Ep. 320: Monthly Tracker – April 2022

May 18, 2022

We hear from members of the research team about the results from April’s general population poll, including answers to some new questions.

Mike McShane: Hello, and welcome back to another edition of Ed Choice Chats. This is our monthly installment of our Tracker Podcast. For those of you who may be unaware, every month we in partnership with Morning Consult poll a nationally representative sample of Americans. We over sample parents to really get a nice national picture of what parents are thinking right now. And we’ve been doing this for over two years. We picked a very interesting time to start such a project, and we’ve been able to look back over the course of the whole pandemic, the experiences that people have been having. The poll that we are talking about today was in the field from April 21st to 23rd. The results are available on our website, edchoice.morningconsultintelligence.com. And in some ways, John, I’ll probably kick it to you first, in some ways I thought the poll this month was kind of boring. And while for our podcast purposes, that may not be the best thing. But like living as human beings thing, it’s actually great. So many of the questions that we’ve had that were more contentious or more difficult, some of them were kind of phasing out actually over the course of the next couple of months, because we don’t really need to ask them anymore, but there’s probably no better question about this than this question we’ve asked over and over again. But based on what you’ve seen, read, or heard about the coronavirus outbreak so far, how comfortable are you with your child or children attending school? In April, 84% of parents said that they were comfortable with their kids going back. That’s up two points from March. Only 14% said that they were uncomfortable. That’s down two points from March. We’ll have another poll in May. Maybe some kids will already be done at that point. So this may be sort of the picture of what we have at the end of this school year. So John, is this it? This is the parents saying this thing’s in the rear view mirror?

John: It’s definitely the perception that I have of this and I can’t help, but kind of go back to what you and I talked about in a podcast last month, where we just started seeing this idea or trend post Omicron variant that maybe we are at a point where we are past COVID-19, at least as a cultural phenomenon, or at least as something that is filtering all of our decision making, especially about education. And while it is exciting looking at this on a monthly basis and looking at differences in trends, how high is that plus or minus number, because those are interesting and there’s stories behind there. A plus two percentage points of people feeling comfortable, a slight increase on the record high of people feeling comfortable sending their kid to in person education right now probably is a sign that a lot of people are just very comfortably post COVID when it comes to making decisions about their kids’ education. We have plenty of other questions about whether their ideal scenario involves sending their kid to school five days a week. And that’s not necessarily the case, but when it comes to the idea of in person education, the vast majority of people are at least as comfortable with it this month as they were last month. And yeah, I think confirming the new times we’re in. Whether it’s new normal or not, I’m not going to say what normal is or what new normal is. But yeah, we’re definitely in a new post COVID era when it comes to schools and decision making.

Mike McShane: And you wonder if we’re going to kind of do better than 15% of people saying that they’re uncomfortable with their kids going to school. You wonder how much of that is just like a baseline of, so now we’re sort of saying it’s because of COVID, but there’s just some percentage of people that are just generally not comfortable with their kids going to school for whatever reason. And you wonder if that’s sort of where we’re at there. But so Colin, part of what we’re kind of thinking about now, again, because we have the luxury of being able to say, it seems like people are as John I think wisely puts out there that as a sort of cultural phenomenon, the Coronavirus is over. At many points on this podcast, you could go back where we were like, yeah. I mean, I’m pretty sure this thing’s in the rear view mirror, only for some mutation to take place in some poor soul and spread all over the place. But one of the things we’ve been thinking about at least is like what post pandemic schooling, what’s going to look like as this school year comes to an end? We’re starting new one. And a term that came up over and over again during the pandemic were pandemic pods. There was a lot of discussion about micro schooling, hybrid homes, all of these sort of things that were in there. As a little bit of a plug for the podcast that I do with this series, What’s Up With Mike McChain, we’re going to have a podcast coming out soon with Amer Kumar who runs [inaudible 00:04:31], which is this really interesting network of micro schools. So this is a teaser for what’s happening there. But one of the things I found was that in this month’s polling, we’ve asked this question as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, are you currently participating in a pod with other families? If we put together the people who are currently participating or they’re looking to form a pod, we’ve been seeing some kind of down ticks with this, but it actually went up this month, up to about 34% of people said that they were either currently participating or looking to form a pod. That’s interesting. So now again, I think a lot of folks made this thing, like pandemic pods, were going to be like the way every kid in America goes in the future, but a third of American kids being somehow involved in this, that’s kind of a big number. When you look at some of the pod stuff, the pod numbers from this poll, what do you see?

Colin: Yeah. First, thanks for having me, Mike. I really love listening to you guys and now it’s kind of surreal getting to actually be part of it. But yeah, I’m a bit biased. I’m a huge fan of learning pods. Last month, I was a little bit concerned. We saw two straight months of 29%, which since we started asking the question was the lowest number we had to date. So I was really curious what this month, whether we would see it continuing to plateau at 29, 30%. But we actually got an increase of 5% and that was not just from people participating, but also an increase in people looking to join a pod. So I think that was really encouraging if you are in the learning pod camp. I think the biggest thing that stuck out to me was, and I think this is why I’m a fan of learning pods is because it can appeal to a very broad range of people. I think we asked for the first time, the reasons why people were looking to join or looking to find a pod. And the top reason was for parents to give a child a learning experience without COVID restrictions. So you have one group there who are possibly upset with the way their current school is looking in terms of COVID restrictions. And then the second most popular reason for parents, why they were looking or why they’re participating in a learning pod was that they were concerned about COVID or their child’s health or safety at their current school.

Mike McShane: I love that. I thought that was so funny. One and two were the polar opposites of each other.

Colin: I know. And to me, that’s perfect because you can attract so many different people with learning pods and it just shows the flexibility. And for me a learning pod fan, I thought that was great. And then the third reason to me, it was a summary of what we were talking about here and it’s parents want more say in their child’s education. And I think that just encapsulates learning pods as a whole. So yeah, I mean a lot of good information that, like I said, I was happy to see that we bounced back from 29 to 34. Like you said, the third of people looking to participate or are participating currently in learning pods. That’s a significant chunk of people. So yeah, good stuff for learning pods.

Mike McShane: Exactly. And I think it’s so interesting that in a time where stuff is so polarized, it hasn’t read one way or the other. So it’s like pandemic pods are for people who want to get away from COVID restrictions. And that’s like so many things in our world become kind of coded one way or the other. It’s like, oh, those are like the pro mask people. Those are the anti mask people and this is what they do. Well, it turns out pods didn’t end up that way, that they are sort of for both groups. That there are some folks that are sort of exactly, as you said, oh wow, like I’m still kind of iffy about the coronavirus. So a pod’s a good way for me to prevent the things that I’m worried about. And the flip side is true as well. And we had some interesting demographic stuff. John, I mean, like the top five groups that said that they were more likely to join a pod of the demographic group. So we have the number one group was black respondents, 59%. We think about 34% total. They were at 59%, up 13 points from March. Then private school parents, urban parents, homeschool parents, and special education parents, which is like that’s an eclectic bunch of sort of linking folks together. And then interesting. The bottom five were folks in small towns, which is only 18%, rural, non-Hispanic whites, folks in the Midwest, and district school parents. And district school parents were sitting at about 30%. And special education parents, which was like number five on the top end was at like 45%. So when you look at some of that demographic stuff, maybe the bottom five have some things in common, but the top five are definitely sort of a mixed bag that you wouldn’t necessarily put together. So can you make sense of those numbers or are you staring at them the way I am?

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Mike McShane: Can you make sense of those numbers or are you sort of staring at them the way I am?

John: Yeah, I think my biggest takeaway is similar to Collins’s takeaway from interpreting the reasons that people join learning pods. The reasons people join learning pods is very diverse and you can’t really put together a cohesive narrative about this is who the learning pod people are. And when you look at the demographics and things that you associate with various demographics, is also the same kinds of things. So you might take private school parents and homeschool parents together in a group to some sense, and that you can say, hey, these are parents that have invested a lot into their child’s education already. They’ve already been in a mindset of trying to find alternative forms of education for their children beyond the traditional assigned school method, if you will. So they might be more inclined to try something different, like learning pods as well. That’s kind of a relevant question. But then you have special education parents and they are often associated with really needing the resources and help from a strong school or a strong district with a lot of resources. And they’re looking for something additional or something different from traditional public schools or traditional district. The thing is that these kids at learning pods could also be in traditional public schools and [inaudible 00:10:26] supplementary and that’s another question we ask that you can check on our results. You can come up with a narrative for black families in urban areas that may be dissatisfied with the way that their kids have been treated in the traditional public school system. And there’s been all sorts of stories about that since COVID started and we saw the share of black families homeschooling pricing and things like that, the same narrative behind that, you can point to a possible reason why black families and urban families are so interested in learning pods as well. It’s a kind of controlled, smaller scale environment for kids to learn, where parents feel like they have more agency and their kids can have more individual attention while still having good socialization opportunities and learning and all those different things. We can break down the demographics all sorts of different ways, even district school parents at 30%, while lower than average, is still not insubstantial. So we could go down this list entirely and come up with different reasons why different demographics might be interested in learning pods. But the point is that you really can’t come up with just one reason why people look to learning pods and I think that’s a very important lesson just going forward, that for anybody who’s interested in kind of this post-COVID search for different kinds of education.

Mike McShane: Well, speaking of not being able to come up with one reason for something, we thought we were kind of slick this month. I’m going to be the first one to put that out there. There has recently been some discussion the Biden administration has put out at least I think a draft of some potential regulations on charter schools. And we won’t necessarily go into the depths of them, but the long and short of them is it’s kind of going to make life more difficult for charter schools. It’s going to give school districts more control over whether and how charter schools are able to operate and setting aside the merits or demerits of such a proposal, though I think if anyone has been listening to this podcast for any length of time, you could probably imagine where most of us might land on that. But what we wanted to do was ask adults and ask school parents what they think about charter schooling. Obviously we’ve been asking questions about popularity of charter schooling, it continues to pull quite positively across lots of different groups of folks. But on some of these specific questions of like who should have control, who should have control about whether or not schools are able to operate or where they should operate, we sort of asked a two part question. We said of the following, who do you think should influence whether or not a public charter school can open or operate in a particular area, and then who should have the most power to approve or reject public charter schools?  So in theory, we gave a lot of options – school district, parents, state government, independent chartering boards, universities, et cetera. And in short, it was kind of like, at least the way I thought of this question when it came out was, “Okay, the folks who sort of say school parents, they’re kind of on the charter school side or the charter school advocacy side” at least because they’re saying those are the people who should have the decision. And the folks who say the school district say, “Oh, that’s the sort of Biden administration side,” et cetera. And in some ways, setting my personal feelings aside, you sort of want to see one emerge more than the other so that when we get together on this podcast, we can say, “Oh, that tells us we know what Americans think.” And that is not in fact what happened. If we think of those top two groups, it is true that the folks were most likely to say that the school district or students’ parents should have the most say in whether or not a school opens, et cetera. But basically the exact same number of people said each. So for those of who should influence it, school district 34% of all adults and 41% of school parents said it while students’ parents, it was 31% and 36%. So numbers very close to one another. And then when it came to who should have the most power, amongst all adults, it was literally the exact same number, 26% said students’ parents, 26% said the school district. And among school parents, they were basically the same, 25% said students parents, 28% said the school district. So Colin, it seems to me that public opinion is not dispositive on this question. I guess what I’m wrestling with, and I’d be interested in what you think, is part of this is that this is just kind of an esoteric topic that most people don’t know? It’s sort of like someone asked someone’s opinion on like the infield fly rule or something. Most people would be like, “I, sure.” Like how many TV timeouts should be in a college basketball game or something and sort of partisans have really strong opinions about this and most people just don’t. That’s kind of my first blush reaction to that. Do you see it the same way or did you see something different here?

Colin: I really like the analogy you had, Mike. I think, like you said, you’re getting into the nitty gritty of charter schools. And like you said earlier, charter schools are very popular, but if you were to ask the general public or just someone off the street, who do you think should influence whether they can open or operate in a particular area? I think this is probably pretty accurate. There’s a lot of ambiguity here, especially among all adults. Parents there’s, I mean, one in four adults said that they don’t know or don’t have an opinion. I think that’s a pretty substantial share. And then parents, it dropped down to 13%, which I think makes sense because the issue is more prevalent to them. It’s right at their doorstep, especially if you support charter schools, which our data has shown a lot of people do. For me, when I first saw this question, it seemed very fresh and very raw. Like you said, the Biden administration, there’s a lot of talk about charter schools. They were fresh in the news. I think this is a really good jumping off point for the question. I’m really curious to see where it will go in the future. Like you said, there’s just a lot of ambiguity. 23% of adults saying they didn’t know or didn’t have an opinion, to me, that’s the large number. And I think hopefully we’ll see that shrink and maybe we’ll see them slide into different categories, but students parents and school districts, if I had to guess, I think those will probably continue to be two of the top options, but we’ll see. I think that’s the beauty of the question is the more it gets talked about, the more people will know and maybe we’ll see some interesting, I don’t know. Like you said, there’s a lot of ambiguity.

Mike McShane: Well, speaking of another topic that people might have some ambiguity on, this is a question that we’ve asked over and over and we haven’t talked about it on the podcast because there’s been other current events happening or the pandemic. But I thought given that we’re in this kind of interesting breather period here, I wanted to spend a minute talking about this because this is probably one of the data points from our polling that I personally cite the most in my writing and speaking. And I think it’s worth digging into, especially with so much pandemic related spending. But in general, just talking about school spending here. We ask this question, how much do you think is spent per year on each student in your state’s public schools? Your estimate of the state average to the nearest thousand dollars will represent the combined expenditures of local, state and federal government. We’re asking, “Hey everybody, all in, how much do you think schools spend?” And we continue to get this. You can almost set your watch to it. Every month, adults, school parents, the number isn’t that different. This month it was the same. And they both came up with $5,000. And folks think that it’s $5,000 per kid, per year, which depending on where you are is either very wrong or very, very, very, very wrong. And again, we’re not even talking about COVID spending or any of that stuff. So John, I just don’t know about this. It’s so weird to be kind of in a space, and maybe this is in other areas of public policy.

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Mike McShane: … to be kind of in a space. And maybe this is in other areas of public policy, as well, that people just dramatically overestimate. Here’s what the historic stuff about like foreign aid spending. People massively overestimate how much we spend on foreign aid. Or maybe it’s like the military’s budget or something. People don’t fully understand what these numbers are. But when I look at these numbers, I just think it’s really hard to have a reasonable conversation about education policy when people are off by a factor of two, three, four, or five as to how much we’re actually spending. When you see this, what do you see? Do you have a similar conclusion that I do? Or have you found something else in here that’s like, “Oh, there’s maybe something we can do about this”?

John: It is tough. It always surprises people, I think, how much money is spent on K-12 education. I live in Indiana, and in our particular case, half of the entire state budget is dedicated to K-12 education. And anybody I tell that to is shocked to hear that number, that that’s just such a startling high number to them because there’s a lot of perception. And at least in our particular case in this state, was there was a period after mid and then a little bit after the great recession, nearly 15 years ago now, where there was a decline, a real decline in K-12 education spending. It was not nearly as significant as a lot of people say, but that number was negative. And kind of ever since that point, there’s been, I would call it, marketing where there has been this perception that K-12 spending is declining. K-12 spending is too low, even though that claim has been outdated for nearly 15 years now. And it’s because people don’t go to the National Center for Education Statistics. They listen to people. They listen to political leaders. They listen to signs that they see during election season, things like that. And that is where people are getting information. And people will listen to “underfunded.” People will listen to not “prioritizing the children.” People don’t think about numbers usually. I’m so sure that a lot of these people were just kind of pulling a number that made sense to them, maybe comparing it to what they thought private school tuition would be and assumed that it would be a lot lower than whatever that costs. It’s hard to see where these people are getting reference points for, but it is kind of interesting that it is pretty consistently $5,000 every month. But what we do is we randomize whether people learn how much money their state is actually spending or not. And those that do learn how much money their state is spending on K-12 education pretty consistently are like 15 or 20 percentage points less likely to say that spending is too low. But it’s still pretty consistently over a third of people are saying too low, even if they do learn how much their state is spending after they’ve already guessed. So what has happened is that they’ve learned that they have underestimated how much money their state is spending by like two and a half times over or four times over, depending on where they are. And they’ll still say spending is too low. And what that tells me is that a lot of people really don’t have a very concrete idea of how much money education spending should be. They just have a sense that, “Hey, we are not getting out of our schools what we think we should be. We are not serving kids well enough. And the best solution that we have is more money. So whatever we’re spending on it’s not enough. It’s $12,000, not enough. $20,000 in certain East Coast states, not enough because we’re not getting results.” And I think that’s just the extent to which people think about the relationship between money and outcomes in education. That’s kind of been my takeaway for a while when considering how stable these numbers have been. I just don’t think they’ve changed much over time.

Mike McShane: Yeah, that’s the thing. So we’ve also done this thing where we ask this question of … We give people the data, right? And one of the things that’s interesting in all of this is that it does change people’s minds. So if we tell people, “This is what your state spending is,” the number drops usually by … And it’s interesting because we’ve been asking this since January of ’20, and it was interesting that there was like a brief blip kind of early pandemic where even when we gave people the information, they still said, “Oh, it’s still too low. We need more.” Then the gap reemerged. And maybe it’s a little bit smaller now than it was two years ago, but it’s still a pretty substantial gap. When you tell people how much states actually spend, the percentage of people who say it’s too low drops dramatically. It goes from over half of folks without the information to just a little over a third with the information. So Colin, I mean, I’m sort of interested again, setting aside whether we think states should spend more or spend less, because there’s probably situations in which some states and localities should pay more. And there are probably some that they’re spending way too much. But just like the sort of impact of information on the conversation or on people’s opinions, it seems to me like a good thing, right, that people respond to information? But I don’t know. What’s your takeaway from it?

Colin: I think that’s a good point. John raised a lot of good points in his answer. It reminds me of our school choice policy questions. When we ask, “What do you think of school vouchers? What do you think of tax credit scholarships?” And you get 60, 70%, maybe even higher, maybe a little lower. But then you give them information, and all of a sudden you get less people saying they don’t know, and you get more people deciding one way or the another. Either way, it’s good to see with more information, people are able to discern whether or not it’s too low or too high. I do think seeing it drop down to around a third … I mean looking at it throughout the trends since January ’20, you see more people say, “About right,” once they’re given information. You see a lot more people saying, “It’s about right.” And maybe that’s because they see the actual expenditure, and they see their guess and they’re like, “Oh wow. I was way off.” And John’s saying $5,000 is they just think of a reasonable well-rounded number. And going past the cross tabs, going through the cross tabs of this, seeing 5,000 so frequently, you’ll be hard pressed to find anyone that goes over 5,000. You see a 6,000 every once in a while. But the minimums are really around 8,000, 9,000. The average around 12, 13. The max being extreme case is 25. I think people seeing that and are like, “Wow, maybe it is right.” And then you also see a bump of people saying, “Oh, I think that’s too high,” which is respectable because they end up seeing with information. I do think John raised a good point about … Or maybe, Mike, you said this. People still saying too low, you still have to respect that number. And I think that has to go with people’s possible general dissatisfaction with the way education around them, or they think education nationwide is going. I think you’d see more of a proportion of our respondents saying that’s just right if there weren’t so many issues in education. But every time I see this, I’m begging for a group to say like 10,000, 15,000, because they can throw out those numbers. And the fact is they’re going to be closer to the actual expenditure. And I think that I’ve gone back in the past and we see like 2,000 or 3,000 and the fact that it’s in some states it can be almost 10 times that, just it’s mind boggling to me. This is one of my favorite questions we ask, but maybe one day we’ll get a 10,000 or 15,000. I’m hoping so.

John: I feel like it’s worth reiterating too. Because Mike, you mentioned this, but as long as we’re kind doing a deep dive on this, it’s worth mentioning again. We don’t also show people the COVID aid numbers, which kind of come down to about … We’ve seen people total this, so if I’m remembering right, it basically comes down to, conservatively, public schools have another $4,000 per child to spend over the next five years. And we’re just in a different era where schools are used to a scarcity mentality, and teachers have been given a scarcity mentality, “Why you can’t have this for your classroom.” And then you give them this number, which is now outdated because it doesn’t have COVID aid, as well, to me, it’s a signal that it would be helpful if we moved past a scarcity mentality when it came to education spending and started questioning, “So how do we spend the resources that we do have better?”

Colin: That’s funny you mentioned that, John, because I think we talked about this. There was a video on Twitter months ago where there was a school and they had teachers on the ground like scrounging for dollar bills, and they got to use that for whatever they wanted in their class.

John: Wow. I forgot about that. Yeah.

Colin: It’s been a while, but there was a big backlash on Twitter and social media and everyone was like, “This is why teaching’s such a hard job. Teachers are so underfunded that they have to go into their own pocket for classroom expenses.” And the fact is, I mean, we see extreme outliers like that one, and not to say that teachers aren’t going into their pockets for classroom expenses and maybe they are dealing with scarcity, but I think like you said, people aren’t aware of these numbers. And I think big outlier, big, extreme examples, like that video-

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Colin: I think big and outlier, big, extreme examples like that video on Twitter is misrepresenting the actual situation.

Mike McShane: Well, something to kind of close on here, we’ve added a new question, in the course of the last couple months, talking about the kind of salience of education as a political issue because, ultimately, these decisions about how much money gets spent is a question of politics. And so, we’ve asked folks, thinking about your vote, what would you say are the top three issues on your mind when you cast your vote for federal, state, and local offices? Across the board right now, probably not surprisingly, economic issues is number one and rising. It shouldn’t necessarily be surprising. We are recording this on May 13th. Yesterday was kind of like the cryptopocalypse. So, I don’t know if you have any Bitcoin holders out there. They had a rough day. If you had one of the other ones… What was that coin? Luna or something, that basically lost to all of its value. So, hopefully, if you had some of that, you had hedged in some way. Though, I have a feeling that’s… Yeah. Some of those folks may not have done that. But anyway, the economic issues, obviously, with inflation, stock market, all that stuff, that’s at top. Probably not surprisingly, coming out of a global pandemic, healthcare issues are number two. So, 56% of people put economic issues in their top three; 33%, healthcare issues. But interestingly, at the local level, education comes in third at 28%. It comes in tied for third at state offices, so that’s education, security, and seniors issues tied together. And then it comes down the list, it comes in sort of second to last of the ones that we offered for federal offices. So, we have elections coming up in 2022, both at the local and state level. John, do you see education playing a role in some of these elections? Like [inaudible 00:28:48] I don’t know, third place at state offices, we’re going to be electing governors and folks like that. Do you think education’s playing a role or are economics going to swamp everything?

John: It’s a good question, comparing the two. A lot of this comes down to what government officials people think have control over the issues that they care about, and people have different perceptions as to what that means. So, not surprisingly, people are more likely to think that they’re local offices, or at least if I’m right about that assumption, people are more likely to think that local officials have more control over education issues that they care about than state and federal. We did see a big jump in people who cared about education issues or placed education issues in one of their top three issues after the Virginia governor election, where this started to really take a national spotlight. Went down a little bit since then, but it’s climbing back up again, which makes me think that this is a longstanding issue that people people are going to care about in the foreseeable future. Obviously, the longer that certain economic issues go on, I think, ultimately, we’ve just seeped this throughout American history so much, not just America, but if certain economic issues go on for long enough, that’s what people will care about most. But education issues are climbing back up. And I feel like it’s worth mentioning, teasing our survey of teens and parents of high schoolers, one of my favorite findings in that was that more teenagers named education issues their top priority issue than any other policy issue, which is insane to me because that’s just something that we usually never see. We don’t think of teens approaching things from that perspective. But what that tells me is that education issues are a central issue. Education is the center of what I would say is like a cultural political issue, if you will, in that it’s something that people care about and people think need significant change. If the kids are caring about it, it’s something that’s really seeped through culture, I think, is what I’m saying. And there are fewer kids paying gas prices and things like that, so they might be less concerned about that compared to economic issues. But anyway, it’s hard to say how it’ll compare to economic issues because that’ll depend on where economic issues go between now and election season, but I don’t think it’s going away.

Mike McShane: Yes. And Colin, since this is your first time on the podcast, should I just say, as we would say over in Ireland, you played a blinder. I want to give you, our guest, but though I think listeners will get used to hearing the dulcet tones of your voice because you’re going to be on here over and over again, but Colin, I’ll go ahead and give you the last word, either on this last question or anything else.

Colin: Yeah. To echo John, I mean, when the teens survey came out, to see the teenagers are prioritizing heavily and, in fact, the most education issues was shocking to me. I would’ve guessed it would’ve been climate or healthcare, which ended up being very close in terms of percentage with education issues. But I think that was super encouraging. It’s kind of a weird… Looking at this chart, you wonder if education issues were lower, would that mean that there are less issues to fix in education? Or you can look at it the other way and say, “Oh, people are really prioritizing education, there’s a lot of passion, there’s a lot of ambition there to make it the best it can be.” So, there’s a weird middle ground between just looking at this. I’m not surprised that economic issues are number one, especially with everything going on. And like I said, we’re talking about adults in this, we’re not talking just school parents or talking about any other demographic. It’s adults. So, economic issues being king does not surprise me. Looking back over the years, seeing where education has fluctuated, it was as low as six at one point, but below senior issues and security issues, and obviously, in local offices, it’s higher. But yeah, I always look at this and I try to figure out which light to look at it, whether there’s passion and ambition there to solve things, or if the issues aren’t on your mind, then maybe there aren’t issues to solve. So, it’s interesting. I really like looking at it. And the teens one was fascinating. Everyone should go listen to Mike’s podcast. He has an upcoming one with a teenager and a high school parent and they go in depth into the survey. So, that’s a little plug, but I’m really looking forward to that. So, thanks for having me guys, and like I said, I’ve been listening for a while and it’s nice to be on this and, hopefully, many more because I love talking to you guys about this stuff.

Mike McShane: Well, great. Well, Colin, John, thanks so much for being part of the podcast. Jacob, our wonderful editor who’s working behind the scenes, thank you so much for your help on this, as well. It was great talking to you all today. I hope everybody has a great day. And I look forward to chatting with all of you again on a future edition of Ed Choice Chats.

PART 4 OF 4 ENDS [00:33:49]