Episode 1. Intro to the Messes: K-12 Education is BIZARRE!

The inaugural episode of the K 12 Confidential podcast dives into the complex and pressing issues plaguing the American K-12 education system. Host Trina English discusses with her sister Mandy Walker the alarming states of literacy and sexual violence in schools, the opaque and ineffective governance structures, and the exploitative practices of for-profit educational corporations. The episode sets the stage for a series of investigative discussions aimed at unveiling the root causes and proposing solutions through a petition for the creation of a national K-12 educator governing board.

00:00 Welcome to K-12 Confidential

00:19 Introduction to the Podcast and Petition

00:49 Interview with Mandy Walker

01:21 The Teacher Shortage Mess

01:31 The Literacy Crisis in K-12 Education

08:12 The Reading Mess and Systemic Failures

20:19 Sexual Violence in Schools

26:39 The Hidden Problems in K-12 Governance

27:05 The Role of School Boards and Superintendents

29:18 The Petition for Change in Education

29:53 Historical Context of the Teaching Profession

32:00 The Need for Teacher Leadership

33:47 The Petition Process and Goals

40:25 The Influence of For-Profit Companies in Education

42:06 The Podcast's Mission and Call to Action

46:03 Conclusion and Next Steps

We need more teacher voices to this this justice! Visit us at k-12confidential.com to request to speak on the podcast.

Sign the petition to join the movement to save K-12 Education!

Transcript

 Welcome to the K 12 Confidential podcast. The podcast where current veteran K 12 teachers blow the whistle on the ignorance, apathy, corruption, and greed of our leaders, which is eroding our democracy from within. This episode is called. Introduction to the messes. K 12 education is bizarre. In the last episode, you heard our brief scripted introduction to the entire podcast and learned a little bit about our solution framework, which is detailed in our petition to the K 12 subcommittee in Congress, which creates a national K 12 educator governing.

In this episode, as with the first episodes on every theme, you're going to hear me be interviewed by a lay person, someone not in the K 12 world, as I break down the through lines, which will be discussed in greater detail with the experts that come on. So this time around, I have my sister Mandy Walker on the podcast.

She's an intelligent and civically engaged citizen, but not someone who's mired in K 12 jargon. And she can also see things from a different perspective. So she helps me break it down. Together we attempt to explain the basics of the podcast, how it got started, and more about the petition. Next episode, after this one, I bring on my first expert, my own husband, a 25 year veteran, as we touch upon each theme once more.

Immediately thereafter, you get into the first thematic category, the teacher shortage mess. 

K 12 Education is a mess. Us literacy rankings are in the bottom half of the world and are a hidden cause of the erosion of our variability to effectively self govern. How did we get here? America's teachers can tell you and the answers will shock you.

This is K 12 confidential.

I am really, really glad to have you help me, um, unpack this topic today. Well, you know, you've talked to me about it off and on for. Years. Years, I wanna say. Yep. I've been working on this for a couple years. Yep. And I feel like I intermittently hear like this crisis or this has happened or this mess and so, you know, it, it's kind of interesting that I get to listen in and find out really what.

But the, the, the problems really are, and, and maybe, hopefully get a better understanding about it because, you know, I'm a small business owner. I, I book charter yachts. I try to pay attention to the news. I know almost nothing about this, um, industry. And I have a ton of friends who are teachers as well as, as you.

So, um, I, I'm, I'm all ears. Yeah, and it's really salient right now because there's this big talk to shut down the US Department of Ed. And really for the first time, in my experience, I'm hearing the problems in K 12 education really be honestly discussed for the first time. 'cause in, in my, from my perspective, it's been hidden and there's been institutional di indifference and downright coverups for a lot of this stuff.

Do now you think that's, do you think that's because it's gotten so bad? No, it's always been bad. Okay. It's al it's always been bad. Admittedly, we're since COVID lockdowns, which we get to in the different thematic categories, the different messes, um, but it's being used as a political weapon, as a excuse to shut down the US Department of Education.

So on the one side, I really love that we're being open and honest about the problems with K 12 education, but on the other side, we're blaming all the wrong people. It's. Okay. Not the US Department of Education. US Department of Education has very little reach into our world. It is all left to local control, so we are being governed by local school boards.

And those politicians do not have degrees or experience in our field. It is just bizarre. It is so weird. So everybody wants to sort of enter into the conversation of how do you preserve, protect and uphold K 12 education, but nobody really understands what it is and how it's governed. And so this podcast puts the experts, which are K 12 teachers and in places where it's available, we have tenure.

And we are able to speak truth to power with a modicum of job protection. So we have the knowledge, we have the protection. You can sort of think of K 12 teachers as the judicial branch of government and our three branches of government lifetime appointees that don't have to worry about being reelected.

And the role we play in upholding the our moral duty to the nation and to our children. That's sort of what we are, but we don't have any role in. Leading our own profession, and we're the only profession that is credentialed in America today that doesn't have our own national gov governing board. And so we also talk about how that is and the repercussions of that and the solution framework, which is we are writing a Petition to Congress that we need everyone to sign that creates one.

So we're able to fix all this mess. I think it's good to start with how I wound up in this place and to really understand that when you talk about what's really wrong in K 12 education, all of the problems funnel back to the same source. If you're willing to peel back that layer of the onion, you are willing to sit through long form journalism that gets all the way to the center.

All the problems stem from the same place. Um, so. I think starting with how I found this journey in the first place is good because if you look on the website, you'll see there's a like eight, 10 messes that I'm, we unpack the can curriculum mess, the DEI mess, the teacher pay mess, teacher preparation, mess.

All of these messes all trickle back from the same source. But I started with a couple, so this is my second profession I worked in. A nonprofit sector before. And I do think that not having worked my entire adult life in this field helped me to be a little bit more clear-eyed about how weird it was.

'cause I didn't go right into this profession. Um, but I started out really noticing two things. One, I was working in a, a privileged school in a urban district with a lot of socioeconomic disenfranchisement. So in other words, there was a lot of very low income students and very high income students and all in one district.

Right. This is a major metropolitan area urban, so, and it was a bizarre contrast. My first teaching. Gig in that district was in a very low disenfranchised neighborhood where everybody was experiencing that kind of marginalization. And then as soon as I could, I got out, moved up to an, uh, more privileged school.

But because we had open enrollment, some kids were being bused over every day if they were willing to go without sleep because it. You have to go without sleep when you bust outta your neighborhood. And so you had this drastic divide of the haves and the have nots. And what I was seeing reliably year over year was that I had a consistent amount of Bipoc boys specifically, and usually in my district, African American boys who simply could not read.

And we had no. And what and what grade level are you teaching at? Thank you for that question. Sixth grade. Sixth grade. And. When we say a child cannot read to a large extent, that is esoteric knowledge like it, what do you mean a kid can't read? Like at what level? What is the determinating factor? Because there's a lot of confusion about that.

Right? And so what I mean by that is they're scoring reliably and consistently below the third grade reading threshold in sixth grade. And if you're not. An elementary educator who's seasoned, specifically one who's taught in those first, second, and even third grade classrooms, you probably do not realize, um, that first and second grade is where we are laying the foundations of reading those very discreet skills.

So if a kid gets to third grade. And they haven't mastered those skills. They're not really being explicitly taught anymore, and it's a fundamentally qualitatively different kind of instruction that is not offered in middle school. Right. So what I saw was this radical divide between the kids from the low socioeconomic neighborhoods and the high socioeconomic neighborhoods having radically different reading opportunity gaps.

And back then we were calling it achievement gaps. That is kind of a misnomer. 'cause these two different groups of kids have had different opportunities to learn to read. Right. And, and, but well, okay, so when was that? That you started to see this know? Uh, 2015. 2016. Okay. When I was saying it. Okay. Yeah. So, um, what I noticed, 'cause I dug in, you know me, I'm tenacious, I don't give up.

I, I just started asking questions and talking to the kids. And when I realized was these kids. Not only had just a series of brand new teachers, they also frequently had, not even that they had a parade of subs. There were no teacher of record in the first and second grade years. And what I knew was that it takes a very long time to learn how to teach reading.

It is probably the least intuitive thing and the most important thing that we teach in K 12, it is esoteric and bizarre, and our brains were never made. To acquire this skill, we're forcing our brains to do something very foreign, and we think, oh, speaking is so easy, and learning to speak English is very easy, right?

But learning to read at all and specifically English is very, very difficult. And so. Yet, it's something we know how to do, and so why were we failing these kids? And I dug and I dug and I dug. I couldn't even get anyone in my district, which by the way, was boasting a huge social justice game to acknowledge we had this problem.

And that it was, uh, a civil rights issue affecting our African American low socioeconomic students. Because what they wanted to say was, oh, they're just struggling readers. Don't label them Trina. They, they will never learn to read if you label them. And I said, I'm acknowledging the problem. We can't fix it if we don't face it, and no one would face it.

And I just thought, how can we be failing? So miserably at a basic thing that we, the public is expecting us to teach our kids how to read. Why are we failing at this most basic task? We don't have the language to describe it. The people in leadership never taught reading, and yet they have all of the decision making power over what we do.

I couldn't get historical data, and then I dug even further. I was trying to get historical data in my own district. I wanted to know, are we getting better? Are we getting worse? Are we starting this? No one had that data. Yeah, so then I started digging on a national level and I discovered. I, I use the CIA World Fact book, and you guys can go Google it now.

I've watched this thing change over the years, over the different presidencies where it's gotten harder and harder to see the data. But what it is, is it's our own central intelligence agency collecting quality of life indicator data from around the nation. So we're talking about life expectancy rates, um, infant mortality rates, maternal mortality rates, all this.

Right. And one of those indicators is literacy rates. And the way it's being sort of decided upon is the, the extent to which someone can read at the sixth grade level. So the number of people who are, I think over the age of 14, who actually read their native language at a sixth grade level. So sixth grade level is sort of where everything is written at.

Like I tell my sixth graders. Yeah, good. If you're reading on grade level and the, everything is written at the sixth grade level, you know, um, so at that benchmark. The United States measures quite low, but I could not get the data because it was written as a table X and y axis table, like the, the names of the countries on one side and the qual, um, the quality of life indicators on this side, right on the X and y Xxi axi side.

If you're not watching the video and all you needed to do was scroll down in a, b, c order and find a country and look at those indicators. Back then, when I was first doing this investigation in like 20 15, 16, 17, you could easily see that the literacy rates just weren't there for the United States. The box was empty.

Right? It was just empty. And then you think to yourself, well, our own central intelligence agency compiling this data. It's not some other country off to the field somewhere else. Why is it empty? It's one of two things. It's either. They couldn't get at the data, which makes no sense. It's our own country.

Why wouldn't we be able to get at that data? Or they did and they didn't like what they saw, so they hid it. Now either is a very bad scenario for the United States because we need to know what those numbers are and we need to be able to address them. Because our entire schooling system was established free public, public secular schooling.

One of the first in the world was established in the 1830s specifically because we were a democracy and we needed our public to be able to read. Be literate and thoughtful to effectively self govern. So if something has gotten in the way with that, it is an erosion of our very ability to be meaningfully engaged in the Democratic process.

So I was extremely concerned and there's evidence all around us right now that we, uh, have not, we have not been able to effectively self govern and vote in our own best interests. This, my podcast is bipartisan. Yeah, but if we're talking about closing the US Department of Ed, we are definitely voting against our own best interest right now.

Right. So I did a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of digging, years of digging, and I watched the that table organization become more veiled and hard to read over the years was different. Administrations attempted to cover up the data. The most current iteration, if you go and look at it now, doesn't publish a lot of the European Nations literacy rates either.

So it doesn't look like. We're the only one. We're an aberration. So what you find if you do the digging, is that they're reliably, the first world is anywhere between 98 to a hundred percent literacy rates. That's what you see. And then you see some in the lower eighties, upper seventies for third World War torn nations especially.

But you'll often see countries in the third world or the second developing world that are coming in in the nineties, right? There are a few countries that are quite low, and you can guess what those are. Those are like. Basically where anarchy has taken over and they're so war torn. There are no systems in place.

We here, we're talking about fifties and sixties, right? When I finally got at this number, and I'm still not sure if it's accurate, it was put out by the US Department of Education, which is probably why people wanna shut it down, because it doesn't always make us look good. Right? But 65%, so that would put us in the bottom quartile of the entire world.

For literacy. But you're, but just so I'm, we're clear here. You're saying to be considered illiterate, you are, you are not able to read at a first or second grade level, like six and 7-year-old. Yeah. I mean, what it means to be literate is variable. Right? Right. So as a teacher, when I see a sixth grader is coming and reading below third grade, they are missing the fundamental discreet skills.

That I need them to have in order to differentiate and scaffold and you know, I can deal with a fifth grade reader, a fourth grade reader, and to some extent you can deal with a fifth grade, fourth grade reader all the way up through K 12 afterwards. But when someone is coming in without that, that continuum complete of the skills that we layer on top of each other, which are not intuitive, there's nothing you can do.

You cannot, the kids cannot access their education. And but at the sixth grade level, that's what the CIA world Factbook and the world is looking at. That is the level you need to have mastered to be able to engage in public life meaningfully. To let all of your applications do everything that's required of you to be, to be civically engaged in your nation and your area.

Um, um. Are kids ever offered or suggested to be held back in the earlier grades? K 12 doesn't hold kids back at all anymore, so it's a social promotion every year. So even if they, they get a failing grade in reading comprehension and, and all those things that, like, I remember getting my work report card.

The kids just go on. See, and this is why we have an entire thematic category called the reading mess, because what is, what actually goes on there and our failures to teach kids how to read is a lot to unpack. At the center of it is that the Reading Teachers of America who hold esoteric knowledge that is not understood outside of first and second grade, like I know the basics because I had to get my multiple subject credential, but I've never been a reading teacher.

So I would not be the person calling the shots for that. I would advocate for the experts to call the shots, and then I would listen with love and intention at what they had to say. But, so since they aren't the ones deciding what reading instruction looks like in America, we're gonna continue to make bad mistakes.

The CAN curriculum, the big textbook who make the largest of which is going to clear $2 billion in profit this year, and yet we're in the bottom quartile of the world for reading. So clearly they fail. They're the ones and all of the assessments and the pedagogy that, which is the way we teach things, it's all packaged and it's all baloney.

It's it? Mm-hmm. It is. It is baloney. We are. Ticking boxes, making things look good on paper, and no one is being called to account for the mess of having a very illiterate nation. And so I know that. Stabs the heart of what we like to think about American exceptionalism, our capitalistic country, providing the market economy, giving us the best possible version of things.

None of these things can be true if you aren't centering the experts who know how to teach reading. And so that's, that was the first thing I was noticing is how could we be messing this up so badly and nobody notices or cares since then. It has been brought to light and I've talked to some of these people who championed the cause of illiteracy.

Like it all came out in a big podcast called Sold a Story, um, in which there is a huge, long podcast expose on how we managed to botch reading so badly, but it fails to peel back all the layers of the onion. And so my thematic categories that I talk about, um, do a better job, I think, because it gets a K 12 teacher's perspective.

But the reason why it does a better job is because I bring on the experts who can tell me and teach me more than, than I already know, you know? Um, so anyways, the first problem I was noticing was this huge illiteracy problem that no one was willing to talk about or understood. And then the second thing was the huge sexual violence problem amongst the kids.

And you know, you know, I used to run a domestic violence shelter and rape crisis hotline in a previous life. And, um, I wound up, you know, resigning from that position to be a stay-at-home mom for a while. You know, my kiddo had celiac disease, has celiac disease, and so I had to homeschool him for preschool.

And then full circle, my original plan was to become a teacher. When I was in college years ago, came back to that. And so when I was teaching in sixth grade, I had, um, a mentor teacher say to me, Hey Trina, we wanna start up. Student interest and identity clubs. Is there anything that you feel qualified to lead?

And I said, well, I could probably do a feminist club because of my involvement with domestic violence and sexual assault advocacy. But I never imagined it would be about that. I thought it would be about healthy body image and dating boundaries, you know, and building up self-esteem of girl. That's what I imagined it was gonna be.

But what happened was I started and what year was this? 2016. So the Me Too movement launched, right? And then I was like all these little girls, these middle school girls who, I don't know if you've can identify with this, but at some point in my experience, through adolescence into womanhood. I became aware of harassment and abuse.

It was something that I had to deal with. I looked around and noticed nobody gave a shit, and then I realized, oh, this is something I just have to deal with and quietly suffer through. And that, that was my experience with it. But these little girls, they didn't, they weren't jaded and they were seeing the Me Too movement on public, me, on um, social media in the happening in the public and expected.

Us to care about their struggles. And of course, K 12 has no bandwidth. And I was like, oh my God. So I had all these little girls being brought to me, um, kind of like surreptitiously, like they were friends would bring them like, oh, you're in the feminist student union. You need to see Mrs. English. I'll bring, you know, they, I was being brought a bunch of student victims who had.

Tried to tell their counselor oftentimes, and it didn't go anywhere. And so I thought, oh no, what are we going to do? Like what are the laws that govern these spaces? Um. Because I knew what we did for adults and we didn't even do that for kids. And as it happened, as I, um, discovered through knowing child sexual abuse laws, mandated reporter laws, but also Title IX laws, we're supposed to be doing a lot more in the kids space, not nothing.

Um, right now at present in the university spheres of life, higher ed and in the professional settings, I'm not saying women aren't experiencing. A lot of sexual harassment and abuse. They are, but they are receiving a lot more protections than the children are in K 12 and the law Title ix, which was the sort of benchmark legislation that was passed in 1972, championed by Patsy t Mink, first woman of color, congressional representative from Hawaii.

Ugh, love Patsy Mink. Recently passed away. It's been a while now, but she championed this piece of legislation that was passed 50 years ago. So here again, I'm like, how can there be a 50-year-old piece of legislation that nobody knows anything about? Like if you asked anybody in 20 15, 16, 17 what Title IX was, which I did frequently, they'll say, oh, that thing that makes sports be equal, they thought it was specifically and only for athletics.

Hmm. So PE teachers might have heard of it, but nobody else, and I learned that we are supposed to have. Prevention plans in place. Everybody's supposed to know who this thing called a Title IX coordinator is, and there's supposed, there's a whole due process that's supposed to be happening, which is wildly different than disciplinary action investigations, that other disciplinary action investigations that, um.

Principles are engaged in, and of course that's why I want, I wound up studying that from my Master's of Ed leadership program and finding out that all of K 12 scholarship had completely sidestep any investigation of this problem and. Here. I was like, okay, so how do we have these two massive problems?

Like I had literally have students who were being raped on campus, can't get anyone to do anything about it. Can't get anyone to even make a police report about it. Right? The very basic and kids can't read and no one cares or nose. Ah, that is going on at k12. Ah, right. And this is going on at, and you were teaching middle, middle school, right?

Mm-hmm. So sixth, seventh, and eighth. Yep. So this was going on in your sixth grade class or just this was going on in, in all like in the school. It was school wide and it was, it's very difficult to, as a teacher to, to speak in a space like this and characterize a problem as a nation because our very vocabulary for describing problems is very mired in what the vocabulary is for a specific district.

We are siloed and it is. A big problem that prevents us from seeing and understanding and discussing the problems. That's a big reason why I assume CIA couldn't even get at our national literacy rates, right? I mean, you can get the national literacy rates, um, for Vietnam, but you can't get them from your country and you're the Central Intelligence agency.

Like, you know, assuming that it was as innocent as that. I, I, I often think maybe they did. And said, oh, we can't push that, you know, but, so anyways, these problems were deep and that sort of began my investigation and in so doing, for the last two years, I've been talking to teachers across the nation. I've had two different iterations of this podcast that I never promoted.

'cause I'm a full-time teacher. I just wanted to talk and record first before I brought anything to the public. And so I've had the benefit of that and I have learned. That these problems exist everywhere. Sure. I'm not, yeah. They exist everywhere. So then it, the question is how, how could it be this bad?

How are the culpable parties getting away with it? And that brings me back to the K 12 governance mess, um, which is basically that. K 12 is governed in a very strange and cloaked way. People are not really familiar with who their school board members are. And school board members use, um, school board positions as stepping stones to larger political aspirations.

They're not particularly invested in the quality of the education. They're ticking the boxes. At at best, they might be really emotionally invested in doing the best job, but they don't have the knowledge or access into our world to do anything real about it. They just don't know our world, and they're getting everything filtered through a superintendent, which is a person who taught a very long time ago, usually for a very short time, who's got a huge ego culture of personality around them, filled with Sy defense.

Or telling them he's wearing beautiful clothes when he is buck naked. And the superintendent is the one position a school board gets to hire for. And so there's no centering of your expert veteran teachers in leadership. You have to leave teaching, formally, leave teaching to lead it, and when you leave teaching.

You lose your tenure and you rapidly become less relevant in the conversation. Like there are a bunch of people in leadership right now who taught like site-based leaders who don't have the humility and acknowledgement to say, oh, I haven't taught in this post pandemic world. Maybe I'm not so relevant anymore.

So again, the the problem is. You've got a, a bunch of SY defense and people tethered to local politics, school boards, making all the decisions, and nobody, and the public isn't being made aware of how bad things are, and the teachers are so siloed that we don't have a platform like this podcast to come together as a national professional body.

To start to speak truth to power, and we really need the American people on our side. That's why this podcast exists and where it came from. And also, you know, correct me if I'm wrong, but the, the point of this is also to, to shine light. That, that you are trying to make a change, um, kind of on the federal level, but, but there's a petition.

If I understand, is that, is that the point of the petition or? Yeah, the petition does a couple of things. It, people are roll their eyes and are cringey about petitions and you know, rightfully so people, people use 'em as useless virtue signaling. This one isn't. This one is legit. This is an actual public purpose petition that exercises a congressional.

Right enshrined to all American people to seek redress by Congress. This petition is directly to Congress because Congress established our profession in the 1830s, and they expressly made our profession for women because they wanted to pay them a third of the salary of similarly qualified men. And I don't harbor resentments about that like it was a noble goal.

Horace man, who established our profession. Was an abolitionist. He envisioned all social classes, all races, ethnicity, eth ethnicities, males and females getting a free, popular, excuse me, free secular public education. That's a noble dream, and that did not exist in the world. What we had before that was these elite men from trained higher prestigious universities, being hired by elite families to tutor their children.

We didn't have. A free, uh, public secular schooling option. And so they, they thought, we gonna need, we need to teach everyone here how to read because they had used our founding fathers, the Greeks and Romans example for democracy. And back then in ancient Greece, uh, you say, oh, all citizens voted. Well, citizen was wealthy, land owning men.

So you didn't have this problem. They all knew how to read. So if you're gonna make citizen open to many more people with the first time in the whole world in the United States, that's amazing. Well, they need to know how to read and we don't know how to pay for it. So we're gonna create this profession for women and pay only a third.

And so I get it. I get it. The problem is, is that back at that time, women couldn't sign contracts on property or vote. And so when you think about. Who, what power they should have over their own profession. Um, what they deserve, what they should be able to lead, how much their opinions matter. It's all baked in to our profession is a structural flaw in our profession that we were never given that space to lead.

And we say more about how that all manifests and where that came from throughout the different podcast themes, which. Uh, the other thing the petition does is it gives us, um, real actual positions of leadership as we remain current teachers. So if you're willing and you want, and you have a calling to say write curriculum, um, you go get that degree.

You release for part of your day, you write curriculum. Right, and if you say, for example, you have a calling and a passion for site leadership, you get your master's of Ed leadership degree, you stay teaching, you're released for part of your day to help actually need, and you're paid a leadership wage.

Because right now there are teachers who are like TOSAs teachers on special assignments that do tons of work, have extra responsibility and aren't paid, and aren't really listened to. Either. Um, so I also think that we should be released for up to two years to serve at the county, state and federal departments of education, like we need actual, current teachers leading teaching in America, and to keep having to say this.

Is bizarre because if you are in another professional field like yours, for example, or you're a doctor or a lawyer, you're like, wait, what? Teachers don't have a national governing board. You don't set the standards of ethics. You don't make these decisions. Uh, no, we don't. But if you talk to teachers in our world, they're like, what?

We should have our own national governing world. Really? That's insane. That could never happen. Because it's so bizarre, the idea to have it, and I'm not the first person to bring this up, educational scholar, Diane Ravitch has brought this up. Um, I think I'm the only person that's tried to take it this far and get it really done, but I'm definitely not the first person to notice.

So, okay, so there's a petition. How many signatures do you need? What is it that you. That needs to happen. I don't, I really don't know anything about the process of, of how you get it from where you are right now. Yeah. To where it can, it can go. Well, or how to get it there. We as teachers need to decide exactly what it looks like and we need to work very closely with Congress.

But the first step is to compel Congress to start. Right? Right. So we need a hundred thousand signatures. It will go to the K 12 subcommittee in Congress and listen, I know this may be and that exists. Yes, it exists. Yes. Okay. And I know this current iteration of Congress maybe isn't particularly open to this change, but they will cha, they will move out and other people will move in and this will remain, it will remain through, uh.

Uh, partisan politics through using slandering, the US Department of Ed because it's real. And by the way, I didn't use one of those cringey, uh, petition maker platforms. It is totally main independent. Nobody is going to ask you for money. Nobody is going to sell or share your information. If you go to, uh, k12 confidential.com, that is k12 confidential.com, and you click on the petition, it is a simple form in which you acknowledge that you are over 18, which state you live in, your, your, your alignment with the goal of.

Creating a K 12 educator governing board and your consent to allow your information to be shared with the K 12 subcommittee and only the K 12 subcommittee. And who, who is running that subcommittee right now? Do you know? It is shifting here and there. I, I don't wanna mention their names. Um, um. I don't wanna, I don't wanna throw No.

Yeah. I'm not trying, I, I not out of malice. It's more just curiosity of it. It, I didn't even realize that there was a K 12 subcommittee. I didn't realize that it exists and it, and is that, that just transcends, it's always there. It's not like it can be undone. It exists. It will, it will continue to exist and, and it continues to exist.

And again, those people are not. Current or prior educators, so, right. So, but what is the, what committee is it coming out of? You said it's a subcommittee, so who oversees this subcommittee? There is a larger committee that is overall of education and then the subcommittee just for K 12 education. Okay. So there's an education committee mm-hmm.

In, in Congress. And it has nothing to do with the board of Educ or the Yeah, the. You know, I'm not familiar with what their involvement is with the US Department of Education. Department of Education, sorry. So what Well, okay, so the head of the US Department of Education is a, um, is a presidential appointment.

Right? It's a member. It's a member of the ca Yeah, it's a member of the cabinet. So, um, I'm, and, and then of course the members on the K 12 subcommittee are elected officials by their local municipalities. Right. So they're, they're not. In the same realm. Like they don't necessarily have a aligned goals, but the point here is, is that none of them have the knowledge that they need to do their jobs effectively, nor the humility to know that they don't.

So we need to exist as a K 12 educator governing board in order to ensure that relevant, um, information is being used to make important decisions about education in America today. That's really what it amounts to. And does the, and I I have no idea if this is in future episodes or there's a whole conversation.

'cause the only thing I have heard about is that the Department of Education, has it been removed, has it been cut? Has it, I mean, the idea of defunding and dismantling the US Department of Ed has come up and as, as I said at the top of this episode, I am glad the current administration is. Uh, drawing attention to the problems in K 12 education.

Yeah, they've been hidden and ignored forever, and that is not a political issue. As I say, over and over and over again, all the messes that we talk about, particularly in the first mess that I unpack, which is the teacher shortage mess, red, blue, and purple states. Are all equally culpable here. Yeah.

There's not a lot of data that proves that blue states are doing a lot better than red states. It, it's just a bipartisan problem. K 12 education. I mean, there's some stuff that kind of aligns a little bit, but oftentimes no. And there are bizarre idiosyncratic differences. Say for example, in just in literacy rates, like in two very red counties in the same state can have radically different literacy rates.

Hmm. And it's just wild, the differences that you see. What was your original question? I, I got this. Oh, uh, the, or I think the original question was the, the purpose of this podcast is to shine the light and get people to, to sign, sign this petition. The process is you get these a hundred thousand signatures and then what?

We take it to Congress and we, you know, of course then we are actively, um. Lobbying, I guess is the word. Yeah, I guess individual members on the K 12 subcommittee, we have a full on grassroots campaign. Getting people to contact their politicians at every level of governance to compel them to bring this forward and.

You know, a lot of times as I've been working on this over the past two years, I, the feedback I was getting, you bring up all these problems. Well, what are your solutions, right? Uh, I'm just one teacher. How arrogant would it be for me to pretend I have all the answers? What we need is to create a platform for all of us to come up with those answers together, and people have said, oh, well, teachers will make mistakes.

Okay? Yes. All governing boards do. But for the love of God, we're your best hope America, and we're willing to do it. Do you really trust politicians more than us? No, they don't know what they're talking about. So the, so the early steps is just to get the a hundred thousand signatures, take it to Congress, and then contact your local, I guess, congress person?

Mm-hmm. Or specifically the members of the subcommittee. To get them to Yes. Yeah, because right now there is, there's a huge industry, a huge multi-billion dollar industry that is like a growing cancer on K 12 that is profiting. Off of, of outsiders claiming to have the answers to our problems. They sell us curriculums.

Ed tech companies, the big, big textbook, they sell frameworks on, um, behavioral intervention plans and they. Lobby and schoo the bajesus out of K 12 leaders. I mean, they go on lavish trips together. Yeah. And they, uh, line their pockets. Like, we don't have, teachers don't have the ability, we don't have access to that money.

Right. And so there's a really gross. Relationship between the for-profit ed tech, educational corporations and K 12 leaders right now. And they're doubling right now. And this is what we're gonna be unpacking in the can curriculum mess and the teacher autonomy mess are cooking up narratives that say we have the answers to these problems.

We can tell you how to address your literacy rates. We can tell you how to deal with the trauma, um, impact of trauma since COVID lockdowns. Teachers don't have the answer. We do. And they're charging an arm and a leg for it. So we have to get that gross, um, Lech, which is the, um, neoliberal for-profit industry off of K 12.

And because right now they have all the lobbyists in Congress and they are convincing everybody with their slick data that is all bogus, that what they're doing is working. Um, okay, so this, so this podcast is dedicated to, to unraveling and, and, and kind of like highlighting some of the worst of the Yeah.

What we do is The dark secrets. Yeah. The top of each theme. At the top of each theme, we're gonna do exactly what you're seeing today. A lay person in this instance, my fabulous sister. Yeah. Um, who I have great chemistry with 'cause of all the years we've known each other, um, is going to interview me to make this intelligible and, um, understandable, intelligible to the masses because engagement, we are so jargony, we have so many acronyms and it's just a lot.

Yeah. And then after that layperson interview, unpacks the 30,000 foot view. I have different experts come on and speak. More specifically with and bringing their evidence to the table. And what I really need are more teachers across the nation to come on. I need teachers from the East coast, the south. I need teachers from the Midwest, the north all over because it's so different everywhere.

I need private school, public school, charter school. I need elementary, pre-K, middle school, high school. I special ed. I need all kind of teachers to come on and talk. So what I'm asking for you to do is to go to the website, look at those themes. There's some kind of discussion if you click on 'em about kind of what we're gonna be offering.

But I want you to come on and speak because this is your platform to tell America what's really wrong and to speak for yourself. Because if you're a teacher, you know the press is not covering this, and when they do, they make a mess of it. It is up to us. It is up to us to tell our own story. And I wanna also say how much I love all K 12 teachers.

Like clearly, we all have our own politics and it's so easy to get angry at uh, each other because this is such oppressive system. I meditating on love for all K 12 teachers. This is not political. I don't care what your politics are. I don't care what you believe. If you are a teacher. I love you. Come on and I will do you right on the podcast.

I promise. I promise. Oh, you know, I just have like, I still have like really fond memories of I think nearly every primary school teacher. Growing up, I can still remember their names. I remember their, their little nuances and they were all really loving when I think back to it. Right. And so, so this is sort of like a, a shout out for, for them too.

And, and maybe this podcast will even like, make it like a cheerleader cheerleading session for teachers. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I, I do, I always like hesitate how much do I like. How much do I center the pro-democracy movement going on in our nation right now? Because it feels like it's probably. On the left only, and the people on the right don't identify with it.

Yeah. And I don't want us in that partisan space. Yeah. But I do wanna say that if we don't fix this, our abilities to effectively self-govern, continue to erode. And I kind of think maybe that's what the elites want. And I'm not talking about the right or the left. I'm talking about the wealthy elites in this nation.

The one percenters. The one percenters. They want us dumb and they want us addicted. They want us distracted. We, there are far more of us than there are of them. If you save K 12 education by centering teachers' voices, we will save our democracy. I'm not saying it's the only thing that's getting in the way of democracy.

Yeah. But it is a big part and it is a hidden cause as well. Otherwise, we're living in Idiocracy. Yes. Yeah. Get your screen Gatorade. To water the plants. Um, okay. Well, I thank you for this. I mean, I look forward to the, the future discussions on the, the specific, you know, eight to 12 specific issues that, that are at hand.

And I, I hope that, that, uh, people start signing the petition. Um, what's the website again? K12 confidential.com. Um, our next episode is going, so put it in there too. Yeah. Thank you. Our next episode is going to have a 25 year veteran teacher, my husband. Come on. Come on. And we're gonna touch upon each of the themes and um, then we're gonna switch over to the teacher shortage mess.

And the bulk of those episodes are, and these are all dropping at the same time. These first like four episodes. Are kind of dense because I, I secured a really awesome guest, the only academic in all of higher ed, who's formally decided to try to quantify he and his two other collaborators how bad the teacher shortage mess is.

And it's a little dense, but it is chilling. It is chilling and I covered it and I sent it to him, crossing my fingers and hoping he would come on two years ago. And he said he did. It was the only time anyone had covered it accurately. So yeah, he came on. Oh, and he's coming back on to talk about other stuff too.

Dr. Paul Bruno. He's the best. Oh, awesome. Yeah. Well, I look forward to watching that. Um, okay, well, any, anything else you wanna add for, for today? I just, I'm so grateful for everyone listening. K 12 teachers have boundless love for America. We are so embattled and so beleaguered, and we are losing our best people.

Help us save K 12 education. Give us a little bit of time. Listen to our evidence. We have a solution. This is fixable. You just gotta let us do it.

Thank you for listening. You can help this vitally important movement by signing our petition found@k12confidential.com. Liking and subscribing to our YouTube channel and following us on Instagram.