The Forum with Josh Cowen Podcast

Unless you’re a really hard-core advocate in either direction, the reality of school choice policy from the standpoint of research and data is a decidedly mixed bag.

Generally speaking: private school vouchers have failed to deliver anything like the academic results their big backers promised. Charter schools—nominally public institutions that are independently authorized and managed outside the traditional district framework—have shown some success in some places, but far less so in others. The big dividing line there seems to be schools run by non-profit or for-profit companies. The former have tended to serve kids better, the latter not so much.

Then there is open enrollment within and between public school districts. This happens when states or large districts allow parents to enroll their children in traditional public schools outside of their home catchment area.

I’ve been on record as conceptually supporting public school choice, in part because parents seem to want it and I don’t believe the traditional public sector can survive—along with the principles of public education—just by assigning parents to schools based on their neighborhood location.

Each of these different forms of school choice have their kind of challenges when it comes to creating access and opportunity for kids. And if there’s one common theme across every item—academic, policy-facing, general audience—that I’ve written about school choice it’s this:

School choice is subject to the same economic, social, and demographic forces as any other policy intervention. There is no panacea. There is no cure-all solution. Everything takes work. Everything takes intentionality.

When it comes to equity and excellence alike, policymakers need to pay as much attention to one as to the other.

There is no one better in the country to talk through this issue than Princeton’s Jennifer Jennings. That would be true even if she hadn’t just written an entire book on the topic. Jen’s not just an expert on school choice, she’s also studied accountability, assessment, special education, and a lot more. One of her earliest papers, on academic “triage” within schools in response to school accountability, is one she wrote while we both were in graduate school and—although I was a year ahead of her at a different institution—by the time I was done, Jen’s paper was already required reading for all of us in most up-to-date Ph.D. programs.

Now, nearly two decades later, her book, The Scarcity Loop: How School Choice Reshapes the Rationing of Public Education (Russell Sage Foundation) is poised to set the field when it comes to evidence-based writing on school choice.

So, of course, we had to sit down to chat.

A Conversation with Jennifer Jennings

Before we get into some specifics, give me just sort of a general overview of what The Scarcity Loop is about, and what the story you’re telling is.

I think at its most simple, it’s a book about what happens when we try to use a process of choice to distribute something that’s scarce. So just to give folks some context, the case is New York City, although as I’ll talk about, I think it applies much more broadly.

You’d think: we have 440 high schools. A recently as 1970, we only had 86, right? So there’s been a huge expansion of options, but still, we still have two-thirds of the of the applications going to about a fifth of the schools. So there’s still a mismatch between what people want and what’s available, and that causes us to have to ration just in the same way that rationing happened through housing price in the past.

But what I find is it changes how that works. It’s not we’re moving from income to things that are plausibly correlated, but not perfectly with income. So stuff like your 12 year old’s grades in 7th grade, your ability to navigate a process, your commute, the spatial distribution of schools, which is mismatched with the spatial distribution of kids at this point.

And so these are the new ways that that rationing has happened. And the other big point in the book that I think is broadly something to think about in American inequality is that this very much changes where the blame lands. So when you had an attendance zone, and you could say the district drew this line, my school’s not good enough, I know who’s responsible. You didn’t turn the finger back at yourself when things didn’t work out.

So, what I see happening now, and the folks that we talk to, that people are saying: “I could have done more research. I should have done this right. Maybe I didn’t try hard enough.” And so the kind of narrative about who’s responsible for educational inequality shifts from being something the state is constitutionally required to provide to something that individual families feel like it’s on them.

This is the culmination of years of work, collaboration, multiple projects and papers rolled into one overarching contribution. How did your focus on scarcity as the driving theme for the book project and really your kind of summary of more than a decade of scholarship?

It would have been much more efficient to have had some really great theory of scarcity at the beginning and to go forward and test it. That’s absolutely not what happened. I think the questions I was studying, and as you said, in collaboration with Sarah Cohodes, Sean Corcoran, and Carolyn Sattin-Bajaj, I started first as a graduate student myself studying how principals make sense of the system. And then as a team, we looked at things like, how are parents and kids and counselors moving through this system?

And it really wasn’t until I got into the history, which happened really at the end of this that I began to realize that we’ve been doing the same thing over and over, at least since [Brown v Board of Education]. And what that looks like is there’s a call for “more seats are better seats.” There are new opportunities that are created, but they’re pretty quickly enclosed.

I mean they’re not just seats you can easily access, and that’s looked different at different points in time. Then the scarcity itself becomes a distinguisher or signal of quality to folks.

And so, if we were talking about absolute scarcity, we can policy-make our way out of that. But when districts kind of continue to create this sense of relative status scarcity, that’s not something that you can easily address. So you then see additional loops of reform that happen over time following the same pattern.

The big issue is the gap between what we’re asking choice to do and what it actually can do right. Choice can provide alternatives, but it can’t eliminate the inequality.-Jen Jennings

Do you think the problems and challenges you investigate in the book are a failure of policy design? Is it the failure of an idea or a theory? It’s easy to read the book and see what “went wrong” for individual families. But where’s the underlying problem located?

There certainly are small technocratic fixes that can happen in this context, but I think the bigger issue is the gap between what we’re asking choice to do and what it actually can do right. So choice can provide alternatives, but it can’t necessarily eliminate the inequality that kids who live in different parts of the city face.

And so I think that to the extent that I make this distinction in the book between choice as a way of assigning kids, as opposed to what the supply of schools is, to the extent that we’ve really perfected, you know, the allocation mechanism. We’ve had conferences about how to do it better. We’ve, you know, kind of built the best mousetrap you can.

But at the end of the day, a shortage is not something you can choose your way out of. And so I think that what we expect from choice is something that it can’t deliver. I think it’s absolutely the case that, on average, families do say that they want to have options, but I think to ask it to reduce vast out-of-school inequalities and access is more than it can actually deliver.

This may seem like an inside baseball question outside academia but I hope not: How does being a sociologist, specifically, inform your approach in this book? I think of “scarcity” as more of a problem in economics. All else equal I’d have expected a book about school choice from a sociologist to be called “Stratified” or something. If you want to read this as a question teeing you up to comment on the right-wing attacks on sociologists, feel free!

Yeah, I mean, I think “stratified,” I’m kind of mesmerized by this title. I think it kind of would have been a spoiler, right?

But in fairness, I mean, I think we all, based on what we know, know there’s going to be stratification. I think what I was seeking was more of the kind of fundamental mechanism that leads to that stratification. And so I think, while scarcity, if we’re talking about a concrete good like how much gas we have access to, or something like that is very well suited to economic analysis.

And I should say, I see all these things as deeply interrelated like I don’t kind of think of us as being a unified social science. But I’ll say a couple of things about what I think is different. So one, I think scarcity is in part socially constructed. So that figure I gave you at the beginning that two-thirds of applications are going to a fifth of seats. That’s in part because there’s this construction of something that’s selective and oversubscribed, and this is very New York in, like, a velvet rope way, um, as being somehow more valuable.

So I think there’s a role for sociologists to try to understand how does that idea get produced. I think the second is also thinking about the division of labor when there’s scarcity. So who ends up having to figure this out? I’d say on average, it’s moms who are charged with you know, navigating this labyrinth, but a lot of the time, um, especially in families where the first language is in English, it’s their teen-year-olds, right, who are charged with trying to find their way through a system that, you know, um, adults with lots of resources find very challenging. So I think that’s also kind of a sociological question.

And then the third is thinking about the role of schools as institutions. So much of the school choice literature has really tended to suggests that it’s all like, it’s the same thing as going to buy a sandwich, right? You go, you approach the sandwich, you pick the sandwich, you take the sandwich home with you. But there’s someone on the other side of this exchange, and those are schools which have a vested interest in maintaining their school’s kind of standing and you know, status in the market.

And so it’s a two-sided exchange as opposed to a one-sided exchange, even when, on paper, it’s meant to be a one-sided exchange.

At the end of the day, a shortage is not something you can choose your way out of. —Jen Jennings

Take me out of New York City. What are some of the bigger policy implications for school choice—even public school choice, which this book is mostly about—anywhere in the country?

So, I think on the one hand, New York City has all of the conditions to be the best case scenario, where it has incredible population density. It has a transit system that, despite some of its flaws, is actually quite reliable and quite comprehensive.

And, you know, it has the ability to stand up 440 different schools, right? So, in many cases, I think of, like, New York City as being…if it doesn’t pan out here, what might that mean for for other places? So that’s kind of one thread. I think that the bigger thread, though, is that giving people the opportunity to apply is not giving them the opportunity to go and to access a resource.

So to the extent that a lot of the families that we talked to just did not feel like it was either safe or viable to travel, even when the transportation network was there, I think that really kind of starts to redirect us to how are we distributing schools across different spaces, and by that in New York City I mean across different boroughs. And how are we ensuring that people have nearby options that allow for choice, but aren’t asking a mom to have to really reroute her life in order to make this happen?

I mean, an example of this is I taught in a high school. It was a long time ago at this point, but we created kind of a schools within a school. So everyone came to Trenton High School, but there was the ability to have kind of micro schools. Not what we call micro schools now, but small learning communities, what they were called at the time, within the school.

So that allowed for both some kind of differentiation, but also not requiring kids to travel somewhere further away.

You’ve studied and written on a variety of topics in education reform, not just choice. Your piece on school accountability, written when you were in graduate school, was required reading for other graduate students! What are some of the themes in The Scarcity Loop that are also important regardless of the specific policy space we’re considering?

I think I apologize to all the graduate students in the country. But I think that the big interest that animates a lot of my work going back a long time comes out of being on the ground as a teacher and seeing the massive gaps between policy as written and policy as implemented.

So I think if there’s a through-line in a lot of my work, it’s looking at that. So in the case you’re talking about, you know, it is a case of rationing: where basically schools had an incentive to focus on kids who are close to passing and to essentially triage those kids so they would get more resources and be bumped over the line. I found that same kind of process happening in New York City when I followed principals, despite the fact that on paper this was not a selective system.

There were manifold techniques used by people who loved kids and wanted to help kids succeed. Right? Because they’re not bad folks, right? This is a system which is not surprising. If you tie you know the future of principals, jobs in their schools to metrics and don’t adjust for inputs, you’re going to have a system like this, right? So I saw the same thing happening in terms of that kind of allocation of resources.

So I think that the kind of trying to understand what policy looks like on the ground, you know, in the hands of the people who live it is probably the the real through-line there.

Jennifer J. Jennings is Class of 1988 Professor in Domestic Policy and Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University. Her new book The Scarcity Loop: How School Choice Reshapes the Rationing of Public Education (Russell Sage Foundation) is out now.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joshcowen.substack.com/subscribe

I appreciate everyone—the dozens of elected officials, candidates, authors, and more—who takes a few minutes to sit down with me for this series.

But I am especially grateful today to be able to sit down with Lt. Governor Jacqueline Coleman of Kentucky, a former teacher, principal, and basketball coach who is now running to succeed Andy Beshear as governor.

I first met Lt. Gov. Coleman two years ago when I joined her alongside Governor Beshear at a series of public events to offer research evidence against an effort to permit school vouchers in the commonwealth constitution.

But we stayed in periodic touch afterward, especially on the administration’s work to deliver PreK-for-all to Kentucky families—an effort I’ve written about many times here in this space, and one that the lieutenant governor has helped lead.

I’ll get out of the way now and give her the floor.

A Conversation with Jacqueline Coleman

Lieutenant Governor, how are you? Thanks for being here. Just to level set, tell us a bit about your background before becoming LG and how it all came together to help lead an entire state.

I am doing great, Josh, and thank you so much for having me. So this is my first elected office, being the lieutenant governor in Kentucky. And in Kentucky, we run as a ticket. So Andy Beshear is the governor, and I’m the lieutenant governor. We were elected in 2019 and then reelected in 2023.

Before that, though, I was a high school teacher, a girls basketball coach, and an assistant principal.

And so my experience in the classroom really informs my vision. It’s the lens through which I see every challenge we face. And it’s really served me and this administration well to have somebody in a seat like this who has worked so closely with students and families and communities the way that our teachers do.

What are some of the accomplishments in your current administration that you think folks ought to know more about? Obviously you serve the people of Kentucky but in this day and age, state leadership matters across the country too. What should we know about what you’ve done so far?

I think one of the things that we are most proud of is our economic development in Kentucky. We have broken every single economic development record in Kentucky’s history year after year after year. And so now we are looking at about 70,000 new good paying jobs across Kentucky.

That is enough to rank Kentucky as number two in the country for economic development and number three in rural job creation, which I’m especially proud of because I’m from a tiny little town, in Kentucky.

And then about $50 billion of new investments. And that is companies who are choosing Kentucky, but it’s also companies who have already chosen Kentucky and want to expand here. In addition to that, we have broke the tourism record in Kentucky every year as well.

We’re on our 4th year in a row doing that. People are coming to Kentucky, and I always say if economic development is the kitchen, tourism is the front porch right? You want to bring people here, and, you know, take them on the bourbon trail. That’s always a winner.

And then they want to stay, and companies want to be here. And so, I would say that’s something that we definitely want people to know about Kentucky.

Alright, so now you’re running for the governorship itself. Tell me about what you want to do in that role, and maybe—if not where you differ from Gov. Beshear—where you think in your current role you’ve left some things on the field that you’d like to keep working on.

Of course. And every administration cannot do everything all the time, right? You choose your priorities, and you roll with it. That’s what we’ve done. And so, what I would say is, as I move into the governor’s race, and hopefully the governor’s office in 2027, I want to first and foremost keep all of that economic development success going: the job creation, the private sector investments, that has really been an engine for Kentucky and us to be able to move forward.

I would also say that there were some things that we wanted to get done that we haven’t been able to get done that I want to stay focused on. First: raises for our educators. Whether you are a bus driver or the biology teacher, you deserve to be paid at least a little closer to what you’re worth. And in Kentucky, we have not given the educators the kind of raise that they deserve, and so I want to continue fighting for that.

And Pre-K for all, that is an initiative that we have started and funded every year in our budget, and the legislature has taken it out. But that is so critically important, not just to the future of education, but also to the current workforce in Kentucky.

A place that I think I might be a little different than the governor, or may just have a different focus, is the child welfare system. I really, really want to make sure that we elevate those challenges and really focus on those kids.

As a teacher, I had kids who were homeless. I had kids in the foster care system in my classroom every single day. And I think about these big companies that have these high paid lobbyists that come in and, and, you know, lobby for them and get their bills passed.

Well, the kids in foster care don’t have that, and so we have to be that for them. And so I want to make sure that we put a little bit more focus on that and serve those kids the way that they deserve to be served.

So, pulling on that a little further: most of my readers and listeners are interested in policy areas related to kids and families. Everything from child care to PreK to K12 and beyond. What are some of the specific priority areas in that space that you’d like to keep leading on, and where do you think—say—Democrats have some learning to do in how they plan and prioritize around kids and families?

That’s a great question. And I would point to — I just talked about Pre-K for all. I want to make sure that we stay focused on that and, of course, increasing pay for educators. So I want to keep pushing those things. But the other issue that I think we’ve really got to focus on is paid family leave.

I was able to work with the governor to get that done in Kentucky for state employees, but I want every company, every family to have access to that.

When it comes to the Democratic Party and what we should be focused on, I would very simply say the things that Kentuckians and Americans are focused on: those issues that they wake up every day worrying about from, you know, childcare to getting a good paying job, to great public schools, to the roads and bridges they drive on and infrastructure.

And I would I would actually throw in public safety with that as well.

So I think it would do us a lot of good to spend a whole lot more time talking about those issues and a whole lot less time chasing the culture war bandwagon that’s that we so often see on cable news.

One just quick kind of follow up to that. I spent five years in Kentucky. My first teaching job was at the University of Kentucky. My son was born at UK Hospital. One of the things folks who don’t live or haven’t lived outside of the state: Kentucky is incredibly economically and geographically diverse. You have all of eastern Kentucky, northern Kentucky, Fayette County, and more. How do you think about some of the different needs in the kids and family space specifically as they might vary across the Commonwealth?

I would first point to childcare deserts, right? So in the places where we do have childcare, and that would probably be your more populated areas like Lexington and Louisville, you know, we do have it.

But we still have waiting lists and we don’t have enough of it for families. But then there are areas where there is not even one option for our families. And so for the folks that live in childcare deserts, those are the more remote rural areas. That presents all kinds of challenges for the workforce and for companies in those areas who are trying to recruit more workers.

I would also say that even though Kentucky is very geographically diverse, a lot of the challenges that people face may look different, but they really are so similar, regardless of where you’re from.

It just…it may look or sound a little bit different, but when you drill down to it, it all comes back to taking care of families.

Something I ask a version of to a lot of policymakers is the tension between leading with values and governing with policy. There are tradeoffs that have to be made sometimes—especially, I would think, in a role like the executive instead of a legislator. How do you think about the way policy reflects your values—even when policy isn’t perfect—and what do you think that says about the kind of leader you are and want to be?

What a great question. Well, first I would say we have to make sure that we don’t let perfect be the enemy of good, right? So oftentimes, especially in the advocacy world, you know, it’s all or nothing, right? If you don’t pass the exact policy that, that they’re advocating for, then it’s not good enough.

And while I’m not saying I disagree with that, what I am saying is taking steps in the right direction, take us closer to where we want to be. And so I think with, along with your values, you have to recognize that sometimes you have to take small wins to get to the big wins.

And every step counts. And so just because something’s not perfect, don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. But take keep making steps in the right direction. And then you will be able to live out your values. It just may take you a little longer than you wanted to, but I think anything that involves government does.

Jacqueline Coleman is the 58th lieutenant governor of the commonwealth of Kentucky, and is now running in the 2027 election next year to serve as governor.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joshcowen.substack.com/subscribe

The 2026 midterms are around the corner, and although we’ve been hearing “this is the most important election of our lifetime” for literally all of my adult lifetime, I think it’s pretty safe to say this one is really it.

So in addition to all the candidates and elected officials I’ve interviewed here over the past year, I’m trying to feature a few more conversations with folks working in different ways on Election 2026.

Today I’m very excited to be chatting with Jessica Mackler. Jessica is a longtime political strategist, currently serving as President of the legendary group Emily’s List. Emily’s list is the premier outfit working to elect Democratic women to all levels of government. This year, they’re especially focused on Congress.

I’m going to get out of the way and get right to it, so here you go.

A Conversation with Jessica Mackler

Give me an overview of your map: some of the candidates you’re most excited about and maybe one or two places you’re excited to be competing in that maybe weren’t on your map in earlier cycles.

Absolutely. Well, one of the things that was very clear to me coming into this election cycle, kind of our guiding North Star strategic focus, was that the most important thing that we could do was to leverage the strength of this organization into the fight to take back power in this country.

That we needed to secure majorities in the House, in the Senate, secure governing power in the states, so that we could fight back against some of the most grave threats that this country has ever seen. And so, that’s really how we’ve oriented our work all cycle long. What I’m most excited about right now is that we’ve delivered on that, to see women at the center of the House majority, women who are going to deliver that House majority for Democrats is really exciting.

When we saw the first round of initial party red-to-blue races come out, 8 of the 12 candidates on those lists were EMILYs List women. Emily’s List women make up the majority of toss-up races in House races right now. So everyone from Christina Hines in Michigan 10, Denise Powell in Nebraska 2, Joanna Mendoza in Arizona 6, these are women who are at the very heart of the House majority fight.

The Senate majority is in play because of Mary Peltola’s campaign in Alaska, once in a generation opportunity to flip that seat. But beyond that, what I’m really excited about is that we are competing in seats that have eluded Democrats in the past. That is true of the Michigan 10 seat that Republicans have been able to hold onto over and over again, and is really at risk of flipping. I think Christina is going to flip that seat this November.

It’s also true of seats that Donald Trump carried by significant margin. When we look at someone like Pia Dandiya, who is a lifelong educator, former principal, running in Florida: this is a district Trump carried by 10.5 points in 2024. It’s a district that Republicans gerrymandered to give themselves a seat that is now in toss-up territory for Democrats. So the fact that we’re really able to compete in places all over the map that would not normally be in play.

There’s another district that is up in Michigan, Michigan 1, this is the UP. Really tough territory for Democrats. Callie Barr, a military spouse, former high school English teacher, is putting this district in play. This has never been competitive for Democrats before. This is a Trump 21.2-point district in 2024.

So across the map, whether we’re talking about the districts at the heart and soul of this majority, the districts that are being pulled into competitiveness that haven’t been before, women are at the center of that. We’re really proud of that fight. I could talk as you can tell all day about these, but you can find all of them on our website.

We could talk about Christina Hines all day. She’s a friend of mine She's a friend of mine over in the Michigan 10th. She's been on this chat, too, as well. Alright, so walk me through your process right now at Emily’s List. You’re a values-driven organization but you’re also a serious political operation. What are you looking for both early on and, as an election cycle moves forward, to partner with particular candidates and in particular states?

Well, if you zoom out, the founding of Emily’s List, the genesis of Emily’s List was to create political power for women. That women didn’t hold enough offices for their concerns to be taken seriously, and so they were dismissed and they couldn’t get that power because nobody took them seriously as candidates.

So our role here is to elect women. I judge our success by hands raised taking oaths at the end of the day, and that’s really the foundation of all of the work. And one of the reasons that we have such a strong record of delivering wins with these candidates is we approach this work through that lens throughout. What does it take to actually win this seat, for this district, for this candidate in this place, in this moment?

And that tailored work is what drives really big impact and really big results. That’s everything from working with candidates on their launch, thinking about tweaks to their call time program if it’s not working but also some of the bigger strategic challenges of their election. And so we are real partners with them embedded in their races, thinking through every dynamic of those races to think about what does it take to get us across the finish line, keeping an eye for what is starting to expand, what is working in our favor.

Certainly in other cycles, that could work in reverse, but in this cycle, we’re in a cycle where the opportunity keeps building, and so we’ve really been thinking through the entire cycle of what does it take to expand upon opportunity and to put women in this, in the position to actually make those wins happen.

You don’t get to a point where we’re here in the end of September with Democrats having, at times, a double-digit advantage on the generic ballot. We don’t put those races in play by starting here in September. We put them in play because we started back in early 2025, really looking at what was on the table for us.

We set out one of the most expansive maps of any national organization in the country at that time, even at a time when it didn’t necessarily… we didn’t know that that was all going to come to fruition, but it’s really by that kind of broad strokes look at the map, what is working, and then the very detailed, tailored work in each individual race that puts us in the position to be able to have people win and make competitive districts that, again, as we’ve said, are just… have not been traditionally competitive for Democrats.

You are curating both an immediate electoral project but also a longer term political project. I had Adam Jentleson on here a couple weeks back and we talked about durability. How do you at Emily’s List think about being a part of a larger coalition of potentially ideologically, geographically, and demographically diverse candidates, while also keeping laser-focused on some of the specific goals you’re also trying to meet and make last?

I think for us at Emily’s List, it’s really been about abandoning the idea of those working in competition with each other, but really seeing that it works in concert. And when you put them in concert with each other, we actually have greater results. You know, we hear all the time that pundits, stakeholders, others question women’s electability.

This is particularly true when it comes to women of color, and really makes a lot of assumptions about who can win and where. And what we have found is that when we take that really tailored approach, when we look at a district and think about what it takes to win that district in that moment of time, then we’ve proven over and over again that that’s not true. Because what we see is that voters are looking for leaders who really understand their struggles, and we win seats by putting forth candidates whose life experience really resonates with voters.

So a great example of this is Emelia Sykes, who represents Ohio 13. This is a district that is predominantly white. This a district that Trump carried twice, or that Trump carried that she’s won twice. And Emelia has won this district as a black woman.

Because of her leadership and who she is and what she represents, and by winning that district, we really are able to cast aside some of those assumptions about, again, who is able to win and in what territory. And so I think when we really think about each individual district and what it needs to be successful that we’re able to drive a longer term strategy.

To your point, how do you grow the political power of women over time within this coalition? It is by both having that broad philosophy about what it takes to be successful and then deploying it in individual races in a really specific and tailored way.

And kind of casting aside some of the assumptions that people are making about who can win, and actually interrogating what is it going to look like to win right now with these candidates in this one place.

I mean, we’ve been talking about Christina Hines in the 10th District of Michigan there. I can tell you, going out to Macomb County, there was still some conversation over there in the primary about, well, “only a guy is going to be able to win Macomb back for Democrats,” stuff like that. And it was something that you know, a lot of us who supported her from the beginning were trying to kind of really push back against. Like, this is not the conversation we need to be having right now. It’s also not very creative.

No. And We hear this all the time, right? And you just gave a great example, but if, for any district and any race I give you, we would have examples of that. It’s what I talk most often with our candidates about, is the way in which, no matter how strong they are, they face these questions, additional questions about their electability.

But what’s true and what we’ve shown over and over again is that when we put support behind these candidates, they deliver some of the biggest wins. That was true in 2025 with Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger. And so we say at the end of the day, supporting women is actually a strong electoral strategy. And the more we win, the more we prove it.

I have a lot of readers and listeners here in the policy space, broadly, related to kids and families. We’re talking schools. Pre-K. Sometimes higher ed. One of the big themes in some of my writing right now—and I came out of the voucher wars in 25 states, mostly red and purple—is I worry that Democrats are really behind on K-12 issues. We’re starting to see this in polling. Democrats seem great on child care, Pre-K, school meals. All crucial stuff. But there’s really a lack of attention right now to K-12 improvement. This is something I ask a lot of candidates about—many of whom are working with you too. What do you think is going on here? Feel free to disagree with the premise of the question!

Well, this is the reason, this is the very reason that I believe so deeply in how much it matters to elect women to office and moms to office. You know, Christina Hines will often invoke the fact there are more billionaires in Congress than there are moms of young children.

The way that we drive attention to issues like K-12 education is by putting people in office who actually understand that on a personal level or have dealt with that throughout their professional lives. So when we have an educator like a Pia Dandia, when we have a young mom like a Christina, you have candidates who really understand this in a personal way, have lived it.

And naturally, that is going to be a focus of their leadership. We know that education factors in a major way for voters, particularly women voters who make up the majority of the Democratic coalition. This is critically important in any given House district across the country.

Women under 55 make up 25 to 30% of our electorate in this election cycle. So these issues do matter. The way that we get to a place where Democrats are really leading on this is by seating more women in office who are going to naturally bring that focus. And in fact, we see that in the data. There’s data from 2018 that shows that women, when they’re elected, are more likely to focus on K-12 education and similar issues.

And so, again, to me, this is really at the foundation of why it matters to put people in office who truly understand what voters care about and what they’re going through, and then are going to make that a focus of their leadership.

We’re six weeks ahead of the midterms so I don’t want to get too far ahead of ourselves here. But give me a look ahead. What will you be looking for, say, one week, one month, and then maybe six months after Election Day? Do you jump right into 2028? What should folks who support you or at the very least follow what you’re doing be expecting from your team?

Absolutely. I mean, 30-plus days is both a lifetime and not a lot of time at all, so it will be here before we know it. I mean, first and foremost, in those first few weeks after the election, we’re going to be talking about how women voters and women candidates were responsible for delivering the House and Senate majorities and governing power up and down the ticket.

This is going to be really important that we drive that attention to the fact that women were at the center of this from the very beginning, that that’s the work that we did at Emily’s List to make sure that that happened and that they were the ones who delivered these victories.

Beyond that, we’re going to see women be one of the strongest counters to this presidency, this Donald Trump’s presidency, the chaos, the cruelty that we’re seeing coming out of Washington. Women are going to be focused on the issues that are impacting people’s lives, thinking about what they can do to improve that quality of life, to push back on the ways this administration is making their life more difficult.

But beyond that, whether you’re talking a week out or a month out or six months out, we will be right back to work. We will be recruiting candidates. That is work that we’ve actually already started. We are going to make sure that we build on the foundation, the successes of this cycle to put more even more women into power to keep and retain and build on those majorities, both at the state level and the federal level, and so that’s going to be critically important because this is not a short-term fight.

We are going to be going up against the threats that this administration is bringing to us for quite some time, and it’s these women who are going to be the powerful force of standing up and figuring out how we chart a better course for this country.

You can read more about Jessica Mackler, and support Emily’s List here.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joshcowen.substack.com/subscribe

Sometimes running a newsletter and podcast series on a super broad topic like “education, kids, and families” means you can jump into a news item, a book, or a column at length. Sometimes you do it because it speaks to something you’ve been trying to engage with, or re-engage with, for a while.

Today’s guest is an example of that. We’re talking with Katie Rainwater, a fellow at the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, a faculty member at Florida International University, and a researcher on how national conservatism seeks to change education.

Katie recently co-wrote a piece on proposed federal accreditation rules that would undermine higher education across the country.

If you follow me here at all, you know that general theme is something we cover here too. And last spring, I sat down with Katie’s colleague Isaac Kamola at the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, to talk about some of these issues as well.

One of the big issues I’m watching for over the next several weeks is the regulatory environment around the new federal scholarship tax credit, whose benefit to public schools is real—but could be restricted by the U.S. Treasury’s regulatory process.

So heading into the fall, it’s a good time to check in on what to expect, and why it’s exactly through the tedious processes of regulation and paperwork that some of these big policy changes are happening.

A Conversation with Katie Rainwater

You recently wrote about proposed federal rules that would make some pretty significant changes to the way colleges and universities are accredited, including giving the federal government and states more leverage over the accrediting process. For someone who hasn't been following this debate, what is actually being proposed here—and why should people outside higher education care about it?

I think what is being proposed is a set of rules that destroys the independence of the accreditation system. So universities, they’ve long had independent accrediting bodies that review what’s going on in the university to ensure that it’s a quality university, right? That students aren’t wasting their money. That the government is not wasting their money by giving loans for students to pursue a degree at that university, right? So these are independent bodies that serve to review institutional quality. What the proposed rules do is they really take away the independence of accreditors, and they do this in two ways.

The first is by saying that it’s the role of the accreditor to ensure that the university is following state law. This has long been a goal of the Right, including the Heritage Foundation. They want to return education to the states, right? We see this with the attempted demise of the Department of Education. And again, with these accrediting bodies, right, there’s been legislation proposed by [Governor Ron] DeSantis When he was in the House of Representatives, to enable states to create their own accreditors.

So this basically means that independent accreditors cannot say, hey, look, this state law is going to impinge upon the quality of your institution if you follow it. Instead, they have to be telling the university, okay, here’s all the state laws, are you following these or not?

And then the second thing that the rules do that’s really alarming is they’re much more kind of prescriptive than the existing proposed rules. And so the existing proposed rules basically say accreditors need to assess institutions in 10 general areas, but they don’t really say like in this area, this is what a quality institution would be. But the new rules, they’re very prescriptive and they basically say that you’re going to need to ensure that the universities have this set of kind of standards in place.

You argue that these seemingly technical accreditation changes could give states much more control over what happens inside public universities. What would that actually look like on a campus?

So just to take, you know, the example closest at hand to me, I’m a sociologist in Florida, right? And so what the state has done over the past two years is they’ve said, we want to reduce student access to sociology in Florida. We don’t like this discipline. We think it’s left-wing. We think it’s ideological. We don’t think it’s a real science.

And so, it’s not going to be allowed to be included as an option for students to take within the general ed curriculum. These new proposed rules would basically require a state like Florida to enforce legislation like SB 266, which introduces all of these restrictions on what can be taught in the general education.

One of the things that jumped out at me was the connection between accreditation and academic freedom. How could these rules affect what professors can teach and what kinds of research universities support?

Academic freedom is really the bedrock of the university. And the reason why is that, in order for there to be public trust in a university, you need to ensure that professors have the independence to kind of pursue the truth, right? And they’re not going to modify their research findings or they’re not going to frame their discussions of topics in class in order to appease a set of donors or a set of politicians, right?

So universities need to have academic freedom. And what’s interesting about the proposed rules is they actually require accreditors to introduce a standard on academic freedom. But this doesn’t really improve anything because all of the major accreditors already have standards on academic freedom, but what the proposed rules also do is they say that no standard can be enforced, which contravenes state law.

And so in Florida, we have all of these state laws that really interfere with faculty’s ability to exercise academic freedom. So just to give a couple examples:

We have this law about countries of concern, which is designed to end research partnerships that faculty might have with other faculty and countries like China, Iran, Venezuela, right? Under these proposed rules, the accreditor can’t say, hey, look, there’s this issue where faculty aren’t able to engage in the research partnerships they need to engage in in order to pursue the projects they find important.

Instead, they have to ensure that those universities are enforcing that law. And then in terms of the classroom, again, with general education, the accreditors need to ensure under this that any laws with regard to curriculum, and some of these laws have even been found unconstitutional.

We found Florida’s Stop Woke Act is now enjoined. But accreditors, while these laws are still in the books, they would need to ensure that they’re being enforced. This could limit students’ exposure to ideas that the state government in power doesn’t want them to be exposed to.

And so in Florida, we’ve seen restrictions on teaching about race, gender, these types of topics.

You also raise the possibility that the new emphasis on “student success” and economic returns could affect which degrees universities offer and even which students they admit. How seriously should people take that possibility?

I think people should take this extremely seriously. So if we look back to Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation said that one of their goals is to rebalance post-secondary education to get more students involved in workforce education, right? And so I want to say at the outset that getting training in a trade is like it’s not necessarily a bad thing. And especially, you know, for those that weren’t going to pursue college or weren’t going to pursue a university.

But what the Heritage Foundation wants to do is it wants to take students that were going to go to college, were going to go to university, and get them into the workforce faster and ensure that they’re kind of, you know, getting training that they can just quickly use on the job instead of getting a kind of liberal arts education that will allow them to participate more fully in our democracy.

And so one of the things that these proposed rules do is they say that there’s like a number of different pretty quantitative metrics that are introduced in terms of student success. And so some of these metrics are like, what’s the return on investment of a degree? Is a student going to be making more with that degree than they would be making if they entered the workforce straight out of high school, right?

What the Department of Education could do is they could use these proposed rules to tell accreditors in order to maintain accreditation, you need to slash degree programs like women and gender studies or like sociology that aren’t offering a high return on investment.

And I want to say that in the proposed rules, there are provisions that are going to require cost cutting all around. So one of the things that the proposed rules require is they require that the institutions maintain a sufficient flexibility in staffing.

Finally, this is happening through what sounds like a pretty obscure regulatory process. What can faculty, students, and ordinary members of the public actually do right now—and does public comment have a realistic chance of changing the outcome?

In this case, maybe so, because the federal rules essentially require the Department of Education to review every comment and to respond to it before implementing the proposed rules. And so the Department of Ed, they have a relatively short timeline. They have to respond to all of these rules by November.

And so lots of public comment in this case could actually slow down the implementation of the rules or even open the Department of Education up for a lawsuit if they don’t sufficiently consider the rules. Unfortunately, public comment did just close yesterday. However, these proposed rules are catastrophic.

And what we really need is we need everyone with a stake in higher education. So we need students, we need parents, we need university administrators to go on the record and kind of publicly say these proposed rules are going to be catastrophic for higher ed. They shouldn’t be implemented. And so, you know, if you’re involved with the university, I would encourage you to try to get your administration to make a public statement listing their concerns with the proposed rules.

Katie Rainwater is a fellow at the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, a faculty member at Florida International University.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joshcowen.substack.com/subscribe

One of the big debates—maybe the most important debate right now—going on in progressive politics is the the extent to which policymaking requires compromise.

It’s both an electoral question—how can Democrats regain a majority both in 2026 and in 2028 and beyond—and question about crafting the kind governance that actually moves dearly held issue priorities forward.

These are conversations I’m especially interested in because, although I cover all sorts of perspectives on policies related to kids and families—ranging from history to religious faith to civic engagement—at the end of the day, I’m a policy analyst.

I’ve always been drawn to questions that require research, data, and evidence to bring a little light to the heat of political controversy. And right now, I’m getting pretty heavily criticized among many friends in the public school community for sticking to that approach on a couple of education questions—one of which we get into today.

All of this is why I read with great interest a new book by Adam Jentleson, who makes the case that heterodoxy—both with respect to policy, but also politics—is necessary to actually win elections and govern. Adam is the president of the Searchlight Institute, having previously served in a number of leadership positions on Capitol Hill.

His new book is called Supermajority: How Democrats Can Build Lasting Power (W.W. Norton & Co.)

A Conversation with Adam Jentleson

Adam Jentleson, thanks for being here. You make a pretty provocative argument that Democrats shouldn’t just be trying to win the next election, but should be trying to build something more like the dominant coalitions Democrats had in the FDR and LBJ eras. What do you think Democrats fundamentally misunderstand about what it takes to build a political supermajority?

Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s a fair summary of the argument—and not to downplay the importance of winning elections. I would actually argue that my thesis is that we need to take that extremely seriously. But the way you do that is instead of aiming at the bare minimum number of votes.

Whether you’re talking about the electoral college or like how to get to 50 plus one in individual election, instead of aiming at the bare minimum number of votes, we should be aiming higher to build bigger, broader coalitions so that every election doesn’t come down to a coin flip, you know, especially given the stakes that we’re dealing with today, where you have a genuine rise of right-wing authoritarianism in this country, and every election could be the difference between the survival of our democracy or not.

So, you know, I think what the party has been missing is that—look, it is a privilege to have as much data at our fingertips as we do today. It’s an extremely useful tool. I would be the first to embrace it, but we at Searchlight have an in-house public opinion operation. We take it very seriously, and part of the argument in the book is that Democrats do need to pay attention to it.

But you can’t become captive to the data. And one of the things that’s happened is we’ve decided that we can sort of, you know, slice the electorate extremely thin and aim, you know, and be very efficient in our resource allocation, you know, just to get to that literal, you know, 50 plus one that you need to win.

And that has been a disservice because it’s caused us to try to be too clever by half in a lot of ways. My argument is that we should step back and say, what do I need to do to represent a broader coalition than the bare minimum necessary to win?

That’s important electorally. It’s important for building, you know, more than just winning the next election. It’s important for building dominance over the next generation. But it’s also important on principle because, you know, you should aspire to represent as broad a swath of the public as you can, whether you’re talking about representing a district or a state or the country writ large as president.

You know, it is a good thing and a healthy thing in civic society to try to represent as many people as you can, rather than just the bare minimum.

So that’s… that’s, I think, what the party has lost, to answer your question, is that bigger perspective, that broader perspective of saying, you know, what does it take to build a dominant electoral coalition in this country, and how can we break out of that era of narrow… this era of narrow polarization that we’ve been stuck in for way too long?

You write about the importance of “heterodoxy” — candidates who don’t necessarily fit neatly into the Democratic ideological box. But there’s an obvious tension here: if Democrats need to appeal to voters who don’t think of themselves as liberals, how do you distinguish productive heterodoxy from simply moving to the right? What’s the test?

The test is whether you’re represent… Two tests, actually. One is whether you’re authentically reflecting your own views as a, you know, candidate, as a leader. Yeah, well, you know, let me pause on that one for a second, and I’ll get to the second test in a second. But, you know, we talk a lot about authenticity these days, right?

Part of my argument is that it is actually inauthentic to assume a rigidly ideological position across the board, because that’s just not how… that’s not how I work, it’s not how you work, it’s probably not how your listeners and your readers work.

I think, you know, any person, if they’re being honest with themselves, you know, is maybe mostly liberal, but probably has a few points of view where they diverge from the prevailing orthodoxy of their side of the spectrum, or, in the case of politics, from their party.

And what we’ve done over the last 10 years is we’ve created an ecosystem that tries to suffocate any divergence from that orthodoxy, and that polices rigidity, and that tries to enforce these purity tests.

And so what you end up having is candidates who are inauthentic, because they pretend to believe every single bullet point on their side’s, you know, articles of faith.

So, I think, first of all, to answer your question, the first test is, you know, saying to yourself, well, listen, am I… are there areas where, you know, if I spoke up, I would diverge from my party, I might take some criticism from activists, interest groups, donors on my side.

But I would be being true to myself, and I’d be being honest with myself. And frankly, by doing so, you’re probably gonna end up better reflecting the constituents that you’re vying to represent, because chances are that they think that way, too, where they have, you know, thoughts and ideas and beliefs that diverge.

The second test is whether you’re picking fights for the sake of picking fights, or whether you’re doing it, um, to try to reflect that diversity of viewpoints that are in the, in the, uh, sort of in the mix of the American people. And I think, you know, there is risk in… part of what I outline in the book is that.

These fights are actually very effective at breaking through our crowded media environment. You know, when media loves conflict, when you diverge from your party and you get yelled at by your side, that’s going to create a media scrum that breaks through, even in this intention starved environment that we live in.

It is easy then to start to do that just for the sake of, you know, getting that attention and getting that fight. You do see some examples of that with folks who, you know, kind of get addicted to that high of picking the fight, getting a lot of attention, sort of wash, rinse, repeat.

I think those two things combine, and that’s where you sort of form your basic standards here. You know, am I doing this because it’s what I believe in? Am I willing to have the argument because it’s my principle, or am I just doing it for the sake of fighting and for the sake of attention? And, you know, listen, as with many things in life, you know, there are gray areas, there are nuances you have to navigate here, and it could become a slippery slope, you know, but it’s easy to have a slippery slope back in the other direction of saying, well, I’m just gonna, you know, not ever speak my mind, or be honest about what I think, and instead just, you know, take the positions that are being forced on me, because that’s the path of least resistance.

So, you know, we’re all adults here, I think people sort of know when they are being honest with themselves, or when they’re just doing it for the sake of attention, and that’s the kind of nuance that you have to navigate, but I think it’s worth it to embrace the challenge of navigating it, because the outcome is going to be a more, you know, genuinely representative politics, and, I would argue, more successful at dominating the power structure for the next generation.

If we don’t embrace good faith policy disagreement, we really are creating a party that is going to become narrower and narrower and narrower, and our power base is going to become smaller and smaller and smaller.—Adam Jentleson

You’ve argued that Democrats need to build a broader coalition without simply moving right on every issue. So let me test that with an issue I spend a lot of time thinking about: school choice. I’m not asking whether Democrats should embrace private-school vouchers. But the new federal scholarship tax credit creates an interesting wrinkle because, unlike many traditional voucher programs, the money can also support things like tutoring, after-school programs and other educational expenses for public-school families. I’ve argued that Democrats should be looking at this as an opportunity to crack open the voucher model — to make sure public schools and public-school families can access this new revenue stream, rather than ceding the whole concept of educational choice to the right. I’ve gotten attacked a bit by friends in the public school community on that. Is that the kind of policy heterodoxy you think Democrats should be pursuing, or is there a point where adapting a conservative policy framework risks legitimizing the underlying model?

No, I would argue on your side against your critics because, you know, this is an issue, you are obviously someone who’s deeply committed to liberal principles. This is an issue you’ve dedicated an enormous amount of your time to. And I think, you know, here you have an example where there’s an issue area where embracing some of the conservative ideas actually leads you to the liberal outcome that you’re seeking. And, you know, more money for the things we care about, right? And I think that that’s the kind of thing that we should embrace,

And I would go further to say that you are clearly coming at this from a good faith perspective, and, you know, a lot of the pushback, having received similar pushback on different issue areas myself, people immediately sort of start to try to question your motives, and I think that’s the kind of discourse that we need to be rid of. You know, we need to say, look, we are coming at this in good faith, yet the fact that you would, you know, entertain some ideas from other ideologies is not reflective of, you know, bad motives, it’s reflective of a genuine intellectual curiosity and trying to find the different tools that are available to us to achieve the ends we all agree on.

So I would, you know, be entirely in favor of that. I think that that kind of heterodoxy falls squarely within what I’m proposing that we embrace in the book, you know, and that’s if we don’t embrace that kind of thinking and that kind of good faith disagreement, we really are creating a party that is going to become narrower and narrower and narrower, and our power base is going to become smaller and smaller and smaller.

We genuinely need to say, you know, this is… we are open to different kinds of thinking, we are not trying to police, we’re not being the thought police here.

If you have ideas that have, you know, some pedigree of conservatism or, you know, libertarianism or what have you—that doesn’t cancel them out, and that doesn’t automatically mean that they should be disqualified. I think we’ve created this intellectual culture that is far too restrictive, and we need to open it up, and that’s going to lead to creativity, it’s going to lead to good outcomes on policy, I think.

The reason we get up in the morning, the reason we go to work is because public policy is public service, and our job is to pass policies that help people and advance the causes we believe in. Are you, at the end of the day, moving the ball forward? —Adam Jentleson

Your argument is ultimately about power, not just winning elections. But Democrats have had moments where they won substantial majorities and then failed to preserve them — or failed to use them as effectively as they could have. What do you think Democrats should do differently the next time they actually have the votes? In other words, what does a supermajority need to accomplish in its first two years if it’s going to become a durable realignment rather than just another electoral cycle?

Well, you know, having sort of been there at the inception of the last supermajority when President Obama had 60 seats in the Senate and huge margins in the House, I was working for Senator Harry Reid at the time in the Senate, you know, one of the things, I mean, look, I’m proud of what we accomplished there.

We passed the Affordable Care Act, we passed, you know, a tremendous number of laws that actually helped people. I’m not gonna sit here and list them, because your viewers, your listeners are familiar, but, you know, but I would say that we probably could have done more, and next time we should do more. And one of the things that held us back at the time was this lingering belief that Republicans would act in good faith, you know, on policy and not just prioritize winning elections. And this was sort of it almost sounds naive to say it now, but, you know, at the time, this was there was still legitimate reason to believe that senators like, you know, a Chuck Grassley or an Olympia Snowe or a Mike Enzi would engage thoughtfully on healthcare policy because they had dedicated so much of their careers to working with it, working on that issue.

Mitch McConnell was sort of the villain here, and he said to his caucus, I don’t care how much effort they put into reaching out to you and trying to court you to partner with them on policy. We are going to block everything this president does, because that will be better for us electorally, and it will show the American people that he can’t deliver on his big promises of hope and change.

And so it took really two years for it to become clear that McConnell would succeed in whipping his caucus into line, and that it was going to work. For a long time, we thought that branding Republicans as the party of no, who refused to work with this popular new president, was gonna work electorally, and it just didn’t.

And so that was sort of the last gasp of an old era. We are in a new era now, and I think we are more familiar with the political realities as they exist. And so when, if Democrats are lucky enough to have a trifecta and have the White House in control of both houses in Congress in 2029 they should not entertain that fantasy at all. They should obviously welcome Republicans if they want to come work with us, but we should have an agenda from day one that just powers through and passes as much big-scale policy change, but also structural reforms.

And this is a roundabout answer to your question, but part of the way we make it stick is not just by passing a raft of ambitious policy, but also passing some of the structural reforms that are going to be necessary to make that policy durable.

And so I’m talking about things like court reform to rebalance the scale of the courts, statehood for DC and Puerto Rico, ending the filibuster, a major passion of mine. It was actually the topic of my first book. And again, if Republicans are interested in working with us and governing, the door will always be open, but we’re not gonna wait for them.

And we’re gonna move aggressively with the mandate that we will have at that point. If the people choose to put us in control of all three branches of government, and we will enact our agenda, and also the structural reforms to make sure that conservatives can’t just come back and quickly undo what we pass.

One thing I found interesting in your argument is that you’re not really describing a coalition without disagreement — you’re describing a coalition that’s comfortable with disagreement. How much ideological conflict do you think a successful Democratic coalition can actually tolerate? And is there a danger that in trying to make the tent big enough to win a supermajority, Democrats become so internally heterogeneous that they can’t actually govern together?

I think we are so far away from the tent being that big that that’s like a problem I’d love to have. But it’s a legitimate question, and I take it seriously. And I think, part of the historical examples that I discuss in the book are illuminating on this score. You look at the coalition that sustained the New Deal in the 1930s, and you want to talk about internal conflict, I mean, this was a coalition that included the most avowed, you know, proud white supremacists, you know, self-identifying white supremacists. They would literally use those words to describe themselves. In the South, I mean, remember at this time, the South was basically a one-party region and all of the… and to be elected as a Democrat, you had to swear to uphold Jim Crow and dedicate your career to it.

And then this was also the period when Black Americans, who had been loyal to the Republican Party up until this point because the Republican Party is the party of Lincoln, started to shift to the Democratic coalition, because despite all of the carve-outs and things that the white supremacists in the South insisted on putting in New Deal programs, nonetheless, a lot of those benefits still did find their way to many Black Americans.

So you want to talk about a fractious coalition? I mean that you don’t get much more. And then liberals in the north and the Midwest and Westerners who are their own, you know, whole deal.

So, I think eventually the coalition does become so big and fractious that it falls apart and there is some other realignment. But what I’m proposing is that what we achieve with that coalition in the meantime can save our democracy by shifting us away from this trajectory that we’re on.

You gotta make it count when you have the power and you have the ability to pass these policies, but if we build a tent that is big enough to sustain us in power, you know, over several election cycles so that we can pass an agenda that relieves people’s economic precarity, that makes our tax system more fair, that makes the wealthy pay their fair share, that reigns in AI at these incredible threats that we’re facing today, plus the structural reforms that make it stick.

Will that coalition fall apart eventually over a period of a decade? Probably. But we’ll have made it count, and we’ll have improved the lives of millions of people, and we’ll probably have saved our democracy, and I would say that would be time well spent.

You can push as hard as you can for the things you believe in, but at the end of the day, the job of this business is not to make yourself feel pure, it is to enact policies that make a concrete difference in people’s lives. If you sacrifice that potential to change someone’s life just so that you can feel more pure, I would argue you’re doing it wrong.—Adam Jentleson

Let me end on a slightly more personal and perhaps slightly less strategic question. There’s a tendency in Democratic politics to assume that if someone is centrist or moderate, they’re either making a calculated electoral decision or they’re compromising because they’re afraid to fight. But some people are just temperamentally centrist — they genuinely see the world that way. How much do you think political temperament matters? And can Democrats make room for people who are centrists not because they’re “selling out” or trying to win a particular constituency, but because that’s actually where they think good government lives?

I will give you an example of somebody who fits that description, former President Barack Obama. You know, I mean, here was a man who was, you know, deeply liberal and dedicated to progressive causes, but temperamentally, it was, you know, by nature sort of drawn to inhabiting the experiences of other people and trying to understand the perspective that they were coming from. And, you know, this came through in his very famous speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, where he talked about living in a purple American, worshiping a righteous God in the blue States, and wanting to help the poor in the red States, and that was his calling card.

I think it’s incredibly important. Listen, I’ve worked with and mentored a lot of young people in my career, and I always tell them, the reason we get up in the morning, the reason we go to work is because public policy is public service, and our job is to pass policies that help people and advance the causes we believe in.

Does that mean sometimes making compromises, or trying to build coalitions that include strange bedfellows, or working with religious conservatives on issues of personal freedom and stuff like that?

Yes, it does. And does that sometimes mean you abrogate your deeply held political principles, or you do something that is less pure than you would like? Yes, it does. But the question is, are you, at the end of the day, moving the ball forward?

Are you helping people? You know, you can push as hard as you can for the things you believe in, but at the end of the day, the job of this business is not to make yourself feel pure, it is to enact policies that make a concrete difference in people’s lives.

If you sacrifice that potential to change someone’s life just so that you can feel more pure, I would argue you’re doing it wrong.

Now, there’s a role for activism, you know, and purity is the main thing for you, I’ve counseled young people to say, hey, listen, you know, I don’t mean this in a pejorative way at all, perhaps activism is a better calling for you.

But when you’re talking about policy and politics and public service, you gotta remember at the end of the day that improving people’s lives is the name of the game.

If that means compromising, sometimes that’s just part of how you get it done. And, you know, that’s how progress is achieved. And I’ll close by saying, you know, part of what I try to highlight with these historical examples in the book, you know, going back to the New Deal era.

Social Security, what we embrace as the greatest domestic achievement of democratic governance was considered a compromise and a sellout at the time, because you had the Left, led by populists like Huey Long, calling for confiscatory tax rates on the wealthy, and basically universal basic insurance for all families.

Just by saying, I’m only going to have an old age pension program, FDR was already called a sellout. So it’s all relative to the to the demands of the era. But, you know, I don’t think anybody would say Social Security was not a worthwhile endeavor.

Enacting a public option today, which would be life changing for millions of people on the healthcare front, may not get you to single payer immediately, but it would still be an incredible improvement and change people’s lives for the better. Even though some on the Left might say that’s an unconscionable compromise. And I would, I would respectfully disagree there.

Once again, Adam Jentleson is the president of the Searchlight Institute, and author of the new book Supermajority: How Democrats Can Build Lasting Power (W.W. Norton & Co.)

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joshcowen.substack.com/subscribe

Sometimes you read something that you just want to scream about from the rooftops.

That happened to me a few days back when I read the first new report from SustainableED, the Sustainable Education Research Initiative at Brown University. That’s a relatively new center devoted to examining the impact of climate change on kids and families in schools.

With just some basic statistics, the team has shown that huge numbers of kids learn everyday near environmental hazard sites—and exposure is highly uneven and inequitable. The new report is out in PNAS, one of the most highly cited scientific journals out there.

So today we’re talking to Dr. Matthew A. Kraft, founder and director of SustainableED, and one of the authors of the new report. Dr. Kraft is also an expert on teacher labor markets and policy interventions like high-dose tutoring, and served in the Biden White House on the Council of Economic Advisors.

Following field guidelines, Dr. Kraft’s team defines environmental hazards as Superfund (EPA-designated sites with significant legacy toxins), Brownfield (former industrial or commercial properties with real or suspected contamination), or Toxic Release Inventory (active facilities that process toxins).

In terms of total number, my home state of Michigan is at the very top with more than 5,000 hazard sites, and near the top in sites (51.2) sites per 100,000 people. Nearly two-thirds of our schools are within 1 mile of an environmental hazard site, ranked behind only the tiny state of Rhode Island.

With the exception of Minnesota, other standout states are in the northeast— Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York and Vermont—or the Mountain Plains.

Across the country, students of color—especially Black students—are far more likely to attend school near a hazard site. As are lower income families.

Highlighting this kind of problem is exactly why I started The Forum. And one of the best things about doing it is that I don’t have to summarize the issue much further beyond what you can casually dig up on your own. Instead, I can just reach out to the experts and let them walk us all through it.

Let’s get into it.

A Conversation with Matthew Kraft.

Matt Kraft thanks for being here. We’ll get to the report in a second. But I want to orient folks to who you are, the kind of work you’re drawn to, the sort of work that you are involved in, and what brings you into the work you’re doing today. What have you been up to?

Well, I’m an educator. I started my career as a substitute and taught middle and high school humanities in public schools in the Bay Area.

And since then, have dedicated my academic career to thinking about how we can strengthen K to 12 public education. And I try to do that in a way that isn’t just about writing abstract academic treatises, but to really ask questions that matter for real families, real teachers, and connect to policy and practice on the ground.

A lot of the folks that listen to this or read this series here are in the policy community, policy staff, education community, things like that. Those of you citing something that says that, yes, teacher experience matters to student outcomes, chances are you’re citing some work that Dr. Kraft here was a part of, and we’ll get to that in just a second. But let’s talk about this report. A lot of public schools in the United States—and private schools—are located near environmental hazard sites. That’s what your report here is showing. Tell me a little bit about this.

I’ve been engaged in a pivot in my research. The privilege of academic careers is that I get to pursue things that I think are interesting and important. And in the last several years, it’s just been increasingly evident when I’m in schools, talking to teachers, talking to parents and families that environmental pressures, climate change, is impacting the daily work of teachers and the experiences of students.

One need only look out at the, you know, orange-colored skies with fire season upon us to know that reality is here with us today. Or have a kid like I do who goes to a school that doesn’t have AC, and it’s sweltering hot with upwards of 90 degree temperatures inside the classroom.

And so, part of what I’ve tried to do is just to learn more about what’s happening, what’s what’s the basic facts about how schools are impacted by environmental pressures, and what can they do to try to address them?

And one of the things that we learned about early on was that schools are sometimes located shockingly close to toxic facilities.

We had a sense that there were some really bad individual cases, you know, a few cities where some analysis is done, a few kind of snapshots that focus on one particular type of toxic site.

But being newcomers to the space, we started to just ask the basic questions like, well, how big of a problem is this? How often does it occur? And it turned out we just didn’t have answers to these very basic fundamental questions.

And so we set out to try to answer them by collecting data that we work with often on the universe of K-12, public and private schools in this country, and then let’s map that onto these other datasets that we had never worked with before, maintained by the Environmental Protection Agency, that catalog three different types of these registries of known environmental hazard sites.

Black students in the U.S. are 86% more likely than their white peers to attend a school that is within a quarter-mile of a toxic site.—Dr. Matthew Kraft

How frequently? How common a problem is this?

Way more common than I ever anticipated. We try to be conservative, like most academics, to say, hey, first off, we’re telling you proximity and that isn’t a guarantee of exposure but it’s certainly at a heightened risk and a lot of studies find exposure to different toxic sites up to a mile or more can have negative effects on children’s health and development.

We found that even when we narrow in to a quarter of a mile, we’re talking 4 blocks at most, a lap around that track at the high school, that there are over 9,000 schools. We’re talking 8% of our U.S. K-12 public school buildings are within a quarter mile of a toxic site.

And you found something like 44% are within a mile total?

That’s right. And so this isn’t an isolated or unique phenomenon. This happens in every state and in more communities across this country than anyone, I think, fully perceives.

Sometimes it’s really obvious. There’s a major, you know, industrial plant, and it’s got giant smokestacks, and it’s billowing smoke. Others are a little bit more kind of subtle, with different types of manufacturing plants that may spill chemicals that leach into the ground or old abandoned sites that in more of the earlier industrial air were using chemicals, lead, asbestos that are still there in the ground.

And so we found that these numbers really belied a national problem about providing safe and healthy learning environments for kids.

Are there some kids that are more affected than others?

Like so many other examples of educational inequity in our country, we found that Native American students, Black students, Hispanic students, and students from low income backgrounds were substantially more likely to attend a school that was in close proximity to one of these toxic sites.

And to put that more concretely, Black students in the U.S. are 86% more likely than their white peers to attend a school that is within a quarter-mile of a toxic site.

It’s not just that schools have always existed in these sites sites show up or don’t. It’s that these sites often are legacy sites that operated, you know, decades and decades ago, and now school districts are trying to figure out, you know, where can we build affordably? And sometimes that means building in places where that hasn’t been attractive to develop other types of homes or other business areas.—Dr. Matthew Kraft

Is that because—I want to ask you about the policy implications in a second, but is that because of where at-risk children are located, and where these hazard sites are located? I mean, it seems like it’s sort of a two-part problem: these environmental hazards are located far more widely than we might believe. Like you don’t have to be sitting next to Three Mile Island or whatever to be next to a dangerous site. And even given the widespread nature of these sites there is still differentially bad clustering in at-risk communities. Is that a fair way to put the result?

I think that’s right. Frankly, it’s a complex social science phenomenon where we both have patterns such as these sites are more common in more urbanized areas, and students of color are often more likely to live in those urban centers.

And so it’s a distributional thing, and it’s also a phenomenon that different industries are often, when they are producing these toxic emissions and working with hazardous chemicals, not welcome in communities, and so they have to find places where they can get a foothold, and it’s often communities with the least political capital, the communities with the most economic need, that end up kind of having the lack of ability to oppose these types of facilities to show up.

You know, it’s a little bit of a two-way causal arrow as well. It’s not just that schools have always existed in these sites sites show up or don’t. It’s that these sites often are legacy sites that operated, you know, decades and decades ago, and now school districts are trying to figure out, you know, where can we build affordably?

And sometimes that means building in places where that hasn’t been attractive to develop other types of homes or other business areas.

So what are the implications for sort of policy? You mentioned the problem of the lack of AC. Folks in the research community are studying schools that are too hot, too cold in the winter, or th problem of exposure to poorly ventilated systems obviously came up during COVID. But those are maybe a little structurally easier to fix through a grant process or whatever to redo an air filtering system. Here we’re talking about a bigger problem, physically, at least in that like you’ve got whole locations that are an issue. How are you thinking about talking about this as a problem with potential policy solutions?

It’s hard to fix a problem that you can’t see and you don’t measure. And so I think part of the solution has to be an increased effort to monitor air quality, soil quality out in the playground, water quality in drinking fountains at schools.

You know, we forget that kids spend upwards of 20% of their time in schools, and more when you add on extracurricular activities after school, the sports practices. Schools are really central hubs for community and family life, and so that makes them also potential sites of environmental exposure.

And we need to know what we’re exposed to in those places. Beyond that, we need to think about targeted investments in school infrastructure that help to mitigate those effects. You know, the high-quality HEPA or HVAC system filters that may help to reduce particulate matter that students inhale when they’re inside of school buildings, as one example.

And so we can make investments, but beyond that, I think it really the importance of the legislative process at a local level as much as anything, thinking about zoning, thinking about questions about site review processes. Are we aware of the surrounding facilities when we’re thinking about opening a school, or permitting for air pollution at different types of sites, so that we can make conscientious choices in trade-offs?

You know, the answer is simply not to stop all possible manufacturing and energy production. It’s that there are particularly young students whose bodies are still developing are highly vulnerable, both physiologically and neurologically, to these types of toxins from things like Superfunds and toxic release inventories, Brownfields that we measure—all collected and tracked by the Environmental Protection Agency.

I think, owe it to them to say, hey, your parents put you on the bus, they drop you off to school, you ride your bike. We expect that to be a safe and healthy place.

The more people that come to see that environmental issues are core education policy issues, I think the more progress we’ll be able to make. —Dr Matthew Kraft

Last question, sort of a wraparound question, and I don’t want to get too in the weeds here, but there’s a larger conversation right now going on at the federal level in some states about what education research can do in the policy space. And even some attacks on education research in general. We’ve got all kinds of stuff with Department of Ed funding and Institute for Education Science and all that business.

But you’re somebody who spends a lot of time working on teacher labor markets, on high-dose tutoring, on all kinds of really specific policy problems that there’s a lot of interest in. This issue on environmental conditions is something a little different.

What do you think the role that the research process in general, whether it’s academic, whether it’s at an agency, whatever it is, in trying to identify problems like this, and particularly in a cross-field, cross-disciplinary, cross-professional way, because it seems like we’re going to have to draw on a lot of different types of expertise to address problems like this, whether they’re coming from the environmental community, when they’re coming from the contracting and construction communities. I mean, there’s going to be like a lot of different sort of conversations that need to be had here. How do you think about where research fits into that type of conversation moving forward?

One of the things that’s become more and more apparent to me in my career is that the way that the academy kind of structures narrow focus and expertise doesn’t necessarily allow us to do our best work in work that most accurately reflects the complexity of the real world.

I’m increasingly convinced that the more that we can do interdisciplinary research that draws upon the expertise of, you know, scientists across disciplines and the more that we can leverage that expertise in partnership with folks in the real world or in state capitals or the federal government to inform ongoing conversations or frankly to shine a light on evidence that just hasn’t gotten the attention that research suggests that it should is really a critical role.

That, frankly, has something to do with the research production process, but it has just as much to do with how you talk about your research: who you talk about it with, how you share it.

I think it’s incumbent upon researchers to think: I found a question that in talking to folks, it feels like matters, for policy and practice. And we’ve done a rigorous, pressure-tested academic study. How then am I going to engage in a public-facing dialogue?

I know from my own experience serving in the White House to serving on my local school board that time is unbelievably short, and no one’s, you know, googling most recent academic research that’s behind a paywall that is too technical to read.

Instead, they’re saying, okay, like, what did the parent who stood up and, you know, give an impassioned plea for, like, how can I respond to that? And so, we as academics, I think, need to do excellent work, but we need to do excellent work that informs an ongoing and real conversation. And does so in a way thatrepresents the reality and complexity of the real world.

Dr. Matthew Kraft, Brown University and SustainableEd, the new center you’re building to address some of these research questions. Appreciate you taking the time with us today.

It’s a pleasure, and I’ll say that we at the SustainableEd organization are looking to bring people together who are interested in these topics about climate and education from all different angles, researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and so we welcome people to reach out.

We think that moving the conversation forward will really require us to help people to understand that this is just not about macro, global, planetary health. This is about the bottom line of budgets for families and for school districts.

This is about student health and student learning. And the more people that come to see that environmental issues are core education policy issues, I think the more progress we’ll be able to make. And a big shout out to my co-authors, uh, the lead on this study, Sohil Malik and Grace Falken.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joshcowen.substack.com/subscribe

It’s been a busy week here in my home state of Michigan. On Monday, I wrote some notes about governing, politics, and policy ahead of what looked to be a divisive primary. '

And over the weekend, I sat down for an interview with Jacob Soboroff on Jacob Soboroff on MSNOW alongside Puck reporter Abby Livingson, to talk about what was at stake in that primary.

We covered the ferocious battle over issues and ideology going on right now in Democratic politics, and Jacob managed to get a question to me about schools in Michigan and beyond.

The primary’s over, and Abdul El-Sayed is moving on to the general. The conversation still stands.

Take a look if you have a few minutes. We’ll be back with some more education news on Monday.

-Josh

PS if you don’t want to watch all 13 minutes, check out the transcript page link to this post.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joshcowen.substack.com/subscribe

This week, we’re continuing our series with elected officials and candidates prioritizing policy solutions for kids and families.

Today is my conversation is with Congressman Greg Landsman, the Democrat representing Ohio’s 1st District. That’s basically Cincinnati, on the Ohio River, and the northeast suburbs.

Before coming to Congress in 2023, Congressman Landsman served on the Cincinnati city council, and ran an organization that helped fund preschool for all three and four-year-olds in the city. He’s a former public school educator, teaching both Spanish and math at the high school level.

In Congress, Rep. Landsman working on a bill called the Child Care Small Business Insight and Improvement Act, which would help support small businesses operating child care provision across the country.

Like many districts across the midwest, Ohio’s 1st District is a swing seat, where broad appeal across the political spectrum is necessary not just to win elections but to help govern as well. Congressman Landsman is running in a tough re-election campaign to serve a third term for the district.

A Conversation with Congressman Greg Landsman

Congressman Landsman, welcome to The Forum, where we talk all things on kids and family policy. You come to this conversation differently than most members of Congress — you were actually in the classroom, and you grew up watching your parents do this work. When you’re sitting in a committee hearing or negotiating a bill, how much does that experience actually shape how you think about what’s in front of you?

It’s a great question. I think it probably entirely shapes the way I’m understanding what’s being presented and thinking about the issues and the policy. One of my big issues or passions is the idea that we should be creating a community or society, or country where everyone gets a shot. And for me, that means that you look at policy from that angle: Does this help ensure that more and more people are getting opportunities? Or is this hindering folks and their ability to make progress?

So this is one of the reasons why I’m so passionate about early childhood education education in general, because it’s, as has been said, the great equalizer, right? No matter where you’re born, or who or what kind of family you’re born into, or circumstances you’re born into. If every kid gets great prenatal care, or every expecting mom is much more likely to have an on time, healthy birth— developmentally that’s a huge deal.

And then, if you get time with your parents because they have paid family leave that makes a huge difference. And then access to high quality childcare and preschool that helps a kid get totally ready for school. All of those things, you know, mean opportunity. And if you can extend those things to every child, then everyone has a shot. So I absolutely think about that, and then my experiences as a teacher. The way I was raised. My parents were teachers, just all of that comes into play, for sure.

You got Cincinnati voters to fund two years of quality preschool — the first city in the country to do it. That’s a real proof of concept. But what did it take to actually make the quality part true, not just the access part? “Preschool” can mean a lot of things, and the difference between a good program and a mediocre one is enormous.

Again, starting with the why, which we did a lot of when we were running the campaign. It was a lot of years of organizing house parties and just events all over. We got 10,000 people to sign this pledge that every child deserves two years of quality preschool.

And that was such a big motivator. This was before I was on council. This was a ballot measure. So I was just a citizen and a parent. My kids were in preschool. I saw what a difference it made for them. They had quality preschool.

And then I was living in a city, which is the case in most cities, all cities, where most kids don’t. And those kids are typically not ready for school, or they’re not ready enough. And so, you know, we wanted to make a major investment as a city in preschool—quality preschool in particular.

And so the question was, how do you measure quality in Ohio? We have a rating system, and that rating system is based on the things that would be sort of intuitive, maybe maybe or maybe not. But I think they’re intuitive, which is: if you know class sizes, for example. If you’ve got a ton of kids and only one instructor, that’s going to be challenging for those kids. It’s not. It’s not as as good as it could be. And so you look at a low teacher-to-student ratio that helps with quality that the the teacher does.

Then, does he or she have the training in early childhood? And if they have that training, that’s that’s the difference between high quality and and less. Then, the curriculum, is it evidence-based curriculum? And those are 3 of the biggest things. And you can do that achieve that in a in a center based program or home based. And so.

We decided to invest—as we assumed voters would want—their dollars going to quality preschool. And so, one, the tuition assistance that families get here, they can use it in any quality preschool, public or community-based, center-based or home- based.

And then there are additional grants for those providers to help them get that curriculum, or hire additional staff, or get them trained so that they can achieve higher quality.

Both parties really need to prioritize child care for our economy, for our kids, for our families. It’s got to be at the top of the list.—Congressman Greg Landsman

Walk me through your bipartisan child care bill. Who are your Republican partners, and what did you have to give up — or hold firm on — to get them there? I want to understand what bipartisan actually looks like in practice right now, not just as a talking point.

The first thing, for those folks who aren’t as familiar with this world: a lot of these childcare providers and and preschools childcare is usually the 1st couple of years infant and toddlers. Essentially 0 to 3. Preschool is 3 and 4 year olds, and that’s a particular kind of curriculum.

Some of these are public entities, but a lot of them are private centers or programs, meaning, you know, they’re for profit. And they don’t make a lot of money, and in some instances it’s really hard to make any. And so a lot of these small businesses need additional help. And the Small Business Administration is supposed to help all of us. All of our small businesses.

Childcare was not at the top of their list when it came to be, and so we are pushing really hard for the SBA, the Small Business Administration, to invest more in helping childcare businesses, those folks that are providing childcare, giving them the technical assistance and additional resources so that they can grow.

And this happens to be bipartisan. It’s not exactly a top priority, quite honestly, in my opinion, for either party. Both parties really need to prioritize it for our economy, for our kids, for our families. It’s got to be at the top of the list.

But a Republican congressman from Pennsylvania, [Dan] Meuser, he is my partner on this. I served on the Small Business Committee with him. And we’ve got a lot of bipartisan support. The key is just getting the chair of the committee to mark it up and get it to the floor.

I ask a version of this to a lot of Members, governors, and candidates. I worry that Democrats have struggled to find a coherent K-12 message, and the polling backs that up. You’ve got real credibility here as a former educator. Do you think the party has earned back teachers’ trust — and separately, parents’ trust — or is there still work to do?

We haven’t had a national vision for education in 25, 30 years. Someone has to lead on it, and my hope is that in the next [year] there are members of Congress like me and others who are leading on this.

But you really need this to be something that those who have really high profiles, and in particular, the next [presidential] nominee should say I’m going to lead on this. Like, this is not just something we’re gonna leave to the states when we need a national strategy to ensure that our kids, every single one of our kids is getting the best possible education.

I would love to see that be a major part of the debate as Democrats pick a nominee. And I have laid out what I think is a major education reform bill that would ensure every kid has what they need.

My argument is a little different than most. I believe that the vision has to be one that includes or expands education so that it includes brain development and early childhood so that we’re not just stuck in sort of thinking about education in that sort of myopic K-12 way, even though it’s incredibly important and we need to have a better strategy and I’m happy to talk about it.

But I would love to see us say: look, we’re going to reboot the Department of Education, and we’re going to have it follow brain development and make sure that kids get what they need, which means that we’re going to include prenatal care in our system of education, because it’s key to a kid who’s developmentally on track the same with quality childcare and preschool. I’d argue, paid family leave needs to be a part of that. Even if it’s just what we’re measuring.

And then, when you get to K-12, the first goal has to be every kid shows up prepared, because if every kid shows up prepared, you’re gonna see better outcomes. Then you have to invest in teachers and classrooms and curriculum.

And then I would argue that there should be some adjusting of high school so that kids can get into careers much faster. I don’t think we have to continue to accept the idea that everyone needs to have that that senior year. If, in fact they want to go to college or they want to go right into career training.

We should be able to save some money at the end, invest it early, and let kids go get that college and career training as soon as they can at 17.

If you want to grow an economy where everyone’s got a shot, you have to make strategic national investments in children and families.—Congressman Greg Landsman

The administration has been cutting everything that touches kids and families — Head Start, Title I, IDEA funding. As someone who led a local ballot measure to fill gaps the state and federal government weren’t filling, what’s your honest assessment of how much of this damage cities and counties can actually absorb on their own?

I think they’re at their limit. And this has been going on. It’s been accelerated under Trump—the sort of pulling back of federal support, and quite frankly, in Ohio, state support. And so local communities have tried to patch and piece things together. And most communities, unfortunately, have had to turn to taxpayers and say the State is, or the Federal Government is, no longer working on these issues that we care deeply about, that matter to our community. So we’ve gotta we gotta put something on the ballot and raise people’s taxes.

And so people are paying more in taxes, even though federally, and here in Ohio, politicians are like, “well, we lowered taxes.” No, you didn’t. You lowered taxes for the super wealthy and these corporations. But, the everyday, Ohioan—this is true in most parts of America—Americans are paying more because their local property taxes went up because they have to fund the things that are no longer being supported by state and federal budgets, and that is hugely problematic for folks,

I think, at least here in this community, they’re running out of room in terms of the capacity of local taxpayers, and it’s a scary proposition because we have to provide healthcare and education and housing, and these local communities can’t do it on their own.

That’s why we’ve always invested in these things at the federal level, too. It’s not entirely at the federal level, but if you want to grow an economy where everyone’s got a shot, you have to make strategic national investments in children and families. And that’s childcare and preschool and schools and housing and health care, all of those things.

And when you pull back on it, it’s going to cost local communities more, and ultimately, they’re gonna run out of room and our economy is going to just fall off a cliff.

You’re a former teacher leading a bipartisan child care bill in one of the most dysfunctional Congresses in modern history. What’s the path for this kind of work to be sustained where, say, kids in Cincinnati and everywhere else are better off five years from now?

I think there’s a path in the sense that it’s still, you know, relatively bipartisan. I mean, there’s some partisan arguments about where the dollars go, but I think supporting children and families is something that should be bipartisan. The issue is lawmakers like me have to be able to like punch through this chaos and the dysfunction.

And, you know, we would be better served with a speaker that wants to see bipartisan work, and work that’s actually going to improve people’s lives, as opposed to the political, hyper-partisan political theater that we get day in and day out with this current crew.

Congessman Greg Landsman represents Ohio’s 1st District. You can read more about him here, or on his campaign page.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joshcowen.substack.com/subscribe

There have been so many changes within the federal government under Donald Trump that it can be difficult to keep track. Tariffs, DOGE, ICE, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the gutting of the U.S. Department of Education—all of these taking something of a wrecking ball to national politics and policy as we know it.

With so much attention understandably on some of this big-ticket news, I’ve been worried that the public policy community, specifically in education, has been under-focused on some of the lower profile efforts to severely undermine decades of regulatory and administrative guidance that meaningfully impact families across the country.

I can’t think of anyone better to speak to this than Sam Bagenstos. By day, Sam’s a professor of law down the road from me at the University of Michigan. He specializes in civil rights, labor and employment law, health law, and governance. That, my friends, is a lot of expertise across a variety of issue areas.

But Sam is also a longtime veteran of the kind of legal and policy circles that Trump has tried to overthrow, and that we’re going to need to rely on again for any sort of rebuild.

Sam served under President Biden, first as general counsel at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), then as general counsel at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). He also served under President Obama at the Department of Justice (DOJ), as the No. 2 official in the Civil Rights Division. He’s also been part of several statewide committees in Michigan and beyond.

All of this is relevant to where we are today under Trump, but given how much of the current administration’s efforts are being directed by Ross Vought at the OMB, Sam Bagenstos has particularly unique insight into where we are and where we’re headed.

A Conversation with Sam Bagenstos

Welcome to the The Forum, Sam. Just to get started, tell us a bit about your legal and professional background and where that began to connect formally to government service.

So as you said, I currently teach at the University of Michigan. I’ve been on the faculty there since about 2008, but I have taken a couple of leaves to serve in the federal government since my time there. I was, during the Obama administration, the principal deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Department of Justice. So in a leadership position there.

And then for the entire Biden administration, I was on leave. I spent the first year and a half starting at the moment of inauguration as general counsel at the Office of Management and Budget. And then in June of ‘22, I moved over to the Department of Health and Human Services where I was the general counsel until pretty much the end.

So that’s the work I’ve done, and I continue to do a lot of work relating to the government, although not in the government at this point.

As somebody who works pretty closely with policymakers in states, and to some extent the federal government. I really… I can’t overstate how important the jobs that you just described are. What’s kind of a nuts and bolts piece of that before we get into some of the specifics? What’s the portfolio look like across kind of some of these agencies?

Yeah, I mean, so they’re all sort of different. Probably the widest portfolio I ever had was working at the Office of Management and Budget. OMB is the sort of nerve center of the federal executive branch. They’re the folks who make sure that all of the agencies across the executive branch are doing what the president wants, consistent with the law.

And we’ll talk a little bit about that balance in a minute, I’m sure. And so, what that meant was my responsibility as the general counsel for that agency in the White House was everything, everything that the executive branch did.

So I didn’t know whether I’d be walking in and dealing with some environmental issue or obviously COVID was a huge issue when we started, or evacuating folks from Afghanistan was the thing we had to deal with.

But it was literally anything that was going on in the federal government was something I dealt with, and the legality of all of those issues. And so that was every regulation across the federal government, making sure it was checked to be consistent with administrative law. All of our spending, the drafting of major legislation, like the COVID recovery bills, the American Rescue Plan, and the other bills that President Biden did.

At HHS, sort of similar job, but narrower scope. But I will say the Department of Health and Human Services is the largest cabinet department by budget. So it was about $1.73 trillion when I was there.

And about 40% of the regulations issued by the federal executive branch come from HHS, so it was again just a very wide ambit.

At the Department of Justice, earlier in my career, it was much more focused on bringing enforcement actions to make sure that civil rights laws were complied with, so bringing and threatening lawsuits around the country, negotiating agreements with states and localities and businesses to make sure they complied.

Can you give us a sense of what’s going on right now in these various agencies and what we should be most concerned about?

I think at the highest level, the most important thing that’s going on is you have this pervasive effort to transform the federal executive branch into something that’s not implementing laws and policies enacted by Congress in an impartial way, but instead is using the tools of government as a weapon to serve the interests, not just of a political party and not just of a faction within the political party, but of a person and the people around him:

Pervasive weaponization, politicization, and personalization of the government around Donald Trump and the folks around him, and the use of every tool of government to reward the friends of Donald Trump and punish the enemies of Donald Trump.

That is the absolute antithesis of what a good government or a republican government should be. So that’s at the highest level.

We can talk about what that means for particular policies and actions, but that’s the most important takeaway.

I want to ask about the administrative and regulatory state here. Outside advocacy groups, including in education, are often understandably focused on legislation. But a lot of what Trump’s done has been more on the administrative side. Legally or not. Can you talk about some of the specific non-legislative tools that have been deployed? If you can think of one that’s maybe patently illegal and one that’s, at least, more legally questionable or defensible on the letter but seems plainly abusive?

I think there are a few obvious ones to talk about here. And let me start, just because you started with education, what Donald Trump is doing to the Department of Education.

So what you have is a department that was created by Congress. You have provisions adopted in appropriations bills by Congress that say you can’t eliminate the Department of Education, Mr. President. We are continuing to fund it and we are barring you from eliminating it.

And yet what you have is this dismantlement of the department done entirely through administrative processes. So what they’re doing is essentially farming out as many of the responsibilities of the Department of Education as they can to other agencies.

You know, legal tools that they point to there: so there’s a tool called the Economy Act. I worked with this a lot at the Office of Management and Budget, which is basically, if one agency has a responsibility to do something but doesn’t have the ability to do it, it can contract with another agency to do it.

And so what they’ve done is said, aha, Department of Education is just gonna contract with the Department of Health and Human Services to do all the disability work. It’s gonna contract with the Department of Labor to do job training work. It’s gonna contract with the Department of Treasury to do all the student loan work.

And pretty soon you have no Department of Education at all. And so that’s, you know, taking this existing legal tool that you can see a use for it in particular cases, using it in a way no one could ever have imagined. And, you know, I think that’s abusive.

I would think there’s a plausible argument that that’s illegal. It’s certainly inconsistent with the judgment made by our elected representatives that we are supposed to have a Department of Education, that it’s good for the people to have a Department of Education.

Okay, so that’s one thing. Take something that’s much more abusive, maybe, and certainly much more in the nature of rewarding friends, punishing enemies, um, and also much more clearly illegal. So, one of the things we’ve seen this whole administration do is use its power over money and particularly grant funding or federally funded programs where the money goes to states and localities and other entities, use that as a tool to attack people who are on the bad side of Donald Trump for whatever reason, right?

I mean, we actually, you know, we’re recording this on Wednesday. We just saw yesterday the federal government say they’re going to withhold an enormous amount, I think a billion dollars, of Medicaid funds from two states.

That all seems to be about punishing them because they’re blue states. We’ve seen lots of funding cutoffs that are all about punishing blue states, punishing them supposedly for violating terms and conditions of agreements.

But violating them in ways that red states are probably doing the same thing and are not getting the same treatment. We’ve seen the shutting off of funds to institutions of higher education to force them to come to heel. I mean, look at what happened to Columbia, which ultimately did knuckle under. Look at what happened to Brown University, which did knuckle under.

Harvard sued and actually prevailed in its lawsuit that these threats were unlawful. The University of California was going to negotiate a settlement with the Trump administration, but the faculty and faculty unions got together and filed a preemptive lawsuit, and the court said that what the Trump administration was doing was unlawful there.

And what they’re doing is saying, look, you’re a university, you depend on hundreds of millions of dollars a year of federal funding for research programs. We’re going to cut that off until you do exactly what we want. This is plainly abusive and a violation of law.

But there are so many of these examples where what the Trump administration is doing is using the tools it has cut off federal funds to investigate or threaten investigations or prosecutions in order to coerce people to do their bidding and in order to punish people who seem to be on the wrong side of the administration for reasons having nothing to do with the laws that are being enforced.

Let’s talk more about one piece of this. OMB has recently announced it’s reviewing uniform guidance for federal awards. Which basically is bureaucracy speak for “it’s looking for new ways to hold back funding.” This is one (of many) potential changes that could in my world fundamentally alter the federal relationship to education. But can you just walk us through this particular piece, this uniform grant guidance, what they're trying to do mechanically, and why you think it’s wrong?

So there are across the entire federal government many, many programs that Congress has created to give grants to various entities. Sometimes it’s for scientific or medical research from NIH or National Science Foundation. Sometimes it’s for job training, which could be from the Department of Education or Department of Labor. Sometimes it’s for programs to support education from the Department of Education anywhere, housing programs, any kind of program, you name it.

And what this uniform grants guidance would do is it would adopt a uniform grants regulation to replace what we have now, which is a general set of guidance for each agency to make its own rules with a single uniform set of rules that govern all the grants.

And uniformity, you can have some arguments, is that good or bad? The problem is the specific rules that would be adopted, which would do things like, say, peer review can only be advisory.

And any grant determination whether to issue a grant and to whom has to be made by a political appointee and has to be made by a political appointee according to what demonstrably advances the president’s priorities.

Now, Congress has created a whole bunch of very specific grant programs to serve various kinds of interests and to pursue various goals, which may not be the president’s goals. In fact, we know they’re not the president’s goals.

Congress has specifically required peer review for grants from some agencies like NIH and NSF, where what we’re trying to do is advance the science, and so we want the scientific community to have a significant amount of control over where those grants go.

So that’s, I think, illegal. It’s flying in the face of a congressional determination, and it’s likely to lead to less development of knowledge and less development of useful knowledge, right? So it’s gonna harm the public. It’s gonna mean…people are gonna die, people aren’t gonna learn as much, I mean, you know, it’s really very serious stuff.

Also, there’s a set of forbidden topics in this rule that says, you know, we can’t be financing quote-unquote gender ideology, which means, you know, saying that LGBTQ people should be treated equally and with respect. We can’t finance quote-unquote, illegal DEI, which is a term that this administration throws around, that it’s never been clear what they mean by it, except efforts to promote equality on the basis of race or sex; ghat grants should not be used to promote illegal immigration. Again, nobody is using grants to actually pay for people to cross the border illegally. Promote illegal immigration seems to be used in a way that’s, like, to flag people talking about the value of immigrants, however they came into this country, to their communities.

So that’s a major concern. And then there’s also a very significant concern about adding a provision that would say that grants can be terminated at any time if they no longer serve the policy goals of the incumbent administration, which means if you get a multi-year grant, you know, to conduct a study that’s going to take 5, 6, 7 years, you have to purchase a lot of infrastructure, you have to hire a lot of people.

All of those investments can end up just in the garbage can at the whim of a political appointee who decides, yeah, politically, I don’t like where this study is going. Again, just deeply contrary to the idea of developing knowledge.

And to what Congress has repeatedly voted for. So it’s deeply contrary to our Republican democracy, where we don’t have one person who decides. We elect a set of representatives who pass laws, and the president has a duty to faithfully execute those laws.

On OMB more generally, one thing I hear about right now is “well we don’t trust Russ Vought not to say he just doesn’t like something and hold funding back.” That’s fear is across the board with education funding, but I want to ask where you think some of the real danger spots may be over the next, 30 months or so left in the administration.

Russ Vought, the OMB director, is, I think, one of the most significant figures in this administration. And he is significant because, A, he’s totally bought into the Trump approach to the world, and B, he is very, very smart and skilled with moving the bureaucracy. And so it’s that combination that is incredibly dangerous here.

He knows, I mean, he was OMB director during Trump’s first term, at least toward the end, as well as working in the White House before that. And he’s been around Washington a long time. He understands the levers to pull and the most important lever that the Office of Management and Budget has is that it controls the purse strings.

So the B part of OMB, Office of Management and Budget, is really, really important. No agency can spend a dollar of the money that Congress has appropriated until OMB signs something called an apportionment. And what Russ… and this is, like, incredibly wonky stuff nobody knows about, and what Russ Vought knows is that that is the crucial lever for making agencies do what you want to do.

And, you know, in a well-run administration, what would happen, and an administration that cares about good government, what would happen is the apportionment power would be used as a tool to make sure the agency had a good plan for spending the money.

The whole reason it’s there is so agencies don’t spend too much too quickly, but are spending prudently and spending efficiently. And so you’d have a conversation, then you’d sign off and say, okay, go ahead, spend the money or spend this quarter’s amount of money and come back to me in a couple of months for next quarter.

And what Vought has done, pervasively, is use it to drill down to the most specific decisions and say, I’m not going to sign off on this unless you hammer these people and reward these other people.

One of the things we’re seeing him do now, and the pattern is very clear, is the president sends up to Congress a budget every year. That budget is not legally binding. That’s the president’s proposal. Congress has the power of the purse under our Constitution. Congress adopts a budget through a law. They pass a budget resolution and then they pass appropriations laws.

And those laws are binding on the president, and the president cannot refuse to spend money that Congress has passed through an appropriations law, which, of course, the president has signed. But what we’re seeing now is where Congress appropriates money that goes beyond what was in the president’s budget request.

What Russ Vought is doing is just saying to the agencies, you may not spend beyond the president’s budget request. And so he’s effectively treating Congress as having adopted the budget that they explicitly refused to adopt.

And so this is creating problems over and over and over again. And again, it’s harmful to effective governance, and it’s also fundamentally anti-democratic. I mean, you know, there is a long and unfortunate history that led to the legislature taking the power of the purse, first from the King of England, and then that carried over to our founding.

And, you know, what we’re seeing right now is reversing that in favor of allowing one man, Donald Trump, and his one man by his side, Russ Vought, to make these decisions.

Your expertise and experience are in really high demand right now. You’re all over the podcast circuit, I see you on socials commenting on things. What have you not been asked here or elsewhere? Get something off your chest that the good governance, the policy community should be thinking about moving forward.

Well, I think the thing people are thinking about too little is, you know, we obviously let’s hope, are gonna have a new day at some point where we’re gonna be in a position to rebuild what’s been torn down. And everybody knows that that’s gonna be a very difficult effort.

I think people are dramatically underestimating the scale of what’s going to be necessary, that it’s not just going to be, OK, that was a thing that happened those last four years. Let’s go back to normal. There is not going to be a normal anymore.

In order to rebuild the government, we’re going to have to, unfortunately, spend a lot more money than we would have expected because, again, we have to rehire people. People who have left government service, often because they were forced out, are not going to come back on the same terms as they did before.

You know, the reason why people serve in government jobs, in career civil service jobs, I mean, two reasons. One, they know that it’s a mission-focused job. And two, they know it has stability. And what we’ve learned in two successive Trump administrations is that we are one election away from losing both of those aspects of the public service bargain.

And so we’re going to have to do something to entice people to come back.

That’s gonna be expensive, that’s gonna be hard, that’s gonna require rethinking a whole lot about the way the government works. And I think people just need to get their minds around just how difficult a position we’re in. Now, I know there are a lot of people who are working very hard now to be prepared and who will be ready to jump in, but it’s going to be an enormous task.

Sam Bagenstos is a law professor at the University of Michigan, former general counsel at the Office of Management and Budget and the Department of Health and Human Services under Joe Biden, and former deputy at the Department of Justice under President Obama.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joshcowen.substack.com/subscribe

We’re capping off a half-year of conversations with members of elected officials and candidates about the politics and policy of serving kids and families. There will be more over the next few months, and look for a special recap next week.

Today’s guest is an especially important leader in all things child and family policy: early education, child care, K-12 schooling, and access to higher education. I’m talking with Congresswoman Kristen McDonald Rivet, representing Michigan’s 8th District.

Congresswoman Rivet is finishing up her first term in Washington, after serving in Michigan’s state senate. Both her state and national legislative districts are about as swing as they come: voters routinely back both political parties not only in different election cycles but even on the same ballot.

So she knows how win tough elections. In both the legislature and in Congress, Kristen McDonald Rivet has been a leader on child care, access to early education, and improving K-12 schools—while fighting for public investment in all of those areas as well.

Before elected office, the congresswoman served in a variety of roles inside and outside government. She was the executive director of Michigan Head Start, chief of staff at the Michigan Department of Education, and on staff at the Department of Health and Human Services.

So basically, if you’re into public policy, and you’re especially interested in the idea that public policy professionals can and serve in some of the most consequential elected offices in your state and in Congress, Kristen McDonald Rivet is for you.

Give this a read or a listen.

A Conversation with Congresswoman Kristen McDonald Rivet

Welcome and thanks for joining me here. Just to get started, tell us a bit about your background, how you got involved in electoral politics and about the Michigan 8th Congressional District you represent.

Let me try to sum that all up really quickly. Fifty-six years of my life, right, in this little section. I actually spent most of my career working in this public policy space around kids and families. Started that career running the Michigan Head Start Association.

The thing that I want to tell you about that, that was so life-changing for me, is that in Head Start programs, as well as the Head Start Association, half of the board of directors are parents.

And when you’re trying to put together a policy agenda for small children, and you’re doing it alongside a mom or a dad who lives at the federal poverty level and is actively parenting a toddler: your lens changes just fundamentally changes.

And so that became for me, it was a really good instruction for how this work should be done, how we should be relating to people, how we, you know, things when we determine who whose voice has value in a room and it’s all fraught with those decisions.

So in that time I started, you know, having my own children. My husband and I have raised six kids. What I know to be true is that we are significantly underfunding our kids.

We are not supporting families in their attempts to, you know, raise their kids and just really have a stable, thriving household. And I saw that when I was the chief of staff at the Michigan Department of Education, and was a senior advisor to Governor Granholm, and all of these, all of these pieces, even when I was working on the ground in Detroit for the Skillman Foundation.

Across demographics, across rural, urban. It’s harder and harder to raise a child, and there are big things that have to change if we are going to change that trajectory.

I ended up getting into electoral politics for the first time in 2022, when I ran for the Michigan State Senate. And, I said no, quite honestly, the first couple times they asked me, because it just felt like, politics has gotten ugly and unproductive, and I really thought…You know what? We need to change our child care system. We need to change our education system. We need to change the way we talk to parents and community members. We need to change how programs are run and how we talk to people.

It felt to me like being in the State Senate was a good place to do that. So, I ran for the Senate, flipped a Republican seat, and a year later, uh, was recruited to run for Congress. And here I am.

We need to change our child care system. We need to change our education system. We need to change the way we talk to parents and community members. We need to change how programs are run and how we talk to people.—Congresswoman Kristen McDonald Rivet

Before we get into some policy details, let’s talk a bit about the job. You’re in Congress, you’ve been in the state legislature. You’ve worked in leadership roles at state agencies. What are you finding that’s different about Congress, specifically? Anything your past leadership roles have helped prepare you for in DC now?

It’s been an interesting 18 months. First about my district. I represent Genesee County, where the city of Flint is. Saginaw County, Bay County, half of Midland County. What’s really interesting about the 8th Congressional is, it’s a microcosm for the whole Midwest. We have farmers, we have manufacturing, we have abandoned industrial. We’ve got the home to Dow chemical semi conductor. All of these things that are when you look to Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana.

This is what the Midwest looks like.

But 70% of the jobs in my district pay less than $60,000 a year. So you think about what take-home pay looks like on 60 grand a year, and then start to think about the cost of groceries, and keeping your heat on in the winter, and childcare, which is around $450 a week for an infant.

People can’t make it. People can’t make it.

So, that is what I get up every day and think about, and get up every day and try to make a difference. And so, when I got to Congress, this is a wild, unruly place. A lot of people are very cynical about it, and there’s reason for that.

But where I’ve been able to actually find success is going into that common ground and finding other people, I don’t care what side of the aisle they’re on, who are also getting up every day and thinking about that, because it’s not just the Michigan 8th, right?

It’s the same thing in congressional districts in Pennsylvania, in Iowa, in places where people are hearing it from their constituents. And that’s where we’ve been able to partner, and I’ve partnered with other Democrats and Republicans, and been able to actually get some real stuff done.

Even though people think that’s not possible in Washington anymore.

Let’s turn to schools, kids, and families. You’ve been a leader in the early education and education reform spaces. Tell me a bit about what you’re working on these days.

I just recently introduced a major tax cut for working families. And it’s part of building on the working families tax cut that I authored in the state senate that we were able to pass in the first six months of the trifecta that has been so meaningful and actually brought thousands of kids out of poverty in Michigan.

But it’s also rooted in my own experience of having — there’s a moment in time where as a single mom with two kids, I knew exactly what it feels like to run out of milk on a Wednesday, and no, you’re not getting paid until Friday.

The secret to that is you add a little water to the milk to make it go farther. But we shouldn’t really have to be doing that, and if you look at who’s paying what in our tax system, it’s an important question. So, what we’ve proposed is a large tax cut for families making less than $100,000 a year, and who have children under the age of three. So, what this would be is a $5,500 refundable tax credit for every child under the age of three.

So it’s building on that work that we did in the state senate. But mostly what this does is put more cash in people’s hands, more money in your pocket to be able to buy formula and diapers and help pay for childcare, trusting parents with these dollars to make those decisions that we know we’ve got 40 years of research that says that that makes an enormous amount of difference.

On K-12: we have to call the question on these things that we just defend with such rigidity when we have overwhelming evidence that we’re failing our kids and our teachers on pretty fundamental levels.—Congresswoman Kristen McDonald Rivet

I worry a bit that Democrats have kind of lost the plot a bit when it comes to K-12—and polling is starting to pick this up. We’ve seemingly got a clear plan on early childhood, and momentum around what it means to set students up for success in higher education, but there’s still some work to be done to come together on K-12. You’ve been working on all this for so long and wearing so many different hats, how do you make sense of what’s needed right now in K-12 relative to the other policy spaces?

So let’s just level set about where we’ve made success. So we are in Michigan right now. Most four-year-olds are in preschool. So we’ve really gotten very close to achieving universal preschool, and it’s wildly successful. We can see it in all kinds of different ways.

We’ve been able to help shore up our sort of birth-through-three space, lot of support for that, and, we’re almost at free community college for everyone, which is great. And the way we’ve been able to do that is just by putting a lot of choice out there, and a lot of roads, and a lot of access.

But when it comes to K-12: we get into these very prescriptive, very nuanced, this is how you have to do it, this is what it has to look like, this is the test to see whether or not you’re doing it well, and this is the morass of bureaucracy and red tape that you have to wade through in order to reach goals that you were not a part of setting.

And I think that that actually is a big part of the problem. Now, I’m not a pro-voucher person. I think that vouchers are dangerous from a funding point for our public schools. And also it’s embedded in Michigan’s constitution, so they’re not even legal in Michigan.

But let’s just sort of define what the problem is. We’re, what, 30 years from No Child Left Behind, where we put in this accountability system and these mandated testing of one specific test that was mandated, and that test does not inform the practice of teaching in any way, shape, or form.

The schools have no voice in when it’s administered and what test it is, and the consequences are very draconian. And parents don’t understand what any of that means.

So in that time, what we have seen is our educational outcomes drop, teacher salaries basically stagnate, and everybody is very concerned with the state of our education system. So I think what we have to think about is what do we do going forward?

Because the problem here is that our teachers are demoralized and struggling financially. Our kids, what we’re watching is that the access to things outside of those core things that are tested is almost non-existent unless you are from a wealthy family or in a wealthy community.

And when I was coming up, granted, I’m an old person now, right? But I took driver’s training at school. Sports were free. There were all kinds of things that helped me become who I am that were beyond my math skills. And that, I think, is where not just Democrats, but everybody should be focusing.

They would have to call the question on these things that we just defend with such rigidity when we have overwhelming evidence that we’re failing our kids and our teachers on pretty fundamental levels.

We have to stop being in a place where we’re looking at states that are getting to a 60% reading proficiency and a 20% math proficiency in high school, and calling that a miracle.—Congresswoman Kristen McDonald Rivet

Last question. It’s pretty clear that the federal role in education is changing—funding, oversight, governance, all of it. You have an Administration that is doing everything it can to dismantle the Department of Education. As someone who’s sat in local, state, and now national leadership positions, what do you see when you look ahead? Where do we go from here and what are some of the big priorities we need to focus on together?

I’m just going to give it a little bit of an optimistic twist, which I know is unusual in these times. But let me say this. The president can’t eliminate the Department of Education. He’s got to go to Congress with that, and there aren’t the votes.

He’s farming out all of the different pieces of it to make it basically a shallow shell. But I think we can all agree that the Federal Department of Education needed a massive overhaul.

And so, now we’re in a place where we are going to have to rebuild. So for me, it’s not a question of we’ll see what it looks like when it’s rebuilt. I wanna be a part of rebuilding it. And what we actually need to do is to think about, so the one I’m most worried about in the right now is our kids that need special education services.

Because that is highly alarming to have that entire program put under Health and Human Services in a department that is completely rejecting all science of all kinds, and there’s just so many concerns there.

We also — what if we could build a Department of Education that said, listen: we need every single kid who graduates from our public school system to be proficient in reading and functional in math.

And when I say every single kid, we have to stop being in a place where we’re looking at states that are getting to a 60% reading proficiency and a 20% math proficiency in high school, and calling that a miracle.

That is bananas! So, if the Federal Department of Education suddenly became a place that was trying new things, an education R&D, where we are looking at places where we can get to 90%, not 60%, that is something worth investing in, and I think that we all need to commit to being a part of the rebuild of the Department of Ed, and make it really work towards this goal of every kid and not just the rich kids and then some small other part of the country.

Congresswoman Rivet is also running for re-election in the competitive 8th District—a seat that Democrats have to hold to retake the majority in Congress. You can learn more about her campaign here.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joshcowen.substack.com/subscribe