Ep. 236: Monthly Tracker Results – January 2021

February 9, 2021

In this episode, we share key takeaways from our January 2021 wave of polling as reported on our EdChoice Public Opinion Tracker. For more from the full report, visit edchoice.morningconsultintelligence.com.

Mike McShane: Hello, and welcome back to another edition of EdChoice Chats. This is Mike McShane, director of national research, and it is time for our monthly installment of our tracker poll podcast. We put our tracker poll out to a representative sample of Americans back in January, and the results are in. I have Jen Wagner and John Kristof with me today to talk about what we found. We’ll talk about vaccines because we had some really interesting questions about people’s perceptions about vaccinations and the intersection they have with schools. We’ll talk a bit about back to school. As we see more and more schools across the country, as case counts start to go down and more children head back to school, what people think about that?

Then, maybe we’re being too optimistic here, but we’re going to actually look at a bit of stuff of post-coronavirus. What are people’s opinions of schooling as we head back to “normal?” And then as time allows at the end, one of the great things about our podcast and polling a representative sample of Americans every month is that we’re able to construct some really interesting trend lines and we’ll have some opportunity to look at what those trends look like, but let’s start. I want to start on a hopeful note: vaccinations. We were just sharing before we started recording here about our friends and loved ones that are starting to get vaccinated. I think it’s definitely something that’s hopeful. I think another thing that we lead off and maybe Jen, I might start with your thoughts on this. We’ve been asking a question if the FDA-approved vaccine to prevent COVID-19 was available right now, would you agree to be vaccinated?
What we saw, I think across the board, and these are groups that previously maybe were saying that they would be less likely to get vaccinated, some folks that were in the middle, some are most likely to get vaccinated all across the board. It seems like those numbers went up, more people were saying that they would get vaccinated. What do you see there?

Jen Wagner: Yeah. I think it’s not a surprising trend because as every day or week goes by, we see more stories of people getting vaccinated. We have more vaccines coming online, being more available to other age groups beyond our seniors and our frontline healthcare workers. I think I’m very glad to see this trendline. I don’t think it’s a huge shock either that you’ve got the most likely to be vaccinated, obviously baby boomers, but you’ve got some interesting ones in that breakout as well. You’ve got obviously educated folks, 69% with a bachelor’s degree or post-grad, Asian-Americans, high income earners. Then, you’ve got different regional breakouts that were interesting to me, yet the south is moderately likely to get vaccinated. Northeast, pretty likely. Then, of course, you’ve got the groups that are the less likely to get vaccinated.

This is also not a huge surprise that you’ve got the younger folks—the Gen Z, millennials, even Gen X in there. I think that’s reflective of COVID itself, and the fact that a lot of folks in those age ranges never really felt like they were in danger. If they didn’t have any pre-existing conditions, they were less likely to get seriously ill. But overall, I think it’s great to see that this is on the uptick and that people are more and more likely, every month that goes by, to embrace the vaccine.

Mike McShane: Yeah. Absolutely. I will say it was great to see all of those increases. Again, for some of the groups that were already very likely to get vaccinated, maybe the gains were smaller because they had less of a place to go. I am a bit worried. If we look in our data, the three groups, who according to our polling are least likely… Maybe it’s the four groups that are really what are worrisome about this. Less than college educated at 46% saying they’d be likely to take the vaccine. Low income, so earning less than $35,000 a year, 42%. Rural areas, which folks are already worried about actually getting vaccines out to those places, only at 40%. And our African-American respondents, only 31%. That number is up one percentage point. But at the very bottom of our likelihood for these things, we know how disproportionately the coronavirus has impacted many of those communities—lower income folks, African-American folks.
That’s definitely something, hopefully as we continue to poll on those numbers, they will go up because we would like to see those populations get taken care of. But another thing that we looked at. John, I’ll throw this over to you related to this question. We say when an FDA-approved vaccine to prevent COVID-19 is available, do you think that it should be mandatory or encouraged for the following groups? We asked this. For teachers and other staff working in public K-12 schools, teachers, and other staff working at private K-12 schools, students attending public schools and students attending private schools, and we saw a mishmash there of findings. Could you make sense of those?

John Kristof: Yeah. I think this is a really interesting results, especially comparing it to December. We just spoke about how across the board, there is an uptick in people who say that they are more willing to receive a vaccine if it’s available. That positivity toward vaccines gets reflected here in this question about its place in classrooms because there is an uptick across the board—whether it’s teacher, staff, students, public school, private school—people are a little bit more likely to say that teachers, students, staff should be at least encouraged, and there’s also an increase in those who say it should be required for those groups. Less than one out of every five say that teachers and staff shouldn’t be encouraged or required to get vaccines.

This reflects two things. One is a desire. We’re going to talk about this a little bit later, but a desire for parents to know that the classroom is safe, and as confidence in vaccines increases and familiarity with vaccines increases, as we know more and more people in our circles that have the vaccine, it’s kind of putting two and two together, I think for some people and saying, “Hey, this needs to happen for a very important part of our ecosystem to be safe.” I think this number is going to continue to trend at least encouraged and also mandatory for teachers and staff in that direction.

Mike McShane: Yeah. You brought up going back to school. As teachers get vaccinated, as case counts change in different places that folks are heading back to school more. I think it’s interesting to dig into some of our polling on this. The first thing, and I think this is the first time we’ve asked this question and I wish we had asked it before, but luckily one of the things that I’ll throw out there, as we put this information out there, people reach out to us and ask us questions, “Hey, have you asked a question about this? Or, “Hey, it’d be great to ask a question about this.” We’re always looking for those things. We can’t guarantee that we’re going to use them, but if there’s some question out there that you’re interested in knowing what America thinks about related to education, we can ask.

If you got some product that you want to sell or you want to run for office, we can’t really help you out, but if you’re interested in some of these more general things. We asked this question: What is the mix of modality that your children’s school are in right now? Are they an in-person school? Are they in some sort of hybrid of in-person or are they in remote? We saw, I think some interesting differences that we’ve heard about anecdotally that private schools were more likely to be in-person than district schools. It seems like our numbers kind of confirmed that. Jen, what do you see there?

Jen Wagner: Yeah. I think this was really interesting that we put this out there and found these data. You see in the results that twice as many private schools, so 42% compared to 21% of district schools, are back in-person only. We still get a pretty even split in that middle range of the schools that are both in-person and online, but I think it’s really interesting. There’s no clearer contrast. This obviously gets to the question that we’ll get to in a little bit here of like what parents are looking for and what they’re comfortable with, but it’s very clear that if you want to be in-person, your best bet during this pandemic has probably been a private school whereas if you gravitate more toward that online only option, your district school’s probably meeting your needs. I think this is interesting because there’s a national debate about getting kids back into classrooms and learning loss, and what’s the best thing to do right now versus six months from now or six months ago. Again, you’ve just got a really clear contrast here of which schooling type was engaging and is engaging in which type of learning.

Mike McShane: Yeah. It is interesting to see, and it should also be noted in our findings, we did see that 18% of private schools are still remote only. It’s not that it’s been out there and that every single private school in America has been operating and another 41% are in some sort of hybrid mode. Forty-two percent are full-time in-person, but that’s still less than half. Yeah, John?

John Kristof: Yeah. I just wanted to compare this to… We have another finding as well of what parents want, I think it’s really important. We know that so many public schools are doing remote only. As we’ve said, that’s reflected the news and the vibe around the role that unions are playing and things like that, but the vast majority of public school parents, the long-term want some kind of mixture. At least some in-person instruction, only 13% of public school parents are interested in remote learning in the long-term and yet, well over two out of every five schools are doing that. What private schools are providing are much more in line with what private school parents are wanting.

I think that that reflects the difference in administration, whereas decisions in public schools are much more centralized and a little bureaucratized, private schools are much more decentralized and inherently are much more parent focused. The kind of education that they’re providing during this time is a little more reflective of what parents are desiring. We see what we would expect because of the different administration styles reflected in what parents say they want versus what they say that they’re getting.

Mike McShane: Again, it’s great that you bring that up because Jen, I feel like you and I have talked about this version of it’s not really a pie chart, I guess, because the center’s out. It’s like a donut chart, but it functions like a pie chart. We’ve been asking this question. Based on what you’ve seen, read or heard about the coronavirus so far, how comfortable are you with your children returning to school right now? Obviously, top of mind for so many parents and this month, 51% of parents say that they are uncomfortable. That’s both people who responded very uncomfortable and somewhat uncomfortable. That is down three points from December and 46% said that they were comfortable. That’s vary in somewhat up for from December.
It seems like it’s trending towards comfortable, but comfortable is still underwater. There are more parents that are uncomfortable than comfortable, but it just seems like, again, it’s one of the things we’ve been having this… I feel like how many times we’ve talked where it was like 51/46 in one direction, 51/46 in the other directions. We see these movements and maybe that’s a trend, maybe it isn’t. I don’t know. I would love to know your thoughts on that.

Jen Wagner: Yeah. We’ve had this… This has been months in the making. We’ve been asking this question. The very optimistic part of me wants to think, “Okay, cool.” We talked about the vaccine. That’s getting out there. More people are getting it, so maybe people are getting more comfortable with the idea of their kids being back in a classroom. But I think it’s still split right down the middle. I think this is a really important slide taken in context with the prior slide, the prior discussion about what parents want? What we don’t know based on just looking at this donut chart and I’m getting hungry, but this donut here is, “Okay, which percentage of these folks that are uncomfortable are not getting what they need from the school that they happen to be in?”

This speaks to the larger conversation and what we do for a living, which is, “Okay, how do we get them what they need?” Or, “How do we create a framework where should we have another global pandemic, which knock on wood, we will not, or some other disruption that a parent can easily and quickly get their kid into the learning environment that they want as opposed to being stuck in a system where they either feel really uncomfortable with a decision that’s been made for them, or they’re not getting the kind of learning that they think that their kid needs?” Those are trade-offs that parents, like no time ever before, have had to make in the last 11 months.

I think there’s a tremendous opportunity for us as advocates to lean into that and say, “Hey, I don’t need to tell you what kind of school your kid needs to be in, because I don’t want you to telling me what kind of school my kids should be in. But if you were in fact, not particularly happy with the way this all went down, how can we help? What kinds of things will make it easier for you in the future to get the K-12 education that you need?”

Mike McShane: I think that’s great. John, my reaction to what Jen was saying, which I entirely agree with was like… Yeah. In so many places, if you are a public school superintendent or you’re the school board, whatever decision you make will be the wrong one, right? Because half of people will not be happy with it. Unfortunately, just the nature of the beast. If you have a big school district where people are… Where thoughts are divided, and we see this not just about it’s a very acute problem right now, but there’s all sorts of things like how should we teach mathematics or any of that sort of stuff? When should we start in the morning? You got half the people want to start earlier and half the people want to start later and you just have to… The nature of it is you just have to pick one of those, but we also have these trendlines over time. Right? It’s not like this decision has gotten any easier. I know you’ve been digging into some of these trends about how this looked, so I would love your insight.

John Kristof: Yeah. I laughed a little bit when you guys were mentioning that we’ve been looking at the doughnut chart for a very long time and split 50/50 one way or the other, so it’s hard to derive anything. I do think next month when we’re looking at these trends about comfort going back into school, next month is going to be really indicative for me because what we do see with the trends overtime is that this was the first month in four months that there was an increase in parents who said that they were more comfortable with their kids returning to school. You can see in the trendline, there was these waves where over the summer, parents were more comfortable with the idea of their kids returning to school.

Then, once kids to school in September, discomfort with in-person education seems to climb. We can see in the chart here that parents who say that they’re not at all comfortable with their kids returning to school peak at 36% in November. That’s declined since then, but that didn’t necessarily mean that parents were more comfortable. I think there was just more ambiguity. This is the first time… This January result is the first time since August that there was an increase in parents saying that they were comfortable with their kids returning to in-person instruction. Now, is that a fluke? It’s going to be interesting to see whether that lasts because there is still a lot of uncertainty. There is a decent split, but it was interesting for me to see a positive sign instead of a negative one for the first time in a while, but we’ll see.

Jen Wagner: Yeah. If I could jump in real quick too, what I would love to if we had all the resources in the world is to know the why. I would love to know if it’s… Is it because you’re afraid your school isn’t going to take proper safety precautions or because your school can’t because it’s tiny and they can’t really do the things that are scientifically recommended to stay safe or are there other reasons why you don’t feel safe? I wish that we could probe all of these questions a little bit more, but I agree with you, John. I think it’s good to see that we’re maybe coming out of the woods here and we’re turning a corner where parents will start to feel a little bit more comfortable. Again, we’ve all seen the stories about learning loss.

I can speak personally about the fact that my kids have been in and out of school. They are in private school and that has gone back full-time in-person, but every two weeks or so, another case of coronavirus pops up and this class is quarantined and that class is sent home, and my son’s teacher actually came down with it two weeks ago. It’s just been really, really disruptive. For whatever choice you want to make for your learning environment, which I know we’re going to get to here in the next slide, it will be really nice when people can get back to getting what they want.

Mike McShane: Well, you’re right. I think that’s such a good point too, of just we’ve had this really truncated conversation of whether kids should be at home or should they be in school? It’s like, “Well, what does that mean?” I don’t know if there’s a school or a district that’s providing really dynamite remote education, then maybe the bar is much higher to send kids back into school because they’re doing a great job. Similarly, just as you brought up, like if the schools are doing things to keep people safe and are abiding by precautions, or if they aren’t, that changes the calculus a little bit. Right? They can totally change the way, but so much of our national conversation is just like, “Well, you’re either kind of for sending kids back or you aren’t.” It’s like, “Well, there’s a whole lot of it depends in there.”

All right. Well look, as we start to look forward in the post-coronavirus time, we have a few slides in the slide deck, which again, you can always find on our website. Obviously, this is of particular importance to me. We asked a question after the pandemic, given the option, to what extent would you prefer schooling to be scheduled each week at home with a parent or tutor to provide the best education for your child? We asked whether folks would want to have education completely at home. Would they like to have a mix of at home and outside of the school, what we might call hybrid or completely outside of the home, so at a school now. Obviously, as I mentioned, I have an interest in this. My new book, Hybrid Homeschooling: A Guide to the Future of Education, comes out on March 14. That’s March 14.

It is available at your friendly neighborhood, online retailer. Hybrid Homeschooling: A Guide to the Future of Education, Michael McShane. But one of these questions that I’ve actually been interested in and may or may not have been able to get this question put into the poll was, is this something… Because the book that I wrote was about hybrid homeschooling before where kids go part-time, before the pandemic, like I started doing the research of writing for this years ago. Then, the pandemic kind of brought this idea of hybrid homeschooling and a lot of people didn’t like it, but I’m starting to put out there, Well, it’s not the same thing. It was done ad hoc and it was temporary and whatever.” Pardon me, worried that this had poisoned the well for the idea and lots of these schools that I visited that seemed to be doing great things and the kids were enjoying it and the teachers were enjoying it. It’s like, “Wow. This could scupper that whole thing.”

Well, as it turns out, in our polling, we asked school parents this and we can break it out between public-private schools and district schools, but just among school parents, we asked them so 14% said they want school in the future to be completely at home, and 42% said they want it completely outside of the home, so completely at school, but 44%, the plurality, the single largest group of those three said they would like a mix of at home and outside of the home. We asked them, two to three days at home is most preferred for those that chose this option. That’s a lot of people. Are we thinking that we’re going to see more of these in the future? Obviously, when I saw this, I’m thinking book sales. No, I’m kidding. When I saw this, I’m thinking, “Okay, maybe this was a good…” But I would love to know when you all saw this, what did you see?

Jen Wagner: Yeah. I was also going to say, like I was going to shamelessly promote your book for you, Mike, so you didn’t have to do it, but you checked that box and I hope everyone goes out and orders a copy of that when it’s available next month. This was really surprising to me, but I guess it shouldn’t be in the context that we’re all having this conversation right now about every part of our lives. If you are fortunate as we are to be able to work remotely and not have to go into an office every day during this pandemic where we did have to do that before, you’re having this internal conversation of, “Yeah. You know what? That’s pretty great work-life balance that I can get up, and not have to shower and have my behind in my chair by 8:00 a.m.,” and that’s been pretty great, but also missing those interact.

I think we’re seeing that as parents with our own kids that maybe there’s a better balance, and you’ve got 64% of private school parents who were potentially looking for a mix of at home and outside of the home after the pandemic and 40% of district school parents. Those are really big numbers and it’s pretty exciting and well done, Mike, predicting everything that was going to happen long before the little coronavirus made our world’s tip upside down, but…

Mike McShane: I should have invested in Bitcoin or something, then I really would be rolling in dough.

Jen Wagner: Yeah. These are cool findings, like really exciting for the future of K-12 education.

Mike McShane: I think Jen hit the nail on the head with corresponding this with the same kinds of conversations that we’re having about the work environment as well where we’re both realizing… We’re reflecting on what we like about going into work and what we also like about not having to go into work. We’re probably noticing the same thing with our kids where we’re realizing the benefit of them going into school and dropping them off at school, and we’re also realizing the benefit of having them around at home and being able to interact with them in a new way and taking a new kind of role in their education. When I saw this, the first thing that came into my head was we’re seeing a desire to maintain control and to maintain flexibility over our own schedules and over our own inputs into our jobs and our kids’ education.

It doesn’t specifically quantify because we didn’t specifically ask how important is having control over your kids’ education and schedules and things like that. We’re not asking that. But to me, I think when you put in people’s minds, the option of, “Hey, a few times a week, your kids go into school and a few times a week, they’re at home.” That idea really appeals to people to hold into a specific schedule that’s dictated to you. I wonder if that’s reflective of grander scale changes in how we’re viewing education as well that we’re taking an active role and not taking it as a given that your kids go to a specific district school and are holding to a specific schedule. I think we’re thinking about it more.

I think a lot of parents are excited at the idea of options. Even if they do go to the same thing, they know why. They know what the benefits of that are versus other options. I think parents are thinking about these kinds of things more, I think it’s exciting. Another question we asked about class sizes and learning environment size. This was another one that I thought was really interesting. We asked, “If given the option, what size of learning environment would you select to obtain or provide the best education for your child?” 56% of respondents would like to see less than 15 kids in that learning environment. 41% said 15 to 25 students and whatever the rest of that is, which is a very small number, said that they would like to see more than 25.
Now, it’s difficult when we say this whether that’s talking about like the whole school or just the classroom, but if the takeaway from the numbers that we just looked at is about flexibility, this looks like we’re hearing more about size about, and whether that’s about community or I don’t know what it’s about. That’s what I’m interested in you all saying. My takeaway, so if the last thing we say, parents want more flexibility, it seems to me that the parents are also saying they want smaller. Am I right to think that?

Jen Wagner: Yeah. I think you absolutely are. I think as we continue this conversation moving forward about what does K-12 education look like? Things that, goodness gracious, Milton Friedman could never have imagined back when he started to pioneer this idea of school choice. It’s exciting, and it does lend to the conversation to topics like micro schooling or pods, which we’ve also polled every month since the beginning of the pandemic, learning pods or micro schools, that small still teacher led, in many cases, schooling experience that might or might not be happening inside of a school building. I think you see in this question, the answers are very reflective of a willingness to maybe go back into a school building, but you want to go back in there and you want to make sure your kids are in a really small learning environment.

They’re getting that one-on-one attention, so that they’re not getting lost in the shuffle. I think, again, we’re a little bit Pollyannish around here, right? Because we are advocates for school choice and we love new things, but there’s definitely an opening here to have that conversation with those 56% of parents who want that small learning environment, like what does that look like? How can we get you there? Maybe it’s in the public system, but maybe this is a kind of a clarion call to public schools that having 35 or 40 kids in a classroom is not what parents are looking for. Again, really exciting as we explore new types of schooling and also potentially get back to schooling the way we used to do it, but maybe that’s not the way we keep doing it.

Mike McShane: I would be really interested to see how responses to this had changed overtime and changed through the pandemic. Perhaps what comes to my mind, I know a few teachers and among them, one is a teacher at a charter school, one is a teacher at a private school. They’ve had the experience of going online and then back in-person, even over the course of the fall semester. Both of them noted that there were some students that they had in the classrooms that seemed to struggle quite a bit and they were worried when schools closed down again and they went back online and weren’t sure if they were going to get the help that they needed online and of those students… Most of those students, they said, there were some with difficult home environments that still struggled, but of the students that had attention at home, they came back leaps and bounds ahead of where they had been when schools closed down initially.
They just attribute it to the one-on-one attention that they were able to receive. Even though school suddenly closed down again, we weren’t expecting it here in Indianapolis per se, or at least that’s not what schools were projecting at the beginning of the semester. Despite the schools being on their heels, the one-on-one attention helped the students a lot. I think parents and guardians of students in those kinds of situations would look in the long-term for learning environments where you can get as close to that individualized attention as possible. That’s going to be seen in small learning environments. I think perhaps the pandemic and our closures and going back… Hard to know to what degree. I’d be interested to see overtime, but I think it will increase demand for small classroom sizes even more than it already has been.

As we wrap this up, I want to talk about some of the trends that we’ve observed. We started putting these polls in the field back in February of 2020, which seems like a lifetime ago, but the trendlines… One survey poll question, do you feel things in K-12 education are generally going in the right direction or do you think they’re on the wrong track? But at the same time, we’ve been asking questions, like what do you think about education funding? Do you think funding is too high or too low? What do you think about teacher pay? Do you think teacher pay is… Do teachers deserve a pay increase or not? Those last two, we do an experiment where we don’t give people information. We just asked that question, but then we also say, “Well, this is how much teachers make,” then what do you think?

But it seems like in all three of these areas, the numbers have been trending downward, right? That fewer people think the education system is moving in the right direction. Fewer people think that we should spend more money on education. Fewer people think that teachers need a raise. I’d be interested in looking at that whole trajectory there, what do you all see? Is this the winter of our discontent? Is this a permanent thing where people’s opinions changed forever about this? Is it just that we’re in a pessimistic mood right now? I don’t know. What do you all think?

Jen Wagner: I would probably err on the side of the pessimistic mood. Beyond K-12 education, the last half of last year politically was tense, no matter what side of the aisle you are on. We weren’t feeling particularly great about the direction of the country. I’m not super surprised to see the sentiment on education has also been heading in that downward trendline. I do think it’s interesting. Just for anyone listening, we have long asked questions outside of the scope of the Morning Consult public opinion tracker about funding, per people funding, how much is necessary? It’s always surprising when people find out how much students are funded in their state that they go, “Oh, I had no idea.” That usually gets way too low, but I do find that an interesting trend and wonder if it will continue. There obviously is a bit of a rallying cry right now as legislatures go back into session that schools need more money.

Now, we all know having worked in this field for a very long time, that schools getting more money does not often actually equate to teachers getting paid more, which is one of those disconnects that’s probably worth its own podcast and exploring. I did find it interesting. The last thing I’ll say is that the only time throughout the pandemic that the teacher pay question didn’t change basically from when you asked, “Should teachers make more and didn’t tell people how much they make,” to, “Hey, here’s how much teachers make now. What do you think?” Was in April of last year. Right after the pandemic started, nobody cared how much teachers were making. Everybody thought they needed to be making more. That is obviously normalized, stabilized a little bit and is now heading more into that downward direction where people think perhaps once they find out what teachers make, they don’t need to be making significantly more money, but it’s a conversation that’s going to continue. We’ll obviously continue polling it, but I do think it’s reflective of our national mood at the moment.

John Kristof: To add one thing to the teacher salary question. When you look at this trendline, you do see a lot of stability from maybe June to December as far as percentage of people who think teachers need to make more. Then, the percentage of people who think teachers need to make more, once they know the number that they are paid. Then, in January, the share of people who say teachers should make more after being informed of how much to make, that percentage suddenly dropped. It’s not too drastic, but it is really noticeable compared to all the stability that we saw on this chart for months on end for the better part of last year. I asked myself, “What’s happened since December?” I don’t know if this is the answer, but something that comes to mind. Again, we have vaccine rollouts. Different states have different plans on when teachers will be in line to receive vaccines.

The story that jumps out in my head was, in policy world, I have some colleagues in the DC area, the teachers’ unions in Fairfax County, Virginia said that their demands essentially would not change even after they received vaccines as far as uncompromisingly would not do entirely in-person education, even after the vaccine rollout, essentially changing the goalposts until all the kids are vaccinated as well. Leaving the merits aside, I can imagine that some parents and I saw some parents really frustrated by that kind of response. Again, that’s one anecdote I’m bringing to the situation. I know that there are different teachers’ unions across the country that have had their own kinds of responses that have frustrated some parents who want their kids to return to in-person education. I don’t know how prevalent that opinion is, but if it’s happening in Fairfax County, Virginia, I can imagine it’s happening other places as well.

That might decrease willingness to pay teachers a little bit more because if you’re vaccinated and I have to go to work and I need to drop my kids off at school, what are we paying you for? It’s an idea. Don’t hold me to the fire, but I would be interested in exploring that a little bit more because that’s the one thing that I can think of that’s changed since December that might contribute to that kind of dip.

Mike McShane: I’ve got you down firmly for that. If at any point anything changes, I’m going to hold you personally accountable. Just glad we got that on the record. Everyone, make sure that you mark that to John’s. Well, look, Jen…

John Kristof: Never speculate on a podcast, right?

Mike McShane: Right. This is so true. Everything is recorded. Jen, John, it was lovely chatting with you as usual. I look forward like you, I think there are so many of these data points that I’m going to be fascinated to see next month and the month after that because I think there’s a time of a lot of change happening right now. For those of you, our dear listeners, please check back with us again in roughly one month’s time, and we’ll see what these trends look like now. But until then, thanks so much for joining us today. I look forward to chatting with all of you again on another edition of EdChoice Chats.