Why Are Billionaires Messing With Public Education? Part 1

Transcript

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Lisa : So public schools are one of the ways in which people encounter people of different backgrounds, and that is fundamentally threatening, I think, to people who want to control society, who want to limit the narrative, who want to reinforce some of these hierarchies in ways that serve them.

Natieka : Hello and welcome to School Me, the National Education Association's podcast dedicated to helping educators thrive at every stage of their careers. I'm your host, [00:00:30] Natieka Samuels. Have you ever wondered why the rich and powerful seem to have so many opinions about public education when their children don't even attend public schools? This episode is the first in a two-part series, exploring how the rich and powerful are cashing out on public education. Today we're looking at the big picture, the historical decades-long agenda by wealthy donors and corporate interests to privatize schools, weaken unions, and limit what educators can teach. Joining us to break it all down is Lisa Graves, founder and executive [00:01:00] director of True North Research, a national investigative watchdog group that works to shine a bright light on the dark money-fueling regressive agendas that target vital public institutions like public education. Thank you so much for joining us today Lisa.

Lisa : Thank you so much for inviting me to be on. It's an honor to be on your show.

Natieka : Well, today we're going to be talking about, I guess, a solemn topic of how the rich and powerful cash out on public education. But can you just start with a little bit of information about you [00:01:30] and why you're here today to talk about this topic?

Lisa : My name is Lisa Graves and I lead True North Research, which is an investigative watchdog group that focuses on telling people about who's blocking progress, who's distorting public policy. I got started in this particular set of work about 16 years ago when I became the leader of the Center for Media and Democracy, and I'm still the board president of CMD. At CMD we did a lot of work on the issue of education and detailing [00:02:00] who's been trying to privatize public schools and more, and that was also where I launched ALEC exposed and worked closely with members of the NEA and AFT and other groups like Common Cause, People for the American Way Color of Change to expose how this group called the American Legislative Exchange Council had been involved in privatization efforts. And I'll conclude just by saying I'm a lawyer, but I'm a proud graduate of public schools in America and honored to be on the show.

Natieka : [00:02:30] So the history of public schools goes back as far as the 1800s in this country. But let's fast forward to the 1950s around the time of the Brown v. board decision that we all know so well. What was the political and social climate around that time as far as the rich and powerful and public schools?

Lisa : In the 1950s, America was undergoing significant change in the aftermath of World War II. And [00:03:00] we had for a brief time, a president who was determined to work in alliance with the NAACP and respond to the racial segregation that was dominant in America. And that was President Harry Truman. He talked about as president, how sickened he was to learn that African-American soldiers who had served our country and helped defeat Hitler, helped defeat the Japanese Empire, were treated with such violence and disrespect [00:03:30] upon their return in the United States, and he worked to integrate the United States military to order that integration of the United States military. That was a dramatic step forward in civil rights. It came not quite a hundred years after the conclusion of the Civil War and the Civil War amendments, which sought to secure freedom for people who had been enslaved on these slave farms called plantations. But that promise, the promise of those Civil War amendments was quickly destroyed by [00:04:00] right-wing politicians at the time. They were then Democrats who were opposing what were then called the radical Republicans. And they were abetted by United States Supreme Court that sought to neuter those civil war amendments that guaranteed the right to vote, that guaranteed equal protection of the law, and they allowed the Jim Crow racial apartheid to become the law of land in America.

So that was the state of the country. And in fact, in 1948, in response to President Truman's declaration that the United [00:04:30] States Armed forces were to be integrated fully Strom Thurmond, a South Carolinian, ran for president on the Dixiecrat label to try to make segregation not just the law of the South and not just the informal rule of the North, but to make that the official national policy of America. And he lost. So one of the things that happened shortly thereafter ... Sorry to get into this, but I think it's an important part of that history. Is that President Eisenhower, a Republican who would be a moderate Republican, certainly by modern [00:05:00] standards, became President. Nixon was his vice president. And Eisenhower appointed one of his political rivals, the Republican governor of California named Earl Warren to the United States Supreme Court. Earl Warren had been a prosecutor, had been a Republican all of his life. But when he got to the Supreme Court, he was determined to really be a judge, an impartial judge enforcing the Constitution, not just a politician. And shortly after he was appointed the court, the United States Supreme Court issued the Brown v. Board of Education decision. [00:05:30] It was a unanimous decision finding that separate schools are inherently unequal and ordering the desegregation of public schools in America.

That was particularly in a case out of Kansas. Brown v. Board of Education, the Topeka Board of Kansas. But it involved other cases from the East Coast that were consolidated. And it was a landmark ruling to finally declare that the equal protection clause of our constitution means what it says and that school children could go to school together [00:06:00] and not be racially segregated, especially with these inferior schools that were created for black children along with all the other incidents of slavery and discrimination, segregated water fountains and swimming pools and public sites and restaurants and the like. And so this was a truly landmark decision, and it was embraced by many people. It was spearheaded by the genius of Thurgood Marshall, who was then the head of the NAACP along with his legal team, but it was reviled by southern governors, [00:06:30] many southern racists, along with some northern racists who sought to obstruct the implementation of Brown v. Board of Education.

And so in many ways, what we're seeing play out now is part of that legacy from 70 years ago. That was just one of the most important and moral decisions of the United States Supreme Court. And it was one specific to ensuring that all Americans, no matter their race, have access to quality education to fulfill their dreams and their destiny. [00:07:00] And unfortunately, some of the children and grandchildren of those racists who oppose Brown, some of the people who inherited that philosophy or regressive philosophy have been empowered in many ways in recent years to continue to attack public schools and public education.

Natieka : And how does, I guess, the relationship between people and public schools change around this time, specifically white people in this country. Is that when we see more private schools [00:07:30] created? What happens once integration becomes mandatory?

Lisa : Well, two things happened. One immediately and one shortly thereafter. The first thing that happened was that a number of governors, including the governor of Arkansas, literally shut down the public schools in order for private schools to be created for whites to go to get them out of public schools. When I went to the inauguration of Barack Obama in 2009, I had the fortune to sit near the Little Rock nine who were the students who first [00:08:00] integrated the Little Rock schools in the aftermath of that shutdown of the public schools. In other states like Virginia, people like Lewis Powell, who was the lawyer advising the city of Richmond's school district that was the former capital of the Confederacy. They were working on efforts to help get public funding for basically vouchers or tuition for white children to leave the public schools in Virginia, which were subject as were other schools to these desegregation orders by the United [00:08:30] States Supreme Court. So the immediate reaction was that powerful white people, powerful white leaders, sought to block that integration by removing white children or helping to remove white children what would be called white flight in some ways from those public schools, from them being integrated.

So immediately there was a period in which President Eisenhower was using the federal government to insist that brown v. Board of Education be implemented. There's the famous photo and painting of Ruby Bridges, the [00:09:00] brave elementary school student walking into school, being faced with this extraordinary hate. This hateful, racist crowd spitting angry white women and white men and their children assailing her and the other students who were integrating the schools. But then there was a period in which there was slow-going, that integration. There were all these maneuvers by these white politicians and the parents who were complicit to deny equal education to black students. And so it was only in the early 1960s [00:09:30] when those lower federal courts were really able to start issuing significant orders saying, "You're not complying with Brown. You've got to integrate these schools."

And that led to an explosion of what were called "independent schools". These independent schools were purely private. They were also called by their critics, and rightly so in my view, segregation academies. They were places where rich white parents were creating schools for their kids. This was outside of some of the longer standing non- [00:10:00] public schools, which were religious schools, like Catholic schools that were associated with the Catholic parish in town. They were private, and they launched a huge number of them in the 1960s. There were a number of newspaper articles about them. There were books about them. One famous one was in Wichita, Kansas that was helping to spearhead this so-called independent school movement, but really the roots of that in the 1960s were rooted in racial segregation.

Natieka : So it sounds like things we're talking about right now with privatization and also vouchers [00:10:30] seem to have been created straight up from fear of integration and racial hatred.

Lisa : I think that's true. And part of what we saw when I looked at this history, one of the things that really struck me was back in 1955, the year after Brown v. Board of Education was issued, Milton Friedman, who later became a famous economist, criticized the Brown v. Board of Education decision, and he used attacking the public schools as the basis for that critique. He said, "Privately conducted [00:11:00] schools can develop exclusively white schools, exclusively colored schools and mixed schools." And he said the problem wasn't segregation. The problem was public schools. And then later on, as Milton Friedman worked to implement this effort to defund public schools, he said, "The ideal way would be to abolish the public school system. How? Vouchers." His family foundation, which is now called Ed Choice, promoted vouchers and charters and other so-called school choice. The roots of Milton Friedman's [00:11:30] efforts back then dating back in 1955 are significant and a lot of people don't know part of that history.

And then the second thing that I learned when I was studying this was that Charles Koch, who was then a proto billionaire, he was the heir to what became known as Koch Industries and is now called Koch. In the 1960s, he started supporting these so-called independent schools, the one in Wichita. And the very first separate nonprofit that he helped create was called the Center for Independent Education. [00:12:00] And it was specifically opposed to public schools and supported these so-called independent schools. He also wrote, back then ... He was in some ways a more public person, but he talked about both public universities and public schools. But he had a piece that he wrote about a model for private colleges. He wrote this piece with George Pearson. And he said in it ... And I just feel like it's important to say this because I think it sheds light on the mindset. He said, "There's no reason why the taxpayer, wealthy or destitute, [00:12:30] should be burdened with the financial responsibility of training and educating the future employees of industry." So basically he's saying, we should not be ... Rich people. But he tried to say poor people too. But basically, rich people should not have to subsidize the education of other people's employees or servants in essence. So that was in the early 1970s.

And at that time, he also helped underwrite a book attacking compulsory education, meaning the idea that kids would need to attend public schools as part of the American [00:13:00] experience as part of learning the basics of history and math and English. So this is a deep longstanding antipathy toward our public schools by one of the really most influential billionaires in America now. But back then, those are the roots. And so those two strands of this attack on public schools are deep and long.

Natieka : One thing that immediately struck me when I was thinking about making this episode and talking about this topic is why are rich people so concerned about public schools when they can afford [00:13:30] to send their kids to private schools? Maybe this is a philosophical question or something that is unknowable, but what do rich people get out of getting involved in public education and other parts of public life that don't have much to do with them?

Lisa : I've thought about this question too because Charles Koch never attended public schools. Why was he so hostile from such an early stage to public schools? Betsy DeVos, who was Trump's first secretary of education, she never attended public schools. She has a deep hostility to public schools. [00:14:00] And many of these other billionaires who are backing this effort to undermine public schools through the so-called school choice, like you said, a lot of them went to private schools or certainly can send their kids to private schools. It's a little bit like social security. Why are they attacking social security too when it doesn't really affect them. But it's about control basically. One of the things that I've observed in looking at a number of these billionaires that are involved in politics is how much they want remold America in their image. [00:14:30] When I think of Charles Koch, I think of him as someone who is trained as an engineer, and basically he's sought to re-engineer America to fit his worldview, and they have the money and power to do so.

I think the other part of that is that public schools are one of the most democratic things in a democratic society. Every student can attend. There's no discrimination based on race or by wealth or religion. Every kid can go and get the same education in that school district or in that [00:15:00] elementary school or middle school or high school. That brings people together from all walks of life. It breaks down when it's successful, when it doesn't reinforce residential patterns of segregation or residential patterns of separation by wealth, economic separation. It breaks down those barriers where people would or could remain more insular. For example, many churches in America are also racially segregated, racially separated. So public schools are one of the ways in which people encounter people of different backgrounds, [00:15:30] and that is fundamentally threatening I think to people who want to control society, who want to limit the narrative, who want to reinforce some of these hierarchies in ways that serve them.

And so I wish that they would just focus on their own private schools. The idea of just attacking assailing, undermining, defunding public schools is so fundamentally destructive. It's just almost mind-boggling to see it take hold. For example, the Walmart fortune. That [00:16:00] is a fortune built on these retail stores that were founded by Sam Walton, his family, the Walton's. They're very, very wealthy. They've inherited this great fortune. But they've been essential to this effort to privatize public schools. Why do they want to do so? Now, some of them make a critique of public schools. There have been these critiques over time claiming that they're not good enough. But then when you look at what happens in the charter schools, the charter schools have similar performance as the public schools. In fact, the public schools often outperform these charter schools [00:16:30] that are creaming, meaning they're not taking all the students like a public school has to. Maybe they're not taking disabled students. So there's a lot of disinformation out there about supposed performance of these charter school alternatives or what have you. But it's a myth.

And there was a fantastic expose by the Detroit Free Press about a decade ago where they really looked at what Betsy DeVos had created in Michigan through her political pressure. What was happening with those charters, for example, that were administered [00:17:00] by the university, but really operate in their own independent way. And they found that these so-called alternative schools were not performing better than public schools. But what would help public schools in my personal opinion, would be more funding. More funding to support the arts, more funding to support industrial training, more funding to support talent in athletics, more funding to support science and civic education. But that's not the direction that these regressive billionaires are going.

Natieka : It seems like the natural idea is if [00:17:30] you don't think something is good enough, make it better as opposed to go to an alternative. So ALEC is a group that comes up a lot when we talk about the rise of, I guess, a lot of right-wing agendas over time. And I'm sure public education is just one of many things that's in their crosshairs, I guess we should say. So when we talk about ALEC, let's be clear about what that is. It's an acronym for anyone who's never seen it written out. So what does that stand for and how [00:18:00] has this group changed education policy over the decades?

Lisa : ALEC is the acronym for the American Legislative Exchange Council, and it describes itself as the largest voluntary body of state legislators in the country. What it really is a pay to play group to advance special interests. And we know that in part because the legislators who are the members pay like 50 to a hundred dollars a year in dues, but the corporate lobbyists and special interest group lobbyists that vote as equals with those legislators behind [00:18:30] closed doors at ALEC Task forces, they pay 10,000, a hundred thousand dollars or more to be part of ALEC to have this captive audience to advance their agenda. When I launched ALEC Exposed back in 2011, I looked at all the leaders of ALEC to find out who were they? And 103 out of the 104 leaders of ALEC were Republicans, not my fault. They claim that they're nonpartisan, but they're largely a Republican entity that has closely aligned itself with Republican presidents in [00:19:00] advancing policies of Republicans.

ALEC has had a task force on education for decades now, and it has focused on pushing forward these changes to divert public tax dollars into private hands in the form of vouchers or charters or neo-vouchers. Alec is a group that has other agenda items. It has been behind the scenes working on supporting measures that make it harder for Americans to vote. For many years it advanced the private prison industry along with trying to [00:19:30] expand the detention of immigrants. It has worked to make it harder for Americans to sue companies when their products kill their family members or injure them. It has worked to make it harder for Americans to keep a big industrial facility out of their backyard. So basically, like I said, a pay-to-play group that pushes these bills in the states and the education agenda has been a key part of its agenda.

Natieka : Yeah. When you say that, just think about they're saying the quiet part out loud. And while that's very disturbing, [00:20:00] I think it's important to be clear that they are very clear about what the end game is, and it is to kill public education. It's not just fearmongering for us to say These people want to kill public education.

Thanks for listening to School Me, and a quick thank you to all of the NEA members listening. If you're not an NEA member yet, visit nea.org/whyjoin to learn more about member benefits.

And so we're talking about Betsy DeVos and all the money in her family, and we talked about Walmart [00:20:30] and the Walton family. There's Rupert Murdoch, there's all of these people who have a lot of money and a lot of power. Why do these corporate giants in particular see public education as a business opportunity?

Lisa : So that's another part of the equation. You have these multiple forces. There are some entities at the local level. We've seen a lot of fraud, for example, in charter schools, in state after state because there's so few controls. And there are people who want their hand in the till. They want some of this money. [00:21:00] We've seen multimillionaires try to get their hands on public school money diverted into these vouchers or charters in order to buy real estate and then make that real estate, whether it's a strip mall into a school and then turn that real estate into an REIT, a real estate investment trust as a tax benefit. There's been dozens and dozens of cases of charter fraud and abuse of this money and lack of controls as part of the way those ALEC bills go in. They're not subject [00:21:30] to the State Department of Education's typical rules for accounting and financial controls and that sort of thing.

But at the macro level, a few years ago you had Rupert Murdoch talking about how the field of public schools was a $500 billion industry in essence, that they wanted a piece of. That Wall Street should get part of. And then we've seen the emergence of so-called virtual schools like K-12. This was long before the pandemic, and we had this broader adaptation [00:22:00] to deal with the health risks of the pandemic and had more virtual schools. But back 15 years or so ago, one of the school companies that was created was called K-12, and it's a Wall Street traded entity pays its executives huge sums, way more than any principal or teacher would ever be paid. That's one of many examples of a Wall Street traded entity that has become part of the industry that has emerged out of this so-called school choice movement.

Then we also saw back after Katrina and [00:22:30] the disastrous hurricane in New Orleans, how there were predatory entities who were trying to engage in their own form of disaster capitalism. That they would use that disaster to try to buy up buildings and take over key parts of delivering education in order to grow their power. There's the ideological component of so-called school choice agenda, which has been seeded in the racist animosity in response [00:23:00] to Brown. There's this religious component that Betsy DeVos weaves into the equation along with some of her counterparts. So all these forces have come together to really drive what was an acceleration of privatization before the Trump administration, but then has been dramatically accelerated with these attacks on the Department of Education.

Natieka : We're in a Trump presidency again. So I wanted to move into talking about him and Project 2025. So Project 2025 [00:23:30] pre-exists his presidency, but what does it propose for education and what is the goal of Project 2025 when it comes to education?

Lisa : Well, there are a couple components of it. One was Project 2025 expressly targeted the Department of for elimination. Most people believe that that would be impossible because as a matter of law, it requires Congress to deauthorize an agency or to create an agency signed into law by the president. Can't be done unilaterally by a president. [00:24:00] And yet we now have the Roberts Court, which issued a ruling in McMahon v. New York just two weeks ago, where on the court's shadow docket, the Supreme Court overturned a lower court ruling blocking the firing of nearly a third of the workforce of the Department of Education. They didn't have oral argument, they didn't have full briefing. But the partisan justices, the Republican justices appointed to the US Supreme Court overturned that lower court ruling to allow Trump to go forward [00:24:30] with this mass firing of civil servants who spent their careers working on behalf of the American people, helping with public school funding, also helping with some of these charter funding offices, civil rights enforcement through the Department of Education, aid for students who are attending public universities or private universities and more.

Project 2025 set out an ambitious agenda that was extreme. It was spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation and joined by more than a hundred right- [00:25:00] wing organizations, most of which have received funding from Leonard Leo's network. Leo is the person who Trump chose to handpick the justices he chose to put on the Supreme Court. And those groups banded together in a chapter that is just an assault on public education, on the Department of Education, on Civil Rights Enforcement and protection through the Department of Education and more. And it also mapped out an attack on a doctrine that's been part of the US Supreme Court [00:25:30] precedent for nearly a hundred years. That case is called Humphrey's Executor, but it's about independent agencies. That's related to the president's power to fire, basically a commission head, let alone anyone else, which is all part of this broader theory that Project 2025 embraces called the Unitary Executive Theory, which we've heard from some of these Republican Supreme Court appointees, which basically suggests claims that a president can fire anyone, whether it's the head of the FBI or an agency head or [00:26:00] secretary at the Department of Education. Everyone reports to him, everyone can be fired with him, notwithstanding any other rules.

And Project 2025 also sought to replace thousands of federal workers who were career hires, people who were hired based on merit. Replace them with loyalists. People who would be chosen based on their loyalty, not to our constitution, but to Trump. During the presidential campaign, Trump denied that he had anything to do with Project 2025, even though he was at an event announcing his embrace of [00:26:30] heritage and how they were going to fill in the details. And then of course, since he was elected, this administration has implemented substantial portions of Project 2025.

Natieka : And why do you think that this billionaire backed agenda is so persistent and successful despite public polling consistently showing that the American people do support public schools?

Lisa : It's interesting because on the one hand, for example, Charles Koch didn't endorse Trump, but basically Trump advances Koch's agenda, whether knowingly or not innumerable [00:27:00] ways including on education. We know that Steve Bannon, for example, one of the early advisors for Trump and someone who has continued to help shape this administration's policies from the outside has talked about with a more colorful acronym, but throwing stuff at the wall, basically. Throw as much of the wall as you can, and they can't stop it all. Your opponents can't stop it all. Most of it will get through because you just can't stop it all. And so the Trump administration has sought to capitalize on how much attention anyone can [00:27:30] pay to any given thing that's happening when they're doing multiple destructive acts at the same time. And I also think I would describe them as having an overly confident view that they can not pay political consequences for their actions. That because of the gerrymandering that this Supreme Court has allowed, that the Roberts Court has allowed the district maps for voting to be so distorted that it could be hard for Republicans to face a political consequence because in many jurisdictions, they have safe seats where [00:28:00] their only competition is from a Republican, not in a general election because the maps have been drawn with such precision like in North Carolina to allow them to prevail even when they embrace deeply unpopular policies.

So I think they're counting on that gerrymandering that the Roberts Court, the Supreme Court has allowed to protect them from the consequences of their actions. But I think they're in for a big surprise because I think the American people, they're going to come to this August recess in 2025 [00:28:30] and see a lot of people who are really unhappy with the array of destructive policies, including toward our public schools that this administration has put forward as well as tax on Medicare, Medicaid and more. And I think that unhappiness, along with the economic instability that Trump has injected into our system, I think it's going to really grow opposition to Trump and his enablers coming into 2026.

Natieka : Okay. We've heard this. We see [00:29:00] the writing on the wall, the history behind us, and a little bit of a preview of what's to come. So what can educators, community members, anyone listening right now do in order to push back against all of these privatization efforts and these other different ways that this administration and other rich and powerful people are chipping away at the institution of public schools?

Lisa : I have a couple thoughts. One is we've seen a small number of [00:29:30] people who have been funded by far right heirs, like how Moms for Liberty has come in some of these states and school boards to try to take them over or get their people in place who have really regressive views, and they've been funded by one of the heirs to the public's grocery store fortune. That's like a small number of people being funded by a couple of really rich people to advance what I consider to be a pretty extreme agenda. And the reality is that we have millions [00:30:00] of Americans who have benefited from public schools and who are currently benefiting from public schools, where their kids are thriving, where their kids are growing and getting the benefit of our schools. And those parents, along with the teachers and administrators who are working to protect those kids, are going to need to band together even more to protect public schools, to advance the idea of public schools, to correct the damage that's been done and to view this as a long-term moral fight.

[00:30:30] This isn't just a policy fight. This is about our future. It's about the children of America. It's about our values and whether we really are a family-oriented country or community or politics where we're actually going to invest in our schools, invest in the idea that learning matters, that truth matters, that knowing history matters, that understanding math matters and science. And I think as you point out, most Americans are with us. [00:31:00] Most Americans really like their public schools. They like the teachers who are teaching their kids. They want the schools to thrive and to be supported. And so we have a ready-made majority if we can just help people not give up, not accept that this is just the way it's going to be and believe that it can be different and better. There are choices we can make. This is not set in stone. We can make different choices, better choices for our kids, for our communities, for our country. Second, I really [00:31:30] truly think everyone should listen to or watch Becky Pringle's speech that she gave for the NEA earlier this month, earlier in July. It's called On Freedom. And it's just a powerful, beautiful speech about what we can do together, why we need to build power together and why it matters for our freedom and our future.

Natieka : Why are there no billionaires on the right side of this, or do we not hear about it? Where's the powerful progressive person who will back, I guess, the anti- [00:32:00] Moms for Liberty movement, the anti-ALEC movement? It's very interesting to see there's just so much money on the other side of this, and it doesn't seem like it's a fair fight at all.

Lisa : Well, there certainly are people from all financial backgrounds who have been trying to protect our public schools and protect our democracy and protect our freedoms through philanthropic efforts as well as through organizing. Like the work that the NEA does, for example. Both its ordinary education of its members, [00:32:30] but also the separate funding that it has for reaching out to voters. But it seems to be a disproportionate number of billionaires on the right who have been so devoted over such a long period. And I think Charles Koch being the person who has devoted the longest, deepest, widest effort in a way to assailing schools in various ways through his different organizations. But it's not that there's no people of wealth that support public schools, it's just that the [00:33:00] billionaires who oppose them are shouting more with their money basically. And I think given the number of crises we have happening in the country, whether it's access to reproductive healthcare, fighting for access to Medicaid for parents or parents who are in nursing homes or family members who are disabled or living in group homes or other settings and need these supplements, we have so many fights going on right now that I think the [00:33:30] money is dispersed in terms of countering these assaults on our freedoms and our just wellbeing.

But I hope that once the dust settles, as people sort of get their orientation around like, okay, now we've seen the first six months of these efforts to undermine these basic institutions like public schools and more, here's how we can come together and leverage our mutual support, mutual aid and support like with all the people who came out on the No Kings Day effort, [00:34:00] for example, or who've come out to support marking John Lewis's call to action of good trouble. How can we see these issues as not siloed, but as shared issues for our shared community and try to have funding support and grassroots activity, grassroots action that can meet the challenge that we're facing on so many levels and not meet it in a siloed way whereby dividing us, we would fail, but if we could be united, I think we can succeed.

Natieka : At least there's [00:34:30] a little hope. Thank you so much, Lisa, for talking to me today. I think I learned a lot and I think anybody listening will learn a lot, and hopefully people feel like they have a good sense of why we are where we are right now.

Lisa : Yes. Well, thank you so much for inviting me, and I'm supported by my team at True North Research and my colleagues over at Court Accountability and other researchers in the world who've done tremendous work on these issues. So I'm honored to be part of your program and look forward to listening [00:35:00] to all of the work that you're doing and to really supporting the vision that Becky Pringle really called forth in her beautiful speech.

Natieka : Thanks for listening. Make sure you subscribe so you don't miss a single episode of School Me. And take a minute to rate the show and leave a review. It really helps us out and it makes it easier for more educators to find us. For more tips to help you bring the best to your students text pod, that's P-O-D to 48744.