The State of the Schools: Public Education

TOPICS DISCUSSED

  • How We Value Public Education

  • Learning Loss

  • Staffing Shortages

  • Falling Enrollment

  • Political Debate

  • Outside of Politics: Tech Tags for Kids

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EPISODE RESOURCES

TRANSCRIPt

Sarah [00:00:07] This is Sarah Stewart Holland.

Beth [00:00:08] And this is Beth Silvers.

Sarah [00:00:10] Thank you for joining us for Pantsuit Politics. Thank you for joining us here at Pantsuit Politics. Today, we're going to continue the conversation we started on Tuesday about the state of schools here in America. In our last episode, we tackled higher education. And today we're going to be talking about the state of public K-through-12 education. When a topic is as big as this one, it's intimidating. And it's easier to tackle the day to day headlines and controversies, but we take a different approach here at Pantsuit Politics. And we didn't want to shy away from something as important as this just because it is both huge societally and incredibly emotional personally. So, that's what we're going to try to do today. And as always, we'll wrap up with what's on our minds Outside Politics, which is should you track your kids?

Beth [00:01:06] And we know that you're going to have thoughts about that. One way we love to continue our conversations is with our premium members on Patreon. There's always a really vibrant discussion there after an episode and it's so fun for us. We learn a lot from it. It definitely influences what we're going to discuss next here on the show. If you aren't already a premium member, now is a great time to consider becoming one. We're in the middle of our bi-annual premium drive. On Tuesday you got to hear from Alise, our managing director, about her work and how your support makes it possible. Today, we wanted to let our community engagement manager, full time employee of Pantsuit Politics Number two, Maggie, share a little bit more about her work.

Maggie [00:01:51] Hello, my name is Maggie Penton and I'm the community engagement manager here at Pantsuit Politics. One of my roles on the team is to manage our social media channels. Sarah and Beth create so much content on the podcast and our premium channels every day, and I try to take that and share it and our social media in a way to give you a place to add to the conversation. And if you like, share and all the things, if you send a DM to us or comment on our page, I'm likely the first person to see it and I make sure that Sarah and Beth get to it too. One of my favorite things that I get to do is put together and distribute our weekly newsletter every Friday. I also work with our advertising agency to make sure that the ads you hear on the show are for brands that we really love and that we're making sure we present their message in a way that's authentic to us and interesting to you as a listener. One of the things that I really love about this team and the work that we do is that our community of listeners are truly the nicest, most interesting and thoughtful people on the Internet. It is such a privilege to hear your stories and perspective. And the support and investment of the community make it possible for us to have these conversations that are about bringing a different approach to the news rather than perhaps the most clickable or outrageous or any number of other words that people often use to describe the news. And so, I am so grateful for your support on Patreon and Apple Podcasts for making this work such a joy every single day that I have just doesn't even feel like work most days. So, thank you.

Sarah [00:03:29] Next up, we're going to talk about the state of our public school system. Beth you know I like to start big. I'd like to start real, real big picture. When I started thinking about the public school system, one of the largest and most complex educational systems in the world, that's what we have here in America. I just wanted to know some overall numbers. Over 50 million students are in our public school education system. That's a lot of kids.

Beth [00:04:07] It's a lot of kids. And it's hard because it's not one system. We're talking about it like it's one system and we put that number out there, but it's even harder than that.

Sarah [00:04:18] Yeah, 13,000 school systems approximately, and over 3 million professionals working within those 13,000 school systems. So, it's big. It's really big. And I wanted to talk about the ways in which that system has been a success before we start talking about the struggles, because I think we often do this with the public school education system. Believe me, I know, I grew up with public school teachers. We go right for the issues instead of thinking about what a historical success this has been. I was trying to look up how many Americans over the course of history-- we've had the public school system since about the late 1800s-- have received a public school education? I could not find that number. If you know it, I would love to know it. But when you go back and you look at those charts that are charting literacy rates, graduation rates, education rates for women, education rates for people of color. They all look the same. They all go up and to the right, they just go up and to the right. And I don't want to miss that. So many aspects of this system, which is big and is complex and does have issues, has been an enormous success because I think how do we talk about what we want to do if we haven't fairly examined what we've already done with the public school education system?

Beth [00:05:40] I listen to this really fascinating conversation from 2019 this morning among a group of educators, one of whom focuses specifically on textbooks. She's done all this research about the development of textbooks over time and across societies and how much you can learn about a society from examining its textbooks from the time while.

Sarah [00:06:02] I like that.

Beth [00:06:03] And just hearing her talk about how our our textbooks used to have four food groups in them and two where meat and dairy because it was really a time of ranching in the United States. And I think that it just made me feel really happy that we have those artifacts because we have tried so hard here for so long to make sure that as many people as possible receive that education. We know when you think about our history and what we've gotten right and wrong in the American experiment, it's really a beautiful thing that we recognize so early that you cannot do democracy without uneducated citizenry. I love remembering that we've been at that project in that it has had moments like meat and dairy as two of four food groups, and we have still made it and we're still moving in a direction. The things we get to debate keep getting more and more sophisticated and interesting and hard because we've been at it for so long.

Sarah [00:07:03] I mean, in 2017 we reached almost 90% of the population aged 25 and older completing a high school education. That's incredible. That's an incredible statistic. It brings tears to my eyes. That's such a success. And I think when you watch that journey and you think we've been at it for so long and we got so much wrong, and that's okay, because wherever we are at any given time with the public education system is not permanent. It's not permanent. We will mess things up. We will continue to work on things because it's a system that is big and complex and alive and it's constantly growing and changing. And I think we don't give ourselves enough grace for that. So just remember like this isn't going to hit a moment of stasis. My grandmother always complains. Said this to me literally yesterday, "Well, that's what we do in public education. We find something, it works and we think, well, we better change it. That's our constant refrain." And I think there's truth in that. There's truth in that. But because it's filled with human beings who are constantly trying to get better and are constantly trying to reach more kids and keep those statistics going up and to the right. And I think about not only how many of us have received that education-- I did not expect to get this emotional so early, but here we are. But I think about coming from a family full of public educators, how many people have dedicated their lives to that project? I mean, millions and millions of Americans over 100 plus years have dedicated their entire lives to this system. What an incredible gift. What an incredible thing to think about. As we do continue to work on it and continue to improve it.

Beth [00:08:54] Well, you know I love your Memom [sp] and I think that she's right about this and that's kind of the point. One of the quotes that really struck me in that conversation about textbooks I was just alluding to was that education exists to simultaneously embrace the past and its people exactly as they were, and also to challenge exactly as it is right now. That we are supposed to meet everything where it is and say, what's next? How do we keep pushing and exploring? Of course, we should find things that work and then change them in public education, because that's the essence of education.

Sarah [00:09:34] Well, and I just think about the system. And the thing I say a lot when I'm criticizing our society is that we say we care about kids, but we don't. And that's a very cynical take and probably not fair as I look at the public education system. A system composed of children. A system that we spend enormous money, enormous effort, enormous energy trying to perfect, trying to improve. I think about how many kids are saved by teachers in both concrete and ephemeral ways. I mean, teachers are the biggest supporters of neglect and abuse. They're out there watching these kids every day, all day. And I think about people who tell stories about the one teacher who said the one thing, and I think, oh, we do care about kids and we spend enormous effort on kids filling their days with instruction and play and games and sports and socializing. And just what an enormous pursuit we're all engaged in and that we have all been a part of. And I just don't want to lose that because I think there are enormous problems in the public education system. But I also think it's an institution that deserves our care and that deserves grace and deserves an enormous amount of pride.

Beth [00:10:59] Well, it's helpful to back out because the school system, like everything else, you live in anecdote instead of data. And so, you live just the period of time that you were in school. And then if you have kids that are important in your life, the period of times that they are in school. And that individual experience is what shapes your understanding of what's going on in public schools. And that's as it should be. We're not doing anything wrong through that, and it is our job to advocate for individual kids experiences within the system. The system doesn't work if we don't. I was thinking about that as we were reading about COVID, which I know we're going to talk about in a minute, and how many recommendations for what happens next are going to require these long periods of study where a whole group of kids are just going to be part of the experiment of how do we do this better? And they're going to be out of the system before they can benefit from some of what we learn through all that study. And that is really, really hard. And so, as we complain about public education or we think about what needs to be done differently, or as we experience frustration even and especially perhaps from within that system, teachers, administrators, aides, special educators, remembering that you are part of this very long chain of progress, I hope is helpful to everybody.

Sarah [00:12:18] Yeah, I think seeing my participation in that progress and seeing my link in the chain as a parent, as a student, as a community member is enormously helpful. And we went to an event at our school-- surprise its May. I know that's a shocking sentence to hear in the middle of May, but it's called the sneaker ball. It was at our middle school and I kind of expected and had heard that there would be this sort of wall go up once they entered middle school and there wouldn't be a lot of parent participation. And to our principal and administrator's enormous credit, that has not been my experience. And we went to this event and it was one of the most diverse community events I've been to. I had fun. I met new people. I felt like we were supporting all the kids in the school and holding them up and the teachers. It just was such an incredible experience. Even though it wasn't perfect, it went too long as school events tend to do. But I thought that's it too, right? Like, that's part of it. That you get bored, you stay too long, you wish it had been this or that. And also it was wonderful and connecting and encouraging and it was all those things at the same time. And I just desperately wish that could be more people's experience inside our public school education system because I think that that's the promise and I want to hold that promise up before we move into the the problems.

Beth [00:13:47] I love the clunkiness of school events. I love that you go to a school event and you need to help fold your chair up at the end of it and put it away. We were at the school talent show last night. I ran the lights backstage.

Sarah [00:13:58] You know how to run lights?

Beth [00:13:59] Now I do.

Sarah [00:14:00] I don't know how to run lights.

Beth [00:14:02] Miss Melvin taught me. And it was great to see the kids getting ready to go out. I mean, it is so clunky, it's such a mess and it's so fun and it's really beautiful. And then on the way out, I noticed like, oh, there are folding chairs that haven't been put away let's grab those. And we got some kids and parents and just worked together and did it. And I think those places where you do realize this doesn't happen without everybody, there is a lot to do here and it is for everyone. But that means that it requires everyone's input. Like this is not a slick event that's been produced for me. I dig that and I think we need more of that. And I don't know how else you can convene that. Public schools have a really unique opportunity to convene people in those spaces.

Sarah [00:14:48] Yeah, a beautiful mess. What a great subtitle for an episode on public education. And to your point of how many people it takes and how many people participate. When I was looking at the numbers on the public education system, I thought, okay, well, I want to know how many students are in public education versus private education. And when I looked it up, I expected it to be like-- I don't know, 70-30 somewhere in there. Especially because I feel like my whole life I've heard public schools are under attack. They're coming for us. They're going to give all the money to private schools. They want privatization of education. And I think there's some truth in those attacks. I'm not saying it's all untrue, but when I looked it up, it's 90% of students attend public schools. And I thought, dang, private schools and homeschooling take up so much space in this debate and there are only 10% of students?

Beth [00:15:42] To be fair, 10% of 50 million is a lot of people.

Sarah [00:15:45] It's true.

Beth [00:15:46] But the 90% is a lot of people too. And it's, I think, a really good reminder that as much as you hear this is doomed, it's over, it's not going to work anymore, when 90% of society relies on something, then we all do have a vested interest in that something and making it successful. And COVID certainly highlighted that.

Sarah [00:16:13] So let's get into that. Let's get into the mess part of this beautiful mess and what problems we knew we had before COVID in the public education system and what the pandemic accelerated and exacerbated. All right. When we first started talking about this episode, Beth, we thought we would walk through the many and varied controversies over the past school year: banned books, AP African-American studies, the entire state of Florida-- you know the big things. But as we started digging in and thinking about the state of this beautiful, messy institution, what I really realized is that I think so much of those cultural controversies are, surprise, really just obscuring our real anxieties about public school in particular. I think we both experienced the trauma of school closures and are anxious, frustrated, overwhelmed by the impact of those closures, especially learning loss.

Beth [00:17:16] I think that's true. The other thing that really occurred to me as I was doing the research to prepare for this episode is how the banned books, the AP courses, the textbooks, none of that is new. That we have had controversies over what will be taught in public schools forever. Because we do all have that vested interest and because a textbook does say so much about a society, and because you are in so many ways when you're talking about curriculum, trying to say, what are our shared values? And that is hard and it is contentious. But I think, again, like that 90-10 framework for who attends public school versus something else is probably a pretty good measure of who has a real vested interest in particular pieces of the curriculum versus looking at the whole system.

Sarah [00:18:02] Yeah. We're going to get into those politicization topics, trust us. But we don't want to lead with that because we think that's obscuring some of the bigger anxieties. So let's talk about learning loss. By the spring of 2022, according to several researchers, the average student was a half a year behind in math and a third of the year behind in reading. And not surprisingly, there were dramatic differences before COVID between rich districts and poor districts. In 2019, they measured the typical student in the poorest 10% of districts scored one and a half years behind the national average. And so, you compound that with any COVID learning loss, and we have a very big problem.

Beth [00:18:49] I sort of struggle with this because I think it's both true that learning loss is a really significant issue and it feels incomplete and hard to put in greater context. We haven't done the kind of measurement around education and timing of when students should hit particular milestones throughout that lengthy history to be able to compare this to what the learning loss has been associated with other really disruptive events in our history. And so, I find the tone of these pieces so alarmist. I just read this New York Times op-ed that was like parents don't realize how far behind their students are. And I thought, one, I think we do. It might not be manifesting in the way that correlates with your observation of how they're behind.

Sarah [00:19:35] Productive-wise, yes.

Beth [00:19:37] But I think we do have a sense of that. I think some of us also have a sense of something like peace, that this will over time sort itself out. That they can't make up that loss in two years, three years. But over time, hopefully we'll get there. Some trust in the system that will get there. I don't want to feed into this is a dire situation or look away from what is a legitimate problem and I have trouble calibrating.

Sarah [00:20:08] I did read a research project that talked about this is a higher level of learning loss than they measured after something like Hurricane Katrina. Not by a lot, but a little bit. But let me tell you, I bet you in the last pandemic it wasn't learning loss. They dropped out of school, you guys. They just dropped out. They didn't go back.

Beth [00:20:27] People just died too. A lot of people died.

Sarah [00:20:29] If the young adults in your family died and you were in school in 1918, you weren't like, "Oh, man, I'm a few years behind in reading. What am I going to do?" You didn't go back to school. You had to go work. So, let's celebrate that. Look at here, we've made it farther than that. We're concerned with how they stay in school. Now, look, that is still an issue. Chronic absences is a part of this that people have just stopped going, so I don't want to downplay that. But then I don't need to be a statistician to feel pretty confident in saying not like they did in the early 1900s. Not in the numbers back then. That sort of perspective of like what we've tried to do here, we've gotten better on a lot of measurements so then those things we're measuring become like more intense, right? Like you said, the problems we're focusing on get more complex. And it feels so paradoxical to me to say learning loss because we're comparing them to students a few years ago when really shouldn't we be comparing them to each other? Isn't that where we're trying to get in education? Is sort of acknowledging the individualization, the diversity of experience and need. Our school systems mantra is know every child by name and need. And so, I think it's so weird to me that in this this attempt to better individualize education, we lean more into standardized testing.

[00:22:00] I understand we need measurement, but it feels so weird to me. Even with the school closures and the learning loss, we learn that some people, particularly people with disabilities or psychological challenges being exposed to their peers, thrived in that environment. There were some people who needed and who found a new skill through school closures. I still think school closures on the whole were a mistake and had cost. And I think there are certain sides of the political spectrum (mine) who, in refusing to acknowledge that, weakened the argument. But there's also pieces of this puzzle that are important to acknowledge. That places with higher COVID deaths had worse outcomes. That places with low institutional trust, and they measured that by voting rights and [inaudible] participation, they had higher levels of learning loss. Well, that makes sense when we're talking about an institution that we need to trust. And this sense of, like, I feel like something is wrong, and so I just double down on attacking this institution, it's such a weird instinct for me. But you see it everywhere. You see it everywhere when people feel like they're encountering something that went wrong or didn't go the way they wanted it to go inside the public school system.

Beth [00:23:17] I think that testing is so complicated and we could do 10 shows just on testing. For the big picture purposes and especially thinking about learning loss, you said should we be comparing them to kids two years ago or to each other, or should we be comparing them just vertically to their own performance? Did they individually go backward from the skills they had pre-pandemic, or are we talking about opportunity cost where they normally would have learned and they didn't what we think they normally would have learned, but who knows? Because each child has variations and ebbs and flows in their own lives. Just figuring out what our frame of reference is, is so hard. And the truth is, this is why we're all dissatisfied with public education because we want it all to be true. We want them to be better and smarter than the kids two years ago, better and smarter on an individual basis. And we want our kid to be better and smarter than all of their peers. We want public education to give us all of those things at one time for everybody. And that's unreasonable.

Sarah [00:24:19] Yeah Impossible. Well, and here's a part of the learning loss. I got a hot take. Do I have any data to back this up? I don't. Is this anecdotal? It is. I think a component of learning loss is the surge of technology use and instruction over the pandemic. I told one of my vice principals-- because I get calls that my kids are on their screens, on their computers that the school gave them, playing games and not paying attention-- it's an addictive technology that you gave them. I can't put my phone down and I'm 41. I told my vice principal, when I came to high school I think they shut down the student smoking section maybe like five years before- not that long. And everybody's like, wow, you had a student smoking section? That's bananas. And true, it is bananas. And I think that's how we will feel about giving every child a computer and especially elementary and middle school in like five, 10 years-- at least I hope so. When you said about textbooks, I'm like, "Oh, textbooks, can we go back to textbooks, please?" But they're expensive. And I get it. And I understand that we live in a technological age, and out of one side of my mouth I'm saying we need to let go of this industrial structure of education and we need to transform public education to meet this technological age. And also, like, don't give them computers. I get it. I can hear myself. But man, I know it's affected my kids attention level and I just I kind of hate them. I'm just being honest.

Beth [00:25:53] I hate them too. I feel no need to say anything qualifying about it. I do hate that my kids have had a Chromebook their entire educational journey. I don't like it. I especially don't like how that tech time is often a reward that if the class does something, they get extra time to just play games on the technology. I really, really hate that. And, again, I'm not trying to criticize any individual teacher. I get where this came from. Playing the Oregon Trail was my reward in elementary school on the one computer that sat in our classroom. And that was a level of exposure to technology that none of us were getting anywhere else in our lives. My family had a computer pretty early, but we were one of very few who did. And so I understand how education went down this path of like, "Oh, they're not going to be conversant in the world as it exists if we don't introduce." I think that has shifted in a lot of ways. I understand there are still kids who don't have technology at home and don't have access to stable, reliable Internet and so school has to be that place. Again, we're asking you to do a whole lot of things at school and be a whole lot of things. The conflicting messages that we are sending our kids though about technology, I'm really concerned about. And I'm really concerned that we are feeding an addiction that I personally also cannot control in my own life by already putting so much of their lives on a screen.

Sarah [00:27:24] Well, and I think some of those tools I know my kids take those test you described where they're just testing against themselves, like they're just trying to beat their own scores or whatever. And I think that's valuable and important. But when we are trying to accelerate learning and we're trying to build in more instruction because we've lost so much during the pandemic-- well, my middle child has ADHD, so giving him a distraction which computers inevitably are is going to eat into that instruction time. They try to block stuff, but the kids understand what a VPN is in middle school. They all install VPNs. They all bypass the blocking. My kingdom to the person who figures out how to keep a kid off a VPN. But I think that's really, really difficult. And I think as we face real learning loss, I think paying attention to that will definitely be important. Learning loss, I think, is a source of anxiety. And I think staffing is a source of anxiety. My sixth grader and my eighth grader both had long term subs for a majority of the year this year. And several of the positions that they were trying to fill had one or zero applicants at the middle school. Now, this is different across the country because we actually have more teachers and fewer students due to fall in enrollment, which we're going to get to in a second. But it's the qualified teachers, the special education, reading, math that are experiencing real shortages.

Beth [00:28:51] We have a real challenge with teachers for languages here. And so my daughters have had some Spanish, often from teachers who don't speak Spanish fluently. They've had some sign language, which was terrific because that teacher uses ASL in her life regularly and really understood how to teach it. But it's been back and forth, so they're not really building in any way. And I think that's probably not an uncommon experience either.

Sarah [00:29:21] Yeah. Well, and look, I think the recruiting to me is the issue because teacher pay has stagnated, but the educational requirements for teachers just keep growing. Not to mention that a four year degree, as we talked about on Tuesday, just keeps getting more and more expensive. I just think between those two things. And I think it goes back to how we feel about the institution itself, we don't talk about teaching as an admirable profession in so many areas of American life. Not to mention with the politics coming to play, we get messages from teachers in our audience all the time about the stress they feel because of the way people think about public education, because of the way they demand and speak to teachers and just show up not as community members, but as consumers and expect the teachers to respond in turn.

Beth [00:30:18] Here's where I'm going to get over my skis I'm sure in terms of what I know and have information to back up. I thought so much during the pandemic, especially as states were experimenting with these staffing shortages about this topic. You might remember-- I think this is another Florida thing. I really hate letting Ron DeSantis set the agenda for any conversation I have, but there were some programs out there to qualify more people to come in the classrooms, and those programs were extremely offensive to teachers. And I understand why, and I support them in their taking offense to it. This highlights to me how challenging it is when 90% of America depends on these school systems. It's hard to experiment. Having spent some time in schools-- not enough time to have any sort of expertise. But an observation that I have is that we just need more adults in the building, period. If we can have more adults in the building, maybe the number of teachers we have works if they have more adults to help them, and maybe all those adults don't need masters degrees, and maybe all those adults don't need even specialized content knowledge. Maybe we need shorter programs that really train some people just in classroom management techniques or recognizing individual student needs. Certainly, we need more people to just be aides to students who have particular learning challenges or physical or emotional challenges. I'm not against how much we require of our teachers if they're really going to get to spend their whole day teaching. But so few teachers are getting to spend their whole day teaching because we don't have enough adults in the building to provide support around them. And I wish there were more room for schools to experiment with that balance.

Sarah [00:32:15] Well, and the requirements for those adults have risen too. When Griffin started school, you could just go to a class party and show up, and now you have to have a background check. You have to complete a volunteer program. It's sort of a heavy lift, one that I don't always do every year because I'm like, I missed it. I can't go. It's kind of a heavy lift.

Beth [00:32:34] And honestly, that doesn't bother me because I understand the risk they're trying to manage. I mean, though, that we need more consistent paid adults in the schools in different kinds of roles. I think volunteers are probably very helpful, but also sometimes as much work as they are help just trying to get them acclimated and give them something to do. I think we need more people in the schools who have defined roles, who the kids know, who are in relationship with the kids and the teachers, so that the teachers really get to be faculty instead of social workers, disciplinarians, coaches, all the things.

Sarah [00:33:15] I think the difficult part of that is if teachers aren't making that much than aides and lower level qualification positions are going to make even less.

Beth [00:33:23] Yeah, I would shift some money away from other software subscriptions to help pay for this. That's part of my idea.

Sarah [00:33:30] I think that's the tough one. How about we just raise everybody’s pay? That's fine with me. I'm happy to raise the teacher pay. I'm happy to raise teacher aid pay. To cross the threshold of that building, I am ready and willing as a taxpayer to pay you fairly. It's a particularly big ask in the age of increasing school violence, which I think is definitely a part of this. It's a part of our overall anxiety and how we want to control the situation and act out our frustrations and rage and fear on this institution. That's a huge part of what's going on here. It's not just the learning loss, but I think that the increasing fear in danger we associate with public schools is a part of this too. It's a part of why fewer people want to be teachers. And it's also a part of the next issue, which is falling enrollment. Now, public schools lost more than a million students from the fall of 2019 to the fall of 2020. Now, that's a truncated timeline. It makes a lot of sense at the beginning of the pandemic, but it has been falling. To me, I wonder if this is less a statement on the state of public education, although I do think it's a part of people's reaction to a loss of control during the pandemic, definitely fear surrounding school shootings. But it's also like we know we're having fewer kids and demographically there's just big changes coming to the United States. And I got to believe that's part of this as well.

Beth [00:34:54] I think we are probably several years from fully understanding these numbers because if you take a cluster of headlines, you'll see like, well, there's anti-vax sentiment that's keeping some people out of public schools. And there are people who started working during COVID and decided to keep working instead of coming back and high schoolers. There were people who I can't relate to this but really enjoyed homeschooling when they hadn't done it before. Whatever the situation, I just think there's so much to unpack, plus the demographic trends, plus all the people who moved. Do we just really have good information yet? Because so many people relocated over the past few years out of cities into different areas, people moving around different parts of the country for political reasons or whatever. There's just too much going on for me to make much of this right now.

Sarah [00:35:46] Well, and homeschooling was growing among black families, which I think is a super interesting demographic trends. But enrollment has been falling before COVID. We have seen this trend and it was so disturbing to me. I got on Apple Podcasts, as I often do, and I wanted to hear a bunch of different voices talk about public schools and process how I feel and think about things. And when you search public schools on Apple Podcasts, you know what comes up? A bunch of Ben Shapiro podcasts telling you why you shouldn't send your kids to public school because they're going to brainwash them for LGBTQ stuff and they're going to turn them into woke liberals. And I thought, dang, there is just so much of that particular perspective out there, easily findable. It's not like you see YouTube videos and podcasts just popping up with a person advocating for the power of public education, how it served those kids. But you don't have to search hard at all for that sort of far right wing perspective of why public school is such a danger to you and your kids, which is probably a transition into talking about the politics and how the politics come to play when we talk about public education.

Beth [00:36:59] Yeah, worth remembering it's always easier to take shots at something than to try to build it up. Always. And that is also not a reason to never give an inch on public schools, to not acknowledge these problems. There are absolutely problems, and I just want to have reasonable conversations about what those are and have them in productive ways where you can like walk away saying, well, that's a really good idea that we could pursue. How might we pursue that idea instead of just deciding this is the best or the worst without any in-between?

Sarah [00:37:34] Yeah, because I think that sense from the right that we should have more control over education is met on the left by we should just spend more. That's always the solution. Let's just spend more money on public education. And, y'all, we spend a lot of money on public education. I know it doesn't always feel like that. And absolutely the biggest problem to me sort of systemically and public education is that the Supreme Court decided you don't have a constitutional right to an education, even though this is something that 90% of us use. And so, because of that decision, you can receive a vastly different education depending on where you live. That is a flaw. That is just a fundamental systemic flaw built into this system that I believe in. But because of that sort of systemic flaw, this idea that we will spend more and that will help things, well, it doesn't help the poor districts because of the way we've just sort of built inequality into real estate taxes, into property taxes. And so, I don't have a great systemic solution to that as opposed to just we should stop doing it that way.

Beth [00:38:44] And some states have. And I would like to see more states go in that direction, because I do think that that is a flaw that's built in. I also think it's hard to take seriously the argument that the answer is always more money and that nothing else needs to change. We just need more resources because that will always be true. It has always been true. It always will be true. And I'm not against putting more money in, but we do need to have conversations about what that money does and how you spend that money in a way that's actually transformational, instead of just continuing to layer on to what we've been doing.

Sarah [00:39:21] And that's what I hear from sort of the progressive left a little bit. It's like, well, we just need to get back to where we were. And I'm like, do we? One of the best things I read was in The New York Times the morning they said the question and political debate is where we go from here. Double down on public education. Try to address the learning loss and emotional damage caused by the pandemic closures and make an effort to restore the nation's confidence in public schools or create more alternatives via school choice. And I thought that's a false dichotomy. Well, I don't want either one of those. I don't want to say we're just trying to get back because we knew that there were problems before. And I think so much when I look at what COVID exposed or made worse and the solutions that people are proposing to address that, which we're going to get into, they clarify and center on some big things that I do think we need to focus on and change when it comes to public schools. Because there are problems and there's such defensiveness, particularly (and I say this with all the love in the world) with teachers. I know this because I have this argument with my mother and my grandmother all the time. I think there's so many stakeholders in public education: taxpayers, politicians, bureaucrats, teachers, administrators, staff, parents, sports that the students are often last and everybody thinks that they're really advocating for the student. But it's like that popular metaphor for religion where everybody's blindfolded and they're describing the elephant. I think everybody is advocating for students in their way. But it's never a holistic picture. Parents are missing part of it. Teachers are missing part of it, We're all blinded by our experience w1ithin the system as these stakeholders. And nobody wants to admit like, well, I'm getting part of this wrong. So what part are you getting right?

Beth [00:41:13] Yeah. I just ordered this book called A Minor Revolution: How Prioritizing Kids Benefits Us All. It's by Adam Benforado. I read an article about it that described it as kind of a manifesto for what actual children's rights should look like in our country. And he advocates for lowering the voting age significantly. And I think that's a really interesting argument that I'm curious to read more about. I read some of his ideas and felt some initial resistance. And I thought, well, that's why I should read this book. I feel a little resistance. Let me see if he can convince me. Let me see what I can learn here. And I do think that listening to kids more about what's working and not working in schools will always result in an entirely different perspective than you have as a parent. Doesn't mean it should be the controlling perspective or that they've got everything. But I was just chatting with my seven year old Ellen this morning and she was talking about how she desperately wishes school would start later and open with social time. She said, "I wish that we could just get there and have a few minutes to talk to our friends." She wants to chat about the talent show last night. And I thought, I wonder if that would make every teacher's day easier. You and I are talking a lot when we were substituting about the clock and how the whole school day feels controlled by the clock. And most of Ellen's observations about what she would change if she were in charge are also about time. When they start and in what order things go in and how much time she has to talk to other people versus sit in a class. I would like to elevate student voices a lot more as we think about where we're going here.

Sarah [00:42:55] Yeah, I think time is at the centerpiece of a lot of this. And I think that's why the trauma of so dramatically upsetting the status quo when it comes to the time they were at school during the pandemic revealed so much. And I think some of the most interesting solutions for how to deal with learning loss, summer learning, increased individualized tutoring, a 13th year- like additional years in school, longer school days. I think that gets to something that we're all circling around and we're circling around beforehand, which is the way we structure the day and the way we structured the school year is dated. It is no longer relevant to the way we live our lives. We all know we took off the summer so people could go plant the field. My kids haven't plant fields. Well, yours might because you actually have a garden. But, I mean, we don't need that anymore. That's not how we live. I really wish this sort of crisis moment could lead to a revolution where we say, okay, well, we have all this learning loss and we need a lot more instruction. Let's just do away with this, we're done here. Let's change the school day. I wish it started much later for high schoolers. I wish it went much longer for little kids. There's just so many things I think we could shift and pay teachers fairly for their time and get at this. Because I think the other thing that is a vestige when we talk about that advocacy and listening to kids, of the previous time period in which we created this institution is, we've come a long way on how we view kids. They're no longer to be seen and not heard. Like Jennifer Senior says in her book All Joy and No Fun, now kids are economically useless and emotionally priceless, which was not the case when we invented the public school system. And I'm not sure we've like fully integrated that in all areas of our lives. I think as adults we say that and we believe that until it bumps up against what we want, and then we want to go back to the seen and not heard. And I'm including myself in that. I am including myself. I want to be empathetic and listen to my kids until I'm tired. And then I want them to do what I say because I said it. And I just think you see a lot of that in a system, of course, that is composed largely of kids.

Beth [00:45:17] I think it's also really difficult to have a sense of imagination about what it could look like to change the timing around school. And that's what we need, a sense of imagination. A tolerance for even more disruption. That's the problem. We've had so much disruption that nobody liked that came with nothing positive; and so now we're like just get it back to the way it was. And what we really need is to say we'll take some more disruption, we'll accept some failure, we'll acknowledge that our kids are part of an experiment to make a shift here because we do need that shift, clearly. Additional time in the school day could mean a lot more social time that every single study on earth tells us they need. We know that loneliness is the biggest challenge. We know that time spent on social media is causing them to be anxious and depressed. We know they need more social time with each other. How could they get that? Longer school days. That doesn't mean that every teacher has to be there for the entire school day, like the adults can be shifted in their roles and responsibilities. This could make extracurricular activities go back into the curriculum so that they are available to more kids, so that more kids have the experience of being on a team and doing something enriching and finding their gift and their spark. I hate that the talent show had to be at 6:30 in an evening instead of in the middle of the school day because they feel no freedom in the school day. It is such a constrained set of time for all that we're asking them to do. I really would love for us to kind of blow this up.

Sarah [00:46:54] Well, and I think for summer, one of the most interesting things I read about addressing learning loss was using camps to address learning loss. And I thought, please God, that would be amazing if like June instead of me as the parent having to shoulder this entire situation, it was built into the public school system. So they say, "Okay, we've graduated from eighth grade, June is camp time." And so, if you are interested in this or you are struggling with that, then everybody goes their way and it's funded so that I'm not writing giant checks, and so we don't have an entire population that's excluded from this experience because it's so expensive. And it's not summer school where we're not asking them to be in this building just for their whole entire year. I was reading all about this. I think Boston's even funding it and giving parents money to go and explore camps, to expand those learning opportunities, to expand those social opportunities, and to have that sort of integrated, project-driven experiential learning we all want for our kids. And I thought, that's genius. Why can't we roll that out everywhere? That's such a cool idea, because this money from the federal government for COVID is going to expire. And I would love to see as it expires to say, okay, well, we're going to give you more money. This is what we want you to do with it. You can make it look how you want, but we know this is a big funding lift, so let's give you the money. This is how we want to start to address the learning loss with some summer opportunities that look different and more immersive and more integrated.

Beth [00:48:44] I think that's a great idea. And I think that the more schools partnered with camps and with extracurricular activities that have been done outside school, the more it would change what the day looks like in the year, that we would see more of that project focus brought back into the school, we would start to see greater flexibility for teachers. I would love to see year-round school, but where teachers still get sabbatical time, where a teacher doesn't have to be there all year for students to still be learning. This is the big thing in my mind. Teachers are wonderful, yes, but we do to teachers what we do to mothers where we say you've got to be at all. And that is not working, obviously. So how can we build more structures where a teacher is great and important and working at their highest and best for their gifts, but they don't have to be at all because there are lots of other people around with different skill sets to reach students in different ways.

Sarah [00:49:42] And as much as I'm concerned about technology, I do think artificial intelligence holds some of these solutions. I think the way Khan Academy is working with artificial intelligence could be revolutionary and very, very powerful and helpful so that it doesn't all have to come from humans. I think there are technological solutions here. I just don't think it's going to be an entirely technological solution. And I think we should use the technology to open up that imagination when it comes to staffing and scheduling in a way that's really productive. Beth, listen to one of my favorite things that I've been using since the beginning of the school years. A friend of mine went to a football practice. And the parents were behaving poorly in the parking lot. And one of the coaches who used to be a professional football player in my hometown stood up and said, "Listen, we have got to get out of our own way, people." And I just think that is ever relevant and particularly here when we talk about these cultural clashes that cloud us and distract us from being empowered and imaginative and moving forward with some of these solutions. We've got to get out of our own way, y'all.

Beth [00:50:52] I think that's right. And we're not doing a good job of getting out of our own way because it is so easy to take the headlines that we see about schools and have them be another proxy for the difference that we feel in our partisanship. I have spent some time this week looking at the controversy over the AP African-American studies course and the textbook challenges coming out of Florida in particular. But Texas has a long history with this as well. Texas is very lively around the textbooks too. On the AP African-American studies course, I really took away that it is just bad news when those of us who have nothing to do with curriculum weigh in on something like this because we have so little information and perspective. The best conversation that I heard was from a public radio interview of the first teacher in Oregon to pilot that AP African-American studies course. Black man, he talked with such pride about being part of this pilot program and teaching this course, how much it meant to his students to have this course offered, to have it be taught by a black man. He said it's really important to have someone who's not apologetic about the subject matter teaching the course. I thought that was an interesting and helpful note. And he said this was always a pilot. There was always going to be discussion about what goes and what doesn't. There will always be tremendous flexibility in any course for a teacher to make it relevant to their students. He talked about how he's in Portland. If they talk generally about gentrification or policies that have prevented people from owning land in certain areas, they are going to then apply it to where they live because that's how it's relevant to these students. That's how the information comes alive for them. And he also said it's one course. We can't fit all of African-American history in one course. So things are going to come out. And when those things coming out sounds like, well, the College Board has capitulated to conservatives, that's just not a healthy, productive conversation about what's actually happening here. And it really diminishes the work of the people out in the field.

Sarah [00:53:14] Well, that tracks with the controversy I dove into over the last few weeks. Which is I decided to read the banned books. I think the language has actually challenged the most challenged books in America. I think that's the language the librarians use these days. I started because I wanted to read Genderqueer, which is the most challenged book in America. And I hope you all are sitting down for this. I believe that is a deserved title. I do not believe that book belongs in a high school library. It's a very adult book in particular because it is a graphic novel. There is very little you could write in words that I wouldn't put in a high school library. We were all reading VC Andrews books. Y'all those books are messed up. And Mary Higgins Clark, where everybody gets murdered. So, if it's in a text, there's just very little I would challenge. But this is a graphic novel with some pretty graphic representation of sex acts. So that's the only one. But I thought, oh, how interesting that I think you can sort of reflexively react to those headlines, and be like, "How dare you? You're Nazis. You're burning books." You can just get yourself in that posture. So I thought, well, I want to read them because I'm a librarian [inaudible]. But then the rest of the ones I read tracked with my initial reaction. Which was there was a lot of LGBTQ content, none of which was bothersome to me or I found offensive, even though some of them were pretty adult. And I thought, we just don't like the messiness. We want to control this. We want to tell ourselves that this is how we will control this. And that's just so silly when it comes to kids and their big expansive existence and experiences.

[00:55:05] And it just felt like, again, just a cloud covering our bigger anxieties. That we want to control-- particularly a certain subset of the population, although I don't think this is solely representative in the conservative political perspective. But they definitely represent this parental control narrative and that's what you see bubble up in those Ben Shapiro podcasts, right? Something's happening in the public school system that you can't control. And I just read these books and I think about that and I think maybe there's lots of things about your kid's life you can't control. In fact, most of it, which is going to be relevant to our Outside Politics experience. But I just think that's this undercurrent of our conversations about public school, which is just this fear of how much is going on in our kids lives that we can't control, that we can't improve, that we can't structure and direct and perfect in the way that we want to. And, man, you can see that in these books, because these books are messy. These are about kids that have been sexually abused that struggle with addiction and self-harm. And it's hard to read those things and think, man, this is what's happening to so many kids. This could happen to my kid. This may be happening to my kid right now and I don't know it. And that's the fear that gets so wrapped up, I think, in the public school system becomes this avatar for all our fears and anxieties around our kids.

Beth [00:56:44] The perspective I take is that my kids are going to encounter all kinds of things every single day everywhere, from authority figures and not, that are not what I wish for them or not my values or challenging for me to navigate with them. And I welcome them encountering it and bringing it home and talking to me about it and giving me a chance. My parental rights are really my responsibility. It's not that I get to control the flow of what enters their world. It's that I am here, that they encounter it at an age in a time when I am here to weigh in on it, instead of encountering it for the first time as an adult when I might not be around to weigh in on it. And so, whatever they read or discuss or hear on the bus-- which let's be honest, is where the worst of it comes from, other kids on the bus-- I just have to say, "Great, we're going to talk about that now and we're going to think about what we believe about this and how you might want to handle it." We could spend all day everyday thinking about every word that a teacher utters or every line of a textbook. And our kids are still going to run into all this stuff. All we can do is equip them for it. And the school is part of that. But, man, it's a tiny part of that when we really get down to what we're afraid of. I find it confusing, the conversation around the books, because I'm not sure in today's universe how people intend to bubble wrap their kids and have them be productive members of society at all if they're unable to run into a book like Tango Makes Three.

Sarah [00:58:29] Here's the thing. I don't think the public school system is such a tiny part of it, and I think that's what people are upset about. I think it's hard to admit to yourself that your kid is spending hours and hours and hours a majority of their day away from you outside of your control, around kids you don't know what they're saying, around teachers you don't know what they're saying, around stuff you couldn't teach. I couldn't teach my kids geometry if I wanted to. He comes home and he asks for help, and I can't help him. And I think there's just this vulnerability wrapped up in that that is so hard to face openly and honestly. And what I have to understand is that, yes, there is a huge part of their life that is taking part away from me. And that part is only going to get larger and larger and larger. And on the whole, I find the benefit from the public school system way outweighs the risk when I think about how much I'm trusting my kid's life with that system. And risk analysis, let me tell you, is a great transition to our Outside of Politics segment up next. Beth, I love to get the Today Show emails because they're such a potpourri.

Beth [00:59:43] Bet they are.

Sarah [00:59:45] They really are fun because it'll be like, here's your steals and deals. Here's your update on the war in Ukraine.

Beth [00:59:51] A recipe.

Sarah [00:59:52] Here's a recipe. And here is the latest viral controversy. And I just love that they see me for the whole incomplete person that I am over at the Today Show-- which I don't watch, but I do like the emails. Okay. In the Today Show email yesterday, there was a story. The headline is Mom Defends Tracking her Kids with Tech Tags. "I'm extremely paranoid." But it was the sub-headline that got me. You can't ever be too protective. That was the sub-headline. This is from Vada Stevens. She posted a TikTok of her toddlers wearing bracelets with Apple Airtags and has, in her words, trained them to come when the Apple Airtags beep.

Beth [01:00:34] Oh, Vada. So I did go watch the TikTok.

Sarah [01:00:36] I did, too. Her kids are very cute.

Beth [01:00:37] And I did see that her caption was like, "We're dog training today." So she was kind of making fun of herself, even though many people in the comments didn't see it that way. We bought Apple Airtags when we went to Disney the first time and put them in everybody's belt bags. Just thought that would be a nice way to know if we get separated we have a plan. We got home, we decided let's just put these in backpacks. Why not? We have them. I have not gone to the bracelet step, but I'm not here to bust on Vada for that. I could see myself perhaps giving one to Ellen. Ellen will do the thing in the summer where she will leave as the sun rises and not come home until it sets and just find her way around. And our neighbors are all super kind of generous. She'll eat somewhere. There will be adults interacting with her somehow. I might see her face throughout the course of the day. I might not. I might take a walk around to try to figure out whose yard she's in. So, I get it. And I think this is sort of a silly thing for the Today Show email to focus on. I very, very strongly disagree with the sentiment, though, that you can't ever be too protective. That is where I depart from this analysis.

Sarah [01:01:50] Yeah, that's the one that got me. I was like, well, that's not true. Yeah, that's not true at all. There's a great Led Zeppelin song that Natalie Maines covers. I highly recommend the Mother if you think that's true. I love that. That's how I would love my kid to exist, particularly my youngest. But that dream died the day he got diagnosed with type one diabetes, sadly. And so I have to be able to track him. He carries a cell phone for his continuous glucose monitor and so I always can find him. And when I can't, it's a real panicky moment. He's pretty aware of his lows. But Felix goes low and no one's paying attention, that could be a life or death situation. And still, I do not feel, even with my type one diabetic child, that I can't ever be too protective because he is still a little boy and he still has to go out and play with his friends. And I have to trust that the systems we have put in place will work and then I have to allow that it can't ever be perfect and there might be failure. But the costs of trying to prevent any failure or any risk would come at way too high a price for him and for me. Who wants to live like that? I have an older son who has a cell phone who has Life360 on it that I check when I need to know where he is. Amos does not have one, and he is my most distractible, wandering child. I'm excited for the day when he has a cell phone and I know exactly where Amos is because there's been a couple of times where he'll take the bus home when he's supposed to walk to lessons. And there's that moment of like, where is he? That's sucks.

[01:03:31] I have to just accept that bad things could happen to my kids. And I just feel I feel sad for Vada because I feel like she thinks that she can protect against bad things happening to her kids. Like Griffin got jumped one day last year. A kid just started punching him on the sidewalk outside of his school. But my neighbor saw him and she got him and another lady yelled at the kid. And it's just like those moments where we lost Felix one time on a vacation for like 30 minutes at a shoreline. And eventually he came walking up with the sweet lady holding his hand. I was thinking about that on Mother's Day, actually. I was thinking about this sort of universe of caregivers that's out there in the world watching out for our kids. And it doesn't always catch them. Kids die in truly tragic ways all the time, every day. But I just feel so sad for the people who run from that, who try to escape that reality because it seems like such a fraught, scary existence.

Beth [01:04:42] I don't want to assume too much around the TikTok. I can see the Airtag bracelet being a pathway to greater freedom for the child. Like for Ellen, if I could just see she's still around here, I probably would leave her alone even more than I already do. And I leave her alone a lot. So I don't mind technology being used as a way to say, hey, this helps us stay in touch and you get even more independence in the world. I think that's great. I struggle in conversations about protecting kids when we switch from how do I responsibly foster their independence to treating them like belongings. And I think that when we say we can't ever be too protective, then we've switched into treating them belongings, like possessions. And yet the whole experience of being a parent is to realize this is all risk. There's only risk here in this experience. There's beauty, too. But most of that beauty comes on the other side of dramatic, life altering risk. And I sense more and more that my job as a parent is just to say, like, "Here is the world, how can I help you get ready for it?" Not to say, "Let me create a life for you that's going to feel really stable and good?"

Sarah [01:06:08] Well, listen, Sweet Vada did an interview with The Today Show and she expanded on some of her thoughts and described herself as truly paranoid and trying to protect her children from all bad outcomes. And I just thought, oh, sweetheart.

Beth [01:06:21] I don't want that for her.

Sarah [01:06:22] I don't want that for her.

Beth [01:06:23] That's a hard way to be.

Sarah [01:06:24] It's a hard way to be. And I just think when we do that, when we talk about it and have this energy of like, I can put enough effort into protecting my kids. What we are implying is that the kids who do die, the people around them did something wrong. They were off their watch. They failed. And that's just so hurtful and harmful. I think all the time about an episode from Oprah, I mean probably 20 years ago at this point, where this woman fell asleep at the wheel and got in a car crash and her children died, all of them in the car. And she lived. And Dr. Robin, who I loved-- I don't know where Dr. Robin is these days, but I will follow her on Instagram if she was still around. I love Dr. Robin. And she said, "You did what everybody did. You just got caught." Everybody does this stuff. Everybody turned their backs. Everybody walks away. Everybody gets distracted. And sometimes the chaos catches up with us. But you didn't do anything bad. You didn't love them any less. Like, it's just a chaos lottery. And sometimes your number gets pulled and sometimes your kid's number gets pulled. I'm so sad when I see people trying to outrun the chaos lottery, because that's not how life works.

Beth [01:07:51] Yeah, I don't think the Airtags necessarily are trying to run the chaos lottery. But I think the mindset that the first and only thing is keeping you within my immediate control, does more harm than good in the long run.

Sarah [01:08:11] All right. Well, thank you for joining us for a very long episode of Pantsuit Politics. But, listen, we were tackling public schools and we still left a ton of stuff out and we talked forever. So that's just the reality. Thank you for joining us. We love it when you guys engage with us after the episodes and share your thoughts. And a great place to do that is our premium community. We hope you'll consider joining us there. There's more information about join in today's show notes and we will be back in your ears on Tuesday. And until then, keep it nuanced y'all.

Beth [01:08:54] Pantsuit Politics is produced by Studio D Podcast Production. Alise Napp is our managing director.

Sarah [01:08:59] Maggie Penton is our community engagement manager. Dante Lima is the composer and performer of our theme music.

Beth [01:09:05] Our show is listener-supported. Special thanks to our executive producers.

Executive Producers Martha Bronitsky. Ali Edwards. Janice Elliott. Sarah Greenup. Julie Haller. Helen Handley. Tiffany Hasler. Emily Holladay. Katie Johnson. Katina Zuganelis Kasling. Barry Kaufman. Molly Kohrs. Katherine Vollmer. Laurie LaDow. Lily McClure. Linda Daniel. Emily Neesley. Tawni Peterson. Tracey Puthoff. Sarah Ralph. Jeremy Sequoia. Katie Stigers. Karin True. Onica Ulveling. Nick and Alysa Villeli. Amy Whited. Emily Helen Olson. Lee Chaix McDonough. Morgan McHugh. Danny Ozment. Jen Ross.

Beth Jeff Davis. Melinda Johnston. Michelle Wood. Joshua Allen. Nichole Berklas. Paula Bremer and Tim Miller.

Sarah [01:09:58] I just want everyone to know that I feel like I've finally learned to say exacerbated. It took a long time. It took several years, but I think I've gotten there.

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