Ep. 147: Big Ideas – “No One Way to School” with Ashley Berner

October 31, 2019

Ashley Berner, professor at Johns Hopkins University and deputy director of the Institute for Education Policy, discusses her book, No One Way to School. She unpacks how the United States moved from a pluralist education system to a uniform system.

Jason Bedrick: Hello, and welcome back to EdChoice Chats. I’m your host, Jason Bedrick, director of policy at EdChoice. This is another edition of our Big Ideas series. Today’s topic is educational pluralism, and our guest is Dr. Ashley Berner, professor at Johns Hopkins School of Education and deputy director of the Institute for Education Policy. She’s also the author of a book titled, No One Way to School: Pluralism and American Public Education, as well as a recent report with the Manhattan Institute titled, The Case for Educational Pluralism in the United States.

Dr. Berner, welcome to the podcast.

Ashley Berner: Thank you for inviting me.

Jason Bedrick: In your book, you argue that one of the major causes of our education system’s lackluster performance is a series of decisions more than a century ago to embrace a uniform structure rather than a pluralist structure. What do you mean by a uniform structure?

Ashley Berner: Education policymakers have to deal with at least three issues. The first is the structure of public education, the second is the content of it, so what’s going to be taught and why, and the last is how you fund it. The uniform piece of it, it refers to the structure. Educational uniformity says only the state can deliver public education. Educational pluralism, on the other hand, will say the state funds education and regulates it, but doesn’t necessarily deliver it.

An educationally plural model is one in which the government will fund diverse types of schools, whether they’re Roman Catholic or Jewish or socialist or secular, and then hold them all accountable for academic results. The uniform system, by contrast, is essentially the district school, that only the district school is a legitimate expression of public education.

Jason Bedrick: In the United States, you would say, well, we have a pluralist system because there are private schools, there are all different types, there are Catholic schools and Jewish schools and Muslim schools, as well as nonreligious Montessori or Waldorf or what have you. You argue that that’s not really a pluralist system because the only one that’s publicly funded, at least in most places where they don’t have widespread school voucher programs or the like, is the district school system. Am I understanding that correctly?

Ashley Berner: That’s correct. The consequence is that every departure from a uniform delivery has to argue for its own right of legitimacy, its right to exist, its right to funding. In this country, the current departures from the district uniformity, from the district model, are charter schools and tax credits and vouchers and, in some states, education savings accounts. But notice that even in states where charter schools and school choice mechanisms are widespread, they still have to argue for their right to be funded. There are still lawsuits and pressures against charter schools in many, many states.

That is a consequence of our educational uniformity, whereas if you were to live in the Netherlands or England or many provinces of Canada or Sweden or Denmark, most other democracies, in fact, you could enroll your children at state-funded schools that are quite different from one another. The Netherlands funds 36 different kinds of schools on equal footing, and they all take the same exit exams.
It’s a different way of looking at public education, and I would submit, and I argue in the book and in the paper, that it’s a much more democratically aligned way to manage public education, and the United States used to be educationally plural.

Jason Bedrick: I was going to say, that’s one of the most interesting things of your book, is you point out that most other nations in the developed world actually have a more pluralist system than the United States, and even the United States originally had a much more plural system. So, how and why did we move from a pluralist system, where the state actually did fund a wide variety of different schools, including a wide variety of different religious schools, to a system where we have a district-run system like we have today?

Ashley Berner: My background is in history, and my doctorate is in intellectual history. The story of how we became a uniform school model just fascinated me when I first learned about it. It’s an interesting story. The best storyteller on this is Charles Glenn, who’s written The Myth of the Common School and Contrasting Models of Church and State and lots and lots of different great books that many of us have learned from.

Here, in essence, is the story. The United States, like most democracies, funded all different kinds of schools, and it depended on the demography of the local area. It wasn’t necessarily funded at the state level. It was more of a township and municipal matter. The state would collect taxes, or the state here… By the state, in this conversation, I really mean the government in general, whatever entity we’re talking about… would collect taxes to fund school types that matched the population. You could have Catholic schools or Congregationalist schools or nonsectarian schools, and in some of the boroughs in New York, there were even Jewish schools that were state-funded.

This was something that Americans liked. There was a lot of antipathy to Horace Mann, who’s known as the father of public education in this country, because he was the first to strongly articulate the need for a uniform delivery system, that the common school model was the only way to form democratic citizens. The materials, the delivery mechanism had to be the same, and the state should be in charge of it.

He was not taken… He had those who agreed with him, but he was not as popular in his early iterations of this project, until something happened in the 19th century that changed Americans’ minds about uniformity. That something was a massive immigration from primarily Catholic countries. In some of the cities in the new United States, the Catholics became almost a majority of the population. This is particularly true in the Northeast. And as they had expected in their previous home countries, and as they had been accustomed to receive in the United States, they wanted funding for their Catholic schools.

Well, this was too much for the primarily Protestant Anglo-Saxon majority in our country who did not believe that Catholics could become good citizens. It was threatening. The influx of Catholics spawned the 19th-century nativist movement that saw the Know-Nothing political party, the activism of the Ku Klux Klan, among others, all kinds of grassroots and elite movements to defund Catholic schools.

What we found is primarily in the last quarter of the 19th century, that state after state after state passed legislation to restrict public funding to district schools. In fact, in some states, the nativists even succeeded in making Catholic schools basically illegal. That was actually the second time that the Supreme Court weighed in on a state’s education laws, was in Pierce v. Society of Sisters, when they actually said, no, it’s legal for a Catholic school to exist.

There was a lot of antipathy to Catholicism that led to the uniform school model. It was the key contributing factor. In fact, many of our state constitutions still have the word uniform in their education statutes.

Jason Bedrick: As well as the word nonsectarian, and both of them, in a way, especially the latter, are euphemisms for not Catholic.

Ashley Berner: Well, and they were Protestant. It’s a very good point. If you’re a part of the cultural majority, you don’t necessarily see how chosen your norms are, so the same legislators who could vote on the one hand for a uniform delivery model that was nonsectarian also, in many cases, required the Protestant Bible and Protestant prayers to be observed in the nonsectarian schools, so the Supreme Court, I think rightly, secularized the public schools in the ‘60s and ’70s. A lot of Evangelical Protestants experienced it as a huge loss because the Protestant prayers were no longer being assumed, but if you were a member of a cultural minority, you would’ve, of course, understood this because those are not nonsectarian.

Jason Bedrick: Right. They could say with a straight face that they were nonsectarian because they said, “Look, the prayers that we’re teaching and the Bible that we’re using is common to a wide variety of different sects.” You could be a Baptist, you could be a Congregationalist, you could be an Episcopalian, and you would be comfortable sending your child to the so-called nondenominational common school, the public school, knowing that their prayers were not going to be explicitly Methodist or what have you because it was essentially something that was common to all the different varieties of Protestantism, but not Catholic.

Ashley Berner: Exactly right.

Jason Bedrick: Let alone non-Christian. Right.

Ashley Berner: Not particularly Unitarian, which was the other thing that was a bit uncommon then. But you’re absolutely right, it felt normal to them. It felt nonsectarian, even though it didn’t to those who were in the minority. At the same time that they were talking about the nonsectarian nature of the common schools, the Ku Klux Klan were firebombing Catholic neighborhoods and churches.
This is a whole part of our history that we forget, but it has massive consequences for even how we debate about education now, whenever we have these debates about whether or not charter schools are better than on the basis of test scores, but the real issue that we’re fighting about is, are they a legitimate expression of public education? In most other countries, the answer would be yes. That’s one of the hopes for a pluralistic system, is that it actually takes away the need for the school-sector competition that we in the reform space spend so much time dealing with.

Jason Bedrick: Neal McCluskey from Cato Institute has something called the Public Schooling Battle Map, where he shows all of the different ways that people fight to have their views expressed in the public system. He argues that if you had a system of choice, or a pluralist system, that different people with different values could actually have their values expressed in their own schools without having to impose their views on their neighbors. For this reason, and others, you argue that a uniform system is actually incongruous with both freedom and democracy. What do you mean by that?

Ashley Berner: It’s interesting to talk about the school battle map that Neal McCluskey runs. It’s a fascinating study, actually, in what it feels like to be a member of a cultural minority who doesn’t have the funding to send your child to a different kind of school. There are a thousand different reasons why any given school might not work for a given child. It might have to do with religious beliefs, but more often than not, it’s about the pedagogical approach or the size of the school, whether or not the school has certain activities that children really want. The only people in this country who can make those decisions are people who are wealthy enough to either move or enroll their children in a private school. This is the fundamental principle of the inequity of the uniform system, is that we have educational choices, but they’re only limited to the few. An educationally plural system makes them available to others.

I think part of what that map highlights for us is that education is not neutral. We can pretend that it’s neutral. Remember when the common school folks passed their initial legislation, they didn’t pretend that it was neutral; they just thought it was nonsectarian. Now many of our district school… Many of us assume that the public schools are somehow neutral, but they can’t be. That’s not a nefarious thing. Every school exists on the selection process. By that I mean every element of the school day is chosen in some fashion. The way that the discipline is administered, the hiring processes, the curriculum that’s used, all of these things are chosen. They’re not neutral.
In fact, one of the most interesting questions is, what does the school not ask? What questions are not allowed to be discussed? Because that’s informative for students too. If you don’t talk about God, for example, you’re teaching children something about that subject, either that it’s not important or that it’s not polite, or that it’s too toxic to discuss in a public setting. Other countries have mechanisms for imparting content knowledge while also respecting the choosiness of a school’s culture.

Jason Bedrick: If schooling truly can’t be neutral… I think that the people who designed the district school system understood that on some level. They just wanted to impose their views on the whole system. What undergirds this notion of a uniform system? Canada, for example, also experienced a wave of Catholic immigration, and they decided to extend their existing plural system. They were funding happily, and still do to this day, Protestant schools alongside Catholic schools. So what were the arguments in favor of a uniform system that carried the day and fundamentally changed how we delivered education in the United States?

Ashley Berner: Good question. Yes, Canada, it’s interesting, has always funded Catholic schools alongside of Protestant schools. In some of the provinces, they’ve actually expanded their pluralism greatly in the past few decades. Alberta is a case in point. They even fund home schoolers. Critically, though, they all have to take the same assessments, so they’re all learning the same content. But they’ve expanded their model to include home schoolers and Jewish schools and even First Nations schools.

What were the arguments that won the day? Well, there were several. The first and most important was that Evangelical Protestant and the Protestant majority had a hard time believing that Catholics could become good citizens. Remember that the United States in the 19th century was still very… It was new, and there were many folks who didn’t think that a democracy such as ours could really make it. When Catholics became such a large portion of the population, the Protestant majority… It was pure politics, concerned about funding going to those whom they suspected might have loyalty to a foreign power, namely, the pope. Many of them argued that Catholic worship and hierarchy, in and of itself, did not sit well with democracy, and therefore should not be encouraged or funded.

There were intellectual arguments, philosophical arguments, political arguments. After the Civil War, the Republican Party needed a new narrative and needed a new coalescing agenda, and it turns out that the push for a uniform school system actually fit their needs at the time. The Republican Party became advocates for a nonsectarian education after the abolitionist movement could no longer be their key platform after the Civil War.

Those were the arguments. It’s not very appealing when you look back at all of the writings about this. Some of it is deeply dispiriting, actually, from the pulpit, from political events and gatherings. There were protests, tens of thousands of Protestants marching against Catholic schools. It was a real battle cry.

Jason Bedrick: Now, I would say that, these days, the arguments in favor of the uniform system have been, by and large, stripped of their explicit anti-Catholic bias, but you still hear this case that really only district schools can produce good citizens. You’ll hear often that the public school system is referred to as the foundation of democracy, even though it was adopted more than 100 years after the American Revolution, and we had a plural system before that which produced the leaders that led that revolution.

But you still hear that. “Well, this is the system in which all different types of Americans from all different backgrounds, from all different races and religions and cultures, can come together in this melting pot and learn what it means to be a good citizen,” and that if we don’t have a system like this, it will lead to so-called balkanization, that the nation would be split. Do we have evidence that only district schools can produce good citizens? Do we see in other countries that have more plural systems that they’re balkanizing?

Ashley Berner: Good question. I think that the question of social cohesion is a really important one. It’s something that all democracies have to deal with quite repeatedly across their history. How do you integrate newcomers and so forth? I would never make the argument that district schools have not been responsible at some parts of their history and in some places, in the early 20th century in New York City, for example, where they really did play an integrative role for different kinds of ethnic groups. That can certainly happen. It’s also the case that many district schools are fantastic at forming the next generation of citizens.

However, by and large, the empirical record does not show an inherent advantage to district schools. In fact, it’s actually the opposite. One of the ironies of 20th-century educational research is that the schools that have, on balance, produced the most engaged citizens is the Catholic school sector. This was first highlighted by James Coleman in his work, and then Tony Bryk and many others have followed on that. In fact, studies are still coming out about the positive outcomes for volunteering and giving and all of that that come from the school of fact of a distinctive school like Catholic schools.

Jason Bedrick: Not to mention political tolerance and civic knowledge and engagement and a wide variety of other measures.

Ashley Berner: That’s right. When political scientists look at the indicators of strong civic formation, they look at political skills, political knowledge. The skills are do you know how to interpret legislation, do you know how to write your congressman. The political knowledge is do you really know how this works and why it’s important. Then the civil tolerance of others, being willing to support the beliefs of others even if you disagree. Then, finally, the habit of voluntary activity. All these things are more closely correlated to non-district schools, so, no, there’s no inherent advantage.

Now, I will say that every single pluralistic school system still has to work on the social cohesion piece, because you can’t fund 50 different kinds of schools and expect that there’s not going to be some selection process that may not work for democracy. The way that most of the pluralistic democracies manage this is by requiring common content. It doesn’t matter if you teach certain texts through a Marxist lens or a Catholic lens or a Jewish lens; you’re teaching the same text and requiring the same body of knowledge. That’s what catapulted Alberta, Canada, to become one of the highest-performing school systems in the world. They have a high-quality curriculum.

It is important to say that pluralism is so powerful conceptually and empirically because at its best, and no pluralistic system is perfect, but at its best, it enables strong academic content and coherent normative cultures. School culture has a positive effect on civic outcomes, but so, too, does core content. One of the reasons our NAEP scores have been so low in our country on civics is because we don’t require coherent content. In fact, many of the adults in our country don’t know history, and don’t know the three branches of government even. That’s another thing that our institute certainly works on. We are trying to address not just the structure, but also the content of education.

Jason Bedrick: I want to get back to that question of content in just a minute, but before we do, I want to return to some of the arguments in favor of the uniform system. I think you make a very strong case that actually empirically, both in the United States and elsewhere, we see that a plural system can also produce good citizens and, not only that, may even have some advantages in doing so. But you also hear this argument that a district school system is necessary because only state schools can offer equal opportunities to all children, that a system of so-called privatized education is going to lead to gross inequalities, and we want everybody to come together in the same system, and that’s the only way we can produce true equality. What do you make of that argument?

Ashley Berner: Well, I don’t think it’s true. First of all, I think it’s important to say that district schools are legitimate, that there should and will always be district schools. Most pluralistic countries, in fact, all that I know of also have what we would call district schools. The Netherlands funds 36 different kinds of schools on equal footing. 30% of those schools are district schools.

I don’t think we need to diminish the power of district schools and the importance that they bring to say they don’t have the corner on equity. It is simply not the case that opportunities exist most strongly in the district sector. I think that when you look at social capital and the requirements of really understanding the networks and the way the world works and so forth, here again there’s some empirical evidence that schools with distinctive cultures do a better job in that area.

I don’t think it’s the case in pluralism that we’re arguing for private education. That’s not the way the Netherlands understands it. That’s not the way Canada understands it. It’s not privatization. It’s simply a different way, and many of us would say a better way, to think about public education.

Jason Bedrick: So it’s an expansion, in your view, of public education, not confusing public education with one particular delivery mechanism, what we might call public schooling, but an expansion of the funding so that families are empowered with multiple options from which they can select and, preferably, find the school that best fits their child’s unique needs, talents, aptitudes, and their own values and aspirations. Is that an accurate reflection of your view?

Ashley Berner: Yeah, that’s exactly right. The other thing that pluralism brings is the ability to be flexible over time, because democracies change and beliefs can change. I’ll just give one example. In the UK, some of the big cities, namely, Leeds and Birmingham, have had a real shift in their demographics, so whereas many of the neighborhood schools were once Catholic, those neighborhoods are now often mixed between Catholic and Muslim students. There are some interesting cases in which those schools have adapted, in some cases, to have secular subjects in common and then some religious and historical courses separately, but they are together in the same school. Now, that would not be possible if you don’t have a nimble and very responsive way of setting up schools in the first place.

I think there’s another aspect to this, which is the human capital aspect of this, that teachers have different beliefs about the world and they have different pedagogical styles. Pluralism makes it possible for teachers to find a good match for them as well. If you love the classical tradition, but you like the project-based approach, you want to be able to find a school or found a school that matches your sense of the best way to teach. Teachers are often left out of this conversation, and I don’t think they should be.

Jason Bedrick: Right. Well, on that question, if teachers are going to have the freedom to teach the way they believe that they should teach and families are going to have the freedom to choose the school that reflects their views and values and type of teaching that they’re looking for, is that not somewhat incongruous with the idea that you discussed before that there would be some sort of common curriculum for all of the schools? Isn’t there at least some strong tension there?

Ashley Berner: There is tension. I think the way that pluralistic countries handle it is they say… Well, there are several ways to handle it. The most common is to say you have to learn the same content because our job as a country is to make sure that all of our citizens know certain things, and within that, you can teach from your own cultural perspective.

The way this plays out is really fascinating. In Canada, for example, the students have… In fact, we just published something on this. If you look on our website, there’s a great study of Alberta, Canada’s curriculum. The curriculum is pretty rich. They have to know about the history of the country, why it matters, what the key conflicts were, and so forth, but the materials that they have in use in Catholic schools looks somewhat different than it does in a secular school because Catholic schools want to bring in more theological constructs and concepts as they talk about community. It’s just a different way of looking at it.

I think what these countries do… Or the Netherlands. I forgot to give you the contrast with the Netherlands. They have the same exit exams at the end of several years, it’s not every year, but every few years, that all students in the country have to take, but those students’ end-of-year grade is not just contingent upon the exit exam. The exit exam, by the way, is not like our exams that are skills oriented. In the Netherlands, they’re content specific. They all have to learn certain things about the world, which, by the way, drives equity. That is a key driver of closing the achievement gap. The Netherlands also allows part of the grade to be made up from the school assessments. The school sets its own assessments, the government sets its, students take both, and their final score is the result.

Now, the really interesting thing about this is in cases like evolution versus creationism. The Netherlands funds creationist schools, different religious varieties, but they also require that all students have to learn about the theory of evolution. A student could be tested on the theory of evolution. Schools don’t have to teach it as truth; they have to teach about it. Those students in those schools could actually have a test that requires them to articulate what the theory of evolution teaches, but then on their school assessments, they could have to mount an argument that was pro-creationism.

It’s the same thing in the UK with the marriage equality act. Every school has to teach that marriage can exist between same-sex, same-gendered individuals, but they don’t have to teach that that’s a good thing. I think that’s a really interesting way to arrange it.
In this country, I think one of the real disadvantages, and I talk about this in the introduction to the book, is that it’s not just the structure of our schools that have gone amiss; it’s the content. We haven’t talked about content in any meaningful way in more than 100 years. Actually, Diane Ravitch has a great book about this. I refer to this book all the time. It will make you weep because it talks about the way that progressive education walked away from a coherent liberal arts curriculum. Most high-performing countries, incidentally, democratized the liberal arts curriculum. We did not, and we’re still paying the price for it. In particular, low-income kids are paying the price for it.

Jason Bedrick: In what sense? How did they democratize the liberal arts curriculum, and how would that benefit low-income children?

Ashley Berner: Right. There’s a whole other body of research that’s very powerful and persuasive that knowledge sticks to knowledge, that the more you know, the more you can know. This is E.D. Hirsch. This is Dan Willingham at UVA. And that skills of learning how to read are really important, but that beyond, say, fifth grade, the content knowledge about the world is just as important for student success as the skills of maybe finding the main idea, etc., things like that, which is what we tend to traffic in.

The consequence is, for low-income kids, that wealthy kids have information about the world coming at them from their dining-room conversations. Their parents take them to the museum. Their parents take them on trips. They may not know as much as their peers in other countries, but they know more than their peers in their low-income neighborhoods. Whereas countries like the Netherlands or Canada, because they require certain bodies of knowledge, have much smaller achievement gaps.

The OECD has a lot of research on this as well. We see that in this country as well. That’s an area in which we have a lot to learn from other countries, and our institute is working pretty hard on that issue as well.

Jason Bedrick: One of the interesting things to me is this idea of core knowledge that E.D. Hirsch and others pushed. You’re more likely to find it, actually, in charter schools and in a number of private schools than in the district school system. It seems that that’s something that parents are actually actively seeking, and yet in the politically managed system, the district school system, you’re less likely to find it.

Ashley Berner: Well, that’s interesting. I think that’s changing, though, because there’s a real growing awareness among states and large districts that the achievement gap is, in part, a knowledge gap. We saw this in Baltimore City. We have a process called the Knowledge Map, where we actually read all of the components that are in an English language arts curriculum, and we create a landscape analysis of what bodies of knowledge does this curriculum actually impart. We worked with Baltimore City on this and found that their knowledge build in their curriculum was very modest, in fact, inadequate. So, Dr. Santelises, within a month of receiving our report, had a proposal before the school board to adopt Wit & Wisdom, which is one of the most content-rich liberal arts curriculum out there, and that’s in the Baltimore City schools.

We work with districts and states all the time that are promoting content. Louisiana, we’re working with them on their federal pilot assessment authority that’s actually trying to leverage the content-rich ELA curriculum that most of the schools happen to use, and assessing students on the content, not just the skills.

I think this could be a game-changer for American education. My concern is actually that, look, some private schools and some charter schools, if they don’t get with the program about really high-quality and content-rich curriculum, they have a lot to learn from their district peers in some cases.

Jason Bedrick: Now, one of the cases that you make against uniformity and in favor of pluralism is that you argue that uniformity is incongruous with freedom, and that pluralism is a much better fit for a free society. Aren’t you concerned, though, that if a pluralist system were to become too prescriptive in regards to the content of the curriculum, that it would also be incongruous with freedom?

Ashley Berner: I would have thought that until I actually looked at the research and until I had my own children go through elementary and secondary school, and I saw the access to a rich curriculum that they were privileged to have, and contrasted that with what I see in many other classrooms. It’s night and day in what is required in a really high-quality private school that is content-rich and in the run-of-the-mill American school of any sector. My children also studied in England when I was doing my doctorate. They attended a Catholic school that adhered to the national curriculum, and the resources that are available to children of all income levels is remarkably rich.
The research is pretty clear that this is an equity issue. While I don’t think we want the materials to be required, having core concepts on your mandatory list are not a bad thing.

I guess I would say this, and I would qualify that, to say the strengths of pluralism derive from their ability to promote a high-quality academic experience and maintain a strong school culture. As soon as a curriculum requirement starts to trespass upon the school culture itself, then you have a tension that needs to be resolved. There are some cases in which the government’s curriculum has impinged upon a school’s culture, and I’ll give you an example.

In Canada, in Quebec, a center-left government took over and began to require not just a course on ethics and religion, which had long been required and which is par for the course in OECD countries, but actually to require a multicultural approach to that religious curriculum. This was an infringement on the schools’ cultures. Jewish schools, Catholic schools, and many Protestant schools objected to the imposition of this content. By the way, it didn’t just apply to funded schools. It applied to all private schools, funded or not. Actually, this case went all the way to the Canadian Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court found on behalf of the schools, and the government had to stand down.

I do think there is a point beyond which you don’t want to go because it does trespass upon the school’s culture, but it certainly isn’t necessarily so. I think Americans worry about that a lot because we’ve shied away from content for so long that a lot of teachers even don’t know what we’re referring to when we talk about a content-rich curriculum.

Jason Bedrick: Before we go, if there was one thing that our listeners could do to help move us closer to the direction of a pluralist system like you’re describing, what should citizens do to push toward a pluralist system?

Ashley Berner: First thing is to stop diminishing entire school sectors. I would say stop condemning district schools wholesale, and the same for district leaders condemning charter schools. If you assume that all schools that are high-quality have a legitimate role in the public square and can meet the common good, then you can put your weapons down.

Jason Bedrick: A good place to start.

This has been another edition of EdChoice Chats. Our guest today has been Dr. Ashley Berner, professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Education and deputy director of The Institute for Education Policy. You can find her book, No One Way to School: Pluralism and American Public Education, anywhere fine books are sold, and the Manhattan Institute website has her recent report The Case for Educational Pluralism in the United States.

If you have any other ideas for authors you’d like us to interview for the Big Ideas series, please send them to media@edchoice.org. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast on platforms such as SoundCloud, iTunes and Stitcher. Follow us on social media @edchoice. And find us on the web at edchoice.org.

Thank you very much. We’ll catch you next time.