In this episode, we share key takeaways from our June 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, welcome back to another edition of EdChoice Chats. This is your monthly installment of our tracker podcast breakdown. As usual, I am joined by my superstar colleagues, Jen Wagner and John Kristof. And today, we’re going to be talking about our poll that we had in the field from around the middle of June. It was in from June 11th to June 17th. For those of you that are unfamiliar, we at EdChoice had partnered with Morning Consult Intelligence. We poll a nationally representative sample of Americans every month, a nationally representative sample of teachers every quarter. We actually, this is one of those magic months where we’ve had both the general population survey and the teacher survey, but we were actually breaking this into two podcasts. So, for those of you who have some yard work that needs to be done, hang on because we will be able to be with you as you prune your hedges or mow your grass.
But today, we’re just talking about our general population survey of Americans. And I think we should probably start with, the whole time we’ve had these polls in the field, the whole time we’ve been doing this podcast has been the age of the coronavirus. And in the past couple of podcasts we’ve done past months of polls, it was this sort of good news that was always coming out, that the vaccines were ramping up and case counts were going down, and it seemed like this thing was in the rear view mirror. And because we can’t have nice things or because what was that those world leaders touched that orb couple of years ago, I don’t know what happened, but this Delta variant is rearing its head in places across the country, in my native Missouri, and particularly the southwestern portion of it is like the national epicenter for these things.
And so, it’s interesting because we’ve asked a couple of questions throughout the course of the pandemic. The first is how disruptive has the pandemic been to your life? And then we’ve asked the question of how comfortable do you feel sending your children back to school? And it was interesting because the disruption question had been trending steadily downward. There was obviously, the highest peak was back in kind of March, April of 2020. It lulled down, but then it rose back up again to peak again, sort of in February of 2021. And it had been trending downward, but the trend turned a little bit, kind of the May-June poll that we have. So, Jen, I’m interested as you look at those numbers, do you think is this a Delta variant thing? Is this a summertime thing? What do you think is happening there?
Jen Wagner: Yeah. It’s hard to know, right? Because we’ve got the month-to-month data, and obviously, we’re going to know more looking at those long-term trends. I think Delta could be playing a role in this, but I would have to see a few more months of data kind of either staying steady or ticking back up slightly. And again, even then we wouldn’t really be able to correlate those things unless we asked directly.
I do think, and I know this is our next topic of discussion that you already previewed, but the number of parents feeling more and more comfortable with their kids returning to school, to me is a better indicator of where our mood is as a country right now. And in that area, we saw a nine-point jump in the total comfortable category for parents in sending their kids back to school. And I actually think that will probably go up even more as the younger, that sort of missing section of kids who’s not able to get vaccinated right now, maybe becomes eligible to be vaccinated either, probably not before the school year starts up again in earnest but maybe before the end of the year. So, I look at that one and probably read more into that, than I do the disruption numbers.
Mike McShane: Yeah, John, as Jen mentioned, so the numbers are that now 74% of parents, and we do a kind of… For those unfamiliar with polling there’s, an over-sample, we basically make sure that we have lots of parents in our sample to get a nice picture of what parent opinion is. So, of our parent respondents, 74% said that they are comfortable with their children going back to school. As Jen mentioned, that is up nine points from our May administration. And only 22% said that they were uncomfortable, which is down eight points from May. So, when you look at that, what do you see?
John Kristof: Last month, when we looked at the May version of this graph, we had seen for a while a steady uptick in comfort with in-person education that suddenly stopped a little bit where we were seeing these huge increases month after month since the beginning of the year. And in May, we only saw like a one or two-point increase and we were wondering, is it going to just slow down here at about two-thirds? And this month we see the trend pick right back up at a huge increase of parents comfortable with in-person education even as we’d have seen the perception of COVID being disruptive to yourself or to your community ticking up a couple of points.
So, it’s interesting seeing these two perceptions of COVID impact diverge so substantially like this, that I think reflects parents maybe changing perception about the relationship between COVID and COVID safety and schools, which might just point to like just a changing understanding of how we view school’s role and COVID spreads, and how we view COVID’s role and figuring out children’s activities and where children are safe being, which could reflect us getting used to some things. It could reflect parents finding more research or parents just having more personal experience with kids going to summer camps or kids have spent some time in schools and haven’t seen outbreaks things like that.
It could be a variety of experiences, but it is good to see parents becoming more comfortable with in-person education as summer is underway a little bit, but I will be interested to see if we see any more months in the future where we see comfort with in-person education and just a general perception of COVID disruptiveness diverge anymore in the future because it’s interesting to see these unlinked, because it might be… I have to check, but it might be the first time we’ve seen it. And I would dare say certainly to this extent.
Mike McShane: So, John mentioned that summer is progressing apace. Jen, I hate to say this, but we are starting to look at back-to-school time. I can imagine that that’s a whole set of challenges and interesting things that are going on, but so we’ve asked some of these questions about in the fall, what do we think schools should be doing as we move forward? I think it’s worth breaking some of these down. So, we’ve asked this question about offering options. So, we said, when we ask folks to look forward to the fall, “Do you think schools should only offer one approach to educating K-12 students, or should they provide multiple learning options?” And we see pretty strong break, right? 70% of respondents say that we should offer multiple responses. But 19% say that there should only be one.
And this month, our friends at Morning Consult actually broke down some of these numbers. And if we look at various demographic groups who are more likely to say that they want multiple learning options, if we look at the top of lists, African American respondents, Democrat respondents, Hispanic respondents were 76%, 74%, and 73%, respectably. And the three lowest groups were white respondents, high-income respondents and Republican respondents at 69%, 68%, and 62%, respectably. So, when you look at that, those numbers are relatively close to one another, but there does appear to be a kind of meaningful divergence of that. What do you think about when you see that?
Jen Wagner: Yeah. I think this is the fun part about doing this podcast, right? We get to read into these numbers, what we think is happening and then…
Mike McShane: It’s great, right? It’s very liberating. Yeah.
Jen Wagner: Yeah. It is. It is. And I think, first of all, it is yes, there is one out of five folks responding to this saying, “I only want one option.” Which, okay, but there’s still 70% saying, “I want multiple options,” which is a huge number. And I know we are actually heading right back into school season, at least where I live in Indiana, my kids go back to school in three weeks and four weeks, and then the public schools here go back in about two and a half weeks. So, it’s going to be really interesting to see how this plays out, moving from a hypothetical into reality.
And now, with respect to the breakdowns, the demographic breakdowns, I would be… Again, I’m just prognosticating because that’s what we get to do here, but you look at that, especially the responses among black and Hispanic families, 76% and 73%, respectively who want multiple learning options, I don’t think that it’s any coincidence that those also are demographic groups that were more adversely affected by COVID. Those are communities where we’ve not seen as many people getting vaccinated, either because of a lack of access or quite honestly a lack of trust. So, I think there’s probably a correlation there that we can make between the communities that were hardest hit and the communities that are now expecting there to be learning provided via multiple avenues and not just going one direction.
Mike McShane: So, John, one of the very surprising findings that we’ve talked about sort of month after month is we’ve asked a question about a kind of hybrid school model, asking parents about what’s their ideal school schedule when kids go back to school? Would you want your children to be entirely at home, entirely at school, or some combination? We’ve asked them, “Would you like to spend one day at home, one day at school, two, three, four,” et cetera. It’s been interesting because the numbers were so large. Huge numbers of folks were saying, they actually might want some kind of hybrid school week, but this month, we saw some declines in that, right? So, the numbers of folks who said that they want their schooling to be done completely outside the home went up nine points. So, that’s, we want to go back to a traditional school model in the fall, jumped up nine points this month.
And that was taken away from folks who said, “Two days at home, three days at home, four days at home,” or even people that were saying they would want to completely homeschool their children. When I look at that, I wonder if this is a sort of… We’ve asked this question hypothetically and now like some rubber is meeting the road somewhere and they’re saying, “Actually, we want to go back full time.” But I don’t know. I don’t know if you see that differently or is this a sort of an idiosyncrasy of this month, or what do you see when you look at those numbers?
John Kristof: That’s a good question. My first response was kind of the same as yours, where as you say, maybe the rubber is hitting the road, and we can see academic year 2021-2022 coming fast, and going back to something that we’re used to feels a lot better than maybe alternative options that we were thinking about and hypothesizing for a while, maybe some work options have become less flexible than they were for a while. Now, maybe some temporary hybrid plans at workplaces have gone back to a more full-time model. I don’t really know any data about that, that was kind of my first response. But I also think it’s worth looking at overall trends here. And if there was an idiosyncrasy, I think it’s important to realize just how high a preference for hybrid spiked last month versus kind of steady growth or rates holding steady in months prior.
So, if you want to go back two months to April, before that spike and compare April to these June results, the number of parents who would most prefer two to three days at home or outside of school environment, it’s essentially the same as it was back in April. The number of parents who would prefer school to be completely outside of school are essentially the same since April.
So, maybe on the fringes of parents who prefer one or four days, there’s been some change there and those have swung toward wanting completely outside of the school, but on its face, it looks like there’s this huge swing toward preferring completely outside the school, and maybe some parents who were kind of maybe sort of leaning one way or the other, not fully committed to this idea of hybrid or at home or just planning on doing completely traditional school model. But this month isn’t as big a swing as you might expect, given how kind of strange last month was. So, as we collect more and more data and see trends over more and more months, and next month when we come back and the school year has come even closer to people as we survey people in July, we’ll see whether that hypothesis of mine is correct, but yeah.
Mike McShane: I’m going to say, for both of you, if I need work in my garden, I think I would like to hire either of you because you’re so good at hedging. Oh yeah. All of you, if listeners, you could see the faces that they’re making right now.
John Kristof: Listen, these are recorded. If I’m wrong, I have to come back and…
Mike McShane: That is true. Fair. Fair. I just get to ask the questions, I don’t have to answer them all. Jen, I want to ask you, a term that sprung up throughout the course of the pandemic, #Pods, pandemic pods. We heard about this a lot back in October of 2020. So, we’ve asked a question, are you currently participating in, or would you like to join a pod? So, a small school kind of, you want to call a home-based micro-school, the term for it. Back in October of 2020, it was 55%, 45% wanting to participate versus not wanting to participate, or not planning to participate. By now, in June of 2021, it’s 63% not planning to participate, and 37% participating are looking to. So, are pods a thing of the past? Where they just sort of blip during the pandemic, or what does this tell us about pods?
Jen Wagner: I don’t think they were a pandemic blip. If anything, I think during the pandemic, we realized a lot of families realized, “Oh, hey, there are other ways of educating.” And they were forced to do it because of circumstances outside of their control. And it’s easy for us to sit here and say, “Oh my gosh, look at that huge swing from October of last year to June of this year,” and to be doom and gloom about it, “No, oh, pods are… They’re just a flash in the pan,” but they’re not. We can clearly see that you still got 37% of parents who are currently participating in or looking to form or join a pod. That’s a lot of families saying, “Hey, I’m still interested in this so I’m still doing this.” And I think that’s to be expected.
Again, a lot of families were forced into this mode of education back in the dark cold, depending on where you live, snowy days of October and November of last year when schools were still shut down and vaccines were not as readily available, but I’m heartened by this trendline that’s holding fairly steady from February until last month, where you’ve got a sizeable portion of parents who are still, at least, if they’re not doing it, they’re open to doing it, or they’re looking at doing it. And I think going to John’s prior conversation of the in-person versus at-home learning, I think pods will remain a strong force among those families that are looking for something that isn’t five days a week in a classroom.
Mike McShane: So, now John, as we’re continuing to talk about what’s going to happen when students go back to school, obviously there’s a huge concern about learning loss that took place during the pandemic, as Jen mentioned, with shuttered schools or low-quality remote learning or kind of toing and froing between all of these things. So, a big thing that folks have been talking about is tutoring, right? And we have a number in this month’s poll that blew me away. It asks this question, “Is your child getting tutored outside of regular school hours this school year?” And so, we ask the question, they can answer, “Yes, my child is currently tutored.” “No, but I’m actively looking for a tutor.” “No, but I will be looking soon for a tutor.” Or just sort of no, that they’re not going to be doing any tutoring. 45% of parents said that they are either currently, their child is currently being tutored or they will be looking for that in the future.
If there’s north of 50 million school children in America, that’s like this huge, huge explosion in tutoring, a huge marketing. I don’t know if anybody invested stock or invested in tutoring company stock, but boy, that would have been like Tesla or GameStop a few months ago. But I’m just wondering, when you look at those tutoring numbers, are we seeing some huge new development happening here? It seems to me poised to be a massive thing happening in the American education system.
John Kristof: I think there’s a huge sense that tutoring is going to be very important now and through the next school year. There’s another question that we asked where we asked this for parents and also just kind of the general population about what you think would be helpful for children in the upcoming school year post-COVID? What kind of resources do you think would be helpful? And there’s like an overwhelmingly positive response to this idea of after-school tutoring as being helpful. For parents, it was very helpful to their own child, and then also the general public thought that tutoring would be a very helpful post-COVID resource for kids. And we see that reflected in nearly half of parents being at least interested in tutoring for their children. The number of children who are currently being tutored according to parents and parents who say that they’re going to soon be looking for a tutor, it’s held steady between this month and previous month.
So, that indicates that there is a steadiness here. There’s a kind of continuing sense that this kind of supplemental education is something that we need. And if I can combine this with the last point that we were talking about with pods, something that I think I’ve mentioned in the previous podcast or on TikTok, maybe they all blend together in my mind now, but the preference for pods have held very steady through all sorts of changes over time. So, perhaps pod usage was highest when we’re at the peak of schools being out. And since then, you had a winter COVID spike. You had the development of vaccines, the acceleration of vaccine usage and pod interest and pod usage has remained pretty consistently about like 35% and 40%. And even now this month. Also this month, we saw an increase in the share of parents interested in pods or in pods who saw pods as supplemental to regular education as opposed to like a complete replacement.
So, it’s long been about 70% and this month it was about 80%. So, that was kind of reflecting what I’m seeing now is I think parents, even if they recognize the value in going back to school and sending their kids back to school, at least some of the time, there’s a recognition that there are also other resources available. And there’s an advantage to taking advantage of resources elsewhere to help their kids develop, whether it’s a sense of giving them something that school cannot or more individualized attention because they saw benefit to giving their kid individualized attention during school outages and things like that. There is just a very strong sense across all sorts of different questions that tutoring or other ways of describing tutoring is just going to be very important for kids for the next year.
Mike McShane: Yeah. So, I want to shift gears here and I’m actually going to shift gears twice, once very quickly. And then we’re going to settle into another gear because we’re kind of motoring through topics here and there’s some more that we want to cover, but we would be remiss obviously we are EdChoice, we have been working in states all across the country as we were seeing 2021 as the bumper year for school choice legislation from across our great nation, lots of different programs, expansions, new things, et cetera. I just want to throw out there as sometimes happens after big pieces of legislation get passed, some folks have buyer’s remorse or they get a little worried, “Oh my goodness, we did this. It sounded like a good idea at the time. What are we doing?” So, we’ve been asking you questions about education savings accounts, which we saw in four states.
And obviously, because we have a lot of national educational attention, I’m just going to put it out there, back in July of 2020 if you look at the favorable, unfavorable, it was 65%, 14%. 65% support, only 14% opposed. In June of 2021, it’s 67%, 12%. So, there’s no reason to think, I think that anybody has buyer’s remorse. Again, I’m going to just get out there on the limb and say, one of the reasons that we saw all of these bills passed is because they are popular. Our research consistently says that people support things like education savings accounts so we shouldn’t be surprised when legislators pass them. So, that was the first gear change. Now I’m going to go into the second one because we’ve actually added a new suite of questions. Many of the things that we’ve been talking about, avid listeners of the podcast know we’ve covered a lot of these questions and we think that they’re interesting how they change over time, but we’re starting to actually work on a new suite of questions that are in here.
And it’s frankly, a response to anyone who is even tangentially following education right now knows that in school districts and states across the country, there is a lot of controversy about what goes on in schools and how they’re taught. Probably you would have to be living under a rock to have not heard terms like critical race theory, but there’s lots of things that are sort of related to race and gender and all sorts of things that are happening in school right now. And we, at EdChoice have this crazy idea that we would, rather than adding heat, we try to add light. So, rather than jumping into one of these conversations and just pontificating about things, we actually try and do something crazy, like collect data, better understand what’s going on and share that with people to help hopefully better inform discussions that are happening in the public square right now.
So, this month we asked a series of questions about diversity and inclusion efforts, and we asked them to parents to sort of grade their schools or to look at what goes on in their schools and say, because obviously you hear all the stuff in the news about where, “Oh, everybody thinks this.” Or, “Everybody says that.” Or, “This is what’s happening.” And there’re just these gross generalizations. So we said, “Well, look, why don’t we actually talk to some folks here?” So, Jen, I would be interested to hear your response. So, one of the questions that we asked is how much do you agree or disagree with each of the following statements as it relates to schools in your area? And we asked them a battery of questions that are things like emphasize, showing respect for all students’ cultural beliefs and practices. Has questions like encourages all students to take challenging classes, regardless of race or background, provides effective support for students that need alternative modes of communication, treats all students equally regardless of their race or background. What do you see when you look at some of the responses that we had to those questions?
Jen Wagner: Yeah. I’m happy to get into that too. And I also want to put a piggyback and say to anyone who is listening, we are being very deliberate about our approach to these issues. This is obviously not the first time that curriculum has come up in the K-12 education in how, and what should be taught when to whom and we are a school choice organization that believes in our core that we live in a pluralistic society and that the answer more often than not and quite honestly all the time is that if folks are not satisfied with what they’re getting in their current schooling option, that they should have access to other schooling options, which I think is reflected in the high support for ESAs that we have seen over the course of this Morning Consult project. I think I’m biased, obviously because I work here that we are doing the right thing in trying to inform this conversation with data points instead of what is happening oftentimes on social media where it’s not data points but opinions.
So, I think what we see in this first set of responses is actually somewhat heartening. When you ask school parents how their own schools are doing with respect to this battery of questions about diversity and inclusion, you’ve got nothing lower than 74% of folks who agree with a particular statement. And at the high point, you’ve got almost 80% of parents saying, “Hey, yeah, my school does emphasize showing respect for all students’ cultural beliefs and practices.” Now, obviously, those are not 100% numbers, so there’s still work to be done in these areas as parents are telling us in their own schools. And I think it’s really interesting. I know we’re going to get into the demographic breakdown.
Mike McShane: I was just going to ask you about that because it’s interesting that we have these exact same questions. We have the sort of general responses, but we also break them down by various demographic groups. And I was just wondering if for you, anything stood out of a particular sort of patterns in the data there?
Jen Wagner: Yeah. I think and again, I would highly encourage people to go and look through this slide deck on our website because Morning Consult did a really cool breakdown of this with a heat map so it kind of shows green is obviously more in agreement and they’ve got some red areas that are less in agreement. Please note though, overall all of those numbers are still very, very high in agreement with the statements that we asked, but you definitely have across the board with all of these questions, black parents are less in agreement with some of these statements about their schools and diversity and inclusion, as well as lower-income parents also scored their schools a little bit lower in terms of agreeing with the efforts that they’re putting forth on diversity and inclusion.
So again, there’s two ways to look at this, right? It’s on the one hand, a lot of parents think that their school is doing a really great job, but we’ve also got room to work on or honestly, since we work in school choice for those parents who don’t think that their school is doing a very good job, let’s make sure they have the options so they can find a school that better reflect their values, their culture and their community.
Mike McShane: So now, John, we also broke these down and Jen, I just want a second. The heat map is super interesting and we could actually probably do like an entire podcast, just looking at just sort of patterns in the data of like differences between Republicans and Democrats or special needs parents and non-special needs parents. So, that’s all in there. So we have racial demographics, income, special needs classification, political, et cetera. But we also had a slide looking at private schools. We broke down between public and private schools. And it was interesting that it seems like in almost every case, this sort of positive thing, I think we could all probably agree that we want to see showing respect for all students’ cultural beliefs and practices and treating students equally, regardless of their race or background, et cetera. In every one of those cases, it seemed like private schools outperformed district schools. Did you see the same thing that I did? And what do you think about that?
John Kristof: I need to dive into the crosstabs a little bit more in order to, I think, fully answer this question because unfortunately, particularly in areas where school choice is not a very strong option, you don’t have well-funded ESAs or voucher program or things like that. Private schools are still fairly relegated to families that can afford to pay tuition. So in the last slide with the heat map breaking things down by demographic, the biggest disparities as far as comparing groups, as far as how you feel about your school, it’s not across race, it’s not across political spectrum, it’s across income. The biggest disparity is between those with high incomes, which we categorize as a household income of $75,000 a year or more and low-income which we categorize as $35,000 a year or lower. So, if that’s your group with the biggest disparity as far as how positive you feel about your school’s like diversity, inclusivity and things like that, it’s hard to be too surprised that there is also going to be a fairly big gap between how private school parents feel about their school’s practices and district school practices as well.
I think it’s also worth noting that it’s not like a religiosity thing or other matters like that, which I think is clarified through some of the other demographic breakdowns that we have that you can see in the crosstabs.
Mike McShane: So, Jen actually our sort of last slide that we’re going over here today, or the last question I’m going over, I thought is a really, another one of these really interesting ones. So we asked this on a scale of zero to 10, where zero means completely disagree and 10 means completely agree, how much do you agree or disagree with each of the following? And again, we asked a battery of questions from things like all students feel welcome in our school. My school teaches American history from a variety of perspectives, to I change how I speak on certain issues due to political pressure. And a couple of things sort of stood out to me. The one that we saw the highest number which would mean that it’s the most agreement is that all children feel welcome in our school. I think that’s good, right? We would like that number to be very high.
The one that we saw the lowest number on was, I change how I speak about certain issues due to political pressure, which I thought was really interesting. And another one that ended up kind of dead in the middle was we said the question, “The debates about curriculum are more intense today than they were five years ago.” And the number that came down was like 5.79. So, it’s kind of like right in the middle of all of that. So, those all kind of stood out to me. It’s like, “Wow, that’s kind of interesting. I wouldn’t have necessarily thought on some of those.” Did any of them stand out to you or even looking at those, did that sort of peak your interest somewhere?
Jen Wagner: It did. And I think also the group of parents, we didn’t have people who were like, “I 100% agree with that,” or, “I’m absolutely in disagreement with that,” which I think is interesting and reflective of parents have other things to be worrying about. They’re not spending a lot of time probably reflecting on these issues. So, when we asked them about them, they come down pretty much in the middle. And I say that as a parent. I am not actually actively sitting around my house contemplating whether or not I change how I speak about certain issues due to political pressure. I’m more trying to figure out what we’re having for dinner tonight and how many days until school starts back up again. I did though find that that last issue of changing how you speak about certain issues due to political pressure interesting in that it was the lowest.
And I think, again, it’s hard, right? Because we all work in this issue every day and we read the news every day and we are constantly bombarded with political coverage that might or might not match what we also believe. And so, there is a temptation to think that somehow parents or Americans more generally are parsing their speech and pulling punches because they’re afraid of how they’re going to be viewed. And it doesn’t look like that’s the case. I think that you’ve probably more often got the situation where you got a bunch of people, I don’t know, at the PTO meeting or standing in the grocery store line and a controversial topic comes up and they say their piece about it-
Mike McShane: They lean in.
Jen Wagner: … which is weird, right? Yeah. Like if you live on social media, that is not the case. And I kind of took heart in that, that deep down as human beings in our communities, we’re actually just still having normal conversations where you could disagree with your neighbor or your friend on a particular topic even if you don’t see eye to eye and I say that as someone who… I am a Democrat, I am marrying a conservative Republican. So, it can work out, you guys and the proof is in the data.
Mike McShane: You’re our own James Carville and Mary Matalin. The James Carville and Mary Matalin of Indianapolis, Indiana. Well, look, Jen, John, a pleasure as always again, everyone listening at home, you can go to edchoice.morningconsultintelligence.com and check out. As John mentioned, we have all the crosstabs of any of these things you found interesting and you’re like, “Oh, I want to know maybe in more fine-grained detail, exactly what subgroups thought about things, all that stuff is available, the questionnaires available. We have created so much data over the course of the last now year and a half.
There’s some enterprising grad student that has a dissertation in this easily, trying to help as a former graduate student. I’m trying to help some people out here. So, all of that stuff is available. Please check it out on our website. And as always, we’re constantly looking for new questions, new issues. So, folks who are listening to this podcast, if there are things about educational opinion in America that you’re actually interested in, please don’t hesitate, shoot us an email. I can’t guarantee that it’ll actually end up in the survey, but there’s any number of times in which we’ve had conversations with folks and said, “Wow, that’s actually a really interesting thing. We’d love to know it.” Well, drop that question in there. But as always, thanks for listening. Look forward to joining you for another edition in the future of EdChoice Chats.