Loading summary
Transcript43 lines
- [00:01]
A
We have to be broader in education so that kids have engagement, have agency, can critically think, which means not only do you teach the basics, there are three branches of government, but you teach the context of it, you teach the struggle around it, you teach what it means.
- [00:21]
B
And now the good fight with Jasia Monk. What is the role of public schools, of public education in a functional democracy? Why are public schools under attack from parts of a political spectrum at the moment? And are schools actually doing a good job of educating young Americans? Are public school unions perhaps in part to blame for why many schools in the United States remained closed at the end of the COVID pandemic for far longer than schools in other countries around the world? Well, it would be hard to speak to somebody more interesting on these topics than Randy Weingarten. Randy has for 17 years been and remains the president of the American Federation of Teachers, aft one of the biggest unions of public school teachers and other educational professionals in the United States. And she has a new book out called why Fascists Fear Teachers, Public Education and the Future of Democracy. We talked about the purpose of of public education. We also talked about why it is that many schools in big cities around the United States are not managing to get their students to grade level in reading and writing and math and what can be done about that. And we talked in the part of a conversation reserved for paying subscribers about whether teachers unions carry part of the blame for those prolonged school closures that had really adverse effects on the achievement of students. This was a really spirited and I have to say, a really fun conversation. I hope that you listen to all of it and you can do so by becoming a paying subscriber by going to yashamonk substech. And becoming a paying subscriber. Randy Weingarten, welcome to podcast.
- [02:58]
A
I'm just so honored and humbled to be in your presence, Yasha.
- [03:04]
B
That is far too kind. You know, I was thinking as I was preparing for this conversation about some of the statements that the framers of the Constitution made about the importance of the phrase we often use was the diffusion of knowledge and obviously the role that public institutions should play in that. Going back to the founding of the United States, what is the role that public education was supposed to play for educating citizens?
- [03:28]
A
So it's interesting if you look at the Constitution, there is not a direct absolute right to public education in the United States Constitution. And in fact, what has happened is that every single state does actually create that right. I mean, that right was created by the supreme court in Brown vs Board of Education as well. But it was every single state created a public education system and created universal public education ultimately, over the course of the decades and generations. But in listening to the framers and the founders or in reading their writings, you see just how important education was to them as a bulwark against tyranny and against dictatorship. They understood that without education, there was the ability to repeat tyranny. To repeat having a tyrant again was too great. So they pushed, whether it was Franklin or whether it was Washington or whether it was Madison or whether it was Jefferson, you see in their writings a real push for education, a real push for critical thinking and a real understanding. They wouldn't have used the word fascist at that point. They would have used the word tyrant or king or dictator. A real understanding that knowledge was the antidote and critical thinking was the antidote to tyranny.
- [05:04]
B
I think it's right, and it's interesting to think about the role that they thought that well educated citizens would play in defense of a political system. I don't want to understate the extent of political division, political polarization, the early American Republic, not just between the white majority and black Americans who are completely excluded from the political system, but also between the founders that quickly were at odds with each other, that formed political factions and started to do political battle with each other. But at the time, I think. I think it wouldn't have been controversial to say that part of the purpose of the forms of public education that was slowly being spread through the late 18th and then the 19th century was to give citizens civic virtues, an appreciation of the Constitution, appreciation of the fundamental values of that young state today. I think it's interesting because that is historically one of the roles that schools were supposed to play at their founding. But we are now so divided about many basic political values that any teaching about politics and about civics can start to feel divisive. So what do you think the role of public schools should be today in that respect? Is it just to give citizens the basics of reading and writing and so on so that they can go and have affluent lives? And hopefully that is one way to sustaining the American republic? You know, what role should civics and an induction into those civic values play in public education? And how do we do that at a time when we have such fundamental divisions about virtually every aspect of our system of government?
- [06:35]
A
So do we have about five hours?
- [06:39]
B
We go pretty long on this podcast, but not quite to five hours.
- [06:44]
A
So let me see if I can unpack what is basically the question every single day that those of us involved in education, particularly in civics education, ask ourselves. So I start, I start as a lawyer, but then I became ap, an advanced placement gov teacher as well as a teacher of 11th and 12th grade regents in New York State, which were basically American history. So that's kind of my academic area separate and apart from law. So first, the first purpose of education was civic engagement was because if you don't have an educated electorate, how does the electorate make decisions about who to vote for? It wasn't cast as I'm on Team A, you're on Team B. You just presumably are going to vote for Team B because you're on Team B and I'm on Team A. CAT There was a sense in the country of those early, of those founders. And you're completely right. There's, there's, you know, we can't, the founders had their fair share of problems and it's, you know, I, I often like saying about our country, it's, you know, the founders as amended, because the United States has, until the Trump era or the MAGA era, I would say the United States over the course of modernity. So from the World War II to Maga, the arc of the moral universe did actually bend towards justice. We saw growing freedom and a sense that more freedom and more opportunity and thinking about the all, not the sum, was a good civic virtue. And so, you know, you saw that in the civil rights laws, you saw that in suffragists getting the vote. And it's not that it was without struggle, but that was the story of democracy and of patriotism in America. So that has changed some with a sense of some people in America saying, I'd like to go back to a different time, a different era, an era that seemed more golden even though it was far less embracive and inclusive. I say this because that's the civic value that until the MAGA era, Republicans and Democrats all agree to, there was a sense of America. I mean, whether you looked at George W. Bush, looked at the Bushes, whether you looked at Reagan, whether you looked at Johnson in modernity until Project 2025, you essentially saw that as where both political parties were. They may have disagreed about what freedom was, but they believe that there should be greater and greater and greater freedom. We're in a different situation now right now because of what's happened with the overturning of Roe vs Wade. We're in a different situation because of the challenge to marriage equality. We're in a different situation because of the erasure of human rights. So it's going to be hard to actually answer that question today about what we should.
- [10:43]
B
What.
- [10:44]
A
What we can or can't be doing. That's part of what. Why I wrote this book, because I wanted to expose this fracture, but I also wanted to expose it as, in my judgment, the fascistic elements. It is. I wanted. And so to answer your question directly after saying that's where the founders were, if you looked at American curriculum throughout the country still today, still Today in the 50 states and territories, because curriculum in the United States is not done by the national government. It's done by state governments and local school boards, you would still see a tremendous applause to what the founders and framers did in the Constitution and a tremendous applause to the rule of law, the separation of powers, the three branches of government, and federalism. You would still see that. The problem is. What you don't see is that this is so thin that people don't actually really understand what it means. And so that's in some ways part of the fight right now in the federal system. What's Congress's role? What's the president's role? What's the judiciary role? So I would say that what if you ask a schoolteacher, a schoolteacher is gonna say, yes, we have to teach civics. Yes, it doesn't matter whether there is this divisiveness here. In fact, civics education and critical thinking will actually help us deal with this divisiveness. And if we could actually create a safe and welcoming environment where people feel like they can ask questions, where there can be context, that we should really be doing this. And the real dividing line is that fascistic behavior, because I don't call anybody a fascist in the book for what I hope is very obvious reasons. I didn't want to get into. No, he isn't. Yes, he is. No, he isn't. That wasn't my purpose in writing the book. My purpose is in people seeing what fascistic behavior is. Fascistic behavior is an us versus them. Fascistic behavior is basically saying, no, don't teach anything but math and science. Don't teach anything but English. We have to be broader in education so that kids have engagement, have agency, can critically think, which means not only do you teach the basics, there are three branches of government, but you teach the context of it. You teach the struggle around it. You teach what it means.
- [13:29]
B
So I agree with much of what you said. Let's focus on civics first and then have a slightly broader question on the civics question. It seems to me, that at the high school level, but also at the university level, there are kind of three challenges to teaching civics. Well, the first comes from the right and has to do with not wanting to confront some of the injustices in American history, some of the imperfections of America today, in an honest and straightforward way. And I think that's certainly one part of it. The second simply comes from competition from other things, right, from we should all just be focusing on allowing people to make good money. And you have that at the university level as well. At Johns Hopkins University, my university president wants all undergraduates to have to do a democracy requirement where they take some course during the undergraduate time that deals with major questions of a democratic system in a major way. And many faculty members oppose that because they don't see the importance of that and they feel like whatever other reasons. I would first say that there is also a third concern I have, which is that often what civics is taught is taught in a predominantly negative way from the left, where what you primarily learn about the Founding Fathers is that they were flawed people who were slaveholders and who didn't live up to the moral imperatives of the time. That you don't learn about the ways in which democracies like the United States, despite being imperfect, are in many ways superior to countries that lack the liberties that we take for granted. You learn how to go and protest against things that you dislike, which is obviously an important part of our political system, which is obviously one of the things you should learn about. But if you skip the part we learn about the logic of our political system, what democracy actually means, what it has historically achieved, and you go straight to this is all unjust, and here's how to protest, that actually feels like a significant mistake as well. And so I sometimes feel that either there's sort of no real civics, or there can be a civics that itself has a predominantly negative frame. And again, this is at university level. In fact, for example, that until very recently, Harvard University didn't have any course on the American Revolution because nobody seemed to think that that's something to celebrate and teach about. But I also, and I have to say as a preamble to the whole conversation, that I didn't go to high school. I did go to public school, but in Germany rather than the United States, I did not go to public school in the United States. So it's hard for me to gauge exactly how something is taught. And obviously there's huge differences in how things are going to be taught in Oakland. California or in the Upper west side of Manhattan versus in Topeko, Kansas. But I'd say that there's that concern about how civics is taught in schools as well. I wonder what you make of that.
- [16:09]
A
So, you know, again, you're. I mean, I don't. I'm not intending this as a way to just say, oh, my God, these are fantastic questions, and let me figure out, you know, how many hours I have to parse it out. I think all three of your analyses are right. I think they're all, all three are problematic. And, you know, I. I will often get criticized by the left. As I get criticized, I get more criticized by the right. The right attempts to completely undermine and. And eviscerate public education. But I do think that there is a. The way in which the left too easily criticizes all of our institutions has actually created distrust in those institutions. Every institution that we have in the United States, frankly, in the world, every institution is flawed. Every institution can be better. But when you spend the time being so critical of it and hoping that your impatience for making it better is heard more than the value of the institution, that's a problem. And so I want to take, I think, off. I think all three things happen in terms of education in America. Let me just say that in the number two issue, though, which was in K12, let's talk about it, as opposed to talking about it in a higher ed context, and the business school not wanting any liberal arts courses. What we saw in the analog in K12 from the year 2000 on was what was called no Child Left Behind. The issues that mattered were English and math, and in fact, English and math. And then science squeezed out civics because the way you teach civics, if you don't teach with context, if you only teach with memorization, most kids are going to be bored as shit. Excuse my language. Because it's like, why do I have to learn this? And how many times did I hear in like, 2008 or nine, a disappointment on Barack Obama because the sanitation trucks were not timely in picking up garbage, where somebody would say, well, Barack Obama didn't pick up the what? That's not his job. That's a municipal job. But the fact that people said, and you heard it a lot. I voted for change. I voted for Obama. The change didn't happen fast enough. I'm disappointed. I'm opting out. That, to me, is a failure of
- [19:34]
B
civics because people didn't understand that the sanitation truck in the neighborhood is not run by the White House. Obviously.
- [19:40]
A
Exactly.
- [19:41]
B
Help give me some context, both as somebody who myself were arrived in the United States around 2007, and to some of the international listeners of a podcast about this debate about no Child Left Behind. It's a policy that was introduced by the George W. Bush administration, and so far as I can tell, its ostensible purpose was very laudable. Right. It was saying that in many schools, there's a significant share of children that don't learn to read and write very well, that are failing at basic math. And we want to make sure that we're not leaving those children behind, that we're not giving up on them, that we create the mechanisms of testing and accountability to make sure that we prioritize those skills. And as somebody who, as the beginning of this conversation attests, deeply believes in the importance of civics. I also believe that if you can't read and write and you can't do math, you know it's going to be hard to be actively involved in our politics and to be a good citizen and so on. Right. So it seems logical to say that is the first thing. So explain sort of what you thought perhaps was right in that policy and where it fell short and why you see it critically.
- [20:45]
A
So you need to take actually this. And that's why I talk about Johnson in my book. You need to take a step, one step back to the 1950s, which is when America really, through Brown versus Bordeaux casein and then several other Supreme Court decisions, really created profoundly the right to an equal and adequate education for children, all children in the United States. The way in which Johnson did it, through the civil rights laws, was to match civil right to equal opportunity, education opportunity with resources. And what you saw in America at that point was a huge increase in test scores and increase in the number of kids actually getting more and more education. All of a sudden, kids were out of the shadows, kids with disabilities, black and brown kids. And Johnson talked about, and I use this story in the book, about how he taught in Texas, where kids would walk into schools without shoes, where how he, like so many other teachers in K12, took money out of their pockets to actually feed kids and help kids. You started seeing a plateauing out in the 90s. Clinton had some very good ideas in terms of title one, which was the poverty program. But what then happened was an impatience that there was still a gap between white kids and black and brown kids. It's not just a standards movement about what kids should know and be able to do to be on a trajectory towards college. There was a sense that we had to create accountability. That sense was a shared sense. The issue became not as much no Child Left behind, but the way in which no Child Left behind got implemented. Because there was a sense that. And that gets to your question. There was a sense that we, of course, have to have accountability for English and math. But we move from the federal government actually thinking about civil rights writ large and looking at all of the societal issues, including resources, to schools, to simply looking at math and English as if the teachers alone were the ones who could overcome all of societal issues to make sure that every single child did really well on math and English tests. And what ended up happening in so many schools over so many years is that everything else got dispensed with. So you would have double and triple periods of English, you'd have tutorials, you'd have all of that, as opposed to understanding how kids really learn and what they need around them to do that.
- [24:08]
B
What would the. The right mechanism for accountability look like? Right. I mean, look, I'm a university professor. I think that the majority of tenured colleagues I have work very, very hard, but there's some who don't. Now, I think that's a problem, but it's a problem that is not the end of the world. Because if people publish a few fewer articles in political science, frankly, the world will go on. In the case of teachers, it's a bigger problem. Right. Because even if most teachers who have tenure and who have security of a job are working very hard for the kids, very good job, if there's some teachers who don't, and those teachers teach a good number of kids, then those kids are obviously being failed in a way that's really problematic. Right. So I'm not jumping to questions about job protection, but I'm just trying to understand sort of what is it that this legislation was trying to do, and what do you think is the right way of trying to do it? How can we make sure that kids are served, but also that teachers have some element of evaluation on the job performance so that they have the incentive to keep going? And undoubtedly, you know, humans are humans, many humans are driven by their duty and driven by the reasons that got them into the profession. They're going to do a good job regardless. There's always going to be a subsection of humans who are very responsive to those kind of incentives. And so how do we make sure that if a teacher isn't living up to the job, that kids are making doing much less well than other teachers at the same School at reading and writing and doing math, that we address that problem.
- [25:33]
A
Okay, but those are two separate issues. Meaning what you're essentially saying is that test scores of children are a really good indication of a teacher's performance and it's completely not. What we've seen is that that's completely not true. That's different than if you want to figure out what. So let me unpack that. Number one, teachers should be evaluated and somebody can't teach, they shouldn't be in teaching. And frankly, what tenure should be in K12 is really different than what tenure is in higher education. Frankly, we represent more higher ed personnel in America than any other union. And you basically have three quarters of higher ed being taught by adjunct and contingent workers, not by tenured professors. The issue of tenure is not. Is there should be due process, we should make sure that people can teach. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the fact that what would happen in a school district is school district A would get on. State scores would be in the middle of the pack. Like a district like Scarsdale, which has basically fairly affluent parents, would be at the head of the pack. A district like New York City, which doesn't have affluent parents or has them in pockets, would be in the middle or below the pack. And then what would end up happening is they would say, oh, look at the test scores. The city schools are not doing well. And then what New York City would do is say, okay, we'll have two or three periods a day of English for kids who are not doing very well, as opposed to what do these kids need to know and be able to do? What engages them? How do we make sure kids have glasses so that they can see the board? How do we make sure that they're fed well so that they feel okay? How do you wrap services around? Because what ends up happening is, is we were being measured by the same set of exams for every kid, regardless of those kids social economic status. And what ended up happening is because the test scores became the be all and the end all. That's what squeezed out things like extracurricular activities that kids come to school for. That's what squeezed out things like social studies because it wasn't on the test. And what teachers would start saying, really good teachers wouldn't go to low income schools because they didn't want to be assessed on. I mean, it became almost the opposite of what you wanted. You want really good people to go to schools that have the kids that are the hardest to serve but if you're being evaluated on kids test scores, you're saying, what am I doing? How am I doing that? So it became. So all I'm saying is that the incentives didn't match what we were trying to do for kids. And that's part of the reason that everybody started hating testing because the test score became more important than the learning and the incentives were really off. So we have to have. All I was trying to do was answer your question of simply why was civics basically squeezed out of the curriculum?
- [29:14]
B
Right. And that's because of all of the testing, et cetera. No, no, of course. I mean, to get to the test, obviously. It seems absurd to me that a teach in a low income community who is an incredible teacher who manages to pull the students up, whose students are perhaps much better than the students in the next classroom along, who are, you know, from a very similar background who happen to have a less good teacher, somehow ends up, you know, evaluated less good than a mediocre teacher in a very, very good school with very, very affluent parents, et cetera. So that obviously makes sense.
- [29:43]
A
Yeah. Because what ended up happening was between the algorithms and between the way things were. I mean, this was all part of kind of like no child left behind 2.0, which was race to the Top, which was Obama's program, and President Obama, to his credit, it became test scores, rating teachers. Everybody in communities hated it, particularly parents of special needs kids. And the president at one point or another during his presidency, rolled a lot of it back and said that they were wrong because they tried to reduce what is a really, I mean, you know, look, you've written about this all the time. What is a really important human endeavor. They tried to reduce it to an algorithm and they tried to reduce it to a test score, and none of that worked. And in some ways I think that that's. But that was, again, to answer your question, that's why, to answer your question, we have to be able to, you know, we have to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. Yes, of course. We have to evaluate teachers. And if somebody can't do their job, they shouldn't be there.
- [30:55]
B
So how should they be evaluated? In what way do you think they should be validated? Because I take your point just as a kind of broader theoretical point that any metric is going to start misshaping an activity. Right. Whenever you're trying to measure the success of an activity, it is in some strange way going to make people try to maximize the metric rather than the thing that the metric is trying to measure, and there's always going to be some distance between those two things. So you have to have multiple measures. You have to have smart measures. But none of that is a reason not to have measures, right?
- [31:25]
A
No, no, no, no. And I'm not saying we shouldn't have measures. I'm saying that high stakes testing as the be all and the end all and reducing kids and teachers to an algorithm did work.
- [31:39]
B
So what measures should we be applying? Right. In schools where a lot of kids aren't reading and writing very well and are struggling with math, what kind of metrics should we be applying?
- [31:49]
A
Well, one of the things we should be doing is taking these out of the classroom.
- [31:53]
B
Smartphones for those of you listening.
- [31:54]
A
So there's a bunch of measures that the evaluation systems these days have a bunch of those measures in there. They have the supervisor assessment, they have some proxies for how kids are doing. So you have various different measures now in evaluation systems. I mean, the irony in terms of the American teacher workforce is we have a huge teacher shortage because we don't have the conditions in which teachers really can operate successfully. So you have a big teacher shortage across the United States. But the issue about teacher evaluation is no longer a dominant issue because people have learned how to have multiple measures that seem fair and reasonable in terms of, is a teacher doing the job the teacher should be doing? Is a teacher getting the conditions and the supports that the teacher should have? And so this is not today's question. Today's question in terms of teachers, are, do we have enough teachers? Are we paying them well enough? Do we have the conditions that they need to be able to thrive, including enough autonomy. I'm not talking about higher ed right now, but enough autonomy and freedom in a classroom so you can meet the needs of kids.
- [33:28]
B
There is also a question of school performance. Right? So again, I teach at John Hopkins. So in much of the public school system of Baltimore, there are schools where very few students are reading at grade level, are doing math at grade level, and a large portion of students are graduating functionally illiterate. You know, I have friends in New York, in Chicago and other cities who have very strong political commitment to the idea of sending the kids to public schools and really wanted to do so, who come from a middle class background. But, you know, they looked into their local schools and in one case, less than 10% of the kids in that school in New York were reading at grade level and doing math at grade level, and they decided, we can't send our kids To a school where the vast majority of students is so far behind. That's not fair to our kids.
- [34:19]
A
Look, I run the most effective charter school in the city of New York, and I ran the New York City Union for years. This year, student test scores went up eight or nine points in terms of English language literacy. In New York City, you have some fantastic schools. Most of the schools are good to fantastic. And you have some schools that are not so good. Frankly, what we're seeing in terms of New York City is that you need the resources for lowering class size, you need to wrap services around schools. And in those schools that do that, you have lots of people who send their kids to public schools. There are also lots of people who want to send their kids to private schools. And I whatever they want to do, that's all right with them or that's all right with me. But the point is that when you don't have the resources in a school to actually meet the needs of all kids, then you can't actually say and ask the teachers to be the ones who are doing everything. And in New York, in Philadelphia, in Chicago, in la, if you look at these big, in Miami Dade, you look at these big systems, you see continuous improvement. You saw it before COVID and now you're seeing it again. Does it mean that there's not problems? Of course there's problems. These are big cities with lots of different problems. But what happens is that the school environment in many of these places, parents are saying that their kids are in an environment where their kids can thrive. And it's the teachers who are trying to do this all the time. So what I've seen in many times is that right now, in the last two or three years, it's frankly extremists from the right wing who are constantly throwing obstacles at them, not letting them meet the needs of kids, book banning, all of these things, as opposed to providing the resources that actually kids need for continuous improvement. And I would actually also say I think there's something that we've all been missing in the last two or three years, which is the role of social media and which is the role of attention and is the role of cell phones and devices. Because at the end of the day, what's really going on is that schools should be focused not on test scores, but is a school a safe and welcoming environment for children and for families? And number two, are we creating an engaging and relevant curriculum so that kids feel that agency? So I think we should actually be measuring things really differently. I think we should be doing a lot more project based instruction and performance based instruction. Because the real key for kids across America, regardless of socioeconomic status is is are they involved and engaged in their education or are they checked out? And that in a post Covid era, I think is much more important in terms of what we need to do for kids. I think the test score issue unfortunately has been overrated and oversold in so many ways that I look at like a school in Baltimore that has wraparound services. Their test scores have gone up hugely because we're meeting the needs of all those kids, but we don't do that in every single school in Baltimore.
- [38:09]
B
What certainly seems true is that I think test scores are probably a very good indicator of whether things are roughly going right or roughly going wrong. I mean, if unless they're terribly designed, simple tests indicate that people are doing very well, then something must be going right at the school. And if these tests show that kids just are really falling behind, then clearly something is going wrong. Now what I agree with you is that if the response of that from a superintendent is let's cover all of this time for kids to do test runs of these tests, to do practice exams all of the time, that obviously is not going to fix the underlying problem, but that may be the kind of behavior it incentivizes. So I'm fully agreed on that. Since you mentioned the smartphones, I'd be intrigued to hear what you experience and the experience of the many teachers you represent has been with smartphones in schools and perhaps in the classroom. Obviously. Jonathan Haidt, friend of the podcast, has suggested that schools should ban those kind of phones on campus. Do you favor that solution? Do you think that that would make a big difference?
- [39:16]
A
I favor both of his major solutions that he's talked about, both the issue around play as well as the issue around devices. And I think what he, the, the point he has made recently, which is not in anxious generation, but it is, but it's more of his recent writings, is that what, what Instagram, what TikTok, what a bunch of these social media platforms has done. I focused a lot on the bullying and the kind of dystopian behavior and the making kids feel bad that Instagram did for girls for so long. But what Jonathan is focused on, and I think it's right, is the lack of attention and that what has happened is that there's just kids just opt out of being with each other, of seeing each other, of having this conversation. Look, you and I, we don't know each other. We've had an intense conversation for, you know, I don't know, several, you know, certainly may have been an hour already. But we're talking based upon facts we know, attitudes we know, we're applying facts. We're doing something which it would be my goal as a school teacher to be able to create an environment where every single kid in my classroom could do the same thing as you and I are doing. But it requires an attention to reading, it requires an attention to detail. It requires actually critically thinking and problem solving. And that lack of attention TikTok 30 seconds. If you don't or you opt out, the fact that you kids are reading less, the fact that America is reading less, all of this is really a problem. And he what his theory is, and I just heard him at a, he did a book club for the AFT a couple of weeks ago. His theory is if you look at all the test scores that have recently come out the top, a quarter are still doing pretty well and everybody else has slid back. He said that since 2010 when we've had the touch phones, that's when we've started seeing the slide back in terms of test scores. I find this both fascinating and terrifying because how do you then engage kids in relationships, in being with each other as human beings? How do you gauge the kids in critical thinking and problem solving? How do you do all this? What's the engagement philosophy? What's the theory? How can we use classrooms to do that? So I come up with two things. Number one is we have to do much more project based instruction like we do in career tech ed. And number two, we have to find a way to divorce the kids from their cell phones during school so that they can spend more time in the human endeavor as opposed to on their phones. And so that's why I agree with these distraction free schools. Not just distraction free classrooms, but distraction free schools.
- [42:50]
B
That makes a lot of sense to me. I mean, I think it's sometimes over tempting to explain everything by the rise of technology and by the rise of the Internet and social media. I found Jonathan's arguments to be very persuasive and he made them here on the podcast. But I was still holding judgment in reserve a little bit. I was very struck by some new data that came out about a month ago, according to which the personalities of young people had changed across America, according to which young people are less extrovert, less conscientious than older Americans, but also than younger Americans were 20 years ago. And that is really striking. I mean, if young Americans are rating Themselves as less capable to stand distraction, as less capable of carrying through on a plan, less capable of being punctual. You know, those are very basic life skills that they're going to need to succeed in the workplace or to have functional human relationships.
- [43:44]
A
But that's why I've become a really, really big believer. I keep on saying project based instruction as opposed to, you know, a lecture based environment where you're following every single bit of a curriculum. If I look at career tech ed coursework like and it's not just welding
- [44:05]
B
and career tech coursework is, for example, you're learning to be a welder, you're learning to be a car mechanic. Is it broadly speaking, this kind of thing? It's a technical phrase that I haven't come across that much.
- [44:15]
A
Yes. In one way it's working with both your hands and your head. But it's also the culinary traits, it's also the hospitality traits, it's also the health care trades. So I want to make it broader than what you think as you know, your grandfather's vocation. But what I've seen and look, I started my teaching was at Clara Barton High School for the Health Profession. So it was a traditional vocational school even though I taught AP Gov and I taught debate and all of that. But this is the difference, this is what I've seen and this is why I've become a big believer in project based instruction and experiential learning. And I think that becomes the antidote for what we need to do on this whole discussion that we've had. When you ask how do you evaluate, how do you teach, what do you do first? What we're seeing is that in these CareerTech Editions programs, 95% of kids graduate. 90 to 95% of kids graduate on time and 70% of them go to college. So there is an and they become a promising pathway and create far more choices for kids. We have to get rid of the stigma. But if you actually then put passion and purpose together, kids start thinking about their own possibilities. Because if you then marry what the study that you just saw with a new Wall Street Journal poll that says kids no longer think that they're going to do better than their parents. They're very pessimistic about the economy. So part of this is what do we do to kind of break this logjam instead of having a trajectory that is dystopian, that is divisive, that is nobody's, you know, that that's, that guy is doing better than me. So I'm Going to pull that guy down instead of pull me up. That kind of divisive, in some ways, theology that we have in America now, what if we could actually create a whole bunch of choices within public schooling, a whole bunch of different pathways within public schooling, a whole bunch of different partnerships with industry within public schooling so that kids have internships all over the place, so that kids have these kind of. It could be debate, you know, ap, you know, a government debate that you and I could have with kids. And, you know, you could do these kind of projects and programs, but finding a way that high school becomes like a real incubator of fun and ideas and critical thinking that leads to a whole bunch of avocations and occupations. And I think the German model, the German and Swiss model do it a lot better than the American model, because without tracking, they give kids a lot more opportunities. And I think we need to give kids more agency from a younger level. And I think that that would change the trajectory of what we're talking about.
- [47:30]
B
And attention is a battle. You want to take away the devices that distract them during the course of a school day, potentially, but you also need to give them something that is able to hold their attention. And so when they feel like they're engaged in a meaningful project that might
- [47:43]
A
be in many meaningful projects, you have to use devices, but it's not your personal device that you're addicted to in talking to TikTok or Instagram or texting with your friends.
- [47:57]
B
That's a good point. But it doesn't have to be against digital devices. Probably if you're learning all of these skills and crafts, whether it's more traditional kind of manufacturing ones or hospitality, you're going to be using electric devices in those contexts, too. But it's not scrolling TikTok under the desk while your teacher is trying to teach you math. One of the key arguments of your book is that I have a disagreement about the term fascist and fascistic, but I think that's not really worth going into in detail for this conversation, but that people who have demagogic or authoritarian ambitions fear schoolteachers and that they want to undermine public schools for that reason. And I find that argument to be very plausible. I find it plausible in general that the Trump administration has chosen to take the battle and the fight to institutions that they consider to be hostile to their ideological views or simply to their electoral interests, whether that is universities, whether that is public health authorities or many other institutions we could list. So I'm on your side on that point. I also worry in general that many of us are tempted to dig in our heels at the moment and to simply say, you know, these are outrageous attacks and therefore we're not going to be looking at our own flaws. I think that higher education has serious problems in the United States both in terms of what is taught and how it's taught sometimes, but also just in terms of tuition fees being incredibly high. For example, students certainly at the more elite institutions being forced to basically book a four year holiday in a white lotus resort in order to get access to a good education. I don't think that you'd need to pay for the most lavish gym in the world and all you can eat meal plan free meals a day in order to get to history lectures or to get to your biology lab. And I don't think with higher education is sort of serious enough about looking at some of those flaws. You could make similar arguments about public health in other areas. You know, when it comes to schools, what do you think is the right balance between, you know, resisting attacks on the very important value of public education, but also perhaps looking in the mirror to try and understand why it is that trust in those institutions has eroded over time, that there is, not just in Magaland, but more broadly, a share of Americans that have just become deeply disenchanted with most of our key institutions in society, but including some of those institutions like public, high and middle and elementary schools.
- [50:31]
A
First off, we should not be willing to settle for having the cruelty of Trump or a broken status quo. I completely agree with you there. We should always be looking to do something where that people believe, see, feel a future is possible. And it's hard to break out of the status quo. But breaking out of the status quo is no longer given a lot of credit in America. So you know, for example, years ago we, to your point that you made at the very beginning of the podcast, as the uft, we worked with our then chancellor and we turned around low performing schools. We did a new contract for those schools. I did it with then chancellor crew. We turned around all the elementary schools that we worked on. Middle schools were harder, but we turned around the elementary schools. Instead of creating credit for this, the new administration, the Bloomberg administration, Joel Klein threw out the whole experiment instead of building on it because it wasn't his experiment. So part of this politically we have to look at how to.
- [51:56]
B
That's a problem of democracy. I'm joking.
- [51:58]
A
Well, yeah, yeah, yeah, but, but you know, on that and that I'm talking about it, not complaining about it. I'm just saying that part of it was you often see people basically saying, in with the new, out with the old, even if the old worked because they want their own thing. I do think that part of democracy or part of what we need to do to create trust in institutions is, is that when something is working, you actually lift it up and that it becomes a societal piece to lift it up, not to just say, oh, it's old. You know, like on career tech ed, there were years, it's taken three or four years to overcome a stigma that says, oh, you're talking about stigmatizing kids again. No, I'm not. I'm talking about giving kids lots of opportunity. So you have to constantly look at what is working, what isn't working, and what you need to create possibility. And I think that's what unions, I mean, at least our union, that's what we try to do. We just started a national AI institute with our biggest union, the uft. And with all these big tech companies, we're not, we were very careful about who we're working with. Microsoft is our lead partner. But there's a lot of people who question it and wonder because we don't have the AI regulation that we need in this country, why we're doing this. And I kept saying, look, we gotta meet the challenge. Teachers need to know we can't repeat what happened with social media. Teachers need to know what to do and have some digital literacy. So I think we have to think about what's the possibilities. But the right wing, the far right wing, this is different than the left because they hate unions and they hate public education. They will never give us. They will always find something to demonize. Because the power, the point of my book is we have to create power for regular folks. Frankly, that's what public education does. And instead of saying, this is how we improve it. Look, George W. Bush, I may have disagreed with his way of doing it, but no Child Left behind was his way of trying to improve things. Vouchers, which is what Betsy DeVos wants to do, and others. That's not about improving public education, that's about dismantling it. The key is how do you work to recreate trust in society, that you have a continuous improvement loop and that when things don't work, you jettison them, but when things work, you find a way as society to lift it up. Which was kind of our first conversation about the founders, like, okay, they were flawed, but they created the United States of America. Pretty remarkable.
- [55:17]
B
Thank you so much for listening to this. Episode of the Good Fight in the rest of this conversation, I ask Randy about an obvious and important topic. A lot of public schools in the United States were closed much longer than public schools in other parts of the world at the tail end of the COVID pandemic. And some studies suggest that the best predictor for where schools were closed especially long was the partisan lean of these districts and the degree to which they had trade union representation. So our teachers and teachers unions in part to blame for how long those school closures, which led to very serious losses in learning for students, were. Well, for this spirited part of a conversation. Well, this spirited part of a conversation is behind the paywall. So if you want to listen to it and if you want to support the work we do, if you want to make sure that we can continue to bring you these great episodes of the Good Fight and the new episodes of the Good Fight Club, in which we discuss the most important items of last week's news together, please go to yashamonk.substack.com thegoodfight and become a paying subscriber. That's yashamonk.substack dot com the good fight for access to this interesting part of the conversation, for helping us run this podcast, and for feeling good about yourself, supporting a worthwhile project. But hopefully, if you're still listening to this right now, gives you a good bit of joy in your life. Thank you so much for listening to the Good Fight. Lots of listeners have been spreading the word about the show. If you too have been enjoying the podcast, please be liked, rate the show on itunes, tell your friends all about it, share it on Facebook or Twitter, and finally, please make suggestions for great guests or comments about the show to goodfightpodmail.com that's goodfightpodmail.com
- [57:40]
A
this recording carries a Creative Commons 4.0 International License. Thanks to Silent Partner for their song Chess Pieces.