Great Ideas

The past year and a half has been unusual to say the least when it comes to the way Americans live and interact. During the Covid pandemic, we’ve all had to adapt in all kinds of ways, and many of us have also found our preferences and priorities changing. Nowhere has that been more obvious than in the workplace. For Americans who have kept their jobs, there has been a new reality in day to day work life. From putting on protective gear to working behind a plastic shield… from meeting remotely over zoom to working out hours when you can get away from family caretaking commitments.  And then of course there are the tens of millions whose jobs were disrupted or lost altogether. As we begin to emerge from this pandemic conditions, American workers and businesses are re thinking how we work, How much we work, what we do at work,  and what we need out of our jobs.

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The Covid-19 pandemic has now been a central part of our lives for a year and a half.  Along the way, our understanding of what this coronavirus is, what it does, and what we should do about it have evolved. In this episode, with all with the power of 20 months' worth of worldwide scientific research behind us, we look at both the present and future of Covid -- its risks, how to stop it’s spread, and how to protect ourselves; but also what is it going to take to end the pandemic conditions we’ve been living through and get ourselves to a new and better normal.  To explain all of this we have an outstanding scientist: Dr. Jodie Guest who is a Professor and Vice-Chair in the Department of Epidemiology at the Rollins School of Public Health and School of Medicine at Emory University. 

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Recently, we did an episode here on Great Ideas where we talked about some of the lessons learned during the pandemic about remote learning, hybrid schools, and school reopening. We talked about what worked what didn’t and some of the problems that we encountered in trying to get "back" to school. But what if in our all out effort to get school going again, especially for our elementary age kids, we got focused on the wrong question?

Even before the pandemic, progress on basic reading, science, and math scores had flattened. And those figures are far worse for kids in rural areas, Black kids, kids on Indian reservations, and most of all, for poor kids. The simple fact is that according to our best assessments, we are not getting the vast majority of our students to be even be proficient in basic skills. So amid the headlong rush to get back to what we were doing before, it seems reasonable to ask, are we rushing back to the right thing? Or is the right question really, how on earth can we do better by our kids? How can we move forward?

That question has obsessed my guest today for his entire career. Dr. Benjamin Heuston is Executive Director of the Waterford Institute, a Utah-based not-for-profit that conducts early learning research and develops interactive education software aimed at kids in the pre-K-6 range.  He believes that our fundamental way of educating young kids needs an upgrade, but also, encouragingly that it’s do-able, and he has the evidence to prove it.

***Editor's Corection: the audio refers to Dr. Heuston as the CEO of the Waterford Institute, his former title.  We regret the error. 

Every parent with a kid in school at any grade level over the last year and a half has some strong opinions about today’s topic. We all remember exactly what it was like in March of 2020. The sudden closure of schools. The scramble to figure out exactly what was next for kids. And then the patchwork of things that schools tried to do to hold the rest of the school year together. And of course, an even greater patchwork of approaches that schools tried across the country in this past academic year. Remote learning. In person learning. Hybrid schools. There are 13,000 different school districts in this country and there were 13,000 different ways to try to tackle learning during the pandemic.

Our guest today has led an effort to answer these questions. Dr. Khalilah Harris is the Managing Director for K-12 Education Policy at the Center for American Progress. They’ve authored an insightful new report Remote Learning and School Reopenings What Worked and What Didn’t, and she’s here to tell us all about it.

Doug Dunbar spent almost 30 years in senior positions in government. He was the deputy Secretary of State in Maine. The press secretary to the Governor of Maine and his Communications Director in Congress. He’s worked for US senators and state agencies. He’s also now a felon. So how on earth did Doug end up spending 136 days in jail? And more importantly, what happened afterwards, and what does it mean for our system of criminal justice in America?  Today, a look at the system through a story that’s unique, but in many ways is going to be far too familiar to millions of Americans.

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A February poll by the Associated Press found that about half of Americans think Democracy isn’t functioning…only 16% think it’s working well.  The Pew Research Center finds that only 1/3 of Americans have confidence in the public’s wisdom in making political decisions, a figure that has been cut nearly in half in the last 25 years. 40 percent of Democrats and Republicans see the other party not just as people they disagree with, but as a threat to the well-being of the nation. 3/4 of American adults today say that Republicans and Democrats can’t even agree on basic facts.

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For decades, one of the biggest debates in American public policy has been over our military spending. Defense accounts for 1 in every 7 dollars we spend. Many respected defense leaders have questioned whether we’re spending on the right things for the future, or if we’re mired in old thinking -- since as the saying goes, the Pentagon is always fighting the last war. And of course, there are countless stories of overspending, duplicative functions among the five separate military branches, and weapons systems that maybe we just don’t need.

So how much of a problem do we actually have? David Walker is a nationally and internationally recognized expert in fiscal responsibility and government accountability. He served as Comptroller General of the United States and CEO of the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). He’s a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the U.S. Naval Academy, the author of four books, the subject of a 60 minutes segment, and today our guest on Great Ideas.

President Biden's first overseas trip to Europe last week brought our focus back to the relationships that defined American foreign policy – and much of world history – in the 20th century. But do they even matter anymore in the 21st? Max Bergman, a former State Department official who is currently a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress says the answer is yes. And by focusing there first, and accomplishing as much as he did, President Biden hit a foreign policy home run for America.

The fact is that Europe has undergone a massive transformation since World War II.Europe is integrating and has formed a union. The economy of the European Union is the same size as the United States. It's the same size as China. There's 450 million people in Europe – larger than the United States. It spends as much on defense as Russia and China. Its regulations set a standard worldwide.

On top of that, it is quite stable. It is democratic, capitalist and free-market oriented. It could be our greatest strategic partner. And on the flip side, if it disintegrates, that's what Russia and China are after. That could be a strategic nightmare.

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Since the creation of the Affordable Care Act a decade ago, we’ve gotten stuck on health care.  It's become incredibly hard to make progress on the sector which makes up 1/6th of our economy, and for most Americans is the most personal and meaningful interaction of government policy with their lives. Both political parties are mired in seemingly unending health care wars, while about 4 in 10 Americans have difficulty paying their medical bills. Today, we present a new idea on how to make some meaningful progress.  Ladan Ahmadi is the Deputy Director of Economic Communications and Health Policy at Third Way. She says that the way to move forward is to focus on the right thing: capping costs.

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President Biden wants to reverse Trump’s 2017 tax cut for the wealthy and use the money to pay for infrastructure. Republican leaders have drawn a line in the sand, saying they will not support any tax increase. And now the two parties are stuck. But conservative budget expert Brian Riedl of the Manhattan Institute says that there’s a better way: an approach that raises more revenue and that both parties could agree on.  Instead of fighting over taxes, why not cut back on some of the money that the federal government spends on rich people?

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