Ep. 344: Monthly Tracker – September 2022

October 13, 2022

This month some members of the research team sit down and discuss some of their findings from the September general population poll survey. They continue to use new categories in order to break down the data.

Mike McShane: Hello and welcome back to another edition of EdChoice Chats. This is Mike McShane, Director of National Research at EdChoice, and we’ve got something kind of fun today. You may hear a slightly different audio quality of this podcast, and that is because for the first time ever, we are all in the same room as one another. We happen to be all in Indianapolis at a wonderful EdChoice training event, actually a couple wonderful EdChoice training events. And we said, listen, we’re going to pull a Bill O’Reilly and do it live. Let’s actually do this podcast all together with one another. So it’s so funny because I’m looking at all of them at this table as I introduce them, but my colleagues, Colyn Ritter, John Kristof, and I obviously have to give a shout out because he’s sitting here too, Jacob Vinson, who makes all this magic happen. Fellas, it’s great to be in the same room as you.

John Kristof: I’m so excited about this. I’m looking forward to this for a while. Like I proposed this, like, hey, we’re all going to be in the same country is there any chance that we could keep Mike from getting to his plane on time and do a podcast live? I’m excited.

Mike McShane: Yeah, I feel that we can’t do too well. We have to sandbag this one a little bit, otherwise people are going to say we don’t listen to the normal podcast. But anyway, this is our monthly tracker podcast. Those of you that have been listening for a while know that there’s a rotating cast of characters, but basically the three of us, Colyn, John, and I break down our monthly polling data. We have a great partnership with Morning Consult and every month we poll a nationally representative sample of Americans. This month for September of 2022, our poll was in the field from September 16th to September 17th, we polled 2,200 members of the public, including 1,303 school parents. So we’ve got a lovely, nice big picture of what America thinks, and particularly what American parents think.

We can’t do the whole poll justice, so we’re going to pull out the stuff that we thought was most interesting and we’ve chosen to organize these things based on some categories. Those of you that listened the last month, we kind of refresh the podcast. We’ve actually heard some great feedback that people enjoyed it, so we’re going to stick to it. So we’ve organized what we think are most interesting according to a couple different categories. Some of these will be familiar. We’re going to mix it up from month to month, we’ll throw some different categories in. But we’ll start with the one again, a fan favorite, the Cleopatra’s Pizza Hut most surprising number of the month I won’t do this every month, but for those of you that may be hearing this for the first time, some people are surprised to know that Cleopatra actually lived in time closer to the building of the first Pizza Hut than of the Great Pyramids. Time’s funny that way.

So we were thinking every month, usually some number comes out that surprises us, like finding out that Cleopatra lived closer to the building of the first Pizza Hut than the pyramids. So Colyn, what number jumped out to you this month as something surprising?

Colyn Ritter: Well said as always Mike. The Cleopatra Pizza Hut most surprising number to me came at the beginning of our report actually with one of our first questions. We ask people, how do you feel things in K-12 education are generally going, whether you think they’re in the right direction or the wrong direction. We ask that at a local, state and nationwide level. And what we typically have seen in the past is parents are more optimistic than the general public, which isn’t a big surprise. That being said, parents steadied off this month, it wasn’t too big of an increase or decrease from them. But in terms of the general population, we saw sharp increases, significant increases across all levels, national, state, and local, and they actually cut the gap a decent amount between parents and the general population, which was interesting to me.

I don’t want to speculate as to why it happened, but it also, I do think it probably correlates to a couple other questions we asked in the report and in the monthly tracker that we do, and we asked whether people are prioritizing education issues when it comes to voting, and education actually dropped in voter’s minds in terms of prioritization, which again, I’ve talked about this in the past you can look at it a good or a bad way. People who are very passionate, that’s one way to spin it in a positive way. So maybe education should be at the front of voter’s minds, but also I tend to think if education isn’t on the voter’s minds, then people are maybe satisfied with education. And at least this month with the way the general population was looking, they do believe it’s getting closer to being on the right track. Granted, there’s still a significant chunk who think it’s on the wrong track.

So, that was my Cleopatra Pizza Hut most surprising number most surprising number. What do y’all have to say?

Mike McShane: I was going to say, John, what’s yours?

John Kristof: I did preview this one offline a little bit ago, but my most surprising number to me was that, well, it’s kind of cut to the chase. Learning about the drop in nap scores that hit a lot of education news outlet headlines and education policy talking heads. We’re talking about the National Center for Education Statistics on September 1st released the results for standardized test scores in reading in math for at least third grade. I don’t think they’ve done it for eighth grade yet, or at least all the talk has been about for third grade at the very least. And we saw just dramatic drops in test score results for both reading and math. The worst drop in reading scores since 1990 and the first ever decline in math scores since we started doing this test, the National Assessment for Educational Progress. So pretty dramatic stuff.

What we’ve done is connected that to a question that we’ve been asking for a long time. So a question we’ve been asking for a long time in this monthly opinion tracker is how well do parents think their children are progressing during the school year? And we ask about academic learning, emotional development, and social development. So we ask parents, How well do you think your child’s doing in these three categories? Asked that for a while, we’ve talked about it in other podcasts where for some reason that’s still kind of unknown to me, there was a big jump in parents who were very optimistic about how well their children were doing in June of this year.

What we’ve done this month is we’ve introduced a split sample question into here. So some parents just see this question that we’ve asked for a long time, how well do you think your kids are doing in these three areas? Another group of parents chosen at random see the same question, but before they see that question, there is a description that says, According to the most recent national assessment, the results for nine year olds show the largest average score decline in reading since 1990, the first decline in mathematics and its testing began in 1973. Then we ask, how do you feel your children are progressing this school year? I anticipated that learning this information about a national trend would kind of encourage or cause parents to think about their own child’s experience more critically, to kind of be primed in a different kind of way.

Maybe my child is not doing as well as I thought they were. If there’s these substantial trends, worrying trends in K-12 education right now, and that would mean that fewer parents would think their kids are doing well. That was completely wrong. There’s essentially zero difference between the parents who saw this information about the NAEP scores and those who did not. Certainly not when it comes to academic learning, there’s a one percentage point difference, which is less than negligible. So that was a lot of setup to be like, why this would be a very interesting question, we just found that there’s not that much of a difference.

So what that tells me is that parents, when they’re looking at news articles and when they’re looking at national trends, don’t necessarily make a connection to their own kids. They kind of view their own kids in isolation. They know their kids. They might be interested and concerned about national trends, but they’re really just mainly when they think about their kid, they’re thinking about their kid. And I think that maybe should influence how different people in the education policy space talk about different trends of all kinds, but especially academic when it comes to trying to motivate parents to think about their kids in certain ways.

Mike McShane: Mine is actually, I think, related to that, so we’ve been asking a question for a long time about tutoring. Our fearless leader, Paul DiPerna, has always been interesting in tutoring, I think for years he’s been interested in it. So we’ve been asking you imagine there’s a lot of strong evidence that high quality tutoring can help catch kids up. We’ve had, as John just talked about, all this evidence of learning loss. So tutoring might be a way to do something about it. We asked this month about families. Is your child getting tutored outside of regular school hours? And 61% of families said that they were not getting any tutoring. I don’t know if that would hit the mountaintop of Cleopatra’s Pizza Hut most surprising number.

One of the thing that I did find interesting was when we ask people whose children are not getting tutored, 66% of them say that the reason why is because my child is doing fine academically. Trying to square the circle of what John was just talking about with NAEP scores and all the learning loss that we’re seeing documented, in some ways I think that’s probably not true. I think that probably more children than that are not doing fine academically. And I don’t know, maybe that information isn’t getting passed on to parents, or we’re not exactly figuring that out. It just seems to me more than that number of children had really substantial disruptions to their education.

I don’t doubt that there’s a portion of the population that was pretty insulated from the pandemic, but I think that that’s definitely a minority. So I just think that number shocked me how many parents were pretty confident that their kids were doing well just because it seems to fly into the face of a lot of this evidence.

Well, okay, so the flip side question to this is we call the death and taxes most predictable number. I’ll go ahead and lead off with this one. I think a number that we’ve seen, we’ve asked this question about kind of hybrid schooling schedules. So we’ve asked parents, “What would you like your optimum school schedule to be? Would you like it to be five days a week in school, five days a week at home, or some combination in between?”

And since we started asking this, I believe in March of 2021, every single month that number has been in the kind of low to mid-forties of people who want the hybrid schedule. And this month was no different, 41% of parents would like to see some sort of hybrid schedule for their students. It seems to be pretty much baked in at this point. John, what was your number?

John Kristof: So I’d thought about this, and I don’t know if this is a hot take considering this is not surprising or not, but here we go. This is the second month that we’ve asked a question about what adults across America, and then also parents specifically what kind of information that they have heard when it comes to teacher shortages, and then the decline in enrollment in public schools. It’s just kind of contemporary issues in K12 education. I don’t think we talked about this a ton last month, so I wanted to bring this up here.

Very similar results between parents and the rest of the population. We asked first, “Have you heard about these issues? Have you heard read, seen anything about teacher shortages?” And 71% of all adults and 73% of parents said, “Yes we have.” And the second thing we asked was, “Have you seen, heard, or read anything about public schools losing students right now?” And only 42% of the general population and 48% of parents said that they had heard about public schools losing students.

The part that’s just not surprising to me is that the teacher element, the question that revolves around teacher issues, seems to have a lot more visibility among both parents and the general population compared to public schools losing students. And I think there’s just a lot of incentives that would bring this about. Teachers are a very popular population. Teachers’ unions are very good at marketing as well and marketing issues that teachers have in education.

And we think about all these issues that schools are facing right now, and teacher shortages are a common thing to blame for a lot of things happening in education, which can be true from school to school. Public schools are not very likely to talk about public schools losing students because that has all sorts of implications. Not all of them fair, but some of them being fair, but all of them having kind of serious consequences. You lose students, you lose some justification for some funding depending on how the funding formula works in your school, or people begin to ask, “Why have you been losing so many students compared to these educational alternatives that have come out in the positive since the pandemic began?”

One motivates some sympathy, whereas the other loses you some sympathy, and I think that’s what I’m ultimately getting at. So it’s not too surprising to me that there is a significant difference between teacher shortages and public schools losing students, and their visibility to parents in the general public.

Mike McShane: Sure. Colyn, what was your least surprising number?

Colyn Ritter: Yeah, I’m sticking with the teacher trend. And John, those are really good points, and that’s good background for anyone reading that question. But I’m going to stick with the teacher trend as well, and the death tax’s most predictable number is 60% of Americans feel that teachers are undervalued. Of all the professions that we listed, they were the highest group to be selected as undervalued 60%. And then we also asked, “How much do you respect the following professions?” Same professions listed, and teachers were respected by two-thirds of the respondents 67%, and they were third behind members of the military and doctors, but above engineers, police officers, professors. So very well-respected professions, teachers are up there for the second straight month.

I will say that it is a bit interesting that last month they were overvalued. Only 7% of respondents thought teachers were overvalued, that actually increased a little bit this month to 11%. Again, I’m not going to speculate as to why, but still, I mean that ratio of 60% undervalued is not surprising to me, and I think that will continue to stay the same.

Mike McShane: Sure. So next category here, and this one I think we brainstormed doing. I don’t know if we did it last month, but we probably should have because we only had two months to do it. Yeah, that’s true, very true. So this one is the number most important to the midterm elections. Obviously, coming up in right around a month now we will be having a round of midterm elections. And so we want to say, are there any numbers in our polling that we think are particularly salient for the upcoming midterm elections? Colyn, what number stood out to you?

Colyn Ritter: I think I’m lucky to go first here because I’m guessing we might have the same one. But we asked a new question this month about whether parents feel their child’s school is political or not. So we had 37% and we did not count the don’t know or know opinion answers, so these numbers won’t add up to 100, but 37% of parents feel their child’s school is political.

This is the first time we asked this question, so I didn’t really have a guess. I think about around one-third, it probably feels right to me. Among those people who believe that their child’s school is political, 17% believe that their school aligns with their own political beliefs, 8% believe that their child’s school is too conservative for their beliefs, and then 12% feel that their child’s school is too liberal.

I think that’s probably a decent breakdown, nothing too crazy on one end or the other. Funny enough on the other side of that coin, 37% of parents at the same time think their child’s school is not political at all. Yeah, I mean it was the first time we really asked this question and obviously when we’re talking midterms, we’re talking politics. So we’re asking this at the right time. I’m curious if I stepped on your toes there.

Mike McShane: I think that was a super interesting finding. I have it in a later category, so I’m going to come back to that because I think I’m right with you that I think it was so interesting, and I was surprised by it. But yeah, I have it for a later one. But so, John, was this yours for this category, or did you have a different one?

John Kristof: I’m worried you and I might step on each other’s toes a little bit later, but that’s okay. We cross that bridge when we come to it.

Colyn Ritter: Look at this synergy.

John Kristof: Well, I picked a very straightforward one for the election issues here, at least I thought it was a straightforward where we give our respondents seven major categories of political issues, and we ask them to pick three that are in there that they would consider to be in their top issues; economic issues, women’s issues, healthcare issues, security issues, education issues, senior issues, energy issues.

I think we have room for people to write in their own answers as well, but for obvious reasons that tends to not accumulate to more than what is presented. And we ask, “What are the top three issues in people’s minds when they cast their vote for local office, state office, and federal office?” So three different election types here. Probably unsurprised to know that economic issues continually are number one on this list by a wide margin because it’s the economy, stupid. Although there was some signs this month of concern about that tapering off a little bit, maybe is inflation is stabilizing question mark.

That’s not my specialty, but most importantly to us, education issues seem to be on the decline a little bit ranking. What is this? Tied for fourth out of the seventh for local office, and tied for last among state office among three, fifth to seventh, and the lowest for federal office. So we started asking this question in November of 2021, kind of in the wake of a very high profile Virginia gubernatorial election. And that’s kind of our baseline, and it’s kind of stayed around those numbers for a while, but this is a sign of a decline a little bit, and it’s not super dramatic, 25% of people still think education is a top three issue in local office. A fifth of people think so for state office, and 18% of people think so for federal office.

So I don’t know what a good takeaway there is, and maybe just something really helpful for people in education to be aware of, that just maybe some overall attention to K-12 issues are a little bit lower on people’s minds right now. I would encourage people interested in this to look at the cross tabs that are freely available on our website at choice.morningconsultintelligence.org, and look at the cross tabs and the demographic answers to this, because I think that’s where some interest is, and it would be boring, and also we don’t have enough time to really dive into it, but you can see how some people compare. How self-identified Democrats compare to Republicans, and how suburban parents compare to rural parents, and et cetera. Because I think that’s where the interesting trends are here. So I just point for you to look at that yourself if you’re interested in this from a political perspective.

Mike McShane: I have maybe a weird one here, so you guys are going to need to go with me on this one. I think the number that will actually affect the midterms the most, or give us the most information about the midterm, is we ask a question, which is, “How concerned are you about a violent intruder, like a mass shooter, entering your child or children’s schools?” In September, 46% of parents said that they were either extremely or very concerned that that’s happening. So why do I think that matters for elections? I think midterm elections in particular, it’s an old saw of, we talk about change elections versus continuity elections. Do people want to keep the people that are in power in power? Do they want to see change? It seems to me a baseline where 46% of parents, which is a huge constituency in America, thinks that their child is almost in imminent danger, those are people who will want change.

And I think that’s one of these indicators out there that there is this sort of simmering thing underneath the surface, of people who don’t like the way things are going currently. And it’s interesting, I would imagine that if we broke out the cross tabs of that, that actually cuts across political parties. It’s not necessarily one side or the other. And what those parents want to have happen, we know from our polling in the past. They don’t all agree on what we should do about it. But just when I see a number like that, 46% of parents are extremely or very concerned about a violent intruder in their kids’ school, I see change. People don’t want to keep living like that. They want something different.

John Kristof: That’s a pretty good case. I do want to add just real fast so people know, we started asking this right after the tragedy in Uvalde, Texas. And one of the things I was looking for was, “Is this going to go down over time?” And very small amounts, did it go down, and it actually went up this month. So you really can count on the greater zeitgeist in education right now is a concern about violence in school. That number or something around it is sticking around.

Colyn Ritter: Yeah. I’m going to add something there too. We dive into, and like John said, we asked it right after Uvalde, and obviously that happened at a school where it involves K through four parents, so parents of younger children. And what we’ve seen is the parents of K through four children are typically the most concerned. We saw that when we first asked it in June or July, and then August as well. What we saw this month, which was interesting, was that actually parents of high schoolers in grades nine through 12 are now … There was a nine point increase there among parents, and now parents of K through four, the younger children, are the least concerned. Granted, still 46%, but there’s a little bit of a shift there, and it’s almost now there’s a bit more uniformity there with the parents of different age groups. So yeah, like Mike said, I think it’s not going anywhere at all.

Mike McShane: So our next category is the Frankenstein’s monster against the grain number. And again, to fill in the joke on that one, it is a point of consternation of mine that people think that in the story Frankenstein, that Frankenstein is the monster. Frankenstein is not in fact the monster. The Frankenstein is the inventor. The monster is unnamed. So this is a number that goes against conventional wisdom, because I think the conventional wisdom, if you ask people, is that it’s Frankenstein, is the name of the monster. So I’ll just start, because this is what I had, Colyn. The politicization of schools. This is my against the grain number, and here’s where I come down on it.

As Colyn said, the breakdown is only 37% of parents think their child’s school is political, full stop. So that’s already just a minority of parents. And of those parents, or it’s not even of those parents, but of the total sample, so 17% of people think that their child’s school is political, but it shares their politics. So really only 20% of parents, like one in five parents, thinks that their child’s school is too political. So they either think it’s too conservative or it’s too liberal. And funnily enough, they’re basically broken down evenly. 8% too conservative, 12% too liberal.

And I think that this is one of those things, on the news, in social media, and others, we think that there’s this massive group of people in America who think schools have gotten too politicized, and-or we hear, and again, it sort of depends on your outlet, that schools have become way too conservative, or we hear schools have become way too liberal, and it turns out that that’s just not parents’ experiences. That there is clearly a very vocal minority of families, or a vocal minority of sort of people, where they think that this is happening. But if you just ask parents, only one in five parents think their child’s school is too political in either direction. And again, the directions basically cancel each other out.

Colyn Ritter: So quick note on that. I was talking to our fabulous coworker, Margot, who is a former teacher, and she saw that statistic, and was very shocked by it, in the sense that she thought it would be much higher. So I think we should ask this question to teachers as well.

Mike McShane: Yeah. We should definitely ask this of teachers. And I have this feeling, and I could be wrong, we should ask it for a few more months. But I just have this feeling that this is a kind of media effect, or a social media effect, where this echo chamber sort of builds up, and we think that … We hear a story from one school district in a state, it gets broadcast everywhere, and it’s like, “Oh wait, this state has 500 school districts and this is only in one of them.”

Colyn Ritter: Are you saying that social media is not a real representation?

Mike McShane: I know, right? Hot takes on the podcast today.

John Kristof: I don’t believe it.

Mike McShane: Colyn, what was your against the grain number?

Colyn Ritter: So my against the grain number, bipartisan support for school choice policies remains strong. And for those really in tune with the school choice world, and they’re familiar with our data, that doesn’t seem against the grain. That actually could probably fit under the death taxes most predictable number, but for people who are less familiar, and I’m going to use my sister here, we were at dinner, I mean, she works in healthcare, who actually just graduated from St. Louis University. Got a job in St. Louis.

John Kristof: Go Billikens.

Colyn Ritter: Yup. Go Billikens. She’s doing great, so shout out to her. We were talking about school choice, and she figured, and she’s not wrong, she’s broadly correct, that any barriers or roadblocks to choice stem from just being a partisan issue in this country. And like I said, she is broadly correct, but hopefully not for long. Shout out Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania for warming up to school choice as a Democrat. That is awesome.

When you dig into the numbers, the majority of Democrats support vouchers, charter schools, open enrollment, and ESAs. And I want to highlight ESAs in particular, because they’re supported by Democrats 74%, which is higher than ESAs are supported by Republicans at 69%. Regardless, significant support on both sides of the aisle. School choice is refreshingly bipartisan. And also shout out Arizona, for passing the first universal ESA expansion in our country to every kid in Arizona. They are awesome, and they’re the gold standard. But yes, Democrats support school choice. The numbers do not lie. Don’t listen to anyone who says otherwise.

Mike McShane: John Kristoff, your against the grain number.

John Kristof: Yeah. I’m just going to jump back a little bit, because as I feared slash expected, Mike and I had the same ones.

Colyn Ritter: There we go.

John Kristof: So I don’t want to add too much, because I think Mike talked about it really well. The only thing that I would add is just kind of an additional perspective to it, with one element of it is, “Do parents feel like their school is too political in a direction that they don’t favor?” A very high percentage of parents who saw this question didn’t really give much of an answer at all, in that they said, “Don’t know,” or, “Have no opinion.” One out of four. That’s a pretty high number for a survey. So that’s another element to consider as well. When you combine a quarter of parents not knowing enough information about their school’s political views or how they feel like their school interacts with political ideology, you add that to the 37% of parents who more strongly say, “I don’t think my child’s school is political,” you have, most parents really don’t have a perception of their kid’s school being political. And I think that the implications of that are vast and perhaps obvious. But anyway, just wanted to add that as another perspective to that question.

Mike McShane: For sure. For our last category today, we are going to do the number that we think is most important to parents. Obviously we at EdChoice care deeply about parents. We go through all this effort to oversample them in our surveying. We talked to 1303 of them. I’ll go first because I have to be honest, I have a boring one. I feel like I’ve reached on a couple of these, and then I burned out all of my creative energies on it. So my boring one on this is just the parental satisfaction numbers. We asked parents how satisfied they are with their children’s schooling. We see broad satisfaction. Private schools, 96% of parents say that they’re satisfied. Homeschooling, it’s 93%. District schools, it’s 87%. Charters, it’s 84%. I think that might be the first month where districts passed charters. I could be wrong about that, we’d have to double check.

But the other bit of it though is there is still that enthusiasm gap. If you break out the people say that they’re very satisfied, 67% of private school parents, it drops down to only 58% of homeschool parents, and then it goes down to 43% of district and charter school parents. Again, this is one of those things that I like to keep hammering on that two things are true at the same time. One is that there are broad satisfaction with schools, but when you ask someone, “Are you somewhat satisfied?” If you went to a restaurant, if you saw a sporting event or something, and it was like, “Oh, I was somewhat satisfied with the outcome,” it’s not really a ringing endorsement. So to me, I tend to lean more towards that people who say, “Oh, I’m very satisfied with it.” If we were doing a net promoter score or something like that, that would be where we’d be going. So there is a little bit more difference there. And we do see some variations. So obviously I think the number most important to parents is whether they’re satisfied or not. That’s the sort of breakdown. John, your number most important to parents.

John Kristof: Sure. What drew my attention, and this might be stretching the category a little bit, I’m not entirely sure, but I was drawn to the homeschooling question, and that’s because we changed up how we asked the homeschooling question a little bit. We note this in the report. Initially when we started asking about favorability toward homeschooling, we phrased it in a way that was in light of the coronavirus pandemic, “Has your opinion or favor toward homeschooling shifted?” And pretty consistently, two-thirds of people would say “Yes, and I’ve grown more favorable toward homeschooling as a result of the pandemic.” We’re in a new space now and in large ways, our survey has leaned toward moving on from COVID specific questions in a lot of ways. Here we decided to shift the wording to ask, “What is your opinion of homeschooling?” We asked this to parents and 69% of parents said that they were favorable toward homeschooling.

And in comparison, 25% said that they were unfavorable toward homeschooling. Obviously not necessarily that many parents want to homeschool themselves, if you look at our most recent SIA, number of schooling in America, 2022 is out now, by the way, homepage of our website, check it out. In that survey, we ask, “In your ideal scenario, what kind of schooling would you do?” 16% of parents, I believe said that they would like to do homeschooling. So obviously that’s much less than 69%. But a lot of parents really respect the idea of homeschooling and it reflects a level of trust that they have in other parents. I think that’s an important takeaway of parents’ perspectives on schooling alternatives and how they feel about other parents taking initiative in their child’s education. Substantially higher favorability rating compared to disfavor.

Colyn Ritter: To round it out, I agree. I felt like I got really creative there with the first four and then limped to the finish line here. But the most important number to parents, and I think I also stretched it a little bit as well, we asked parents why their child is enrolled in the school that they currently attend. And the most popular reason by far was location. So 46% of parents report that location was their primary reason for enrolling their child. Next highest was safe location at 29%. Academic quality was a little bit behind there at 27%.

I read that and I think of things I simply choose for location. I think of gas stations, grocery stores, I don’t think of schools. Obviously location plays a part in it. If the school that you want your child to attend and it’s a good school is near you, that’s absolutely great. And you don’t want parents driving multiple hours to commute, to drop and pick up their kids. So location obviously plays a role. My thing is, I don’t think location should be that much of a substantial lead over things like safe location, and quality education, or academic quality. To me it’s just one of the most clear indications of the need for choice in education. Again, I just want parents to see that number and think, “Hmm, maybe we can close that gap a little bit.”

Mike McShane:  Yeah, for sure. Absolutely. Well listen, Colyn, John, it was awesome being in the room together. Again, I hope everybody will enjoy this buttery audio that you’ll be getting out of this. And we may be back to Zoom and internet connected microphones in the future.

John Kristof: No waiting for us to unmute ourselves.

Colyn Ritter: Right? Shout out Jacob.

Mike McShane: Yes, that’s the thing. Since he’s in the room, we’re obviously so appreciative of Jacob. He’s going to edit all this together, but he also has to put up with the internet cutting out and all of those terrible things, and he does it all with aplomb. So Jacob, you’re the best. John, Colyn, it’s been great to be here with you and everybody who’s listening, thanks for listening, and we look forward to chatting with you again on another edition of EdChoice Chats.