#205 Schools as Sorting Machines

Have you heard? Have you heard? Have you heard? Have you heard? Have you heard? Have you heard? Have you heard?

Welcome to Have You Heard. I'm Jennifer Burkshear. And I'm Jack Schneider. And Jack, we have two very distinct listening audiences for this show. And I would say that the first group are people who are just trying to figure out what the hell is going on. With the schools in their district or the schools in their state. And then the all their audience is made up entirely of academics who write books.

about the former. Yeah, we we tend to focus more on like what's going on right now in education. But I think we also do a nice job of periodically diving into like, you know, some research and offering some new ways of Thinking about K-12 and higher education, that I think uh run on a parallel track that actually does intersect.

That more policy and politics of education track that we're usually on. Because I think that that stuff really helps offer us new ways of seeing and new frameworks for understanding what's going on on a day-to-day basis. Well in this episode, we're going to be combining those two audiences in a manner that is either deft or clumsy. We'll let you be the judge.

So uh we have some friends of the show have written a terrific new book. It's called Schooled and Sorted, How Educational Categories Create Inequality. It's by three academics. that Domina, Andrew Penner, and Emily Penner. Um people may remember that Emily has been on the show twice now, one way back in the day and one recently in our episode about ethnic studies in California. And at the very same time that Jack and I were starting to read this great book.

We received some correspondence from listeners in Portland, Oregon, where there is a heated debate going on about. just the sort of specialized program that our authors delve into and our parents in Portland wanted to know. Hey, does the existence of this specialized program at a time when Portland schools are under intense financial pressure? Does it lend itself to the district's larger vision of equity, or is it actually a counter to that?

And so we thought it would be a great opportunity to take you to Portland and hear about what's going on and then use the wisdom of our academic specialists to make sense of it in a bigger way. Well, Jennifer. I am going to go sharpen my interviewing skills because listeners. to the show, expect quite a bit from me when uh I go on my Cub Reporter beat. So uh I'll be working on that and whenever you need me, uh I will be assembling some high quality tape for you.

Well thank you, Jack, and I'll let you get to it.

Our first stop today is Portland, Oregon. And as is the case in so many places right now, Portland Public Schools are facing some really tough decisions. Enrollment is down since the pandemic, costs are up. Which means that consolidation of some of the city's neighborhood schools is on the table. But our story starts a couple of years ago.

That's when Michelle Dewberry, who is the parent of twin seventh graders, got an email from the school district informing her that one of her daughters was eligible to apply to attend a special school called Access Academy. It was a school Michelle didn't really know all that much about, but that was about to change.

I had thought of Access Academy as a school for children who struggle with significant social and behavioral challenges in addition to being tag identified or having very high test scores. So my daughter was being invited to apply based on her test scores alone. And I just thought that was really surprising that my own school district would provide an off-ramp to a child from a neighborhood school. to a school that specifically caters to children who score very high on standardized tests.

Tag identified refers of course to talented and gifted, or gifted and talented depending upon where you live. To determine which elementary students are eligible for Access Academy, Portland Public Schools uses a very specific measure with a very key workaround. Emily Teplin Fox has an eighth grader and a first grader who attends school in the district. to be eligible to attend access A child needs to have scored in the 99th percentile on a standardized task.

However, if your child does not score in the ninety-ninth percentile on the tests that all of the children are given in school, you can also pay for private testing. and use a high score on any number of private tests to achieve eligibility to attend Access Academy.

Now, in some ways, this is a complicated story having to do with the way that Oregon law defines talented and gifted, and the sorts of services that school districts are mandated to provide in order to be in compliance with that law. But the way parents like Michelle and Emily see it, the issue here is actually pretty black and white.

At a time when neighborhood schools like the ones their kids attend are desperate for resources, the school district is pursuing a policy designed to draw resources away from those schools. We are neighborhood school proponents who love and deeply appreciate the neighborhood school model with all of its challenges and triumphs.

And our district is facing a horrific budget crisis, as many districts are. And we started just thinking about programs that our district supports that draw resources away from neighborhood schools. And we had always sort of had questions about access and curiosity. We just decided to look into it and just get some public data. And the tale told by that data? Well, it's pretty stark.

Of the 320 students that attend Access Academy, just one is black and not a single student is learning English. In other words, not exactly representative of this wildly diverse school district. Meanwhile, Portland's wealthiest neighborhoods are wildly overrepresented. Roughly three quarters of these students hail from the city's most affluent zip codes. Michelle says that the more they dug into the data, the more familiar this story started to feel.

We see this as sort of part of a historical context where wealthy white families are kind of trying to wall themselves off from a population of students that is more diverse. and low income. And so we find that really problematic. We want our kids to be together with kids that are different, all different kids, whether they're wealthy or not or intellectually gifted or and we think the diversity of our schools is a a real strength.

Then of course there is the deteriorating financial situation in the quote unquote regular schools, something Michelle is far too familiar with. At our kids elementary school, the librarian and the art teacher were both cut to halftime. We've lost a lot of teachers. My kids have never experienced a classroom with fewer than 30 kids. And the array of needs and abilities in a single classroom with one teacher makes learning almost impossible. Like it's

Every every year I'm amazed that my kids continue to learn. Like these teachers are absolutely heroic, but there are kids. in those classrooms who have significant needs that are not being met because of lack of funding. And what we know is that it's going to get worse. They're projecting an enrollment decline in future years. $32 million projected shortfall in 2026 and 27. And what we're hearing from district leaders is that school closures are on the table.

Now, equity may be a banned word these days, but it is still very much a stated goal of the Portland Public Schools or PPS. But for Emily, what the district says and what it does seem to be in contradiction. What we are concerned about is how PPS is making policies that comport with its self-articulated values of equity. This just didn't seem to make sense to us when we dug into the data.

Access Academy is a publicly funded PPS school that again, PPS chooses to invite families to leave their neighborhood schools and bus for free to attend. And I don't see how that comports with PPS's values.

When Emily and Michelle reached out to have you heard, it was because they had a lot of questions. Like, how common are programs like Access Academy? And where does the idea of separate schooling for high achievers come from in the first place? Well, as is so often the case, we knew just where to look. As it happened, Jack and I were in possession of a new book called Schooled and Sorted, coauthored by three scholars.

Thad Domina, who's an education professor at UNC Chapel Hill, Andrew Penner, a sociology professor at UC Irvine, and Emily Penner, an education professor at UC Irvine. The book is an eye-opening exploration of how our education system categorizes kids, reinforcing powerful social categories like race, class, and ethnicity along the way.

And like so many projects, this one started out more or less by accident. Quite a few years ago, our authors were hanging out, having lunch, and a reporter happened to call with a question about a new color ID system that had recently been rolled out at a California high school. As Emily explains, the thinking behind the system was relatively straightforward. Give students colored IDs reflecting their performance on standardized tests, and they'd have more skin in the game.

So they organized a whole structure where students got different colored ID cards. and matching planners depending on how they had done on test performance the year before. And they had to carry those around everywhere. And if you got the highest status one, which we called platinum, you got extra privileges. One of the privileges was that the kids who had platinum cards got an express lunchline. So a reporter learned about this and took a picture of the two lunch lines.

And if you imagine some things that might be associated with who gets a platinum card and who's not in the platinum card line and the maybe the different demographics of those two lines and you take a picture of it, you can imagine what that harkens back to. If you're wondering who does this, the answer is lots of schools. This was the peak of standardized testing mania, and districts across the country were eager to find ways to get those scores up.

And the color-coded ID system at this California high school? Well, it actually worked, at least for some students. On average, actually, the program improved achievement, but for the kids who just missed out on becoming a platinum card holder, it was devastating to them the next year and their achievement tanked.

So that was one of the things that we started working on that started pointing out to us that there's categories that schools create all the time and that they use them to try to motivate students or to try to target instruction or to try to do things. that are broadly well intentioned, but that can have these kind of nefarious consequences in some cases.

As for the larger question of how categorizing kids became so central to what schools do, that Domina says that we have to consider how schools function in addition to being places of teaching and learning. Schools are are category-making machines because they're dealing with a lot of people with a lot of different needs.

They're mass organizations, they're bureaucratic organizations. They need to and do split kids up. And when they do that, whether it's formally or informally, they're always creating inequality. That act of category creation is just always fundamentally implicated in the creation of inequality. I think our argument is that if you turn the lens toward those categories, you have a kind of new way, a productive way, to think about the really complicated relationship between education and equality.

A little more about the book. In the first half, the authors train that lens that Dad was just describing inside of schools, and what they find is complicated. That the relentless categorizing that is at the center of what schools do can end up making inequality worse or better.

There are ways that schools do this that maximize inequality and there are ways that schools do this that might minimize or create really transitional inequality. Tracks are one of those kind of inequality maximizers or broadeners.

But I think about grades, the age grade, really great and like hopeful example. I really love thinking about what happens in kindergarten and the transition from being, you know, a son, a brother, a neighbor to being a classmate, a student, and thinking about how that's an identity that that isn't relational. It goes with you throughout life. And that's it's very closely related in my mind to the identity of being a citizen.

When we put kids together, five-year-olds together and six-year-olds together, we're grouping them on something that transcends so many other social categories. And we're also grouping them in a way that built into that grouping is movement. So it's not a problem that the six year olds get less advanced academic work or fewer different kinds sets of uh opportunities than the seven year olds because the six year olds are gonna become seven year olds, the first graders are gonna become

I see this book as actually being a really optimistic one. And at the same time, I see it as a deeply sociological book. And the way those two things come together for me. is that inasmuch as it

a sociological book, it's taking stuff that's all around us and making it visible. It's taking the invisible world and giving components of that invisible world names so that we can talk about it. Right. So when we're talking about category creation, we are gaining the ability to see, oh right, this age grading thing that schools do, for instance.

Which we hear so much negative rhetoric about, right? Why are we still age grading? Students should be advancing according to their abilities and however fast their parents want to push them towards college and career. That actually it's creating this category of citizen and classmate, friend. It's doing this kind of leveling thing that we at least profess to believe in as a society.

And then it's a hopeful book in that by naming this stuff, I see it as empowering readers to imagine how we might do a better job of realizing. our deepest aims and our values.

Yeah, the book is so is in some ways really pessimistic in the sense that I think our argument is that Schools and inequality are joined at the hip. But we also really want to emphasize that although that's true, the degree of inequality is very malleable, the kinds of inequality

are very malleable. And I think that thinking about categories gets us thinking about little choices that we as educators all make every day and the ways that we can make maybe it's not more or less unequal, but more or less just education. One of the things that we have talked about a lot on the show and more in recent years, even than in earlier years. is the importance of doing nationwide education in a public fashion, in a truly public fashion, which means, among other things,

having some democratic control over the schools. If we want at all to create anything resembling equal opportunity, we cannot just throw up our hands and say, well, everybody's gonna get what they can get in the free market. And I see a lot of new ways of thinking about that in this book, in terms of the ways. that having a public system allow us as members of the public.

To negotiate around the kinds of categories we want to create. For instance, you know, we discussed age grading, right? That age grading is essentially a compromise that we have made as a society, whether or not we have ever articulated that compromise, the compromise is That

You know, some students are not going to move as fast as they could if they were being pushed to the limit academically. Other students may be pushed a little faster, but what we're getting as a result of this is some formal equality. And we're establishing among those students equal membership. Which, as you all argue in the book, then spills over and it creates a sense among young people as they're growing up that they deserve the same treatment as everybody else.

And if you don't do that in the context of a public system. Then the implicit message, and maybe even the explicit message, is everybody's on their own and everybody should be seeking their own self-interest. And so not only are there these pressures to then undermine any kind of formal equality. But there are then these structures.

that are really cementing in inequality by dividing us from each other and making it so that, you know, some members of the public have absolutely no say over what's going on with other members of the public.

I think we default to an idea that school is about Skill acquisition. and getting every kid as far as they can go. And I don't have a problem with that idea, I believe in in skills and I'm I'm a big learner, like and I want my kids to learn and all the rest. But I think the the age grading example is a really nice one because it allows us to step back and say that's not all we're doing.

It's not all we're doing in schools. If that was all that we were doing, we wouldn't do it this way. And so what other logics motivate the way we do things? And so I think one that we've dramatically undervalued, dramatically undervalued, is civic and socialization. School is a place where we just learn to be

We use the word solidarity sometimes, a sense of kind of membership, of fellowship that we belong to one another. The world we're living in is one in which we're seeing the costs of undervaluing solidarity. I would never want to draw a straight line from the way we organize schools to the political chaos.

that's in our life, but our education conversation over the last couple decades hasn't done enough to prepare us for the world that we're living in. And so it certainly hasn't pushed enough against the situation that we now find ourselves in.

Now at this point you may be thinking, wow, that was quite a question, Jack. And also, what about our parents in Portland, Oregon? How did they fit into this conversation? Well, that process of categorizing is creating and sometimes maximizing educational inequality we've been hearing about is exactly what's been happening with that special school for high achievers in Portland. Think about it.

Starting at age six, these students are being grouped together in a highly selective category intended to differentiate them from other six-year-olds. And where this kind of differentiation occurs, power and privilege are sure to follow. Portland, by the way, is not unique. Take, for example, the algebra wars that have been raging in California for more than a decade, another subject that our scholars have been studying.

Emily says that what started out as a well-intended effort to require every student to take algebra ended up setting off a cascade of new categories. At the time, there was a lot of frustration about students not taking algebra soon enough and a lot of students taking pre-algebra in eighth grade and then getting to ninth grade and pretty much having to repeat the content. And at that time, there was also frustration that of course

students from certain demographic groups were disproportionately less likely to get access to algebra. So the thought was a policy push to require schools to have everybody take algebra. And we studied how that played out in a bunch of different districts. What we started to realize was along the way and reflecting backward once we had written a couple of papers about this. was that again, here was a way that a school was creating a category, differentiating people between algebra takers.

eighth grade algebra takers and not eighth grade algebra takers. And that people who had status and power and privilege were negotiating their way into those courses or into now even more advanced courses in eighth grade as they felt like the eighth grade algebra experience was being diluted. And we just put these two situations in conversation with one another and it started to just unlock this whole book for us.

Earlier, Thad used the word solidarity to describe all of the things that schools do that prepare kids to live together in the world. If solidarity was already undervalued, the pandemic may have driven a stake through it. In Massachusetts, for example, where Jack and I both live, affluent parents began moving their kids into private schools when public schools were closed. And not only have they not returned, but more parents seem to be following them.

That's the subject of our scholars next research project, by the way, looking at the various ways that the pandemic undermined parents' sense of school solidarity, in part by delaying young students' enrollment in public schools. So we wonder in the pre-pandemic era compared to the post-pandemic era, how much

uh kids from families of different income levels are enrolled in public school versus not. And we wonder if there's been any changes in that enrollment after the pandemic. And we kind of wonder that if it's happening in certain grade levels more than others. You know, I think a big pandemic trend was to hold kids out for kindergarten in a lot of states where there isn't compulsory kindergarten.

And so families were either keeping their kids at a preschool that had a kindergarten or a Montessori or something, or they were homeschooling for kindergarten. I think there were a lot of trends around that in particular and they were just delaying entry into public school. But I think there's potentially also ways that families kind of continued that delay. And we're trying to find out if that's true.

Meanwhile, over in Studio B, Jack has been talking to Thad and getting more and more excited, and has arrived at some new insights. Jack? We have underinvested in our collective belonging and mutual dependence. And I feel like that's a huge part of this book, is that when people read this book, they'll come away seeing schools as places. Where we are working as a society to invest in this idea of collective belonging and mutual dependence. And yes, students are learning to read and do math.

and hopefully think a little bit like historians and scientists and maybe pick up a foreign language. But also schools are doing all of this other stuff, including teaching us

how to live alongside one another, how to value each other as equal members in a democratic society. And w we don't talk about that nearly as much as we talk about These other two kinds of aims, which would be preparing young people for the economy so that they can get ahead themselves, and preparing young people in an efficient manner. so that we are maximizing the return on investment that we're getting.

We wanted to make a conversation between a sociological tradition that sometimes gets very cynical about the social reproduction of inequality. That's the place that like I come from. It has a lot in common with a critical scholarship tradition. You know, often it is about social reproduction of racial inequality in particular, gender inequality.

So this sort of structuralist way of thinking that is powerful and also very dark because it is about a system that is closed and the way educators often think about their work, which is about school as a place of possibility and a place of hope. And that says that a huge part of what the book tries to do is connect these two voices, the deeply cynical sociologist who is obsessed with structure, and the inherently hopeful teacher.

I think our argument is in some ways that the hope and the possibility that educators feel is very like it's very face-to-face. It's interactional, it's relational, it's it's now, it's in the here and now. And the cynicism that the structural Feel is like when you step way back. And I think what we wanted to do, and I think that's what categories do, is it kind of puts you in this mezzo level, this middle space.

where the person-to-person interactions kind of pile up to create structures or are constrained by structures. And in that place you can see how these two voices don't necessarily contradict one another. And you can see how you can open up space in the structure to to make real

No, it will come as no surprise to you that Schooled and Sorted is not a beach read. This is a lengthy volume and it's filled with academic research, but it also has an action component. The final chapter is called Sorting Toward a Better Future. And that says that the point is to remind educators that they're not powerless. I think when you write a book like this I feel some need to do something that's not a little bit more than a little bit

that's actionable and I don't think this book has a program. Um it's not a manifesto, but I do think it implies a toolkit or a way of thinking about what we do as educators that I hope does Help us claim some agency around how we organize schools. So that that is exactly the hope.

two steps to get from what's in the book. Actually maybe it's more than two steps. But it takes some steps to get from what's in the book to what the practical implications are. But I think we're really motivated by the idea that those practical implications are there and

educators and communities, if they take these ideas up, they can find them. They might find different ones in different places and that that's okay by As for Emily Penner, she hopes that once readers understand the downside of all of our educational categorizing, that they'll start to see categories everywhere, just like she did. Once you start to see categories

and the ways that they are used in school and the ways that they transfer from school into society and access to opportunities in later life. And you see how much power and resources can help you manipulate what categories you have access to, you can't not see it. At least that's what we hope actually. We really hope that people take away the kind of new lens that we're trying to put onto school.

help people see that there's categories that are operating, that those categories are always political, and that people who have resources in power have more ability to shape those categories and move between them than the people who don't have resources and power.

Back to Portland, Oregon. That's where our parents, Michelle Dewberry and Emily Tepplin Fox, have been leading a campaign to pressure the school district to close Access Academy and redirect the nearly five million dollars costs to run the school and transport students there back to neighborhood schools. Their efforts, by the way, have triggered a surge of parent activism, just maybe not the kind they were hoping for. I mean we expected the access

families to fight back. And I don't blame them at all. You know, we're proposing that their child school be closed. And so I'm not surprised that they're organizing and that they're outraged by this. You know, access parents are really mobilizing and they're contacting the school board, they're contacting district leaders. What you won't see is parents who don't send their children to access. defending access or insisting that access should continue to exist.

Whatever happens in Portland, these parents have started a conversation about power, privilege, and access. And Emily says that it's with tough conversations like this that change starts. You know, the best I think we can start to do is to just

help people see the ways in which this system is really unequal and the ways in which it really affords some people privileges and other people without opportunities in the same way and ask questions and have conversations about it. And uh that is uncomfortable stuff and it doesn't make you a popular person.

Because there's folks who like the version that they have. They don't want whatever their the current status quo sort of operation is to go away because they're happy with it. And so it takes Either inviting a broader set of folks into a conversation and being willing to listen to what they have to say and use that to make changes, or some other kind of mechanism for reshaping things. A huge thanks to our special guests, Portland parents, Michelle Dewberry and Emily Teplin Fox.

and to the authors of Schooled and Sorted, How Educational Categories Create Inequality, that Domina, Emily Penner, and Andrew Penner, who was unable to join us but participated in spirit. And Jack and I will be right back to talk more about how the sorts of sorting we've been hearing about undermines Solidarity, and of course we'll be revealing the topic of this episode's in the weed segment for our Patreon supporters.

Here's a hint, nape scores. Does anyone care? And are we a little bit surprised that nape still exists under this administration? If this intrigues you, just go to patreon.com slash have you heard podcast and become a supporter. So, Jack, at the same time that I was reading this fantastic book and getting to work on the episode, I've also been teaching.

And unlike you, I love teaching. Oh stop it. And my um um I always start my class by having students interview their peers and one stranger about what people think is the purpose of public education. And what was so interesting was that, you know, virtually all of my students come from the sorts of programs. that that Thad and and Emily and Andrew are talking about in this book. They all are the products of some kind of school district carve out.

um a gifted and talented program, um uh um a a magnet school with with very select enrollment. um something where they had to take a test in first grade, or they didn't pass the test in first grade, and they've been burning with rage ever since. And what was really interesting was seeing their dawning awareness.

about the nature of these programs because I find that um for almost all of my students and it doesn't really matter where they are, their educations are largely a mystery to them, right? The why of what happened to them. And so so for these students, the light bulb that went on had to do with the fact that they had been sorted. They had been sorted in schooled. Yeah, when I listen to you, Jennifer, I think about the kinds of fights that we have seen in community after community over the past.

five to ten years. over access to so-called gifted and talented programs or to selective high schools. Right. You and I are both in Massachusetts. So they have been fighting over admission to Boston Latin School. for what seems like eternity but has actually only been several years. Or or think about um think about the the story in in Palo Alto.

where, you know, the the story that whizzed around the internet was that they were getting rid of honors biology and it blew up it became a national Topic. Ro Congressman Rokana weighed in and you and I often, you know, we bemoan the fact that Democrats have nothing to say about education these days. Well, that's one area where you will find Democrats getting really worked up is the idea

that that some kind of track is being eliminated that encourages our our highest achievers. And what those fights speak to, I think, is the undernourishment of our understanding of what the authors of this book refer to as the solidarity aim. Right, that if that aim had been adequately fostered through public conversation, through leadership, through a range of ongoing policy efforts.

right, if that had been adequately understood and valued by Americans, then we would see these questions over who gains access to um, you know, selective admissions high schools or to uh honors and AP classes, we would see these questions as dilemmas. in which we have to balance competing aims. There's no solution. There's no easy way, right? Because a dilemma, unlike a problem, can't be solved. But because our collective understanding of that solidarity aim is diminished.

we then struggle to come up with an alternate explanation. And the explanation that is offered by those who see schools purely as mechanisms for advancing efficiency, is that this is a woke attempt to undermine the well-earned meretricious kinds of rewards that can and should be doled out to the most talented and the hardest worker. And I can't say enough times how important it is for us to make the invisible visible and books like this. are really important because they do that.

If the invisible is not occasionally made visible for us, then it can disappear. And You know, I think sometimes the role of rhetoric is overstated. Uh, but this is one of the things that that rhetoric is really valuable for is continuing to remind us of what is important and what is collectively valued. And we've spoken many times previously on the show about the emphasis for the past several decades.

on what these authors refer to as efficiency, what David Labberry refers to as the social efficiency aim in education. And we can see that Collectively, we have begun to forget, if we haven't forgotten entirely, that schools do so many things, right? Not only do they establish this sense of solidarity between and among us. But then they also do this third thing, right? Which is Help individuals discover what they're good at and what they care about and seek a kind of self-actualization.

And that's something that that always really moves me. And, you know, I always think of our friend Mike Rose and the way he wrote about education when it was done right. It didn't just Prepare young people for their slots. in society and our economy. It didn't just establish a kind of common ground, what David Labray would call democratic equality, it also turned the light on for individuals.

and helped them discover what they wanted to be, who they wanted to be, how they wanted to be. And that is so important for us to talk about, because if we don't talk about it, then it disappears. it it fades away as an aim and it begins to feel like something ancillary rather than something central.

So one thing that was really funny about these student interviews was that like so many of the their peers when they interviewed them, like everyone understood that the answer to the question of the purpose of education was supposed to be like a solidarity answer. But really it was all just social mobility. They were in it for what they could get for themselves. And they felt sort of sad about that.

So Jack, we need to uh move on to that special area that we call the weeds. And that's the part of the show that is reserved for our supporters on Patreon. And this for this episode, I challenged us both. to come up with something that would make our listeners feel a little better about the world. And spoiler, we both failed. And that for everybody else should uh, you know, make them feel good, right? That you're not gonna miss out on the real downer part of the show. Congratulations, folks.

Uh you have listened to our uplifting message. for the past, whatever this is uh ended up being for you. 40 minutes or so. And we, as always, are grateful that you came this far with us. Whether this is the first time you're listening to the show or the 200 and something. uh time uh that you've listened to the show two oh four, two oh five, two oh six, something like that. Um Just a quick reminder, I don't think I've said this in a long time, uh, that it helps when you give us a reading.

And if you want to say like a sentence or two about uh why you listen to the show, that if nothing else is always encouraging. And I think it it's helpful in terms of getting other people to listen. Um we grow because you tell other people to listen to the show. That's that's The only way we grow uh in terms of expanding our listenership, uh, we don't have Iraglass. Uh doing, you know, promos for us. We don't have Gimlip media embedding us in the feeds of other shows.

Uh, we just have you. And uh if you haven't done any of the things that you can do to support the show in a non-monetary way, it would be awesome if you would do that because we're gonna keep doing the show for you to hold up our end of the bargain. In Jack, people still don't even know what we're gonna be talking about in the weeds, and the answer is nape squash.

They came out recently and well the news is pretty bad and Jack and I were both sort of curious about what this does and does not mean. for the future of public education and the conversation about what to do about it. If this intrigues you, just go to patreon.com slash have you heard podcast. And you'll see a list of all of the extras you can get just by uh throwing a few dollars our way each month. We do a custom reading list for every episode.

Um, we uh give people who subscribe at the$10 a month level a free copy of our most recent book, The Education War. And I think you just get to feel good about the fact that you have been helping this little podcast keep going for all these episodes. So if you're gonna join us in the weeds, uh you've got a a nice convo about nape scores to look forward to. For everybody else, we'll be back in two weeks. I'm Jennifer Berkshire. And I'm Jack Schneider. This is Have You Heard.