussion there, which is like, I get. I, of course, get. I mean, I grew up in a very religious and, you know, politically conservative part of the country. I've moved back here, and so I went to high school about 13 miles from where I'm sitting today. And these issues are fraught still with, or currently fraught with a challenge. But I think part of what I think about this is I get why it's hard. It's hard because it's very important. And it's hard because of both the multiplicity of points of view you could have about which values and whose and all of that. And then schools are in this context of the larger political and cultural moment we're in, in society, which is very hard. We know it because we're trying to work through it and bridge it in our own lives with people in our families and friends and colleagues, and. And so, of course, it's hard in schools. The reason the flight or freeze option just, to me is I get. While on the surface it is happening, it's not really happening, because, just as I said, I think about colleges, it's happening. There's values being transmitted, messaged, inculcated, shared, massaged, even if it's not intentional, because it's impossible for it not to, as you said, Diane, like, you know, kiddos are in school from a few minutes after they wake up in the morning until, you know, until right as or right after their parents get home from work these days. And it's impossible for your 8 most active waking hours of the day as a child or a teenager or a person, an adult person in the world to be values neutral, values free, like it's happening and going to happen. And so if you are fleeing or freezing, what you're really opting into is almost anything goes until somebody's mad about it. Because now individual educators and, you know, administrators are making almost individual choices about which values they're bringing to bear and which norms they'll prioritize or not in their classrooms or in their cohorts of students. And I think that's actually a recipe for more tension and more upset because there's not some overarching perspective, just as we were talking about with the core education part, there's not some overarching, even loose agreement about why we might be committed to ensuring that a set of values and some character attributes are prioritized in our experience and what it means to have a core set of those, while allowing for plenty of different perspectives and points of view across families and religious traditions and country of origin and all kinds of things, but to just

again,

fight on the ones that are hot button cultural issues right now, or freeze or flee because it's hard and you don't want to upset anybody. I just think, I think we're missing the boat a little bit, both at the micro and then the larger kind of broader macro education level right now to try to act as if it's not the role of schools and educators to be providing some sort of underpinning of values, character, moral reasoning in young people. And then you got to put the filter of kind of age appropriateness and those kinds of things on it. But I think we need to be more intentional about it, not less like, lean into it more with some intentionality and good intentions rather than try not to offend anybody, which is usually a recipe for offending more people than you would have if you were trying to be more intentional about what you're up to. Right.

It's so interesting to hear you say that one, Stacy, because also, if you think about you said age appropriateness. Right. And the last time we were recording, as you said, oral Instruction was one of Ben's lists. And the thought I had at that time, which I think has been borne out based on recent events as we're recording this, is that college is too late to build in A lot of these things that we want to see students be able to do, meaning have civil conversations across disagreement and recognize disagreement as a strength rather than a threat. And so, you know, obviously there's age appropriateness of not introducing content that is inappropriate for, say, a six or seven year old. But I actually think building in these character skills, these habits, these, what I think of as fundamental democratic values, are incredibly important. And to your word, intentionality, very intentionally like this was the purpose of the public school system. This is why we got public dollars.

That's right.

To do this enterprise above anything else, preparing for careers or anything. Right. And with all the caveats that Diane like alluded to. Right. With where it was misapplied and certain groups that were discriminated against and so forth, the purpose was to knit us into something larger. And so I, and I think you're right to a large degree, the debate now is often, should we or shouldn't we? Not acknowledging regardless, you are. And then two, it's sort of this weird pulls of, and I'll just say like, you know, the right being character matters and the left historic, you know, for a little period of time was like, I don't know about that and, but now very much the opposite. Right. Actually, it's really important. And here's the values that we think and the right saying, whoa, wait a second. So it's, it's kind of a weird conversation against a backdrop where I'm going to get the number wrong. But like 80% of the population largely actually has a common set of answers for what these values, et cetera, are. And that's what I think is so maddening, frustrating about this. And it goes, I think, to your first thing, right, when we were talking about the core program is that if individual school communities came together and said, okay, what's our purpose? What's our zone? Like, where, where's the agreement that we can all get behind? And then I, I, I can't remember when this came up recently, but it was in the last few days my wife and I were taught having a conversation about something. And she said, isn't that great? That, or I, I can't remember that. And I said, well, I don't know if they should be doing this. And she said, you know, good point. We ask educators to do a ton of stuff for society that probably overstretches them. Right. I don't know if it was in reference to the Bad Therapy book by Abigail Schreier or what, but the point, I think is something that I really learned deeply from you, Diane, which is a lot of these things you can do in the context of the academics rather than your special carve out lesson that's going to offend some group in some area. Right. And so my fifth grade graduation speech, I'm going to go to that. I remember talking about learning the value of fair play, learning the value of, you know, respecting your classmates in just the lessons themselves. Like they were like, you know, David had three apples and I took two.

Right.

Like that sort of stuff communicates a lot of this. And we, we pull these things apart, I think, in very strange ways that maybe provoke a lot of the fights that, that we could be smart about. And as I've learned from Diane, you actually learn it better when it's all knit together as opposed to atomizing it all. So I think those are my. Actually one other quick one, Diane, before you react, which is you also had this notion of college for all distorting a lot of this, which I completely agree with. And it looks like Stacy's going to jump in after this. What's interesting about that is I think the things you listed, preparing people for career, life, et cetera outside of school, I think is spot on. And that's also a controversial statement. Right. Because a lot of people would say, oh, it can't be about those material interests or it shouldn't be about whatever else it should be about. I'm not sure what they think college's purpose is, but. Right. They would say that it's about something larger and college sort of represents it, which again, in the backdrop we are in right now, seems absolutely crazy from my perspective, but. Yeah, they see.

Yeah, yeah.

No, Diane. Michael, I'm glad you flagged that because Diane was so glad that you kind of in the values section named this value that a lot of us had been working on for a couple decades. Right. The college for all as a value in the system and the set of expectations that come with that and that we're trying to build in for students to, to see themselves as both capable and worthy of being on a path to college. That's how we, you know, the ed reformers of, you know, the, the call it, you know, 1995 to 2015 or so. Like that's the, you know, that one of our driving purposes was college for all. And I Always try to be cautious about this and say that wasn't like in a vacuum. It was in the context of some very real national data that then showed up in medium and small ways at the state and local district and school level where you had these really significant gaps in what outcomes were that then if you traced them back, you could see why those outcomes were so different. Because we developed a really great way of sorting kids pretty early, you know, before they were preteens. Yeah.

Deeply disturbing ways. Right.

Deeply disturbing ways. On, you're either on that path to college, which only a, you know, small percentage of you are going to be headed towards and the rest of you, well, you know, we'll, we'll, we'll do other things for you. And what's interesting is it's so much of policy in general and different sorts of social issues and reform efforts end up being these pendulum swings. Right. It's like to counteract that very undesirable, untenable state we were in 30 years ago where we ended up not so surprisingly. Right. If you reflect back on it was this narrowing, okay, we've got to get everybody to college or at least ensure that everybody could go to college right. Then it's hard to do all the things on our top six, you know, things that we're going to talk through. We're only on the second one. It's so hard to do all of them. So we can only do a few really well. So let's do reading, math, ensure our kids are ready to take important tests that are going to kind of make or break this college for all path that we've got everybody on. And when it comes to character, slash, whatever the other words are for those kinds of things, it's going to be in service of good grades and doing well on tests and kind of the like persistence, what was the word? Grit. Like the thing that you need to be able to get to and persist in college. Now again, I don't mean to say it in a way that suggests, I think those things are bad to have, but because of the way we so narrowly focused and then kind of hyper engineered an accountability system around it, we did end up in a place where a broader notion of what it means to be a successful human, a young adult who has what they need to choose a path or two and navigate those effectively, just all got to the degree it existed before the college for all push, you know, it certainly got bit by bit kind of chipped away. So the three of us and a lot of other great folks that we're kind of on the journey with. Have been for the last almost decade now kind of pushing in a different direction or an adapted direction from this. But it does have values embedded in it. Like, that's why I was glad you put it here and that those set of values actually do affect young people. It affects families, educators, etc. So I don't know. I, I talked too much on the last podcast. I wasn't gonna do it.

No, it's a robust conversation and I think we are too ambitious when we begin. But I will encourage us to pick up the pace here on these, These are, these next ones. I mean, look, those are two really big ones and probably the rest are as well, but maybe not as we might not as be as passionate about it. So let me go to number three, which is. I would. I'll start with the problem here.

No passion here.

Conflict with the first two elements in many ways. So this, this third one is this, this role that the school system plays in terms of providing custodial care. You know, and if we're going to be really horrible and provocative, like Ben and Mark, we'd say like babysitt. And, and with that comes the obligations around protecting the security and the safety of young people. And I, I'm going to say that's on two levels at least now, which is their physical safety and emotional. That's two, actually, there's three, as well as their data and their privacy. And so as much, I mean, this is as big in sort of the virtual world, if you will, as it is in the, in the physical world in a lot of ways. So this is a big role. I would say the biggest problem here is the people who work in schools for the most part don't want to do this job. They don't really conceptualize of it as their job. They don't like it and they don't do it terribly well, quite frankly, probably because they don't like it and don't want to do it. I mean, most school people think of themselves as like academic, teacher, learner, those things. Not babysitter, you know, security guard, any of those things. So I think that's one of the biggest problems. And the conflict is though, that families and like, they want and expect this. And so then it's also not very good the way it's done because the people who are doing it don't want to do it. So I'll stop there.

Stacey?

Yeah. You want me to go? You want to stay in our order? Michael, say a couple, couple things about this I, you know, I don't, I don't, I don't have children in, in, in, in our public school, in our schools. And, you know, I see all these videos now. I'm not on social media all that often, but when I am, I do. If I went by that, one of the things I would assume is that not just in our high schools, but especially in our high schools, I have a chaos and some of the physical safety concerns. Thinking sort of, Diane, about kind of outside in, but also inside the physical safety of kids from each other and sometimes from teachers and teachers from students. I don't know how widespread that actually is. I have educators in my family. They teach younger ones. I do not hear these stories about their schools in any way, but I see all these videos of these. And so it's like this. There is a sense, I think, in the popular consciousness right now that at least our high schools are absolutely out of control. And that part of the contributing factor, maybe the biggest driver of that is discipline policies. I know we're going to talk about policy later, but kind of the approach schools have been taking to ensuring good community order in the building and a move over the last decade to think more about restorative practices and ways of building community through tough moments rather than just a punishment philosophy. And so I think there's this tension, you know, tension that's been playing out, continues to play out, and with the pendulum swings, who knows where this is headed anytime soon. Where it's not only physical safety from outside in, but physical safety from kids, kids from each other and, you know, et cetera. And what it makes me think about, you know, Diane, you, you, we kind of talked about, I'm not sure you mentioned this or not, but a second ago, but, you know, kind of worst case scenario, right, is school shootings. And you all know that some young people in my family were high school students in a school shooting in our hometown back in 2018. And that notion of there's so much to talk about there, which we're not going to, and the idea then that kids are a danger to each other. In my niece's situation, the shooter was a student, an 11th grader that in a relatively small town people had known since third or fourth grade wasn't an outside in. And so then the way that shifted the culture of the community and the school as kids as dangers to each other. And so, like the stakes that the incentives that that creates around safety that result in enormous amount of community time, attention, emotion and real dollars that get plowed and dollars have to come from somewhere, so they come from something else. Probably those things we were already talking about, right. Or academics, values, et cetera.

And. And

again, the kind of the interplay between physical safety and what's happening, what we have to do to signal to the community that we're protecting, providing the safety, and what it turns our view of our young people into, and therefore how that inculcates the culture of the school. It's just, you know, it's a uniquely American problem right now, and, and. And a real one, certainly for the concrete reason, you know, obviously of real physical safety, but also this cultural notion of how we think about our schools and our young people, you know, we. We used to have fire drills and. And when we were all kids, right? And now, like, active shooter drills start

pretty young,

as early as they can start them. And so there's a real. There's a real issue here. Like I said, I know we don't want to. I've already spent too much time on it. But it's a real challenge that our professional educators are facing day in and day out in their communities. For sure.

Yeah. I'll try to be brief, but just pulling from that, I'm having this deja vu moment because it occurs to me the three of us were at an elevator in a hotel about a year ago having this very conversation, and it spurred Diane and I to have a podcast on the issue you just talked about. Stacy.

Yeah. Should go back and listen to that. It was very good.

So. Well, so I. Anyway, with that acknowledgment, I guess the. The couple things I would say are, one, the tension in this one seems to me an ironic one at this moment in our society's history between one, the child care piece of this not having adequate hours or time and availability for the working families of today, and two, on the other end, chronic absenteeism being the highest it's ever been that I can remember. And so those are two things that are in direct tension with each other. And I think it connects to a couple of things here, which is, I think it connects, number one, to the safety and discipline, certainly piece of this. It connects to the formation of character in the second one. It connects to the relevance of the curriculum in the first one and whether people actually have passion for this and see a place for it in their lives. That all connects, frankly, to mental health, which then connects to the shootings. Right. And so there's this sort of. These three, actually, I think, connect in really interesting ways. And the last pieces this is yet again, I think, one of those places where we fight a lot on the edges with each other. And one of the fights is like sort of the, you know, the restorative justice, you know, don't discipline versus the, you know, no excuse, excuse me, zero tolerance sort of policy. Right. And. And I think a lot of people who have been pushing for. They get lumped in with the restorative sort of view of things, but that's not quite what they're saying. Right. Like a doctor Becky or someone like that. They believe in consequences for action and they believe in hard lines and limits. They just don't believe in arbitrary ones that have nothing to do with what you just did. Right. And so again, there's this third way that I think is through these polls that we keep. Keep missing and maybe I'll just leave it there.

Yeah. It's hard not to go to solutions and it's hard to do all of these short.

Let's go to the next one. Because it connects also to these things.

It does. It's deeply connected because quite frankly, what schools a big element of. Of their purpose. Well, I don't know about their purpose, but of what they're spending their time and resources on is essentially is a social services agency. And so when we just tick through the responsibilities of most schools and districts, transportation like some of these districts run full. I mean, many school districts do the job that entire companies do, only one element and they're doing like all of these different versions. Right. So they run whole transportation fleets. Meals they are serving not just lunch anymore. Breakfast now too. And oftentimes snacks so full like feeding of large numbers of people, some basic health elements. So they're testing your eyesight and for life. And you know, all of the, you know, we won't even get into covet. And all of those pieces that, I mean where schools literally turned into clinics. Yeah. I'm not even going to talk about how I felt when California started encouraging every high school to have someone have the ability to administer Narcan or. I'm getting that name wrong. But the, you know, if there's a drug overdose, it's like, what More please. And then the schools have always played this role, but can. But it's more and more complex, which is they have to connect families and children to other agencies that are supporting them, especially when there are troubles or crises. And not forget the role of schools as mandated reporters. So it is incumbent upon schools and everyone in them to report if they suspect child abuse or neglect or any of Those items. And you know, some schools are even now employing social workers, counselors, you know, school resource officers. I'm not sure what bucket they fall in, but one of these so running huge systems that are. Are going well beyond just the classroom that we've been talking about. And I would just say the obvious challenge here, the most obvious is like these are operationally intensive endeavors. They require a whole set of, you know, skills and knowledge that are not necessarily aligned with everything we just talked about. And again, most people in schools don't want to do these extra jobs. They don't want to do them. They extra. They feel on the side, they feel added on. And when you treat jobs like that, that way without operational efficiency and excellence, they don't get done well, which like ends up being this whole spiral. So I would say those are the big problems.

Yeah, I have nothing to add on this one. I, I agree completely with the explanation and your, your identification of problems.

Yeah, I'm in the same boat. I think it just. And, and yet again it's. I think this is maybe the best evidence of the experience expanding nature of what we have thrown on schools. Every social ill, it seems that we have like ah, you solve at schools. Right. And this is where we have thrown another one. And I'm not sure that they can completely get out of thinking about these things if they're trying to accomplish the first three, which we can get into maybe in the second episode. So Diane, why don't you march on. Great.

A lot of tension there. Number five shifts us to what we're calling policymaker. And I think this one I later I'm going to offer a local government agency. And some people might say, what's the difference between the two? Aren't those the same? And so let me make the case for why I have separated them here. You know, when I think about people talk about government and they spend a lot of time thinking about the federal government, I think less time thinking about their state government, but they do think about state government, less time thinking about county government. We are talking about people in school buildings and maybe on school boards who are literally making policy decisions regularly that maybe have the biggest impact on the lives of children and families. I mean the everything from their grading policies and their discipline and behavior policies and their health and safety policies as we've just all experienced. You know, all of those decisions throughout Covid were made at local school and school district levels, generally with guidance from the federal government and the state governments. But one of the challenges we had as a local People I personally had was they didn't actually tell us what to do. They gave us guidance and then we had to decide what to do, which basically meant they told us what to do but gave us no cover for doing it. Right. And so like this. But the point being, local people have a lot of power to create policies that really impact families. Let's just take for example, when schools and districts decide to have professional development during their workday. And that means one day a week, parents have to pick their kids up at noon or whatever it might be some schedule. Like to your point about not being family friendly in terms of care and things like that. So I would say the problem here is that under any circumstance, good policy is really hard to write. And I would challenge anyone who's never written a policy to really get a in there and try to do it and see how hard it is. Because it's really, really hard. And we have about 130,000 schools and almost 14,000 districts. We do not have people who are well resourced, expert, super thought, you know, capable of writing the best type of policy under really hard circumstances. And so instead you sort of get like whatever people think sounds good, you know, and the implications are extreme.

Yeah, totally agree with that. Like, as you said, I have the. This is the policymaker, the local school district plus any school based school level policies are, you know, the biggest policy influence on the day to day life of families. Like it dictates what time people get up in the morning.

Right.

You know, because whatever time school starts, you gotta zero backwards from that and say, okay, this is the time we need to get through our cycle time of morning craziness. So it's like wake up time is dictated by school schedule and then on from there, all the things you said. But just to make it very concrete and embedded in our lives. And I actually think that was one of the things that was so hard about COVID I should say that differently. It wasn't one of the hardest things about COVID A thing about COVID that was difficult for families that I think became such, such, you know, into the popular consciousness because it was affecting every family, was just how central school policy was in their family clock and calendar. Kind of unexamined, you know, maybe sometimes unexamined. Right.

And.

And then when you kind of go with what you said, Diane, which I totally agree with, just how hard it is to make good policy at whatever level you are and you know, whatever level of expertise and resources you have, it's just hard. And we're asking Folks to. We're not asking them. It's their job, it's their responsibility as board members, educators to make policies that touch every family with a school age child in their community without a lot of support and kind of knowledge building, capability building. It's very, very complex. And we have it fifth here. You know, it could be elevated, right. To, you know, depending on how you want to structure a list. It's, it really does flow through almost everything's grading, kind of course schedule and graduation requirements, like all the things. Right.

So, yeah, I don't know that I have much to add it, I mean, and it spills into transportation or transportation spills into it. Right. And all these things are, it just shows you, I think, how interdependent these are. But, but what I, what I'll observe at this point is you pulling them out and naming them. Diane, I think in this way is useful because we see all of the complexity and all of the possible areas for breakdown. And as you said, people aren't trained to do a lot of these roles and yet they are core functions that they have been asked to play or defaulted into playing in many cases. With that, let's go into your sixth, which I think is sort of an exclamation point for a bunch of these.

Well, and it sort of rounds out the student experience grouping. And like I said, I could have led with this one because then everything sort of falls from it. But the role of the school district in K12 is to evaluate, I would say evaluate young people, their skills, their knowledge, you know, their character, etc, and to recommend them for what comes next in their life. And again, a profound role that the school and the people in it are playing in terms of the outcome, outcomes and lives of young people and their families. This is true, you know, in terms of, they said they determine the grades of kids, which we know makes a big difference. They confer the credential on them, they make recommendations to colleges and employers and things like that. And the quality of their school actually signals to those other folks the type of education that the young person has received and the experience they've had. Okay, There's a problem with every one of those things I just said, like they assign grades, but this, this honestly is discounted now because of grade inflation. Right. They assign the high school credential, but that really isn't valued in our society anymore. And so it's pretty meaningless. They write recommendations for colleges, but those, those are undervalued and probably partly because it's the same people having to Write them over and over again with no time to do it, as a general rule, and not a lot of resources. And so they all sort of start to sound the same. And in fact, a lot of people kind of copy and paste. And colleges know that. So those are undervalued. So there's this huge giant role that they're playing, but the no one's valuing them, playing it. And so what I. I would actually argue is the most important, and this is really sad to me, role that K12 is playing, and this is primarily high schools, quite frankly, is the reputation they have, because colleges and universities do have these perceptions about high schools mostly aligned to the socioeconomic status, quite frankly, of the student population, of how good those schools are. And they factor that into their admissions decisions. And so there's this giant important role that all this time and energy goes to, that it, I would argue, is not actually being valued or used in meaningful ways. Big problem.

Stacey, you want to jump in?

Yeah, totally agree with that. I think when we go to solutions in the next episode, we can get a little more detailed about how some of these components of this function kind of play out and how we could do it differently. I think it's interesting, Diane, this last one that you mentioned about school reputation being the signaler, especially to those applying to selective colleges. And then you kind of tie that to the higher ed conversation we had on the last episodes. And it's like a very small percentage of kids go to a selective college, even in the college for all concept, it really is a very small percentage of institutions, higher ed institutions that fall in that bucket. And so, so then what, like, what about for everybody else? Like what's happening here with this evaluator recommender function? It is a weak. It's a signal. It's a weak signal. And back to some of the other things we talked about, like not very intentionally conceived and organized around, outside of compliance, right. Transcripts have to get created and all that kind of stuff. Like it's outside of that. Like, what's the. So what? Like what are the use cases for a credential and to what end? And how does that backward map to things we might do in the core education component and then the social component?

So, yeah, that's really. Yeah, that's really interesting, the compliance observation. When I was looking at this, I was struck, I guess, by two things. One, Diane, a question. Would you put the counseling function, like the guidance counseling function here, Would you put it in courses? Would you put it it in, you know, social service? Agency all three, because, like, that's something we know schools are tasked with doing, but do it. I mean, we know the ratios are like 400 something to one students to guidance counselors, but it, but it seems to fall into a bunch of these. And so this is the one where I thought to mention it because you have this signaler or helping shape right. Where students will go after in this one. And then I guess the other one that occurred to me was this last bullet that you had as well. I heard Raj Chetty speak recently, and I hadn't focused on this before, but he put this slide up right of schools that disproportionately get their students into selective colleges. And I had just assumed, I live in Lexington, Massachusetts. I had just assumed Lexington High School, you know, closer to where you live, Diane. Palo Alto High School. I just assumed that they would be on par, frankly, with the top private schools, and they're not. And I was really struck by that statistic. It's like basically, you know, a Title 1 school, Lexington High School, sort of count for about the same Andover. Whoa. Okay, now that counts for a lot. And so I thought, I thought that was just really interesting against this backdrop, then that you mentioned it. And it seems to me, obviously, incredibly problematic because it's completely decoupled, as we know, with the actual work that students are in fact doing. And the rate of like, as Ryan Craig would call it, the distance traveled. Right. We would call it growth, but of individual students and what that might signal about where or where not would be

a good fit for them on the positive front. I think this category is ripe for solutions and there's a big opportunity there. So I'm excited to talk about it it when we get into the next episode. All right, so that sort of rounds out the. The experience of the young people. Now I want to shift to two that are more about the local community and the role that schools play there. And so this first one is what we're calling local government agency. And I just want to tick through the role that schools and districts play. So number one, they generally have elected school boards. So we've got a full election that's going on and this seated board that holds public meetings and hold into all of those public meeting laws and rules and regulations and. And all that goes on there. I will just quickly say that many superintendents say that they spend literally half their time. This is the chief executive of a school district. They will argue that they spend half their time managing their board in those meetings. So take that the Next thing that they do, schools and school districts, most of them can levy taxes, they can issue bonds. I mean, these are, these are government agenc taxing the people. Maybe the most important role of the government in the US or the thing we take most seriously, schools can do. They also are required for collecting an extraordinary amount of data and reporting it at the local, state and federal level. This goes on and on all year long. It keeps getting bigger and bigger every year. They, they are, when we think of this, they, they are entrusted with significant dol and federal dollars. I was talking to a state superintendent the other day. She, she, as the chief learning officer, the state superintendent of instruction controls half the state's budget. And that is not abnormal. Most states are spending about half their budget on education. These are significant dollars that the, that these boards and these people are entrusted to spending. Well, thoughtfully, et cetera. And then finally, they control huge amounts of the public land. You know, and it depends on the state and how that goes. But in some cases, they are even the people who perform the tasks of zoning and entitling land. And, you know, this is the, the role that the city or the state is often playing for everyone else. But, you know, schools can get exemptions and do that themselves in a lot of cases and places. And so massive, massive governmental roles that schools and districts are playing. And as I thought about this one, I just, I think about my experience in schools and how people who do things like this that involve a lot of money and a lot of land, I would argue, and I'm not going to give a value judgment here, but that is more valued by our society than educating people or providing care for children. Like, when we think about who do we think is more professional, who do we pay more, who do we care? You know, it's the people on the side of the land and the money, right? And so if you revere that a little bit more, where is your time and attention going to go in a system, but to that, right? And in my experience, there's very little connection between the six things we just talked about and this part of the House. And there's very few people who work on it in K12. And I contrast that to our conversation about higher ed, where one of the critiques was we're starting to see like a one for one, an administrator for every student. Not so in K12 at all. So you have far fewer people with different areas of expertise, kind of disconnected from the mission and the purpose, doing all of these functions. That's a big problem in my Mind?

Yeah, I don't have data in front of me, but I want to push a little bit on that last point you made, Diane. And I think this is where kind of broad brush might smooth out a lot of variability. And so I think the way you just described it as has far fewer people charged with managing, governing all of these kind of asset and revenue generating and liability functions, you know, far fewer of them and far more educators where these fewer positions are paid a lot more. And all of that I think like I think in mid sized to small communities, that's probably right. In medium to small size school systems around the country, I think it might break a little bit when you get to the largest school districts in the country. And so if you look at the 100 or 200 largest school districts that are in really significant metro areas around the country or in those really large counties in Florida and Maryland, there are a lot of administrators, you start to get ratios that, that are closer. And so if you kind of look at the headcount allocation in large systems like that, you know, classroom fair headcount FTEs as compared with non classroom FTEs, you get more, you get closer to that one to one or sometimes even one plus to one. But your point's well taken. And again, I think depending on system size it might look different in most places. What you said I think is exactly right. Right. And you know, the other contrast I'd made is just like I agree with the way you framed it as educators, their value in terms of what we are willing to pay and the people who manage this stuff in the school district, that's one comp. Another comp would be, you know, some of these places like the larger midsize and the large ones, like we're talking billions of dollars of assets in terms of real estate, physical plant, cash debt, all of those things. And you're looking at 300 grand for somebody to be the head of one of these systems and like kind of the comparable, I mean in the public sector that's about, you know, that's, that fits. But if you start to think about the private sector, somebody who's got billions of of dollars of assets under management that they are accountable for, then you put the extra, what should be accountability and transparency of it being my tax dollars and yours and yours and yours and alohrs are actually kind of underpaid, right? Might be underpaid in terms of the kind of judgment, leadership ability, ability to bring people along into some of these, you know, public levies that we need to do and the kind of expertise at the general management level even know what Right. Questions to ask, you know, of the financial people who are managing all these assets. And so I can see it both ways. Underpaying educators relative to administrators. Yeah. Maybe underpaying some of these administrators relative to comparable jobs in the private sector. Managing this level of resources and complexity. I don't know. You know, I could make that case too, too.

It's really interesting, Stacy. And I was just thinking about AI as it comes in and perhaps maybe changes some of these dynamics and we want more human facing roles and some others can change because I, I, I had the same reaction as you did. I, I think of places like a New York City or Newark where it's like half the dollar doesn't even reach the school. Right. It gets stuck in central admin and what the heck is going on there. The second thing I had more is problem because I think this is a really good one to identify, Diane. Man is how many of these places, like the elections are off cycle, like, right. Voting is not very high. And yet you realize what a disproportionate impact.

Yes.

These places play in our society and they're kind of decoupled from the democracy. Right. And so sometimes we, like you hear an argument, oh, I just wish you were out of politics. Well, guess what? When it's public dollars from taxpayers, it's part of politics. We can hate it, but it is. We've done a lot to sort of take it out of the politics. And I'm not sure that that's been a good thing, given to your point, the gravity and enormity of some of these decisions.

Yeah. Just to close this one, I've spent a lot of time in school board meetings over my career, and I think it's just so clear, the tension. And a charge that I think is an impossible charge where you have like this school board that is in the same meeting deciding, you know, if an individual student is going to be expelled from a school and, and considering whether or not they should sell or buy a gigantic piece of land and whether or not they're going to, you know, exempt themselves from zoning and then how to spend, you know, bazillions of dollars. And so there, there is, yeah, there's a problem with that. And that's what your regular school board looks like.

Absolutely. And as you were kind of tying those two things, something Michael was saying, what you just said, Diane, oftentimes school board election turnout is in the single digits. You know, it can, it can pop up above that, in some smaller communities where there's a lot of, but not much like it's still, you know, still a pretty low percentage of people in a, you know, given catchment area that are actually making these decisions about who is going to do all of these

very critical functions indeed. All right, number eight, staying with this community theme. Schools really are a hub of communities. They are a centerpiece of many, many communities. And, you know, when you get to smaller communities and rural communities, they literally are the, the heart of the community in many cases. And if, if we have seen this over time, when, when anyone tries to close a school, even in a large city, the, the response from the community is generally overwhelming in terms of trying to protect that school from closure. So community hub is a huge role partly because oftentimes schools are a very significant employer, a regional employer in some cases, you know, and a union employer. And so this is a significant role they play. They also are very, a huge part of something that, that everyone cares about, which is traffic. And so the comings and goings and the traffic is always a big issue around school. Schools. And as we've talked about, a lot of things happen in schools and their buildings and their campuses. Everything from. They are the poll polling places in most cases where democracy is where we do go to vote. They host, you know, a whole bunch of events for communities and become the place of that. And so this community hub is really a significant role they play. I think the problem I would point out here is in addition to what we've already talked about, which is just like mission creep and capability and all of those things is oftentimes we talk about in schools that adult interests get put above those of students. And I think you really start to see it here where a lot of this is much more about the people in the community and the adults who are working there than it is about the kids. And those interests will, you know, preempt those of young people on, on a variety of topics. Yeah.

Nothing to add there, Diane?

Yeah, the only thing I would say is there's a parallel to higher ed, right. Which is that, as we know, small colleges in danger of closing in many areas, many of these in rural areas. Well, you know, the argument you hear, we gotta save them is employment and not some deeper community value necessarily, which I think speaks to the dynamic. And not to say that employment isn't a deep community value, it is in service of what. Right. And so I think that's often a question.

Yeah.

All right, well, let me bring us home then. With number Nine. And now we're going to zoom way out to schools and, and back to the beginning, Michael, of maybe the, the original purpose of them or some of the original purposes, you know, at the, at the kind of the most inspirational level. Public schools are, are, are the, the way that Americans achieve the American dream. The idea that every single American can go to school, a, a good public school and have the opportunity to achieve whatever they want to achieve. There aren't doors closed to them. Everything is possible. The American dream is possible because of, I think over the years we've sort of layered on to that. People have built on that and added onto that that, you know, this is the place where we actually bring socioeconomic classes together in public schools. And, and this is where we mix, you know, as people and as a community. And I, you know, Stacy, you cited the sort of reformers of the last, you know, 20ish years are, you know, we're moving out of that area era. We're not sure what's coming next because kind of Clinton, Bush, Obama eras, many people I know have often referred to public education as the civil rights issue of our time. And so it is that significant and big that the aspiration and expectation of public education. And I guess I would start, I would open the problem conversation here with the idea that I think we have a growing amount of evidence that the system that is public education today is actually producing results that are counter to those aspirations I just named. They might actually be doing harm rather than good. The system might be producing those results. And certainly we can go into depth there, but I will just leave it there for the two of you.

You. Yeah, yeah. I think this is, this is a great one to, to spend a little time on next time, you know, what we might do, what, what, if anything, we might do differently, you know, going forward here. And you know, that civil rights issue of our time was, you know, it's very grand. You know, it's kind of a messianic evangelical plea. And you know, I think with all good intentions, right, you're trying to mobilize a broad coalition for improvement, change, transformation. Because, you know, many of us believed, lots of us believed and I think still believe to some degree, right. That part of the promise of America is that that if you kind of that, that, you know, work hard, play by the rules, get a good education, anything's possible for you. And there's something kind of deeply American about that notion, right? It's that even though I think we've got shifting ideas of what the American dream might be, I think the, the power of that as a concept is still quite, you know, salient. And even though it might be in transition to some updated definition, it's still a very, I think, powerful mobilizer. And part of my stump speeches for years was a quote by Barbara Jordan who said, What Americans really want from their country is just an America that lives up to its promise, which is small and enormous. And then I would say, and part of that promise is a free, high quality public education near you, in your, near your children, near, near you, in your neighborhood. And that, that was my kind of, you know, some of the animating instinct behind entrepreneurship for education. And you know, the ed reform crowd from, as you said, 95 to about 2015, like it was just kind of, we all talked about it, maybe in slightly different ways, but it was that chief animating function. And again, it's kind of, as Michael said back to the beginning of why we ended up with public schools that then became compulsory high schools that then was like kind of embedded in this notion. So I think there's some critique of this both on the left and the right politically these days. On the right, kind of the grandiose progressive project of improving everyone all the time, you know, is kind of suspect and on and on and on the left, you know, what is the American dream really anyway? And like, who gets to decide? And are these institutions so kind of rotten at their core from the beginning, you know, in their design that of course they're producing these inequities. It's what they were designed to do in the place, you know, in the first place. And so I think there's contested ground, but you know, kind of, as we said on some of these other things, I think that there's, I won't call it the great middle or I just think most Americans would still agree. Let me say it even differently. I think most parents and caregivers who have children in schools from Pre K to 12th grade have some things they agree on about what our public schools are for. And if kids are going to be in 12, 13, 14 years, depending on whether they start, start at 3 years old, 4 year old, kindergarten, is that there are some things about our country, about our society that we want kids to understand, feel great about, be challenged maybe by some of the tougher moments in our history and want to work to make those things not true in the future, that there's some role for our schools to still be that of kind, kind of aspirational meeting point, you know, great leveler among different social, economic statuses, where in this country you can still be anything you want to be if you show up, work hard with others, figure out where you want to go. And our school should help you get there. And I think there is an element of social reformer. I still can't think of a better word for it. There is. Is one. I just can't think of it like a reformer sounds. Again, it sounds, it sounds so 1920s progressive. And, you know, we're going to technocratically fix everything through our institutions, which I'm not a huge believer in that on balance, but I, I still find something very inspiring about the, the underlying concept here. If almost every young. Well, whether it's private or public, like everybody except the percentage of kids that are homeschooled, old, you know, goes to a school starting certainly no later than five or six years old, and they stay there until they're 17 or 18. The things that are going on in those years during the daylight hours, autumn, mean something for who we are as a country and who we could be. So anyway, I'm start seeing now I'm just preaching again. So. But it's very, it's still, you know, I'm still very sappy about.

About it should be. Yeah. No reason to run from that. Right. I think I. The only two observations I would have here are one, when, when I saw this on the list, Diane, I thought of the zip code, one that you mentioned, that everyone should have a great option for them in their zip code. And I, I guess I thought of something different, which is I thought of our broader trends in society around segregation. And we know the history with racial segregation, of course, but the bigger segregation we live in with right now is not race. It's one of ideology and political party. And that we, in fact, don't live in districts where we mix with people who generally think differently from us. And so we don't have these conversations or are forced to just compromise and live with each other at the little league fields and in the schools. Right. And sort of live up to what Stacy just was sketching. And I guess that's the second thing that I've been wondering about a lot, which is, you know, you, you both echoed the rhetoric that we used to have of the civil rights issue of our time. I guess I've been thinking a lot about what's the causality, Right. Is it actually the opportunity, maybe above, that drives education to be in service of it, or is it the education that creates. And I'm sure it's a. It's a bit of both. But going back to your original observation, and I'll I'll end my thought here, Diane, is if we're not teaching in line, like if we're not running an institution set to, you know, fundamentally around learning, we don't have a great what you learn or how you learn it, maybe it isn't actually driving the causality and the success in the American dream we've historically had had. And so I guess then that's a really difficult set of questions. Is it in service of and that's where we need to be asking our questions, or can it be different and actually drive this in a more positive direction going forward that I think we all would hope because we all spend a lot of time on it, so.

Well, that's a good place to wrap today. Thank you both for waiting through my list with me. And if the if folks have hung in with us this long for an extended episode, we appreciate you and hope you will come back for the for number two, where we're actually going to talk about solutions that are both already, you know, beginning and that we see might be possible and opportunities. So thank you.

We'll leave it with that. Right. Thanks for joining us in class disrupted. We'll see you next time. Time.