Vol 38 – Derrell’s Mom Got There First: Unpacking The Nikole Hannah-Jones Article

Jed Wallace 0:00

Hey Andy,

Andy Rotherham 0:02

Hey Jed, how are you?

Jed Wallace 0:04

I'm doing pretty good, doing pretty good. You know, you're looking darn, you know, respectable. I think— hey Derrell, nice to have you here. I think we have 3 collared shirts. Is that a collared— that's a collared shirt, right?

Derrell Bradford 0:13

No, no, it's a fake collar.

Jed Wallace 0:16

Ah, okay, well good.

Derrell Bradford 0:16

It's the warm-up, but the vest has a collar.

Jed Wallace 0:17

Well then, all right, well

Andy Rotherham 0:19

Whatever it is, whatever it is, you can bet it's fashion forward because we today, our guest who we will introduce here in a second, if you're watching this, you can already see him. Well, it's Derrell Bradford off of 50CAN, but who is the best dressed person in the know, in the know business, like always fashion forward. So whatever he's wearing, everybody be wearing next year at this time.

Derrell Bradford 0:43

Yeah, the feathers are a great way to cover up for my lack of substance. Thank you for the invitation, to both of you though.

Jed Wallace 0:52

It's great to have you here. Great to have you here. Key moment. And you both— you guys improvised. I know you guys had other things going on today. And so I appreciate you taking time. We're recording this on Monday, the 28th. A lot of stuff is breaking so quickly that I think it's worth saying when exactly we're doing this. But I mean, I want to drive straight in, dive straight into this, you know, Nikole Hannah-Jones piece and see what your guys' thoughts are about it. It's been fun to swap a few emails and get a little bit of a preview. I think a lot of people have been doing a great job of summarizing where everybody is. But you know, hearing from where you guys are would be— it would just be great to start with.

Andy Rotherham 1:39

And before we do that, real quick, you're listening to the WonkyFolk podcast with Jed Wallace from CharterFolk, Andy Rotherham from Eduwonk and Bellwether. Our guest today is Derrell Bradford. There's a gap between the number of people who listen to this podcast on the various platforms that you can listen to it and the number of people who like and subscribe. So if you would like and subscribe, that helps us with the mysterious algorithms we've been told by our producer. We appreciate everybody who listens, but you can go ahead and sign up. And Derrell, yeah, really glad you took some time. I know this is a busy day for you, took a little time out. Now, it was a busy day for you before the nor'easter hit your town, so appreciate you taking a little time out to discuss this with us because it was an important article just in the sense of everybody talked about it. Like, you know, all you had to say is, what'd you think of the article? It didn't even need like any modifier. Everybody was talking about it.

Derrell Bradford 2:30

Yeah, I mean, just for starters, I want you to know that the nor'easter is my favorite sort of like fall/winter weather pattern, assuming I don't have to go anywhere. So when you just sort of look outside, you're like, oh, this is great, you know. Yeah, I mean, it's like, you know, it's a lot. All right, so 6:30 I think is what it is, Sunday morning, I'm waking up trying to see what's coming on in the Nations League, or whatever it is. I go to the New York Times, I see this story there, I'm like, oh shit, I gotta read this, you know, like right now. And I had, you know, blown it up in like the next, you know, half an hour basically, because I had to, read it, and then I had to send it to all the people that I thought needed to see it. I had the first mover advantage. And I would just say that like a couple of things. The first thing was, and you know, my, I sort of talk about this a lot, but you know, my mother is a bit of a texting neophyte, but I sent her this article, not even knowing whether or not she would be able to click on it to open it up. And the following text was, Thank you for not doing this to me. Right?

Andy Rotherham 3:45

Wait, was that— hang on, hang on— was that her to you, thank you for not writing an article about how much you hate her, or was that— was that you to her thanking her for the school choices she made?

Derrell Bradford 3:49

No, touché, touché.

Andy Rotherham 3:54

You got it.

Derrell Bradford 3:54

That's right, she's the singer, I'm the writer.

Andy Rotherham 3:55

In the context of this article, you got to be, you got to be clear. All right, all right.

Derrell Bradford 4:01

No, you know, it's a school choice thing. I mean, I think, you know, for anybody who knows me, like, you know, I grew up in Southwest Baltimore, the first school I went to was the only school I was ever zoned for. You know, I remember family members talking about whose address we would use so I could go to the school I wasn't zoned for. I went to— every other public school I ever went to was one I was not zoned for, including sort of like the wealthiest one possible, which is just the worst one for me in terms of fit. And then I went to— an independent all-boys Episcopalian day school on a scholarship from 7 to 12. I didn't realize this until I was an adult. You know, I was integrating the school. I was the only Black kid in my class for 3 years when I was in high school. You know, I played football and lacrosse there, like, learned I like to sing, learned I like to write, went to Dartmouth, played lacrosse there, transferred to Penn, rowed crew there, right? So it's like the— You know, when I talk about this stuff from like a— I know I'm talking from a policy standpoint, but, you know, like I lived it, right? So it is very kind of close in terms of like what my decision-making is like. And so I see this piece come up. And of course, for anybody who had not read the original, you know, a decade ago, I guess at this point is when it was, when the first one came out, we used to teach it to our fellows in one of our fellowships. You know, it was difficult not to just immediately, like, jam them together. And I will say this one thing, which I think is important, and then we can kind of get into it. You know, and here I won't be charitable. The second story has so much detail that in thinking about it, I was like, the intent must have always been to write the second story. Which was incredibly frustrating, right, because it lacked the spontaneity of a revelation and instead, like, featured the detail of something that is chronicled and expected. And you can only look at this whole thing and be like, you know, Nikole Hannah-Jones ignored everything that the three of us and all of our colleagues have been talking about for the last 30 years, right, like the key, institutional arrangements, inertia, and dysfunction of the American, you know, sort of urban education system most acutely, particularly in big districts, but really the system overall and what it does to people with limited political capital and finance, and in some cases to people with a lot of both of those things, in the case of Ms. Hannah-Jones, which might be the most interesting part of this whole thing.

Andy Rotherham 6:50

You just said something really interesting that I had not thought about. One thing I do want to talk about is the timeline, because I do think it is interesting and worth talking about that she was still like making statements about her ability to move things and change and like all this once clearly, according to the latest article, things weren't necessarily going so well.

Jed Wallace 7:09

Yeah.

Andy Rotherham 7:09

And so there is a little bit of like, what is your responsibility if you're going to go down this road as a public intellectual to be transparent? But it's interesting, you just said, like, so you use this article, the original one, the one she wrote 10 years ago, and that strikes me as interesting only because, like, I got to be honest, when this article came out, I had forgotten about the first one, and my reaction was all these people, like, if she— and I think this is actually to her credit that she wrote the second one, because I think if she hadn't, I don't think— you have to be a pretty serious Nikole Hannah-Jones hater to, like, remember the first article and be, like, clocking this and what's happening. I had totally forgotten about it, right? And I do this professionally. And it is just— and so when she wrote the second one, I was like, oh yes, I remember that first article, I remember that. But I had not— I hadn't thought about the article in probably 10 years. And so I thought it was actually to her credit in the sense that, like, she could have just quietly put her kid in a better situation, she could have said nothing. And I think, again, nobody would— most people would not remember except, like, the real obsessives. But it turns out you were using that original article, so You are keeping that current in your fellowship is what you're saying.

Derrell Bradford 8:17

Yeah, we haven't taught it in the last couple years, but it was important enough because even if you didn't— do not— did not agree with her take, right, which we can talk about, like what her end goal is for having this integrated system that she advocates for, even if you didn't agree with that, the trade-offs, the honest trade-offs, I will say, of the first article are important from a policymaking standpoint because they chronicle the challenges that families of all income levels with all kinds of like desires have when they are trying to match values and aspirations for their child, right? And so we, you know, we used to go through that because it's like, I mean, the underlying thing is different people want different things, you know, like, and I'm like, hands down, whatever, like I, you know, respect that greatly. I think the thing that we always pushed on our fellows was, and this has become a real point of contention, I think, in the current discussion, is what role you have to securing the best opportunity for your child versus what obligation you have to sacrifice that in the name of some other good, right? And whether or not other people should be as enlisted in that trade-off, which was hers, as much as you are. And the first piece is a good kind of opening stanza to that.

Andy Rotherham 9:50

And we should talk more about that because I do think there's some interesting stuff there. And I also want to talk— there is this, like, one of the things when we can talk about is like there's this— I've heard a lot of discussion about this that's almost like single voice. Here's how people are supposed to think about this. And to her credit, I listened to her give an interview. I don't know how many interviews she's done on this, but she did one with Michael Harriot. I think I'm saying his name right, Harriot, on his podcast. And she talked about sort of how she's been struck by some of the dissidents in the Black community about this. But if you listen on Twitter, it's like there's no room for dissidents. It's this sort of one voice. Approach to this. So I think there's a lot to unpack. One thing I want to throw on the table, I thought the most interesting observation about kind of hidden in plain sight, it kind of hit me over the head, is this past weekend I was listening to the Reason Roundtable podcast. It's Reason Magazine, Reason Foundation. They do a lot of work in education, their podcast. And Nick Gillespie had this observation that I thought was really interesting. I see you nodding your head. You may have heard it, Derrell. He was like, as a piece of sort of commentary and writing and literature, this is a very compelling article, compelling piece of journalism, which obviously is evidenced by everyone's talking about it.

100%.

But then he was like, as a piece of policy analysis, it was really weak. And I think like I intuited that in what I wrote about it. I was like, this is— it was interesting she wrote it and kind of admirable, but like here are a whole bunch of problems, like if you look at it from a policy perspective. But he like— he was the first person I saw to sort of say that people are approaching this from two very— and depending which of those perspectives you approach it from, you're going to end up in a different place. And I think a lot of us jump to the policy place, whereas other people are just experiencing it as like a powerful first-person testimonial.

Yeah, I mean, whenever I've written kind of like 1.5 things, the other thing is in edits right now, about Nikole Hannah-Jones, her takes on education. And the opening paragraph is always something like, Ms. Hannah-Jones is a talented writer.

Yeah.

Which is kind of like the, you know, if you fancy yourself a writer, I mean, like, you got to call it out when you see it, right? And she does spin a wonderful yarn. And, you know, my challenge is that from a policy standpoint, she either ignores the solutions or elides them, right? Which is kind of a thing.

Oh, I think I would actually— I'll go further. I would say in some case I think willfully misrepresents.

Yeah.

Like on this podcast recently, I was just telling you about that she was talking— she talked about No Child Left Behind, and she talked about how it, like, took resources away from schools and so forth. No mention that at that point— this is obviously pre-Great Recession, pre-COVID— but at that point when it was passed, that was the largest one-time increase in federal spending on schools. And she likewise uses school finance statistics that don't really— in the current article when we're talking— they don't really tell the whole story. That school is spending over $50 thousand a kid. But you would search in vain to see that. And she uses a statistic that doesn't really account for federal transfers and doesn't give sort of the whole context around what's happening on school finance. And so I think like, I think that if you, that is a problem. Like I, when I read that article, part of it, my takeaway was like, this is a classic case of everyone's entitled to their own opinions. There's a lot of room for, I think, for real honest disagreement here, but everyone's not entitled to their own facts.

Yeah, two quick things, and I'll get back to the first quick thing, but the second one is like, so as the former board chair of the ghost of EdBuild, from where that— from where the $23 billion number came from, I remember talking to Rebecca about that study and being— yeah, yeah.

And this is Rebecca Sibilia who runs— okay, yeah.

And, you know, in the way that only a board chair can, and being like, listen, you're saying that there's enough money out there and it's just in a wrong place. I said, what's going to be said is that you owe me $23 billion. And that was what the message came out as. So I just want to highlight that. The other thing, though, you skipped over, and it's really important, Andy, right? She's catching hell from Black people because Black people care about their kids.

Yeah.

Okay? And like, the best thing about this, other than the fact that like broadly, like, two things. People are giving her hell about this because Americans don't want to see a child's potential held cheap. Right? And you could argue that the best thing about this entire thing is that people are like, I can't believe you did that, because they value her daughter's potential more than she values her own values. Right? And so that is presenting itself, I think, in a way that is good, especially given what the pandemic and school closings, whatever, kind of say about who we are as a nation and what we think about our kids. Right? So I just want to, like—

This is the single voice thing though, too, right? Like, a majority of Black people in this country support school choice. They support— like, there is— like, I think part of the problem is a big part of Hannah-Jones's audience is actually white progressives who really enjoy reading her stuff.

Right.

That's why this one reason this stuff gets so many clicks and all of that. And so there's a little bit of a conundrum there, and they are in some ways the obstacle to this because they're standing in the way of this demand for greater choice, greater options. And the people shouldn't have to have this face the choice that, that Hannah-Jones and her family did, and that too many families face as they try to navigate where they're going to put their kids in school.

Well, Andy, I am glad you heard that at a cocktail party I am not invited to. So—

What? Well, I mean, I think there are different ways to talk about single voices. There are ways to talk about single issues, single trade-offs. I think the thing that's just really interesting about the way she presented this was the different cognitive dissonances. Andy, you and I have talked a lot about it, the cognitive dissonance of your kid's in a lousy school and I'm a good parent. How do you reconcile those things?

Right.

The other piece that I think many of us also contend with is, I got my kid into a school that is good, that I know other families couldn't get their kids into, and I'm being a good citizen. And that tension, you know, about how we can, like, strive for something good for our own kids and for others, because I think in the cognitive dissonance on the second side, what happens is a lot of people start downplaying how unfair the public education system is. And, you know, I have to have that conversation with people over and over and over again. The presumption that if you're public, there's something noble about it from its first standpoint. And I think it's because we handle that second cognitive dissonance incorrectly, or we just simply— and the thing that I think is just interesting about the way that Hannah-Jones did this, her presumption, if you have to weigh those two things, it's, I'm going to be a social justice warrior first, and then to the extent that I can help my kid within that framework, I will. Whereas other people typically, and certainly this is what we did in our family, which was, hey, our kids have got to get a great education. Our kids have got to get a great education, but this system is terribly, terribly unfair. Can we find some that are both good by all kids and by our own? And I just hope that this is going to be a moment when we start talking about the two cognitive dissonances that we have, and can we keep both of these in our minds? But another possibility is this doesn't make any damn bit of a difference anyway. 10 years from now, we'll be remembering this one as much as we seem to remember the one that came 10 years ago.

Well, I remember the one 10 years ago.

I mean,

You didn't.

Yeah, Derrell will be teaching this one too.

Andy was like, what happened 10 years ago? Jed, though, I really appreciate where you're coming from. And you and Andy said this, and to me this is an and thing. Right? Like, I've, you know, this is a rare instance where I will quote my own tweet. You know, it's a mistake to build public policy that requires people not to act in the best interest of their own children. But so I want every family to secure the best education for their own child, right? That meets their values, meets the child's expectations, and all these other things. But to Andy's point, the work of ed reform has been about the and the whole time, right? Like, so about expanding the and, right? About proving that there can be this and more, right? Like, and is the key conjunction here, right? And so this is why the piece, again, to Andy's point, is so frustrating, because it's not like Success Academy, Achievement First, Uncommon Schools, KIPP, all these other places aren't a 30-second walk away from PS 307. Right? So the idea that you would want this thing and willfully ignore its current incarnation because you don't agree with the policy levers that helped bring it into existence is incredibly troubling and difficult to countenance. Like, this is a rare instance where you're saying, hey, here's the solution, and it's scaled already, right? And there are lots of examples of how more people could get it, could do it, versus saying, hey, we got this thing on paper, and we think that maybe in 15 years, there are going to be better opportunities for the 63 thousand Black families who swapped their neighborhood assigned school for charter schools over the last decade in New York City.

Yeah. I mean, the thing I think about as far as timing goes, twenty sixteen to now, I just— and maybe to a fault, I write about twenty sixteen over and over again. People talk about the Trump election and then that— how that re-engineers where we have to present ourselves on these choice issues and other education reform issues. But the other one is the defeat of Question 2 in Massachusetts, where I think the NEA discovered its new approach.

Yeah.

And then in twenty seventeen, new policy agenda, and then the gauntlet being thrown down at Gavin Newsom and Biden, and they all fell for it. And twenty sixteen has turned out to be a watershed year. That doesn't necessarily think— make the article A watershed article. I think it's really a subtext, but it was very much of that moment of the milieu. This is what people with their values in the right order from a left perspective think about. And they do kind of fit together. And so what I wonder is whether this next article 10 years later might fit into something different from a policy framework as well. I mean, I also feel like I'm being hopelessly naive, and I've been through this 1 thousand different times. Well, how can you even utter something like that? I'm curious what both of you guys think. Is this going to be a moment that we identify as one where change, you know, happened?

I think she makes the problem worse, actually. And look, a lot of things happen after twenty sixteen too, so I feel like also you gotta be really careful what you ascribe to these articles and what they like. But like, I think she inadvertently— I don't think she realizes it, but the way she describes these things, she actually gives cover to an unacceptable status quo. First of all, no one's going to read that article and then be like, oh, I want to try to do change here. So the very sort of people of, you know, getting out of the system that she decries, all she does is encourage that.

Well said.

And then she doesn't— I mean, like, the fact that school has a teacher's adult-to-kid ratio of less than 10 to 1 and apparently can't, like, run an orderly cafeteria, any kind of semblance of, like, discipline and all, and let alone learning— like, she should be— she's like, she was startlingly, to me, incurious about all of that. And there are reasons for that. There's a, there's a teacher's contract, there's a that is then— you can argue it's endogenous. Did it create a bad culture in the school, or is the bad culture the result of the teachers' contract? Either way, it is a fixable thing. And to your point, Jed, you don't have to— if you want to see it fixed, you don't have to go to Finland or England. You can walk down the street and find schools where it's been fixed. And so I think she inadvertently does it. I think she thinks she is helping. I think she actually does a disservice. She allows all these conservatives to dunk on her. And honestly, like, one of the most frustrating things— you watch this, you get this sort of like almost racial and socioeconomic determinism that you get it on both the right and the left, and she fuels it. And these people sort of agree with each other. They'd be horrified to hear that, both sides, but they sort of agree. And I think she fuels that in some really really unproductive ways. And I think a better article would have been What are some of the things we can do here? And she may not have wanted to get into that. I think one of the interesting choices the Times made that I actually— I'm very surprised by is her husband has a role in the school system and that wasn't disclosed. And there may be a bunch of reasons for that. I heard from some people inside the school system that he's not going to win any popularity contests. And so that may be a reason, but— or that may be why she didn't get into the policy stuff, because she would have had to disclose that. But there's a set of choices there. But that's the part of the article that's missing is, like, a serious analysis of, like, what could change. This is not an immutable inherent state of affairs in PS 307. This is a result of a whole bunch of choices.

Yeah, I want to— that's really well said. There's lots of well-said on this thing from you guys. So I don't want to skip over what Jed said in the beginning because I think this really matters. Michael Hartney, who I think you may know as professor at Boston College, did a podcast on this recently. I wrote this paper for PEPG called Markets and Monopolies, and in it there's a little subchapter called The Bad Bet. And the bad bet is what Democrats have done on education policy basically over the last 12 or 13 years, right? It starts with the— the collision of Common Core and teacher eval, right, blows up. We get ESSA, which like limps across the finish line. Trump one happens. And at that point, though I was no part of this discussion, I think the national Democrats are like, we need the unions back on sides so that we don't do this again. And the cost of that was abdicating the education positions we've been working on through like the neoliberal era of the aughts and NCLB, right? And then COVID happens, and then the news gets so bad that people don't even wanna see it anymore. And now we kind of are where we are, where like the Democrats don't have a rational education policy playbook anymore really. To the extent that we do, it is driven by animus. I can't believe those guys in Mississippi are kicking our asses. Wow. We really have to— well, how can we stomach this? Right. I mean, it's terrible.

Yeah.

I'm keeping it real. Right. And to Hartney's point, you know, the UFT, who seemingly does not care that Nikole Hannah-Jones has a Pulitzer and the NEA are together in fighting for democracy. And the polling shows that even as the opinion of the American public education apparatus is racing to the bottom, led by Democrats, Democrats are willing to abdicate the pedagogical responsibility for the political activism right now. So this is like a worse, worse, worse case scenario.

Even worse. And the political activism, they did get them back on sides. So we had the teachers unions with the Dems in twenty twenty-four, and they still lost.

Right, and we still lost. It's still lost.

Yeah.

Right?

That's right, that's right.

Like, so it's also like, you, American politics turn, interest groups matter, but they also turn on some different stuff sometimes. And the Democrats did such a poor job between twenty twenty and twenty twenty-four that the Ameri— you know, some of the American people decided to give the keys back to this guy, which is, it should occasion like no end of, apparently hasn't, but should occasion no end of soul searching about like why that is, because it's bananas.

Yeah, wait,

Well, if we look at like responses from the status quo, and I don't want to overweight on these, but Weingarten had a very just terse, you know, Facebook post.

But before you even got that tweet, that tweet is an arsonist, right, with a, with a flare lit and a can of kerosene being like, what happened here?

I

So I just want to, I just want to say that before you continue.

Just think they're nothingburger responses. They're just, oh, we can wait this thing out. Oh, isn't this sad? And then let's just get on to whatever happens next. But I think it's interesting, the New York Times this morning has an article by 3 authors that says 30 ideas for fixing our public schools, which seems like a natural follow-up to Hannah-Jones here. The thing that I find so interesting is, of the 30 ideas, growing charter schools was not one of the 30.

Which is bonkers, which is bonkers.

Not one. So, so, I mean, I mean, and vouchers, you know, that of course they make a 2x2 matrix and they say vouchers are like, you know, so expensive and not effective, and then they talk science of reading, all this other stuff. But literally, for charter schools, they said at the end of the article, we also solicited ideas from our experts about a few ideas that we left off the list, and a couple mentioned charter schools. I was like, I— but I put a lot of this— I bring this back to Derrell, your say it loud thing. We've had a decade of our world just not saying it loud.

Very fair.

We just have not said it loud. And when we don't say it loud, then we start from zero in terms of what are the policy ideas. And I'm sorry, I put much more of this on ourselves than I do at this point. But I don't know, Derrell, what do you think about that, being the author of Say It Loud and all that, right?

No, I think, you know, again, right, like, I think the ed reformers' heart is a passionate but convivial one, right? And because we have the minority position historically, not just in terms of like fewer people thinking or have experience for it, but because it is a lens that is primarily leveraged to help minorities attain the American educational promise, right? I mean, that's kind of the, you know, the start of all of this. We've approached this discussion as one of a big tent that is welcoming and thus includes concessions. I think the truth of it is there's some things which you shouldn't concede on. We should not have conceded on, right? And instead of trying to sort of like, you know, explain to your, you know, captor why you're a good actor, you know, you have to stand on your principles. And I'm not sure how to sort of like re-roll that out now. You know, like I think one of the challenges to this is like the, you know, in the Hirschian way, the body of knowledge the three of us are building from to even have this conversation, does not exist at the entry level, you know, of the ed policy movement, right? Like, people don't know why we make the decisions we make and all these other things.

Yeah.

I was writing this thing this weekend, you know, you might not know this. I mean, obviously I talk about private schools and charter schools, you know, all the time. I went back and I visited the history of a private school in Newark that had, well, you know, educated Black kids in Newark forever. That had converted to charter, right? And I'd given a speech at this school. And so in going back to look at the history of the school, I found out that there are two people who had been principals at that school who went off and started no less than North Star Academy and DSST, right? I mean, even I didn't know that, right? I had to call Bill Kurtz. I was like, "What's up, dog? I didn't know you were Newark." He was like, "I love the Brick City," right? So I just— You know, that's really important if you want to be pointing to a North Star without destroying your strong foundations. And this knowledge does not exist at the front end of our pipeline for the next people who take on this challenge after we do. And our ability to say it loud is imperiled because of that.

Coleman Hughes wrote a piece that kind of got at this. I thought it was an interesting take on the whole you know, I tried to read as many sort of secondary takes on the article. And I think we should know one of the things I do think we should point out about the discourse around this, it was stunning to me how many people, including many people in our community and some of our colleagues who had lots to say about this, but clearly hadn't even actually read the article. Like, I heard people say stuff like, I can't believe she didn't say this. And it's like, well, actually, she had a paragraph on that. You know, like, it was— it was— these things take on a life of their own. But some of the secondary analysis was very good. I thought Coleman Hughes's point was really important, where he just simply said, look, he goes, there's this idea that, like, we've, we've never tried this and would it work. He's like, actually, we have tried this, and when we've tried it, it's actually generally worked. Pretty well, and yet somehow, like, we refuse to learn from that. He cites some research that Roland Fryer had done, but there's other examples. I was just in Indianapolis last week, and I was there before the test scores got released, but at the end of the week, again, the charter sector there was turning in some noteworthy results.

They're doing a great job.

And we've been doing— I've been involved in Indianapolis episodically throughout my career, and we've got some work coming out of that soon from Bellwether. The other thing that struck me is I spent some time hanging around some schools, and you've got this system, and you've got some very strict teacher-focused schools. I wouldn't say they're necessarily no excuses, but they are— there is a strong instructional program. They use data, they use time, and teachers there are part of a system, and they talk about that. That actually attracts them to working there, but it's a different style. Then you've also got like project-based schools, and there was one school in particular I spent some time at that, in addition to just a beautiful physical space, their approach with kids is sort of highly progressive. And they both live under the same umbrella, right? And this is exactly what I would think someone like Hannah-Jones would want. By the way, these schools were both very integrated. They were, they were what we would want to see in terms of lots of different kinds of kids, socioeconomically, racially integrated. And they all live under the same umbrella, which is the charter plan in Indy has given birth to all this, and it gives parents real choice about like, okay, what kind of experience do I actually want for my kids? And I think that's like, if her goal is that affluent powerful people should have these things that everybody should have, like, that's a model for what that actually looks like. And I happen to completely agree with that. I think like your choice shouldn't be a lousy public school that hasn't served you well and like one kind of charter school. It should be like the kind of options that affluent people take for granted, like, what is going to be the best fit for my kid and what they want.

It's really interesting. So I'm very supportive of what's going on in the innovation sector in Indy. And, you know, for your listeners who haven't dialed in, they should look at this new sort of transportation facilities authority they have set up, which is like a very cutting edge, if wonky, way to think about how to lower competition between sectors in a more market-oriented collaborative relationship. So just kind of like, you know, throwing it out there. You know, I do think one of the challenges for, you know, Ms. Hannah-Jones' piece is a challenge of New York Times writers that I sort of like get at all the time. So, you know, we have the office subscription, so I read The Athletic because you guys know I like footy. And the— I'm convinced that like most of the writers at The Athletic don't really care about sports at all, right? They care about other stuff. And sports is just the place where they come to write about the things that they care about. And in the end, you know, Ms. Hannah-Jones is not an education expert. You know, it's like I feel like we've given her the deference of being an education policy expert because she describes the problems incredibly well. But her end goal is a societal one grounded in integration. Right. And that may even include, you know, not a view that everyone gets what affluent people want, but that everyone gets the same thing. Which is actually grounded in like a, you know, and I don't say this like a four-letter word, a kind of communist view of the ability of American public institutions to generate good things. And so if you think that engine is a scarcity engine, then the only things, the only levers you have left are to decide who gets them through the political process. And I think that is very much her position. Position. The Indianapolis example you just cited, right, or Newark, or, you know, New York and Massachusetts before the caps, or Texas, or any of these other things, these states and jurisdictions have taken precisely the opposite approach. They've said, where's the thing that we see that is in high demand and can we make more of it? Right. Which, you know, that's the no boundaries approach. Right. Like, you know, like residential boundaries are engines of scarcity, right? Which is one of the underlying discussions of PS 307 and that whole region in DUMBO, you know, in the city. So it's a very, like, I don't know, it's a cynical take, but it is also, and look, I respect people want America to be lots of different kinds of ways. I just think it's important that, like, in having a robust discussion about what is good for America's kids, we don't, we don't ignore that some people write about education as a way to accomplish other things. While the three of us are principally engaged in the work of improving education so that other things happen.

Right, and that's increasing though because schools are like the place where as we have fewer and fewer common sort of institutions, and as the rich essentially buy their way out of society in various ways, like schools are one of the last places where this sort of plays out.

Yeah.

And so that's why I think they've become such an engine for it. And I think that pressure is going to increase if these societal trends kind of continue on the path they're on.

I will also say that Indianapolis had new data released, the entire state of Indiana did, on Friday.

The iLearn stuff? Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, the regression analysis by predicted versus actual stuff, what it shows happening in Indianapolis, the percentage of students attending schools in the bottom 10th who attend district schools almost doubled. It's almost 40% of students in Indianapolis Public Schools, school, are attending schools performing in the bottom 10th. Predicted versus actual, and charter schools are just off the charts, you know, on the other side of things. And I was able to put that same basic regression analysis into the New York piece that I wrote about after Hannah-Jones' piece came out.

Wow.

And, you know, and it was, it was interesting, but it was interesting, you know, Jonathan Chait picked it up, or he commented on it, and so we had 5 thousand more visitors to the to the CharterFolk website last week than we typically have.

I read that. I read that piece.

Yeah.

And the mantra I had in my head writing the whole thing was empathy for her, empathy for her, empathy for her. And that's exactly where Chait went. And that results in this data getting in front of people. Somebody comes out then and attacks— you know, there was 1 thousand people that commented on, oh, this regression analysis is just statistical salad. But, you know, it then allows us to say, yeah, it may be statistical salad, But our efforts, you know, we can't in the moment say that these things are causal, but the results are better. And there are all these other results that have been studied over years that show that these things are causal. It's very likely causal in New York as well.

Yeah.

And I just feel like this mix, this mix of firm, you know, unapologetic, aggressive even on the policy side, but some kind of greater balance on the empathy side for the people. I think it's the only way for us to go forward such that the ideas that we have are actually heard. But I feel as back at square one on how to do that as ever. Derrell, are you learning anything?

Well, can we— before we get that, we have a moment, and just empathy for the kid.

Andy, are you learning anything? Yeah.

I think that has gotten a little bit lost, and all the people who want to dunk on Hannah-Jones because they don't like her— I mean, a lot of this is about priors and all that.

Yeah,

The kid clearly didn't have a great school experience, and I think like people forget, like, that's not like an article you tune in on, you know, for a day or two and talk about or do a podcast.

Life.

Like, that was that kid's like day-in, day-out reality for years was some level of a frustration, not understanding what was going on around them, their time being wasted, probably some sense of that if they couldn't like intellectualize it yet 'cause they were too young.

That's right, correct.

Like, that's like a horrible thing. And that's, I think, the person who really deserves empathy here. And like, that's, I think, why a lot of us come to work 'cause like you extrapolate that out, that is the experience of a lot of kids in this country. Your most precious thing in life is your time, and their time is just getting wasted year over year over year.

Yeah.

And you only get to be a kid once. I mean, I just, I don't want to, I want to be very sort of like careful about the word I use here because it is not pejorative.

Right, yeah.

It is meant to describe a role, right? But this is all very Shakespearean. And the jester character is the character who normally tells you the truth, right? Like that's the role. And the daughter is cast in this role, right? She is like, I am the person who is here to tell you what is really going on. And the question is whether or not the two, you know, the protagonists act on that information. So it is incredibly Shakespearean. Like, it could, you know, it could have been a tragedy. Like, in the, you know, on the upside, the daughter stunningly has the wherewithal to know that an intervention was necessary. And the parents, you know, by hook or by crook, can support that financially, you know, in a way that lots of other, you know, parents can't. I mean, honestly, that was part of the bet. If you go back to the original piece, she basically says, "Oh yeah, I knew the school was terrible, but I figured we could," we could hook it up, right? It was just like, and that did not work, you know, which I think is also incredibly telling in terms of like leverage and like inertia and actually how difficult it is to sort of move these institutions, absent the, like the finality of exit, which is like one of the things we've been talking about.

Yeah. Yeah, but here's the thing, man, like that— so that kid struggled still despite all that, if you— in the account in the article, and that kid had access to incredible social capital given who her parents are.

Right.

Like, think about then the average kid who does not have access to that and what's going on with them.

Correct. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I didn't miss any of that. And I would just say it's like, I don't know if there's any— like, I was writing this thing about this, and I was trying not to write what everybody else writes. You know, which is kind of like a hard thing. I normally like to chill when something happens. I'm like, nah, I gotta hang back.

Yeah.

It's tough to be like the first guy over the wall on things, you know. But, you know, one of my things here was like, All of these people, you know, who read the piece and who didn't, right, liberals and conservatives, like Republicans and Democrats, you know, whatever, have slammed her, slammed Nikole Hannah-Jones, for making this demonstrably, objectively awful decision for her daughter. No one has questioned her right to make it. And to me, like, just to your point, you know, Andy, so much of this work about school improvement or school choice in particular is about extending the same grace to families who maybe don't have the same social capital but who are just as committed and who are in many cases trying to make objectively better decisions for their kids than the schools that they are zoned into. And so I just don't want to, I don't want to lose that because if there was any big takeaway from this, it should be that.

Yeah, but that's an ugly feature of our politics now, which is like she judged people really harshly. And to her credit, she's acknowledged, maybe not as much as people might like, but she's acknowledged like, okay, like, yeah, this is maybe I, you know, it's now my turn in the barrel because of that.

Great.

But like, that's an ugly feature of our politics. She did that and she judged people making choices in the best interest of their kids or what they perceived as the best interest of their kids. And she judged them very harshly. I'm not sure it's useful to turn around then and just dunk on her. That's the ugly feature of our politics now is just this reactionary back and forth. And they kind of came out of the woodwork. There's a cadre of professional Nikole Hannah-Jones. She could declare that the sky is yellow and the sun's blue, and there's a bunch of people who defend her on that. Because that's just what they do. And likewise, she can make like the most obvious statements about things, a bunch of people are going to attack her because that's what they do. And that's a very— this is a very ugly, counterproductive feature of our, of our discourse right now.

Yeah.

How much do you chalk up to the vacuousness of the policy ideas that are out there in response to all this to our lack of policy ideas ourselves? I just— there's the silence over the last 10 years. I do think there's been silence, but no, I mean—

I think it's boredom, Jed. People like— I mean, we kind of know not everything. I never want to be heard to know we know everything that works. I think we need a much more robust— I've been for years saying we need to spend more on R&D, not less. The Trump administration should not be getting rid of IES. They should be restructured so we have a real national leadership agenda.

Yeah.

I'm there on all that. But also, that said, there are a bunch of things we know. There's a sector of charter schools that do a particular set of things and get really good results. Are they getting every kid through college or through post-secondary? Not yet, but they're, you know, multiples higher on the rates of kids going to college, finishing college, going to post-secondary, getting credentials. We know about reading and curriculum. That research is— the reading research, like, I know we have to characterize it as new. That's the way you got it, but like, That is not new research. Emily Hanford did just a tremendous job explaining all that.

Yeah.

But this was not like, you know, all like very recent research. This was research that George Bush used when he was governor of Texas. This is research that like, you know, goes back to, you know, direct instruction and so forth. Some of this stuff's a half century old. The results on accountability are like pretty clear that you need accountability. So it gets you a bump. The alchemy of all these things starting to work together. And then you throw in like doing a better job with teachers and you know, getting serious about teacher training and so forth. Like, so I think part of the problem is like boredom. It's like it's not interesting for people to keep saying these things. And so that's why we're so susceptible to the shiny thing. And I think that's one reason the sector kind of lost its mind for a little while, you know, sort of post, you know, twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen, ESSA on, where people were just kind of bored. And I think like that, I mean, I don't mean to be pejorative or glib, but I think, like, people, like, it's not that exciting to keep doing the same thing again and again. And so people, like, they chase after the shiny stuff. But we do have a fair degree of, like, we know, like, another podcast on this I'd recommend is Terrance Carroll has a podcast. He's the former speaker of the House in Colorado, was a charter school leader there, and he had Peter Groff on, who's done a bunch of stuff, including led the Alliance for Charter Schools.

Sure.

And Peter was a state senator there and led the state Senate. And I think both of them— Peter, I don't know if he was first. Terrance, I think, was first. But both pioneering African American politicians there who, unfortunately, because Colorado has term limits, they couldn't persist.

Yeah.

But two really great politicians and public servants there. And just listening to them talk about this, they're like, man, we were doing this stuff. Here's what we were doing almost two decades ago. I just think there's a fatigue, and it's like, It's 3 yards in a cloud of dust, and that is not as interesting as, oh my God, the future of learning, and this is going to be like— that's like, that gets everybody, you know, it— that hits like a lot of these people like right in the erogenous zone rather than just like, you just gotta like keep doing this. As some ways uninteresting as that is, it's about implementation, it's about politics. Anyway, that's my, that's my theory of the, of the case.

Yeah. Listen, I don't think you're entirely wrong. I would like to spin this a little differently though. There are two things that are kind of, two desires, or two things happening at the same time, right? So like, so there's physics, right? There's the laws of acceleration, electromagnetism, you know, all these other things. And they describe how the world works. Operates, right? And that is like the base work, you know, like the things we know, right? They're the conditions that describe, you know, life or whatever, right? Apple falls out of a tree, high-performing charter school, good authorizer, right? And then there is the super collider, right? Or like you know, artificial intelligence or, you know, or any of these other things, right? Which are the most cutting-edge expression of those same principles. And we are caught between those two things right now, right? So we have, like, to your point, this playbook of the understood. And, you know, I think in particular with the AI stuff, yo, like, what's antiquated is new again. Right? Like, I find myself, you know, in a rare moment of Ludditehood, being like, y'all need some books, right? I mean, some paper. You know, here's a pen, right? Write some shit down, right? I mean, like, whatever that is, it seems like the more arcane some of these tools are, the better we learn from that, right? I think it's a mistake to ignore that, right? But I highlight that to say that, like, Many of the successes feel like they're in the antiquated bucket, while people want to get excited about the new hotness, like the Will Smith old and busted new hotness, right, from— right? So I just want to— I think that's a natural tension. I think the challenge with the new stuff is that, you know, it requires us to revisit the borders between sectors, the kind of finance we use to go there, the way we measure these things, right?

Right, here we go, here we go, there we go.

Like how we describe success, all of it. And that's actually new and very— at least this is what the whole federal tax credit thing— I show up and talk to people about that. It's very interesting, right? It's a new set of problems. Like some of us weren't there when the first charter school was founded, you know? So it's not that we can't do it. We have to allow ourselves to do it alongside championing things that have historically done right by kids.

Yeah, it's well said.

Well, Derrell, you got me.

And I think some of this is how do you expand these things, and that's new levers, new ways of doing finance and so forth. I think that, that's, as you said, a lot of well said, but that's what— that's well put, Derrell.

Yeah, because I think you got us like halfway there, Derrell, because I'm sorry, Andy, I just don't I don't think the rehashing of the ideas that you've talked about is the heart of the matter. You're absolutely right. People grow bored of that stuff, glaze over. But no one has tried what Indianapolis has tried when we all know that's the— exactly.

Except Indianapolis, right? Right.

Right,

They've done it. And look what's happened.

But they're doing this. But these schools, Jed, my point is, in these— you go into these schools, they're not doing like revolutionary new stuff. They're doing stuff we know how to do. They're doing it very well and at a high level.

At a high level, right?

Exactly, but what the

Yeah, but they're not like— they're not— I mean, I think there's this idea that like, you don't walk in, the kids aren't like bending spoons with their mind. They're not doing like future of learning. They're just teaching really well and teaching in some different ways. Like, some of these schools, again, are very project-based. I was in one that's all, you know, you can imagine, this one really got me. It's all outdoor-oriented. There's a stream that runs behind. The kids are out there getting muddy and they're

Yeah. Did you see that piece about the Mountain School in the Wall Street Journal two weeks ago?

Running. Yeah, look, I mean, that's, that stuff I love.

Yeah.

Like, that's great. Get kids outside, get them muddy. They literally tell parents, if you send their kid to this school, they're probably going to come home muddy a lot of days. If that's a problem for you should like think about that. This is a choice. But they're not doing like— they're just doing things well.

Yeah, I hear you, and we want schools that do that. What we have in Indianapolis is a construct, a context within which those things can be done.

Yes, exactly.

And we don't have that everywhere else, and we're going silent on that. And I don't think we have very good ideas about that. And like what Hannah-Jones brings up, there are things that are unfair in our public education system that I don't think we've ever really taken a run at. And I think we know that if we take a full-on charge into the buzzsaw, people with affluence and having nice things for their kids, they're going to find a way to keep it, right? But I do believe there are ways for us to make incremental progress on this stuff that we're not bringing up, that we're not bringing up. And we know what they are.

Right. But that's politics though. I think that's what you got to disentangle here. That's politics. I mean, that was the reading problem. It wasn't like this reading research didn't exist. It's politically people, we created the Democratic way to teach reading and a Republican way to teach reading.

Right.

You had people who are like, I think how you create knowledge is really important. Rather than like, there's actually a lot of evidence here about how we ought to train teachers to teach reading.

Yep.

So I think we want to be very cautious about conflating craft and so forth with what you're talking about, Jed, which is politics. I mean, what they did in Indianapolis, which makes it really remarkable— and again, I'll preview this. We got some stuff coming from Bellwether soon on this— is it didn't take a storm. It didn't take a bankruptcy. Any of these horrible things you wouldn't wish on a community. It was just people deciding, hey, like, we got to make the schools better, and Republicans and Democrats working together to do that. Like, it's po— and that's why I think, again, people— I think they— people don't want to look into the abyss and be like, maybe this is in large part at this point a big political problem.

Yeah, I hear you. I'm with you. I'm with you. And I feel like it's It's not just political, it's context. It's a political fight to get to a context within which, you know, better practice can be there.

Yeah.

But also, I mean, I think if we just got onto a whiteboard and spent, you know, 2 hours and said, okay, we've landed, you know, in the United States here, and we have this history of redlining and unfairness and blah, blah, blah, how would we start to erase these things over time? Or it's like, Derrell, I mean, you're the chair of the board on— Open for All— Tim's—

Yeah, Available to All. Yeah.

But like, what policies? I mean, there's some really great publications that are coming out of that.

But come on, Jed, let's be honest. If an alien landed right now and wanted to do that exercise, they would look at the two parties and they'd be like, why does one party want to keep all the kids locked in these schools that don't work? And why does the other party not want to measure anything to see if anyone's learning anything. Like, and they'd be like, what is— like, you know, and then they'd probably leave because they'd be like, this is like pretty fucked up. Like, but this is like— I mean, this is, this is, this is, this is political.

Yeah, I hear you, but I, but I'm like, I just don't think that it takes that much imagination for us to say that a school that's demonstrating those kinds of behaviors that Hannah-Jones' daughter was subjected to shouldn't have some form of accountability.

That's fair, it's very fair.

Yeah,

And we can propose what that accountability is, and we won't do it.

No, well, yeah,

And you can say it's because we want to be convivial, Derrell. I think it's because we lack courage. We know what's going to come against us, and so we shut up about it.

Yeah, Well, we lack courage and people lack exit. Like, I mean, a little bit, one way to think about her whole thing is this was like, you know, she decided to like live out the exit, voice, and loyalty experiment with her, with her daughter, and like it turns out voice doesn't get you and Like, I would be very interested to know how many parents— like, a good thing for a reporter to do would be to actually go to that school, hang out, talk to a lot of those parents, and how many of them, if they had an ability to exit, would like to.

We're doing that.

Like, one of the, one of the things that drives me a little nuts about this, everybody's like, controlled choice, controlled choice. That's an oxymoron, right? Like, and how many of those parents aren't real happy with having their choices controlled?

I would just say two things, two quick things about this. One is that, like, you know, in reading what Nikole Hannah-Jones is trying to get for her daughter, right, I'm sitting there and I'm kind of like, this is— you've gone from the objective pursuit of a very strong school to the subjective pursuit of your own perfect values-aligned utopia, right? And both of those things require trade-offs, but don't act like they're the same thing, right? She's sort of acting like the threshold now is the belonging utopia, right? And that's what everybody should be going for. So I just think That's kind of an important thing to tease out. The second thing I would just say is like, you know, look, like the market speaks, right? And there are more families in America in one of these alternatives to the residential— residentially assigned school, right? You go to a charter school, you get an ESA, you get a refundable tax credit. You're in a state that's opted into the federal tax credit, you know, whatever, you got any of these things, right? You're in an open enrollment program, 1.6 million kids in America in open enrollment, whatever. There's a point where there are enough people doing that you gotta be like, all right, let's see what happens, right? And I do think we have a Scale lever now, right, which says nothing of homeschooling, the microschool stuff, and all these other things, We have a scale lever now that I don't think we've ever had, in a way to be like, all right, what new might happen given all these people, all this capital, all this opportunity? Like, what are these things? And I would just say I'm excited to have that be like a new kind of breakfront on this discussion.

Hey, that sounds like a great place to wrap this up. A moment of optimism, some hope for what comes next.

Yeah.

Andy, do you have another thing you wanted to throw in here to wrap it up?

I just think, like, the optimism point, I'll just, like, I don't understand when I bump into people in this sector, and you bump into them pretty frequently. I was just talking about this on Karen Nussle's podcast, like, who are like, oh, nothing works. It's like, then why do you work here? Like, good, you go, like, I don't understand how you can work in the sector, not be fundamentally optimistic, because, like, why otherwise, why would you do it? Like, I do, I mean, I believe progress is possible. We can do a lot better. We can serve kids at much more scale, much better. Otherwise, like, you know, the world contains multitudes. Go, go do something. There's lots of ways to make a living.

Yeah, and I think that there's one piece. I think Hannah-Jones's article, for some of our folk, will be considered something of an invitation to say something that they haven't wanted to say for a long time, and that will help incrementally. The question is just how do we build on that? And we'll see.

Okay. In that way, then you are more optimistic than me in that way, but we'll see.

Because you don't feel like our people will do it, or they'll do it and it's not going to make any difference anyway.

I feel like everyone's arguing from their priors. I've seen very little and in some cases appropriately, like I don't think it was wrong for like Eva Moskowitz and some other New York City school leaders to be like, hey, this is a false choice. You can have you can have all the— you can have all these things.

Eva's piece was great.

Well, good. I can live with let's wait and see. But Derrell, any last thought?

No, I'm good. Thanks for having me.

All right, hey,

I appreciate it.

Derrell, it's awesome to have you. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Thank you.

Okay, talk soon, guys.