 Hi, I'm Nick Gillespie with Reason, and I joined today on this live stream, our annual, annual weekly live stream with Zach Weismiller. Reason say hello, Zach. Hello. And we are joined today by Robert Pandicio, who's an education analyst and expert at AEI, the American Enterprise Institute. You wrote a fantastic book about success academies, the charter school system. You work at the Fordham Institute, and you were also a school teacher in the South Bronx, right, Robert? I was. It's been a few years since I've been in the classroom, but the rest of those guilty is charged. Yeah. What was the name of the book again? I'm sorry. It was called How the Other Half Learns, came out about two or three years ago. Yeah. And that was, you know, a fantastic work. We talked about that. What's interesting about you, obviously, is that you are a proponent of school choice in the broadest terms possible, but you also call bullshit, both on a lot of things that are happening in the public schools, but also in private schools. And so we're going to talk about the varieties of school choice. And we're going to, and we're also going to talk about what's wrong with public schools, as well as private schools, including the wokeness of elite prep schools everywhere, which are the worst of the bunch. But let's start talking about what we use as the title for this, which I don't have in front of me because of technical issues. Why did schools stop teaching kids how to read? Yes. Why did schools stop teaching kids how to read? Maybe we should call it, why didn't they start? Yeah. Let's talk about this. You wrote an op-ed in the New York Post, I don't know, about eight or nine months ago. Expert, it is to see on teaching kids to read beyond comprehension. What are you talking about there? What's the problem with the way kids are taught to read? Well, it's complicated. All of these topics that you enumerated up top, Nick, are all complicated. So it's going to be a challenge to do anything more than scratch the surface in an hour. But I mean, at the risk of being the guy who waves the bloody shirt, most of what I learned about literacy, I learned the hard way as a South Bronx fifth grade teacher. And to set the scene, I was a second career teacher. I had a whole other career in life in the media world until I was almost 40 and then I signed up to be a fifth grade teacher in the South Bronx for two years under the New York City Teaching Fellows program. Two years turned into five and I never quite went back to my other life, partially because I became kind of alarmed and militant about not just reading instruction, but curriculum at large. In other words, at the time in the policy world, everybody was talking about assessments and testing and accountability and teacher quality. And I was like, can we talk about what the kids do all day? Because that seems to matter and nobody seems to be talking about it. So my real beef, as it were, with the way I was taught to teach reading and writing, frankly, is that it made a lot of mistake in assumptions, not the least of which is this idea that reading comprehension is a skill. And at the risk of wonking out a little bit, I mean, it's important to kind of think of reading as kind of like having two main components. The first is what we call decoding, the ability to look at a piece of text and translate those symbols into words. And the second far more prodigious challenge is understanding what the hell those words mean. So in other words, there's the quote skill of reading, that is a skill. I could show you nonsense words right now. And even though they don't exist, we could all agree how they sound, so to speak. But the much tougher nut to crack is the comprehension piece. And as you know, Nick, that's how I became a disciple of Evie Hirsch Jr. and his core knowledge and cultural literacy views. Because as I've said, I think I've even said this to you. He was the one guy who described what I saw in my South Bronx classroom every single day, kids who could decode, for the most part, but struggled with comprehension. And that piece that you showed from the New York Post was kind of like the antithesis of that. I was trained under the methods taught by Lucy Calkins of Teachers College, which broadly speaking said, oh, well, look, it has to be kids aren't reading because they're bored, they're disengaged, the curriculum isn't about their interests. So we need to make it more about them so they'll be motivated and engaged. And Hirsch was the guy who's like, no, it's background knowledge, it's vocabulary. And at the risk of over summarizing, Hirsch is right, Calkins as well. So let's talk a little bit about this in terms that kind of certainly parents might understand or anybody who's been reading, you know, education kind of policy arguments for, you know, really 60 years. How to translate this into just how does this intersect with arguments over whole language learning to read and phonics? Yeah, I think mostly that's the first part of that. If a colleague of mine once described reading as a two lock box, the first lock is the decoding piece. The second piece is the comprehension piece. So that's the first box. And this is not new. I mean, somewhere behind me on that bookshelf, there's a book from 1955 called Why Johnny Can't Read. We were arguing about this then before either one of us. Robert, I'm just going to ask you because I think your microphone, you're clicking against it. Would you mind just, why don't you take the earbuds out completely? Maybe that might help. Yeah. Okay. Can we hear you now? I don't think so. Oh, now put them back in. Yeah. Okay, put it back in and just keep the jacket zipped up. Sorry, this is. We're having a little of a technical rough start today. This is our two lock box here. Yeah. Okay. Can you, you might have, oh, you know what? He's muted. So hold on. There. Yeah. Did that work? I think he muted himself. It says. Okay. There we go. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. And just, I will try not to talk with my hands and looks like you guys got booted off now. So let's just keep improvising here. So anyway, as I was saying in answer to your question, Nick, that you can still hear me, we've been arguing about, you know, phonics versus whole language from well over half a century. As far as I can tell back from, you know, the Rudolph flesh book why Johnny can't read in 1955, you know, back then we didn't call it whole language. We called it the look say method and why Johnny can't read took apart the so-called look say method. And then, you know, 30 years, 40 years after that, we had the national reading panel, you know, which was put together by an active Congress, which once again said it's phonics. Basically, I mean, it's more complicated than that, but it reasserted that phonics was the way to go. So what we're having now is the latest version of an argument and debate that has gone on for well over half a century. But what's important here, I mean, or part of your critique is, and I apologize to our audience, because we're having technical issues with the program that we're using to stream this. So Robert is constant. Zach and I seem to be intermittent, perhaps a, you know, a kind of echo of our shoddy academic careers or something in and out of the classroom, but no, but I'm the Al Hague of reason. I'm in charge. Yeah, you could just keep talking, you know, and just talk as much as you can for as long as you can until somebody tells you to shut up, which I'm sure you're used to as a school teacher. But no, so I mean, so part of this, the phonics and whole language or look see method, this, you know, that is about decoding and basic, you know, it's hard to say like literacy. I mean, it's like that people can understand what the letters of the alphabet are and the words that they form, etc. That's a big part of reading. Absolutely. If you get the code, you cannot read. Period. And it's also one of the things that is curious just to bring up about why Johnny can't read, you know, from the mid fifties, a decade that people like Bill Bennett, the, you know, former education secretary who wrote a nation at risk and said, you know what, everything was fucking great in the fifties. The only thing teachers worried about was kids chewing gum in the hallways or something. You know, in fact, when you look back at the 1950s, it was filled with anxiety about the coming idiocracy of America because, you know, kids were fat, they needed the presidential fitness stuff, you know, the Soviets were putting satellites into space, and we could not read anymore. There was a huge anxiety about that. So in a way, education policy and wankery is always in a state of like heightened anxiety. Really? Yeah. You know, so that, I mean, that's clear. But is there a clear difference between the efficacy of whole language and, and phonics in learning that basic skill of how to read? Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure I'm answering your question directly. But I mean, if with no phonics, there's no, there's no reading. I mean, for what it's worth, when I was teaching in the South Bronx, I never had a kid who couldn't decode. They could all decode. So this is why I became more of a comprehension guy. Yeah, look, this is this is a blind spot on my part. I probably, if you want to say that I've been a little bit blithe about decoding over the years, I'll own that. That's probably true. But I think because it's because it is a skill, it's easier to get kids, I shouldn't say easier, easier to get kids to the starting line of decoding. And again, this is not the question you're asking, but I think it's important. One of the big mistakes that we're at risk of making right now is conflating decoding and reading. If we get every kid in America to the decoding starting line by the end of third grade, one, that would be a massive achievement. But that doesn't mean that, you know, years from now, we're going to look at, say, fourth grade and eighth grade and eighth reading scores and see a huge improvement because that second piece of it, the comprehension piece, is a much, much harder not to crack. So, you know, look, I'm a big fan of what we're seeing across the country in terms of some of these laws. And I know it's, you know, it's an ironic thing to say to a reason audience that I'm in favor of state laws on reading. We can talk about that, if you like. But, I mean, there's a new seriousness about getting kids to the starting line of decoding that is essential. But it's really important that we understand it's just the starting line. Okay. And so, yeah. Well, I do want to kind of talk about that, though. Like, how do school choice advocates like us cope with the widespread adoption of what seems like a clearly flawed teaching strategy? Yeah, you could see it like, I don't know if, like, school choice necessarily solves it because then, you know, it's not necessarily just infiltrating only district schools and in a way like a more fragmented system might be more open to that sort of infiltration. Look, Nick kind of alluded to my calling bullshit on both sides up top. And this is one of those areas in which I've made myself a little bit unpopular with our school choice friends. I mean, I can't tell you how many times I've given talks or been on panels where I kind of say this to school choice and also to end reform people. Like, you know, if you think about the internal logic of education reform and testing for the last 20 or 30 years, we have this idea that, oh, teachers know what to do. We just need to hold them accountable. Or I guess the choice version of that would be to say, oh, there's all this, you know, this, this, this untapped capacity out there in excellence that just needs to be freed from bureaucracy and red tape. Like, where the hell did you get that idea? Because I promise you, it's not true. I mean, I use the example in my old school of saying, you know, this was not a school where you had, you know, lazy union adults lay about, you know, waiting to hit their 30 years and 25 years of or 55 years old and 25 years of service punching the clock and counting the days. It was mostly, you know, what I've described as good people trying hard and failing and not failing despite their training, but failing because of their training. You know, so if we have this idea that either teachers are phoning it in and would do better if only we held their feet to the fire, or they already know what to do and we don't let them, you got to let that go. That is simply not the case. You know, we have had any number of kind of demonstrably bad ideas, again, about reading comprehension in particular, that don't go away either through accountability or because of school choice. Why does it keep happening though? Like, what is so appealing about something like Lucy Calkin's approach to so many? That's really easy. I was just telling somebody this yesterday, because these are ideas that are obvious, intuitive, engaging, sexy and dead wrong. In other words, to broadly oversummarize, I think the big mistake we make is assuming that reading comprehension, and I'm sorry for dwelling upon those distinctions, but they're important, this idea that reading comprehension is a skill like throwing a ball or riding a bike, that it doesn't matter what you read as long as you're reading and, you know, that you're going to become a proficient reader. And that's just not so. You know, back to the Hirsch thing, you've got to have a whole broad body of background knowledge, because, you know, language comprehension, broadly oversimplified, it's a kind of shorthand, you know, that we, every conversation we have, everything, literate speakers and writers assume their audiences are operating with the same, you know, schema, the same broad body of background knowledge. And when that's true, conversation is fluid. I mean, it's almost like, you know, the words we are using are the tip of the iceberg and below the waterline is a whole lot of context, vocabulary, ambiguities around words. I mean, think of the word shot, for example, simple word shot, everybody knows what it is, every kid comes to school knowing that word shot. Well, it means a very different thing on a basketball court and a doctor's office and a rifle range and a bar. You know, if you don't know those contexts, and this is one example, but all of languages like that are most simple utterances rely on shared background knowledge and shared context. Sorry, that was a long discursive answer. Can I, well, two things just to ask about that. Is it clear that cultural literacy, you know, has declined and Hirsch was writing at the, you know, what, at the end of the 80s? Yeah, it's about right. Nick's gone again. So I'll just run with that question. Yeah, I mean, you know, language is a cultural construct. And it's uncomfortable to talk about this. But I mean, there is a dominant language culture, and it relies a lot on the idioms and cultural illusions of that people assume you know. So is it different? Well, let's say, for example, we decide, oh, we're not going to teach Greek, Greek myths anymore, because, you know, that's that's white supremacy culture. Well, then years from now, when, when a, you know, one of my former students is at a job interview and somebody makes a reference to opening Pandora's box or somebody's Achilles heel and the kid goes, huh, what's that? Well, you know, that doesn't mean the kid is dumb. It doesn't mean the kid is poorly educated. It means somebody along the way made a decision that you don't need to know that. Fine, we can make that decision as an educator, but that person who might hire him or her across the desk might think differently. How could that kid not know Pandora's box? How could that kid not know Achilles heel? Everybody knows that. And then you make a judgment and someone else gets the job. So, you know, this is this is the message I always preach to teachers is I don't want to be the guy who tells you what kids should know and what they don't need to know, but just understand that those are high stakes decisions with real consequences for kids. So the the challenge here is, you know, maybe there is a need for cultural literacy or there's kind of a broad understanding that certain teaching methods are bad and certain teaching methods are better. But it's the the idea of getting to to that truth and and and how it gets applied across the system. And so then that's where these questions of, you know, school choice versus like district or state level management come in. So where do you draw those lines? Because I mean, I guess like my inclination as as someone who's very pro school choice, bullish on school choice, like it's that these kind of have to be worked out and like the cream will rise to the top versus implemented from the top down. But does that have limitations as to how far it can be applied? Yeah, it has. Here's I mean, remind me, Zach, because I do want to go back and kind of, you know, talk about the Lucy caulk and stuff and what happens when we assume that, you know, kids just need to read and it doesn't matter what they read because I think that's a lot of, you know, how these pedagogies kind of take effect because they feel good, they're engaging for kids. But you know, the answer to your question, I think, you know, and again, you know, I'm a school choice guy, unapologetic, you know, I chose my daughter's school, I want you to choose your kid's school period full stop. But there's an opportunity cost here. So let's say, for example, you know, in other words, if teachers have been making this mistake for dozens of years, why do we think parents are going to be better at being critical consumers of, you know, instructional materials, pedagogy and whatnot. So you might make a bad choice, okay, and then your child's education will be harmed. And good for the rest of us, we're now learning from your example. So it'll be better for your grandkids. But, you know, your kid only gets to be in fourth grade one time, you know, and if the model of the curriculum that you chose, the school that you chose, is holding on to bad ideas about literacy, well, okay, you know, there's, you have no one to blame but yourself, I suppose. I'm less worried, frankly, about, you know, the engaged parent, you know, who can be a savvy consumer of curriculum and school culture and whatnot, than I am the families that I used to work with, you know, whether in South Bronx or Harlem. I mean, I would see, you know, and I want to be careful here. I don't want to suggest that they can't make good decisions. They can and do. But there's always going to be a problem in education with camp followers. Okay, this is an unlovely thing that we never like to talk about with choice. You know, we spend billions of dollars on education and that's a rich, you know, target of opportunity for a lot of folks who, you know, are not necessarily cognitive scientists and well versed in whatnot and are perfectly happy to cash the check and move on. So, you know, you got to be, you can't assume, I think, that every parent is going to be, you know, have be very clear eyed about this, and that there aren't some unscrupulous motivations among people who will rush into the choice market. That's all. Does that mean I'm not, does that make me a bad choice advocate? Okay, maybe it does. But I think it makes me a realistic one. Right. So then what do you do with that information? Like how far, I guess, are you willing to push school choice? Because the question always is, you know, and we'll probably get into some of the states that have passed these education savings accounts laws that is kind of like the latest frontier in school choice, where you just kind of give the parents or it's kind of framed as refunding them some tax, the tax money and they're able to use it at a private school. And then the question that, you know, we libertarians over here always have as well, are there going to be strings attached to that or there are going to be conditions attached to that. It sounds like you might be saying that there should be some level of string attached. Maybe not. How do you think about that? This is kind of where I stare at my shoes and change the subject. Because I just don't really have a good answer for you. I mean, one, look, I think it's incredibly naive to think that you're going to take public funding all together out of education. You know, that world doesn't exist and it's not going to. The idea that you're just going to say trust, it makes no more sense to say trust parents and send more money than when the teachers union would say just trust teachers and send more money. You know, public dollars are going to come up. Yeah, we should also point out in a profound way, public schooling to paraphrase Stokely Carmichael, public schooling is as American as violence and cherry pie. I mean, it really goes back to the colonial era where there was publicly pooled money. So we don't have to litigate whether or not there's going to be public money in education, but then what are the... Oh, we might, Nick. We might have to litigate that because there are some, especially frankly on the libertarian right, who think there should be no government role whatsoever. And then what do you do with the 60% of kids who are not going to either homeschool or what you do with those kids? Well, I mean, I'll say this within the, you know, kind of political battles right now, the right, which broadly speaking is the one that wants to separate state from school, they don't want to do that because they want to be able to control it. And we're going to talk about Ron DeSantis's forays into curriculum development in Florida or devolution in a bit. But what are the limits? Let's just say this like, because, and it's true, you know, I grew up in New Jersey, most I went to Catholic school there, the state had certain requirements of all schools that, you know, got tax breaks and things like that. So, you know, it's already there. What are the limits that you would put in place on, let's say, backpack funding, you know, you get in Arizona, $6,000, $7,000, whatever it is, is going to go to the kid, they can use it for basically anything. What kind of school do you say not that one, or what kind of expense where if the parents say, you know what, we're going to Disneyland and they're going to learn about pirates of the Caribbean there? Would you, you know, like how do you, how do you create a policy that, you know? Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, I'm probably a lot more, you know, libertarian in that regard. You know, I guess the way I would say that is, look, as you can tell, I have some very well-defined ideas about, you know, good, better and best in terms of schools, good, better and best in terms of curriculum. I don't want to be the guy that imposes those ideas. I want to persuade you to adopt some ideas, but I don't want to compel you. About the only thing that I think I would probably compel is decoding, is early childhood literacy. You know, in other words, if you want to take public dollars, you got to get kids to the decoding line. Which would invalidate, like, you know, most of the schools in New York, right? Most of the public schools, because they're not, I mean, seriously, by like, you know, the early NAEP scores, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, what do they have? What, you know, what are the proficiency levels? It's got to be below 50%, right? Oh, I think that's right. Yeah. You know, in the New York Times article on this, they were estimating about a quarter of elementary schools employ Lucy Cochens' methods. That's huge. Well, can I, you know, because I was in and out due to technical difficulties, which are really a form of original sin. I went to Catholic school, but learned how to read anyway. But I put everything in terms of why did, and I apologize if you've answered this, but why did going from teaching reading, like the first part of decoding, why is that necessarily, even from a progressive point of view, why does that mean, okay, and we're not going to teach cultural literacy? Because it's, yeah. I think we can broadly separate those two things. Okay. I mean, the whole language versus phonics debate versus the, you know, the cultural literacy versus let a thousand flowers bloom, kind of, I mean, they're related, you know, there's a through line from one to the other, but they're distinctly different arguments. Yeah. Okay. But then if we're talking about the kind of, I mean, then is the problem with the Lucy Cochens style reading stuff, is it that the kids don't even get to the decoding line? No, no, again, I think they do get to the decoding line. The problem, and we started to talk about this and either we got diverted by technical problems, or maybe I diverted myself as I sometimes do, the problem with the Cochens method, I don't mean to single her out unfairly. A lot of folks adopt this. I mean, you know, on the shelf behind me is a ton of books that are dedicated to teaching, I would say. And I mean, school teaching scores, and you know, the general feel about it, you know, it sucked for the 20 years prior to her kind of. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I think a lot of this conversation to be broadly oversimplifying. And here's another example. We have this idea that is still dominant. And Lucy's the poster child for this in many ways, that reading comprehension is a skill that you can that you can practice comprehension strategies and skills the same way you can practice riding a bike or throwing a ball. And that's simply not so. It's heavily dependent on background knowledge and vocabulary. So if you are a Cochens advocate, you would say as long as the kids are reading, well, let's let's engage them, let's make sure that the that they're reading stuff about their interests about their lives, you know, and that will as long as they're practicing the skill of reading, then they're going to become better readers. There's a grain of truth to that. I mean, and it has to do with a lot of technical stuff about how even the language of children's books has more rare and unique words than our conversation as college graduates, for example. So there's something there. But again, you have to read broadly because of, you know, you have to build schema, you have to build vocabulary and you're unlikely to do that if all you're ever doing is reading about your own experiences and interests. Worse, Nick, you get kind of a false positive. You know, you can see kids doing what feels like fairly sophisticated comprehension work when it's about topics they know. But when the test comes and they they're suddenly reading about a subject they don't know, it's as if their brain has fallen out of their head and you think as a teacher, what happened? We worked on these skills. It's like, but they're not a skill at all. Yeah, this is a lot of, yeah, there's a lot of domain specific knowledge, right? Which is, and I think about this, I don't know if you guys have seen Glass Onion, but I'll wrap that in. But, you know, there's a nylon must style billionaire who's kind of an idiot. And, you know, what I think is right, and there's a French sociologist named Pierre Bourdieu who talked about cultural capital, but that what happens constantly is that people who have success in one area, say making a billion dollars in business, because they're really good at selling widgets or a certain type of food or something like that, they start to think, well, I'm brilliant in this field. So when I start discoursing about public policy or about nutrition or whatever, or celebrities who are really fucking good at making movies, you know, start telling you about like, you know, what you should eat or what kinds of, you know, rocks you should shove up your vagina, like it's all equal to them because they're brilliant for everything they do. And in a way, our public school, not our public school system, our school system has gravitated more and more to tell kids, you are a genius, you are so smart, everything you do is kind of smart. Main specific stuff, like, I know some things really well, and then I can kind of fake it because there are certain kinds of matrices of understanding or analysis that you can play everywhere. But man, you know, it's like, you got to know something to know what it's about. No question. Look, there was a fantastic paper written, Dan Willingham, my buddy, he was a cognitive scientist at the University of Virginia, loves to talk about this. Best paper ever. The title was, could Steven Spielberg manage the Yankees? And the answer is no. You know, you're a creative genius, but you're a creative genius filmmaker. So and look, this is a really an important point. If you think about the things that we talk about all the time as the desired ends of schooling, we don't want kids to be, you know, compliance driven automatons. We want them to be problem solvers and communicators and collaborators and critical thinkers. Well, those are all domain specific things. Right. You know, just like Steven Spielberg couldn't manage the Yankees, you can't make kids all purpose critical thinkers and problem solvers. All of this stuff is domain specific. You know, you and I could not have this conversation, you know, and come up with insightful, you know, insights into fields we just don't know. Having said that, and this is kind of taking us far afield from the kind of juicier topics we can talk about, there is something and I, you know, as an undergrad, I was a psychology major, which is to say, I know less about psychology than people who are English majors, which I also was. But, you know, I worked with a lot of people who were heavily influenced by Jean Piaget, who, you know, most of his work is questionable because he like observed his own kids in the 15 minutes when his wife wasn't taking care of them and generated these theories. But, there's some stuff to be gained from that. And part of it is that if you know what works in the domain, you are specific and you can start to abstract certain kind of idea, you know, basic best practices of critical thinking or critical inquiry. And that's part of what education is about. Right. Is that become competent at this one thing. And then let's start moving into other areas. And you can bring some of the skills like sociology, you know, like if you bring a sociological approach to literature, that's kind of interesting. It doesn't mean that you shouldn't also know literary history, et cetera, and vice versa. But I feel like we're in kind of in the miasma of kind of educational discussion. And unfortunately, in education schools, a lot of the times, there isn't enough attention paid to the idea that, you know, you got to learn the canon or you got to learn what this discourse community really believes to be expert at that. And then maybe you can find novel insights in other areas. But, you know, let's be epistemologically humble and figure we got a lot of learning. Well said. We do this all the time in education, like we're not going to teach history. We're going to teach you to think like a historian. We're not going to teach you science. We're going to teach you to think like a scientist. And that just becomes history and science appreciation. You don't actually I want to turn it over to Zach for a second, but just I want because I want to, you know, bring up the fact that you have a very Italian last name. And my mother was very Italian. And, you know, we were talking before our grandparents came over roughly the same time in the 19 teens. My mother and my father, who's the son of Irish immigrants grew up in New York and Manhattan and Brooklyn, they to the to their dying days in the 90s, they could tell me that, you know, Bauxite was the third, you know, most valuable commodity mined out of Montana, etc. Like they grew up in the golden age of, you know, American public schools as the, you know, the place, the melting pot and where you learn knowledge. And there wasn't all this bullshit. And like, you know, they, you know, the teachers told you, you were all stupid and would amount to nothing. And I, you know, can you rescue? Like, can you talk a little bit about that? Because what they, they were taught a lot of facts that stuck with them. I mean, like 70 years later, 50, 60 years later, but they were not taught any analytics, they were not taught any, you know, it didn't appear at least from the way they talked about stuff. They were not educated beyond, you know, grammar school and high school. But so, I mean, like, as bad as education is now, is it worse than what it was when we look back and say like, Oh, that was the heyday. Yeah, I mean, I don't want to be that guy who says, well, back in the day, but I do think there's some wisdom to that. That that, and I think it's, you know, it's almost as if that we think, you know, that it's like education search for the Northwest passage that doesn't exist. We're going to find a shortcut to these things. And it's a false dichotomy, but I think as a practical matter, it's a real one. Every time we think, no, we're just going to teach these skills. It's at the expense of knowledge, you know, who's knowledge? Oh, you can just Google it. Well, no, you can't, you can't use those tools effectively without a certain amount of background knowledge. So I'm not suggesting that we were good at this and then lost our way, even if we were good at it accidentally, you know, it was probably, you'd probably be better off. I mean, nobody wants, you know, the grad grind school where, you know, battle of hastings that you see in old, you know, English movies. But I mean, in education that is content rich, that is knowledge rich at the expense of these higher order thinking skills would, I'm not saying it's good, but if you had to choose a school that just tried thought that it could teach one and failed and one that made no, no attempt to, you'd probably back your way into more educated people by, by ignoring them all together. And I'm going to be clear, I am not advocating that, but I'm just answering the question that you posed. Yeah. No, thank you, Zach. What is the role of, you know, you're talking about test scores a little bit earlier. I'm just going to display a couple of the trends over time here. This is a dead man's EKG you got up there. Yes, totally flat. I think it's a remarkable weight level for a late middle-aged man. I don't know. I'm impressed by that. Yeah, it's a very slight incline and then a kind of reversion in recent years. That's the what we call the pandemic learning loss. This is for mathematics. These are national math scores. This is reading. Same story. Call the code. He's flatlined. Yeah. What is the role of test of testing in general and how it shapes the education system? Like how focused should we be on these numbers? And especially when we're talking about school choice because the data on that and maybe you can, I know you're steeped in it, so you can talk about, you know, what effect do charter schools have on it? I mean, there's, this is just one study I pulled from Education Next, which is generally a pro charter organization and showing that in districts that have charter schools in them, there's a slight improvement in scores across the district, even in the public schools. It's a modest effect though. And there is earlier work that shows in urban districts where there's a lot of Catholic schools that provided competition, that that kind of boosts everybody ups their game a little bit. When there's more choice involved where there are more options, it seems like it has a positive effect. And I mean, your book is about Success Academy, which is very focused on that and does achieve pretty remarkable results. This one, you know, very famous and controversial charter network. But, you know, there's questions about like system wide, what would the effect be on? Is that something that like, how concerned should people like us who are, you know, pro school choice be with those numbers? And or are there other things beyond that we should be thinking about? Yeah, those are two very different veins of ore to mine. But let's put a pin briefly in testing and come back to it. What I, the one thing I want to say about testing is I'm not anti-testing at all. But it's kind of, it's had a very complicated effect on school, curriculum and culture. And nobody should sentimentalize the days before testing. It is, it has not been an unalloyed good. It's resulted in a lot of bad practice, like some of these practices we were discussing earlier are incentivized by, by, by misconceiving. There is definitely, we all have either have kids in the educational system, K through 12 or higher ed, or we've all had kids teaching to the test is real and it's spectacular. Uh, I don't know. And by that, I, by that, I mean it, it, it is absolutely a focus. Oh, no, it's clear that trying to do well on whatever tests we're talking about really has anything to do with making your kid, you know, more educated. The bromide is, is it a test worth teaching to? I can see my way to teaching to the test in math because that really can be skills driven in reading. It probably does more harm than good. Let's come back to that if we must. Okay. I'm going to be a jerk on the charter school stuff because since I've, you know, since you know, I'm pro charter, I'm pro choice. I get kind of aggravated by the, these distinctions, you know, when you, when you compare charter results to, to, to district schools, because frankly, as an educator, knowing that the school is a charter or a district school tells me absolutely nothing of value. Like what's happening inside of that charter? What's happening inside of that, of that district school? Are they teaching Lucy Calkins? Are they teaching? Is it a core knowledge school? Is it a classical school? Was it Montessori? It tells me absolutely nothing of value. So I mean, you could make the case and, you know, that, that, you know, charters with, with their, in theory, here we go again, charters by dint of the fact that they are free to, you know, hire and fire. They're non union. They can, you know, they can make better choices about curriculum, et cetera. I want to know what the decisions they're making because to be really honest, there's no excuse for charters to be a little bit better. They should be a lot better. So let me ask a kind of the same question from a slightly different angle. If you look at parental satisfaction of schools, traditional assignment, public schools are here, charter, public schools of choice are here, and then private schools are up here. And that seems pretty ambiguous. Is parental satisfaction the main measure that we should use in evaluating and then to make that more complicated? How do parents know? And I say this as, you know, Are you going to have any easy questions today, Nick? Yeah, no, no. My ex-wife and I are both PhDs and we, you know, our kids went to K through 12 public schools, mostly in, in Southwestern Ohio. And we were like, I don't have, you know, you get the state report card, blah, blah, blah, not in the school district, which is kind of good to have. But like we had no fucking idea. Like when our kids came home with books to learn how to read or to do math, like I don't know how to evaluate that. So my question is, is parental satisfaction the, you know, the kind of ultimate yardstick and how does that relate to just getting meaningful information about whether or not, what is school is doing and whether or not it's effective? It's, it is a better yardstick than many of the others, maybe even most of the others. You know, something I always say about school choices, like when people say, does school choice work and they compare test scores, like, well, here's my barometer for the school choice work. Did you get to choose? Do you like your choice? If the answer to both of those questions is yes, then school choice works for you. Here, I'm going to make another comment that will put me in bad odor with our choice friends. We like to say among choice folks that, you know, parents should be in control of their money. Well, it's not just their money. You know, I pay taxes to the Greenville school district, even though my daughter is 24 years old and never spent a day in Greenville, New York schools, I still have a literal vested interest. I just wrote the check, you know, so it's we're putting parents in control of our money. So from an accountability question, are parents a better or better levers of accountability than test scores? Yeah, probably because they've got, well, it's certainly for their kids, for their kids, but not for my tax dollars necessarily. Exactly. So it's you're not going to have a perfect accountability system by saying either trust test scores, trust parents, it's always going to have to be some kind of, you know, informed push and pull between the various stakeholders in public education. And then we also make a bad choice, a proponent, then I'm a bad choice. If I may also just to make it more complicated still, you know, part of education and certainly K through 12, it's not about, you know, book learning or anything like that. It's about, you know, these vaguely determined morals questions or the culture that I want for my kid. My parents, although they literally couldn't afford it, and I ended up paying for part of it, they sent me to a bad series of parochial schools, including a high school in Middletown, New Jersey, modern day that went out of business. You know, because it sucks up at it recently went out of business. But, you know, they would say we wanted you to have those values. And then, you know, when it comes to school choice, especially in the K through 12 thing, how do we, you know, how do we how do we talk about that? And how do we factor that in? You know, like how, you know, because part of the promise of charter schools and of a broad school choice, certainly with backpack funding or ESAs is that there is going to be a Kung Fu Academy, you know, where your kid will get, you know, he'll graduate, he'll be able to read or she'll be able to read and write and do arithmetic. And she's going to have a black belt in Taekwondo or something like that. And that might be great. I mean, actually, I would love that. I would love to see like, a bunch of different schools saying we're going to we're going to teach your kids, you know, basic stuff, and we're going to route it around sports or, you know, science projects or whatever, or moral instruction. So how do we how do we account for all that kind of? For what it's worth, I'm not sure if this is how you intend this, but this to me is a much better argument for choice than test scores. In other words, and again, I don't want to say I'm blithe about test scores because I want kids, all kids, to learn how to read period full stop. But it frustrates me that we never make that argument that you tacitly just made in favor of choice. The argument we tend to make is, oh, unions suck demand choice, or your local school is terrible demand choice. Wouldn't it be a more potent argument to say, look, mom and dad, nothing wrong with your local district school, but maybe you'd like a classical school, or maybe you'd like Kung Fu Academy, or, you know, maybe there's a thousand different flavors of curriculum and instruction, one of which might be more interesting to your child rather than having them sit their board all day. That to me is just a richer argument for choice than test scores, bad choice, good. Right. And just a demonization of unions as this kind of, you know, we don't have the Soviet Union to kick around anymore. And I say this, I have a bunch of friends who taught in public schools, mostly in New Jersey, and they were union members, and they paid their dues, and they were glad to have the union on certain levels, but they also were like, God, this union sucks. So, you know, I mean, we're, I think as choice proponents, and I'm not necessarily saying you, Robert, I speak for myself here, you know, we're probably needlessly alienating teachers who are suffering almost as much as the kids. Yeah. I just finished a 5,000 word piece for national affairs that will come out in a couple of weeks. That makes precisely that argument. I guess because I got bored of sticking my thumb in choice eyes, now I'm sticking my thumbs in conservative eyes. You know, I work at AEI, this is dangerous. They're going to ship you off to their satellite campus in the green zone. They're going to piss off everybody before I'm done. But I mean, this earnestly, I mean, another thing that we tend to forget as choice people, or, you know, in my case, as somebody more right than left, you know, the vast majority of American children go to public schools, and they always will, at least in my lifetime, you know, so it doesn't make any sense to undermine these places to turn parents against them. I mean, maybe I've been reading Yuval Levin too long, but I'm kind of an institutionalist, and I'm interested in public schools because that's where the kids are. So we can't, it can't be in anyone's interest to crap all over them and de-legitimize them. You know, we should, and again, you can be a choice person without withdrawing your interest in the public schools. I think it's just kind of, and also if your argument for that, we haven't touched on this, but if your argument, you hear this from some guys at the Cato Institute, is, oh, this is the solution to the culture war. Well, then if everybody who feels one way about culture war issues exits the public school system, you're concentrating their effects among the vast majority of American children who are left behind. That doesn't make any sense to me whatsoever. And just to put some numbers on it, you know, I have a video that went up yesterday about kind of fictional schools of choice that we all wanted to attend, but it's about less than 25% of American students go to some school of choice, whether it's a public charter school or a magnet school, something that they choose to go, homeschool, private school, all of that. It's like a little bit more than 75% is, or I'm sorry, yeah, because the chosen public school, there's homeschooling, et cetera, but it's like overwhelmingly, most kids are still going to residential assignment schools. And you know, that's where the money is. Yeah. Yeah. And that's where the kids are. I mean, I can't be more emphatic about that. The kids are money. Let's face it. You know, okay, but I'm not sorry. I'm not cynical enough to just look at kids and see dollar signs. I see the kids who will be paying into social security, who will be fighting our wars, who will be building our industries, et cetera. The idea that we should wash our hands of our future. No, not at all. I'm joking, but Zach. Okay. Well, I was just going to say, first of all, let me just say that on a personal level, what you were saying earlier, I resonate with that in terms of it being just really appealing that there's this kind of increasing menu of options that fit different lifestyles. I mean, I see it in my neighborhood. I live in Florida, which has a lot of school choice in my neighborhood. There's a pretty good neighborhood school that's a technology magnet. My kids go to a kind of like artsy, like Waldorf inspired school, which I'm sure you would think has total like garbage curriculum, but I like it. I would think you would like the Waldorf. I don't like it or dislike it. It's perfectly fine. The Waldorf schools are better than the Waldorf salad. I'm a huge Rodolf Steiner fan, but that's for a different live stream. I like it because they're like consciously very like tactile and like sort of anti technology and the kids getting up screen time like outside of school. So I don't want to go home and have rich dinner table conversations with college graduates, which also builds language proficiency. Right. And then like right across the street from that is like a science magnet, a STEM magnet that's, you know, kind of the opposite approach. So it's kind of, there's a kind of beauty to seeing everyone be able to like access all these different things that work best for them. And I agree that that's kind of like the even more powerful argument for choice. Is there a butt coming, Zach? What's that? There's a butt coming, isn't there? You can say butt. No, no, there's no butt coming. I wanted the, well, the objection that I want to levy at you was to the idea that we still need to be heavily invested in kind of the culture war wrangling over curriculum because so many kids are in public school. I mean, you know, these are, this is just some data, historical data about the rise in charter school enrollment. And, you know, there's been a slow but steady upward drive. You've documented in your work, Robert, that, you know, post pandemic, there's been an accelerated, you know, exodus out of the public system. Part of me just feels like the more that libertarians engage in like, well, what should the states determine the curriculum be, the more we are kind of impeding that process or that progress towards. But can I just push back a little bit on that? I mean, I don't necessarily disagree with you, but I'm starting to feel like my libertarian credentials were in pretty good order until we became school choice advocates. And now I feel, and I tease my friend, Neil McCluskey about this, who is at the Kato Institute. Yeah, exactly. And he's written a lot about, you know, how school choices, the antidote to culture wars. And first I say, well, you know, schools are the original culture war fronts, you know, we argue. Yeah. And just to dump on him right away. Yeah, please. I don't want to let me just finish. You know, and I mean, like, you're assuming, if you if you upset yourself in this conversation, you're assuming the vast majority of American kids who are left behind the public system are going to always value personal liberty the way that you do. And so what I tease Neil with saying, you know, I don't want to read your future book about gulag choice, you know, because it could come to that. In other words, you're, you know, you are assuming that that the eternal values of American society will always be in place and they don't need stewardship. And I don't think that's right. That's I mean, I was going to say that, you know, I think about this completely in terms of religious freedom, you know, we have time and America has always been famous for having lots of different religions and sub sex within, you know, Christianity within Catholicism within, you know, Judaism, etc. And that doesn't diminish culture war battles over religion. What it does is it stops the violence over warring factions of religion. And if we I look forward to a day when everybody is going to a school of choice, not because it means we won't be arguing over what is right and proper or effective or the center of America, but we'll have richer conversations because people don't have to, you know, you don't get stuck doing something else. And Martin Morse Wooster, a longtime reason contributor and author who wrote a great book called Angry Classrooms, Vacant Minds. He died recently. This was from about 20 or 25 years ago. It had a great history of the Philadelphia school riots in the pre civil war era where the, you know, the wasps who ran the Philadelphia establishment, it was a big Catholic town, and they forced Catholic schools to use the King James Bible. And it was this, you know, the people died in the ensuing struggle, that's ultimately on a certain level of libertarian emphasis on choice. I think it's like, okay, it takes the violence out of the system, including the violence of sending your kids to a school with whom, with whose curricula you kind of disagree with fundamentally. I think that's good, but it's not going to stop these conversations. But perhaps to bring it back to something that Zach was getting at as well is, you know, when you talk about a core curriculum, like who, who would decide that in, you know, and let's say, you know, 75% or you know, 70% of kids are going to be going to residential assigned schools in the state or the, you know, the state and the local school boards are going to be kind of calling the shots and the feds a little into, but you know, it's kind of interesting to question like, okay, well, who's history, because at some point you've only got, you know, you've got like 40 actual full school days in the year. They're always kind of nickel and diamond get down, but like, you know, you can teach, you know, Zach grew up in Florida. So it's like, okay, Ponce de Leon is in, but then maybe, you know, the Rosewood massacre of a black town, well, that's out because that's, you know, that's problematic. And then, you know, something about how orange juice is like the fucking greatest beverage ever is in Walt Disney is a God. No, but I mean, like, don't doesn't it make sense really from a operational level to if the state is going to dictate certain outcomes, you know, those be minimal. And if it's going to dictate certain books and things like that, that really should be pretty small. Yeah, I think that's probably right. And for what it's worth, and I'm going to be a little bit mealy mouthed on this, I think it's more important to build these foundations in the elementary years. So you can have these which debates and say middle school and high school. So I'm probably a lot more interested in being prescriptive to the degree I'm interested at all in K to five, maybe K to eight, but not not in high school. So, but I mean, look, you know, we have a mechanism for the for adjudicating these debates right now, Nick, and you just alluded to it, we've got 13,000 school boards, we've got 50 states. But in 1950, we had like 114,000 school districts. Yeah, like in a bizarre way, you know, I mean, I mean, the consolidation and centralization of education in America, like from, you know, after World War Two was immense and phenomenal. And that's also not a bad thing to because like most of those school districts, you know, were probably absolutely, you know, Deja Ray segregated. And they also probably had, you know, our reason, science correspondent Ron Bailey grew up in Virginia in the 60s, I guess late 50s and early 60s. And he showed us some of us on Slack. His he had his elementary school history book. And it was literally filled with happy slaves who weren't called slaves either. You know, they were like happy farm hands or something. And it's like, wow, like that that is an argument for like, I don't want anybody to be in control because the possibility of system failure is really bad. And, you know, Zach, do we want to talk now, give them where, you know, you're in Florida, about the African American Studies AP course? Like, how does that factor into anything? Well, yeah, I mean, I wanted to ask both of you your reaction to that specific example, which is that here in Florida, Ron DeSantis banned a AP African American studies or history course. I have a clip here that I'll pull up with him in a second explaining why he thought that was necessary. But this is kind of part of his broad campaign to quote unquote dewokify Florida schools. And, you know, Robert, I'd like to get into your thoughts of what has happened to the kind of public school curricula, you call it the pedagogy of the depressed. So I want to talk about like how we got there at some point and what your analysis of, you know, why it's a problem. But first, let me just play this clip of DeSantis and get your reaction. DeSantis said teaching black history is required in Florida schools, but added this course amounted to indoctrination. This course on black history, what's one of the lessons about queer theory? Now, who would say that an important part of black history is queer theory? That is somebody pushing an agenda on our kids. And so when you look to see they have stuff about intersectionality, abolishing prisons, that's a political agenda. And then this is from NBC News obtained the the course material. I think, you know, the what he's objecting to seems to be, you know, like in unit four, you can see things like the black feminist movement, womanism and intersectionality, black lives today, anti-colonial movements and military service. I don't know. I guess like my my general sense is, you know, this is a high school AP class, you can kind of opt into it or not. If you like, I don't know why the governor needs to weigh in. But what do you think? Why does the governor weigh in? Because am I reading the Constitution incorrectly or is education no longer under state control? That's why he's doing it. Well, I mean, I'm sure he's got political reasons for it. But and again, I don't want to sound blithe here. But I mean, I'm surprised when people are surprised about things like this. So I mean, I don't know. Let me just say, I don't know that I'm not necessarily questioning his constitutional authority to do so. I'm questioning the wisdom of governor kind of micromanaging what can be in high school curricula or not. I mean, is that well, and I'm not trying to to gain say that. Because again, as I keep saying, I'm a choice guy, okay, I'm a choice guy. I'm much more concerned in American education with the opposite problem of having classroom teachers feeling that they are free as public employees as state actors to close the door and teach whatever the hell they want. Okay, I think that I'm not neither one of these are good things to have. But I think the problem of no curriculum of indulging your priors of viewing your job as no, I'm not a teacher. I'm a I'm a I'm an activist. I think that's a bigger problem, particularly in so far as it is it damages trust in public education. I'm not asking for Walmart schools. But I do think that whether you live in Florida, Ohio, New York, or anywhere else, there should be a certain kind of reasonable set of expectations about the content of your kids education that are met regardless of where you are. So I mean, in like say K through 8 education, is that a big problem that the teachers, you know, they get a curriculum and they shut the door and they say, Hey, we're not teaching this, I'm just gonna, you know, free right about your experience. That's not the problem at all. The bigger problem is there's no curriculum whatsoever. Serious. I mean, and when you say that, like, you know, they don't get assigned textbooks or they don't get assigned worksheets and things like that. Let's take this back to what we were saying at the top about reading instruction. And stop me if I told you the story before, Nick. But one of my first days in the classroom, my Lucy Calkins, professional development staffer, when I said, What am I supposed to teach? He said, Well, Mr. Pondessio, you're the best person to know what every child needs. And I thought she was making fun of me. Okay. But what she what she meant was that you're here to teach the skill of reading and what you choose is well, what you picked. So what year? What year was that? And that's in the New York City 2003? Yeah. And the New York City School District, which is the largest school district in the country. Yeah. And, you know, and so you went into class and they weren't like, Here's the textbook. Here's the reader. Here's, you know, the seat that run book or whatever. And like, you can start a question library. And I was to teach the skill, you know, of reading and writing. So today, you know, I would I would model for my students, you know, when good readers read, they notice what characters say. Now, in the books that you're reading, notice what the characters say. And this is my point about teaching reading as a skill. Okay. Right. Well, you're not teaching any set text whatsoever. There's the mini lesson, the skill de jour than kids, 24 kids, 24 books, they go off and practice the skill, which isn't a skill at all, independently. Right. Part of the point of charter schools early on was the experimentation would supposedly develop some best practices that then could be applied in the public schools or not the public schools in the district schools. To what extent has that happened? I mean, you know, again, success academy is an example of one network where they've gotten pretty remarkable results. Have district schools learned from anything from the successful charters and applied them in their curricula? Not enough. And at the risk of getting down into the weeds, you know, since you kindly alluded to my book, I mean, that was the reason I wrote that book because I wanted to spend a year in this extremely high performing chartered district and say, okay, what are the lessons here that we can apply to K12 at large? You know, to do what we were supposed to be doing. Good news bad news. The bad news was I didn't find a whole lot of lessons. That's the bad news. The good news is one of the lessons that I think, and this may have been confirmation bias in my part, but what I really liked and I think really is applicable to K12, whether it's a school of choice or a district school, is the way they conceived of the role of the teacher. And I did this as a teacher as well. You spend an ungodly amount of time when you don't have a curriculum crafting lessons on your own, going on Google and Pinterest and looking for, you know, lessons or materials to engage and interest your kids. And that time that is time I'm not spending getting to know my kids, looking at their work, becoming expert in the curriculum, building relationships with families, all of these other things that yield more value. At Success Academy, they have a curriculum. They've got their preparation time is what they call intellectual preparation, preparing to teach the lesson, not creating it from scratch. So that creates more bandwidth to do all of those other things. I don't think that's the only reason Success kind of blows the doors off standardized testing, but the conception they have of what a teacher's job is and what a teacher's job is not is one of those things that I think schools... Well, the other thing that you found, I mean, the big takeaway or the kind of headline controversy making was that success is not skimming good students. That's the charge that's lobbed at all successful charter schools. But it's that it really selects for a highly motivated parents. And that's a big... De facto. I mean, you can't. You literally cannot handpick families, but they create any number of mechanisms that make it more likely that active engaged families will persist. Yes. So, okay, go ahead. Yeah, I was just saying, we returned to this question of what has happened to curricula beyond the problems with basics like reading and arithmetic. You penned this article in commentary, the unbearable bleakness of schooling. And you write there that this pedagogy of the depressed America, the problematic, is thought to be a virtue among professional educators who view it as a mark of seriousness and sophistication. We want children to grapple with, quote, honest history, close quote, starting in elementary school and to discover the power of their voices by writing authentic essays about their personal problems. What is the pedagogy of the depressed? And how did this overtake... To what degree did it overtake the curricula in public schools? And how did it happen? Yeah. Well, the pedagogy of the depressed is, Nick will appreciate it, it's kind of a little inside joke. Because all of us as teachers had to study Paulo Freire and his book, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. So this was just my having a little bit of a laugh at that and turning it on its ear. But I think you could write a really good book about education, about how we are sometimes wrong for all the right reasons. And this is a good example of that. So is the reading curriculum, like who thinks kids shouldn't be engaged by what they read? Of course they should, but then you're missing something profound. So it makes a lot of sense that, oh, you should challenge kids, you should make the curriculum about them, they should write about things that matter to them, they should learn about problems in the world. So they are inspired to do their part to build a more perfect union. All these things sound engaging and exciting. And as adults, this is what we do all day, this sounds great. Well, I do worry that for children, it's overwhelming that the world begins to appear to them as nothing more than just it's all bad and broken. And wait a minute, you're asking me to fix this? I'm 12. Where are the grownups? What's your role in all this? So I don't want to overstate the problem, but nor do I want to understate the problem. Yes, we want students to be problem solvers, but that doesn't mean that educators should be problem fetishizers. And I think that's what's happening. What is the core curriculum, the kind of cultural literacy of depression that is being taught? Is it that America was founded as a white supremacist club med or something? Is it that the environment, that the planet is irredeemable, it's burnt to a crisp, but you still got to separate your plastics and paper? What are the lessons that are being taught? Yeah, and again, I don't want to overstate that, but I do think that we are airing on the side of painting a picture of the world as bad and broken. And you just cited some of the examples, like, oh, the planet is going to be uninhabitable in 12 years. Wait, I'm 12. That's going to be a problem. You look at the world of young adult literature, all this stuff that is supposed to be engaging and interesting to kids. Well, sometimes it's like those old TV movies of the week where the pathology du jour, I mean, it's all about drug use and sexual abuse and racism and whatnot. I mean, it's just, I don't think I'm wrong to suggest that we are sometimes guilty of presenting kids a view of the world that is awfully dark. We are oftentimes, and when I say we, Robert, I'm going to include you in this, baby boomers have internalized and are projecting out anxieties in a way that maybe our parents' generation was a little bit more stoic in a lot of ways. Look, you and I are roughly the same age, Nick, and in that commentary piece, I think I wrote about this. Think of the world in which we grew up, okay? I grew up on Long Island. I can't remember where you grew up. I'm sorry, we'll speak slower. And I grew up in New Jersey, so this is like the workshop test of toxic dump sites. Think of the world of the late 60s, early 70s, okay? It was a time of tremendous unrest. You think it's bad now in terms of political unrest? In Brian Burrow's book, Days of Rage, he chronicled 1,900 domestic bombings in a single year, I think 1971. Can you imagine if that was happening right now? Pollution was through the roof. The economy was in the shitter. My dad was for the airlines. The metric system was about to be imposed. My dad was for the airlines, and the news was filled with hijackings and what that. But I didn't have the sense that I lived in a dangerous, the Vietnam War was going on. Yeah, yeah, nuclear annihilation was like, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Did you have the sense that the world was somehow unique and dangerous? No, no, if anything, it was, you know, no, not at all. Well, why is that? I'm not saying that I have the answer, but I'm very curious as to what change in American life and culture that we grew up in, by comparison to today, genuinely unsettled and dangerous times. But we didn't have that sense as kids. Now things are, you know, look, I'm sorry, there's never been a more prosperous, better time to be alive if you look at by every reasonable measure of human happiness than now. And we think things have never been worse. And somehow we think kids are immune from this. Come on. Yeah. You know, the one thing I'll say though, it does seem as if, and you know, maybe this is off base, but that the typical school now seems to be teaching toward a history of grievance, which is rich and meaningful, but for blacks for lower, lower income people, etc. And the difficulties that they face, I do know that, you know, the Catholic school that I went to taught an alternative history of America that I didn't realize until I went to college was pretty weird and where Catholics were simultaneously the most oppressed group and also the most important and central to American history and American flourishing. So it was kind of, you know, it wasn't quite Marcus Garvey Academy or something, but it was a form of lower middle class, which is the milieu I grew up in a recent immigrant Catholic heritage that was uplifting. And that was like, you know what, we fucking made it here and it's better than old Europe. And, you know, you got some real options in front of you. But in a way, that's not all that different than maybe lower income black kids learning a history that is generally denied. Yeah, this is one of those areas that is too volatile to paint with a broad brush. So I'm not going to. But I will say, here's what concerns me. I mean, I joke that my side hustle is civic education. I do worry about, look, if public education does nothing else, it ought to attach kids to civil society, right? You know, regardless of your politics, regardless of your religious or ethnic background, if we do nothing else, kids should leave us from every school, even schools of choice at age 17 or 18, excited to get on with something. You know, I don't care if it's college, military, job, whatever, but they should feel invested, you know, in their community, in their country, and eager to do their part. You know, we were talking earlier about, you know, Accountability, Zach, there's your accountability. Okay, kids should, I've written about this before. The only accountability that matters is if you say to kids, are you in? You know, and they, and they say yes, and here's what they're excited to do. How would you measure that? Can I finish this thought? Because what I worry about, and I'm not, I don't natter on about grievance studies, but, but if your entire history, if your entire K-12 education was just chock full of grievance and the bad and the broken, where's the incentive to feel like you're bought in and eager to do something? We think, as teachers, that it's a mark of our sophistication that we're inspiring kids to take their part and fix these things when it may have exactly the opposite effect. My AEI colleague, Yvonne Levin, has written about this, about, you know, about what he calls the new social disorder. And it's not an excess of passion for, you know, sex and drugs and money and whatnot. It's just the opposite. It's this failure to launch. It's the, why bother? I'm sitting on the couch. I'm not bought into anything. Do you have a sense of how much the concerns about this, especially parental concerns, are actually driving both the, the exodus from public education, which you mentioned in the same article, 600 school districts in nearly two dozen states found a decline of 3% in public school enrollment compared with pre-pandemic levels, including about 50,000 students gone missing in New York City, 26,000 in LA, 25,000 in Chicago, all told about 1.5 million students have exited the traditional public education. We don't know why. We don't know why. I mean, yeah, go ahead. No, I was going to say, it's funny you should bring this up because just two days ago, I was asking about this, a very question like we know that there's been this exodus, but we know why they're leaving and I can't find a good answer to it. It could be job related. It could be, you know, I'm dismayed with public schools. I'm going to homeschool my kid because homeschooling numbers are way up. I don't think we've got good data. We can make some intelligent guesses, but I don't think we've got good data about why when parents are leaving, why they've chosen to leave. I mean, another one is, I mean, just from personal experience and anecdotal from, you know, living in LA through this, that's where I was when the pandemic hit. You know, the going all virtual with the schools did a few things. First of all, forced this sort of curriculum transparency. Secondly, getting back into it. I mean, a big issue for me was I had a big problem with kind of the health mandates that were being imposed on my very young children. That was a big motivator for me. And I think a lot of other parents, whether it's, you know, children wearing masks outdoors out all day without much justification or like the threats of certain vaccine mandates and stuff like that. And then just like the general way that the teachers union was behaving throughout all this. I don't know how salient that is for people who aren't as like politically engaged as me, but the fact that they were advocating to keep the schools closed until this like laundry list of demands was met. That was all big. What are you talking about? Randy Weingard was working very hard to reopen space. She said so herself. And just the unpredictability, right? I mean, in a lot of places schools would be open, then they were shut, then they were open for two days a week for you, but three days for the other kids, et cetera. It was like, I've really, and we don't like to talk about that among those of us who are like sophisticated about education, but come on, people need a safe place for their kid to be all day. And so it's not just the school closures, it was the quarantines, right? So when schools reopened, then suddenly one kid tests, you know, it wasn't even your kid's class, but it was on the bus. One kid tests positive for COVID and everybody stays home for two weeks. We do kind of need schools to be reliably open or closed so we can make plans and get on with our life. Yeah. And so people also got a taste of trying things a different way. Some people might have tried some homeschooling or they did these micro school pods. I mean, I don't know if that's contributed to people. Some people like remote learning, Zach, you know, I mean, in the main, it's been a disaster, but for some families, it worked pretty well. I just wonder like how much of this, you know, is going to last in terms of people being open to different ways of doing things? I mean, yeah, I think it's a great question. Yeah. Can we get together next year and answer it? Because I'm planning on spending the next year in places like Arizona and Iowa and West Virginia that are going kind of all in on ESAs. Because I think this is the real promise. You know, it's one thing to say I've got choice and now I've even got a backpack full of cash. It's another question to say, okay, what am I going to do with it? I've brought up some slides here of these are just some recent moves that have been made in that regard. So you mentioned Arizona, which I think was the first state to pass an educational savings account law, which allows you to take it universal. There's a lot of laws, but everybody can do it. Yes. Thank you for that. Here we've got Iowa just signed one. Utah, it's been proposed. Florida, it's been proposed. West Virginia legislature passed it. So this is definitely, there's a lot of momentum there. You say you're going to go there and investigate it. What kind of questions do you have about educational savings? It's just that. I'm going to take my own advice on this. In other words, it's not as interesting to me public school, bad private school, good or charter school, good. I want to know. I mean, look, the libertarian gloss on this is once you give parents the backpack full of cash, they can, they can Chinese menu, so to speak, or a la carte their way to a good education by picking and choosing different providers and programs and whatnot. I think that's interesting and worthwhile, but I think that's going to be mostly at the high end. So I'm kind of interested for both good and bad. What kind of entrepreneurial dynamism does this inject into a system? So I said this to somebody yesterday. If I were a much younger person, I'd move to Arizona right now and I'd start myself a low cost ED Hearst core knowledge private school, the school of my dreams. And I'd figure out a way to price it at that $7,000 per family or per kid price point to make it work. So surely I can't be the only person who sees that opportunity. I just wrote a piece yesterday for the dispatch about Great Hearts Academy, which is a terrific network of charter schools. They haven't announced this yet, but they've confirmed that they are launching a network of private Christian academies now aimed at low income kids starting in August. So in other words, people who are in this work should do what Great Hearts, they predictably I would, I would predict we'll do what Great Hearts is doing, which is saying there's now this mechanism. What does this enable us to do that will serve families better? So are you, are you confident that the, you know, that the supply is going to grow to either increase demand or, you know, satisfy it because this was something ED You know, I think a year ago or so, I talked with Chris Stewart, the, you know, who's an education kind of critic and school choice advocate in Minnesota. And he was saying, you know what, when the pandemic hit, the big failure was that there was not the, there were not the schools ready. Like people in the school choice movement have been saying for a long time, you know, we, you know, we can handle it and they couldn't. But this gives them the money, right? So are you confident that you think that the market will be there? If it doesn't, then, then there is a theoretical problem with that way of looking at schools, right? I mean, in other words, this, this should be, if you're a Milton Friedman guy, this should be exactly what you want. You're now creating the conditions for the market to respond. So what's the market going to do? What do you think, if anything, this will do for higher end education? Or if we can talk a little bit about this because, you know, you know, when you look at a high end education, private schools or effectively, you know, high end private schools in towns or whatever that have, you know, that have income levels and zoning and everything to keep it like that. Are they, are they the incubators of the worst kind of curricula excesses? Partly because they know that their kids can learn nothing from K through 12 or K through 24, you know, years of school, because they're going to be okay, like they have the rich conversations at home, they have books everywhere, et cetera. And is it, is it partly that the rot in education, including this, you know, dismissal of core of cultural literacy, it's really coming from the top end, rather than something that like middle class people or minority activists are pushing. Yeah, this is another dicey subject. I mean, my daughter went to one of these elite private schools, two of them, you know, end to end. And candidly, and I have joked over the years that her attendance was the price of peace in my marriage because I was a public school kid, my wife was a private school girl. I'd get divorced today before I'd send my daughter to the two schools that she attended, period. And this is the challenge for choice theory as well, right? In other words, if you think about, and I assume we're talking about these, these, these super elite schools, which by the way, probably won't, ESAs won't make a difference. It's a rounding error on the amount of money that these, that these cause. And so they'll take the money and apply it, but, but, you know, that it's not going to change their behavior. But this is a threat in my mind to choice theory, right? So if you were suggesting, okay, the kinds of parents who send their kids to these super elite upper East sides, you know, Bethesda, whatever Maryland private schools, these are the folks who have the most options, the most choices, the most resources. And they are making a choice that frankly, many of the parents dislike. Okay. Super woke schools. And all they do is they sit there and see and they don't, why don't they get up and change? Well, okay, you tell me why they don't get up and change because the function of the alluded to. Yeah, I mean, the function of the path is great. Yeah. And the function of the education system is not to challenge the existing class structure. It's to replicate it. I mean, I, both public and private, I'm very Marxist on that, on that front. So I, you know, I was at a dinner, I had dinner with David Mamet once the, you know, the playwright who bitched and moaned that his kids all went to crossroads, which was, you know, started in Santa Monica as an alternative hip, you know, very elite private school for Hollywood kids. And he's like, oh, they learned nothing. They learned nothing. But it was like, well, why didn't you send your kids to a better school? And he's like, what can you do? You know, it's like, yeah, no, and it's like, you want to signal that your kids are going to crossroads, etc. And all of this, it's like, can I ask, and, you know, we are, we have gone over time and I appreciate you saying with us because, you know, we did have technical difficulties and whatnot. But how do, you know, in a lot of ways, the question about education, or maybe this is framing it wrong, but it is, how do you help, you know, and maybe it's the bottom 10% or the bottom 20% of kids who are coming from lower income or lower opportunity households. Like those are the people where school can be education can be the real difference maker in their lives. Because if you're middle class or upper middle class, it's like school is kind of a tax that you pay, you know, like your parents pay, and you're going to be pretty good anyway. But you know, how do we make sure that those people really have the ability to, you know, kind of participate as fully in the American experiment? I mean, I think this is the best rhetoric of public schools. Like, how do we, how do we make sure they're not, you know, just forgotten? Yeah, no, look, thank you. That's a great question. And it's a great question to close and just very quickly, Nick, I don't want to be quite as blithe about high end and middle income kids. Your point is well taken. Their outcomes are not guaranteed. It is the way to bet, however. But that bottom 10% as you like, look, these are the kids that my career has been predicated upon helping them. And this is, this is why I think that choice will help them. But I'm not necessarily, I'm definitely not convinced it's a magic bullet. And I think this is a real Achilles heel and choice theory. If the if the idea is that if you set everybody free, they will make good decisions. Many will, some will not. And this is also why I'm not abandoning the public school system, because that's a practical matter where those kids are going to end up, right? So, you know, I'm not going to sit here and pretend that I have the answer. But I think this is a challenge for all of us who think of ourselves as choice advocates, is you damn well better be thinking about those kids, because it doesn't take a great deal of imagination to realize, let's say a year from now, you've got not just three states as ESA states, but 30, okay? And everybody is now suddenly in charge, you know, or you fast forward to the day when parents are in control of this spending. But then it turns out that we've created, you know, we have an underclass right now, but a profound underclass among people who are not just poorly educated, but not educated at all. Well, there goes choice for generation, or maybe more. So if we're not thinking about those kids, shame on us. Yeah, I mean, I guess it's hard for me to see why that would be the outcome. I mean, what's going to prevent it, Zach? There's what's going to prevent people from going to a school where their kids are just not learning anything? Well, or just basically opting out of the system altogether. I'm taking my ESA money and oh, there's this provider and yeah, sure. But then, you know, in other words, if you're cobbling together, you know, we assume that that, you know, engaged, active, educated parents will make good choices. Well, are you going to deny the ability of lower income, low SES parents to make those same decisions? So you're saying people just cobbling together a kind of homeschool type curriculum that is totally worthless? Yeah, that, okay. I was misunderstanding. Yeah. I was just, no, you were misunderstanding. I was being insufficiently clear. Yeah. Do you, you know, one of the hallmarks I've, you know, for as long, I've been at reason for 29 years and have always been interested in school choice and whatnot. And one of the things that I've always heard, and this actually, well, it's complicated, it describes my parents as well, who were not educated, but that low income parents, you know, they want educated in the main, they want better education for the kids, they want better opportunities. And they're pretty good at that. And that's, I mean, certainly in, particularly in urban areas, you know, it seems like the early experiments with vouchers and things like that in places like Milwaukee and Dayton and, you know, a couple other places, you know, that seemed to be the case. I like, there's a lot of motivated low income parents, you know, so maybe it will take care of itself. But I guess part of it is that we really have to wait and see what's going on. I think one thing that has to be, you know, anticipated is that this is already a critique that is very common. And you see from people such as John Oliver did a big thing going after charter schools about six or seven years ago. And the thrust of his argument was, look at this particular bad charter over here or this one over here, and it just closed after, you know, less than a year. And then these kids are left twisting in the wind. And I mean, the theory of, you know, school choice people is like, well, that's kind of the process of choices, you're weeding out the bad schools and to the degree that it's causing even, you know, district schools that shouldn't be open to close. That's actually good. But there is something to his argument that, you know, if you're the person who has your kid in that school, when it closes down, that's extremely disruptive to your life. I mean, what is the, is there any way to, like, what's the best way to cope with that? I don't think there's a perfect answer here. And this is why there's kind of got to be almost, I mean, to use a legal analogy, like almost joint and several accountability. But my Arizona friends love to point to Arizona charters as having solved this, because in most states, I think it takes five years to get your charter renewed. And in Arizona, I believe it's 15. And he, Matt Ladner, and others have pointed out that by the time the year 15 rolls around, parents of longsons voted with their feet. Okay. And that's, that's probably right. But it's not a guarantee. Because again, we're talking about kind of boutiquey very small numbers of schools and students. Would that work nationally? I don't know. I mean, I think there's no substitute for increased parental sophistication. And if there's been a theme to this conversation, it's none of these mechanisms work by themselves. There's no perpetual motion machine here. You've got to create the conditions that create parental, not just choice, but sophistication about these things. I mean, the analogy always uses, if you go to your pediatrician and they send you home with a prescription, by the time you get home, you've already looked on WebMD, you know, about, you know, all the side effects of what your pediatricians are offering you, we don't do that with education. You know, in fact, I would, I would bet my last dollar that if you pull even sophisticated parents about, hey, what's the ELA curriculum at your kid's school, eight out of 10 would even know. Right. And or how to evaluate it. So let me, let's end on this note, which may be just, you can dismiss it as well. But you know, one of the things that the National Assessment of Educational Progress does, you know, going back to the early 70s and tracks kind of student scores, they've been pretty flat. And depending on how you calculate it, we're spending two to three times as much per pupil in real inflation adjusted terms. Is it just that kids are dumber now that we have to spend more and more money on them to keep them at the same or slightly lower level than when you and I, Robert were, you know, in short pants, Zach was not quite born yet. And his SATs, I guarantee you are better than mine, probably yours, you know, but no, but I mean, is it a, yeah, no, that's for sure. Is it, I mean, you know, it's, it's a weird thing. Like are we, are we obsessing over education in a way? And I'm joking about kids just being dumber, but you know, because education, you know, going back to Socrates, you know, educating the young is absolutely filled with existential anxiety of every society. And you know, so is all of this just kind of like, you know, we're just, we got a lot of nervous energy and a lot of money to spend and a lot of time to argue. But you know, actually the kids are doing okay. I don't think the kids are doing okay. And I don't want to be alarmist about this. Something we haven't even touched on is mental health, you know, and if you talk to John Hyde and Greg Lukianoff and others, they'll say it's, it's the screen of stupid. And I think there's a compelling case for, for the deleterious effects of social media and technology and whatnot. You know, it's almost impossible to separate schools from all the other effects in kids lives. Do I think kids have gotten dumber? No, kids have not gotten dumber, kids have gotten smarter. Do I think we have gotten accidentally less good at educating them? Probably. And it probably has to do with some of the factors we talked about earlier, Nick, about how there wasn't, there didn't used to be a lot of question about what you did in school all day. And the more sophisticated we've gotten in terms of trying to raise levels of, you know, problem solving and critical thinking, we've actually made it worse, not better. You've got the issue of who becomes a teacher. You know, nobody should want women to, to, to, to leave law and medicine and whatnot and go back into the classroom. But, but if you think about, I'll bet like you, like me, Nick, some of your teachers in retrospect were women who today would have been doing much more remunerative things than they did 40 or 50 years ago. It's a Gordian notch, you know, I'm thinking also, you know, the amount of environmental lead was so much higher, you know, and lead gets a bad rap, but I don't know when, you know, when we were chewing on lead paint and breathing in lead gasoline air fumes, I don't know what seemed to be doing better as a, as a society. Yeah, look, the one, this will be my parting shot, I guess, but the one, if I could make one change in American education now, it would probably be, and this gets to the idea of, is it getting, is it getting worse? I think what's changes are expectations have gotten outsized for American education. And most specifically, what I mean by that is we literally expect too much, not of education, but of teachers. We keep asking them to do more and more and the same, and look, I mean, this is the last hill I'll die on in education. I point this out all the time, you've got four million American men and women in classrooms every day. If you have four million of anybody doing anything, by definition, you're going to have a normal range of human capacity in a number that large. So you've got to make that job doable by those people. The cavalry isn't coming. There are not enough saints and superstars to fill all those classrooms. We've got to reconceive the job of a teacher to be doable by men and women of ordinary sentience, because that's who we have, and that's all we're ever going to have. So if the job can't be done well by those people, if you don't have a plan, it's a prayer. Yeah. All right, that's a sober but resounding note to end on Robert Pondicio. You're at American Enterprise Institute. Where's the best place that people can follow your reading? We'll have something in the show notes and stuff. Yeah, at AEI or just on Twitter, pretty much everything I write ends up on my Twitter. R. R. Pondicio. R. Pondicio, yes. Thank you, Zach Weismiller. As always, thanks for staging a great conversation. Enjoy the gentleman. Thanks for having me. You're welcome.