This is Busted Pencils, fully-ledded education talk.
Here are your hosts, Dr. Tim Slecker, and Dr. Johnny Lupinacci,
educated educators talking education.
Yeah, it's Busted Pencils fully-ledded education talk,
educated educators talking education Monday morning,
home room, the bell has rang.
I left my stinky...
Well, I won't say my stinky shoes in my locker
before I came to home room, you guys.
So just wanted you to know that, you know,
my shoes were stinky.
I left them in my locker before I came to home room
because I didn't want to offend my two favorite people.
I really appreciate that, especially considering
that we're all so close together, physically.
Come on, don't remember the home room, you know,
waiting out and waiting for the bell to put you to home room,
you're hanging out by your locker, you know,
maybe hanging out with, you know, a friend,
the partner, a lover, and that bell rings,
you're like, oh, my God, I gotta get into my home room,
Jess is like, what is this up to?
Stinky shoes, and then, or, you know,
and so the other thing was the quick dash
to stow away into your locker,
any of the things that weren't considered suitable for class.
I think students today would relate to that more to them,
then I can remember, because I know most students
have pretty strict rules in their schools about,
like, less than, I think it's a max of five minutes
passing time, so they can't even get to their locker.
I never used my locker when I was in high school.
I didn't have time.
Yeah, this is, this is common.
I think the younger generation, Tim,
can relate more to having to,
if they have time to get to their locker to stashing into it.
And I know when I was teaching high school,
a lot of students shared a locker,
because it was closer to that first hour,
or they didn't use it,
and they were allowed to bring backpacks to class.
But nowadays, I don't think students are even allowed
to carry backpacks through the school.
So, I can see that there are probably students out there
who can relate to having the stuff
they're backpacking their locker
in that four minutes that they have
between passing to get to that first hour class.
But I'm glad I'm here.
It's the beginning of the week, Tim.
One week under my belt teaching in the new semester,
it felt great.
I'm not gonna lie.
It's always good to be in class.
And here we are for our week.
Coming off of a week of great episodes.
Listeners, remember, you can download,
last week's home room, if you didn't catch it,
in the class and session.
And we're ready to go this week and kick it off right here.
You've got a bus to pencils.
It's great to be back here in home room.
I always actually love one day for a bus to pencils.
Yeah, it's a great day for a bus to pencils.
And again, I love Monday mornings,
because it's just ready to go
and open up a new chapter
and potentially start all over again.
Drop behind me all of the pain and suffering
that was developed over the past week.
Start all over.
I don't know.
Pain and suffering, Tim.
Pain and suffering, Tim.
Pain and suffering, Tim.
Hey, hey, hey, hey.
Excuseing your locker.
But you have to think the attitude.
You know, it's, well, you know,
and people know, or maybe they don't.
Yeah, I'd, you know,
but we'll do a whole episode on kind of the whole idea
of where do we situate ourselves
when it comes to, you know,
taking care of our own mental health
and dysregulation and things like that.
Because, you know, it's okay to have conversations about that.
So maybe give a little preview that one day
we should have a, especially with teacher Halle
and teacher Joanna Educators Amplified,
a really nice discussion about regulation,
truly the standpoint of going,
what is it that we can do?
Because I was reading an article this morning saying,
you know, as we're coming into president Trump
and the next four years,
we may all need some forms of self-regulation practices
that allow us to, you know, deal with
some of the things that are going to happen.
Speaking of dealing with things,
though, I got a love.
I mean, we've talked about our boy Michael Petrily
from the Fordham Foundation.
Your guy.
Yeah, well, my, you know,
my boy aren't, aren't claiming that.
He's, you know, he's always just so wonderful
about not admitting defeat.
The fact that the Petrily's,
the education quote as they dubbed themselves
the reformers, you know, the accountability hawks,
the no child left behind people,
the race to the top people.
I mean, that was the good old days
when both parties horrendously went after teachers
in public schools and beat the living crap out of kids
and everything like that.
Those were the good old days
and he just wants to get them back
but he's got a new piece in the Fordham Institute.org
His, his little special blog called the fly paper,
education reform in red versus blue states.
Mm hmm.
I just thought that it was an interesting take
because he somehow seems to also be really locked in
on the fact that there always was one team
that was truly committed to Ed reform.
And if we're going to look at it today,
it's still that team and he kind of comes across
and saying like, look,
if you want to talk about Ed reform, it's the Republicans.
They're the ones who want to do Ed reform
and the Democrats are just, you know,
lapping up luxuries at the table of the unions.
So, I mean, that's a brief overview of his analysis.
Johnny, you got that smile.
Were you worried where I was going with lapping?
No, I was catching up with the sarcasm
because as our listeners know, if you don't know,
I don't always put the sarcasm, son.
I was scrambling around like, wait,
is this something that all of a sudden now Tim is a fan of,
oh no, he's running the sarcasm.
He's doing the sarcasm.
Which is, you know, that's Tim's mother tongue.
So sometimes it's an interesting dynamic here.
Yeah, you never know.
Learning sarcasm as a second language,
I'm still struggling with it.
But, you know, I would say Tim actually, for me,
you know, this article is par for the course.
In fact, this, you know, proposition
that the Republicans are doing Ed reform
because they have been doing Ed reform.
Just not the kind of reform that like educated educators
or teachers nonpartisan, right?
I'm not talking about whether it's the Democrats attempt
to reform versus the Republicans attempt.
I think it's accurate for me at least to say
that there is a group of folks
who have been actively reforming education.
And I could categorize that as privatizing it.
It's through standardizations, through, you know,
products that they often call teacher-proofed curriculums.
I'm, you know, standard sets.
Not that any good teacher doesn't want there to be standards.
It's not anything goes.
But, you know, those standards initiatives
that come, you know, with a price tag
and a pre-packaged curriculum.
And, you know, almost a management and business plan
for how to implement in schools.
And so the Republican Party, by and large,
you're has a strong history of reforming education,
our public schools, towards that model.
So I was like, okay, credit given where credits do,
there is some Ed reform.
But when we hear the word reform folks
and we're, you know, educated educators,
we're teachers or we're folks in the community
who are like, hey, I like good, strong public schools.
I like my kids learning.
I like our future generation kind of being, you know,
educated in a way where they feel like they belong.
They feel like they found a pathway to a career
that contributes to not only their health and wellbeing.
You brought that up at the beginning of the show, Tim.
But to the strength of our local economy
and our communities.
So happy, educated people, right?
And we know that schools have done a really good job
of making a whole lot of great folks in our community
feel like they haven't been successful at education
because they're, you know, pushed out of schools.
So schools need some reform.
The Republican Party and the conservative think groups,
you know, the privateers, I think you've called them before.
Oh, no, that's Josh Cown from Michigan State.
So they, okay, yeah, the privateers, you know,
they have made a pretty strong clear effort,
you know, full transparency.
Their, their effort is to privatize.
And it reminds me, Tim, too, of our buddy, Jonathan Garco,
who talks about proposing this, you know,
need for publicization.
So, and I think Tim, one of the things you brought up, too,
that's worth talking about in home room a little here,
is that, you know, by and large,
neither party has done a whole lot of good,
good reform education, good reform.
You know, and I don't know,
and this is me being really kind of harsh.
I don't know that I hear or see much
coming from the Democratic Party right now.
But I do, I will say that the article you shared
and you brought up the key point,
the attack against teachers unions, you know,
came in right on cue.
It's like, okay, it's getting in all the,
all the privatization, you know, hot words,
all the key words for saying,
hey, this is the reform that's gonna save our schools.
It's not gonna save our schools.
It's gonna hurt them and expand markets.
It's a disaster form of capitalism.
You know, it's sad that it's, you know,
that it's eaten up our kids and their opportunities.
But the idea here is that, you know,
it took a shot at teachers unions
and I don't see that right now from our teachers unions.
I would be the first to say if I did,
because there has been periods of my life
where I'm like, hey, teachers unions need to step it up.
But I would say right now,
especially with, we get to have great conversations
with Randy Winegarten at the AFT.
I mean, they are growing.
There's the largest membership and support for unions
then there's been in decades, right?
And we see that by and large teachers,
frontline workers and education together with nurses
who are akin to teaching,
frontline workers and the health of our community
are saying, hey, we don't need just better working conditions.
We need better facilities.
We need better systems.
We need better institutional structural support
for two really important things in this country,
education and healthcare.
So I do see, I will say, hey, buddy,
was his name Mike Petrelli?
Mike Petrelli.
Mike Petrelli, I said, come on, Mike,
this is not a fair and accurate representation
of what's happening right now,
at least with your unions.
I've given credit on the reform.
They can take credit for some reform.
You know, not all reform is good for schools
and children and teachers.
So yeah, I'll give them that.
But don't take a low shot at our unions.
Come on now.
It's come on, and Jess, what you got here?
Interesting, you say.
Yeah, well, just reading through this article,
so Mike Petrelli, the article is looking
at education reform in quote,
red states versus blue states.
And he hits on what education reform needs, what it is.
And he talks about two things
within the same paragraph that I thought were interesting.
And I'm going to throw a little bit of sarcasm in on that
interesting.
He says that school choice, which we know here
is referring to vouchers, which are taking
that public school money and putting it into private schooling
as a path for healthy competition that's going to raise
all boats while also bemoaning a lack of accountability
and standards.
And that just kind of made my head
spin a little bit.
Yeah, well, and yeah, good, Johnny.
Well, I was going to say for our listeners,
we've talked about it, Tim and I here
on busted pencils before.
But this idea of healthy competition
and school choice in particular, the rhetoric of school choice
is really code for expanding markets
and fully mapping the idea of unlimited growth,
which comes from an economic model of capitalism
is the only way to do economics, which we know
is a dangerous way to think about it.
And it maps it on to public education.
I've used this example before, but for listeners,
I think it's helpful to return to.
Imagine you might be working at the best
buy or I don't even know where people buy televisions anymore.
Maybe it's Amazon, but you're a sales manager.
You have a sales team.
And you're working in a model of economic growth,
that bases, that markets can expand.
And there's this false notion.
I put in false notion, because obviously,
I'm a critic of this, but there's this idea.
Idea that markets are unlimited.
There's an unlimited growth possibility here.
So let's say I'm a sales manager
and our charge is to sell a lot of TVs this quarter.
And we work really hard together.
We do some team building and my sales folks
and people on the floor and everybody at the best buy
in the point of service here.
And a lot of that's online nowadays,
but it still has a sales team.
Their goal is to sell so many TVs.
Well, let's say we shatter that.
And we even all get bonuses and incentives
for meeting not only our sales goals,
but exceeding them.
Okay, great.
Tim, the next quarter, the sales team is expected
to sell more.
Now here's the problem on the ground with that, right?
Everybody we know already has a new TV.
So yes, technology companies and everyone kind of plant,
they have this planned obsolescence.
What's the new thing?
How do we market?
And there is some room for like getting people
to always need the new thing.
And I'm not even saying that maybe that doesn't work
with television sales, right?
But that idea mapped on to education doesn't work.
And that's what they're talking about here.
School choice and healthy competition comes from
trying to map on that sales marketing business plan model
to education.
How can we get more schools?
How can there be more opportunities, more choices?
How do we create competition to have scarcity, right?
Demand, right?
We talk about like wants and needs,
but we talk about also this idea of manufactured demand
that will help improve everything.
So like the whole idea that everyone's better off
with more TVs.
So that's not necessarily true.
If everyone has one and it works,
you know, we don't necessarily need a new one,
let alone do we need the people selling even more.
Maybe there's like a happy medium.
And in education, we simply know that children's learning
is not the same as business sales.
And you know, on this one though too,
I got to kind of like get patrilly.
I think he also is though he's suffering from not realizing
that even the Republicans in that argument of competition
for improving schools, look, they've dropped it
because the school choice they're now talking about
is unaccountable.
There's no comparison.
In fact, we're not allowed to know the curriculum.
We're not allowed to know the test scores.
There's no comparisons there.
So there is no competition anymore
because it has turned at least in the Republicans,
the conservatives right now have said private school choice
isn't a matter of competition,
isn't a matter of whether or not schools do better.
It's a matter of a parental's appearance right
to pick whatever frickin' school they want
and the government should not stand in their way.
Competition is gone, Johnny.
And so patrilly here, I think he's trying
to restart the conversation that he believes,
he believes that more TVs are better.
Well, I wouldn't say that competition is ever gone
because we talked about this in a recent show.
There's a difference between competitiveness
and I wanna give credit to all of our great students
out there, they're competitors.
You know, they're in the game.
They're really good learners.
But I think what we have here are similar
to that idea of manufactured markets
and just put it in the chat.
We're kind of vibin' on that.
What's the rhetoric of this choice
in healthy competition and just put it into our chat?
Students always needing a higher score
and keep all caps higher, right?
Because I would say, yeah, what is a higher score?
And to be more advanced at each age.
We talk about this especially like second graders
now doing third, fourth grade work, kindergarten
and now doing standardized testing in some states.
This idea that more, and it comes from that,
it's contagious, it flows from that language
and rhetoric of this idea of healthy competition
because our kids are competitors.
Just because maybe they can do it,
doesn't necessarily mean that it's healthy and good
and it should be done.
But that's become the measure, right?
Like how many TVs get sold, right?
And then that's say, hey, that successful team
is now not successful because they haven't sold
there's more TVs than they sold last quarter.
And so we're setting kids up to compete
in a false measurement system.
That's when I'm kind of emphasizing here.
I think they're still competitors,
but the game, the rules of the game are shifted
so it's about their test scores
and it's about this.
I love how just put it in all caps, more advanced.
So I'll kind of put in scare quotes there.
And it's a dangerous game and we've been playing it.
And that is the game that also to speak to that idea
of that it's about parental choice, right?
I believe that they're shifting that rhetoric
to also associating it to your liberty
as a democratic citizen because, by and large,
because the data, the facts show us
that students don't necessarily do better
by these alternatives in these sort of
watered down markets for education.
Bottom line markets should not be part of public schools.
And I know that's cringe for the market church out there
for the folks who are real big on, like,
let the markets be our God.
But hey, some things aren't great
to privatize and have be a market.
And education is one of those.
Well, before the bell rings for first period,
though one little point I want to circle back to
and it's unions and Democrats and realizing this,
there is a real space and opportunity right now too
to grab a hold of real reform.
Johnny, what we're talking about,
liberating education, the ability to serve all students,
to lift communities, to get behind that,
the unions, in fact, this is where the unions
can really drive this leadership.
And I think that would really drive
the petroleum's crazy is to see unions really leading
that charge not to get on the old reform ban wagon,
but to get on this vision of, let's just call them,
beautiful schools that are doing wonderful things
for all kids.
And that might mean that there are certain forms
of education, certain curricula, certain pathways
that are open for all of those diverse learners
and those diverse communities,
because that is a real engaging way
that we can liberate Johnny as you say,
schooling, or liberate education from schooling.
And now for your moment of Zen.
If those in charge of our society, politicians,
corporate executives and owners of press and television
can dominate our ideas,
they will be secure in their power.
They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets.
We will control ourselves.
Thanks for listening to Busted Pencils.
Don't forget to grab this special class in session
this Wednesday, Dr. Howard Gardner,
pioneer of multiple intelligences
and the synthesized mind class in session this Wednesday.
And free throws and face offs on Friday, Jason Buchary,
for Saturday's full hour show.
You can catch that on all the civic media networks
and keep Busted Pencils.