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The Government Fix
The Government Fix for Education
00:25:39
Education policy works best when the people most affected by it are a voice at the table. In this episode of The Government Fix, Code for America CEO Amanda Renteria sits down with Dr. David Johns to explore what it really takes to build an education system that serves all children. Drawing on his experience as a former classroom teacher, congressional staffer, and leader of the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans, Dr. Johns explains why proximity matters in policymaking—and how decisions made far from students’ lived realities often fail them. Now Executive Director of the National Black Justice Coalition and host of the Teach the Babies podcast, Dr. Johns continues to challenge systems that silence young people—especially Black students, LGBTQIA+ youth, and those from marginalized communities.
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- [00:05]
A
Welcome to the Government Fix. I'm your host, Amanda Renteria. I've worked on Capitol Hill, in the classroom, on Wall street, and now I'm the CEO of Code for America, an organization focused on using tech to improve public services and make government work well for everyone. Early in my life, before I was at Code for America, before I worked in Washington, I was a teacher. I taught high school. I marked that as the beginning of my work in the public, in a classroom. I had a direct pulse on my students, their thoughts and ideas, their daily realities. I could tell who didn't have a good meal before class. I could sense who stayed up late working to help their families. I could see kids that got to just be kids, while others didn't have that luxury. All of them had real stories to tell. But I always wondered, was anyone really listening? As a former teacher, now a mom, and someone who is deeply invested in creating a government that works for all of us, I know how crucial it is to make sure our education system sets people up for success from the very start. In this episode, we're focusing on the government fix for education. How do we design an education system that centers our kids? How do we make sure students from marginalized backgrounds are not just included, but truly heard? How do we hold the adults in power accountable for the promises we make to young people? Today's guest understands these questions from many angles. Dr. David Johns is the executive director of the National Black Justice Coalition, a civil rights organization working at the intersection of racial equity and LGBTQ equality. His path to this work took him through the classroom, the halls of Congress, and even to the White House. Dr. Johns started his career as an elementary school teacher in Harlem. That experience led him to pursue a fellowship with the Congressional Black Caucus before moving onto the Senate Health, Education, labor, and Pensions Committee. There, he spent eight years shaping education policy on everything from Head Start to historically black colleges or universities. Later, Dr. Johns led the White House initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans under President Obama. It's there where he did something radical. He insisted that no conversation about students could happen without students in the the room. He hosted summits across the country where the only people allowed to speak from the stage in front of the White House seal were students themselves, from elementary school age through post, secondary and beyond. Now, through his podcast, Teach the Babies, and his work at the National Black Justice Coalition, Dr. Johns continues to center the voices that are too often left out of policy conversations. He believes that defending democracy requires listening to young people in the ways they're actually speaking, not just the ways adults are comfortable hearing. So let's talk about what it takes to build an education system that actually serves all our kids, especially those who are too often excluded from the process of making decisions that affect them most. I'm Amanda Renteria, CEO of Code for America, and today I am joined by Dr. David Johns.
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I am the quarterback of the team at the National Black Justice Collective. We are a civil rights organization at the intersections of racial equity and LGBTQIA equality.
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A
You know, I want to start there because in this time that we are in, there's so much going on in this space that I just want to take a moment to kind of hear how you're doing, the perspective of what you're seeing right now.
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B
I think that too often in this space, there is a focus on the deficits, the things that are going wrong. And what I know is in this moment, there are lots of people who are black or African American, who are members of the sexual minority communities because of their sexual orientation or identity, gender expression and the like, who are returning to the real AI, African intelligence or ancestral intelligence. I like that those are peddling. And I say that because people are doing things that we've always done when we needed to survive.
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A
So one of the reasons we thought about you for this podcast is really the work that you've done on your podcast, Teach the Babies. And I know you were an elementary school teacher before you started working in policy. And I have to say my first public sector job was a high school teacher. I couldn't do elementary. They were so young.
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B
I couldn't do high school. So thank.
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A
But I'm curious, how do you, how does your experience teaching young folks lead to desire to do the work you're doing today?
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B
I love that question. Also, I love telling this story because it is what led me to Congress. We talked about this right before we jumped on, but I want to celebrate Senator Tom Harkin, who inherited me on the Senate Committee on Health, Education, labor and Pensions, which is where I finished my career on Capitol Hill. Tom Harkin used to always say, learning begins at Bird, and the preparation for learning starts well before Bird and I started, as you mentioned, my career teaching elementary school in Harlem. I'll savor the story of how I got there, but the short is that I resisted the calling that God had on my life to be an educator. And I'm thankful that I did because I was enrolled in the process. I called in my babies lovingly. Some of them have now graduated college because of things have changed that frequently, but they enrolled me in this process of helping them to figure out this world that they didn't ask to be born into. At the time that I was teaching, there was a lot of conversation about no Child Left behind as a potential panacea for all of the problems in public education. The short of it is that I didn't accept what my classmates in graduate school were saying, which is that we had to wait for magical policy windows to appear for there to be meaningful change. Teaching elementary school absolutely prepared me to work in the Senate. Right. Senator Murray and I used to always talk about the dynamics of her big early childhood education, working in Head Start programs. And my experience working in kindergarten, third grade helped me to manage all of the dynamics of dealing with members and staff and colleges and the like. And so I'm thankful for my preparation.
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A
So in your conversations on Teach the Babies, like, and you know, I was fascinated by this experience you had before. And then you, you know, come to the halls of Congress, as you were there, what are those child care policies that you were sort of looked into or education policies and said, oh, my gosh, this place really doesn't understand. Where did that surface for you?
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B
I was responsible for almost everything that the health committee saw as it related to the life cycle and development of children. There was work in the early part of the spectrum with regard to Head Start Childcare Development Block Grant, Captive Child Prevention and Safety act. In the K12 space, I was responsible for a lot of the minority issues. I was on the health committee, and my portfolio reflected my lived experience. And so in the elementary secondary education space, I was supposed to support a negotiation around Title 10. This is legislation for students who are experiencing housing insecurity. They're couch surfing, they're doubled up, they are without a home. And the change we were advocating for was to change a piece of punctuation that would have allowed students who had an unpaid fine or fee at a previous school to enroll in a new school. So foundationally how this works is a student who has a lunch debt, which is crazy, because students in this country shouldn't be having to pay for lunch in the first place. But students who have a lunch debt don't have the opportunity to return a book to the library and have a fine that they owe, are unable to access their records if they're going to a new school. So if a family is worried about safety or any of the other things that happen when life is life, especially under these current conditions, and they're not prioritizing, they are unable to learn or go to school and access all of the safety and support that comes with that. My colleagues essentially said to me that the policy on its merits was decent, but if they agreed to that, then tomorrow I might make a similar request for students who are black and brown. I'm the only black person in the room. And I walk back to my office in the Hart Senate office building that you know well, feeling like these people did not like children or our country. And I expressed my frustration to colleagues who helped me think about strategy, and we brought students to the next negotiation. I leveraged my power. I worked with the committee. I could call meetings when I wanted to. I prioritized the agenda. And the thing that I knew is that, And I dare my colleagues say what you said to me in front of these students who are impacted by the decisions that you make in this space of privilege, because most of you haven't attended a public school, let alone have to deal with these conditions. And so I offer that as one of many examples of moments where I was challenged by privilege and the distance that people, too often in positions of privilege have from people affected by the policy decisions that they make. And I understood that it was my duty and my honor to close that gap, to be disruptive and to advocate disruptively for communities most affected by the decisions that were made in those spaces.
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A
Yeah. What I love about your answer is that when I often ask a policy question, you'll hear a policy answer. And what you said is, actually, it's the voices that are shaping policy that needed to happen and weren't happening. And I think about that in the moment we're in, where there's a lot more access now to city councils, there's a lot more ways. And I remember feeling like I was in Washington, D.C. and I knew a lot of people couldn't travel there. But as we're in this time now, and there's a lot more social media and social spaces to bring voices forward, you still need people who are on the other side saying, yeah, but we gotta listen to this one. And so I think of the time that we're in today on social media and how we talk about policy to what are the ways that in your world now that you're bringing those voices to the table and the different platforms you have or the different places you are, and just advice to folks who are out there, because good policy does actually mean you've gotta listen to the folks who are affected by it in order to create good policy. So in today's world, what are the ways that you are doing that you're seeing successfully bringing those voices out.
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B
As an educator, someone who spends a lot of time thinking about policy, I remain vexed by the reality that in so many ways, the conditions that black students and families found themselves experiencing with regard to public education in this country are worse. Decades after a foundational piece of policy was passed by the judiciary branch with the goal of or the promise of making things better. Too often we don't teach children that democracies have to be defended by each generation. After the Tea Party grew in sentiment, it made my job as a policy advisor impossible. I quit my job in the Senate to go work for President Obama's reelection campaign and thereafter was appointed to lead the White House initiative on Educational excellence for African Americans. The thing that I was most proud of in that space, leading that initiative, is that I took that same lesson around having students be present to keep adults honest, to advocate for themselves. We took that to the White House and essentially said, no one can have a conversation about students generally, definitely not about black students if they're not present. Community colleges and HBCUs and predominantly white institutions and minority serving institutions produce some as well. The one rule is that the only experts who got to stand on the dais and speak in front of the White House seal were students as young as elementary school age, all the way through post secondary, non traditional and otherwise. And it was my honor to force adults to listen, which is often incredibly difficult for adults who feel like they're doing right or no better than who. And we use that to hold our colleagues and partners accountable for responding to the needs that students articulated for themselves. And in this moment, when students are faced with the burdens of adults abdicating, dealing with seemingly intractable problems that they didn't create, they being students, I am committed to listening to the students and engaging in dialogue with them to collect data on how they're leading.
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A
Yeah, and one of the things that I really appreciate about this conversation, and man, you were way ahead of the curve in terms of learning and recognizing how important it was to speak as you do. Right. Twitter, teach the babies. And. And right now we're in one of these moments where, you know, and by the way, government has never been like, they don't have a marketing budget. We are seeing right now a new sense of, you know, both in the political policy and administration realm to be highly communicative. Right. Whether sometimes that information is true or not true. And it's almost like the noise is really hard to break through. And as I think about proposals Right now that the country is facing, will continue to face in these next several years. Like things like eliminating Head Start funding entirely or getting rid of the Education Department. Not just the initiatives, but the Education Department. How are you seeing, like, let's fast forward. What are your worries as we think about it? And then folks who want to be on the front edge of that, as you have been, what should they be doing right now?
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B
I'm worried about children who in this moment are forced to deal with real life problems. I spent the better part of this week helping a young person access health services in a state where they don't have bodily autonomy. And the labor energy required to solve for that problem means that that young person is unable to commit to demonstrating what they know have learned, can contribute in any way, shape or form. And they're still required to engage in all that we're required to as a result of capitalism. That young people are unable to appreciate the privileges of being young people without these burdens is what worries me most. And connected to that, that there are adults, many of whom are in relationship with not just young people, but people who are intimately, palpably impacted by the decisions that people in positions of privilege who are focused on hoarding power are making in this moment honestly pisses me off. My principal wish is that they remain committed to engaging in defense of democracy beyond voting, beyond the activities that we are accustomed to in presidential election cycles. But holding elected leaders accountable and developing a political budget and committing to a political home where you're growing in your organizing, those are the things that I know are required to ensure that we not only get through this moment, but grow through it and come out greater on the other end of it to the doing. What should people be doing? It's leveraging ancestral intelligence. It is again, developing a political budget. We have so much power. It is why there are so many forces expending so much money and time and energy trying not to quell it.
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A
Yeah, I appreciate that. And I mean, one of the things that really drew me to Code for America is it was doing in a different way than when we were on the Hill. Right. We help governments administer food assistance programs in the right way, help connect childcare services for families and make sure there's a subsidy in those states where they have a subsidy. And we work on things like that, like in the state of Illinois. And I guess we've exercised our frustrations in different ways to say what's making a difference. And I love the way you bring voices to the forefront. We at Code for America say, how do we make this system through the mindful use of technology, actually reach people, actually reach some of the policies that we were fighting so hard for, that we had the privilege to fight so hard for. So I'm going to ask you then to dream a bit. If you were designing a federal education and childcare system from scratch that centers equity and justice, what would be your non negotiables?
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B
So acknowledging that childcare in more than 30 states throughout our country costs more than college. It would be free. It would be free. We spend so much of the time that I was on the hill trying to legislate increases in access and quality. No one should have to think about ensuring that their babies have access to developing the foundation upon which all future learning and development will take place. It would reflect all of the data because we all love data, both qualitative and quantitative, that affirms when a child's language, histories, ways of making meaning, culture are centered and celebrated, they do better. And start with the premise that all children are capable of learning and desire to another my sort of ancestral anchors is a sociologist named Asa Hilliard who said, I've never met a child, in particular a black child, who is not a genius. And there's no secret to how we support them. We first acknowledge them as human and then we support them with love. And so that's the ethos within which the curriculum would be both developed and delivered. And then the third is that it would be communal in nature. Too often we exist in this binary would suggest that learning and development only takes place in schools or within four walls of a place that is named a place of learning. What I know as a sociologist is the importance of ecology, that learning happens everywhere. And the attitudes and beliefs that people have in homes and communities impact what happens in schools and especially when babies are learning. Again, to the Tom Harkin remembering that learning starts before birth. It is about inviting every member of the beloved community into supporting our babies again. African ancestral intelligence. It's about ensuring that this is all village work. And then that's the bridge to the end, which is that it would be communal in nature and an exercise in love.
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A
I knew you'd have inspiring, inspiring vision. And I'm so excited to have talked to you today because I think a lot of us can use that inspiring vision just in all the different spaces that we're working in today. And so I want to. We always end with the same last question. If you had a magic wand to change one thing about how the government works, what would you fix first.
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There's no fix for this. In my head, there's technology that enables like a truth meter to appear like a truth and transparency meter to appear as a political figure is talking, that communicates to constituents in a way that cuts through the misinformation and disinformation. There's a part of me that knows that to your point, about people not having marketing budgets, that like, that doesn't really matter in an era where people are paid to perform politics in a way that is everything but transparent and authentic. And there's a part of me that still that in this moment is willing a belief that people still care about the truth and people still want their leaders elected and appointed to care about them.
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A
The care meter, the truth meter. We got work to do. We got a lot of work to do to get there. Because truth is. It's going to be on us, right? It's going to be on how are we bringing leaders and voices and holding people accountable to what is true and what caring really looks like for all of our communities. And thank you for spending time with me too. It's good to. I know we crossed paths, so it's good to cross paths again.
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I'm thankful for it and I'm thankful for you and your team for committing to enabling me to hold space in this way. This has been fun. Thank you.
- [22:51]
A
After talking to Dr. David Johns, what really resonated with me is how education policy is fascinating. Fundamentally about proximity. Leaders priorities are set by how close they are to a problem. If the students experiencing housing insecurity, lunch debt or discrimination aren't at the policy negotiation table, their needs get overlooked. And that is something that has to change. His vision for a federal child care system is one that is really aligned with the government that works for us all. Free and accessible learning really does happen everywhere. And raising children really does take a village. Finally, who wouldn't want a political truth meter? In an era where misinformation spreads faster than facts, we need ways to cut through the noise and help people assess whether their leaders actually care about them. But as Dr. Johns reminds us, it's always been on us. There are voices in power that want us to retreat, to exist in silence, fellows, to stop being in community. But if we commit to having honest, tough, critical conversations, if we keep talking not just to each other but across communities, that's how we win. This episode wraps up our first season of the Government Fix. I've learned so much from the conversations we've had, and I'm excited for season two later this year. If you're curious about what Code for Marriage tackles day to day, head to our website, our YouTube channel, or other social networks where we talk every day about how to make government work well for everyone. That's all for today on the Government Fix. Thanks for listening. This podcast is brought to you by Code for America, the country's leading civic tech nonprofit. For over 15 years, we believe that government can work for the people, by the people, in the new digital age. We work with government at all levels across the country to make the delivery of public service better with technology. We partner with community organizations and governments to build digital tools, change policy and improve programs. Our goal? A resilient government that works well for everyone. Learn more@codeforamerica.org if you like this episode of the Government Fix, please rate and review the show wherever you get your podcasts. That's all for this season of the Government Fix. If you like what you heard and want to support our mission, visit codeforamerica.org donate we're committed to building a future where government services are simple, accessible and easy to use. Just like you've been hearing about this season. We'll be back with a season two in just a few months. Thanks for listening.
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B
La.