This week some of the topics we discuss include the following:
- Why are we making WonkyFolk
- Reactions to Nashville and trends we often miss at tragic moments like this
- The commonalities and differences facing public education in Los Angeles and Chicago
- Andy’s recommendation of the best read to prepare educators
- The changes that ChatGPT may or may not bring to public education
Transcript
Hey Andy.
Andy:Hey Jed.
Andy:How are you?
Jed:I'm doing great.
Jed:Well, thanks for sharing this idea of creating WonkyFolk.
Andy:Absolutely.
Jed:It's something you and I have been batting around here for, I
Jed:don't know, several months here.
Jed:And just this idea that if there's anything that I crave
Jed:in the education space right now is just some sense of coherence.
Jed:There's just so many things that are happening, at such a pace.
Jed:And there's just so much variety at a national level.
Jed:And certainly one thing I've just valued in you, Andy, and your work at Bellweather
Jed:is just being able to bring coherence also with a perspective that's just nationwide.
Jed:And so, hey, maybe we end up talking amongst ourselves and
Jed:we think that there's some value that we're adding for folks.
Jed:But you know, I just appreciate you willing to take a try with it.
Andy:Yeah, I'm excited.
Andy:Look, I think we both, I mean everybody can agree like the world
Andy:needs more middle-aged guys with podcasts, a huge market gap there.
Andy:And so I think we're going to try to fill it.
Andy:You're one of those people I get on a call with you about something like you
Andy:end up having these conversations about what's going on in the sector, what's
Andy:going on in general, before you get to whatever the point of the call is.
Andy:And you're always like, that conversation like that might
Andy:make an interesting podcast.
Andy:So it's good to actually potentially try that out although I unfortunately, I
Andy:bet it'll be more stilted when we do it now then when you're just like getting
Andy:on a zoom to kick something around.
Jed:Well, we'll hope that we keep it fresh and who knows, we may
Jed:also invite some people down the road to broaden out the discussion.
Andy:Yeah, absolutely.
Andy:I'm looking forward to that.
Jed:Cool.
Jed:Well, and I also just feel like this nexus of, look I overweight
Jed:on charters in all sorts of ways.
Jed:Right?
Jed:And I think that's a good place for us to be generally.
Jed:But your knowledge on the wonk side, on the policy side, K-12, that's where I
Jed:think if we really can focus our energy here, I think there actually is value for
Jed:two middle-aged white guys to offer here.
Andy:Yeah, definitely.
Andy:I thought you were going to say, coming out of winter, I'm always
Andy:a little overweight, just period.
Andy:I thought you were going to go there right out the gate.
Andy:Yeah, I think that's right and charters are a big part and I think they're
Andy:illustrative of a lot of what's going on, there are bigger things in the
Andy:sector and obviously this week, like a big one that's on everybody's mind, is
Andy:just this horrific shooting last week in Nashville at the Covenant school.
Jed:Yeah.
Jed:I think these shootings have become so frequent that when you start
Jed:a podcast like this, it's almost off the news cycle already, and
Jed:we're just grown so immune to it.
Jed:But there are things that come up about this particular shooting that I just find
Jed:illustrative of the problems that we face.
Jed:And here it's a private school, right?
Jed:The community that was involved or that was affected, all different and
Jed:new, the political responses that we're seeing from policymakers, new,
Jed:but all sadly, not very to the point.
Jed:But I just think that these instances, these incidents of tragedy like this,
Jed:I just think they contribute to a lack of trust that so many parents have
Jed:in the public education system, or in public private education -- wherever
Jed:you want to focus at this point.
Jed:Well, I think your last blog entry talks about the relative safety of kids in
Jed:schools versus all these other settings, but the broader narrative is: kids may
Jed:not be safe at school and if there's anything that parents gravitate to, it's
Jed:that desire to keep their kids safe.
Jed:And so I see this potentially contributing to kid parents even pulling their kids
Jed:back even more and trying to find other settings within to educate their kids
Jed:where they feel like they're safe.
Andy:Yeah, but as we've seen over the last couple of years, these
Andy:can happen at any kind of a school.
Andy:They happen at traditional public schools, they happen at charter schools,
Andy:and they can happen at private schools.
Andy:Actually they're really rare.
Andy:I think we are sort of soaked.
Andy:You have to hold sort of a couple of things in your head at the same time.
Andy:One, just every one of these is awful and just unique in its awfulness.
Andy:And that they're also pretty rare.
Andy:I think most people are surprised when you ask how many people have
Andy:been killed in mass shootings at school since, say, Columbine.
Andy:You get some really astronomical numbers and it's actually fewer than
Andy:200, which is 200 too many obviously.
Andy:And again, everyone is uniquely horrible, but they're not as
Andy:ubiquitous as you would know if you spend a lot of time, if you would
Andy:think you spend a lot of time online.
Andy:Meanwhile, youth violence, particularly in out of school and communities
Andy:is an enormous problem, has been for a while and to your point,
Andy:things that don't get headlines.
Andy:It doesn't necessarily get a whole lot of headlines and it's just sort of a
Andy:grinding and sort of staggering toll.
Andy:And so I think we struggle to talk about these things and then when
Andy:something like Nashville happens with some of the circumstance around it,
Andy:everything kind of grinds to a halt.
Andy:What's I think really troubling about that is, you know, these
Andy:shootings in general, not everyone, but in general, they're preventable.
Andy:Four out of five school shooters say what they're going to do ahead of time.
Andy:We don't have all the details on Nashville, but this person, their parents
Andy:were apparently concerned enough about them to want to intervene around their
Andy:access to firearms and so forth, and so I think what's getting lost in a lot
Andy:of the rhetoric and the concern and the talk about hardening the target and all
Andy:this is if four out of five young people who do something like this tell you that
Andy:they're going to do it ahead of time.
Andy:Why aren't we heading that off more upstream?
Andy:To your point on trust also what's going on with trust in the school
Andy:with students where they can't engage adults around these things.
Andy:There's so much leaking ahead of time, and yet we're still not heading them off.
Andy:I think we need to have a hard conversation about school
Andy:culture and why that is.
Jed:Well, yeah, I think there are a lot of forces at play right now that are
Jed:keeping candor and agency out of schools.
Jed:And so we have a lot of adults and a lot of kids that can't talk about the thing,
Jed:and when you can't talk about the thing, well, of course you're not gonna be able
Jed:to talk about these kinds of things.
Jed:My wife's a clinical psychologist, she was just forwarding me some stories from
Jed:just social media about parents who are sewing school districts right now over
Jed:bullying and then suicides that have been happening associated with those.
Jed:And I think these shootings, they tend to crowd out, the attention
Jed:on many of these other things.
Jed:And so of course, the problem of gun violence in schools has to be taken on for
Jed:sure but also these other issues can't be crowded out from our attention such that
Jed:we can stay focused on what's really going on with our adolescent kids right now.
Jed:Because the psychological crisis that we have in this generation is
Jed:unlike anything we've seen previously.
Andy:And they're related though, right?
Andy:A few years ago, the secret service made an analysis on school shootings.
Andy:And one of the things they talked about was this leakage and this upstream,
Andy:kids basically saying, in many cases explicitly, what they were going to do or
Andy:having a lot of, in the case of Parkland, the shooter said explicitly what they
Andy:were going to do when they got the chance.
Andy:Or lots of like signs and indications that common sense would
Andy:tell you something's going on.
Andy:But a common factor the Secret Service found was bullying and that kid, the
Andy:people involved in these shootings, they were the victims of different kinds
Andy:of bullying and they actually called pretty explicitly for really vigorous
Andy:anti-bullying programs -- what you would call SEL programs, stuff like that.
Andy:And I thought it was interesting because SEL is getting sort of sucked into
Andy:this ongoing culture war vortex we have, and here you've got the secret
Andy:service, which I don't know that anybody's gonna describe the Secret
Andy:Service, like a hotbed of leftism.
Andy:And they're calling for you have to do this, you have to create that culture.
Andy:Because if kids don't have a trusting environment in school, they don't have
Andy:adults they're going to trust, they're not going to go to them and say, "hey, here
Andy:are these things we're seeing that are, that are worrisome" and you're just not
Andy:gonna have that kind of information flow.
Andy:It comes back to one of the reasons I know you got active in the charter
Andy:world, one of the things that attracted me to charters is just where a place
Andy:we can create a kind of intentional community where kids and adults just
Andy:interact in different ways than is sometimes the normal in schools.
Jed:I think kids are really tuned into whether or not there is authenticity
Jed:and agency in their environment, and if they sense for whatever reason,
Jed:that the adults in that space can't say what they want to say, or it's all
Jed:canned, or it's just completely and utterly predictable, they just disengage
Jed:and the only place the conversations will be happening is in the hallway
Jed:or outside of school, and or in social media where of course, a lot of these
Jed:bullying problems get to be only worse.
Jed:For me, I just feel like the problem of lack of agency in our public schools is
Jed:just much more profound than we recognize.
Andy:Yeah.
Andy:I think that's right.
Andy:So one of the things I knew we wanted to talk about today, speaking of challenging
Andy:public schools is what's happening in a couple of the cities and you're just down
Andy:the road from Los Angeles, which was in the news quite a bit with that strike.
Jed:Yeah.
Jed:I think this strike situation in Los Angeles and the problems we see in so many
Jed:urban schools doesn't get enough attention and perhaps in my writing at CharterFolk
Jed:just beats on it till people are just ready to cry mercy but, I actually think,
Jed:no matter how much I can focus on it, there's still way more problems that are
Jed:there than we're paying attention to.
Jed:And we're seeing an aspect of the urban education world, only
Jed:double down a path that we know is going to result in further demise.
Jed:And that's certainly what I see coming out of the Los Angeles situation.
Jed:I think things hang into balance right now in Chicago.
Jed:We are recording this on a Monday, the election results will be on Tuesday
Jed:and we'll release this on Wednesday.
Jed:But Chicago and Los Angeles have probably been the two hotbeds of teacher unions
Jed:taking on new levels of aggressiveness and new levels of political engagement
Jed:that's translated into them having virtual complete control of the Los
Jed:Angeles Unified School District right now.
Jed:And we'll see what happens in Chicago.
Jed:But should it go in the direction of the Chicago teacher union having
Jed:more control in Chicago, I don't see that doing anything other than
Jed:speeding the demise of the district.
Jed:Do you, do you see it differently here?
Jed:What nuance can you offer as it relates to the challenges we have
Jed:in urban education right now?
Andy:Oh man.
Andy:It's hard to know where to start and those two cities are...
Andy:there's some commonality and some distinct issues.
Andy:One of the commonalities is obviously just unsustainable fiscal structures.
Andy:I'm sort of struck we keep having these conversations and these entities,
Andy:we've got to figure out what we do to get them on a sound financial footing.
Andy:Whether it's, you know, and itcame up in the Chicago race some of the issues
Andy:around pension, retirement financing.
Andy:In LA, you look at the school district's own numbers on the percent of money
Andy:from the retirement that they're paying into retirement for people who
Andy:aren't even working in the system.
Andy:The percentage of classroom dollars that are now going to that it's staggering
Andy:and we're not sort of having any kind of an honest conversation about that.
Andy:Whatever the latest thing is ,the strike dujour, and the sort of
Andy:constant negotiation that the teachers unions have with the districts just
Andy:plays out in these different ways.
Andy:I was sort of struck that in the wake of the pandemic, all the avowed concerns
Andy:about learning loss and everybody saying they're gonna get serious, that in LA you
Andy:had this strike and there was just very little attention to, like, kids need to
Andy:be in school right now more than anything else and we're just gonna have a, another
Andy:school holiday essentially for politics.
Andy:And there was just like very little outrage, it just almost seemed like
Andy:it's business as usual, which was striking to me, given the context
Andy:and given the stakes right now.
Jed:Yeah.
Jed:What was shocking to me was that, Jackie Goldberg was, and the superintendent was
Jed:there saying there's no need for a strike.
Jed:We're willing to give you guys absolutely everything, essentially,
Jed:and yet they wanted to strike anyway.
Jed:And then at the end of the strike, when they talk about what the deal was
Jed:it was essentially the same as what they had been talking about for weeks.
Jed:So what really was the motivation here?
Jed:And do you really have to have another three days of student learning
Jed:loss in order to make that point?
Andy:That's a tactic and I think that's not always appreciated.
Andy:Like the teachers unions that having the strike, getting people out there, getting
Andy:people riled up, it's a membership tactic.
Andy:It reminds the members why they're there, all this stuff.
Andy:And they will strike even when it's not, even when we could actually
Andy:get to a deal without a strike.
Andy:We saw that in LA.
Andy:That was really the sort of thing that really I think changed with teacher
Andy:strikes in general, I think you have to go back to Karen Lewis in which she did
Andy:in Chicago in back in:Andy:you know, Randy Weingarten was talking much more about reform than she talks
Andy:about now and, was saying tenure shouldn't be a job for life and we need to like
Andy:reform teacher evaluation, much of stuff that now would be considered heretical.
Andy:But she was like going to the press club once a year to
Andy:talk about all these things.
Andy:And in Chicago, Karen Lewis was like, you know, no the hell with that?
Andy:We're going to fight on this, we're not going to get on this train,
Andy:we think there's another strategy we can fight and essentially
Andy:exactly what you're talking about.
Andy:The ultimate deal was pretty much the contours of the deal that was on the
Andy:table, but they were pretty explicit, they needed to be able to have a strike.
Andy:It was politically important and they did.
Andy:And they and, I mean, the senior people in the union were relatively
Andy:open about that was what was going on.
Andy:And here we are, this keeps playing out.
Andy:And the interesting thing about Chicago is it's such a stark choice.
Andy:You've got Paul Val, and you can tell the director, we can talk about him and what
Andy:he's done, and then Brandon Johnson and it's two very different choices facing
Andy:Chicago voters and it can be no illusion about which way things will go, depending
Andy:how that race turns out tomorrow.
Jed:Yeah.
Jed:The thing that I just think that we, in the charter world in particular,
Jed:need to spend more time thinking about what is our agenda, what is our North
Jed:Star as it relates to the evolution of these large urban school districts.
Jed:I think for a long time we just basically stayed under the radar screen.
Jed:Hey, that's not our job.
Jed:We don't have to worry about what this thing evolves into.
Jed:Let's just keep growing our schools and it'll work itself out on the other end.
Jed:Now we're at that other end and charter schools disproportionately have charged
Jed:into large urban school districts to try and serve as many kids better
Jed:than they've been served in the past.
Jed:And now we've got just massive numbers of people leaving major urban areas.
Jed:And so our schools are there.
Jed:They're fighting for enrollment in Los Angeles.
Jed:It's interesting, basically, charter school enrollment has stayed flat for the
Jed:last five years, around 110-115,000 kids.
Jed:But in terms of percentage of Los Angeles that is served by the charter
Jed:school sector, it's grown from 16% to 21%, just because we've stayed flat.
Jed:Okay.
Jed:Well, what is the future?
Jed:What's really going to happen here?
Jed:I don't think the charter school world can stay in a keep our head low mode anymore.
Jed:No.
Jed:We have to say, we actually think this is the future that all of public education
Jed:needs to move into, and this is the role that we think charter schools can play
Jed:in helping us get to that better place.
Andy:Yeah.
Andy:And I think the charter community has a decision to make about sort of
Andy:how it wants to play its politics.
Andy:Because one of the interesting things about Chicago is there's definitely
Andy:a race element to the political race -- there is a racial element to it.
Andy:And you're seeing that and civil rights leaders are talking about that.
Andy:But you've got some young progressives in the city, some reformers who
Andy:are African American coming down for Paul Vallas in part over the
Andy:school issues and the reform issues.
Andy:And again, I have no idea what's going to happen tomorrow at the ballot box.
Andy:That's not a prediction.
Andy:It's just you're seeing, but you're seeing some of that.
Andy:And I think that does, there is this idea of how do you create sort
Andy:of a multiracial reform politics that would include charter schools,
Andy:and used to include charter schools.
Andy:And then you've got this countervailing pressure, which is the broader pressure
Andy:in the country with the culture wars and everything where the party just
Andy:cleaving apart and charters feel like, well, we're going to go, their
Andy:heart is with the Democrats even though their political support is
Andy:increasingly more with the Republicans and you're seeing that tension.
Andy:And that could play out in some really dangerous ways for charters, particularly
Andy:if you decide these other issues that are sort of adjacent and tangential around
Andy:educating kids become the thing that you're going to put front and center.
Andy:So I think it's actually a pretty fraught time for charters.
Jed:I agree with you.
Jed:And I think that the rationale behind the creation of CharterFolk was the
Jed:idea that our charter people, you know, believing that they're a part
Jed:of something bigger than themselves and willing to do more than they, than
Jed:is typically expected, as has been our history will continue to happen.
Jed:Well, in our urban settings when our charter folk are hearing all of these
Jed:things about how we're on the wrong side of history and we're associated
Jed:with all these what, whatever, right wing interests or whatever it is,
Jed:our own base can become wobbly.
Jed:Our own base can feel like we're on the wrong side of history.
Jed:The only way, in my opinion that we can like communicate to them and to other
Jed:supporters and others that actually our values align with theirs, is to come
Jed:out and be more vocal about the way our school systems are set up, our redlining
Jed:attendance boundaries, our selective admissions that we know screen out
Jed:kids by race, our funding systems that suck money away from high needs kids
Jed:to subsidize more affluent families' educations, allowing schools to be
Jed:completely and utterly unaccountable, so that the kids that you know are most
Jed:vulnerable suffer most -- these are things that are counter to our values and the
Jed:way that charter schools are set up.
Jed:We are set up to operate schools in a completely different way, and we're
Jed:going to advocate not only for our students to be served in that way, but
Jed:all students to be served in that way.
Jed:In that moment, I think the progressives who you know have thus far heard silence
Jed:from the charter school world will need step back and say, wait a second,
Jed:what do I think about these things?
Andy:Yeah, I think so.
Andy:Look, you're an optimist.
Andy:I think what's happening now that's very striking to me is two sort of
Andy:related but somewhat discordant trends.
Andy:One is, among parents, you're seeing in the data, parents are more willing
Andy:than ever to move across party lines, at coming out of the pandemic.
Andy:They're frustrated, the old alignments don't make sense to them, and
Andy:they want results for the kids.
Andy:And so, the parental vote is up for grab.
Andy:It's much more, it's much more fluid right now.
Andy:And then at the same time, among elites you're seeing people are sort of chucking
Andy:all their prior education commitments out the window in the interest of partisanship
Andy:because things are becoming so hardened.
Andy:And so you've got Democrats who used to support charters who are now like,
Andy:yeah, you know, like that's two partisan of an issue they've gone quiet and
Andy:like those two trends, watching them play out, I think there's both an
Andy:opportunity there for charters, but also just enormous, enormous political risk.
Jed:Yeah.
Jed:And the disconnect between the public positioning and
Jed:what the polling data shows...
Jed:I mean, striking in:Jed:person in Los Angeles, every democratic policymaker wanted to virtue project:
Jed:we are with the teachers, we're with UTLA, we support this strike, right?
Jed:And then UTLA thinks, okay, let's capitalize upon that by getting
Jed:this parcel tax approved that will fund teachers pay at higher levels.
Jed:Didn't even come close to passing.
Jed:Not even close.
Jed:Right.
Andy:Well, yeah, it gives a lie to this whole idea of like standpoint,
Andy:the epistemology and that we're going to listen to people and do what
Andy:they want, because the support for charters, I mean, you know, strong
Andy:majority support in the African American community, strong majority
Andy:support in the Hispanic community.
Andy:There's the idea that like charters are some sort of like unpopular
Andy:thing or political jump ball.
Andy:The only people who really aren't there on charters politically
Andy:are white progressivesm, right?
Andy:But white progressives and the teachers unions, that's a pretty powerful
Andy:coalition inside the Democratic Party and it's not an insignificant
Andy:political coalition in general.
Andy:And so here we are, but I do think charters are one of those, you know,
Andy:they pull back the veneer on some of this stuff and you can sort of see
Andy:where the more raw political power around some of these issues lies.
Jed:Let me ask you something out of white progressives, Andy, because
Jed:my sense is that their opposition to charters may be fragile because, It
Jed:can be shown that most of these white liberals have got themselves into very
Jed:favorable public education situations that they now structurally deny others.
Jed:But they're not being, it's not being shown to them, or they're not being held
Jed:accountable for the fact that they are reserving this special benefit for them.
Jed:And if they were forced, you know, to confront their own hypocrisy on this
Jed:issue, I don't see how they stay in their current mindset unless they're
Jed:willing to go to, okay, I actually oppose charters not for these great progressive
Jed:values, but for naked self-interest.
Jed:I'm not sure that the white progressives can actually pivot to naked
Jed:self-interest as their justification for charters opposition going foward.
Andy:I don't know.
Andy:I mean, look, the history of ed reform in this country, going back decades,
Andy:one way to look at it's a history of people with means evading whatever
Andy:sort of reform strategies put in place, whether it's busing or choice or anything
Andy:else more recently, to figure out how to make the system work for them.
Andy:I mean, I guess I do think there's something to charters made a strategic
Andy:error by focusing overwhelmingly -- obviously the highest need is in urban
Andy:communities and then rural communities -- but focusing overwhelming on urban
Andy:communities without having something there politically for the suburbs in a
Andy:country where the politics are pretty suburban driven and so you, but not
Andy:building that coalition so forth, I think they left an exposed flank that
Andy:is, is causing a lot of trouble now.
Andy:And so we should think about what does sort of a middle class
Andy:chartering strategy look like?
Andy:And I think that's, look, people want customization.
Andy:They want different kinds of schools.
Andy:They want Montessori and, and I think there's a lot of political
Andy:opportunities to make sort of public school choice in the public system
Andy:much more robust and attractive.
Andy:But the second part of it is that is also, I think, in some ways self-inflicted,
Andy:for your strategies, I understand what you just laid out, to work people have
Andy:to be kind of willing to take some hits, be a little bit contentious, point
Andy:out this hypocrisy and all the rest.
Andy:And I think one of the things that really happened over the last decade, and you
Andy:really have to give her credit for it, is Randy Weingarten kind of convinced
Andy:a lot of reformers that they were the problem, that they were too acrimonious,
Andy:they were too divisive, they weren't consensus oriented enough and so forth.
Andy:And that you heard lots of the rhetoric we have to collaborate and all this,
Andy:and why do you have to be in...
Andy:you know, a lot of reformers started to be like, oh yeah, why are we so contentious?
Andy:To the point where Michelle Ree would run a commercial pointing out that like, A
Andy:lot of our schools like, you know, huge achievement gaps, they don't stack up
Andy:well internationally, and everybody's like, oh my God, that's so mean.
Andy:Take down the ad and, and funders got nervous about it.
Andy:Your strategy, if we do want to point out that, yeah, of course,
Andy:everyone's kind of implicated.
Andy:We redline education opportunity in this country by where you lived.
Andy:Our colleague, Darrel Bradford, is I think probably one of the
Andy:most articulate people about this.
Andy:But there's other folks, Tim DeRoche has a new organization.
Andy:We do work on this at Bellwether.
Andy:Yeah, it's interesting, um, that like, you know, if you, you have to actually be
Andy:willing to take some hits and point that out and be like a little bit contentious.
Andy:Not just for the sheer hell of this isn't culture war stuff where it's just
Andy:like for the sheer hell of spinning people up, but just you have to be
Andy:willing to say some controversial things and make people uncomfortable.
Andy:And I just don't know if the appetite is there right now.
Jed:Or if the courage is there.
Jed:Yeah.
Jed:I mean, this is where my MFA playwriting comes back in.
Jed:Aristotle knew all the way back even then, right, what's the making of drama?
Jed:Conflict.
Jed:You choose your conflict and from that you can drive a narrative.
Andy:But that's why we get along Jed...
Andy:When people come into the sector, they're like, they wanna work in education.
Andy:They're like, what should they read?
Andy:And they're like, should I read like Dewey or E.
Andy:D.
Andy:Hirsch, or whatever?
Andy:I'm like, start with Aristotle.
Andy:Understand the nature of power and politics and like a lot of what goes on in
Andy:this sector will make more sense to you.
Jed:But see, I ultimately think our movement will be
Jed:defined by what we advocate for.
Jed:And I think that when we advocate for dumb things, that it's easy for somebody
Jed:like Weingarten to say, you've been too extreme, you haven't been thoughtful,
Jed:you don't have this all the way thought through, or you're just simply, cheaply,
Jed:bashing people, you know, without a real theory, we leave ourselves exposed.
Jed:So I don't by any means say, oh, let's go out and just willy-nilly
Jed:start taking a meat axe to red lines.
Jed:But I do believe that there are ways for us to thoughtfully start to erase
Jed:them such that the question is asked.
Jed:We're not talking about huge numbers, we're just saying, every school district
Jed:in America should have to reserve 5% of its seats for people that come
Jed:from outside the school district so that we can start to have more choice.
Jed:And, and see what people, how they start to respond at that point.
Andy:Yeah.
Andy:Little things on zoning.
Andy:There's a lot of stuff you could do.
Andy:I think choice is a piece of the solution set, but it's not the whole solution set.
Andy:There's the, your, yeah, your idea, there's something you can do on the
Andy:zonings, a whole bunch of stuff.
Andy:I actually think that's how you, it's as if, like, if you think about it, like if
Andy:you walk from -- you're in Los Angeles, I'm in Virginia, or you know if you walk,
Andy:you're in California, sorry you're not Los Angeles, we're just talking about LA but
Andy:you're in California, Northern California, and I'm in Virginia -- and if like we walk
Andy:to each other and our compass is off a little bit, we're not gonna notice, you're
Andy:not going to notice that when you're in Nevada and I'm not going to notice
Andy:that when I'm in West Virginia and Ohio.
Andy:But when we're trying to get where we're going, we'll suddenly
Andy:realize I won't get to your house.
Andy:I'll end up in Portland or down in LA, right?
Andy:And that's the way we think about.
Andy:How do you start to change the system?
Andy:You know, some of this is like the cast some ideas about nudge and so forth.
Andy:How do you change the system, so in 25 years, people are like, oh,
Andy:wow, that's totally different.
Andy:But they didn't see it.
Andy:You're right, I do think we have people who, and this is I think on both
Andy:sides, who just wanna be contentious.
Andy:There's people who just want to sue school districts and all this, and
Andy:lawsuits that aren't going to actually get anywhere given how the law works here.
Andy:And there's, you know, people just wanna come in and try to blow
Andy:things up and it's conflict for conflict's sake is not productive.
Andy:But there will be some friction if there's going to be progress.
Andy:That's a pretty well established principle as well.
Jed:For sure.
Jed:Yeah.
Jed:Well, we talked about keeping this to a around a half
Jed:hour, so we're getting close.
Jed:I wanted to just a ask you one last question.
Jed:What are you making about, and this could be another hour long
Jed:conversation, but just let's spend a couple minutes ruminating on this.
Jed:What are you making of ChatGPT and its implications for education?
Jed:Is it being overhyped?
Jed:Is it being underhyped?
Jed:Are we in a moment where we just don't know?
Jed:I'd just love to hear your thoughts about this because my daughter just, used
Jed:ChatGPT to help her on her first essay.
Jed:That's interesting, she's writing about ALS and ALS is at the origins
Jed:of Charter Folk too, my dear friend Brian Bennett, who passed away.
Jed:And ALS really matters in our family's life.
Jed:And now Tess is writing me from college.
Jed:ChatGPT has helped me understand ALS at whole other levels of understanding.
Jed:But that's just one example.
Jed:How are you thinking about it as it relates to K-12 stuff?
Andy:Yeah, I mean, look, Jed, I'm far from an expert on this.
Andy:I'm still learning.
Andy:I listen to people like John Bailey who are doing a lot of work on this.
Andy:There's others.
Andy:So my sense is it over-hyped or under hyped?
Andy:Yes, both.
Andy:Great.
Andy:I can see, every time there's a new technology around
Andy:learning, people freak out.
Andy:Paper was controversial at one point.
Andy:They tried to license printing presses.
Andy:So when something like this comes along, everyone's like, oh my God, we've have
Andy:to ban it and restrict it and so forth.
Andy:That's like an old human reaction to new knowledge technologies.
Andy:I mean, we even saw that a little bit with like, in the early days of like email
Andy:and the internet, there was some of that.
Andy:And so like that sort of reaction is both understandable, time-honored
Andy:and probably overstated.
Andy:On the other hand, look, this will change teachers jobs and so forth.
Andy:I worry it gives, you're starting to hear already again,
Andy:why are we teaching content?
Andy:Mere facts when kids are gonna have ChatGPT, which I think is a huge
Andy:misreading of how we learn and what you need to know to be able to understand
Andy:the world and make sense of it.
Andy:So like the excesses on all sides are sort of apparent.
Andy:I think some of it's very exciting.
Andy:And one thing I'm intrigued by, you look at some of the stuff it can do and I screw
Andy:around with it like everybody else does, everybody thought like automation and
Andy:all this, they were like, oh man, sucks if you're a cashier or a truck driver.
Andy:Turns out, like probably if you write like entry level ad copy, you work for
Andy:one of these websites that's basically a click farm and building listicles
Andy:and this kind of stuff, or maybe, and this is like hits close to home, maybe
Andy:you're a blogger like me, this thing can do some of the things that you do.
Andy:And I think that's interesting and maybe we'll occasion a slightly
Andy:different and less sort of class-based conversation about automation
Andy:and new technology and so forth.
Andy:And my last thought is just the speed of it.
Andy:I remember a few years ago, I was looking at some of this and messing around
Andy:with, and it was really bad, right?
Andy:It just was not ready for prime time and now, in a relatively
Andy:short period of time...
Andy:So I don't know.
Andy:And then of course, look, I've seen all the same movies you have like, so I worry
Andy:like are the robot's going to kill us all?
Andy:I have lots of thoughts, but no real answers.
Andy:It's really, it's really interesting.
Andy:What's your take?
Andy:I mean, so obviously your daughter's now cheating in college...
Andy:I appreciate you.
Jed:So, I patterned CharterFolk after Stratechery by Ben Thompson.
Jed:And I've just been so impressed by him over the last five
Jed:years of reading his stuff.
Jed:And he is just always so smart and he is always so measured.
Jed:And then he had a chance to see Chat GPT, and he just went over
Jed:the moon about what this meant.
Jed:He had never had an experience interacting with technology in that way.
Jed:And he wrote that, and that then led the New York Times and to BBC and all sorts of
Jed:others, quoting him and interviewing him.
Jed:What is so new about this?
Jed:I tend to think that since COVID and and racial reckoning with George Floyd
Jed:this is probably the most important thing that has happened in the world
Jed:and when we look back on something that happened during this decade.
Jed:And I also think it's happening at the same moment that trust in education
Jed:is evaporating and people want to be able to do different things, but they
Jed:don't feel equipped to do it themselves or in small groups or whatever.
Jed:And I just think this ChatGPT thing is going to give people the
Jed:confidence that they don't have to have any more trust in any other
Jed:schools that is absolutely necessary.
Jed:And so if there's anything I think this is going to do, it's going to accelerate
Jed:the forming of new educational models and ones that ultimately are going to
Jed:challenge our public education system much more so than it will empower.
Andy:All right.
Andy:Well, that's a bold prediction.
Andy:I'll be interested and we can revisit this.
Andy:I'm not going to be in the prediction business, but by the time this does
Andy:come out and this will be our first one, we'll see what people think,
Andy:we will know at least the answers to whether or not the Chicago cops
Andy:can all put their "Let's go Brandon" stickers back on their cars or not.
Andy:So we will pick it up with that and some other stuff very soon.
Jed:See you in a couple weeks.
Andy:See you.
Jed:Okay.