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I BelieveGovernance and Philosophy in America Author: Joel K. Douglas
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Should We Fund Education At All? With Shaka Mitchell
Monday, 15 September, 2025
Joel Douglas (00:03) My guest today is Shaka Mitchell, a senior fellow for the American Federation for Children, a Nashville-based attorney, a Belmont adjunct teaching constitutional law, and a leader dedicated to transforming education for underserved families. He’s a featured guest on TEDx Nashville and podcasts like The Learning Curve and Charterfolk. The charter schools Shaka has worked with drive real growth for Nashville’s underserved kids, often doubling district test scores in math and reading. While high-poverty public schools rank in Tennessee’s bottom 30%, Shaka’s schools rank in the top 20% to 25% serving the same communities. Shaka, thanks for being here. Your work with high-performing charters raises big questions about how we fund and deliver education. So, I feel like we have to ask a basic question to get started.Shaka Mitchell (00:49) Hey, thanks for having me.Joel Douglas (01:02) Should we fund education at all?Shaka Mitchell (01:05) Yeah, good question. Well, thanks for having me, Joel, and you’re starting out with a big swing right out of the gate. Should we fund education? I would say yes. I would say yes.And I want to also give the early disclaimer that I am not a big-government guy. I tend to be pretty skeptical of government. I used to work at one point at a constitutional law firm that came from a libertarian perspective. I really believe in individual liberty, individual rights, and also just an individual’s work ethic. So I am not a big-government guy. That being said, when we’re talking about education, it’s something that I think has a community impact. It’s also something that, from a rule of law perspective, is provided for by every state constitution in the country.Right? So all 50 states have a constitution that says something about education—that education is valued, that it is highly prized, and that the state is going to do something to fund some system of education for the public. Now, whether or not the government has to provide the actual services, I think we can differ about. That’s where I would say no. But in terms of funding, I would say yes because, listen, if we don’t do it, you can’t just fund your own children. I don’t believe that. I think that looking out for one another’s kids in that regard is a societal benefit.Joel Douglas (02:47) And really, that’s why I feel like we have to answer this question first. It’s what you just alluded to: you have to fund your kids and everybody else’s kids. If you look at it from a constitutional perspective, I would think about it as, well, we have six national goals, and if one of those is justice, one is liberty, and one is defense, then education fits into a lot of those buckets.If you think about it from a justice perspective, it kind of gets to an individual—like we need to fund education to help individuals who grew up in a less prosperous or less advantaged background succeed. If you think about it from a defense standpoint, you might think, like the school lunch program was started from a defense requirement standpoint. So if we think about education from a defense standpoint, then that’s kind of a collective; we need to have an infrastructure of training-ready Americans who can go and join the military and serve in defense industries to protect the people of the United States.But it’s both, right? You can’t just do it from a justice standpoint—that’s not the only reason you do it—but you also don’t only do it for the collective benefit. It goes back to exactly what you said about how we have to pay for each other’s kids, too, because some of them might join the military and also because constitutionally, we have a commitment to the justice of those kids that grow up in a less prosperous environment.Shaka Mitchell (04:25) Yeah, I think that’s right. And, you know, education is one of these things that, as opposed to, maybe other, say, commodities—things that we buy from the store. The education that I get for myself, yes, it’s important to me personally and individually, but if I’m better educated, that’s going to benefit the community that I’m a part of. It’s going to benefit the private company that I might work for or the nonprofit. It’s gonna benefit the military if I’m a part of the service, right? It’s gonna benefit my neighbors.So education is not one of these things that’s like going to the grocery store and you buy the kind of breakfast cereal that only you like. You’re the only one in your house that likes it and you say, “Forget about everybody else, I’m eating whatever, Fruity Pebbles. I don’t care if nobody else likes it.” No, education is not that kind of good. It’s the sort of thing that actually has so much benefit.And I mean, you highlight something really important, too, that I took a look at a little bit this summer and might just write about later. And that is that the armed forces right now are going through the lowest recruitment cycle in history, right? Our military is having such a hard time finding academically and physically ready young men and women, and that becomes a defense problem. So that speaks a little bit to this “education as a national defense” and national security issue as well. There’s a lot of overlap there.Joel Douglas (06:06) Absolutely, and I don’t want to take too much time on it, but just from a physical education standpoint, PE. When I was a kid, and I grew up in a small town in northern Missouri, the high school football coach was the PE teacher. He used it as the football training program so that we essentially had an extra hour to do stuff. So, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, we'd lift weights. Tuesday, Thursday, we played some sort of sport, so we were running, chasing each other, doing field hockey, or whatever that was.But my kids today, because I have two teenagers, they don’t do the same kind of stuff in PE. For half of the year, they sit in a health class. And rather than go run for 45 minutes and then have 45 minutes of health class—I don’t want to digress too much—but if they ran for an hour every day, would the military benefit from them being more fit and having a higher pool of candidates who could join after they graduate? Absolutely.Shaka Mitchell (07:14) Yeah. I’m a big believer in physical education and just the benefits of physical activity in general. I really think that it’s something that, frankly, kind of links together with education in this sort of virtuous cycle. Right? I mean, I think for a lot of kids, and even personally, when I feel better physically because I’ve exercised, I think I’m more mentally sharp and focused and ready for the workday. And I think that’s the same for elementary, middle, and high school kids, too.Joel Douglas (07:52) Yeah, that’s right. But I’ll get back on track. You said something about how the government doesn’t necessarily outline how to achieve education. So it says what to do. Well, it doesn’t even say that. It says the goals are justice, liberty, defense, and the other three. So you alluded to there being different ways to achieve those. And I know you work with a lot of those, and that’s the work that you do. So, can you talk about that?Shaka Mitchell (08:24) Yeah, so, you know, a lot of state constitutions—most state constitutions—are really broad, even vague, when they talk about education. They’ll say something like, "The state of [fill in the blank] will provide for an equitable education system." You go, okay, what does that mean exactly? Right? Does that mean we're talking about dollars? Equitable that way? Are we talking about kids who are gonna exit the system with the exact same amount of coursework? It’s so vague nobody really knows. It’s just kind of one of these adjectives that they threw in there, and it sounded good. And then you fast forward just a few years, and you don’t really know what it means.So one of the problems, of course, in any state is that on the one hand, it’s really efficient, or it seems like it’s going to be efficient, to have one system that you have in place for all the kids to participate in. That seems like it would work on paper; it seems efficient. But then what happens is, as soon as you meet more than one child, you realize that they are different, and you realize that the same system isn’t likely to work for a whole range of students. And that’s within one school, let alone a whole district, state, or country, right?I live in Nashville, Tennessee, and we’ve got about a hundred thousand school-aged kids. There’s no way one system with one school board of nine people is going to be able to figure out a system that works for every single child because they have different interests. Even in my own house—and I bet this is the same for you and your kids—same parents, but my kids are interested in different things. One is better at math. One is much more interested in the arts. One is much more interested in reading, nose in a book, right? They’re just interested in different things. They’re going to learn in different ways. And that’s in one family. You multiply that out across the whole city, and you've got to do something different. And so that’s really, I think, why I believe so much in school choice.The idea is that, yes, we’re going to fund education from a central pot. Because again, let’s collect the money that way, easy peasy. But let’s not assume that those nine people on the school board can come up with one system that works for everybody. Let’s let different models work. So if it’s a charter school that’s got a focus on science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), cool. Do that. In my city, there’s another charter school that’s really focused on students for whom English is not their first language. Okay, great. Let’s do that because that was something that the district was really struggling with. Or maybe it’s a values-based decision that a family wants to make. You really want your kids to go to a faith-based school. Okay, cool. I think that that’s your right to do. So let’s figure out how to make it work for families and make it more of a partnership rather than this top-down, command-and-control model where you say, "Alright, here’s the one thing that we say you get to have, and if it doesn’t work, too bad. See you in 12 or 13 years." Like, that doesn’t work.Joel Douglas (12:07) Yeah, and I don’t know if you’ve read the book The End of Average, but it’s a great book. It breaks down that if we average all everybody’s traits, thinking that whatever we produce to make the average will work for most people...Shaka Mitchell (12:13) Yeah, yeah, I love it.Joel Douglas (12:28) ...what in fact happens is we average everybody, and it doesn’t fit anybody because nobody is average. And so if you make a pair of pants that fit the average person, then they fit no one. And so that goes to school performance also, because some kids may not necessarily be low performers, but they may need extra time. The book talks about how they may need extra time in a particular core group of academics. And then later, when other kids who performed higher in that block are ahead of them, they might be bogged down by something else that they need to slow down for. But this kid who took more time in block two, as an example, can now speed through block three, and then they’re caught up in block four as compared to the kids who sped through block two, took more time at block three, and now they’re all in the same place in block four.And I feel like that is a very tough governance problem to have because our public schools today are designed to make everybody fit through the funnel at the same time, and students just don’t do a great job doing that. How would a charter school, or—I’m getting into what you do specifically—but how could other schools kind of solve that problem?Shaka Mitchell (14:02) Yeah, I think it’s the right question in that we have to be thinking about how we make this work for the end user: the students. So part of that is making sure we’re framing the question in that way. What I see happen too often in school districts is that we say, "Hey, how do we make this easier on the adults?" rather than, "How do we make it work better for the kids?"Joel Douglas (14:30) Do you mean the parents or the teachers, or both?Shaka Mitchell (14:32) No, I think we often ask how do we make it easier—sometimes it’s not even for the teachers—it’s how do we make it easier for the central office administrators to track, or how do we make it easier for folks at a state department of education to check the boxes? And so I think a lot of teachers would tell you they spend too much time checking the boxes rather than doing the things that their training would indicate they are uniquely qualified to do. And those are the things that really motivate them, which is, "Okay, how am I going to unlock learning for these specific students?"That’s what we want teachers focused on, rather than checking the boxes to say, "Okay, well, did my kids have this much seat time this week or this year?" Right? I mean, that’s not—seat time doesn’t mean much. There’s a whole lot of ways to sit in a seat and not be productive.So I think some things that schools can do—district schools, public schools, private schools, charter, it doesn’t really matter—is to really be student-centric. And then I would also say to not be afraid of innovation. And that’s something that happens in a lot of districts. They say, "Why are you doing it this way?" And the answer is, "Well, we’re doing it this way either to check the box for compliance reasons, or we’re doing it this way because we haven’t looked up and looked around to see what else is even working." And that’s a really unfortunate dynamic if it exists, right? We want to have a place where our schools are innovative and are taking best practices from other industries even and saying, "Alright, what can we do? What’s working at a school across the state? Can it work over here?" rather than just doing things the same old way. Unfortunately, I think that our incentive system is not set up well to foster innovation; it sort of does the opposite. It encourages schools to sometimes just keep doing the same old, same old, and that doesn’t benefit students.Joel Douglas (16:55) There are at least three challenges, though. I’m sure there’s way more than just three. But what about rural schools that don’t have enough kids? So if you in Nashville can break up a school for this and a school for that, a rural area just can’t do that. They don’t have enough. If you only have, like my school growing up had 27 kids in my class, how do you break them up? And then another challenge is if you take the money from these five kids away from the school and give it to this other school, then what happens to that first school? I think that that’s probably a challenge. And I’ve got my third one already, but I’ll turn it back to you.Shaka Mitchell (17:37) Yeah. Well, thinking about the rural school question. Here in Tennessee, we have a lot of rural schools also. I mean, obviously, not Nashville; anybody who’s been to Nashville recently knows that Nashville is not rural. Nashville is a little bananas, quite the opposite lately. But you don’t have to go far to find rural schools. And so I think things have shifted a whole lot since you and I were in school. There are a lot of things that did not exist when we were in school. Among them is the ability to take classes online and virtually, right? And connect with faculty members on the other side of the world or connect with students on the other side of the world.Just a couple of quick examples of this. I received this demo from a company that’s doing work out of Florida. Florida, you know, really leads the country, I would say, in innovative new school models. And Florida actually has a lot of rural schools, too. You don’t really think of it that way because they have some big cities, but there’s not a whole lot between Tampa Bay and Tallahassee. You’ve got a lot of rural areas. So this company has pioneered some virtual education, and it’s with these big VR goggles, right? And so I sat in a coffee shop in Nashville with the VR headset, and I did a lesson on the Constitutional Convention. I was walking around, you know, in this virtual world. I’m walking around Philadelphia, and the professor was there with me. I don’t even know what state he was broadcasting from. His avatar was there with me. We’re looking at things. I’m asking questions. I could turn pages in a book. I mean, it’s just pretty wild. Now maybe that’s not for everybody, but that sort of thing didn’t even exist 10 years ago in a way that was so tactile and constructive. So I think there are just more options in rural schools now.The other thing is to think about the school building and that time when kids are coming together. It’s like, well, what’s the value of that grouping? Meaning maybe we still want kids to come together for certain subjects or for certain lessons or certain group dynamics, right? People often talk about socialization and whatnot. But even in the homeschool communities now around the country, they have ways of getting together so that their kids have time with one another. And so I can envision things in rural communities where you say, "Okay, we’re going to still be learning in a similar environment, but it’s going to look much more like a one-room schoolhouse, for instance." And you’ve got kids who are working on different content simultaneously, right? It doesn’t all have to be the same one lesson for all the kids in the classroom. It should be differentiated. Because like you said, just because you’re a student who’s doing well in reading doesn’t mean that you’re doing just as well in math. You might be ahead or behind or whatever. And so that’s where you can shift the lessons and really make the lessons match the kids. And you’re seeing a lot of parents are able to piece that together through these choice programs. And again, in Florida, it’s happening. It’s happening in states like Arizona, Indiana—increasingly around the country.Joel Douglas (21:32) And even here in Wyoming. So my daughter, who is a sophomore this year, is able to take Japanese classes through the University of Wyoming as a part of her high school curriculum. And she can do that at her high school; like she has a free period, and during that free period, she enrolls in a Japanese class that’s taught at the University of Wyoming.Shaka Mitchell (21:42) Wow. Wow.Joel Douglas (21:57) And so she also gets college credit for doing that, which saves her money in the long run because she’s not at the university paying tuition rates; it’s included in the cost of the high school. So I could definitely see that that distributed training environment would be—sorry, I have a lot of military instructor background, so I say "training," but let’s just assume I said "education."Shaka Mitchell (22:09) Right, that’s amazing.Joel Douglas (22:25) That distributed education environment would really suit a lot of kids well, especially those who were interested in computers or a very unique subset of material that not everyone in their small school would be interested in taking.Shaka Mitchell (22:44) Yeah, for sure. I mean, AP classes are the best example of this because, you know, unless you’re at a big school—and in particular, a big school in a place that’s more densely populated, maybe an urban area or a suburb that’s close to an urban area—it’s hard to have a lot of AP classes, right? Because you don’t know from year to year if you're going to have enough students who even want to take, say, AP Physics or something like that. I think that’s a place where rural schools have traditionally struggled a little bit to have all those different course offerings, even though the kids might have the aptitude to do it.So yeah, the virtual space, that’s super cool. To be able to save money and get college credit—even if you didn’t get credit by eventually scoring a four or five or whatever you need to on the AP test, that exposure already is going to be super helpful. You’re still going to get the high school credit you need, and you might just find out, "Hey, I thought that I was really interested in business, and then I took a college-level business course, and it turns out I’m not actually that interested in it," or vice versa. And I think that exposure is really, really good for kids.You asked a question about money shifting around, too, and that’s one where I think we’re just seeing different dynamics around the country than what we grew up with. We’re just seeing the dollars start to follow the students. And that, I think, is the model that we want to get to. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to have all those resources, all that capital tied up in a building. And often that’s where it gets tied up. I mean, I heard a stat out of the state of Texas where the debt load that districts are carrying because of football stadium construction costs is just astronomical, right? Why do we have so much money tied up in that? And I get it. I mean, folks would laugh if I said that I played high school football, but I did for a very brief period of time. I get it. It’s fun. I like going to games, watching games, whatever. But we don’t need all of our education dollars tied up in the buildings and the stadiums. The whole point is to make sure that when the Friday night lights go off, these kids are prepared to do something as adults. So let’s work on that.Joel Douglas (25:30) And that may not be a battle that we can win, as far as not having football, but...Shaka Mitchell (25:36) That’s right. Yeah, I’m not trying to turn Texas away from football anytime soon. I’m not gonna die on that hill.Joel Douglas (25:43) But there’s also a compliance piece, too. So if we say, "Okay, kids only need to study from home so they can do all their curriculum at home, and then they come to a centralized location to do interaction or whatever," there’s just an inkling in the background of, if they commingle, are they gonna meet all the same public health requirements and the same nutrition requirements as the core group of kids who are in the mix? And that’s very challenging because there are a lot of people, for instance, with vaccines, who feel right now that they want to have a choice in whether or not their kid gets a measles vaccine. But then they also want their kid to be able to play football. And so then if they’re on the football team, do they need to have a measles vaccine? That’s a challenge that legislators are fighting right now.Shaka Mitchell (26:39) Yeah, for sure. It’s challenging. We don’t wade into those sorts of public health areas, but it’s definitely a challenge. I mean, I think one of the things it highlights, frankly, is that for better and for worse, schools have truly become a hub for lots of other things that are not related to education. Right? So you’ve got schools that are used as public health centers, you’ve got schools that are used for giving out food resources... and I get it, because if this is the place in your community where you’re most likely to see kids or families, I get why you would want to take advantage of that time. But to the extent that we put all that responsibility on school leaders and teachers, I don’t think it’s been really constructive. Let them focus on what they can do, and their locus of control needs to be education. And if that means we’ve got to come up with other ways and other places to do, say, a food pantry, you know, maybe so be it. But I would prefer letting the educators focus on that one thing.Joel Douglas (28:03) Sure. Yeah, and I know you don't. Because you work with so many underserved communities, I know that you readily acknowledge that for some of those kids, that’s the only meal they’re gonna get that day. And so that is an important thing, and I know that you believe that.Shaka Mitchell (28:15) Right, right.Joel Douglas (28:21) You’re talking about a different subset than here in Wyoming or in Missouri where I grew up. We didn’t necessarily see that at the school level, but I certainly believe that in other places, that’s a different thing. So what do you say when a legislator talks to you about, "We don’t want you to take money away from the public schools"? How do you answer that?Shaka Mitchell (28:49) Yeah, it’s a good question. You know, assuming that it’s asked honestly, right? Then I think that it’s helpful to try to get folks to think about what it is that they actually want the money spent on. And so oftentimes, what people say is, "Well, we don’t want to take money from our public schools." But if what they really mean is, "Let’s make sure students in public schools have the same amount of resources," then I’m like, "Okay, yeah, I get that."Because here’s the deal: your daughter, the one that we were talking about earlier, the sophomore—let’s just say hypothetically that she moved from a public school to a different school environment, to a private school. Well, she would no longer be a cost to that original school. So why in the world would we continue to send 100 percent of the funds to that original school? Wouldn’t we want her to be funded wherever she goes?And by the way, here’s the thing: people make it sound controversial when you’re talking about a charter school or a private choice program, but this is exactly what happens anytime someone moves from one county to another county, right? And we don’t stop people from doing that. We don’t say, "Hey, you live in Davidson County, and it’s not fair that if you move to Williamson County, you’re taking money from the public schools." Well, it is true in some sense, but you’re taking the student, too, right? And so I try to get legislators to think about how this kind of already happens in the natural context of people moving around, and we want families to be able to do what’s best for them. So that to me is a higher priority than just sustaining this particular building or that particular building. I want families to thrive, irrespective of what type of school they attend.Joel Douglas (31:13) Sure, love it. Also, I love the distributed education environment thought. I wrote a piece once about how I feel that, in general, high school kids are not well prepared to move into the working world directly. They have a hard time getting their first job, and then they have a hard time building expertise in whatever they want to do as they grow up.But if we took kids who were seniors—so say the kids that were on the university track just keep doing their thing, and then kids who were gonna go into a tech field or were hoping for tech certifications—they take their senior year of high school or the first year after high school and do distributed training. And we have businesses that sponsor real-world problems that they’re having. So then during the class, the kids are actually thinking, "Oh, this is a problem that this business is having; this is how I would approach it." Then I think that that would be really valuable real-world expertise that those kids could get. I would love to see that integrated into high school or early post-high school curriculum, but I also understand that that breaks the education mold, and that’s a challenge.Shaka Mitchell (32:37) Well, you know, it breaks the mold, but it’s not without some precedent. There are many European countries, actually, that have a system of high school internships where the curriculum is basically created by industry and by business leaders. So you’ve got the business leaders who are themselves saying, "We anticipate these needs or those needs..."(Sound of strong wind in the background)Sorry, is there—do you hear that?Joel Douglas (33:20) I was gonna say something. I believe that is the Wyoming wind making its presence felt. Yeah, that’s just our wind in the background. Wyoming is known for our wind, and there it is.Shaka Mitchell (33:27) No kidding. Okay. Well, I apologize for breaking up our talk. That’s amazing. Okay, well, good, I’m glad it’s that and I’m glad your house is still standing, because that sounds intense.Anyway, so, yeah, there’s this European model where you’ve got industry and business leaders who might say, "Okay, hey, here’s the training that we think is gonna be really important in the heavy mechanical engineering industry," right? So, big engines, big motors, and things like that, maybe for ships or something. And they say, "Here are the things that we think are going to be really valuable skills and knowledge for the next five years." And they actually work with schools to create that curriculum on a year-by-year basis. And there are some European countries where something like 80% to 90% of high school kids have basically an externship that year where they’re getting some hands-on training. These are kids where some of them are gonna go into the trades, and some of them are gonna go on to do more education.So I love the idea, not just for one sector of kids, because the reality is, most of us don’t know what we’re gonna do when we’re 16. And maybe we will go to college, maybe we won’t, maybe we’ll go later in life. I mean, I have a lot of formal education, and you know how I spend a lot of time on the weekends? Fixing things around my house. Right? And so it’s not like these things are mutually exclusive. If I have no idea how electricity works, I could get really hurt when I’m trying to, you know, a couple of weeks ago, when I had to fix our washing machine or install a new garbage disposal or whatever. So I think those technical skills really can benefit anybody.Joel Douglas (35:37) Absolutely, and that idea really comes from the Air Force Weapons School. The Weapons School is the Air Force’s version of Top Gun. It’s structured differently, and I won’t go into it... but there are blocks. And in that block, you might have two or three days’ worth of education. You’re in class from 7:00 in the morning till 5:00 or 6:00 in the evening, and then you study that evening. You take a test in the morning the next day, then you start academics again at 7:00. You go through two or three days of that, and then on, say, day four, the instructors give you a problem set of, “Hey, this is a real-world scenario, and you have until tomorrow night to come up with a presentation which you will teach back to the instructors outlining your approach to solve this real-world problem.” And what you learn is, on day four, you feel ready to go, and you’ve gotten good test scores the first three days because you take a test every day. You get the problem set, and you learn you didn’t retain what you thought you did.Shaka Mitchell (36:47) Right.Joel Douglas (36:50) And then you have to teach it to yourself again so you can teach the instructors at the end of the next day. It’s a fantastic education model, and I would love to see it—well, it was a very beneficial education model for me, and I’m sure it would benefit other kids. It’s a tall order to ask a high school kid to do that kind of stuff.Shaka Mitchell (37:16) Maybe it is, but I’ll tell you, I had a conversation with a researcher at Johns Hopkins University, and she does a lot of work on what she calls "education pluralism." She’s done a whole lot of work researching different school models around the world, really. And then also school culture within a school building—meaning, like, how rigorous is it? You know, what are the expectations? And she would say that we are grossly under-challenging our kids in school. And that resonates with me.I mean, you think about how many kids are so-called "behavioral challenges," but actually the challenge is often academic, right? Kids who talk a bunch in class—it’s often because they’re not engaged for one reason or another. Maybe they’re not engaged because they don’t understand the content. Maybe they’re not engaged because they do understand it, and it’s really boring, and they would rather be doing something else. They’re not dumb, and they realize, “What am I doing here?” Right? And so in both cases, unfortunately, we end up doing the wrong thing, and we sort of say, “Alright, you’re out of here, go to the principal’s office,” or whatever, rather than saying, "Are we actually matching the challenge to the child’s aptitude and their capabilities as we see them right now?" And so I think we could do a better job. So it sounds like a tall order, what you have in mind, but I would be willing to say, hey, let’s not play slow-pitch all the time. Let’s throw a little bit harder and see if our kids can make contact.Joel Douglas (39:14) Yeah. I want to give you a chance to talk about whatever you want to talk about for however long you would do that for. So you could pitch charter schools, you could pitch the work that you do.Shaka Mitchell (39:26) Yeah, thanks, Joel. Well, one of the things that I’ll mention—I think it’s a really exciting time in education policy in terms of what we’re seeing around the states and even at the federal level. And I think it couldn’t come at a better time. So just yesterday, some new data was released from the National Assessment of Educational Progress. It’s called the NAEP.Joel Douglas (39:56) Yeah, I saw the performance report.Shaka Mitchell (39:56) Yeah, and what was released were some 12th-grade math and reading scores and an eighth-grade science score. This is often called "the nation’s report card." So this isn’t some ticky-tack little assessment. This is for kids in every state in the country—kids in private schools, public schools, charter schools take it. But the public schools' scores were released, and in math and reading—in reading, for instance, the scores were some of the lowest in history. In math, they were the lowest point since 2005. And remember, these are the kids whose eighth-grade year was when COVID hit. So it’s been super disruptive for them. And I think in some ways, these scores just confirmed what a lot of parents saw during that time, which is, "Hey, this system just isn’t really serving our children as well as it could be." Again, not all schools, but system-wide, we had some major problems.What that looks like, for instance, is that only 35 percent of 12th-graders were proficient in reading. Thirty-five percent. In math, on the opposite end of the spectrum, 45 percent were below basic. So it goes below basic, basic, proficient, and then there's advanced. But 45 percent below basic in math. So who’s gonna be surprised if we have a rising and continuing national debt problem in the future? Who’s gonna be surprised if personal finance is just a mess for this cohort of kids? If you can’t do basic math, it’s gonna be a problem. It’s gonna manifest itself as a major problem when you do hit the working world and you’re not quite sure, like, what do these things like interest rates mean? Whether it’s on a credit card or for a home that you’re trying to purchase or a car or whatever.So those do concern me. That being said, on the encouraging side of the ledger is what’s happening in many states with these programs that allow parents to get public dollars for their choice in education. I think now we’ve got 18 states that have what we call a universal choice program. And we also have now, I believe, 48 states that have charter schools. And so those are public schools that are independently run and operated so that a school leader and its school board can make personnel decisions, they can make curriculum decisions.And really, I encourage families to not feel like you have to be satisfied anymore if your child is in a school that’s not working well for them. In most states now—not all, but in most states—you have some options, and that number is increasing on an annual basis. You know, if you’re in a position where your child comes home and he or she is really discouraged, really disappointed in what’s happening, don’t take it for granted that this is your only option. You may have some other options out there. I definitely encourage folks to, you know, check out our website or do some other research online and see what options are available in your state because you might be able to get some scholarships to attend the school of your choice.Joel Douglas (43:54) Awesome. Hey, Shaka, I really appreciate you being on the show today.Shaka Mitchell (43:59) Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. I really enjoyed the conversation.Joel Douglas (44:03) Thank you.Music from #Uppbeat https://uppbeat.io/t/dada/stormy-sea License code: ML5WFF9OHYGLPAUV Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe
