Defend Public Education: Jennifer Berkshire & Jack Schneider
March 9th, 2023
”All of us lead better lives because we know that in this country everybody's gonna get an education.”
Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider are co-authors of A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School and co-hosts of the education podcast Have You Heard? We discuss the ideology behind the unmaking of public education and the dangers of losing one our most prized public goods.
One of the original visions of public education was about building individual democratic citizens for a polis, an American society. Schools are at the forefront of expanding civil rights, whereas private schools can discriminate on all kinds of grounds. The current intense push to dismantle public education is part of a larger effort to roll back the gains of the civil rights revolution from the 1960s.
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Credits:
Host: Mila Atmos
Guest: Jennifer Berkshire & Jack Schneider
Executive Producer: Mila Atmos
Producers: Zack Travis and Sara Burningham
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Jennifer Berkshire & Jack Schneider Transcript
Mila Atmos: [00:00:04] Welcome to Future Hindsight, a podcast that takes big ideas about civic life and democracy and turns them into action items for you and me. I'm Mila Atmos. Public education is a public good, but it is under attack and has been for decades. Some of these attacks have been blatant and some of them more subtle. They're not always easy to spot. Today's guests are going to reveal the worrying history of how public education has been undermined and what that means for our kids and ultimately our democracy. Our guests are Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider, co-authors of A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School. And they also co-host the education podcast, Have you heard? And Jack and Jennifer, I see this quote that your goal with this book is to "incite a public reckoning," so we are here for that. Welcome to Future Hindsight. Thank you for joining us.
Jennifer Berkshire: [00:01:07] Thanks so much for having us.
Jack Schneider: [00:01:09] Good to be here.
Mila Atmos: [00:01:10] So, Jennifer, I just said that public education is a public good. Period. And that feels pretty uncontroversial. But it seems it is increasingly up for debate and we'll get to that. But first, maybe outline for us the goals of public education and why it matters so much for our democracy.
Jennifer Berkshire: [00:01:31] Isn't that a great question? And it's actually one that students and I have been discussing feverishly the last couple of weeks, because one of the things that I have learned from my podcast co-host and co-author Jack Schneider, is that our understanding of the purpose of school has changed a lot, and that what started out as a really clear objective to raise up Democratic citizens who are capable of self-governance then morphed to what we think of as basically preparing students for the workforce. And then finally, the purpose that we're most familiar with now, this idea of social mobility, that we are going to equip students with the tools they need to make it up to the top of that ladder, to get into that competitive college. And so, now we're at a point where you will find that people don't actually agree on the purpose of public school at all. And I would argue that that is a big part of why our current debate is so heated. Just saying something like "individual parents shouldn't determine what's taught in schools," "we should leave that up to quote unquote society," or "schools have to be about the public good." Those are now considered controversial statements.
Jack Schneider: [00:02:48] I'll just add that we have been supporting public education for at least 150 years, depending on what state you're in. And if you're in a state like ours, Massachusetts, far longer than that. And as a result of that, as a result of the fact that roughly 90% of Americans are educated in public schools and this has been true for generations, we take for granted the fact that we support education in this country with our tax dollars and as the purpose of education in the minds of Americans has changed over time, a divide has emerged between the message we send in the way that we support public education, right? That it is a public good, that all of us benefit from it, both at the state and local level as well as federally. Right? Roughly 10% of school budgets are supported by the federal government. So there's a divide between the message we send in the way we fund it, and the message we send in the way we talk about it. So parents particularly talk about education as if the sole purpose is to help their kids get ahead. And that's a private good. And that's particularly true among the most privileged parents who, in an increasingly unequal society are desperate to not see their children slip out of the middle class or out of the affluent class, if we're talking about the new rich, right. The old rich, they have a little less to worry about. Right. But this split is something that has led us to this present moment where, as Jennifer just said, suggesting that parents shouldn't determine everything about where their children are educated, when the expense is borne by taxpayers, that's suddenly a controversial thing to say.
Mila Atmos: [00:04:38] So, Jack, to flip from our motivations for supporting public education, what are the motivations for the attacks on public education and where are these attacks coming from?
The Democracy Group: [00:04:51] Yeah,. There have been school haters for a long time, but this is a particular brand of school haters. These people are motivated chiefly by a disdain for the amount of taxpayer dollars that get spent on public education every year. We're talking the better part of $1 trillion if you add up local, state and federal expenditures. And they also don't like a few other things. One of the things that they don't like is that decisions are made through democratic politics. So even though people tend to not show up in droves for local school board elections, it's true that local schools are governed by democratically elected boards and there are democratic processes at the state level as well. And so the vision that they've got is that schools would be run as a market, that you would make decisions by voting with your dollars. And that, of course, squares with a lot of libertarian thinking. So Milton Friedman is the center of a lot of this thinking. And there are alliances there. You know, they're familiar bedfellows who form a coalition that is opposed to the idea of public education as it has been enacted for over a century. So this also includes parents with very strong religious concerns that lead them to keep their children out of the public schools, whether homeschooling or sending their children to religious schools, people who have extreme social views, people who have a problem with teaching about race or with the fact that LGBTQ plus students may be enrolled in the school and treated as human beings. So this loose coalition has a shared vision, and that vision is of a totally privatized system, or at least mostly privatized system in which taxpayer dollars are distributed to families in the form of vouchers or perhaps even as Arizona does on a pre-loaded debit card so that you can buy the educational service or product of your choice. And much of what they have been up to in the past 5 to 10 years has been about destabilizing public schools, because while they are constantly working towards a vision of this privatized system of education in which you can choose, let's say, a private religious school and use taxpayer dollars to send your child there, you really need to alienate people from the public education system in order to make that work, because, again, about 90% of people send their children to public schools. Right? So if that system collapses, well, then then alternatives begin to look a little bit more appealing.
Jennifer Berkshire: [00:07:38] Right. I want to add one thing to that, because I think it's really important. We tend to think of education as somehow separate from all of the other political fights that are happening around us. And I would argue that you absolutely have to view the really intense push right now to dismantle public education as part of a larger effort to roll back the gains of the civil rights revolution that really took off in the 1960s. And we don't think about it this way, but schools are really the terrain on which civil rights have been expanded. And so if your goal is to say "Enough. People of color, you have too many rights. Women, you have too many rights. LGBTQ kids and parents back into the closet with you." Well, schools is really, that's where you want to focus your efforts. And that's why we see this intense attack not just on what kids are learning in public schools, but a real effort to do exactly what Jack was just describing to move kids out of the public schools where those civil rights are enforced. And so, if you move them into a private system, well, the private system can discriminate on all kinds of grounds. You can send around an email like a Florida private Christian school did this fall, saying "we will no longer welcome LGBTQ kids and their families here because it's against our biblical principles." And that's a school, by the way, that gets something like a $1.5 million a year in taxpayer funding through Florida's voucher program. So if your goal is to roll back the gains of the civil rights revolution, schools are absolutely what you're focused on right now.
Mila Atmos: [00:09:21] Right. Right. You make a really big case about the language that is used, you know, in order to to basically separate in our public minds the benefits and also the connection between our taxpayers and public education. And these attacks are sometimes actually quite subtle, to undermine the system and to undermine our own faith in the system. So, the language that they use and you point to this a lot is about choice or freedom. So it's pretty hard to argue against choice and freedom. Can you talk to us about that?
Jennifer Berkshire: [00:09:54] You're so right, because it's absolutely the air we breathe and the water we swim in. And you can go back 20 years and hear Jeb Bush making a stump speech at the Republican convention saying, "When you walk into a grocery store, you have all these different kinds of milk. You have chocolate milk. You have milk for people who don't even drink milk. Why can't our schools be organized the same way?" And to a lot of people, that sounds like common sense. Why can't you order up a school the way that you order up a sandwich? But as my co-author is so fond of, of pointing out, schools are not remotely like a consumable good. You know, for one thing, you're not going to have a sense of what impact the school had for many years. And so I think that this problem of language is huge because we've lost the ability to make the larger case for things that schools do, that original vision of democratic citizenship. We hardly have the words left anymore to make that stirring case. And so when somebody comes along and proposes a really radical vision, not just the vision of privatizing schools, but of really unbundling the idea of education from any kind of institution that now you're just going to be able to purchase an array of education related products, and we're going to call that school. We have a hard time pushing back against that because we live in the time of Amazon when we expect the book we just ordered to arrive on the doorstep tomorrow morning.
Jack Schneider: [00:11:35] Public education is something that we take for granted in this country. It has been there for all of our lives; those of us who are alive right now. And it's something that we care about. And because we care about it, we actually tend to complain about it a lot. Right. Education is something that is complex. I don't mean that it's complicated like a car engine. It's complex, like an ecosystem. And so improving schools is actually really hard. And over the past several decades, those of us who are interested in improving schools wherever we are on the political spectrum have generated support for our reform efforts by identifying flaws in the schools. If you combine that with the fact that we take schools for granted and therefore there is no constituency cheering on all of the accomplishments of the schools that we have well accepted for many decades, what you get is a picture of an American public that finds lots of flaws and faults in the public education system without much of another side saying, well, hold on a second. Right. It's a lot better than it used to be. Hang on. Right. Remember all the rights that students now have. Wait just a second. Take a look at what average per pupil spending is today in 2023 compared with 20 years ago, 50 years ago, 100 years ago. Now, the rules have changed because it used to be that whatever side you were on, your first move was to bash schools as they presently exist. And your second move would be to propose a policy that would improve them. And how have the rules changed? Because now there is a group intent on actually destroying public education and they've got this tremendous foundation of criticism to work with, right? So they've got Democrats and Republicans, right. They have teachers' union leaders. They have politicians. They have ordinary citizens on record identifying the many flaws in our schools. And our schools are deeply flawed. Right. But they're also a tremendous resource that we will never get back if we destroy them. We barely have a post office right now. If we propose the idea of public libraries today in 2023, would never pass that as a society. And yet we spend roughly $10,000 per child for 50 million children regardless of their paperwork in this country. And we give them 13 years of schooling. And mostly it's pretty good. And it's delivered by professionals who have been trained. Good luck getting that, if what you do is throw it in the garbage can, and go with a voucher scheme.
Mila Atmos: [00:14:21] Right. Well, Jack, you mentioned that 90% of American children go to public schools. And you also just said that traditionally the public roundly rejected attacks on public education, but then at some point started to take it for granted. And with some of these moves being more subtle, sounding like one thing, but actually doing another, that public rejection of the undermining active support for public education is harder to galvanize. What was the turning point in your view? Jennifer just talked about Jeb Bush. Was that it? Or when Betsy DeVos became secretary of education? Or something else where really people were like, "oh, whatever, you know, everybody for themselves."
Jack Schneider: [00:15:02] It's an impossible question to answer, right? That change happens steadily over time and there's never, well, almost never a kind of clear turning point. But the date that a lot of people would point to would be 1983, when "A Nation at Risk" was released. This was a report that came out of the Reagan administration that famously said that we were being besieged by a rising tide of mediocrity and that if a foreign power had done to our schools what we have done to ourselves, it would be treated as an act of war. And this was really the birth of a new kind of weaponized rhetoric, particularly coming out of Washington, DC, about the quality of the nation's schools. And if you look at public polling from about 1970 to the present, what you'll see is that the public's views of the nation's schools began to decline pretty sharply in the 1980s and has remained pretty low ever since. Now, this is in contrast with polling that finds that a majority of Americans are actually pretty satisfied with the school attended by their own children. And it's actually statistically impossible that a majority of our schools could be the equivalent of a C or D rating on an A through F scale, which is what polling finds, and at the same time that a majority of Americans could send their children to a school that is actually an A or a B in its quality. Those two things don't line up. And to me, what that suggests is not what some conservatives say, which is that Americans are delusional about the quality of their own children's schools. I think instead what it suggests is Americans actually know that when their kids come home from school, they've learned something most days. And they're relatively decent people. And they're better off attending that school, than not attending that school. And that when they graduate, they've actually made pretty tremendous strides in terms of not just what they know about the academic curriculum, but all the other things. So I'm the father of a seventh grader who learned how to play violin in school and discovered that she loves art, has made all kinds of different friends from different racial and economic backgrounds, as well as developing an understanding of science and math. She's a great reader and loves it. So I think we actually do understand the quality of our schools, and there are lots of other touch points we have. If we look, for instance, at test results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, over time, we can see that the quality of the schools has not declined. But the rhetoric has really transformed from, let's say, the rhetoric of the first half of the 20th century, even all the way up through about 1983, despite the fact that there were criticisms, worries about falling behind other countries in the world, we didn't make as much of a sport as we have in the last few decades of trashing our schools. And this is something that has been a bipartisan endeavor for the past few decades. So if you go back and you look at the way that George W Bush talked about schools, it was basically indistinguishable from the way that Barack Obama talked about the schools. And in fact, the signature education legislation of the George W Bush administration was No Child Left Behind, and the Obama administration pushed for a reauthorization of that law as the Every Student Succeeds Act, which basically kept most of the components in place. So I think really, if we're going to identify a turning point, it's the modern era in which we live, and it's an era in which it became a common practice to say very negative things about the nation's schools, about public education in the abstract, even while we continued to have largely positive experiences in terms of our concrete individual experiences.
Jennifer Berkshire: [00:19:01] I would add one more element to that. One is just the intense level of polarization we're living with that it turns out to be really difficult to sustain a public institution in an era in which there's such a deep and bitter divide. And then I would throw the pandemic into that because that is certainly the story that we're being told right now in the last pages of our book. Right when it was going to print, Jack and I mentioned that just as schools were shutting down, the Heritage Foundation was already out with a blueprint. And they're really one of the most influential groups driving the push to privatize schools. And their blueprint was an instruction to states that said basically take advantage of this moment to radically overhaul your school funding systems. "Fund students, not systems." Now, that's a catchy slogan, but it makes about as much sense as saying "fund individual motorists, not roads." And so what you really seeing is that the pandemic created this opening. And now the states that are enacting these enormous universal voucher programs, well they're also red states where the schools were one, the least likely to close, and the first to reopen. But the story that they're telling is that parents saw what was happening in their schools during the Zoom era. First, they demanded that schools reopen. And now years into this, they're basically demanding that legislators defund their schools. It really doesn't make a lot of sense. And I think the easiest explanation is just that polarization and the pandemic have created an opening for a policy idea that's actually really old.
Mila Atmos: [00:20:47] We are going to take a quick break. When we come back, Jack and Jennifer explain how the folks behind that push are using the culture wars to undermine public education. But first. We want to shout out a fellow democracy group podcast called Let's Find Common Ground. We often hear about polarization and division in America. Let's Find Common Ground is a biweekly podcast that shares stories and interviews where guests discuss constructive ways to respect all kinds of people who have very different ways of looking at the world. Hosts Ashley Milne-Tyte and Richard Davies interview changemakers from members of Congress of both parties to social activists, journalists, and authors. Find episodes at the Democracy Group website or at CommonGroundcommittee.org/podcasts. On Let's Find Common Ground, they find common ground one episode at a time. And now let's return to my conversation with Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider. So, Jennifer, I want to come back and talk about the pandemic's effects in a moment or two. But first, let's turn to the right now. Given what, everything you just said, where are we now in the fight for public education? You have a new preface to the paperback version, which is coming out in March. You write that the state of public education is even more dire than you predicted in your original manuscript. Things are much worse. We are a pretty hopeful bunch here on Future Hindsight, but I have to admit that your book really, really depressed me. So go on, tell us how dire it really is.
Jennifer Berkshire: [00:22:31] Nothing like being told that you're depressing to to really get the listeners to perk up. So I think we did a service by letting people know what was happening and just helping people make sense of how what seemed like disparate policy ideas all fit together. But what we underestimated was the speed with which this agenda would be enacted. And so now here we are in 2023 and we are seeing that state after state, all red states are enacting enormous private school voucher programs. They're called universal voucher programs. Parents will be able to essentially take state dollars and spend it however they want. Any of the efforts that were put in place 30 years ago when voucher programs were first being rolled out to define them as a civil rights program for kids attending struggling urban schools, programs for less affluent parents. Those are all falling by the wayside. Now the idea is to just, you know, give the money to all parents, but really what we're seeing is a wealth transfer to the wealthiest parents. States are now using taxpayer dollars to subsidize parents who already sent their kids to private schools. And I think the piece that we missed, we were certainly aware of polarization. But what we mis-underestimated -- is that even a word? -- We fail to see that one, the intensity of the culture wars that were coming down the pike and that just how advocates for school privatization would lean into that; how they would see the ugliest efforts to ban books and to attack vulnerable kids as an opening and an opportunity.
Jack Schneider: [00:24:20] I think of the book less as depressing than as clarifying. The times are depressing. The moment that we are in is, frankly, to me, horrifying. But as we wrote the book, I found myself suddenly understanding what was going on. And I think that that is the key piece that we hope, regardless of whether people read the book or not. In fact, if you want the CliffsNotes version of it, look at episode 100 of our podcast where we talk about the book, right? The thing that I think both of us hope people come away knowing is that there actually is a coherent ideological worldview that lies beneath some of these efforts, which on their surface may seem incoherent, may seem just sort of mean-spirited, don't seem connected to each other. And I think perhaps most dangerously seem like, well, maybe they're happening someplace else and I don't need to worry about it. And what we found as we worked on the book is that actually there's been an ideological push for more than half a century to pull apart the nation's public schools and the coalition that supports this idea of unmaking public education, a coalition of libertarians, evangelical Christians, social extremists, people with extreme views about race or gender. That coalition has seized this moment, and particularly in the wake of the pandemic, right in the wake of Donald Trump's presidency. In a time of deep polarization, they are seizing the opportunity to do all sorts of things that really get at this one aim, which is unmaking public schools. And so we didn't talk in the book about things like critical race theory, gender ideology, but those are all just ways of trying to alienate people from their public schools. And so what we want is to help people understand what are the the tenets of the ideological faith that is motivating this effort. What are the specific policies that legislatures are actually driving forward beyond the sort of red meat talking points about, you know, claims of teachers indoctrinating children? What are the actual policies they're trying to drive through at the state level? And then what do we need to be worried about seeing in our schools? Whether it's through the enactment of a state law that could be coming to a state near you sometime soon or something that a school board has the power to do, or even something that could be done via federal legislation.
Mila Atmos: [00:27:06] Right. Well, Jack, the book really, really does help that understanding. It was hugely clarifying to me and, you know, to take this approach, to think about what are the ideological underpinnings as opposed to looking at these individual legislation pieces in each state and how they all fit together. But so let's keep building that understanding, because there are these taxpayer subsidies for private enterprises by way of these voucher programs. And then, of course, there's the bonus effect of union busting and undermining of professional standards. You know, charter schools can hire unlicensed teachers, for example. Can you talk about some of the effects on educational outcomes from applying these free market consumer choice frameworks to not just schools, but to the teaching profession itself?
Jack Schneider: [00:27:58] One of the things that you were just alluding to is the belief that we should strip back any of the regulations that are in place, that we should move schools out of the sphere of government and democratic politics and into the sphere of the free market. And I think the first thing that we need to watch out for then is the fact that in the realm of the free market, you have choices, you have options, but you don't have rights. Once you peel away the government part, right, that's where the rights are, as Jennifer likes to say. And I think that it is a very intentional move to talk about freedom without talking about what kind of freedom you have. "You'll have freedom to," right, but "you won't have freedom from." And that's particularly concerning when I'm thinking of students with disabilities, for instance, or other students who right now are free from forms of discrimination in the public education system that they won't be free from in a privatized system. Where are your rights and who is going to recognize them and how will they be enforced? A second piece there is about a kind of basic minimum standard. So one of the first things that Betsy DeVos did when she became secretary of education, and she's often viewed as having been ineffective because she didn't win any clear major federal level policies. But what she was so successful at was normalizing an extreme way of thinking about education through rhetoric that if you're not paying attention seems sort of anodyne, but which really offers a view of public education that is totally contrary to how people have understood public education for most of its history. So she talked about funding students, not systems. Well, you know, on the surface, it doesn't seem so horrible. Right? But if what you're talking about there is giving money to families and then saying "do whatever you want with this money." Right. "Government's out of the game." Then how do you enforce minimum standards there? How do you ensure that a school is keeping children safe? For instance, how do you ensure that the curriculum isn't teaching children racist understandings of American history? Right. How do you ensure that at this school there are teachers who have basic minimum qualifications to be in the classroom? Well, Betsy DeVos doesn't think that government has any business in that, doesn't think that regulation should be a part of it, right, according to her and her allies. And by the way, she hasn't gone away just because she's no longer secretary of education. She remains a powerful figure in this movement. According to her, if a parent chooses the school, that's the end of the story. It's a good school. And I believe in what parents know. I believe in what families can understand about schools. But I also know that most of us don't spend our days inside schools. I know that the vast majority of family members simply take it for granted that there are professionals inside the building, that they know what they're doing, that the curriculum has been vetted by other professionals, that there are curricular standards that the state is attending to and that the public has had a say in. Right. These are things that you will no longer be able to take for granted. So in addition to rights being peeled away, I would say that the floor is about to drop out from under us. Regulation does squeeze towards the middle a bit, right? It does lower the ceiling because it limits what we can do, but that is the cost of having a floor beneath us. And I think the challenge then is to say, well, how can we maintain that floor while also making it possible for schools to fly a bit higher than they perhaps might in a heavily regulated environment. Then the last thing that I would say we need to be paying attention to in a market based system is just further fragmentation. So we already live in a deeply segregated society, but our public schools do offer a place where if the community is somewhat integrated, where young people from different backgrounds can come together across different experiences and learn to recognize the dignity in each other and build common experiences that might enable us to live in a racially, economically. And socially integrated society. And I really worry about the potential for that. If what people can do is self-select into micro enclaves that match exactly whatever the home ideology is. And I think we need to go a lot further in order to capitalize on the potential of public education to build bridges across difference. And one of the original visions of public education was about building not just an individual democratic citizen for each student who was attending schools, but a democracy, a polis, an American society. And granted, right, people were excluded from that vision of American society who are no longer excluded. And I think that's what makes now the moment to be thinking about how can we leverage schools so that we actually do begin to close the polarization gap so that we actually do recognize the dignity in each other across the lines of stratification that presently separate us? So that's the third thing that I would be worried about in the system that we're inching towards and that we're already seeing play out in states like Iowa and Arizona and Florida and Indiana.
Mila Atmos: [00:33:46] Hmm. Well. So, Jennifer, let's talk about learning loss during the pandemic. You know, we're still figuring out the true impact of the pandemic on learning, but we're safe to say that it has had a profound impact. That's from a combination of things, of course, including school shutdowns, straight up trauma, remote learning, and like so many things, tend to reinforce inequality. What are your chief concerns around that learning loss and how we're making up for it?
Jennifer Berkshire: [00:34:15] My chief concern is just how poorly we're learning from the lesson of learning loss and that as you look to see the story of how kids fared, we got this sort of country wide lesson in how essential our schools are, how many kids rely on them for all sorts of things like meals and caring, and that it goes beyond just what they're learning in a classroom. And the idea that you would then take that, and your policy solution would be to dismantle schools seems to me horrifying. I am very concerned about the overheated rhetoric around learning loss. I think it plays right into what Jack was talking about, where you see people seizing on rhetoric and raising the stakes. And so you may have seen headlines in the paper predicting out, you know, trillions of dollars of loss in future earnings. And that's the sort of thing that I think is just wildly unhelpful. And what it does is it sort of takes our understanding of what schools do, shoehorns it into this very narrow concept. Well, schools are the place that kids go to train them for future earnings. And the wake up call we got during the pandemic was that actually schools do so much more and that if you don't have one, your community really withers. Let's take that lesson and go forward.
Jack Schneider: [00:35:54] One thing that I think is interesting to observe about the impact of the pandemic on the move to dismantle public schools is that prior to the pandemic, the coalition of people inside groups like ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, or the American Enterprise Institute or the Heritage Foundation or the Hoover Institution, or some of these state level groups like the Goldwater Institute, the Mackinac Center in Michigan, that they were pushing really hard for virtual schools. They were pushing hard for virtual schools for a few reasons. Right. That they are much cheaper to run. Right? You don't have to maintain a physical plant. You can have much larger class sizes. It's very hard to unionize teachers in a virtual school, right? Most of these educators will never meet each other. It's a lot easier to create micro schools that would cater to particular niches in the market. Right? That's much harder to do when you're doing place-based education, right? Harder to find the minimum number of people to run a school who want to do, let's say, a Christian approach to math and science. And that push for virtual schools got essentially put on hold because Americans realized that putting young people on screens all day long and calling it school is a cruel joke. And even though that was the best that most schools were able to do in the case of a once in a century deadly pandemic, that's not something that most of us want to do as we continue to inch back towards normalcy. But it's really important to remember that's a part of the long game here. When they're talking about moving people into the free market, the suggestion is that maybe all young people will be at schools like Andover and Exeter, these $50,000 a year elite private schools. And, you know, they'll have these fabulous state of the art facilities and they'll they'll be picking among their top Ivy League choices for college. And really, the vision is far more bleak than that. And I think there's a lot of good evidence that what we'll see is a race to the bottom. Who can deliver education the cheapest and therefore wring a profit out of what will increasingly be a very small per pupil dollar amount, pre-loaded onto a debit card. And there will be an unregulated advertising space here. So unlike with, let's say, pharmaceuticals, you'll be able to claim whatever you want, right? "This is the best school in America." It just happens to be in a basement run by unqualified educators who stick young people in front of computer screens all day and have an algorithm lead instruction. And so, I think that as we are envisioning a future where the market is where we are making decisions, we need to recognize the fact that the thing that so many of us hated during the pandemic is a key component of the future envisioned by these advocates.
Mila Atmos: [00:39:09] Right. Right. So, Jack, to your point, that virtual learning was so attractive to these groups because it fits into this whole cost cutting crusade. And we hear so much from politicians, you know, quote, "we spend so much, but there are no results," unquote, and then slash budgets, increase class sizes, and outsource teachers. So talk about this intersecting kind of death by a thousand cuts in a way. What's the killer combo at work here? We've talked about so many strategies for decimating public education. So what are the red flag words for tactics our listeners should be aware of or look out for?
Jack Schneider: [00:39:49] Yeah, I think the first one is choice or freedom. And I don't take a stand against those. Who would? Right? Those are things that we are brought up valuing in this country. But I think it's really important to recognize that that's a substitution, right? It's a substitution for rights and that I think there is a space for choice. There's a need for particular kinds of freedom. But if we move towards a system in which all we have is freedom to do certain things and we have no freedom from particular kinds of threats that we have actually quite consciously tried to respond to through the establishment of protocols and rules and regulations. Many of the things that those who would dismantle public education are so hell-bent on paring back or doing away with entirely, then we all have a lot to lose there. I think that one of the things that we need to watch out for is the claim about parental rights. Parents have always had rights and at no point have those rights been curtailed. And it's important to recognize that that, too, is a substitution. It's a substitution for the support of the American public. If we continue to move towards a vision of schools as organizations that only serve the young people who are enrolled there and their families, then what's going to happen to taxpayer support for education if we don't all benefit from schooling? And I think we do, right? I think our communities are stronger, our states are stronger, the nation is stronger, our economy is stronger. All of us lead better lives because we know that in this country everybody's going to get an education. If we move towards that substitution, I have great worries about the America we live in as a result. Which is not to say that I don't trust the American people. I just have more faith in our collective decision making power than I do in the aggregate decision making power of every single individual; when we make those decisions separately rather than together. And then I think the last substitution that people need to watch out for is around these questions of the curriculum, right? They need to watch out for claims about we're going to get rid of woke history. We're going to get rid of gender ideology. We're going to pull CRT out of the schools. What they're really saying there is that we are going to take away the professional decision making authority that school district employees and educators exercise at the moment. And we are going to make curriculum something that we can test in the political realm. So schools are political in the sense that we govern them through democratic elections. You want to govern schools? Run for school board. Anybody can do it. There are young people who run for school board election. Graduate from high school, and join the school board. My fear is that if we move things like the curriculum out of the sphere of professionalism and into the sphere of politics, that what we'll see is not only some very problematic curriculum in particular places, but we'll also just see a constant churn. People will always be dissatisfied with something, and it's actually something that we have kind of collectively decided to leave alone as a society. Every once in a while we come back fighting over the curriculum, particularly around things like sex ed history. Standards tend to get us pretty worked up. But if what we do is say that we as family members or as individual citizens are going to interfere in the curriculum because of these claims that are presently being made, then again, what we're effectively saying is we're going to substitute that as a process for the process that currently exists, where, sure, there's a lot of bureaucracy, there's a lot of regulation. The decisions aren't always great. There's a lot of squeezing towards the middle. But I have a lot more confidence in the schools that are teaching material decided upon, crafted by, and delivered by professionals than a curriculum that is the product of political contestation in deeply polarized times.
Mila Atmos: [00:44:29] Right. So, Jennifer, as a follow up here, what can an everyday parent or an everyday citizen, even without children in school, do to support public education, to bolster the case for the importance and the essential necessity to have public education thrive?
Jennifer Berkshire: [00:44:49] Yeah. So I think one of the most inspiring things that you can do right now is pay a visit. If not in person, then virtually. Find out about a community where public schools have really been under attack. And it could be in the way that Jack was just describing where, you know, suddenly a conservative school board is elected and they, you know, they want to adopt controversial history standards and ban books. It could be in a community like Croydon, New Hampshire, where public education as an institution was on the chopping block. Watch the way that diverse and frankly, just inspiring collection of local residents comes together when they're reminded of the value and importance of public education. We hear so many of the bleak stories, the stories of the racist parents chasing the director out of town. But there are so many communities where people have decided collectively that this is too extreme. We're not going to stand for this. We are not going to just stand by and watch as the most vulnerable kids in our schools are ganged up on and attacked. That was really a big part of the story of the midterm elections, where the sort of extreme culture war as an issue for Republicans felt really flat in a lot of states and communities. And so my answer to your question about what people can do is to learn from the places where people have had no choice but to defend their public schools because they are figuring out strategies that work. They understand that their friends and neighbors hate the partisanship, that they don't think of their public school system that way. They are really resistant to the idea of attacking teachers, attacking students. And the more they come to see these policy ideas as extreme and a threat not just to their schools and the teachers and students in them, but to their entire communities. The more they rally around, and often, you know, over disagreements and and political divisions. That to me, is so inspiring.
Mila Atmos: [00:47:02] Yeah, Thank you. So, Jack. Here's my last question. Looking into the future, what makes you hopeful?
Jack Schneider: [00:47:11] I think the thing that makes me hopeful is when I'm in schools as a part of my job, I'm a professor of education, so I work pretty regularly with school leaders, district leaders, folks at the state level. That often just brings me into schools. And I think of a metaphor used by one of my mentors, Larry Cuban at Stanford, who -- he must have written 20 books about education, and in one of them he described a storm at sea creating all kinds of heavy chop and wave conditions that make being out at sea feel really treacherous. But then below the surface, you know, you dive deep enough and it's calm. And I think that's what we see right now in our schools, right? That in terms of our national rhetoric, it could not be more heated at the moment. And at the state level or at the district level, there is all kinds of contestation. And yet inside schools where we still have professional educators working with young people, all of whom are more or less bought in to the process of education and who are there to learn and work with each other, who trust each other, who feel safe together, who see each other as human beings and who treat each other that way. That's inspiring to me, you know, that makes me feel like it's worth it to fight for the existence of a system that's flawed, of a system that has perpetually failed people over the generations because it's better now than it used to be. And it'll be better in the future than it is today.
Mila Atmos: [00:48:46] Thank you. Thank you both. And I know I said the book was depressing, but honestly, I really don't want to put people off because it is utterly essential. We don't want to stand by and watch this public good, this pillar of our democracy and our society privatized and polarized. Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider are co-authors of A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School, and co-hosts of the Education podcast, Have You Heard? Next week on Future Hindsight, we're joined by Laphonza Butler. She's the president of Emily's List, an organization that aims to help elect pro-choice Democratic women to office.
Laphonza Butler: [00:49:33] It is the women who bring not only the challenges of their community, but they also bring the dreams of their community to the policy making table. And I think that's what drives them to actually try to find common ground, because they're both trying to solve problems but also create futures.
Mila Atmos: [00:49:52] That's next time on Future Hindsight. And before I go, first of all, thanks for listening. You must really like the show if you're still here. We have an ask of you. Could you rate us or leave a review on Apple Podcasts? It seems like a small thing, but it can make a huge difference for an independent show like ours. It's the main way other people can find out about the show. We really appreciate your help. Thank you. This episode was produced by Zack Travis and Sara Burningham. Until next time, stay engaged.
The Democracy Group: [00:50:36] This podcast is part of the Democracy Group.