← The Report Card with Nat Malkus
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- [00:12]
A
Welcome to the Report Card with Nat Malkus, the education policy podcast from the American Enterprise Institute. The Trump administration's efforts to reform education may not be making national headlines quite as often as they did a year ago, but a lot has still happened in education over the last several months. The Trump administration has continued its push to dismantle the Department of Education. Elite universities are making efforts to reform campus culture. The Department of Education released a major report on the future of the Institute of Education Sciences. And campaigns to limit phone use and now screen time in school continue to gain momentum. There's a lot to discuss here, so to break it all down, I invited Rick and Andy back onto the podcast. Andy Rotherham is a co founder and senior partner at Bellwether and the author of the Eduwonk blog. And Rick Hess is senior fellow and the Director of Education Policy Studies here at aei. Rick, Andy, welcome back to the Report Card.
- [01:19]
B
Good to be with you, man.
- [01:21]
C
Good to see you, Nat. Thanks for having us.
- [01:22]
A
So, it's been a long time since we last spoke. The Trump administration has continued its efforts to dismantle the Department of Education, I think most notably through 10 interagency agreements it signed with five different cabinet agencies. Let's start with the basics. Rick, what's an interagency agreement?
- [01:45]
B
It's actually a good question. It's something that most of us had barely given any thought to. It's a routine thing in Washington. It says that one cabinet agency's got to handle something. There's somebody else who's got skill or personnel to do it. So it's just basically a piece of paper which says, we're going to delegate this over to you. It's done routinely, but it's never been done like the Trump administration is using it. Usually it's just a prosaic arrangement because Trump issued that executive order to shut down the department and there's no statutory authority to shut down the department. Secretary McMahon is trying to use IAS as the next best thing and to send big chunks of the department elsewhere. So that's what's going on.
- [02:33]
A
And look, I don't pay attention to this that carefully, but I think the Trump administration is willing to push the limits of tools that are already existing in the government. Andy, the courts have knocked him back on a number of other issues. Are these interagency agreements, the way they're doing it, are. Are they legal?
- [02:52]
C
Well, that's going to be up to the courts. And like a lot of things with the administration, I mean, there's two things to bear in mind one, you know, they had four years between 2021 and 2025 to plan and they learned a lot about these various federal laws. So as Rick says, they're using these things that are in the law, but they're using them in a maximalist manner. And we've seen that on, that's, that's a bunch of stuff across government. And so that's the, that's kind of what's happening. Will a court say, okay, you can do this because you do have these interagency agreements, or will a court say, you know what, you all said the quiet part out loud because you've been talking about dismantling the Department of Education and so forth. And it's like this on a bunch of stuff where Trump has sort of said here's the intent of it, even though they're trying to do something different like, like in, in the strictures of the law. And, and that's caught up with them in some other court cases. And, and it could here. So we will, we will see. The irony is just what a missed opportunity this is. We do need some government restructuring. I think some of this, I mean, I can't speak for Rick, but I, I'm not sure he would disagree. Like, I think there's a lot of merit to moving student loan, the portfolio over to Treasury. It, it's been kind of strange thing hidden in plain sight that the Department of Education's basically a giant bank and secretaries get into office and then, you know, are all excited about all the education policy stuff they're going to do and then discover actually they're running one of the biggest loan portfolios in the United States. And, and that takes a ton of their time. Moving some of the post secondary programs to labor, that seems like a, a terrific way to streamline government. But on the other hand, moving like elementary and secondary education to the Department of Labor, that doesn't make a whole lot of sense, I don't think. And conversely, there's some programs that I would argue should be moved to education. Like I would like to see Head Start, for instance, moved over to the Department of Education. And so like, like so many things with this administration, there's actually an opportunity here they could do something really constructive around sort of restructuring government and some stuff that's been kind of overlooked and ignored for a long time. But instead we're getting, getting this. And in some cases it's, it's, it's routine. In some cases it's a really bad fit.
- [05:01]
A
Well, Rick, on that, the Entire Department of or the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education went over to labor, which seems like a weird fit. Like Andy said, there's a lot of them that are sort of like. Well that kind of makes sense. That one doesn't seem to. Do we expect that there's going to be a bunch of operational changes or dropped balls that there or is it really just kind of window dressing and changing the nameplates?
- [05:29]
B
Yeah, so some of these make all of the sense in the world. You know, Andy pointed out the massive student loan portfolio to Treasury. This, this has been something Democrats and Republicans have talked about for decades. This and especially once the ability to collect money fell apart under Biden, this really had to happen. Career technical led to labor, like Andy said, all this instrument. So elementary and secondary education. Just the idea of moving that from a Department of Education, Department of Labor doesn't make any obvious sense. You're moving it across different management information system platforms. You are creating potentially multiple blockage points for state education agencies that are dealing with Washington because of the way the law is written. Official authority for the programs remains at the Department of Education. So you have. Technically the leadership is still attached to the Department of Ed even if the work is being done at labor, which creates potential complications as far as oversight and management of bureaucracy. Look, is it possible that the grants will be administered more efficiently over Labor? Sure, it's possible. I mean, for one thing it just gives you a chance to do a clean slate between Doge coming in and wrecking house moving stuff over. Anybody who wants to defend business as usual at the Department of Education, I've got to pick bones with. It had become a really kludgy, frustrating, meeting driven place. So there's certainly an opportunity that you come out with is programs that run more expeditiously to get the money out the door faster, that are more responsive. But the idea that because you're moving this to labor there's some deep pool of brilliant bureaucracy that's going to make everything work, you know, terrifically, I think that's. I don't know what they've been smoking, but I would worry about it.
- [07:38]
A
Well, on that, I mean, is there some like inside the beltway knowledge that most people don't know where it's like, well, ED is a bureaucracy that doesn't work and it could be labor or any other department where it's like they really got their eye on the ball and they're just an efficient, well oiled machine.
- [07:56]
B
If there's any department that Republicans usually make more fun of. Than Education. It's Department of Labor. So this is just. This one's bizarre.
- [08:05]
C
Yeah. I mean, like, I guess if we're letting the big state secret out, here's the big thing that people inside the beltway know and that maybe civilians around the country don't know. These agencies can all run really effective programs, and they can all run really lousy programs. And that's true of, of every agency. Education, labor, hud, hhs, Defense, all of them. And so it's not. There's no great secrets here.
- [08:31]
A
But Andy.
- [08:32]
B
But if there's one agency where the unions wield even more influence, the Department of Education.
- [08:37]
C
Yeah. It's. Well, and look, labor, labor, like, I mean, like, like the labor secretary. I mean, like, this inspector general report is going to be a banger because she was apparently like, not only, like her husband was like, sexually harassing this. That, but she brought her dad in on the action as well. Like, it's like it's, I mean, it's, it's. You can't make this stuff up. I think the, the two things to keep in mind, one, this is ultimately just adding to bureaucracy. I think that's what's getting, getting lost. If your goal is to streamline bureaucracy, you should be doing. You should be restructuring government. Their theory, to give them their due, the Trump people would say, hey, look, we need to show that you can do this. And then everybody will see this and say, oh, okay, like this works. So we can get rid of the Department of Education and then we can ask Congress to actually take action and do that. The problem with that strategy is, first of all, the political clock is just against them. They're going to, you know, realistically, the Democrats will gain one or both houses of Congress, everything kind of will grind to a halt. They're not going to get Congress to do that. And second is, as Rick pointed out, some of these things are all not going to work great. Again, Some of them, you know, look, you've got some of these small programs, you know, like foreign medical accreditation. They move that. That's one of the IAAs, and everybody freaks out. You know, like the moving that to the Department of State, again, that's the kind of thing that makes sense. But some of these bigger ones that they, they. There's going to be some issues and some problems. And so I worry we're getting to where we used to have a few things like student loans, that when the Republicans would come in, they would approach student loans one way, and then the Democrats would come in and they would approach it the other way. This was the issue over, over direct lending and that would toggle back and forth with administrations and like, meanwhile, the underlying problems never got addressed. If we start doing that where, like the Republican, you know, the, the Democrat who comes in, let's assume for a moment the Democrats win in 2028 and, and take office in 2029, the first thing they're going to do, they're going to issue an executive order to unwind all this stuff. And so we get to like a lot of activity on sort of moving these things back and forth rather than looking at these underlying, how do we make these programs actually work better for Americans?
- [10:46]
B
Part of this, again, the quiet part out loud. There's an explicit theory among some folks, you know, in the Trump administration, which I find, you know, not, not, not, not, not an unreasonable theory, which is after the, the, the stuff that Cardona pulled at the Department of Ed, the stuff on gender ideology, student loan forgiveness, the rest, that they actually are quite happy to just poison pill the department. If a Newsom administration has to spend its first two years on education just reassembling the pieces and hiring back up, there's a theory that this limits the amount of damage that they'll be able to do if they have the trifecta. Personally, having watched Catherine Lamond operate at the department and then at the White House and watching Cardona, I think that's not an unreasonable response to what we've seen. The other part of it, though, is Republicans need to be cautious because if there are all of these unfilled staff positions at the department, Democrats are going to be able to hire potentially hundreds or thousands of new employees when they reassemble the Department of Education. And that's going to bake a whole bunch of, you know, enthusiastic, progressive, aspiring bureaucrats into the department. And you could wind up with something which Republicans find even more problematic than on the front end.
- [12:11]
A
Yeah. I mean, tactically, sort of like, well, let's make it harder to wind things back because we're gonna be winding things back and forth. Okay. If that's given the tactics make sense as far as a good government. Right. Efficient government, it's just, it's totally screwed. Right. And that may be where we live. Right.
- [12:30]
B
Have you seen a lot, have you seen a lot of good government types running around recently? I've missed them.
- [12:35]
C
But I mean, if you were a visitor from 30 years ago, you heard this conversation, you'd think this is insane that we're even talking this way. Like, I think you're Spot on. Now, Americans are super frustrated right now that government's not meeting their sort of core needs. They're frustrated with both parties in different ways about that. And we should be trying to build towards a politics of addressing those things, not a politics of like, how do I poison pillow for the next guy? How do I, you know, undercut the next person so she can't get anything done? Like, this is like, it's, it. This is a bad way to run the railroad. And I feel like we need, we, like, we're all sort of steeped in it at this point, and we need to like, step back and be like, why aren't, why don't we just have higher aspirations for what we expect, regardless if there's an R or D after their name.
- [13:22]
B
Although. But this, this is where, you know, we get stuck with the prisoner's dilemma that, you know, you know, we've had this conversation, the three of us a million times after a lot of the really problematic stuff that went on in the department under Obama, you know, what we saw under Trump. One was actually Betsy DeVos run a department that I would argue was very much hospital corners by the law, very focused on formal rulemaking. And Republicans felt like they got kneecapped on the backside of that when the Biden team came in and went to town. And so partly there is a sense that we're trapped in this, in this prisoner's dilemma where good faith doesn't necessarily feel like it's rewarded and, and they
- [14:07]
A
got called fascist anyway. Right. I mean, it's, it's not like they, they didn't draw fire.
- [14:14]
C
So I think something we also talked about, you can't, Where's Congress? I mean, this, like the, the joke like you keep hearing people say is like, you know, they're, they're just thankful Congress didn't live to say all this stuff. And like, it's gallows humor, but there's something, there's something to it. So part of this, if you, if, if you want to stop the back and forth that Nat just referenced is Congress needs to step up and do its job. It needs to pass. All the authorizing legislation is overdue to be reauthorized in some cases. You know, we're going to talk about IAS, you know, 20 years. So they need to pass that. They need to actually defend their prerogatives, their Article 1 prerogatives. And, and we need to get back to more, more of a healthy relationship between Congress and the executive branch. But, and if Congress continues just to abdicate its responsibility, then you create this vacuum that everything we're talking about plays out in.
- [15:02]
B
Well, I think the abdication will be over post November, but what comes next, we'll see.
- [15:08]
A
So let me ask about this on the ground. When people at the department are saying no, we got to move OESC to labor because it's more organized. It's the Department of Organized Labor. Are people on the ground, like, are they going to feel this? You're, you're a principal in a Nevada school. Are you even going to notice
- [15:27]
B
nobody who works, somebody who works as staff at the state education agency who has to manage the paperwork around Title one, Their life might either be a little more convenient or somewhat more inconvenient, depending on how this plays out operationally. But if you are a student, an educator in a school or college, this will have no impact on your life.
- [15:57]
C
I would, I would put one caveat on that, which is if the loan stuff doesn't go well, we've talked about. That's, you know, that's like, like people, people like don't really think about government. Then they go to the DMV and they have a bad experience and they, they don't like government. That's the same thing with student loans. People don't interact a lot, but they interact with, know your taxes. If you have an issue that you need help with, with from the irs, if you have a loan issue now, and that could create. There are a lot of people with various kinds of student loans that could. And, and they're not all Democrats that could create, that could, that could create, I think, a backlash. I also something else is worth watching sort of underneath like all the, you know, the stuff get that, you know, grabs the headlines and so forth, but there is just sort of work happening underneath. And one of the things that's, that in different parts of government is, is they're trying to figure out ways to use AI to do a lot of this. I'm not sure I agree with Rick that you'll see like a massive hiring spree if control of government changes. I mean, I'm not happy with how the administration went about the reductions of force at the agency. But you talk to most people there, most managers, they were like, we could, you, you could certainly support a reduction in force. They wanted it done in a, in a more talent sensitive way and everything else. But I think a lot of this stuff you're going to see AI be able to, to, to address pieces
- [17:13]
B
which
- [17:13]
C
again, I don't think that'll necessarily then Change the user experience for people in an SCA or a school. In fact, it could potentially improve it. But again, that sort of slow, deliberate work and this administration is fairly chaotic in how they approach things, but they may have sort of set the conditions for that conversation to start happening over the next decade.
- [17:35]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think Andy's right about student loans. Right. These are the things that directly hit you. Same thing with special ed. If they move special ed to HHS and it really went south, that could actually impact families and teachers. But the student lending thing, the one caveat I'll put on what Andy said is look, they actually, this administration didn't get nearly the credit it deserves, but they did a great job on fafsa. James Bergeron really did a remarkable job of turning that around. And if I had to bet, I mean there's going to be a lot of frustration with student lending just because of changes made in last year's reconciliation bill, because of other questions around, you know, about how this is playing out. But you know, the fact is that the treasury, they have an infrastructure and staff who are just have more expertise and better relationships in the world of banking than the folks at the Department of ed. And so there's a reasonable, you know, it's. If I had to bet, I would bet this stuff might actually wind up working better.
- [18:39]
C
Well, you might be right. You know who has a pretty good track record on customer service is actually the irs. People don't think about that because everybody thinks the IRS is like, oh, they're, you know, the tax man. But like they actually, they do pretty well on customer service response and so forth. And so there is some, some real expertise at treasury and that is actually, that was a pain point in the old, in the old fsa. So you could left. We'll have to see how this, how that piece plays out.
- [19:06]
A
Yeah, funny that the department is operating best on the biggest thing that they're moving off their books. But let's move to IES Late February, Amber Northern's long awaited report. It's called Reimagining the Institute of Education Sciences A Strategy for Relevance and Renewal. It came out six big shifts. I'm going to just list them in a paraphrase for our audience. Stop spreading it thin. IEs should focus on a few top issues that state and district leaders identify. There's too many data collections. Some are redundant and outdated. Streamline them. Keep the focus on things like naep. Go multi state instead of small bore studies. Focus on practicality, innovation and relevance, technical assistance and rels need to be better and their work needs to be shared when it works. And the what works Clearinghouse should be focused on practice guides and usable evidence. Andy, what do you make of the report?
- [20:07]
C
It's pretty good. I mean look, some of it, you know, we joked like, you know, it was, you know, some of it was better in the, in the original. Robin Lake I mean these are ideas like you know, Robin, Dan Goldhaver, Ashley Joachim and I wrote about some of the aspects of this, about how to make this more applied, faster turnaround, more nimble. We wrote about that in the wake of the original IES restructuring the 74. We can put that in the show notes. So I think there's a lot of, I think there's a lot of good ideas in it. In fact I one of the hats I wear. I am a a visiting scholar at UVA's Ed Policy Works and we had Amber in on I do a fireside chat with her last week. Like many of the fireside chats I do with Rick. There was no actual fire but we, you know, we with the UVA community to talk about, to talk this through. And I think people were impressed by like the level of seriousness and so forth that Amber brings to this. The problem I see is she still has to sort of fit this to this vision of returning things to the states, which I think in many cases you can say, you know, states might be better situated to do certain things, have more flexibility around federal dollars and programmatic things. I think research, it's a lot harder to make that case. It is a national priority. You need to aggregate it up what she's talking about with multi state stuff and all that makes sense. But I there, there's two risks I see with, with, with this. One is there's are things our national priority. You need to put national research dollars and focus behind. And then second, what we were just talking about with these IAAs, if they start parsing this out different functions of it to different places, so some to bls, some here or there, I think you lose the value in having a coherent federal agency. So we're back to what we like. IES had some problems but but sort of breaking it apart, I don't think will actually, will actually solve those problems.
- [22:08]
A
Rick, let me ask you about the scale of the report and the scale of what's happened to IES. So DOGE bulldozed IES. It was like first DOGE target the department. There's stories coming out that they're. They got $280 million they got to spend by September. If I'm reading that right, that's. That's a lot of million dollars. And then we have this report. Is it. Is it too marginal? Is it. Does it not go far enough? I ask because it doesn't seem like it's in keeping with the scope of all the other stuff that's happened to ies.
- [22:43]
B
Yeah, I mean, you know, we. We all know and respect, and like Amber, we've all known her for years. She got. She was given, you know, basically an impossible job. It's like you come in, you dynamite an office building, and then you go, oh, here's how we're going to redecorate it. It's like order of operations was backwards. So first IES blew it up and they said, amber, what should we do? And Amber, partly, like Andy said, trying to work within this or returning it to the state stuff, whatever that means, tried to come up with a way to make that sound kind of, you know, organizationally coherent. But look, for me, the biggest problem, one of the motivating factor of IES when Russ Whitehurst took the helm, was that ED research was a disaster. And I would argue it's better today. Russ Whitehurst established some beachheads. There's some pockets that are more serious. But the official mouthpieces of education research, the American Education Research association, the National Academy of Education, continue to be profoundly unserious. The work that rises to the top that gets acclaim in the field still tends to be highly politicized, highly ideological, and methodologically suspect. And this, you know, Amber doesn't really try to take that on. That's not what she's talking about. So that's a huge unaddressed problem. The reason that we invest in research and science at the federal level is because private actors and practitioners tend to have a lot of incentives to work, to focus on the science to reality pipeline. So if you look at biotech, we have a vibrant set of, you know, firms in the US that are busy trying to take what we have learned in labs and figure out how do you use them to create marketable products. What they tend to massively underinvest in is bench science. Because the bench science is. It can be shared by everybody. It's a. It's a public good. And the real question, you make money, but. Well, when you think about this in terms of federal education research, what we really want to do is figure out how to, you know, how do we understand cognitive development, how do we understand acquisition of, how do we understand fundamental Building blocks that either private firms or states and districts can apply in terms of particular practices going forward. And that kind of basic science is getting carved up right now across the government by this administration. And this approach of saying, hey, we're going to focus on things that states are interested in doesn't really wrestle with how that plays out or what that means for ed research going forward. So I think it's like Andy said, I think it's a good effort. I think it's a serious effort. But I do worry that it doesn't really wrestle with the fact that so much ed research stinks. It doesn't really wrestle with what the federal role of basic science should be in education. And frankly, for me, the big value add of most of what Washington does in education data is stuff like the stuff that drives the college report card or naep. And it doesn't really talk about how do we move resources from the mediocre stuff into these things that really drive the conversation.
- [26:33]
A
Amber really had a tough job. There's no doubt about it, right? I mean, she didn't like the fuse she had to deal with the aftermath. Amber is not the IES director. She's not taking over IES or leading it. Let's say her report is just super perfect and incisive in exactly what we need to do. I don't see how any of it gets implemented without a champion, and I don't see any champions on the horizon. Are my concerns misplaced?
- [27:05]
C
You haven't seen all the people running for president on a platform of, of education research. I, I don't know how you can, how you can miss that. It's all, it's, you know, it's all, all the 20, 28ers are talking about.
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B
Yeah.
- [27:18]
A
Look, I mean, even inside the field, Andy. Right. Like, I mean, you know, it's. I, I tried to put up Rick Hess and he said he didn't want the job. So, you know, like, who's going to take it over?
- [27:27]
C
Yeah, well, look, there's a couple of problems. One, the statute is 20 years out of date, and the reason it can't get reauthorized is some sort of underlying political issues that, that, that are unresolvable. So that's the first problem. You've got some people on the Hill who care about it. But you're right. You don't have that person who just wakes up every day thinking about how do they move IES restructuring, reauthorization forward. You know, three more things. One of the interesting, you know, three more Feet. One of the interesting things about Amber's report was, you know, as Rick said, she operated inside a bunch of, of of constructs. One of them was also like, she kind of is like stuff that was inside the law. She didn't come in like there's a lot of people who want like the, the regional educational laboratories and completely redone, but she sort of took that as a given that they were going to be there. And so how do you do them a little differently? Which I don't necessarily disagree with. But like, I think it was interesting. This was not sort of a blue sky reports all those constraints. So I think that's right and I think it'll continue. I think it'll continue to limp along for some time and it could become a flashpoint around some of these questions on empowerment. There is all this unspent money and you know, as we've talked about here, the administration spoiling for a fight on that. They've used ies, as you said, Nat, as a test case. That was the way it was like a Doge test case in the early. Along with usaid. It was, it was one of the early test cases. It could end up being a test case again on sort of what happens to this unspent money. You know, that sort of essentially there's like a stealth impoundment going on and does that get challenged? And then finally, like, I think Rick's right, the field leadership is very scattered. You don't have like a strong voice, sort of a strong, credible voice against this. The field's kind of all over the place, and that's a problem. You need, we need, you need leadership from the field. You know, so for example, on civics, you're seeing something like Danielle Allen really emerge as a force. I don't, I don't know who that person would be. Right now, most education researchers are head down. You know, the really great ones are heads down doing their work. They're not out there engaging in these debates. And I don't think the associations are doing a particularly strategic or smart job about engaging. So that leaves a vacuum too.
- [29:40]
B
Part of this is the history of this. You know, the Education Sciences Research act was done, I guess, was 02 was on the back of NCLB. Rice Whitehurst, people got to remember, wasn't an education guy. He came out of psychology. Reed Lyons, who was instrumental here, was over at National Institute of Children's Health and Development doing the stuff that became Reading First. So, you know, IES was really an outside attack on the education field. It was part of the accountability push, it was part of the reading science push. It wasn't like this was something education welcomed or supported. When Rod Whitehurst would go and speak to the American Ed Research association, he would be booed and labeled an enemy of the people and all that stuff. This was really a hostile. So if you're actually going to do ies in a way that moves the needle, it probably isn't going to come from within the education field. It's going to come from outside. And that's kind of the, that's kind of. I think the conundrum for the ed science types now is the Republicans are in an incredibly different place than they were in those early Bush years. And Democrats, you don't have, you know, you don't have a lot of Ted Kennedys and George Miller's right now who are interested in kind of pushing the field. It looks like the Dems who are going to lead the pack in 28 are going to be much more union friendly, much, much, much more hesitant about doing anything that's going to annoy kind of the established interest in education. And if that's the case, I don't know who winds up driving the train.
- [31:15]
C
I'm not sure about that. I think that you're going to see a split among Dems on that. But again, I don't think educational research, education research per se will be the flashpoint of the, of the split, of the split on education. And I think both parties right now, there's a vacuum. They both parties in different ways have complicated relationships with science and evidence and, and you know, particularly so the Dems on sort of measurement in education and, and all of that, they have a tortured relationship with it right now. And the Republicans have a, just a tortured relationship with science in general right now. And so that's also creating, that's also creating a vacuum. So, yeah, it's tough. I think Amber did a good job. I think there's some stuff in here to engage with and the field should be grateful that she was willing to take it on. But the road ahead seems very difficult. And again, I'm concerned about the risk that they just, they just break this up and parcel it out to some different agencies and we lose that sort of federal leadership role, which as I say a lot, and people are probably sick of me saying it, but it is the oldest federal role in education just post Civil War. And there's a reason for that sort of measurement, research, statistics. That's a really important federal role in education.
- [32:27]
A
Yeah, the one thing that I'll just add as we, as we close on this is the nice thing about Amber's report not being so radical is that it may have staying power down the line no matter who comes in. Maybe that's the optimist view. Talk about some things that have changed over the last few years. Culture change in higher ed. Rick Yale recently released this report blaming higher education's practices for a decline in public trust in universities. They were kind of like we found the enemy. The enemy is us. Harvard released a report on grade inflation. They're also trying to boost viewpoint diversity with some serious money. Many of the topics you like to discuss, Rick dei, legacy emissions, civics, education, these are things that are coming up. They seem much less peripheral than a few years ago in the higher ed space. You think there's been a real change here?
- [33:24]
B
Yeah, yeah, I think, I think we're seeing a real, you know, and again, it's always an important reminder. We're talking about brand name higher ed here. We're talking about the 200 institutions that we always talk about, which is only 5% of American higher ed overall. But this is the 5% of higher ed that drives the conversation that prepares most people who wind up in leading roles in media, in politics and business, who drive the research agenda. So we want to keep that in mind. And it crosses 200. Yeah, they went nuts. Over the last decade, I've argued time and again, and I think what we've seen is a healthy course correction, partly this. The Trump administration deserves a lot of credit for this. I think their tactics have been problematic. I think they've overshot the mark in ways that are counterproductive at times. But I think they have created a lot of room for people who say, well, I'm not like them, but I'm reasonable to kind of step up as campus leaders on campus boards. I think we've seen a lot of frustration in red state legislatures lead to a lot of changes. And I think, look, you know, America is a pendulum, is a pendulum. What happens is a lot of times these things go far enough, you eventually invite kind of the Reformation. And I think we're seeing that. And I think the Yale report in particular was really strong. This was a committee of 10 people that Maureen McInnes had tapped. They really, you know, from talking. My clear sense was that they cover really the full spectrum of campus. So the fact that they were able to reach consensus on stuff like great inflation, on problems with groupthink, on problems with campus norms was significant. I think this was carefully written, I think it was heavily footnoted. There's about 29 or 30 pages of endnotes and footnotes. I mean, they really, you know, took the, took the job seriously. And, you know, everything in these things is in the implementation. We'll see what Yale actually does. We'll see how people actually, you know, we'll see how many of these ideas get picked up and carried on other campuses. But there's certainly a very real possibility that we look back in five years and we say that, you know, that the Yale report on trust turned out to be, you know, a turning point in the conversation around campus leadership.
- [36:03]
A
Yeah, it certainly seems like a powerful document. I, I take your point that like this is the, you know, way out on the tail, the most notable universities that may also be the universities where some of these problems were most, most egregious. I'm not sure if that's the case, but it's possible. Andy, I just want to get you in on this. How much do you think five years from now this will seem like Windows dressing versus a vibe shift?
- [36:26]
C
Yeah, I think it's a significant report in part. You gotta remember Yale. I mean, they were cashiering people over Halloween costumes a decade ago and tolerating some really egregious anti free speech behavior. So I think the symbolism of it is, is, is real. I disagree with Rick a little bit. I think the only thing you can possibly credit the Trump people for on this is sort of waking everybody up. You know, something that Rick has, has said that I agree with is like, look, if you have, if you won't have a reasonable conversation, you're going to get an unreasonable one. I think what we've seen in the second Trump administration is towards higher ed is a pretty unreasonable conversation insofar as, you know, free speech. I think they're, they're replacing, we've talked about, they're replacing left wing dei with right wing dei. And I think most Americans don't like either version, but I think that it has woken people up. I think this report is an example of it. And one of the things that's interesting just in terms of the vibe shift is a lot of the stuff in this report. If you said it just a few years ago, if you said it during the Biden administration, people immediately coded you that you must be MAGA or MAGA adjacent or sympathetic or something, when in fact most of this is like pretty normie centrist stuff. And so I think that vibe shift is real. And I think people in higher ed are starting to realize the extent of the problem they have. And I think the report was, what was interesting about it to me is this was not just a report on free speech, free expression, all the cancel stuff that's been going on. It was the way we're talking about cost is a problem and we're not being transparent on cost. The, the way, you know, we think about teacher was it was a broad report. And I think that, I think we may, you know, now and then you get these reports that people look back on and say that that was a turning point. And, you know, we may, well, we may, we may well look back on this one and say this was a point where higher ed started to take some of these criticisms seriously and think about what it needed to do to rebuild public trust.
- [38:22]
B
A potential analog is 50 years ago, the Woodward report at Yale kind of closed the door on the 60s and said, wait a minute, part of the campus mission of discourse is people have actually got to be able to speak. You can't shout them down. Just a couple, you know, points to build on what Andy said. You know, one, one of the interesting questions is the substantive overlap between what Yale released and the high red compact last fall. The tenor is, could not be more different, but substantively, pretty much all eight of the elements in the compact are here. And Andy's point, you know, what's happened is we've seen a huge shift of the Overton window. And in. If the White House folks hadn't been so five thumbed on the compact and had let the department professionals actually reach out in a more constructive way, it would have been interesting to see how that might have played out. But I mean, one of the questions that this raises for me is how much we were all talking a couple minutes ago about where's good government. One of the concerns is that in this weirdly polarized performative age, that the way you actually move things is by moving the Overton window rather than by executing. And it's because I can't help but wonder if the Trump administration had come in more the way I would have liked, more attention for due process, more measured, would we have seen more, Will we have still seen the same shift towards kind of common sense, or did you, in order to create room for this stuff to be seen as reasonable rather than maga, did they have to overshoot in such a way that the Overton window fundamentally shifted?
- [40:09]
C
And that's a real riddle Rick points up, because, like, I think a lot, the, the problem a lot of people have with the compact was Less some of the specific elements of it than having government dictate that. So like, people are like, yeah, we should have more intellectual pluralism and viewpoint diversity on campus. But I don't want the federal government sort of dictating that or setting up ways to measure it or have any kind of like accountability for it. Like that's saying needs to come voluntarily from the field, like a lot of this stuff. And so, but, so there's a riddle there. If it took sort of crazy action to shock people to their senses, that seems like a problem and speaks to a leadership void in the field because you want this stuff to come voluntarily. I think a good thing about the Yale report is it's a voluntary activity from the field and you want to, you want to see more of that. And on K12 as well, on research, as we talked about earlier, you want to see leadership from the field on these things. You don't want to see this just driven by government. Yeah.
- [41:08]
A
The funny thing about this, we want people to like, look at the evidence, look at the data to inform your opinions. I got to tell you, I really kind of hated how they did all this stuff, like stem to stern. I just hated their, their sort of approach. Kind of now looks like it might have worked. And so the evidence, I mean, it's sort of anecdotal, but nonethele. It, it. It's difficult for me to reckon with.
- [41:29]
B
So you hated the Yale approach stem to stern, huh? No, no, no.
- [41:32]
A
I hated the compact. I hated the over the top. And then all of a sudden I'm like, I kind of like this Yale report. Maybe the cultural downstream change here is, you know, maybe those guys were right.
- [41:45]
C
Yeah, but this is a real problem, Nat, because like, essentially, if you had somebody sitting here, like, if you had somebody who you might, you might say, you know, quote unquote, like really woke sitting here, they would say the same thing. They'd be like, it's, you know, I don't like that all those people lost their jobs in, in 2020. And I don't like all that rioting. But like, it, it, it sure made the country start to realize like, how, what structural inequality looks like and how unfair the structure of American life is. Like this is that. That's a bad business. If we start saying, well, you know, the ends were kind of okay, and so maybe the means weren't so bad, like in a, in a, in a liberal society like the one we live in, and, and, and our societies can be respectful of civil liberties and, and, and all of that you have to be really careful going down this road. Even if the results end, the ball ends up bouncing away. That seems like it might be long term production.
- [42:35]
B
No, I mean 100% agree. But partly what that requires is leadership in civil society like we talked about. I mean, I think, you know, McGinnis moved on this in Yale a year ago. I think she launched the, the committee like year, know, in March or April. I mean, you know, the roster of stuff they actually did, the people they invited speak to campus, campus. Jonathan Hate went and spoke to like a thousand undergrad. Like they, they really put, and you know, we were talking a minute ago about the ed research. You know, aera, the National Academy of Education are absolutely doing the opposite of that. They're digging in their heels, they're throwing ad hominen attacks, they're engaging in vitriol. And so partly, if we want to say, look, we need government to back the heck off and let civil society do its job, people in civil society have to be willing to step up one other disgrace.
- [43:30]
C
And I would add, Rick, sorry, but like, I would just also add we need to elect people and we need leaders who have the thing the right and the left in many ways have in common is sort of antipathy towards pluralism. And, and we need to like flip that on its head and have people in power who actually deeply respect pluralism and respect viewpoints that they don't necessarily agree with. But, but respect, like the problem is we're going back and forth between one exclusionary ideology to the other, you know, for quite a while now in, in national political life. And you know, that's the, the, the consequences of that should be like, you know, apparent and it should be apparent
- [44:08]
B
how terrible they are 100%. One gravestone on the Yale report was it didn't get as much attention as I wish it had, but they actually took on devices very aggressively, which is not, you know, when you talk to higher ed leadership about this, college presidents and such, they're like, yeah, it's a real problem. We've got a beautiful campus where every kid is just staring at their phone with earbuds. And the Yale report actually said, look, we need to set strong norms on campus that, you know, classrooms should be device free whenever feasible, blah, blah. So I think this is a really healthy kind of stamp on that. And everything else, though, the proof is in the pudding. What I'm really hoping Yale will do is in six months or nine months, we'll actually have something up online where they are, you know, in the spirit of building public trust. Talking very explicitly about. Okay, on our 20 recommendations, here's the progress that has been made or not made so far. Because I think part of the problem is we've got a culture of talk talk. And I think what we want to see is are they walking the walk?
- [45:10]
C
We need like a data quality campaign, you know, the 10 elements. We need that for, for, for higher ed. That could be a new project for you. Nat. Yeah. Now that you've solved, now that you've solved youth sports, you can turn your attention to that.
- [45:22]
A
All right, fellas, it's time to do grade it. Give me a grade and a brief explanation. Andy. Asu, gsv. And for those who don't know, what the heck is it?
- [45:32]
C
So it's a conference. It's Arizona State University gets together with Global Silicon Valley, which is a venture fund. It's an interesting conference. It's been happening for a long time. My observation is the conference used to be a place where people went to do a lot of business. There was a lot of deal flow and so forth. There's still some of that. But the conference itself is not now become the business. Everybody gathers. It's the conference everybody loves to hate. But I'm not quite sure why because it's a really useful few days. It's drink it from a fire hose. And so you're not like, it's, it's not contemplative in that sense, but you learn a lot. And this year we were graced by the presence of, of Rick Hess, which, you know, Rick has never gone before. I've heard tell that he may never go again, but he and I did a fireside chat. Penny Schwinn did a, did an admirable job moderating a session we did one morning. And I would give it, I would give it a B plus it is, or even make an A minus. I, I, I learn a lot every year. I think you have to have your own boundaries or you'll come back with pneumonia. But if you, if you sort of approach it the right way, it's, it's a really valuable experience. Yeah, A, on second thought, A minus.
- [46:40]
A
Rick, are you going back?
- [46:43]
B
Probably not. But not a reflection on the conference. And San Diego was gorgeous. It's more that I think I have reached a stage in my life where I don't deal well with that.
- [46:54]
A
Rick, now that the department will be leaving it grade 400 Maryland Avenue,
- [47:02]
B
you know, 70,000ft of warehouse quality space with big windows and ugly mortar. You know, as a rental Property. I'd probably make it a pleasant C minus depending on the price per footage.
- [47:16]
C
Huge improvement over the previous space, though. Everything's relative, Andy.
- [47:22]
A
The Supreme Court's ruling in Mirabelli v. Banta.
- [47:26]
C
I think this is, this is the ruling on concealing things from parents by school districts, concealing gender transitions. I think this is actually presaging what is going to be the, the trans sports issue of the next presidential cycle. Gavin Newsom's very out of position on this one. He's trying to characterize as a law that, you know, forces schools to out kids. It's really a law that says, like, how are we going to interpret privacy? And can schools do things with kids without their parents consent? And if you thought that transgender sports that pulled poorly for Dems, just wait this one parents just have absolutely no tolerance for schools concealing things. And I would actually argue it's not good for gay, lesbian, transgender kids. It puts a toxic frame on them. And you know, you talk to the experts, they tell you, and this includes people like Erica Anderson, a transgender clinician. You have to involve parents. Even when it's hard and difficult, you have to involve parents in these things. That's best practice. And so I think this one is going to age very poorly. And the Democrats pretty quickly need to find their way to a position that respects rights, make sure we're very serious about safety of these kids, no harassment, no discrimination, but also respects parents. Otherwise it's going to be a mess.
- [48:49]
A
So, so, Andy, a grade on the ruling?
- [48:53]
C
I, I, it, it's a preliminary ruling. There's more litigation that comes on how you grade a preliminary ruling. I, I, I guess I, I'd have to give it I, I, you know, it's a pass fail and they passed. And there's, there's more to come on this, Rick.
- [49:09]
A
Classroom based mental health interventions.
- [49:14]
B
You know, in theory, we want kids. Yeah, we, we care about kids. Well, being we're seeing a lot of worrying, some signs, practically speaking, a lot of quackery and silliness and just politicized nonsense has crept into schools under this umbrella. So in theory, I'd give it, you know, an A minus. In practice, I'd give it a D plus.
- [49:42]
A
Andy, Virginia's redistricting efforts.
- [49:46]
C
Ah, I mean, I guess you got to give it a C. I mean, I voted for it. And that's stunning to me because I think redistricting is an absolute cancer. You know, this sort of partisan gerrymandering redistricting is absolute cancer in our democracy. But we're in a really, we're in a really bad place. And I think control of Congress matters. And this is just, it's illustrative of how bad sort of bad politics, bad leadership forces, bad decisions we should never have been voting on. On mid cycle redistricting, Virginia actually approved an amendment to have nonpartisan redistricting. It was a huge step forward. So to see that undercut was, was, was terrible. But you can't have the President, United States going around saying I need to squeeze out more seats state by state. It's outrageous. And the reasons they want to do it are dangerous. And so here we are. And again it gets to, it gets to our quality of leadership. Like I was super annoyed that I had to go vote for that. Like I shouldn't have been voting on something like that in April. It should never have been on the ballot. And I appreciated like there was all this nonsense rhetoric trying to high minded. I appreciate the politicians who were just like this is real politic and this is where we are. That was the only justification for it. Most of the rhetoric about how this was about like, you know, all this high minded stuff was just gibberish.
- [51:06]
A
Yeah, the real politic makes sense. But my parents live two and a half hours away and some of the constituents in their same lobster district live about two and a half miles from my house. So that's, that's the, the craziness of the gerrymandering.
- [51:22]
C
So I will, I guess I'll speak a little personally. I, I spend I'm halftime up in the mountains right up by Shando national park and halftime in Northern Virginia outside the city. And those are very different places. They have been in very different districts for a long time and they're now actually in the same district. And that's insane.
- [51:40]
B
You know, the only people who come out looking good are the Indiana state reps who refused mid district, you know, mid cycle gerrymander and are now being primaried real hard. And so we'll see how that shakes in.
- [51:56]
A
Rick, the job performance of whoever is the publicist for the ECCA or the ta, the Federal Tax Credit scholarship.
- [52:05]
B
Oh man, they deserve a raise. Look, it's easy to like because the only real cost of any of it is that we're going to add a few hundred million or a few billion to the federal debt. But we are apparently so far past worrying about VAC that it doesn't really register in any of our conversations at this point. The rest of it, it's money to help kids go to better schools. It's you know, looks like it's going to be very lightly regulated. There's if the question is, do you want to get free money for families in your state? Partly because of the way the bird bath shaped this last summer, it just becomes an incredibly easy sell. And so I don't know how much of this is the, you know, the PR geniuses who are explaining it and how much is just because of the way the chips fell. But boy, we haven't seen an education initiative get this kind of love probably since Race to the Top.
- [53:16]
C
Oh, I don't know. I'm going to disagree on this one. I'd give the publicists, like, notwithstanding the underlying policy, but just the publicists. I'd have to give like a C minus. I find it fascinating that this is like, you know, the most consequential education policy change that no one's heard of. It's really interesting to me how little attention it's getting outside the wonk circles and people who are looking at whether or not states are opting in. And it's going to be a footrace to get these parents signed up for various things, get them, you know, contributing. So I shouldn't say parents, taxpayers, contributing. And so I've been struck, like, how quiet it actually is in given how consequential this should be and that the words, not the word's not getting out and that that is surprising to me.
- [54:01]
B
That's actually a great point. So let me bifurcate my grade in terms of selling this for political consumption. I'm going to give it an A in terms of the word, you know, words getting out to folks who might actually want to set up scholarship granting organizations to folks who want to help mobilize to parents. I think Andy's right there. The grade is much lower.
- [54:26]
C
And here's the interesting thing. Why isn't the President talking about this? It is a policy that's pretty popular. It's certainly sort of one of his top policies insofar as not being super divisive, being relatively popular. It appeals to parents. It was something he talked about during the campaign and he says nothing about it anywhere. You just don't. You just do not hear about this. And this is a guy who, like you would not say, oh, he's not talking about. Because he's so reticent about things like this guy talks about everything, right? And you know, middle of the night things on True Social and all the rest of it, and yet nothing about this. Which is also interesting from the PR standpoint because it's it. It's a pretty good talking point for him.
- [55:10]
A
Well, you could put it up to. Well, it's not a fight, but it is a fight. It's a fight in all these blue states that he could just like keep hammering on. He does have the cards in this one, but maybe there's just not enough revenge in it.
- [55:22]
C
So, yeah, I guess if the Democrats are smart, they're not going to give him the fight. Like he wants everybody to be ripping each other's faces off. And I think a lot of blue states are just going to go in because as Rick indicated earlier, the way it's structured is it's a hard argument not to go in and you're going to have some public school facing stuff on it. And so like the Democrats may, like 32 of them just went on a bill to repeal this, but like that, that may end up being a political trap and it may be better just to not give them the fight. And a little bit I sometimes wonder, like when you hear some of the Democratic governors who are enthusiastic about it talk about it is like, how does that. The West Wing must be kind of sad about that. They must be like, this is not, this isn't why we passed this thing to hear hear Democratic governors be so happy.
- [56:07]
A
All right, thanks for the grades. Rick, you mentioned the tech pushback in the Yale report since we last spoke. There's been more state cell phone bans and there's another interesting trend, efforts to limit screen time in school, not just phones, but screen time, especially in early grades. Utah has a prohibition on screen time K through third grade. A little bit more aggressive bill was just signed by Tennessee's governor. In LA and Baltimore. We've seen moves on this front. Andy, what's going on here?
- [56:41]
C
Yeah, this is an interesting one and I think for a lot of parents, I would include myself. It's a hard one to talk about because, you know, it implicates some of your own decisions and mistakes you, you may have made as a parent. I think three things are sort of getting mashed up right now. One is this concern about social media. And I don't think you have to go the full we should ban it or the fully in the full height to John height. Just to say there's clearly a problem with social media and young people, particularly girls, it's not good for them. We, we, there's plenty of evidence on that. So there's a lot of concern about that. And, and then there's a secondary. There's concern about ed tech and you're seeing sort of organized efforts to push back that you can always tell is, is sort of these things, you know, start to pop up in the media in sort of a systemic way. You know, there's like something behind that. So that, and some of the usual activists who sort of, you know, rent themselves out to a whatever anti reform cause are now sort of popping up. So like there's obviously money behind something like that. And then the third thing is just anxiety about AI, both anxiety about people using AI and what that means and just a generalized anxiety about what is it going to mean for the economy and society. These things are all getting mashed up. They're actually three conversations we should be having separately because there's different aspects and implications from each one. They're getting mashed up. And if you're a politician, a lot of what we're talking about here is stuff kids are doing after 3pm and before 7am the next day. But politicians don't have a ton of control over that. And so the focus is becoming on schools because that's the one place where you can show you did something. And these cell phone bans have proven to be very popular, bipartisan and very popular. So people are like, okay, what's the next thing I can do that might be popular too? And so that's putting a lot of pressure on. And I think there's a lot of garbage edtech, you know, that's, that's not a revelatory thing to say. I think most people would agree with that. But also some really good stuff and you want to be careful just coming in and being like we're going to ban all this stuff in school. It's not axiomatic that teaching will somehow improve or that these things, it's, it's much more, it's much more complicated. And you want, you want some nuance here but we're not having any. It's getting mashed up. And I think as I over the next month year comes becomes more prevalent, things are going to happen that are going to cause some panic legislating. And it just seems like, it seems to me a recipe for, for sort of overshooting on some stuff.
- [59:01]
A
Rick, I want to get you in on this but. And Andy, I get your three streams. You got the AI and the EdTech and the sort of social media cell phone thing. But I'm really curious about the Edtech and the sort of computer facilitated learning specifically because I don't think we've seen that thread get a lot of thrust. I Do think that we're starting to see that. And look, my theory of this is, well, these things were on the rise. I didn't necessarily think. I was pretty skeptical of them before COVID Then everybody got a device, tons of schooling went on these things. So there was just this external shock that drove a non slow evolutionary process. And now we're just kind of in the rotor wash of that is my, you know, is my skepticism unwarranted? And do you think there's legs to this pushback of sort of tech in school?
- [59:58]
C
Yeah, I mean, well, first of all, I can't help but note like the metaphors today, ever since AEI started paying you by the metaphor. I mean this podcast is just fantastic. The rotor wash. Yeah, I think there's, there's two issues here. There's a lot of stuff that's getting used that doesn't have good efficacy research behind it, good evidence. And then kind of to our earlier on, you know, the poor quality of education research, you can always find two professors to slap their name on a really shoddy evaluation of an edtech tool. That's a problem. The other problem, though, interestingly, is lack of use. So much of this stuff is procured in ways that people buy these huge licenses and so forth, and then it doesn't get used. And just as you had issues with sometimes like textbooks sitting around, you have problems with, with a lot of this stuff not being used. Low engagement, low levels, all this stuff. And as opposed to like there's at least like a warehouse of textbooks that somebody can say what's going on here? This stuff's not real visible and the spend on it is, is, is enormous. North. North, you know, north of, of 30 billion. And, and so that's the other problem. So we have, we have two problems. How it's being used and in some cases too much or, or low quality. And then conversely, at the same time, questions about all the stuff that's being paid for, but actually not being used used because school districts aren't approaching this in sort of a systemic, coherent way.
- [61:14]
A
Rick, what do you think on this, both on the substance and whether the pushback has sort of like the longtime legs.
- [61:22]
B
Yeah, you know, I mean, one, there's usually a lag on these things. When you think about the pushback on, you know, critical race theory or DEI or whatever you want to call it, that really started in 21, but that was going on, you know, at least since 2014 with the Michael Brown stuff. So parents take a long time to actually pick up on These things, they're trusting schools. You know, when you think back to character education back in the day, or kind of the test prep insanity that followed in a lot of places after nclb, it takes a while for this stuff to really just register with parents because they want to trust our kids schools. And look, we have been pumping tech into schools aggressively since the early 2000s. One to one became a watchword. You had lots of reformers who could not give enough hosannas every time a district announced some new initiative or bought new stuff. And so it got to a point that I, you know, and parents understood that this was a good thing. If your school was buying more of it, it was good. Two things really changed. One, I think parents started to really get the sense about the social impact on kids, the mental health impacts, the social isolation. And tech has become, I think, a boogeyman for that, but rightfully so because it deserves a big share of what's going on. And academically, we've seen slopping achievement for close to 15 years. At this point, the timing lines up real neatly with the introduction of the iPhone. Again, I'm sure that's oversimplifying, but like we have talked about with higher ed, if you refuse to have a reasonable conversation long enough, eventually you invite an unreasonable conversation. And it's not like there were no people worried about culture in schools, about use of tech, about kids spending too much time reading on screens. You know, I mean, 10 years ago you had parent groups talking about going in to visit their kindergartner class and seeing all the kids looking at, you know, reading on iPads or watching cartoons. But what happened is this stuff bubbled slowly and we've now hit critical mass, I think for the reasons that you and Andy have flagged. So I think this thing's got long legs. I mean, the problem is that a, you can't unwind all of this. Districts have spent a lot of money. It's no longer easier, cost effective, to get whole sets of paper books once you've invested all. So there's sunk costs. There's also practical questions. How do you actually police this stuff? And like Andy said, you know, a huge amount of what parents are frustrated about is actually happening outside of the boundaries of the school day. But the idea that this is either some manufactured, you know, phenomenon or that it's just, you know, it's right now because people are weirded out by AI and this will pass quickly is, I think, naive.
- [64:23]
C
Yeah, if I wasn't clear, I don't think it's like, I think aspects of it are being ginned up and so forth. But I don't think it was wholly, I don't think this is like wholly. I think there's, there's. If I wasn't clear, I apologize. Legitimate issues. No, no, you were.
- [64:34]
B
But, but, but you. We both know that there's a lot of tech enthusiasts who are like, oh, don't take any of this seriously. This is just right.
- [64:41]
C
Well, that was my, one of my takeaways at asu. I was surprised how unconcerned they were about the backlash. They thought it was just a few cranks showing up in front of the hotel rather than this. This is a real thing. And I think one of the interesting things, just on the politics of it, you know, in most industries you have even entities that like the companies and so forth, that compete, they still come together under sort of umbrella associations or, or to, to do politics, to do advocacy and to sort of push on sort of big general industry concerns and they fight about the details. You don't really have that anymore in ed tech. The publishers aren't doing a lot of that. There's an association that represents sort of software and industry information association. They're not actually doing a lot on this. And like I think the industry, you don't see there's not organized pushback around this, organized efforts to change the political narrative, to do that kind of outreach and advocacy. And that's. That is interesting to me because ordinarily you would see that kind of collective action and it might be able to forestall some of this, but instead it's happening across a bunch of states all at once. Increasingly, in the national conversation, you do have a serious candidate for president who's calling for social media ban and Rahm Emanuel. And I think you'll see other, you're going to see other candidates follow on that kind of thing and you're just not industry. They seem, at least from the outside, it looks like they're a little bit asleep at the switch with this. And I agree with Rick that it's going to have some legs.
- [66:09]
A
All right, fellas, we only have so much time to wrap this up. I want to just back up. It's been over a year since we first got together, got this band together to discuss Trump 2.0. We talked a lot. How much do you think the education landscape has changed during that time? I mean, how do you handicap sort of a, you know, a hard to measure thing like that, Rick?
- [66:37]
B
So probably three big pieces. One in Washington for people who work inside the Beltway. There's been really big changes. The department's much smaller than it was. The IAAs have really disassembled it in significant ways. There are, you know, there are, have been changes made to the way programs operate that, you know, that there's certainly the change of student lending and the law and some of the formal rulemaking. Big, significant changes, especially for higher end. In terms of the cultural zeitgeist of education, I think there have been really significant changes. How much this has been driven by Trump enforcement, how much this is just a pendulum swing that Trump reflects rather than caused, how much this has been complicated or undercut by a lack of due process. Nonetheless, the conversation around gender, around DEI, fundamentally different than it was 18 months ago. As far as what happens in schools and colleges, generally speaking, I think the impact has been much more modest and will be much more fluid leading there. I think, for instance, red state laws speaking to higher ed will have real significance. But remember, hardly anything that Trump has done is actually in statute. We talked about the federal scholarship tax credit, that is, and that's going to be a big change potentially for reasons we talked about. But a lot of the rest of this stuff, if the Democrats have a good night in November, there's going to be a lot of oversight, there will be a lot of pushback. And whether or not that's the case, it's most of this stuff is just embodied in executive orders. And so potentially you're looking at a Clean slate come January 2029.
- [68:36]
A
Andy, what, what Rick get wrong?
- [68:38]
C
No, I largely agree with Rick. I think that was a good summation. I think you have to like how much has changed. You have to ask who, who, who are you asking that to? If you're asking somebody used to work at the department and lost their job in this chaos, a lot has changed. If you are asking that of like the average parent out across, across the country, very little has changed from their, from their perspective and how they're, they're experiencing this. And so I think it's, it's very much sort of, you know, how much change you've experienced depends on sort of where you sit in your position positioning. I think for a lot of this, you know, the bigger, the bigger fish to me are elsewhere in the administration stuff we're not talking about here. Like, you know, things that have changed around, like the Department of Justice and, and the way it's conducting itself and the FBI, those are hugely consequential. The Department of Defense, I think in Education, I Don't mean to be glib about it, but is a little bit like, in terms of out around the country, if you miss it. I heard somebody say this at the beginning of it, talking about their experience in a different country when something like this happened. You know, if you miss, you miss a few days, you miss a lot, you miss a year, you don't actually miss very much. And that does seem to be kind of the quality of this. There's, like, all this stuff, but then courts are rolling it back and so forth. And so I think, I think a lot of the change, as Rick said, is actually relatively fragile. And we're going to see some of it, we're going to see some of it snapback.
- [70:04]
B
Oh, and just part of it, you know, is Trump really entered on a role. I think when we were talking about this early part of last year, we were really struck by how little effective pushback there was at how scattered the education blob was, at how Democrats were hesitant, at how much just confidence, momentum the administration had. And one of, you know, but, you know, while I think this Department of Ed is staffed with just a really remarkably talented team, I think the White House is a debacle. I think the administration more generally is a disaster. And so it's been hard to run a competent, effective operation with all the chaos surrounding them. And now that Trump's numbers seem, I don't know, it's hard for me to see his way back north of like 40, 41, 42%, just given cost of living, given kind of the other issues he's wrestling with. If that's the case, it's hard to see how this administration gets its mojo back over the next 32 months, which means most of what they've been able to do that's impactful is in the rearview mirror.
- [71:21]
A
Rick, you said, you know, we didn't see a real opposition, effective opposition get mounted in those early days. Have we seen it yet? I mean, a coordinated, coherent pushback on all the stuff that, that Trump did. I hear lots of sort of isolated things and like, sort of, you know, oh, I don't like this. I get that. But I'm struck, tell me if I'm wrong, that there never was a major pushback, no chorus pushing back from the left or the, or the center. Lots of, like, ticky, tacky. Well, I don't like that. Am I wrong?
- [71:58]
C
You know, who's actually saved some of the education stuff has been Republican governors, right? So behind the scenes, they, you know, they, they, they, they stepped in, they when, when it looked like nape was, was going to get doged, there's Republican governors were like, we, we need, we need to step in, we need to save this thing. It was a number of Republican governors on some of the stuff around funding and indirect and, and overhead because like, you know, these universities in places like West Virginia, Ohio, Alabama, red states, the big flagships get lots of federal dollars and so they're like, hey, can we like maybe slow our roll here on this? And so that's been, that, that's, that, that's been a lot of the pushback. But on other issues, I think it's a little bit of an indictment on the education community's ability to get its act together. Because you did see, I mean, what happened in, in Minnesota, in Minneapolis with ice shocked people, you saw enormous pushback and the people leading that effort, top to bottom have been removed. They're no longer in public office. And because there was like organized, concerted pushback. And, and you just, on education, you just haven't seen anything of that level, that sort of organized applying pressure. And to the extent you have, it's been office holders of the President's own party behind the scenes.
- [73:17]
B
Yeah, no, I think that's right. So I think the way to think about, and obviously the courts have loomed large here on a lot of the education stuff. Look, I mean, I think the way to think about it is the Trump wave hit the beach in January of 25 and it kind of swept everything before it. And there was a real sense that, wow, this is going to sweep up over kind of the title wall and it's going to really rework the landscape. And without ever hitting that kind of concerted pushback, I think the wave kind of played itself out early and aggressively. You saw Harvard and Columbia and all looking like they were going to bend a knee early. And then you saw them start to fall, find their footing. Brown figured out a deal where it's 50 million was just to workforce programs in Rhode Island. Harvard decided, you know what, there's only so much these guys can. And so I think what's happened is, you know, NSF has been gutted. There's real questions about whether IES or NSF money is going to go out. There have been these. So there was the early shock and all. In fact, I think in a lot of ways, I mean, it's a really impolitic and not thrilling analogy, but it's probably illuminating is the attack on Iran. There was overwhelming force. There was a sense that, you know, if we hit Them hard enough, fast enough, it's going to really create fundamental change. And then there was a sense that, you know what? All of this stuff is stickier than we thought. We can do a lot of damage, we can break a lot of furniture, but at the end of the day, we will not have caused as much lasting change as we kind of hoped. And I think it's not because there was ever a really effective counterattack or defense mounted, but it's just because there was not perhaps as much strategy about finding opportunities to drive meaningful, lasting, particularly statutory change.
- [75:19]
A
Yeah, except the stubborn thing wasn't a repressive, irredeemable regime. It was checks and balances and the tough machinery of government that sometimes it's good that it can't be bowled over quickly.
- [75:34]
B
Oh, it was also the irredeemable regime of the higher ed cartel.
- [75:41]
C
Yeah, I was gonna say Rick would describe the education establishment as a tyrannical, irredeemable regime. I think the other thing that's interesting here, Nat, that we, we, you know, we. We should may maybe end on, I don't know, is just to point out there is a counterfactual here, which is the American people are super frustrated. Frustrated enough they gave Trump the keys to the car twice, the second time after January 6th. And seeing that behavior, that's how frustrated they are. And instead of sort of using that opportunity either in 2017 or in 2025 to. To sort of build a broad, more popular politics by applying sort of pressure on priorities, but in a deliberate, intentional way. So saying we are going to restructure the government. Here's what a restructuring government bill looks like. We're going to Congress and we're going to apply pressure to do some government restructuring on taxes, on all this stuff. Instead, after he handed the keys to the car twice, appealed to this narrow slice of Americans, his MAGA base, this hardcore group, which isn't even all Republicans and is certainly not all Americans, and in doing so, I think has set himself up to. He will be remembered in historically terrible terms when he had an opportunity both times to sort of shift course and for whatever reason, whether it's his own personal defects or the people around him was unable to do this. But I think privately a lot of presidents would be like to be able to come in that and have that free of a hand that he had and then to sort of blow it is inexplicable. They would have loved to have that free of a hand to operate. And I think that that's the interesting. That's the Interesting thing here. And to have it happen twice is really, it really speaks to something, I think, highly defective in his character and the character of the people around him.
- [77:33]
A
All right, let's look forward for the last question on education. Has the Trump administration mostly played its hand already, or are there more surprises we should look forward to? Rick
- [77:46]
B
I think it's played its hand. There's stuff in the pipeline that's important. The accreditation reforms are playing out and will be really significant when the student lending caps kind of kick in. Administration's operating with those. It'll have a real ability to drive things. You know, as the federal scholarship tax credit plays out, the administration can really ride that horse. But between Trump's kind of, you know, sagging popularity and what we're looking at in terms of November, it's hard for me to see, you know, them launching anything that isn't already in the water.
- [78:25]
A
Andy?
- [78:26]
C
Yeah, I think we're going to see a lot of activity and implementation and so forth. I do think the next two years after the election will be consequential. The midterm is a referendum on Trump. He's wildly unpopular, but you know who else is wildly unpopular? The Democrats. And that doesn't get. And, and very interestingly, Trump's political failures are not translating. It is not binary. They are not translating into success for the Democrats. The Democrats will come off of the midterm on a sugar high because it's a referendum on Trump and he. And he's low and they're going to win. But I would say, like the referendum in Virginia, the results should caution people, Trump's completely underwater in Virginia. He's sub 40% approval, and that referendum only passed by a couple of points. That should, like, sober people up. So I actually think the next two years are going to be very consequential because if you look back to, like, Trump in 2020, he's at his worst when his back is against the wall and he's cornered and politically threatened. And that's what the next two years are going to look like. So I think, you know, I'm not suggesting that's going to, like, lead to, like, bunch of stuff on education policy, but I think more generally, in terms of that political atmosphere in the country at large, it's going to be a lot of consequential things happening as a result.
- [79:38]
B
One real interesting parallel there is when you catch that sugar high and you overreact. You think The Republicans in 94 setting up Clinton to grab the middle in 96, or Republicans in 2010, kind of positioning Obama to get his feet back after Affordable Care Act. Trump's out in 28. So even if Democrats kind of fundamentally misplay their hand, we're going to see a dynamic that's unusual because, you know, it's not going to position Trump to do anything with it. You know, it'll shake up what happens in 28, maybe, but that's a different story.
- [80:14]
C
Yeah, the 2028 election will be very different than the 2026 election. And that'll. You may be right, but it may also be that you get someone who's a real torch carrier for MAGA and, you know, and Trump's, you know, involved in various ways. I think there's, I think there's a lot of baseball to be played there. And I'd be, I'd be, I think, I think the people who think the bidding is just between Rubio and Vance are probably missing broader changes over there. And the Democrats are going to have a huge conversation about what they look like going forward. And you've got Democrats across the spectrum who are going to jump in. That's going to be a very lively political conversation in that primary.
- [80:51]
B
Donald Trump Jr. In 28, baby.
- [80:54]
A
We live in interesting times. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on the Report Card to talk about them.
- [80:59]
C
Thanks for having us, Nat, it's great to see you.
- [81:01]
B
Good to be with both you guys.
- [81:03]
A
Thanks for listening to the Report Card with Nat Malkus. And special thanks to our guests Andy Rotherham and Rick Hess. Thanks also to our producer, producer Ellie Lucas. He makes this podcast possible. That's all for this episode. I'm Nat Malkins.
- [81:37]
B
It.