The Forum with Josh Cowen Podcast

Josh Cowen
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  1. 3d ago

    “Women are among the strongest counters to the chaos and cruelty of the Trump presidency.”

    The 2026 midterms are around the corner, and although we’ve been hearing “this is the most important election of our lifetime” for literally all of my adult lifetime, I think it’s pretty safe to say this one is really it. So in addition to all the candidates and elected officials I’ve interviewed here over the past year, I’m trying to feature a few more conversations with folks working in different ways on Election 2026. Today I’m very excited to be chatting with Jessica Mackler. Jessica is a longtime political strategist, currently serving as President of the legendary group Emily’s List. Emily’s list is the premier outfit working to elect Democratic women to all levels of government. This year, they’re especially focused on Congress. I’m going to get out of the way and get right to it, so here you go. A Conversation with Jessica Mackler Give me an overview of your map: some of the candidates you’re most excited about and maybe one or two places you’re excited to be competing in that maybe weren’t on your map in earlier cycles. Absolutely. Well, one of the things that was very clear to me coming into this election cycle, kind of our guiding North Star strategic focus, was that the most important thing that we could do was to leverage the strength of this organization into the fight to take back power in this country. That we needed to secure majorities in the House, in the Senate, secure governing power in the states, so that we could fight back against some of the most grave threats that this country has ever seen. And so, that’s really how we’ve oriented our work all cycle long. What I’m most excited about right now is that we’ve delivered on that, to see women at the center of the House majority, women who are going to deliver that House majority for Democrats is really exciting. When we saw the first round of initial party red-to-blue races come out, 8 of the 12 candidates on those lists were EMILYs List women. Emily’s List women make up the majority of toss-up races in House races right now. So everyone from Christina Hines in Michigan 10, Denise Powell in Nebraska 2, Joanna Mendoza in Arizona 6, these are women who are at the very heart of the House majority fight. The Senate majority is in play because of Mary Peltola’s campaign in Alaska, once in a generation opportunity to flip that seat. But beyond that, what I’m really excited about is that we are competing in seats that have eluded Democrats in the past. That is true of the Michigan 10 seat that Republicans have been able to hold onto over and over again, and is really at risk of flipping. I think Christina is going to flip that seat this November. It’s also true of seats that Donald Trump carried by significant margin. When we look at someone like Pia Dandiya, who is a lifelong educator, former principal, running in Florida: this is a district Trump carried by 10.5 points in 2024. It’s a district that Republicans gerrymandered to give themselves a seat that is now in toss-up territory for Democrats. So the fact that we’re really able to compete in places all over the map that would not normally be in play. There’s another district that is up in Michigan, Michigan 1, this is the UP. Really tough territory for Democrats. Callie Barr, a military spouse, former high school English teacher, is putting this district in play. This has never been competitive for Democrats before. This is a Trump 21.2-point district in 2024. So across the map, whether we’re talking about the districts at the heart and soul of this majority, the districts that are being pulled into competitiveness that haven’t been before, women are at the center of that. We’re really proud of that fight. I could talk as you can tell all day about these, but you can find all of them on our website. We could talk about Christina Hines all day. She’s a friend of mine She's a friend of mine over in the Michigan 10th. She's been on this chat, too, as well. Alright, so walk me through your process right now at Emily’s List. You’re a values-driven organization but you’re also a serious political operation. What are you looking for both early on and, as an election cycle moves forward, to partner with particular candidates and in particular states? Well, if you zoom out, the founding of Emily’s List, the genesis of Emily’s List was to create political power for women. That women didn’t hold enough offices for their concerns to be taken seriously, and so they were dismissed and they couldn’t get that power because nobody took them seriously as candidates. So our role here is to elect women. I judge our success by hands raised taking oaths at the end of the day, and that’s really the foundation of all of the work. And one of the reasons that we have such a strong record of delivering wins with these candidates is we approach this work through that lens throughout. What does it take to actually win this seat, for this district, for this candidate in this place, in this moment? And that tailored work is what drives really big impact and really big results. That’s everything from working with candidates on their launch, thinking about tweaks to their call time program if it’s not working but also some of the bigger strategic challenges of their election. And so we are real partners with them embedded in their races, thinking through every dynamic of those races to think about what does it take to get us across the finish line, keeping an eye for what is starting to expand, what is working in our favor. Certainly in other cycles, that could work in reverse, but in this cycle, we’re in a cycle where the opportunity keeps building, and so we’ve really been thinking through the entire cycle of what does it take to expand upon opportunity and to put women in this, in the position to actually make those wins happen. You don’t get to a point where we’re here in the end of September with Democrats having, at times, a double-digit advantage on the generic ballot. We don’t put those races in play by starting here in September. We put them in play because we started back in early 2025, really looking at what was on the table for us. We set out one of the most expansive maps of any national organization in the country at that time, even at a time when it didn’t necessarily… we didn’t know that that was all going to come to fruition, but it’s really by that kind of broad strokes look at the map, what is working, and then the very detailed, tailored work in each individual race that puts us in the position to be able to have people win and make competitive districts that, again, as we’ve said, are just… have not been traditionally competitive for Democrats. You are curating both an immediate electoral project but also a longer term political project. I had Adam Jentleson on here a couple weeks back and we talked about durability. How do you at Emily’s List think about being a part of a larger coalition of potentially ideologically, geographically, and demographically diverse candidates, while also keeping laser-focused on some of the specific goals you’re also trying to meet and make last? I think for us at Emily’s List, it’s really been about abandoning the idea of those working in competition with each other, but really seeing that it works in concert. And when you put them in concert with each other, we actually have greater results. You know, we hear all the time that pundits, stakeholders, others question women’s electability. This is particularly true when it comes to women of color, and really makes a lot of assumptions about who can win and where. And what we have found is that when we take that really tailored approach, when we look at a district and think about what it takes to win that district in that moment of time, then we’ve proven over and over again that that’s not true. Because what we see is that voters are looking for leaders who really understand their struggles, and we win seats by putting forth candidates whose life experience really resonates with voters. So a great example of this is Emelia Sykes, who represents Ohio 13. This is a district that is predominantly white. This a district that Trump carried twice, or that Trump carried that she’s won twice. And Emelia has won this district as a black woman. Because of her leadership and who she is and what she represents, and by winning that district, we really are able to cast aside some of those assumptions about, again, who is able to win and in what territory. And so I think when we really think about each individual district and what it needs to be successful that we’re able to drive a longer term strategy. To your point, how do you grow the political power of women over time within this coalition? It is by both having that broad philosophy about what it takes to be successful and then deploying it in individual races in a really specific and tailored way. And kind of casting aside some of the assumptions that people are making about who can win, and actually interrogating what is it going to look like to win right now with these candidates in this one place. I mean, we’ve been talking about Christina Hines in the 10th District of Michigan there. I can tell you, going out to Macomb County, there was still some conversation over there in the primary about, well, “only a guy is going to be able to win Macomb back for Democrats,” stuff like that. And it was something that you know, a lot of us who supported her from the beginning were trying to kind of really push back against. Like, this is not the conversation we need to be having right now. It’s also not very creative. No. And We hear this all the time, right? And you just gave a great example, but if, for any district and any race I give you, we would have examples of that. It’s what I talk most often with our candidates about, is the way in whic

    “Women are among the strongest counters to the chaos and cruelty of the Trump presidency.”

  2. Sep 24

    Regulating Academic Freedom

    Sometimes running a newsletter and podcast series on a super broad topic like “education, kids, and families” means you can jump into a news item, a book, or a column at length. Sometimes you do it because it speaks to something you’ve been trying to engage with, or re-engage with, for a while. Today’s guest is an example of that. We’re talking with Katie Rainwater, a fellow at the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, a faculty member at Florida International University, and a researcher on how national conservatism seeks to change education. Katie recently co-wrote a piece on proposed federal accreditation rules that would undermine higher education across the country. If you follow me here at all, you know that general theme is something we cover here too. And last spring, I sat down with Katie’s colleague Isaac Kamola at the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, to talk about some of these issues as well. One of the big issues I’m watching for over the next several weeks is the regulatory environment around the new federal scholarship tax credit, whose benefit to public schools is real—but could be restricted by the U.S. Treasury’s regulatory process. So heading into the fall, it’s a good time to check in on what to expect, and why it’s exactly through the tedious processes of regulation and paperwork that some of these big policy changes are happening. A Conversation with Katie Rainwater You recently wrote about proposed federal rules that would make some pretty significant changes to the way colleges and universities are accredited, including giving the federal government and states more leverage over the accrediting process. For someone who hasn't been following this debate, what is actually being proposed here—and why should people outside higher education care about it? I think what is being proposed is a set of rules that destroys the independence of the accreditation system. So universities, they’ve long had independent accrediting bodies that review what’s going on in the university to ensure that it’s a quality university, right? That students aren’t wasting their money. That the government is not wasting their money by giving loans for students to pursue a degree at that university, right? So these are independent bodies that serve to review institutional quality. What the proposed rules do is they really take away the independence of accreditors, and they do this in two ways. The first is by saying that it’s the role of the accreditor to ensure that the university is following state law. This has long been a goal of the Right, including the Heritage Foundation. They want to return education to the states, right? We see this with the attempted demise of the Department of Education. And again, with these accrediting bodies, right, there’s been legislation proposed by [Governor Ron] DeSantis When he was in the House of Representatives, to enable states to create their own accreditors. So this basically means that independent accreditors cannot say, hey, look, this state law is going to impinge upon the quality of your institution if you follow it. Instead, they have to be telling the university, okay, here’s all the state laws, are you following these or not? And then the second thing that the rules do that’s really alarming is they’re much more kind of prescriptive than the existing proposed rules. And so the existing proposed rules basically say accreditors need to assess institutions in 10 general areas, but they don’t really say like in this area, this is what a quality institution would be. But the new rules, they’re very prescriptive and they basically say that you’re going to need to ensure that the universities have this set of kind of standards in place. You argue that these seemingly technical accreditation changes could give states much more control over what happens inside public universities. What would that actually look like on a campus? So just to take, you know, the example closest at hand to me, I’m a sociologist in Florida, right? And so what the state has done over the past two years is they’ve said, we want to reduce student access to sociology in Florida. We don’t like this discipline. We think it’s left-wing. We think it’s ideological. We don’t think it’s a real science. And so, it’s not going to be allowed to be included as an option for students to take within the general ed curriculum. These new proposed rules would basically require a state like Florida to enforce legislation like SB 266, which introduces all of these restrictions on what can be taught in the general education. One of the things that jumped out at me was the connection between accreditation and academic freedom. How could these rules affect what professors can teach and what kinds of research universities support? Academic freedom is really the bedrock of the university. And the reason why is that, in order for there to be public trust in a university, you need to ensure that professors have the independence to kind of pursue the truth, right? And they’re not going to modify their research findings or they’re not going to frame their discussions of topics in class in order to appease a set of donors or a set of politicians, right? So universities need to have academic freedom. And what’s interesting about the proposed rules is they actually require accreditors to introduce a standard on academic freedom. But this doesn’t really improve anything because all of the major accreditors already have standards on academic freedom, but what the proposed rules also do is they say that no standard can be enforced, which contravenes state law. And so in Florida, we have all of these state laws that really interfere with faculty’s ability to exercise academic freedom. So just to give a couple examples: We have this law about countries of concern, which is designed to end research partnerships that faculty might have with other faculty and countries like China, Iran, Venezuela, right? Under these proposed rules, the accreditor can’t say, hey, look, there’s this issue where faculty aren’t able to engage in the research partnerships they need to engage in in order to pursue the projects they find important. Instead, they have to ensure that those universities are enforcing that law. And then in terms of the classroom, again, with general education, the accreditors need to ensure under this that any laws with regard to curriculum, and some of these laws have even been found unconstitutional. We found Florida’s Stop Woke Act is now enjoined. But accreditors, while these laws are still in the books, they would need to ensure that they’re being enforced. This could limit students’ exposure to ideas that the state government in power doesn’t want them to be exposed to. And so in Florida, we’ve seen restrictions on teaching about race, gender, these types of topics. You also raise the possibility that the new emphasis on “student success” and economic returns could affect which degrees universities offer and even which students they admit. How seriously should people take that possibility? I think people should take this extremely seriously. So if we look back to Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation said that one of their goals is to rebalance post-secondary education to get more students involved in workforce education, right? And so I want to say at the outset that getting training in a trade is like it’s not necessarily a bad thing. And especially, you know, for those that weren’t going to pursue college or weren’t going to pursue a university. But what the Heritage Foundation wants to do is it wants to take students that were going to go to college, were going to go to university, and get them into the workforce faster and ensure that they’re kind of, you know, getting training that they can just quickly use on the job instead of getting a kind of liberal arts education that will allow them to participate more fully in our democracy. And so one of the things that these proposed rules do is they say that there’s like a number of different pretty quantitative metrics that are introduced in terms of student success. And so some of these metrics are like, what’s the return on investment of a degree? Is a student going to be making more with that degree than they would be making if they entered the workforce straight out of high school, right? What the Department of Education could do is they could use these proposed rules to tell accreditors in order to maintain accreditation, you need to slash degree programs like women and gender studies or like sociology that aren’t offering a high return on investment. And I want to say that in the proposed rules, there are provisions that are going to require cost cutting all around. So one of the things that the proposed rules require is they require that the institutions maintain a sufficient flexibility in staffing. Finally, this is happening through what sounds like a pretty obscure regulatory process. What can faculty, students, and ordinary members of the public actually do right now—and does public comment have a realistic chance of changing the outcome? In this case, maybe so, because the federal rules essentially require the Department of Education to review every comment and to respond to it before implementing the proposed rules. And so the Department of Ed, they have a relatively short timeline. They have to respond to all of these rules by November. And so lots of public comment in this case could actually slow down the implementation of the rules or even open the Department of Education up for a lawsuit if they don’t sufficiently consider the rules. Unfortunately, public comment did just close yesterday. However, these proposed rules are catastrophic. And what we really need is we need everyone with a stake in higher educati

    Regulating Academic Freedom

  3. Sep 16

    “Public policy is public service.”

    One of the big debates—maybe the most important debate right now—going on in progressive politics is the the extent to which policymaking requires compromise. It’s both an electoral question—how can Democrats regain a majority both in 2026 and in 2028 and beyond—and question about crafting the kind governance that actually moves dearly held issue priorities forward. These are conversations I’m especially interested in because, although I cover all sorts of perspectives on policies related to kids and families—ranging from history to religious faith to civic engagement—at the end of the day, I’m a policy analyst. I’ve always been drawn to questions that require research, data, and evidence to bring a little light to the heat of political controversy. And right now, I’m getting pretty heavily criticized among many friends in the public school community for sticking to that approach on a couple of education questions—one of which we get into today. All of this is why I read with great interest a new book by Adam Jentleson, who makes the case that heterodoxy—both with respect to policy, but also politics—is necessary to actually win elections and govern. Adam is the president of the Searchlight Institute, having previously served in a number of leadership positions on Capitol Hill. His new book is called Supermajority: How Democrats Can Build Lasting Power (W.W. Norton & Co.) A Conversation with Adam Jentleson Adam Jentleson, thanks for being here. You make a pretty provocative argument that Democrats shouldn’t just be trying to win the next election, but should be trying to build something more like the dominant coalitions Democrats had in the FDR and LBJ eras. What do you think Democrats fundamentally misunderstand about what it takes to build a political supermajority? Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s a fair summary of the argument—and not to downplay the importance of winning elections. I would actually argue that my thesis is that we need to take that extremely seriously. But the way you do that is instead of aiming at the bare minimum number of votes. Whether you’re talking about the electoral college or like how to get to 50 plus one in individual election, instead of aiming at the bare minimum number of votes, we should be aiming higher to build bigger, broader coalitions so that every election doesn’t come down to a coin flip, you know, especially given the stakes that we’re dealing with today, where you have a genuine rise of right-wing authoritarianism in this country, and every election could be the difference between the survival of our democracy or not. So, you know, I think what the party has been missing is that—look, it is a privilege to have as much data at our fingertips as we do today. It’s an extremely useful tool. I would be the first to embrace it, but we at Searchlight have an in-house public opinion operation. We take it very seriously, and part of the argument in the book is that Democrats do need to pay attention to it. But you can’t become captive to the data. And one of the things that’s happened is we’ve decided that we can sort of, you know, slice the electorate extremely thin and aim, you know, and be very efficient in our resource allocation, you know, just to get to that literal, you know, 50 plus one that you need to win. And that has been a disservice because it’s caused us to try to be too clever by half in a lot of ways. My argument is that we should step back and say, what do I need to do to represent a broader coalition than the bare minimum necessary to win? That’s important electorally. It’s important for building, you know, more than just winning the next election. It’s important for building dominance over the next generation. But it’s also important on principle because, you know, you should aspire to represent as broad a swath of the public as you can, whether you’re talking about representing a district or a state or the country writ large as president. You know, it is a good thing and a healthy thing in civic society to try to represent as many people as you can, rather than just the bare minimum. So that’s… that’s, I think, what the party has lost, to answer your question, is that bigger perspective, that broader perspective of saying, you know, what does it take to build a dominant electoral coalition in this country, and how can we break out of that era of narrow… this era of narrow polarization that we’ve been stuck in for way too long? You write about the importance of “heterodoxy” — candidates who don’t necessarily fit neatly into the Democratic ideological box. But there’s an obvious tension here: if Democrats need to appeal to voters who don’t think of themselves as liberals, how do you distinguish productive heterodoxy from simply moving to the right? What’s the test? The test is whether you’re represent… Two tests, actually. One is whether you’re authentically reflecting your own views as a, you know, candidate, as a leader. Yeah, well, you know, let me pause on that one for a second, and I’ll get to the second test in a second. But, you know, we talk a lot about authenticity these days, right? Part of my argument is that it is actually inauthentic to assume a rigidly ideological position across the board, because that’s just not how… that’s not how I work, it’s not how you work, it’s probably not how your listeners and your readers work. I think, you know, any person, if they’re being honest with themselves, you know, is maybe mostly liberal, but probably has a few points of view where they diverge from the prevailing orthodoxy of their side of the spectrum, or, in the case of politics, from their party. And what we’ve done over the last 10 years is we’ve created an ecosystem that tries to suffocate any divergence from that orthodoxy, and that polices rigidity, and that tries to enforce these purity tests. And so what you end up having is candidates who are inauthentic, because they pretend to believe every single bullet point on their side’s, you know, articles of faith. So, I think, first of all, to answer your question, the first test is, you know, saying to yourself, well, listen, am I… are there areas where, you know, if I spoke up, I would diverge from my party, I might take some criticism from activists, interest groups, donors on my side. But I would be being true to myself, and I’d be being honest with myself. And frankly, by doing so, you’re probably gonna end up better reflecting the constituents that you’re vying to represent, because chances are that they think that way, too, where they have, you know, thoughts and ideas and beliefs that diverge. The second test is whether you’re picking fights for the sake of picking fights, or whether you’re doing it, um, to try to reflect that diversity of viewpoints that are in the, in the, uh, sort of in the mix of the American people. And I think, you know, there is risk in… part of what I outline in the book is that. These fights are actually very effective at breaking through our crowded media environment. You know, when media loves conflict, when you diverge from your party and you get yelled at by your side, that’s going to create a media scrum that breaks through, even in this intention starved environment that we live in. It is easy then to start to do that just for the sake of, you know, getting that attention and getting that fight. You do see some examples of that with folks who, you know, kind of get addicted to that high of picking the fight, getting a lot of attention, sort of wash, rinse, repeat. I think those two things combine, and that’s where you sort of form your basic standards here. You know, am I doing this because it’s what I believe in? Am I willing to have the argument because it’s my principle, or am I just doing it for the sake of fighting and for the sake of attention? And, you know, listen, as with many things in life, you know, there are gray areas, there are nuances you have to navigate here, and it could become a slippery slope, you know, but it’s easy to have a slippery slope back in the other direction of saying, well, I’m just gonna, you know, not ever speak my mind, or be honest about what I think, and instead just, you know, take the positions that are being forced on me, because that’s the path of least resistance. So, you know, we’re all adults here, I think people sort of know when they are being honest with themselves, or when they’re just doing it for the sake of attention, and that’s the kind of nuance that you have to navigate, but I think it’s worth it to embrace the challenge of navigating it, because the outcome is going to be a more, you know, genuinely representative politics, and, I would argue, more successful at dominating the power structure for the next generation. If we don’t embrace good faith policy disagreement, we really are creating a party that is going to become narrower and narrower and narrower, and our power base is going to become smaller and smaller and smaller.—Adam Jentleson You’ve argued that Democrats need to build a broader coalition without simply moving right on every issue. So let me test that with an issue I spend a lot of time thinking about: school choice. I’m not asking whether Democrats should embrace private-school vouchers. But the new federal scholarship tax credit creates an interesting wrinkle because, unlike many traditional voucher programs, the money can also support things like tutoring, after-school programs and other educational expenses for public-school families. I’ve argued that Democrats should be looking at this as an opportunity to crack open the voucher model — to make sure public schools and public-school families can access this new revenue stream, rather than ceding the whole concept of educational choice to the right. I’ve gotte

    “Public policy is public service.”

  4. Aug 17

    Is your school near a toxic hazard site?

    Sometimes you read something that you just want to scream about from the rooftops. That happened to me a few days back when I read the first new report from SustainableED, the Sustainable Education Research Initiative at Brown University. That’s a relatively new center devoted to examining the impact of climate change on kids and families in schools. With just some basic statistics, the team has shown that huge numbers of kids learn everyday near environmental hazard sites—and exposure is highly uneven and inequitable. The new report is out in PNAS, one of the most highly cited scientific journals out there. So today we’re talking to Dr. Matthew A. Kraft, founder and director of SustainableED, and one of the authors of the new report. Dr. Kraft is also an expert on teacher labor markets and policy interventions like high-dose tutoring, and served in the Biden White House on the Council of Economic Advisors. Following field guidelines, Dr. Kraft’s team defines environmental hazards as Superfund (EPA-designated sites with significant legacy toxins), Brownfield (former industrial or commercial properties with real or suspected contamination), or Toxic Release Inventory (active facilities that process toxins). In terms of total number, my home state of Michigan is at the very top with more than 5,000 hazard sites, and near the top in sites (51.2) sites per 100,000 people. Nearly two-thirds of our schools are within 1 mile of an environmental hazard site, ranked behind only the tiny state of Rhode Island. With the exception of Minnesota, other standout states are in the northeast— Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York and Vermont—or the Mountain Plains. Across the country, students of color—especially Black students—are far more likely to attend school near a hazard site. As are lower income families. Highlighting this kind of problem is exactly why I started The Forum. And one of the best things about doing it is that I don’t have to summarize the issue much further beyond what you can casually dig up on your own. Instead, I can just reach out to the experts and let them walk us all through it. Let’s get into it. A Conversation with Matthew Kraft. Matt Kraft thanks for being here. We’ll get to the report in a second. But I want to orient folks to who you are, the kind of work you’re drawn to, the sort of work that you are involved in, and what brings you into the work you’re doing today. What have you been up to? Well, I’m an educator. I started my career as a substitute and taught middle and high school humanities in public schools in the Bay Area. And since then, have dedicated my academic career to thinking about how we can strengthen K to 12 public education. And I try to do that in a way that isn’t just about writing abstract academic treatises, but to really ask questions that matter for real families, real teachers, and connect to policy and practice on the ground. A lot of the folks that listen to this or read this series here are in the policy community, policy staff, education community, things like that. Those of you citing something that says that, yes, teacher experience matters to student outcomes, chances are you’re citing some work that Dr. Kraft here was a part of, and we’ll get to that in just a second. But let’s talk about this report. A lot of public schools in the United States—and private schools—are located near environmental hazard sites. That’s what your report here is showing. Tell me a little bit about this. I’ve been engaged in a pivot in my research. The privilege of academic careers is that I get to pursue things that I think are interesting and important. And in the last several years, it’s just been increasingly evident when I’m in schools, talking to teachers, talking to parents and families that environmental pressures, climate change, is impacting the daily work of teachers and the experiences of students. One need only look out at the, you know, orange-colored skies with fire season upon us to know that reality is here with us today. Or have a kid like I do who goes to a school that doesn’t have AC, and it’s sweltering hot with upwards of 90 degree temperatures inside the classroom. And so, part of what I’ve tried to do is just to learn more about what’s happening, what’s what’s the basic facts about how schools are impacted by environmental pressures, and what can they do to try to address them? And one of the things that we learned about early on was that schools are sometimes located shockingly close to toxic facilities. We had a sense that there were some really bad individual cases, you know, a few cities where some analysis is done, a few kind of snapshots that focus on one particular type of toxic site. But being newcomers to the space, we started to just ask the basic questions like, well, how big of a problem is this? How often does it occur? And it turned out we just didn’t have answers to these very basic fundamental questions. And so we set out to try to answer them by collecting data that we work with often on the universe of K-12, public and private schools in this country, and then let’s map that onto these other datasets that we had never worked with before, maintained by the Environmental Protection Agency, that catalog three different types of these registries of known environmental hazard sites. Black students in the U.S. are 86% more likely than their white peers to attend a school that is within a quarter-mile of a toxic site.—Dr. Matthew Kraft How frequently? How common a problem is this? Way more common than I ever anticipated. We try to be conservative, like most academics, to say, hey, first off, we’re telling you proximity and that isn’t a guarantee of exposure but it’s certainly at a heightened risk and a lot of studies find exposure to different toxic sites up to a mile or more can have negative effects on children’s health and development. We found that even when we narrow in to a quarter of a mile, we’re talking 4 blocks at most, a lap around that track at the high school, that there are over 9,000 schools. We’re talking 8% of our U.S. K-12 public school buildings are within a quarter mile of a toxic site. And you found something like 44% are within a mile total? That’s right. And so this isn’t an isolated or unique phenomenon. This happens in every state and in more communities across this country than anyone, I think, fully perceives. Sometimes it’s really obvious. There’s a major, you know, industrial plant, and it’s got giant smokestacks, and it’s billowing smoke. Others are a little bit more kind of subtle, with different types of manufacturing plants that may spill chemicals that leach into the ground or old abandoned sites that in more of the earlier industrial air were using chemicals, lead, asbestos that are still there in the ground. And so we found that these numbers really belied a national problem about providing safe and healthy learning environments for kids. Are there some kids that are more affected than others? Like so many other examples of educational inequity in our country, we found that Native American students, Black students, Hispanic students, and students from low income backgrounds were substantially more likely to attend a school that was in close proximity to one of these toxic sites. And to put that more concretely, Black students in the U.S. are 86% more likely than their white peers to attend a school that is within a quarter-mile of a toxic site. It’s not just that schools have always existed in these sites sites show up or don’t. It’s that these sites often are legacy sites that operated, you know, decades and decades ago, and now school districts are trying to figure out, you know, where can we build affordably? And sometimes that means building in places where that hasn’t been attractive to develop other types of homes or other business areas.—Dr. Matthew Kraft Is that because—I want to ask you about the policy implications in a second, but is that because of where at-risk children are located, and where these hazard sites are located? I mean, it seems like it’s sort of a two-part problem: these environmental hazards are located far more widely than we might believe. Like you don’t have to be sitting next to Three Mile Island or whatever to be next to a dangerous site. And even given the widespread nature of these sites there is still differentially bad clustering in at-risk communities. Is that a fair way to put the result? I think that’s right. Frankly, it’s a complex social science phenomenon where we both have patterns such as these sites are more common in more urbanized areas, and students of color are often more likely to live in those urban centers. And so it’s a distributional thing, and it’s also a phenomenon that different industries are often, when they are producing these toxic emissions and working with hazardous chemicals, not welcome in communities, and so they have to find places where they can get a foothold, and it’s often communities with the least political capital, the communities with the most economic need, that end up kind of having the lack of ability to oppose these types of facilities to show up. You know, it’s a little bit of a two-way causal arrow as well. It’s not just that schools have always existed in these sites sites show up or don’t. It’s that these sites often are legacy sites that operated, you know, decades and decades ago, and now school districts are trying to figure out, you know, where can we build affordably? And sometimes that means building in places where that hasn’t been attractive to develop other types of homes or other business areas. So what are the implications for sort of policy? You mentioned the problem of the lack of AC. Folks in the research community are studying schools that are to

    Is your school near a toxic hazard site?

  5. Aug 6

    Sitting down with MSNOW

    It’s been a busy week here in my home state of Michigan. On Monday, I wrote some notes about governing, politics, and policy ahead of what looked to be a divisive primary. ' And over the weekend, I sat down for an interview with Jacob Soboroff on Jacob Soboroff on MSNOW alongside Puck reporter Abby Livingson, to talk about what was at stake in that primary. We covered the ferocious battle over issues and ideology going on right now in Democratic politics, and Jacob managed to get a question to me about schools in Michigan and beyond. The primary’s over, and Abdul El-Sayed is moving on to the general. The conversation still stands. Take a look if you have a few minutes. We’ll be back with some more education news on Monday. -Josh PS if you don’t want to watch all 13 minutes, check out the transcript page link to this post. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joshcowen.substack.com/subscribe

    Sitting down with MSNOW

  6. Jul 30

    "We have to make strategic national investments in children and families."

    This week, we’re continuing our series with elected officials and candidates prioritizing policy solutions for kids and families. Today is my conversation is with Congressman Greg Landsman, the Democrat representing Ohio’s 1st District. That’s basically Cincinnati, on the Ohio River, and the northeast suburbs. Before coming to Congress in 2023, Congressman Landsman served on the Cincinnati city council, and ran an organization that helped fund preschool for all three and four-year-olds in the city. He’s a former public school educator, teaching both Spanish and math at the high school level. In Congress, Rep. Landsman working on a bill called the Child Care Small Business Insight and Improvement Act, which would help support small businesses operating child care provision across the country. Like many districts across the midwest, Ohio’s 1st District is a swing seat, where broad appeal across the political spectrum is necessary not just to win elections but to help govern as well. Congressman Landsman is running in a tough re-election campaign to serve a third term for the district. A Conversation with Congressman Greg Landsman Congressman Landsman, welcome to The Forum, where we talk all things on kids and family policy. You come to this conversation differently than most members of Congress — you were actually in the classroom, and you grew up watching your parents do this work. When you’re sitting in a committee hearing or negotiating a bill, how much does that experience actually shape how you think about what’s in front of you? It’s a great question. I think it probably entirely shapes the way I’m understanding what’s being presented and thinking about the issues and the policy. One of my big issues or passions is the idea that we should be creating a community or society, or country where everyone gets a shot. And for me, that means that you look at policy from that angle: Does this help ensure that more and more people are getting opportunities? Or is this hindering folks and their ability to make progress? So this is one of the reasons why I’m so passionate about early childhood education education in general, because it’s, as has been said, the great equalizer, right? No matter where you’re born, or who or what kind of family you’re born into, or circumstances you’re born into. If every kid gets great prenatal care, or every expecting mom is much more likely to have an on time, healthy birth— developmentally that’s a huge deal. And then, if you get time with your parents because they have paid family leave that makes a huge difference. And then access to high quality childcare and preschool that helps a kid get totally ready for school. All of those things, you know, mean opportunity. And if you can extend those things to every child, then everyone has a shot. So I absolutely think about that, and then my experiences as a teacher. The way I was raised. My parents were teachers, just all of that comes into play, for sure. You got Cincinnati voters to fund two years of quality preschool — the first city in the country to do it. That’s a real proof of concept. But what did it take to actually make the quality part true, not just the access part? “Preschool” can mean a lot of things, and the difference between a good program and a mediocre one is enormous. Again, starting with the why, which we did a lot of when we were running the campaign. It was a lot of years of organizing house parties and just events all over. We got 10,000 people to sign this pledge that every child deserves two years of quality preschool. And that was such a big motivator. This was before I was on council. This was a ballot measure. So I was just a citizen and a parent. My kids were in preschool. I saw what a difference it made for them. They had quality preschool. And then I was living in a city, which is the case in most cities, all cities, where most kids don’t. And those kids are typically not ready for school, or they’re not ready enough. And so, you know, we wanted to make a major investment as a city in preschool—quality preschool in particular. And so the question was, how do you measure quality in Ohio? We have a rating system, and that rating system is based on the things that would be sort of intuitive, maybe maybe or maybe not. But I think they’re intuitive, which is: if you know class sizes, for example. If you’ve got a ton of kids and only one instructor, that’s going to be challenging for those kids. It’s not. It’s not as as good as it could be. And so you look at a low teacher-to-student ratio that helps with quality that the the teacher does. Then, does he or she have the training in early childhood? And if they have that training, that’s that’s the difference between high quality and and less. Then, the curriculum, is it evidence-based curriculum? And those are 3 of the biggest things. And you can do that achieve that in a in a center based program or home based. And so. We decided to invest—as we assumed voters would want—their dollars going to quality preschool. And so, one, the tuition assistance that families get here, they can use it in any quality preschool, public or community-based, center-based or home- based. And then there are additional grants for those providers to help them get that curriculum, or hire additional staff, or get them trained so that they can achieve higher quality. Both parties really need to prioritize child care for our economy, for our kids, for our families. It’s got to be at the top of the list.—Congressman Greg Landsman Walk me through your bipartisan child care bill. Who are your Republican partners, and what did you have to give up — or hold firm on — to get them there? I want to understand what bipartisan actually looks like in practice right now, not just as a talking point. The first thing, for those folks who aren’t as familiar with this world: a lot of these childcare providers and and preschools childcare is usually the 1st couple of years infant and toddlers. Essentially 0 to 3. Preschool is 3 and 4 year olds, and that’s a particular kind of curriculum. Some of these are public entities, but a lot of them are private centers or programs, meaning, you know, they’re for profit. And they don’t make a lot of money, and in some instances it’s really hard to make any. And so a lot of these small businesses need additional help. And the Small Business Administration is supposed to help all of us. All of our small businesses. Childcare was not at the top of their list when it came to be, and so we are pushing really hard for the SBA, the Small Business Administration, to invest more in helping childcare businesses, those folks that are providing childcare, giving them the technical assistance and additional resources so that they can grow. And this happens to be bipartisan. It’s not exactly a top priority, quite honestly, in my opinion, for either party. Both parties really need to prioritize it for our economy, for our kids, for our families. It’s got to be at the top of the list. But a Republican congressman from Pennsylvania, [Dan] Meuser, he is my partner on this. I served on the Small Business Committee with him. And we’ve got a lot of bipartisan support. The key is just getting the chair of the committee to mark it up and get it to the floor. I ask a version of this to a lot of Members, governors, and candidates. I worry that Democrats have struggled to find a coherent K-12 message, and the polling backs that up. You’ve got real credibility here as a former educator. Do you think the party has earned back teachers’ trust — and separately, parents’ trust — or is there still work to do? We haven’t had a national vision for education in 25, 30 years. Someone has to lead on it, and my hope is that in the next [year] there are members of Congress like me and others who are leading on this. But you really need this to be something that those who have really high profiles, and in particular, the next [presidential] nominee should say I’m going to lead on this. Like, this is not just something we’re gonna leave to the states when we need a national strategy to ensure that our kids, every single one of our kids is getting the best possible education. I would love to see that be a major part of the debate as Democrats pick a nominee. And I have laid out what I think is a major education reform bill that would ensure every kid has what they need. My argument is a little different than most. I believe that the vision has to be one that includes or expands education so that it includes brain development and early childhood so that we’re not just stuck in sort of thinking about education in that sort of myopic K-12 way, even though it’s incredibly important and we need to have a better strategy and I’m happy to talk about it. But I would love to see us say: look, we’re going to reboot the Department of Education, and we’re going to have it follow brain development and make sure that kids get what they need, which means that we’re going to include prenatal care in our system of education, because it’s key to a kid who’s developmentally on track the same with quality childcare and preschool. I’d argue, paid family leave needs to be a part of that. Even if it’s just what we’re measuring. And then, when you get to K-12, the first goal has to be every kid shows up prepared, because if every kid shows up prepared, you’re gonna see better outcomes. Then you have to invest in teachers and classrooms and curriculum. And then I would argue that there should be some adjusting of high school so that kids can get into careers much faster. I don’t think we have to continue to accept the idea that everyone needs to have that that senior year. If, in fact they want to go to college or they want to go right into career training. We should be able to s

  7. Jul 23

    "The absolute antithesis of good governance."

    There have been so many changes within the federal government under Donald Trump that it can be difficult to keep track. Tariffs, DOGE, ICE, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the gutting of the U.S. Department of Education—all of these taking something of a wrecking ball to national politics and policy as we know it. With so much attention understandably on some of this big-ticket news, I’ve been worried that the public policy community, specifically in education, has been under-focused on some of the lower profile efforts to severely undermine decades of regulatory and administrative guidance that meaningfully impact families across the country. I can’t think of anyone better to speak to this than Sam Bagenstos. By day, Sam’s a professor of law down the road from me at the University of Michigan. He specializes in civil rights, labor and employment law, health law, and governance. That, my friends, is a lot of expertise across a variety of issue areas. But Sam is also a longtime veteran of the kind of legal and policy circles that Trump has tried to overthrow, and that we’re going to need to rely on again for any sort of rebuild. Sam served under President Biden, first as general counsel at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), then as general counsel at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). He also served under President Obama at the Department of Justice (DOJ), as the No. 2 official in the Civil Rights Division. He’s also been part of several statewide committees in Michigan and beyond. All of this is relevant to where we are today under Trump, but given how much of the current administration’s efforts are being directed by Ross Vought at the OMB, Sam Bagenstos has particularly unique insight into where we are and where we’re headed. A Conversation with Sam Bagenstos Welcome to the The Forum, Sam. Just to get started, tell us a bit about your legal and professional background and where that began to connect formally to government service. So as you said, I currently teach at the University of Michigan. I’ve been on the faculty there since about 2008, but I have taken a couple of leaves to serve in the federal government since my time there. I was, during the Obama administration, the principal deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Department of Justice. So in a leadership position there. And then for the entire Biden administration, I was on leave. I spent the first year and a half starting at the moment of inauguration as general counsel at the Office of Management and Budget. And then in June of ‘22, I moved over to the Department of Health and Human Services where I was the general counsel until pretty much the end. So that’s the work I’ve done, and I continue to do a lot of work relating to the government, although not in the government at this point. As somebody who works pretty closely with policymakers in states, and to some extent the federal government. I really… I can’t overstate how important the jobs that you just described are. What’s kind of a nuts and bolts piece of that before we get into some of the specifics? What’s the portfolio look like across kind of some of these agencies? Yeah, I mean, so they’re all sort of different. Probably the widest portfolio I ever had was working at the Office of Management and Budget. OMB is the sort of nerve center of the federal executive branch. They’re the folks who make sure that all of the agencies across the executive branch are doing what the president wants, consistent with the law. And we’ll talk a little bit about that balance in a minute, I’m sure. And so, what that meant was my responsibility as the general counsel for that agency in the White House was everything, everything that the executive branch did. So I didn’t know whether I’d be walking in and dealing with some environmental issue or obviously COVID was a huge issue when we started, or evacuating folks from Afghanistan was the thing we had to deal with. But it was literally anything that was going on in the federal government was something I dealt with, and the legality of all of those issues. And so that was every regulation across the federal government, making sure it was checked to be consistent with administrative law. All of our spending, the drafting of major legislation, like the COVID recovery bills, the American Rescue Plan, and the other bills that President Biden did. At HHS, sort of similar job, but narrower scope. But I will say the Department of Health and Human Services is the largest cabinet department by budget. So it was about $1.73 trillion when I was there. And about 40% of the regulations issued by the federal executive branch come from HHS, so it was again just a very wide ambit. At the Department of Justice, earlier in my career, it was much more focused on bringing enforcement actions to make sure that civil rights laws were complied with, so bringing and threatening lawsuits around the country, negotiating agreements with states and localities and businesses to make sure they complied. Can you give us a sense of what’s going on right now in these various agencies and what we should be most concerned about? I think at the highest level, the most important thing that’s going on is you have this pervasive effort to transform the federal executive branch into something that’s not implementing laws and policies enacted by Congress in an impartial way, but instead is using the tools of government as a weapon to serve the interests, not just of a political party and not just of a faction within the political party, but of a person and the people around him: Pervasive weaponization, politicization, and personalization of the government around Donald Trump and the folks around him, and the use of every tool of government to reward the friends of Donald Trump and punish the enemies of Donald Trump. That is the absolute antithesis of what a good government or a republican government should be. So that’s at the highest level. We can talk about what that means for particular policies and actions, but that’s the most important takeaway. I want to ask about the administrative and regulatory state here. Outside advocacy groups, including in education, are often understandably focused on legislation. But a lot of what Trump’s done has been more on the administrative side. Legally or not. Can you talk about some of the specific non-legislative tools that have been deployed? If you can think of one that’s maybe patently illegal and one that’s, at least, more legally questionable or defensible on the letter but seems plainly abusive? I think there are a few obvious ones to talk about here. And let me start, just because you started with education, what Donald Trump is doing to the Department of Education. So what you have is a department that was created by Congress. You have provisions adopted in appropriations bills by Congress that say you can’t eliminate the Department of Education, Mr. President. We are continuing to fund it and we are barring you from eliminating it. And yet what you have is this dismantlement of the department done entirely through administrative processes. So what they’re doing is essentially farming out as many of the responsibilities of the Department of Education as they can to other agencies. You know, legal tools that they point to there: so there’s a tool called the Economy Act. I worked with this a lot at the Office of Management and Budget, which is basically, if one agency has a responsibility to do something but doesn’t have the ability to do it, it can contract with another agency to do it. And so what they’ve done is said, aha, Department of Education is just gonna contract with the Department of Health and Human Services to do all the disability work. It’s gonna contract with the Department of Labor to do job training work. It’s gonna contract with the Department of Treasury to do all the student loan work. And pretty soon you have no Department of Education at all. And so that’s, you know, taking this existing legal tool that you can see a use for it in particular cases, using it in a way no one could ever have imagined. And, you know, I think that’s abusive. I would think there’s a plausible argument that that’s illegal. It’s certainly inconsistent with the judgment made by our elected representatives that we are supposed to have a Department of Education, that it’s good for the people to have a Department of Education. Okay, so that’s one thing. Take something that’s much more abusive, maybe, and certainly much more in the nature of rewarding friends, punishing enemies, um, and also much more clearly illegal. So, one of the things we’ve seen this whole administration do is use its power over money and particularly grant funding or federally funded programs where the money goes to states and localities and other entities, use that as a tool to attack people who are on the bad side of Donald Trump for whatever reason, right? I mean, we actually, you know, we’re recording this on Wednesday. We just saw yesterday the federal government say they’re going to withhold an enormous amount, I think a billion dollars, of Medicaid funds from two states. That all seems to be about punishing them because they’re blue states. We’ve seen lots of funding cutoffs that are all about punishing blue states, punishing them supposedly for violating terms and conditions of agreements. But violating them in ways that red states are probably doing the same thing and are not getting the same treatment. We’ve seen the shutting off of funds to institutions of higher education to force them to come to heel. I mean, look at what happened to Columbia, which ultimately did knuckle under. Look at what happened to Brown University, which did knuckle under. Harvard sued and actually prevailed in its lawsuit that these thr

    "The absolute antithesis of good governance."

  8. Jun 26

    "What I know to be true is that we are significantly underfunding our kids."

    We’re capping off a half-year of conversations with members of elected officials and candidates about the politics and policy of serving kids and families. There will be more over the next few months, and look for a special recap next week. Today’s guest is an especially important leader in all things child and family policy: early education, child care, K-12 schooling, and access to higher education. I’m talking with Congresswoman Kristen McDonald Rivet, representing Michigan’s 8th District. Congresswoman Rivet is finishing up her first term in Washington, after serving in Michigan’s state senate. Both her state and national legislative districts are about as swing as they come: voters routinely back both political parties not only in different election cycles but even on the same ballot. So she knows how win tough elections. In both the legislature and in Congress, Kristen McDonald Rivet has been a leader on child care, access to early education, and improving K-12 schools—while fighting for public investment in all of those areas as well. Before elected office, the congresswoman served in a variety of roles inside and outside government. She was the executive director of Michigan Head Start, chief of staff at the Michigan Department of Education, and on staff at the Department of Health and Human Services. So basically, if you’re into public policy, and you’re especially interested in the idea that public policy professionals can and serve in some of the most consequential elected offices in your state and in Congress, Kristen McDonald Rivet is for you. Give this a read or a listen. A Conversation with Congresswoman Kristen McDonald Rivet Welcome and thanks for joining me here. Just to get started, tell us a bit about your background, how you got involved in electoral politics and about the Michigan 8th Congressional District you represent. Let me try to sum that all up really quickly. Fifty-six years of my life, right, in this little section. I actually spent most of my career working in this public policy space around kids and families. Started that career running the Michigan Head Start Association. The thing that I want to tell you about that, that was so life-changing for me, is that in Head Start programs, as well as the Head Start Association, half of the board of directors are parents. And when you’re trying to put together a policy agenda for small children, and you’re doing it alongside a mom or a dad who lives at the federal poverty level and is actively parenting a toddler: your lens changes just fundamentally changes. And so that became for me, it was a really good instruction for how this work should be done, how we should be relating to people, how we, you know, things when we determine who whose voice has value in a room and it’s all fraught with those decisions. So in that time I started, you know, having my own children. My husband and I have raised six kids. What I know to be true is that we are significantly underfunding our kids. We are not supporting families in their attempts to, you know, raise their kids and just really have a stable, thriving household. And I saw that when I was the chief of staff at the Michigan Department of Education, and was a senior advisor to Governor Granholm, and all of these, all of these pieces, even when I was working on the ground in Detroit for the Skillman Foundation. Across demographics, across rural, urban. It’s harder and harder to raise a child, and there are big things that have to change if we are going to change that trajectory. I ended up getting into electoral politics for the first time in 2022, when I ran for the Michigan State Senate. And, I said no, quite honestly, the first couple times they asked me, because it just felt like, politics has gotten ugly and unproductive, and I really thought…You know what? We need to change our child care system. We need to change our education system. We need to change the way we talk to parents and community members. We need to change how programs are run and how we talk to people. It felt to me like being in the State Senate was a good place to do that. So, I ran for the Senate, flipped a Republican seat, and a year later, uh, was recruited to run for Congress. And here I am. We need to change our child care system. We need to change our education system. We need to change the way we talk to parents and community members. We need to change how programs are run and how we talk to people.—Congresswoman Kristen McDonald Rivet Before we get into some policy details, let’s talk a bit about the job. You’re in Congress, you’ve been in the state legislature. You’ve worked in leadership roles at state agencies. What are you finding that’s different about Congress, specifically? Anything your past leadership roles have helped prepare you for in DC now? It’s been an interesting 18 months. First about my district. I represent Genesee County, where the city of Flint is. Saginaw County, Bay County, half of Midland County. What’s really interesting about the 8th Congressional is, it’s a microcosm for the whole Midwest. We have farmers, we have manufacturing, we have abandoned industrial. We’ve got the home to Dow chemical semi conductor. All of these things that are when you look to Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana. This is what the Midwest looks like. But 70% of the jobs in my district pay less than $60,000 a year. So you think about what take-home pay looks like on 60 grand a year, and then start to think about the cost of groceries, and keeping your heat on in the winter, and childcare, which is around $450 a week for an infant. People can’t make it. People can’t make it. So, that is what I get up every day and think about, and get up every day and try to make a difference. And so, when I got to Congress, this is a wild, unruly place. A lot of people are very cynical about it, and there’s reason for that. But where I’ve been able to actually find success is going into that common ground and finding other people, I don’t care what side of the aisle they’re on, who are also getting up every day and thinking about that, because it’s not just the Michigan 8th, right? It’s the same thing in congressional districts in Pennsylvania, in Iowa, in places where people are hearing it from their constituents. And that’s where we’ve been able to partner, and I’ve partnered with other Democrats and Republicans, and been able to actually get some real stuff done. Even though people think that’s not possible in Washington anymore. Let’s turn to schools, kids, and families. You’ve been a leader in the early education and education reform spaces. Tell me a bit about what you’re working on these days. I just recently introduced a major tax cut for working families. And it’s part of building on the working families tax cut that I authored in the state senate that we were able to pass in the first six months of the trifecta that has been so meaningful and actually brought thousands of kids out of poverty in Michigan. But it’s also rooted in my own experience of having — there’s a moment in time where as a single mom with two kids, I knew exactly what it feels like to run out of milk on a Wednesday, and no, you’re not getting paid until Friday. The secret to that is you add a little water to the milk to make it go farther. But we shouldn’t really have to be doing that, and if you look at who’s paying what in our tax system, it’s an important question. So, what we’ve proposed is a large tax cut for families making less than $100,000 a year, and who have children under the age of three. So, what this would be is a $5,500 refundable tax credit for every child under the age of three. So it’s building on that work that we did in the state senate. But mostly what this does is put more cash in people’s hands, more money in your pocket to be able to buy formula and diapers and help pay for childcare, trusting parents with these dollars to make those decisions that we know we’ve got 40 years of research that says that that makes an enormous amount of difference. On K-12: we have to call the question on these things that we just defend with such rigidity when we have overwhelming evidence that we’re failing our kids and our teachers on pretty fundamental levels.—Congresswoman Kristen McDonald Rivet I worry a bit that Democrats have kind of lost the plot a bit when it comes to K-12—and polling is starting to pick this up. We’ve seemingly got a clear plan on early childhood, and momentum around what it means to set students up for success in higher education, but there’s still some work to be done to come together on K-12. You’ve been working on all this for so long and wearing so many different hats, how do you make sense of what’s needed right now in K-12 relative to the other policy spaces? So let’s just level set about where we’ve made success. So we are in Michigan right now. Most four-year-olds are in preschool. So we’ve really gotten very close to achieving universal preschool, and it’s wildly successful. We can see it in all kinds of different ways. We’ve been able to help shore up our sort of birth-through-three space, lot of support for that, and, we’re almost at free community college for everyone, which is great. And the way we’ve been able to do that is just by putting a lot of choice out there, and a lot of roads, and a lot of access. But when it comes to K-12: we get into these very prescriptive, very nuanced, this is how you have to do it, this is what it has to look like, this is the test to see whether or not you’re doing it well, and this is the morass of bureaucracy and red tape that you have to wade through in order to reach goals that you were not a part of setting. And I think that that actually is a big part of the problem. Now, I’m not a pro-voucher person. I think that vouchers are

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