Loading summary
Transcript52 lines
- [00:00]
A
Foreign.
- [00:08]
B
Welcome back to Firewall. I'm your host, Bradley Tusk. My guest today is Elliot Ragenstein. And just to give a little context before we get into the topic at hand, Elliot is one of my closest friends. We met at the Parks department back in 1994 and have been really close ever since. We've worked together several times that'll come up during this podcast.
- [00:29]
A
And.
- [00:30]
B
And while the listeners may not know Elliot, I often, when I come up with ideas that I then sort of try out on the podcast, have run them by him. So you've been exposed to his thinking indirectly a bunch of times. But now he's here, not in the flesh. He was supposed to be here in person, but the snowstorm meant that he couldn't get to New York. But we're doing this remotely. Hugo and I are here at pnt, and Elliot is in Chicago, where he lives. And if you like this episode, Elliot's going to be doing an event at PNT Knitwear on March 9th. So more to come on that. But Elliot, welcome and thanks for joining us.
- [01:08]
A
Yeah, great to be here, at least virtually, and looking forward to being there in person in March. March 9th.
- [01:13]
B
Yeah. And so the occasion for this podcast and for the event that you're doing is you just wrote a book. It's called Readiness Preparing State Early Childhood Systems for a Brighter Future. And what the book is about, at least when I read it, though, you know, it's funny, I only read that original draft when you were looking for ed. Did it change a lot in the actual file?
- [01:35]
A
No, it didn't change that much from when you read it. So your understanding is going to be.
- [01:39]
B
Yeah, now that I think about it. But anyway, so Elliot is an expert on early childhood education, really one of the foremost experts in the country. And I want them to come on to kind of explain what it means, because we spend collectively about a trillion dollars a year in this country on K through 12 education alone. And so much of it is really determined by what happened with that kid when they three or four and the kind of education they did or didn't receive. And Elliot, in his book, really explains the evolution of all of it, the different types of systems, how it works, and then to me, most importantly, kind of what we could be doing differently and better so that we can continue educating kids in a way that actually makes a difference in their lives. And so, Elliot, let's start with two things. One is just why early childhood education matters. And then two, kind of the evolution of the issue itself.
- [02:38]
A
Sure. So early education matters for a few different reasons, and that those different reasons have really influenced the evolution of the system. I mean, one critical piece of this is that families, you know, adults need to work. Right. And that we have now, more than at previous times in America, households, where every adult in the household is working. And so one of the major strands of early childhood policy development has been around early childhood as a workforce support. Right? Like how are you making sure that kids are in a good place while their parents are supporting the economy? But there's also a completely different strand of support for early childhood that focuses on child development. And on that strand, you know, there's a deep recognition that the first five years of life are really important developmentally and that the role adults play in child development is absolutely critical. Right. I mean, anyone who's a parent knows, you know, the time you spend with your kid in those first five years makes such a huge difference to them and the environment you provide for them. But that if those children are going to be in some setting outside the home, the question of how do you make sure that it's high quality? And given that the vast majority of kids are going to end up in our public schools, how are you preparing them for that school experience? And so over time you've seen a number of different kinds of early childhood programs designed to address different aspects of that. Right. Like Head Start emerged in the 1960s as a sort of holistic child development program that was also focused on adult employment, but. And that's evolved over the years, but remains a program that's very focused on meeting all the needs of a child. Right. Not just educational, but food and social development. Childcare emerged more in sort of the 80s and 90s as a way to subsidize working parents and was tied in some cases to some of the welfare reforms of the 1990s. And that's money that generally has been provided to parents to go out and buy childcare in the marketplace, which can be hard, right? Because when you are a young family, you haven't had time to save up the way you do for college. And as you'd expect, most people make less money in their 20s than they do in their 40s and 50s, so they're at the beginning of their earnings journey. And childcare is very expensive because it's labor intensive. Right. You can't have 152 year olds in a room with one adult. That's just not safe or developmentally appropriate. So the costs are high. And then in the 90s, as states focused on standards based education and reforms there, it gave rise to expanded pre K offerings. And so in the 2000s in particular, you saw a coordinated campaign to increase educationally focused pre K. And those programs were generally housed in state education agencies and often delivered by schools.
- [05:44]
B
And.
- [05:44]
A
And so, you know, when you get to roughly 2004, right, you've got many states doing a lot of different stuff on early childhood, but it's really this hodgepodge of programs that can be hard for families to navigate and all serve slightly different but somewhat overlapping purposes.
- [06:02]
B
So how did you get involved in all this?
- [06:05]
A
So I got involved in 2004 when I was living in Chicago working as a lawyer, actually doing municipal and zoning law. And you as the deputy governor of Illinois.
- [06:17]
B
Just to be clear, that was a very leading question. So.
- [06:19]
A
Yeah, yeah, very leading question. Were running an education initiative in the governor's office and called me up and said, look like, you know, I've got all these education people working on this initiative, but I need someone who thinks a little bit more politically the way you do. And I remember saying to you, well, but I don't really know anything about education policy. And you said, well, you'll learn that part. And so I did. So I joined the governor's office in 2004 and had the somewhat unusual experience of working on early childhood, K12 and higher ed, and learning them all at the same time. Right. A lot of people who work on some combination of those policy issues started in one and then learned the others. Whereas I really sort of came into it with fresh perspective, which is to say knowing absolutely nothing. Um, and that's definitely shaped my views over the years. Right. Because I don't take as a given some of the things that people grow up with in these different systems, but that I worked in the governor's office for two years and since then have spent most of my career as a consultant working with states on mostly sort of systems and data issues relating to early childhood. And in the course of that have worked with more than half the states in every part of the country and of every political stripe. So it's been a really fun chance to get to know the country and to see how early childhood politics play out in a variety of different settings.
- [07:48]
B
And, you know, early childhood would seem like the kind of thing that might fall prey to the typical red blue divide. And yet that isn't the case. The vast majority of states now have government funded early childhood preschool type programs. Why did it happen that way?
- [08:08]
A
It's very interesting and it is really the case that there are a Number, you know, the leading states in this area are a great mix of red and blue states. And some of how that emerged was that the research on brain development that started coming out, particularly in sort of the 90s and early 2000s and the educational focus was very compelling to a wide range of governors. It's also the case that the case for early childhood as an economic and workforce support is one that has played well with certain Republican governors over time. And one of the other things I remember hearing in the early 2000s was that for some Republican governors, it was a way to fund education without funding the teacher unions or funding what they would call the board. Right. Like the school administrators in many states, including in many of the states that I was hearing about at that time, schools play a very active role in early childhood service delivery. But that there were a lot of different political reasons. One, a governor might choose to invest in early childhood, and many of them did, and many of them continue to. I mean, some of the leading states in early childhood today are states that are pretty red and that they've just made it part of their education reform initiatives.
- [09:34]
B
So, you know, given that you had the unusual perspective of learning and you're being modest, Eliot was ultimately kind of the most important person in education in the state of Illinois when he was there. So you were kind of overseeing the regulation of higher ed, K through 12, and early childhood ed. Tell me if this is a accurate assessment or not. Which is higher ed, to me, seems very broken. Right. There is the notion of everyone should go to college or have the opportunity to go to college. And that one basic notion then serves to sort of just justify an entire system that, when you look at it, doesn't really seem to be working for a lot of people. And the fact that there is, you know, a collective $1.83 trillion in student loan debt in this country, and the fact that as recently as 2010, 75% of Americans thought that college had a good value proposition, and that number has now fallen to 35%, I think shows you that the system clearly isn't working for the people that it's meant to serve and has really become perverted in a way that it mainly seems to serve the interests of the institutions themselves. And then when you look at K through 12 education, we spent close to a trillion dollars a year nationally on it. And yet, you know, if the point of A K through 12 education is to prepare people for college, if college readiness is in the, you know, 20 to 30%, and it means that effectively four out of every five students who graduate high school aren't ready for college. You know, imagine if you owned a factory where you made something and four out of every five products you produced were defective. You would fire everyone and start something entirely different. And that's effectively, in my view, what we have today in K through 12 education. Whereas at least my perception of early childhood education is it's a lot more effective than that. Now, maybe you could say that the fact that the other two systems are failures means that maybe it's not that effective because if it were, the kids would be doing better. But it still strikes me that early childhood, for whatever reason, seems to do more good for more kids than the other two types of systems. Is that accurate? And if it is, why?
- [11:56]
A
Well, without getting too deep into the vagaries of K12 and higher ed, I will say that one of the critical because again, like those, those systems have numerous strengths and numerous challenges that would be worthy of a podcast of their own. But that one of the things that is really, really different about early childhood, and that again, is sort of one of the major points of the book, is that in higher ED and K12, systems are deeply built and deeply ingrained. Right? So, like ed, I read this really interesting book last year called Whatever it is, We're against it, which was written by a college president about how even when higher ed recognizes the problems it's facing, the systems that it's already built make it a struggle to solve them. And certainly in K12, you've seen a lot of that too, is that it's just, it's a very large ship and that turning it can be really different. And that's why you've seen to some degree the rise of alternative pathways like charter schools and some of the movement toward more open choice, because there's a sense that it is very hard to change behaviors of well established institutions. And one of the opportunities that early childhood presents is that because the idea of early childhood systems is so much newer, that whatever problems we have, they're not as deeply calcified. And that in the last 20 years, you've seen a pretty radical shift in how states administer early childhood. And so, I mean, again, like, there are very effective early childhood programs, there are less effective early childhood programs. It's, it's, you know, it's very much a mix as it is in K12 and higher ed. But the difference is that. Or one of the differences may be that in early childhood, because a lot of the things that are broken aren't as well established. Or are sort of not as deeply ingrained in the culture that the possibility of changing and improving them just seems much more real. And that's really what this book is about. Right. Is about taking the landscape as we find it today and saying, look, like, here's what we're doing well, here's what we're not doing well, and here's how we might do all of it better in a more organized way. And that in early childhood, just the level of change you've seen in the last 20 years would be really hard to replicate in either K12 or higher ed.
- [14:18]
B
Right. So K12 and higher ed strike me, in the work that I've done and around them as extremely resistant to change, and that you have really powerful interests inside the system that really don't want things to be different than the way they are because the change tends to disempower them and they're more interested in their own power than they are in the outcomes for kids. What is it about early childhood that doesn't put that in the same type of risk where the status quo is able to just kill ways to make it different and better?
- [14:54]
A
Right? Yeah, because you don't actually have those powerful constituencies resisting change. Right. I mean, in higher ed, you know, there are many people for whom it's really working. Right. I mean, or at least ostensibly working. Right. But I mean, you look at the success of many of the elite private colleges and many state flagship universities, and it is plausible for these universities to say, yeah, actually, like, things are going pretty well for us these days. I mean, certainly. Or at least it was until this administration sort of challenged some of their basic notions. And then in K12, again, you've got, particularly in wealthier suburbs, a lot of districts where the kids are coming out and they're going to college. And it all seems like it's going well. And that, you know, students of the game may know that there's some underlying weaknesses that aren't being addressed, but that it's not that difficult to keep up a sort of positive public face in early childhood. It's just not possible to do that. Right. There are so many kids who aren't getting served at all, and. And the kids who are getting served are getting, you know, many cases, like parents are having a really hard time finding and affording the services. And it's also the case people don't identify with their early childhood program in quite the same way they do with their neighborhood school. Right. Wherever you live, even if you don't have a kid, you probably know what school district you're in. You probably even know what your local high school is. You certainly, if you went to college, know where you went to college. You probably know the names of a number of colleges in your area. But, like, early childhood, like, you don't know what the early childhood programs are in your community.
- [16:31]
B
Right? All I know is where my kids went to preschool.
- [16:34]
A
Right, exactly. So you know where your kids went to preschool. You don't even know who else is in the neighborhood. Right. So there isn't this strong sense of identification with institutions that comes with K12, which, by the way, is a huge advocacy problem too, because parents will advocate with K12 schools because they identify themselves as, like, part of a school district. But with early childhood, in many cases, they don't even know who to advocate to. Right. Like they know their own program, but that they don't know. Like, whatever struggles this program is having, who could change that? They don't know what state agency is responsible. It may be multiple. Right. And there's not the same level of community infrastructure. There's not like an elected school board. So it becomes a challenge to solve some of those problems. But the fact that the problems exist is pretty easy to identify.
- [17:25]
B
So then if. If the ability to assess what's working, what's not working, and make changes is a lot greater for early childhood than it is for K through 12 or higher ed. If I just gave you a magic wand and said you're in charge, don't worry about politicians, teachers unions, tenured faculty, university administrators, any of that stuff, just do what you want, what lessons would you take from the success of early childhood and apply it to the other systems?
- [17:54]
A
It's a good question. I mean, one of the things that is very different about early childhood than K12 is the nature of how families choose. Right? It's a lot less geographically bounded, or at least to the extent it's geographically bounded, it's bounded by the desires of parents, not by politically drawn lines. Right? So there's this whole body of literature about the impact of school district lines and boundaries within school districts. Right? So in early childhood, obviously, geography matters, right? Families want there to be. Want to have their kids either near where they live or near where they work, or at least somewhere in between. But that. That's up to them. It's not like a government agency saying, well, like, here's your assigned school. That's where your kid is going. So that is a piece that, again, in K12, you've seen a movement toward less geographic driven Choice, more freedom of where kids can go to school. And I'm in favor of that. So that is certainly a lesson you learn. It's also the case that the nature of service delivery looks really different in early childhood. We in early childhood talk about a mixed delivery system. And what that means is that some services are delivered by schools, some are delivered by private providers. In the case of child care, some of those private providers might be a relative, right? What's called family, friend and neighbor care, where it might be a local mom taking care of three kids and that that can be subsidized. So there is this notion of we're going to have a lot of different settings where we, where different families can have their needs met. And again, that's something where that value is pretty deeply held in early childhood. And you're seeing it start to creep into K12 as well. So the. So those are some of the things that are really positive. The downside is everybody in early childhood is deeply, deeply underpaid and the capacity is very limited. I mean, being a childcare worker or early childhood teacher is in the third percentile of income in America. And you will hear from many early childhood center directors that they have lost staff to driving an Uber or working at Target or Walmart because those places pay better and you don't have to change diapers all day. Right? So it is really a deeply underfunded segment of the community. And that obviously is something that I am in favor of changing, but that some of the aspects of choice and meeting families where they are are really positive.
- [20:43]
B
Right. So I hear you on the argument that you can't expect to be able to have a really effective system if you can't retain the people who do the work. And if you don't pay them at least, you know, a livable wage, they're not going to be able to do it. At the same time, I think it is very reasonable to look at our K through 12 system and say it is a tremendous amount of a waste of money. Right? We spend incredible, incredible amount. New York City spends, I think, upwards of $40 billion a year in its school system. And our schools are abysmal, right? So money is not, despite what the teachers union says, the answer to the problem. So given that so clearly money has not proven to be the answer in A K through 12 education and that spending in higher ed is wildly out of control, just resulting in students having unmanageable debt, how do you answer the question, someone like me of saying yes, what you're saying is logical. But if we give you guys more money, you're just gonna fucking do all the same stupid things and waste it too. So you can't be trusted.
- [21:48]
A
Well, that gets into a really interesting conversation that's been going on in the early childhood community for a while about how do you define quality and what makes for a good experience. Right. And because if you give money to people without, you know, with sort of all the wrong supports and incentives, you're not going to get great results. And again, I'm not going to, you know, get into all the many ways that's played out in K12, but that in early childhood. One of the things I'm really excited about is you're seeing this nascent movement to really just refocus the way we talk about quality and focus on childhood experience. And so what, what you're seeing, and I would say Louisiana and Virginia are, have been the leading states on this, not coincidentally because it's the same person who led the work in both places. But that the idea is historically in early childhood a lot of the measurements of quality have been focused essentially on sort of bureaucratic inputs. And it was a situation where you could measure a program as being high quality and the kids experience was still not that good. And the folks in Louisiana and Virginia have turned that on its head and said, no, actually like what we're going to pay for is for the child to have a good experience. And there are ways of measuring that that really are focused on classroom observation and someone being in there and looking at is this a language rich environment? Are the children being supported? Are they getting their emotional needs met? Are they actually learning anything? And that by focusing on like what's really going on in those adult child interactions and, and working toward funding that and tying funding to are you delivering what we're paying you to deliver, that could represent a real sea change in how early childhood makes sure that the money we're spending is actually having the desired impact.
- [23:44]
B
Would you say like the book obviously lists the number of prescriptions for, you know, how to improve early childhood education. Would you say that's your number one? Or you know, let me give you the magic wand again or I don't even need to, this is your actual job, what you do all day, what should we be doing?
- [24:02]
A
So I would say that's an essential component of it for sure. I think part of the problem, and one of the things the book goes into much more deeply than that is that for a long time in states it wasn't even anybody's job to be measuring quality consistently. Right. So again, you look at Louisiana and Virginia are two of the states where they said, look like we're not going to have this fragmented system where head starts have one quality set of quality requirements and child care has another one and pre K has another one. There's one definition of quality and everybody who's getting any state money for any purpose is more or less expected to use that definition and is going to be measured on it based on how they're improving. So to some degree it starts with having somebody in charge who's capable of saying that and has the sort of data and infrastructure needed to do that measurement. But then once you get, you know, once you get to that baseline, then yes, I would say that that quality improvement approach is really central to the future of the field.
- [25:05]
B
You would say that overall, the early childhood movement has been politically successful.
- [25:10]
A
It has. Because I mean, I think you have to say that because you look at where we are now and where we were 25 years ago or 50 years ago and we've come an incredibly long way, which is not to say that we don't have a lot further to go, but that we've made a lot of progress. And one of the dynamics and the book talks about this and this goes to something that you've written about a lot, Bradley, with sort of both top down and bottom up, is that we have historically been more successful at top down advocacy than bottom up. Because early childhood is an issue that if you are a politician doing good things for early childhood polls, well, people like it, it looks good in an ad. So there have been a lot of politicians who've done good things and then touted that and that has some positive effect. But that screwing over early childhood really doesn't have a negative effect. Right. There isn't a mobilized constituency because again, you're talking about, you know, the target audience being low income families with young children. Right. Who has less political power than those.
- [26:13]
B
Yeah, it's the same problem that we have with school meals. Right. Which is, you know, it polls really well. I think that governors who do it are happy that they did it because they are surprised that there is more recognition by voters than they would have expected. But at the same time the kids getting the food, just like the kids in early childhood can't, obviously can't vote and then their parents tend to be the lowest propensity voters for a lot of different reasons. And so there's sort of a kind of a emotional political benefit in that you feel good and it looks good and whatever else, but when it comes to sort of like actually being able to count votes in a low turnout primary, it's really not all that beneficial politically. And yet, despite that, I do think that the early childhood movement has been very successful, even though in many ways, when it comes to real life, actual politics, when you get down to the brass tacks, it isn't that critical for winning an election. So given the success of the movement, because to me, in many ways, that might define success, right? Which is when you can make something happen, despite the fact that when someone like me does the political math, you're like, it doesn't really matter. The childcare movement, which has obviously gotten a lot of momentum, at least on the Democratic side over the past five to 10 years, and they've had some success, but not nearly as much as they want. If they came to you and said, okay, Elliot, what can we learn from the early childhood movement to apply to ours? What would you tell them?
- [27:45]
A
Well, I think that part of what has been successful in the early childhood movement is that people have found ways to make their message matter. Right. So with childcare, for example, like, there have been a number of business leaders who have gotten very involved in advocating for childcare funding because they need the workforce. Right. And again, I know there's some folks within the early childhood movement who would rather that not be the primary argument, but the fact is, in some contexts, it is. And so you can look at states as politically disparate as Vermont, Virginia and North Dakota, they've all had major successes in childcare funding. Recently in Vermont, it was literally a coalition of business leaders who, thanks to some very talented organizers, right. Were brought together and went to the legislature and said, look, like we need child care. Tax us to pay for it. We're for that. Right? I mean, that's Vermont. So you're not going to be able to do that anywhere. Everywhere but that. In North Dakota, again, very different state politically. You had business leaders going to Governor Burgum, right, who's now in Trump's cabinet and saying, look, like there are people who we could hire if they had child care. Please fund child care. And so they did. Right. Virginia, it was a similar economic argument in the Youngkin administration that, you know, employment rates, unemployment was so low that there was a need to get more people into the workforce, and that that became part of the justification for increasing funding on childcare. So there has been this historical sense in the early childhood movement of, hey, like, the child care providers might not have as Much political oomph as they would like, but that somebody cares about this issue who might be able to speak to legislators in a meaningful way. Let's get those folks to do it. And so again, you look at the model in Vermont, they ran it like a campaign with some very skilled operators and pushed very hard and got constituencies that legislators cared about to go and say, you know, this is a form of spending that is necessary. And a lot of those coalitions have been able to have an impact over the years. That's not the only strategy, but it's certainly been one of them.
- [29:55]
B
Let's play a version of sort of fantasy sports for education where I want you to pick two or three jurisdictions that get early childhood. Right. Two or three that get K through 12. Right. Two or three that get higher ed. Right. And they don't be that. They can all be different. And tell me who you're picking and why.
- [30:13]
A
Sure. Well, I honestly, I'm a little nervous about doing the K12 and higher ed just because I haven't been studying those state systems.
- [30:21]
B
You still know more than 99.9%, including all. Just about all of our listeners.
- [30:26]
A
Well, so I will say that the states that have been getting a lot of attention in K12 particularly have been some of the southern states like Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and Tennessee that have really focused on, you know, have focused on early reading and early literacy as a core component of success. And all of them have had an embedded early childhood program as part of that. Right. Like, if you look at states that are making a difference in K12, it's those states, and they've all recognized that you can't start in kindergarten and have success. And Tennessee has done a number of studies of their early childhood system. And it's interesting because some of the early studies of their pre K program showed that it actually wasn't having positive impact. And that gets cited a lot by opponents of pre K expansion. It's important to note, though, that what actually happened in Tennessee is they studied the program, saw that it wasn't working, and said, okay, what we need is a working pre K program. This one isn't that. Let's change our program so that it does actually work. And so they've made improvements to their pre K program that they see as key to their overall literacy strategy. And so, again, those are the states that are being talked about nationally as really moving the needle. And it's in part because they've focused on those early years with an embedded early childhood component. So credit to all those states but then when it comes to early childhood, I mentioned Virginia, and it's one of my favorite stories to tell. So I'll tell it that in Virginia, when Ralph Northam was the governor and he was a Democrat, he brought in a woman named Jenna Conway from Louisiana, who had grown up in Virginia, but was, you know, had been working in Louisiana and was part of the team for Bloomberg fans, was part team John White in Louisiana. And his coaching tree is really critical to all this work because Jenna has been a great leader in Watershed Advisors, which he helped found, has been one of the key consultants on a lot of this work. But that in Virginia, Ralph Northam brought in Jenna to lead an agenda really focused on quality and unifying governance and sort of making the system work in a coherent way. And then when he, you know, in Virginia, there's a constitutional limit on governors that can only serve one term. So when his term ended, Glenn Youngkin got elected as a Republican. And as you'd imagine, they got rid of a lot of the existing education staff, but they kept the early childhood team and actually promoted them and said, look, this is the right agenda. We're going to accelerate it. And they put money, they put resources, they've built infrastructure, they've made partnerships. And then after Youngkin's term was over, Governor Spanberger got elected as a Democrat and she promoted Jenna Conway to state superintendent. So now you're going to have 12 years of the same agenda. That's a great agenda. I mean, these are really smart, talented people. And can I just throw in one
- [33:34]
B
quick thing on Virginia, which is, I'm just curious how confident you are that that will continue. Only because, and this is a narrow perspective, but we just lost our Universal School Meals campaign in Virginia. And the reason we lost was that the speaker of the House there, Don Scott, killed the bill because his kids in his district already had funding for school meals, and therefore it didn't benefit him and he didn't need it in any way, and so he killed it. I can't think of someone less public spirited or more immoral than Don Scott. And so given that, are you confident that success in Virginia can continue? Because it seems to me that this is someone who basically is a Democrat version of Trump.
- [34:19]
A
I have not had any dealings with Don Scott, so I can't comment on that. But I will say that in my experience that Virginia has had a really good group of legislators of both parties who've been really thoughtful about this and feel ownership of the agenda. So again, that's not a, that's not a guarantee that they're going to get everything they're looking for, but that at least on the administrative side, they've got the right people there. And there is has been a history in the last few years of increasing funding and passing good bills. So, you know, as you know, past results are no guarantee of future performance, but the overall trajectory has been very bipartisan and very successful. So again, that doesn't guarantee it's going to continue, but that if you look at the track record of the last few years, I think Virginia has got a lot to be proud of.
- [35:10]
B
Higher ed, you want to pick any places that you think are really getting it right?
- [35:13]
A
I definitely do not.
- [35:14]
B
Okay, fair and fair war then. Let me ask you a slightly New York parochial New York question, which is, so you grew up in Ithaca, your father was a professor at Cornell, you went to Columbia, so you've been around higher ed institutions in New York a lot. And yet it feels to me that New York just doesn't have the same type of higher ed system in SUNY that you see in other states, like a UC system especially, which just seems to have high quality schools just up and down the coast there. Why is that?
- [35:48]
A
It's an interesting question. And again, my reluctance to speak on higher ed is just because I don't want to name one. You know, I don't want to name the wrong state, but that they. There is, there is a real difference between the east coast and the Midwest in this. And having grown up in New York and now being in the Chicago suburbs. Right. It is certainly the case that the Midwest and the south and parts of the west as well have just put a lot of different energy into their flagship state universities in a way that's been really appealing to people. And you see that a lot of those schools have been very successful. Right. So again, here in the Chicago suburbs, the frame of reference is the Big Ten. Right. Many of the adults went to a Big Ten school. Many of the kids aspire to go to a Big Ten school. And they go to these schools and they've got a ton of resources and they have a great time, they party, they go to football games. My daughter went to Wisconsin, so they lost a lot of those football games, but it was still a lot of fun. And they have these good academic experiences and then they go out and get jobs and that. That feels like a really workable model. And in the east coast there are so many historical and successful private institutions that in many cases the state infrastructure just hasn't been built up in the same way. And obviously, the SUNY system has a lot of great schools, but it doesn't provide the Big Ten experience where kids want the, you know, the sports and all that stuff. So, you know, it fills something of a different niche.
- [37:23]
B
Yeah, that's right. All right, last question. Because I know we're at time here, which is, you know, Trump has been talking about getting rid of the U.S. department of Education. Actually, tonight is the State of the Union. Maybe he'll bring it up again. I don't know. And this is not a leading question. I genuinely feel like, despite all of my kind of experience in government, I. I still don't quite understand what would the practical impact be if you didn't have a US Department of Education? Like, what would suffer? Or is Trump right? And basically, it's a lot of regulation that we generally don't need.
- [37:54]
A
Well, it's interesting because historically, the federal role in K12 education has been to support the most vulnerable students. Right? And that's what Title I was meant to do. Certainly a lot of the civil rights and special education funding, that's what it's meant to do. And you can make all kinds of arguments that the government hasn't been effective at that, which many of which are probably accurate, but that the question is, is the federal government really going to abandon that role? Because, again, that role emerged for a reason, right. There was a state. A sense that states and districts weren't doing right by those kids and that the federal government could. It's interesting because one of the major narratives I've heard privately, right, when people have looked at the Trump changes and some of the proposals is I've had so many people, you know, across the political spectrum say some version of, like, I can't possibly defend the status quo, but this isn't actually improving it. And I think that there was some amount. There would have been some amount of willingness to have a thoughtful conversation about what is the right federal role and how can we serve the populations that need to be served. Right. Particularly on the special ed side, which, again, has been historically sort of a core function of the Department of Ed. How can we serve those children in a way that is more effective than what we're doing, but that's not the conversation we're having. And in some ways, the sad part, to me of what's going on at the federal level right now is not just the potential negative impact of what's happening, because, again, I'm not sure how negative the impact of this is going to be. Right. We're going to have to see that play out, but that it's taking away airspace from what would be a much more thoughtful conversation about. Okay, like, even if our goal is to scale back the federal role, how could we have the federal government play some role effectively? And we're not really talking about that.
- [39:54]
B
Yeah, got it. All right, Elliot, how do people get the book and how do people follow your work?
- [39:59]
A
Sure. So one way to order it, obviously, is through PNT Knitwear, but thank you. If you're not doing that, it is available on most major booksellers and it is available through Harvard Education Press, so you can find it on their website as well. And yeah, so, you know, it's actually on backorder right now, but I'm told that they're printing more, so go ahead and put in those orders and, you know, hopefully it'll get to you and
- [40:26]
B
we will have copies if for those of you who can make it to the March 9 event, there will be copies for sale that Elliot will sign at PNT Netware. So if you like this and you want to get the book and you can make it, best thing to do is come to the event and that way you can meet Elliot and he can sign the book himself.
- [40:43]
A
Looking forward to it.
- [40:44]
B
Sounds great. Elliot, thank you for joining us.
- [40:45]
A
Thank you so much for having me.
- [40:50]
B
Firewalls recorded at my bookstore, PNT Netware, located at 180 Orchard street on the lower east side of Manhattan. We'd love to hear from you with questions, feedbacks, or idea for a guest. Just email me at Bradley at Firewall Media or find me on LinkedIn. And to keep up with what's on my mind and my latest writing, please follow my new substack at bradleytus substack. Com. Thanks again for listening.