The Wreckage of K-12 Education

Summary

The Commentary Magazine Podcast: "The Wreckage of K-12 Education" Summary

Release Date: May 29, 2025
Host: John Podhoretz
Participants:

• John Podhoretz – Host and Editor of Commentary Magazine
• Abe Greenwald – Executive Editor
• Christine Rosen – Social Commentary Columnist and Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute
• Robert Pondiscio – Education Contributor and Former K-12 Teacher

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1. Introduction

John Podhoretz opens the episode by promoting upcoming live events and guest appearances, notably the "Call Me Back" podcast with Dan Senor and Brett McGurk. He humorously remarks on the competitive nature of podcast rankings, highlighting his support for fellow Commentary contributors.

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2. Political Climate and Executive Power

Discussion Highlights:

• Trump’s Tariffs and Judicial Oversight:
  Robert Pondiscio discusses the recent ruling by the Court of International Trade declaring President Donald Trump's Liberation Day tariffs unconstitutional. He criticizes the administration's use of executive power and anticipates further judicial resistance.

  “They are unconstitutional. Everybody knows that. He knows it.” [05:15]

• Demonization of the Judiciary:
  Abe Greenwald expresses concern over the administration’s rhetoric against unelected judges, noting the increase in threats against the federal judiciary.

  “I don't like the demonization of judges... It's not a good thing.” [06:09]

• Upcoming Supreme Court Decisions:
  The panel anticipates significant Supreme Court rulings, potentially on hot-button issues like immigration and higher education. They highlight the court's active role in checking executive power.

  “The judiciary is doing its job... it is healthy for discussions of federalism.” [10:46]

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3. Higher Education and Meritocracy

Discussion Highlights:

• Harvard’s Admission Practices:
  The conversation shifts to Harvard University, where Roman Pondiscio critiques the institution's lowering of academic standards and the politicization of admissions processes.

  “No one has held... these institutions to any kind of account for their behavior.” [14:32]

• Impact of Affirmative Action and Meritocracy:
  They debate the effectiveness of meritocracy versus equity in admissions, with Robert asserting that dismantling meritocracy leads to aristocracy and oligarchy.

  “Privilege finds a way... it's not equity.” [45:49]

• Recommendation of Educational Literature:
  John Podhoretz recommends "Up the Down Staircase" by Bel Kaufman, a novel portraying the bureaucratic challenges within the American public school system.

  “It remains the single best novel... about American secondary education.” [61:38]

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4. K-12 Education Crisis

Discussion Highlights:

• Declining Standards and "Wokeness":
  Robert Pondiscio provides an overview of the decline in K-12 education standards over the past few decades, attributing it to the rise of "wokeness" and the erosion of accountability measures.

  “Chronic absenteeism... Removing honors programs, test optional, on and on.” [40:20]

• Impact of COVID-19:
  Abe Greenwald highlights how the pandemic exacerbated issues like low attendance and relaxed academic standards, leading to significant learning losses.

  “Perfect storm... ideological assault on standards.” [43:50]

• Success and Decline of Charter Schools:
  The panel discusses the success of charter schools like KIPP and Success Academy in improving educational outcomes, and how political shifts have undermined their effectiveness.

  “Urban charter schools remain the one unambiguous win we've had.” [28:06]

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5. Education Reform Movements and Charter Schools

Discussion Highlights:

• No-Excuses Education:
  Robert Pondiscio explains the "no excuses" model pioneered by KIPP schools, emphasizing high standards, uniformity, and rigorous academic expectations which led to remarkable student performance.

  “No excuses meant no excuses for adults. We as adults fail the children.” [23:33]

• Shift Away from Standards:
  The conversation critiques the abandonment of standardized testing and accountability, arguing that this shift has led to grade inflation and diminished academic rigor.

  “It's a war on standards, war on meritocracy.” [44:35]

• Emergence of Education Savings Accounts (ESAs):
  Robert Pondiscio discusses the rise of ESAs in states like Texas and Florida, comparing them to vouchers and predicting their disruptive impact on traditional public schooling.

  “About 50% of families... have the ability to do that.” [56:44]

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6. Political Implications: NYC Mayoral Election

Discussion Highlights:

• Candidates Overview:
  John Podhoretz outlines the New York City mayoral primary featuring former Governor Andrew Cuomo and young leftist Zora Mamdani. He criticizes Cuomo's tenure and praises his role in preserving Success Academy schools.

  “I think Andrew Cuomo is an unbalanced and unstable person.” [29:31]

• Impact on Education Policy:
  The panel assesses how the mayoral race reflects broader educational debates, particularly the conflict between charter schools and progressive education policies.

  “Cuomo bears some responsibility... for that.” [36:55]

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7. Conclusion

John Podhoretz wraps up the episode by encouraging listeners to read Robert Pondiscio’s piece, "How Wokeness Destroyed an Education Miracle," available on Commentary.org. He reiterates the significance of addressing the ongoing crises in K-12 education and the importance of maintaining high academic standards.

“It was a great pleasure to have Robert on... thank you so much for your contribution.” [61:38]

Recommendation:
John Podhoretz recommends "Up the Down Staircase" by Bel Kaufman, highlighting its insightful portrayal of the American public school system's challenges.

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Key Takeaways:

• The U.S. education system, particularly K-12, is facing significant challenges due to declining standards, politicization, and the erosion of accountability measures.
• Charter schools have demonstrated success in improving educational outcomes, but political interference has undermined their effectiveness.
• Higher education institutions are grappling with meritocracy versus equity, leading to debates over admission practices and the role of affirmative action.
• Political dynamics, such as the upcoming NYC mayoral election, have profound implications for education policy and reform efforts.
• The broader political climate, including executive overreach and judicial backlash, continues to influence educational governance and standards.

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Notable Quotes:

• “Everyone on the right has been discussing DEI for the last ten years, but these conversations have been going on for a decade or more in these schools.” – Abe Greenwald [19:22]
• “The elite will always be fine. They'll always find a way.” – Robert Pondiscio [50:38]
• “It's a war on meritocracy, war on privilege.” – John Podhoretz [44:35]

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This summary encapsulates the critical discussions from "The Wreckage of K-12 Education" episode, providing a comprehensive overview for listeners and readers seeking to understand the current state and future trajectory of American education.

Transcript

[John Podhoretz]

Hope for the best expect the worst Some preach and pain Some die of thirst the way of knowing which way.

[Robert Pondiscio]

It'S going Hope for the best Expect.

[John Podhoretz]

The worst Hope for the best welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. Today is Thursday, May 29, 2025. I'm John Pod Horiz, the editor of Commentary, reminding you I pointed out yesterday if you're in the New York area next on June 6, you can go to jccmanhattan.org and sign up to be at a live taping of the Call Me Back podcast with Dan Senor and his guest Brett McGurk. This is a you gotta buy tickets and they're expensive. So if you're willing to pay for expensive tickets to watch Dan Senor in his award winning hit podcast that every week we're like in a little race. Who's higher on the Apple news politics charts? I think this week he's higher. A couple weeks ago we were higher. So I don't know why I'm promoting the Call Me Back podcast when I would rather that we are better off. So I have bragging rights, but I'm doing it for him and my friend Jeff Faig, who is helping to sponsor the event at the JCC in Manhattan. So that is go to jccmanhattan.org look for the tile that says Call Me Back Live podcast and you can sign up to hear Dancing or live next week in Manhattan. Doing his thing. Doing our thing Today, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.

[Christine Rosen]

Hi, John.

[John Podhoretz]

Back after a week's what seemed like a month absence, our social commentary columnist and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.

[Abe Greenwald]

Hi, John.

[John Podhoretz]

And joining us today for the first time, Chris, Christine's fellow fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, commentary contributor, education majordomo, Robert Pandisio. Welcome to the Commentary Podcast.

[Robert Pondiscio]

Thanks. I'm a daily listener, so this is a real treat. Thanks for having me.

[John Podhoretz]

You're a daily, sir, as I you and I met decades ago.

[Robert Pondiscio]

Yeah.

[John Podhoretz]

As staffers at Time magazine. I was a researcher. You were in the I was the.

[Robert Pondiscio]

Paid principal apologist for Time magazine, meaning.

[John Podhoretz]

You were in the PR or a media relations department, and then decided that perhaps there was more to life and more to being a serious person than doing that. So you went off, you got a degree, you became a teacher in the New York City public schools. And, and you can teach. So the those who can't do teach, you can teach. And now you are teaching us about what life is like for teachers in the education system in the United States, particularly in the elementary and secondary schools. And we're going to talk about, we're going to talk about a piece you have in the current issue of Commentary called How Wokeness Destroyed an Education Mirac and some of the hijinks that have been going on this week apparently pulled back in San Francisco, yet another example in San Francisco of what it is that radicals in charge of American education want to do to American education, which is they are actually literally attempting to destroy all standards and all ideas of measurement in order to get their ideological way. But we'll get to that in a minute. I think we have to start with the, the biggest news, which is that three panel court on international trade has ruled the emergency Liberation Day tariffs of Donald Trump unconstitutional on the very playing grounds that he does not have the constitutional right to impose them by claiming that they are an emergency measure. There are tariffs that he has imposed or is in the process of imposing that are not affected by this decision. Countries with which we have a very, very significant trade deficit. The president seems to be allowed under law to levy a tariff of up to 15% in order to equalize those, which I think is probably pretty bad law, but nonetheless is on the books. And some of the other ones that, that do fall under understandings of national security concerns are still in place. But the Liberation Day tariffs, with that chart that he had in the Rose Garden with the, where, you know, we were putting tariffs on islands with penguins on them and no people and all of that, those have all been basically invalidated with the, with the wave of a unanimous court's hand, they're going to try to appeal it to a higher court. It is highly unlikely that the higher court is going to find in his favor because they are unconstitutional. Everybody knows that. He knows it. He's claiming he wants to prevent fentanyl. I don't know. I mean, these are all disingenuous. The reasons given for his right to impose these tariffs. That we are in a condition of emergency in relation to trade is psychotic. And if you believe it, it's psychotic. And if you don't believe it, it's factitious and, and demagogic. And, and it's just because he likes tariffs that he wants to impose them. It's not his right to impose tariffs. That is Congress's responsibility. And so a measure of sanity has at least been introduced into this conversation after, you know, four months of, of the entire world saying what, what the hell is going on?

[Abe Greenwald]

Well, yes, although two points. The abuse of executive power, which we spent the last four years, I think correctly condemning when the Biden administration overused executive power and tried to overtake the responsibility that is Congress's responsibility. I worry a little bit, though, about the message that the administration is going to send when they lose again. Every time they lose, they talk about unelected judges. Unelected judges. So there's a lot of demonization of the judicial branch here. And many of these judges, particularly in a couple of the tariff cases and certainly the cases with universities and with law firms are some of them are his own appointees. There are certainly many Republican appointees on these benches. So I think that sort of rhetoric, even if he takes the L, which he should, and backs off from the tariffs, which this gives him an opportunity to do, is, is very damaging to our system. I don't like the demonization of judges. You know, we've had an increase in threats against our federal judiciary. This is not a good thing. So that rhetoric, although it's, I think overlooked by maga, is just, yes, it's these out of control, unelected judges that's damaging and we should call that out for what it is.

[John Podhoretz]

So that's one thing. The other thing going on, apparently we're going to get a major Supreme Court decision this morning. We're taping this early Thursday morning. We don't know what it is. One can assume, I don't know why one assumes that it's one of the hot button cases, since the court often reserves the hot button cases for the very end of the term, which is obviously the end of next month, June 30 or July 1 or whatever. But it might be. And we sort of know where the hot button cases are. You know, they're relating to the immigration, deportations. They're relating to some of the higher ed stuff, stuff on the shadow docket, meaning the stuff on where there have been temporary restraining words. We just don't know. So the Supreme Court is going to rule this morning. We don't know what they're going to rule on, whether it's a hot button case or not. The most profound argument that was had at the court in this term so far was in the case that appeared to be about birthright citizenship, but was actually about the technical procedure of whatever it was that I now can't remember again, but also very important in the administrative, in the question of whether the administrative state should be weakened or strengthened. But we don't know what that's going to be. Trump is not having good days in court. Some of that is obviously because he things are brought before liberal judges, self selected liberal judges. For example, in, in, in Boston, the Harvard, Harvard has a clearly very friendly judge who is staying his hand and stopping him from doing things there. And there was an extremely complicated and confusing decision yesterday in the case of Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia student who is head of the Colombia, anti Israel, anti Semite, anti American, but is married to an American guy, was born in Syria, has an Algerian passport, worked for, worked for the British Embassy in Lebanon and for unra, the United nations relief agency for, for Gaza and you know, basically incited riots and things like that and has, was, was targeted for deportation and there's a hold on his deportation. Weird decision by not a liberal judge. I mean, not, not a non liberal judge, but a judge who clerked for conservatives like Michael Mukazi, who was of course Attorney General of the United States and a friend of mine. But, but said on the one hand he thought that Khalil was maybe likely to prevail in his argument that he was targeted for speech. And on the other hand was also the government was likely to prevail in the fact that it might have a right to deport him on Secretary of State having the right to make that decision. So it's a very confused decision. Anyway, so Trump is, Trump is in the ringer this week.

[Abe Greenwald]

Well, and all of these are really, I mean, at the 30,000 foot level, questions of the balance of powers. And again, the silver lining to all of this is that Congress needs to reassert itself, which we've talked about before. The judiciary is doing its job and you know, Trump is pushing the limits on many different planes. So I think it's actually, it's healthy for discussions of federalism if you want to see any sort of silver lining in all this litigiousness.

[Christine Rosen]

Yeah, I mean, it's not just this week too. I mean Trump, Trump generally has had courts say no to him more than say yes. And you know, for everyone who's like pulling their hair out saying this is the end of the rule of law, we've never seen so much intervention or, you know, sort of staying the hand of the executive as the courts have done this term.

[John Podhoretz]

I just don't, you know, I think basically that it is very important that we focus on not Trump's thrown all this stuff against the wall to see what's going to stick. And now we're going to see over the next year because it's going to take a year for a lot of this to work through the system. What, what's going to stick, and a lot of it really isn't going to stick. And it's not clear to me that he cares that it sticks or not. The purpose is the throwing of the stuff at the wall and seeing whether you can kind of change the national census consensus or the national mood in relation to a lot of this, which is, I think, why, even if you're saying he's going at Harvard the wrong way, it's terrible rallying Harvard together when people could have. Harvard could maybe clean itself up on its own. But now, as the New York Times reports, so as Harvard is united in the understanding that the barbarians are at the gates and all of that, and that may be well and good, and it may be that Harvard and the elites in America have all united against Trump's barbaric Babbittry, anti intellectual babbittry. But it also means that the individual people who are thirsting and clamoring to get into Harvard, both inside the United States and out, are going to feel a great measure of uncertainty about what it is they're going to get if they go, or what it is they're going to get if they apply. And that institutional assault that the President is launching at Harvard is welcome, in my opinion. It is welcome because no one has held, particularly the nation's most prestigious universities to any kind of account for their behavior, either in being government subcontractors, in being the people who are supposed to uphold the principle of free speech and unpopular opinions while refusing to allow anyone with an opinion that is not within a tiny realm of it, on the ideological spectrum between liberal and far left to teach there, to speak there, to have a role in the administration there. It is a closed system, a closed guild, and nobody has had any interest in going at them full bore. And so yay is what I have to say, because I don't know how else their cultural dominance was going to be challenged.

[Robert Pondiscio]

They are an unlovely defendant. Right. You know, if your heuristic is everything Trump hates, I like, well, Harvard's your test case. I mean, the stuff that the administration wants out of Harvard, Harvard should want for itself. And it's unclear to me why it takes federal coercion to get them to stop being anti Semitic, to improve their record on free speech, et cetera, et cetera. It kind of reminds me of the 1996 World Series between the Braves and the Yankees. As a Mets fan, you thought, usually you say, what a shame one of these teams has to lose. In this case, what a shame that one of them has to win.

[John Podhoretz]

Well, that's a great analogy. You pulled that one out. I had totally forgotten that one.

[Abe Greenwald]

The New York Times story was also hilarious in that it's like, finally, undergraduates at Harvard have a sense of pride. I'm like, has this reporter ever met a graduate of Harvard? I mean, I don't think too much. You know, lack of pride is something we need to worry about in the future Harvard students.

[John Podhoretz]

But you bring up something very important, Robert, which is that none of this would be necessary if these universities were what they are supposed to be. I mean, not only you can even say it's not necessary, but don't recruit a student body that is anti Semitic by favoring in the process of your selection activist high school students who somehow seem therefore to be more committed and therefore likely to be leaders. Like, if I were an admissions officer at Harvard or anywhere and looked at an application, I could tell in five minutes whether somebody was going to spend his time in a classroom learning Sanskrit or whether he was going to buy a Coleman tent and have a temper tantrum at some point in those four years that was disruptive of the educational experience. And the story of the last 30 years is that the people whose inclination is to be somewhat disruptive of the experience, who are not legacies and are not children of Chinese and Indian oligarchs and whatever, seem to be favored in the selection process because that is what the culture of the modern university believes. They are training people to challenge the American system and our way of life and capitalism and the good working order of things and change it in a progressive direction. And that's who that. Whom they recruit. And therefore they are poisoning intellectual life on campuses and poisoning the social and civil life of these campuses. And we've been publishing about this for 40 years and people on the right have talked about it and all this. And then you have people like Philip Howard, respectable set, middle of the road person, writing about the death of common sense on campus, and Larry Summers, the former president, are talking about the incivility on campus and Steven Pinker talking about this and that and the other thing. But, but it's all impotence. It's all, it's all. This is all an expression of it shouldn't be, you know what, it shouldn't be like this. So let's make so that it isn't like this. Or you know what? Something bad is going to happen. Well, guess what? Something bad just happened to them. Yeah, the warnings were real and something as bad has happened to them and they're going to need to go through the fire and seem to come out the other, see if they can be reforged into something better when they come out the other end.

[Abe Greenwald]

And this actually, this is one of the things that in Robert's piece that I think people, everyone should read. It's great. But there's something you point out there that I think a lot of people who don't Follow K through 12 and higher education closely don't realize, which is that folks like you and others who are watching curriculum changes, administrative changes, school of ed changes, the were the canaries in the coal mine decades ago about what we're seeing now, which is the fruit that's born of the DEI type nonsense that was actually it's been churning through the system for a very long time. And so there's a sense in which I think the average, maybe slightly left leaning, you know, sympathetic to the idea that places like Harvard are still great or what they think they should be, are shocked that Trump's going after Harvard. But there's, this has been going on for long time. It's really only conservatives who've been pointing out some of these problems. And so I do think it, I have some sympathy for the people who think this is such a wild overreaction. But I think as your piece shows, Robert, this has been going on both at the K through 12 level and then into higher education for decades.

[Rob Williams]

Hello, this is Dr. Rob Williams, executive Director of the USC Shoah Foundation. Survivors of the Holocaust have long been the bravest voices speaking out against anti Semitism and all forms of hate around the world, whether it's European antisemitism of the 1930s and 1940s or the anti Semitism we see on our streets and campuses today. We'll explore it on the USC Shoah Foundation's new podcast, Searching for Never Again. We'll hear stories that are heartbreaking and stories that are inspiring. Every Tuesday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever fine podcasts can be found.

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[Robert Pondiscio]

I mean, there's a fundamental question here that just seldom gets asked and I think the Harvard case is a good test case. You know, we let universities and let me be clear, I'm a K12 guy, not a higher ed guy, but we let universities and their endowments accrue tax free because they ostensibly operate in the public interest. Well, is Harvard operating in the public interest? Yes or no? That's a. To your point, Christine, that's a long overdue conversation in this country.

[John Podhoretz]

Now let's talk about K12 education and your piece How Woken has Destroyed an education miracle at commentary.org, which you can read. If you were a subscriber, go subscribe and read it. And if you're not a subscriber, shame on you because you're here as a freeloader listening to us day after day and not helping us keep the lights on and publishing for you. But that's my guilt trip of the day. Effectively a story you tell you are. Nominally it's a book review, a book by an education reformer who was forced out of his school system in a sort of explosion of wokeness. But the story is that beginning in the 1990s, school reformers all over the country began implementing relatively simple changes in the daily life of the students in their schools. Order, organization, uniforms, expectations, demands for parental involvement. And the results were unambiguous. That schools that cared and wanted to teach kids things and gave them the tools to teach them things by providing them with a safe, stable environment in which to learn out performed ordinary, normal public schools all over the country in all kinds of circumstances. And then came Ferguson, Missouri and Black Lives Matter and 2015-2023. And it was a long dark night of the soul for a lot of these schools as you tell the story. Because the question was, was there very makeup injurious to the spiritual and moral well being of their students who were being treated. Who are not being treated with proper cultural sensitivity. Right.

[Robert Pondiscio]

Yeah, that's basically it. And yeah, thank you for noticing John, that it's a nominal book review, but was really kind of an opportunity for me to kind of unburden myself about some of these things that have been irritating me for a while. So look, I mean the brief backstory here, you alluded to it earlier. I left the publishing industry and became a South Bronx school teacher almost 25 years ago. And at about the same time, this was circa 2001, 2002. This was probably the high watermark of the so called education reform movement, which was characterized by standardized testing, accountability standards, et cetera, and charter schools. And just down the block from where I was teaching in the South Bronx, the second KIPP school opened. KIPP was an acronym that stands for Knowledge's Power Program. They started in Houston and now to this day, they are still, I think, by far one of the largest urban public charter schools chain. They're all over the country. But they pioneered something that became known colloquially as, quote, no excuses education. And it's important to remind people what no excuses meant because it's been kind of done dirt over the years. No excuses meant no excuses for adults. You know, in other words, children don't fail. We as adults fail the children. So you just described it quite well. I mean, you know, high standards for behavior, for academics, uniforms, you know, et cetera, you know, familiar to those who remember Catholic schools of our parents generation, you know, very, very much the same kind of vibe. And these schools were wildly successful. They were, they were imitated all over, you know, places like Uncommon Schools, Achievement First Success Academy in New York City, borrowed a lot of ideas from no Excuses Education, which by the way, itself borrowed from, from Broken Windows Policing this idea that you, you know, if you sweat the small stuff, the big stuff takes care of itself. And to your point, John, they were not just successful, they were incredibly successful. There's an outfit out of Stanford University called Credo. I can't remember what it stands for, but they have done studies over the years of these schools and they have showed that compared to the district schools that the kids would have attended otherwise, they were adding dozens of instructional fun, adding dozens of instructional days per year, like 40, 50 more days of instruction in English, 80 more days of instruction in math. Just extraordinary results. And then as I describe in the piece, they were kind of attacked from within. They were perceived as white supremacists, as imposing cultural norms that were inappropriate for black and brown children. And this while those of us on the political right have been discussing DEI and, you know, critical race theory in the last couple of years. These conversations have been going on for a decade or more in, in these schools. And so, yeah, they ended up falling apart from within. The author of the book that I'm reviewing, the Lost Decade, Stephen Wilson, was himself a Victim of this, he pushed back against some of these notions that, you know, things like punctuality and respect for the written word are not, you know, white characteristics. They're just, are white values or white values.

[John Podhoretz]

They are white values and they're not, they don't, they don't conform or comport with the cultural norms.

[Robert Pondiscio]

That's right.

[John Podhoretz]

Of African Americans and Hispanics and others.

[Robert Pondiscio]

Yeah. And he paid for it with his job. His board fired him because this was considered such an outrageous thing to say. So he was done an incredible injustice. And you know, to give Stephen Wilson his proper credit, his book is called the Lost Decade. It is a impassioned plea to, to get back to what we knew was working and what we could demonstrate was working.

[Abe Greenwald]

I, I, I'm glad you mentioned the thing that absolutely enraged me when I read about it a few years ago happening, which was the abandonment of the it's Kips thing. Right. Work hard, be nice.

[Robert Pondiscio]

Work hard, be nice. That's right.

[Abe Greenwald]

When that, I mean that actually both the, the no excuses mantra and that, that should have been how MAGA rebranded itself in the second term. No excuses, work hard, be nice. But that, but, but that, when they abandoned that philosophy, I think that was a wake up call for people who were, even those of us who had put our hopes in the charter school movement is like, well, here's this one alternative. The one group that's gotten away from some of the teachers union dominated public school system way of doing things. It was, it was very sad actually.

[Robert Pondiscio]

Well, what's even worse, Christine, is that, you know, and I think my ed reform credentials are in pretty good order. But I've pointed out over the years that really the only unambiguous success of the last 25 years of education reform has been urban charter schools and specifically these large networks, the KIPPs, the Success Academies of the world. Everything else has kind of come out in the wash. You know, charter schools on average don't necessarily outperform district schools, but you would much rather be a low income kid of color in a place like New York or Washington or Boston, in a town charter school then, then, then 50 years ago, you know, that's, that's the one, the one unambiguous win we've had. And it's the one thing that we seem to be embarrassed by for all the reasons detailed in the piece. And we've walked back over the last 10 years. It's, it's, it's not just a sin and a shame, it's a tragedy.

[John Podhoretz]

You know, There is one. This does not come up in your piece, but there is one interesting political matter here in New York City with national implications. We have a mayoral election coming up or a mayoral primary coming up in New York and the two leading candidates. Now, a very complicated system. This is at the tail end of June. The primary will take place and it's likely the person who wins the.

[Abe Greenwald]

And it's ranked choice, right? It's going to be a ranked choice election.

[John Podhoretz]

Yeah, it's a ranked choice election. There are 11 candidates. So it's a complicated system. But. So former governor, you know, resigned governor, disgraced governor Mario. Andrew Cuomo is the leading candidate.

[Abe Greenwald]

You forgot podcast villain of the COVID era.

[John Podhoretz]

Yes, and we're going to discuss that in a minute. Absolutely. So is up against a very far left 33 year old kid named Zora Mamdani, who, in a city that remains 17% Jewish, is openly walking around accusing Israel of genocide, which is sort of a kind of politically deranged thing to do in New York City. No one has ever done anything but talk nice to Jews in New York City if you're running for office. And he's going exactly in the other direction because. And according to polling, by the way, he is leading among whites. Just to give you a sense of what the white people of New York City are like, they're not like wonderful outer borough ethnics who are, you know, spinning pizza and having pierogies and having wonderful, you know, Italian Day events in Little Italy. They're now.

[Abe Greenwald]

I bought that show.

[John Podhoretz]

But no, they're now young leftist AOC voters. But the reason I bring this up is that Andrew Cuomo's foremost achievement as governor, aside from building the Second Avenue subway and the Tappan Zee Bridge, was that when Bill de Blasio became mayor in 2013, he had had a long standing personal feud with fellow former city Councilman Eva Moskowitz. Eva Moskowitz is the president of the Success Academy. Success Academy Network, which is the, I think in terms of results, is the most successful charter school system by a wide margin in the history of the planet, is what I described. Uniforms, standards, longer school days, year round schooling, you know, parental involvement, all of that. And de Blasio came into office determined to destroy Success Academy, both ideologically, because he's a far leftist and doesn't like this notion of. And he wanted to brown nose the teachers unions and various other things. And basically he had been given, because of changes in New York City and state rules, he had been given, as the mayor had a larger amount of control over the local city schools than was previously the case when those were run out of Albany, out of the state Capitol. And it was his intention basically to close them down, to take their buildings away, to move them into uncomfortable and bad spaces, to literally a kind of Machiavellian war against the very existence of this unambiguously successful school system. And it's not clear why, except that Andrew Cuomo is crazy and like operates on hatred and he decided he hated Bill de Blasio because Bill de Blasio was getting all this attention as being the next great New York politician and leader of the progressive movement or something. Whatever it was, Cuomo decided that he was going to go to war with de Blasio to save the Success Academies. And there were rallies and there were march from New York to Albany by Success Academy parents and students and by, led by Eva Moskowitz and all this. And after. And basically I remember having a conversation with her in 2014 when she said, we can't, I don't even. We're doing all this, but we can't win. We don't even know how we're going to win and where we're going to be in three years because he has all the power. And Cuomo, because of his absolutely iron determination to take de Blasio and stuff him into a garbage can, prevailed and kept Success Academy alive. I'm bringing this up only to say that I dislike, as you can hear, I think Andrew Cuomo is an unbalanced and unstable person. I think his management of COVID in New York was criminal. I think his behavior toward nursing homes and people in nursing homes was criminal. I, I don't think, I do think that his ouster on sexual misconduct charges was, was a placeholder for other stuff, his enemies. Finally, I don't think that was just or legitimate. But he was ousted because he had flown too. He had flown too far and was burned by the sun because he had, of course, become this, you know, signature figure of anti Trump resistance state level. And yet I'm not a Democratic voter. I'm not a voter in the primary and I don't endorse. But this city would be crazy not to vote for Andrew Cuomo for mayor and in the Democratic primary on this ground alone, which is that he saved the Success Academy charter schools.

[Robert Pondiscio]

Yes and no. Let me temper your enthusiasm a little bit.

[John Podhoretz]

Oh, great. Okay, good. Because I think positive about Andrew Cuomo. Go ahead.

[Robert Pondiscio]

Well, okay. It's, it's, it's a more complicated, slightly more complicated tale Than that. And, and it's, and this was on Cuomo's watch. New York State has operated under a charter school cap for about a decade now.

[John Podhoretz]

Explain what that means.

[Robert Pondiscio]

A cap meaning there's, there's, there's only so many schools that, that are allowed or too many charters that can be issued. So there's about.

[John Podhoretz]

Okay, we should, we should explain really quickly.

[Robert Pondiscio]

Sure.

[John Podhoretz]

That a charter school is a public school, funded as a public school is, but has a governing document called a charter that allows it to vary itself in curriculum and practices and standards from the centralized rules governing all other schools in the state. Would that be the right way to describe it?

[Robert Pondiscio]

Basically, the publicly funded, privately run is the way to think of a charter school. So they are public schools that you don't have to apply. They admit by lottery, et cetera. So they're public schools. But there's been a hard cap on the number of charter schools that are allowed in New York City for about a decade now, and I think the sun will go out, frankly, before that cap is ever lifted. And what's damnable, frankly, about that is, as we were discussing a few moments ago, all they do is produce results for kids even in their diminished state. Now they are still, for the most part, better than the alternative. So if you were a good progressive, if you really cared about, you know, the fortunes academically, economically of low income kids of color, you would look at this very successful model and say, we need more of those. But, but of course, in New York State, that, that's just not what's happening. And, and Cuomo bears some responsibility for that.

[John Podhoretz]

Fair enough. But he did save the success Academy is what I'm saying.

[Robert Pondiscio]

It was more about sticking his thumb in de Blasio's eye than, than, than doing a solid for Eva Moskowitz.

[John Podhoretz]

Right? But the world of people who would say expecting a black kid to perform in a conventionally academic way, in getting good grades in, you know, coming to school on time, in sitting still in the classroom, in accepting disciplinary action, should they step out of bounds and all of that. That, that is a cultural expectation that is wrong and evil and unfair. That's. That is this guy, Zoran Mutami, like, he is a, he is a perfect expostulant of the most radical opinion that you could have on almost any level. And, and so, but there, but there.

[Abe Greenwald]

Is this, this idea has, has become completely mainstream during COVID in particular. And again, this is another example. Example where a lot of us as, as a public school parent myself, I only became aware of this during COVID but it was going on all along. I only became aware of it. I make my kids go to school every morning. I make sure they're there and when they were K through 12 students. But a lot of parents don't and a lot of kids don't show up for school. And the, the absolute cratering of attendance in public schools in this country, nationwide, but in, in particular for, for kids who are from low income backgrounds, is astonishing. But what the system has done, instead of taking the charter school model of let's hold ourselves and these students more accountable, is to say attendance doesn't matter and they're just graduating these. I mean, it just makes me so concerned for the kids because they've missed months of instruction.

[Robert Pondiscio]

Can I use Abe's line now and say it's worse than that? Because it really is. Okay, it's worse than that. It is not hard to cast your eye over K12 education in this country and just see wreckage. Part of it, Christine, is what you just said about what we call chronic absenteeism. Look, it was an issue before COVID Covid kind of put it on steroids. And now you see increasingly, I think, hundreds of school districts functionally leaning into it and saying, you know what? We're going to go to a four day school week, make a virtue of it in a sense. You know, there was this story out of San Francisco yesterday that they're going to have so called equity grading and they're not to hold kids responsible anymore for attendance, for turning in assignments on time, et cetera, et cetera. In New York, there was a move some years ago to take away. This sounds cartoonish. I promise you it's true. We eliminated the teacher literacy test in New York state because too many teachers of color were failing it. So the answer, oh, the test must be racist. You literally no longer have to demonstrate literacy to be a schoolteacher in New York. Grade inflation, lenient grading policies, the removal of honors programs, test optional, on and on and on. It is not hard to paint a picture of frankly just giving up and just lowering standards everywhere.

[Christine Rosen]

But it's not as if we don't see the results of this. I mean, we know what's happening with test scores and with literacy rates and what kids are actually not learning now.

[Robert Pondiscio]

Harvard has remedial math. Harvard, yeah.

[John Podhoretz]

The number one university in the world has remedial math.

[Robert Pondiscio]

Incredible.

[John Podhoretz]

I mean, so we have this perfect storm, right? We have this ideological assault on standards that began, really began 30, 40 years ago. I mean, competition is Bad for kids. Grading is bad for kids. Progressive education in the United States involves at very high levels, you know, fancy schools that had wildly inflated reputations, like the private school St. Anne's in Brooklyn that did not grade but wrote five page reports on the kids and were rewarded for this not grading system by becoming extremely desirable to admissions officers at the Ivies and highly ranked schools. So no standards, no grading. Then we, you know, evaluation itself is bad for kids self esteem. So you want to talk about what's good about them and not give them direction on how to improve all of that. This is going on in the 80s, 90s, 2000s. And then you have the war on standardized testing, right? Education reform was dependent in the no Child Left behind era on the notion that we needed to have nationwide testing in order to order to know how we were doing and change course and where the, where testing was good in states or in localities, you would get a lesson on why that was better than other places and what they were doing that was working. And therefore you might be able to adopt that model. Right now we have a weird situation in which America's poorest and least educationally effective state for the last 75 years, Mississippi seems to be undergoing some kind of a reading miracle. They have wildly overhauled the system of teaching kids how to read and they are showing astounding results. And so that's the laboratory of education that our federal system can, can provide well. So no Child Left behind came crosswise both of leftist opinion and rightist opinion for complicated reasons. So testing was under assault. In the last 10 years, colleges have increasingly said they don't want to use SAT scores or ACT scores to evaluate kids because they provide an independent measure of, you know, sort of like a competitive independent measure. And therefore their holistic efforts to get the student kind of student body that they want is impacted adversely. And so kids are going through school, being passed out without being able to read or write effectively or at all. And then they're actually getting into the university system, including at Harvard, where they have to learn how to do division long hands. What is remedial math when you're 18 years old? I don't even know and I need it.

[Abe Greenwald]

Okay, we on the podcast should not just judge the new math.

[John Podhoretz]

I am not, I am not denying myself in this. Yes, this is like getting revaccinated when you're 50 for measles because the vaccine wears off. Whatever math I had is long gone and I could use remedial math, but I, that, that's not, I didn't just come to college after having had 12 years of schooling in math. So there has been this war on standards, war on expectations. And then the question is, well, if you're worrying that how do you pick, pick who gets elevated, who's, who's considered good or worthy or should be in these elite institutions. And that's where we get to the politicization of the admissions process.

[Robert Pondiscio]

The fig leaf of respectability about this is the idea that, you know, this is not a war on standards, it's a war on meritocracy, you know, which is a phony notion. So we're going to dismantle meritocracy. Great. Who's going to dismantle privilege? I mean, I say this all the time. You know, what replaces meritocracy is not equity, as we like to say, it's aristocracy. Okay? It's oligarchy. Privilege finds a way. If you're one of those people, I'm not one of them who natters on all the time about dismantling privilege. Well, you can't. Right. So what is your strategy for dismantling privilege? New York Times op EDS and a Twitter hashtag campaign. High achieving parents, ambitious parents are going to find a way to game the system in their kids favor. That's what privilege actually is. So if you take that opportunity away from the strivers, as it were, well then you're taking them off the chessboard, so to speak, and you're disadvantaging them. And then the folks you are condemning as privilege are still going to find a way. You know, it will be aristocracy, it will be oligarchy, it will not be equity.

[John Podhoretz]

Abe, 10 years ago you and I embarked on a project for commentary. And this, this also gets to New York City schooling because there was an effort there. There are eight New York City schools that are high schools that are famously high performing. And the only way that you can get into them is by taking a New York City standardized test called the shsat. And this test is evaluated every year. Tens of thousands of kids, if not more, take the test and they are measured against each other. And the highest performing ones get into these eight high performing schools. And this has been a bugbear for the progressives who want to kill the SHSAT and this merit based system on the grounds that the numbers of admissions, particularly of African American kids, are shockingly low. I mean there are, I don't know, 50,000 slots or something like that, and 800 African American kids get them. And at like the most prestigious one, like Stuyvesant, in a class of 800, there may be eight African Americans. So the results are so awful and so humiliating that people want to kill the test. So I said to Abe, we need to do a P. And who. And who gets these slots are first generation Asian American kids living in Flushing who work their asses off and their parents make them work in their dry cleaner and they have to do well in school, and they go to Chinese school after school, and they have no life and they're, you know, working their heads off in order to improve themselves and have a better second generation to have a. Have a better life than their parents had, which is why their parents came to America. So I said, abe, we need to do a piece on the war and meritocracy. And you came back a month later and said, that's not the piece we want to do. Do you want to remember why? Yeah, because meritocracy doesn't mean what I thought it meant. According as you studied it and sort of what Robert is mentioning, which is, you know, we need a meritocratic system, but do we?

[Christine Rosen]

Well, the meritocracy was churning, Was churning out a sort of human product that we sort of now see flourishing everywhere. They were creating the, you know, the sort of woke army of that or worse, that has overrun higher education entirely, you know.

[John Podhoretz]

Right. So in other words, you came back and said, I don't want to praise meritocracy. Meritocracy has now become the kind of conveyor belt or the right.

[Abe Greenwald]

Well, the aristocracy learned how to game meritocracy.

[Christine Rosen]

Absolutely.

[John Podhoretz]

Absolutely right. How to produce the liberal elite. And we want to smash the liberal elite. And so instead you did a piece called the War on Asian Americans, which was about this very specific effort, which turned out, of course, to be prophetic because it then became the subject of the groundbreaking lawsuit1 in the Supreme Court in 2023 that destroyed affirmative action, or theoretically at least said that affirmative action in these institutions was unconstitutional.

[Christine Rosen]

Yeah, there was an effort to reduce the number of Asian Americans in elite schools. Very, very similar to the previous effort to attack on Jews in higher ed.

[John Podhoretz]

Yeah, right.

[Robert Pondiscio]

John, can I make a point about the vaunted SHSAT and Stuyvesant and Bronx science back to the equity point. If the goal of wanting to see more black and brown kids in those schools is to give them a leg up into elite colleges and whatnot, you know, who's sending boxcar numbers of black and brown kids to elite universities across this country? Charter schools. New York City charter schools. So in other words, if you look at not just those specialized high schools, but the New York City ecosystem, education ecosystem as a whole, again, those numbers are a lot better than they were a generation ago because people like to look and say, oh, well, look, these specialized schools are no better now than they were a decade ago. Yeah. But a lot of those families are choosing charter schools and their kids are getting into college from them.

[John Podhoretz]

Right.

[Abe Greenwald]

There's also the underlying sensibility here is very much the elite will be fine. And as Robert said earlier, the elite will always be fine. They'll always find a way. They have the resources and the ambition to find a way for their children. And they're continuing to do that, by the way, at lots of. My son was the last. His class, when he entered as a freshman, was the last admissions only public high school cohort that had to take a version of a standardized test. They killed it after Covid, and then they never brought it back, despite parents demanding it, wanting it back. The administration said, no, no, no, it's unfair. It's not meritocratic. So. But I do think that the conceit of the, of the liberal elite in thinking that it shouldn't be, first of all, the soft bigotry of low expectations involved in a lot, much of what we've been discussing. But this idea that by having no standards, you're going to give new opportunities to people who are already struggling in a socioeconomic context is appalling. I mean, these kids are just allowed to basically languish in terrible public schools with bad teachers who don't seem to really care about their education. And I refuse to get on my soapbox again about teachers unions because. But I'm curious, Robert, where do you see any, any role here to reform the unions who play obviously a big role in negotiating policies that during COVID became clear to parents. But curricular wise and testing wise has been a big problem.

[Robert Pondiscio]

Yeah, that's complicated. Funny, I just wrote a piece for my substack directed at Randy Weingarten, the head of the aft, because I'd been at a, at a conference where we were talking about, you know, about teaching and learning and noting that a lot of the speakers were saying things that I'd read in the AFT's, you know, House, Oregon, the American educator going back 20 years. And that's my critique, Christine, of the unions. I don't begrudge them for acting like a labor union. That's their job. But I do begrudge them for not doing, not doing their part to raise the Bar for teaching and learning. I mean, the intellectual capital to give them credit is there going back to, you know, the Al Shanker days. But I've seen no evidence that Randi Weingarten and her colleagues are interested in doing anything other than publishing this nice little quarterly magazine that nobody reads. Frankly, that is a treasure trove of stuff for teachers. Why aren't they talking about that? Randy Weingarten is going to Ukraine, for Pete's sake. But she's not talking about improving teaching and learning in the schools that her union members are languishing in.

[Abe Greenwald]

Yeah, she's become a political activist. I mean, they still give so much money, the Democratic Party party, every year. I mean, it's astonishing amount of money.

[Robert Pondiscio]

There's no reason she can't do both. She took exception to it. She wrote back a public, you know, criticism of my piece, But I think, frankly, my critique still stands. Again, I don't begrudge them for acting like labor, but nothing's going to improve in public schools that they do not use their bully pulpit, so to speak, to. To. To. To improve their members practice.

[John Podhoretz]

What we can say, I think after four decades of experimentation in the charter schooling, starting out with vouchers and various other things, was that there was this powerful idea that the only way to improve American education, as we discovered, you know, with the. With the discovery or the unearthing of the crisis in American education from the A Nation at risk report in 1983 issued by the Department of Education, that showed that America was slipping in its. Was. Was falling far behind other countries in our educational achievements, which is what began the educational reform movement and basically made education a gigantic national issue that it has been for four decades since, was the reason to have charter schooling after vouchers. That was the idea that you could give people their own tax dollars and let them use them wherever they could. If they wanted to go to a parochial school or to a private school that did not pass either legal or political muster. So most places it did now. Well, it's starting now, but like, that's literally 40 years later. But the original idea was vouchers. The original idea was because you thought you could harness the power of the Catholic Church and the parochial school system when the Catholic Church was an incredibly powerful political force in the United States States, vouchers didn't work. So then the idea was, what do you do? And the I. That the notion was create competition inside this gigantic behemoth. Right. 4 million kids. No, it's not 4 million kids. It's 18 million, I got 75 million kids under the age of 18 are basically in this system. And it's not one system, it's 50 states, it's many localities. But nonetheless, the only way to improve their education is to create alternatives and have schools compete for the best students. And that has failed. When I say it's failed, I mean it has failed to change schooling in most places. Like we don't have a school system as it looked like was developing in Milwaukee in the early 1990s. You don't have a school system that says let a thousand flowers bloom. Every school should be whatever. And we're going to have these systems where if a principal doesn't up their performance, whatever. There are all sorts of it. Just the comp. The idea that you could create competition inside a public system paid for by taxpayers, in which the people who worked in it, the adults who worked in it, the teachers, the administrators, the janitors, whatever, have political power and the students in them who are languishing have none because they're under the age of 18 don't vote. And their parents have a lot of other things they need to care about. And it's also hard to say what it is that a vote will do to improve their school system. It was not a fair fight. You weren't going to the competition idea, brilliant though it is, and following the free markets principles didn't work because it's not a free market, you know.

[Robert Pondiscio]

Well, stay tuned, John, because the game is afoot, as they say. This is remarkable to me. I travel around the country talking about education in a lot of different places. And the conversation in red states and blue states now could not be more different. When I talk about so called ESAs, education savings accounts in places like Texas and Florida, people are all about it. I would guess that a lot of people who just heard me say that phrase are like, what's that? Well, it's functionally a voucher. Texas a couple of weeks ago became the latest and largest state to pass a so called esa, which basically lets parents opt out of the public school system and take the lion's share of the money with them to go buy themselves some education.

[John Podhoretz]

Their own tax dollars, in other words.

[Robert Pondiscio]

Basically, right? Yeah, that's right. And since Texas is the largest state ahead of Florida now, this is now in about a dozen or so states. We are literally at the point now, John, where about 50% of families in this country have the ability to do that. To just say, I'll take the money and I'll fend for Myself, this is going to be profoundly disruptive. So I agree with you that vouchers kind of, you know, had a bit of a false start 40 years ago. And ESAs are not exactly vouchers. You can use them in a lot of different ways. Functionally, they're for most families, they probably will be a voucher, at least until another ecosystem of alternative schools pops up to absorb these dollars. But this is going to be fascinating to watch over the next decade.

[John Podhoretz]

And by the way, you know, the more religious. I mean, there, there is a. There. One of the other cultural wars that takes place is there is a. You know, there are small cohorts. And the one that I think of most readily because of my own experience is very Orthodox Jews who do not participate in the public school system and go to yeshivot. And they are often paying. They're poor. A lot of them are poor. Schools are cheap, cost four or $5,000 a year in tuition the way Catholic schools used to. And what happened to the yeshivot in terms of their interfacing with the elites in the United. Particularly in New York State, is, is the state education department, in tandem and in, I would say, collusion with the New York Times and its education reporter went on an ideological war against. Against the yeshivas, saying that they were not providing the proper education in secular subjects to Jewish students who attended these schools, every one of whom were they forced out of yeshiva into a local public school would doubtless be much worse off and with a much worse education, even if you could say that these yeshiva educations weren't that good or, you know, didn't weren't teaching math that well or teaching math at all. As opposed to what? As opposed to the school, the schools in there, you know, in, in, in. In Borough park, the public schools in Borough park that teach math so brilliantly. So not only do you have examples of people saying, you know what? I can't even do that. I'm just going to go off on my own. I have no money. But, you know, this is. What's important to me is education more than anything else. And my kids need to learn Torah and Talmud and how to be a Jew, and they're going to at least learn that. And then the elite come after them, try to try to disaccredit or remove the accreditation of these schools and deny them their tax status. And the New York Times is doing report after report about how terrible they are and how unfair they are to their students. And where are the reports every day in the New York Times about how terrible the New York City public schools are every single day. So in 2000.2 kids in the New York City public schools, 90% of whom do not perform at grade level.

[Robert Pondiscio]

To bring this full circle, I mentioned that I left the publishing industry to go teach in the public school system. So in 2002 I started teaching fifth grade at P.S. 277 in the South Bronx. It was in district seven in the South Bronx. So in 2002 that school was. District seven was the lowest scoring district in New York City and the school that I taught in was the lowest scoring school in that district. It's now 2025 and that school is still the lowest performing school in New York City's lowest performing district. I remember that Time series and it infuriated me because there are schools, not just in New York City, across this country, urban schools where literally not a single kid can read or do math on grade level. And the Times and remember they published it, I think, both in English and in Hebrew for the benefit of the Pulitzer Committee. For them to take this on was just galling.

[John Podhoretz]

I'm going to make a recommendation now just because it's so apposite. One of my favorite books, which I read reread a couple of years ago, a remarkable and very singular American literary achievement called up the Down Staircase, which is about not young Robert Pundisio going into a low performing public school, but a young 22 year old female graduate of Smith or Sarah Lawrence or something like that who goes to teach in a school either in. In Spanish Harlem. Published in 1961 by a writer named Bell Kaufman, who happened to be the daughter or granddaughter of Sholem Aleichem. It is an account of a year at this public school and it is written entirely in the form of memos and private letters from our. Our protagonist to her friend about what she's going through. But memos, reports, It's. It's not. And, and what this is a full blooded portrait when New York was still considered a masterly public school system. 1961 of bureaucratic dysfunction, bureaucratic rot. And. And how the system itself makes it almost impossible for an idealistic young person wanting to teach people and make them into good citizens and improve their lives. How the system takes them and tries to chew them out. Chew them up and spit them out. Out. It's an extraordinary book. There's a pretty good movie made out of it with Sandy Dennis. Not great, but good. But the book, as I say, is very singular. There's almost nothing like it that I can think of in its narrative structure. And this telling of the story basically is the story of the bureaucracy and it's, and it's war on this one young woman. But it is, it is even though it is 63 or 64 years old, it remains the single best novel that I'm aware of about American, American sort of secondary education. I can't even think of another one that, that, that is, that is comparable. Most such books are about, most such famous books are about private schools or you know, boarding schools or stuff like that. So that is up the Down Staircase by Bell Kaufman. You can get it on Kindle or Apple Books or something like that. And it is, it is pretty extraordinary. Anyway, Robert Pundisi, it was great to have you. First time, first time appearance and very thought provoking and topic we don't ordinarily talk enough about. And so thank you so much for your contribution. Go to commentary.org and read Robert's piece How Wokeness Destroyed An Education Miracle. We will be back tomorrow. So for Abe and Christine, I'm John Pot Horiz. Keep the candle burning.