It's a Numbers Game: The Numbers Behind America’s Education Crisis: Fewer Kids, More Spending, Lower Scores
4/27/202644 mincomplete
0:00This is an iHeart Podcast.
0:02Guaranteed human. Welcome back to A Numbers Game with Ryan Gruduski.
0:06Thank you guys for being here.
0:08So I want to start the podcast by talking about last week, late last week,
0:12I went to Buck Sexton's book party.
0:14I have a copy of his book, Manufacturing Delusion.
0:18Very exciting. I got to actually meet some other members of the Buck and Clay
0:22Podcast Network like Kara Moskowitz and Lisa Booth.
0:25And that's, it was a lot of fun because you never get to see these
0:27people like in real life and we're very rarely in the same place.
0:29And obviously get to hang out with Buck.
0:31So that was wonderful. And his book, this book seems really interesting.
0:34I haven't read it yet, but I will read it and I will give you
0:36guys a full honest review.
0:40Whether Buck likes it or not, no, I'm sure it's really, really good.
0:43It sounds really well thought out as a thesis and very, very well researched.
0:48So I find that very interesting.
0:49And he wrote me the longest note inside the book.
0:54And I was like, this is not my yearbook.
0:56You don't have to say, never change, keep in touch.
0:59Like this is exhausting, but I love Buck.
1:02So I'm just making a joke, but I'm excited and I'm excited to read.
1:07I'm excited to give you guys some feedback because I know a lot of people
1:09have asked me about it.
1:11I've spoken a lot on this podcast about fertility data.
1:15And I've wrote about it in my substack, talked about social media, national and international
1:19data because, and I know that it's like kind of like a stupid line, but
1:23like the kids of today do determine the future.
1:25Not only of this country, but of the entire world.
1:30But I say it in such a way, I think a way that's different.
1:33I'm not saying it like, you know, Whitney Houston sings it.
1:35I'm saying it like some of countries, I don't think people grasp this.
1:40Some countries as we know them will not exist in the future based upon the
1:44trends that we're seeing today when it comes to birth data.
1:46The nations of my ancestry, of where my ancestors came from, 100, 200, sometimes 300
1:53years ago, predominantly Italy, Poland and Ireland, they are all in a slow motion disaster.
2:00They're not going to exist as we've known it.
2:03Ireland is betting its entire future on importing Africans.
2:08That's, I mean, it's wild when you read the data, especially in the last 20
2:13years. Something like 65 % of all growth has come from African, or not African,
2:19but third world migration. Some of it's from the Middle East.
2:22But they're saying it's going to be perfect.
2:23It's going to work just as well as current Irish populations have, even though it
2:28hasn't really worked out great in Germany and many other places.
2:32Poland just reported their Q1 2026 numbers for their birth data for the first three
2:37months of 2026. And the nation that survived Nazi invasion and Soviet occupation is dying
2:45by suicide. I don't think people really understand that.
2:48They recorded in the last three, the first three months of 2026, they recorded 112
2:54deaths and just 57 ,500 births.
3:00Almost two deaths for every one birth.
3:03And they are not alone.
3:05Italy is in horrendous shape.
3:08Italy's population is already shrinking.
3:10Italy's birth rate is down 40 % since 1985, right before I was born.
3:17And they are recording 355 ,000 births per year and 650 ,000 deaths.
3:24There's no future for these countries.
3:27They are all dying. And maybe somebody will live in those countries and those regions
3:32of the world one day, but they will not be Irish, Italian, or Polish.
3:36The world that we knew it will not exist in a very close future because
3:42they are not actually investing in that future to have children.
3:45That is a huge part of it having a culture, a nation, a fabric, a
3:50society, a religion, everything is, do you have kids to pass it along to?
3:54And we could do a million Monday morning quarterbacking of why this happened and what
4:01should have happened differently. Should they have attached the welfare state and retirement to how
4:05many kids you have? That's something that actually prevented the Soviet Union from dipping in
4:09low fertility rates. They actually had a tax on childlessness.
4:13But nonetheless, and yet still, that is something that's real.
4:18The data all bears it out.
4:20And while Europe has famously suffered from low population growth and population decline over the
4:25last few decades, they're not the only one.
4:27East Asia is way worse than Europe is.
4:31I mean, they're in horrendous shape.
4:33China, Japan, South Korea. No one's talked about this, but South Korea's actually having a
4:38baby boom. And by a baby boom, I mean, they're having 0 .8 children per
4:43woman, which is considered a high point for what it used to be.
4:47That's a baby boom. That's how bad it was in South Korea.
4:50North Korea is having tons of kids.
4:52So when you say, which country is going to have the, you know, in the
4:56battle between North and South Korea, North Korea just has to wait it out and
4:59there won't be enough South Koreans left.
5:02That's, that's just, I mean, that's really wild.
5:05Births are up 12 % in South Korea, but still that's only 0 .8.
5:08You're still talking about for every four grandparents, there is one grandchild.
5:13That's an immense population loss over three generations.
5:17But it's not those countries.
5:19I mean, those countries are the famous version.
5:20We've heard a lot about Japan for a long time.
5:22We've... a lot of Europe for a long time.
5:24Latin America is the fastest aging part of the entire world.
5:28Places like Chile, Costa Rica, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Cuba, Argentina, Brazil all have a lower
5:34fertility rate than France. The world is changing rapidly and people are deciding that children
5:42aren't part of their personal future and they don't understand the larger consequences.
5:47And though America is in a significantly better place than all those countries that I
5:51mentioned, I mean, Italy or Poland would love to be in America's position.
5:54The area of our life that it impacts us the most fast, the place that
5:59we see it the fastest changing is in education.
6:03Education is a big part of our local and state government.
6:07It's a huge job creator.
6:09It's a huge chunk of the budget, of every state's budget.
6:14According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 11 states spend more than 30 % of their
6:18budget on just K through 12 education.
6:20That's not any higher education.
6:22Just K through 12, Nevada, Texas, Vermont, Idaho, Indiana, Michigan, Kansas, New Jersey, Washington, Alabama,
6:29and Utah. More than one in three dollars goes to K through 12 education.
6:35But a number of those states and others are seeing massively shrinking birth rates, which
6:40means less kids. Less kids means less students.
6:43Less students means less bodies in those classrooms that they're spending all this money on.
6:47It means less jobs for teachers, less jobs for administrators, less purchasing power.
6:51That's also in rural areas, the number one employer.
6:55And it means the less need for these buildings, less need for a lot of
6:58the things that money is going to.
7:00But it comes at a time when teachers unions are flexing tremendous political influence and
7:07saying you can't fire in at us.
7:08You can't close any schools down.
7:10We can't experience shrinkage or massive layoffs.
7:13And the issue of reducing education spending is as popular as changing Social Security and
7:20Medicare. I mean, if you are hit with an advertisement of someone, a politician cut
7:24school education spending, they are, voters are horrified.
7:28So you have this, and something is weird in education.
7:33Like, this is the one thing that people don't think we spend like any money
7:35on. People think we spend no money on education in this country.
7:38It's bizarre. It's totally divorced from what we're actually spending money on.
7:43People think we spend money on like just bombs or foreign aid or whatnot when
7:46education is so much of all local government spending, regardless of how many kids are
7:51in the classroom. But it creates a big problem.
7:54Unions who have a lot of political influence and voters don't want smaller education budgets.
8:00And yet there are less students to teach.
8:03So where exactly does this money go?
8:06And in my experience of looking at education for the last five years, they go
8:09to administrators and contractors and DEI officers and new technology in the classroom and a
8:15bunch of nonsense. All of this isn't some, you know, cataclysmic event we're looking at
8:21years in the future about school closures.
8:23This is happening right now.
8:25This isn't happening like when the sun burns out in a billion years.
8:28This is happening right now.
8:312007 was the year that the U .S.
8:34recorded the most amount of births ever.
8:364 ,316 ,233. According to the CDC, that was the biggest number of children ever
8:44born in this country. And those babies all graduated high school last year.
8:52And every year since has been a smaller and smaller and smaller population.
8:57According to the CDC, their initial data found that there was 3 ,606 ,000 children
9:02born in 2025. That's down 710 births from 2007, a 16 .5 % decline in
9:1118 years. 710 ,000 fewer children and deaths.
9:17710 ,000 fewer Chromebooks needed, textbooks needed, teachers needed, teaching A's needed, all of that
9:24stuff, everything attached to bodies in classrooms has to be reduced.
9:30By 2031, which is only five years away, and that makes me as nauseous as
9:35it probably makes you. But in 2031, California, by 2031, California is expected to lose
9:4115 .7 % of their entire student population.
9:4715 .7%. There will be fewer kids in schools in California in 2031 than Texas
9:56had in 2019. According to bellwether .org, they're not the only states to, you know,
10:02experience this. California, obviously, the land of fruits and nuts when it comes to their
10:06politicians. They have a bunch of issues, affordability crisis and a million other things that
10:10make it less family friendly.
10:12But across the country, school enrollment is expected to decline from 50 .8 million to
10:1846 .8 million. Eight states are going to see California -level double -digit decline.
10:26California, New Mexico, Hawaii, Mississippi, Louisiana, Oregon, West Virginia, and New York.
10:32Some of those are expensive states.
10:33Some of those are cheap states.
10:34Some of those are blue states.
10:36Some of those are red states.
10:37You know what they all have in common.
10:38No one's having kids. A lot, a total of 40 states and Washington, D .C.
10:46are going to experience student population decline by 2031.
10:50only states to buck the trend are Florida, Alabama, South Carolina, Tennessee, the Dakotas, Montana,
10:59Idaho, and Wyoming. That's it.
11:01And I mean, Wyoming, the Montana, the Dakotas, Montana, Idaho, relatively small states, relatively small
11:08populations to see increasing children.
11:12In other words, you don't need to have a lot of more kids in the
11:15room to see a population increase their student population.
11:18But that's what's happened. So how are states reacting?
11:22How are politicians reacting to this trend that will only get worse before it gets
11:27better? Because it's not like one immigrants don't have as many kids as they used
11:31to have. People have this vision that immigrants are all having 20 kids and living
11:34in a in a, you know, in a railroad apartment in New York.
11:37That's not true. It doesn't happen anymore.
11:39And most of these countries that we import a lot of people from, they don't
11:43have kids either. India, China, South America, Latin America, unless you're talking about sub -Saharan
11:49Africa or parts of the Middle East.
11:51No, you're talking about below replacement fertility levels across the world at a faster and
11:56faster rates. Parts of Africa are going to get there.
11:58So how are they going to react if they're not seeing immigration booms of children
12:04and native born children are declining?
12:06They're just changing the rules.
12:07In New York state, my home state, state I know a lot of the politics
12:12of, the state government mandated smaller classroom sizes as a gift to the teachers unions
12:18so that we don't have to fire teachers, which, I mean, ultimately, they're going to
12:25have to do. We're just all kind of, you know, playing a game where we
12:29can pretend that things are going to change, where we can just, you know, circle
12:32the drain over and over again with state budgets.
12:36There's a giant boom to the education lobby and the technology lobby and saying you
12:41can't cut us despite being billions of dollars in the hole, despite a state that
12:46is seeing financial strains beyond imagination.
12:50They're saying just don't cut education despite a increasingly falling student population.
12:56New York City lost 12 percent of all students since 2020.
13:01Yet between 2016 and 2022, education spending increased by almost 33 percent.
13:09Mayor Mondani is has a city that's almost six billion dollars in the hole, and
13:15he is increasing education by eight percent while there's less kids to educate.
13:20One point six billion dollars, according to the New York Post, is going to finding
13:24more teachers when the classrooms are getting depopulated.
13:28This is insanity. This is it.
13:32And also, it speaks to Democrats who can't even have coherent conversations about family formation
13:39and what makes people want to have a family.
13:42They're bad on the affordability issue.
13:44They are they will not speak honestly about family formation.
13:48Liberals more than conservatives do not want to have kids.
13:51They view them as bad for the environment.
13:53All this other nonsense that is just it goes into their like culture of death
13:58that they have around the idea of children and family.
14:02And it's ultimately going to impact their most favored people, public sector union workers.
14:10And they're just figuring out different ways to screw over the taxpayer so long as
14:15they possibly can, just not to hurt their giant block of voters, which is the
14:20unions. Declining fertility has a lot of ramifications, political, economical, cultural.
14:27There's a million things going on.
14:29But the tip of the spear is education because those kids go to class before
14:34they get a job. They go to school before they do many other things that
14:38the society feels an impact for.
14:40And this calls into question about what states are going to do eventually.
14:46There's only so there's only I mean, are they going to make classroom sizes that
14:51are as small as like Netflix shows episodes like eight per class?
14:55That's it. In order to keep it a teacher employed?
14:58Are we going to end up in that place?
15:01Because something's got to give eventually.
15:03And I don't think that people even realize that that due date of something's got
15:08to give is coming faster than they ever expected.
15:11And this will never trickle up to college enrollment.
15:14This will be a myriad of other issues.
15:17This will have tremendous impacts across the board.
15:22And I don't think that people understand how many numbers are being played around with
15:27to make sure that teachers unions, especially and school administrators and all the rest do
15:32not feel the impact of what a lot of family formation policies have failed, especially
15:39on liberal policies. With me on today's episode is Mark Porter McGee.
15:43He is an education expert.
15:44He's a nonprofit education. We're going to talk about all this and so much more.
15:47Stay tuned. With me on today's episode is Mark Porter McGee.
15:50He is the founder of 50 Ken, a nonprofit organization which seeks to reform education
15:55policy. Mark, thanks for being here.
15:57Thanks for having me on.
15:57I'm excited to be here.
15:58So from the beginning of the show, I talked a lot about changing demographics in
16:03the sense that Americans are having fewer children, especially from compared to like a decade
16:08and two decades ago, for sure.
16:11Less children means less students on a macro trend.
16:15How does that affect education?
16:17So. It's a huge issue in education.
16:19So you could imagine in some other parts of our economy, you know, in the
16:23more private sector, businesses kind of go up and down.
16:27They can move around. If, you know, people aren't eating a Five Guys burger in
16:30D .C., they can they can shift their resources elsewhere.
16:33But the education system is so local.
16:35It's so driven by the government dynamics in a particular town that when you see
16:40a drop of 10 or 20 percent of students, it can create a huge crisis
16:45in the system. Yeah, especially in rural communities where or or low density populations where
16:51local education is the number one employer as well.
16:54That's a big part of it.
16:57And when you're in a when you might be in a school district that has
17:00only six, seven, eight, nine kids in a year, the amount of resources being poured
17:06to keep those schools alive become very tenuous.
17:10And that's and that becomes a problem within itself.
17:13Obviously, there's an issue with urban schools as well.
17:16And for the first time ever, we've seen public schools advertise to ask parents to
17:23send their children there. And if you're a parent and you go on Instagram, you're
17:26flooded with school advertisements from private schools.
17:28I mean, it's constantly. Does the does this eventually help or hurt kids in the
17:33sense that schools need to market to parents to send their kids there?
17:37And at the same time, there are fewer of them that eventually there'll be fewer
17:42of them as some close.
17:43Right. So I think it you know, it's interesting.
17:46There's been some research that suggests the growth of private school programs where public money
17:51is made available to parents to choose where to go, including private schools, does help
17:56elevate the performance of the public schools that are now experiencing greater competition.
18:02So there's some positive effect there.
18:04At the same time, we saw with the growth of the charter school movement, when
18:08a charter school opened near a Catholic school, for example, that Catholic school is much
18:13more likely to close. So I think the short answer is it benefits competition benefits
18:18parents, except when it gets to a point where you're removing choices.
18:22And then as a parent, you might not have as many options as you want
18:26to have. That's interesting. Why did so school choice makes public schools better, but charter
18:32schools, which are publicly funded, actually makes private schools worse.
18:36Why is that? It doesn't necessarily make the schools worse, but it can lead to
18:42an enrollment crisis, for example, in a Catholic school.
18:47Catholic schools in particular are running on thinner margins and a little more susceptible if
18:54they lose enrollment to closing.
18:56So in an ideal world, what we'd be giving all parents is what the wealthy
19:00have now, which is a set of choices to find the right school for your
19:03kid. And what we need to figure out is what's the funding mechanism that actually
19:08promotes a diversity of options for parents, no matter where you look.
19:13Do we have an example of where that kind of option works or it's being
19:17done currently? I mean, there's a lot of school choice programs in different states.
19:20Yeah. So I think like one city that we've looked to in that our survey
19:25data and a lot of research has pointed to as this working quite well is
19:29Washington, D .C. So if you haven't checked in on D .C.
19:32in a while, I think back in the 90s, it was sort of notorious for
19:35having just a kind of massive government services.
19:39I was at college in the 90s.
19:41Your trash wasn't getting picked up.
19:42We had to boil our water because like water treatment wasn't working.
19:46And it's just completely transformed itself.
19:49And on the education side, you see a really balanced system.
19:53So about half the schools in the city are charter, half are public.
19:57Both have seen performance increase.
20:00There's a whole bunch of nonprofits involved in providing services.
20:04Incomes have gone up. So there's a lot about that dynamic that works.
20:08Now, obviously, it's a, you know, in some ways a special circumstance.
20:12But you've seen that same dynamic in Florida, you know, which is a whole state
20:15where the private school sector has gone up.
20:19Public schools are also doing well, and not just in terms of performance, but enrollment.
20:24So part of it is to make yourself a magnet for families.
20:28So the more family friendly you are, the more options you give families, you can
20:32get families to consider moving on.
20:34Some places that are less family friendly, like my home city of New York City,
20:37we have seen a tremendous drop in schools.
20:41I mean, it's over 12 percent in just five years.
20:43But per capita school spending is increasing.
20:48I mean, it's over 40 ,000.
20:49I think it's $42 ,000 per pupil.
20:53And there's a lot of policies that they're doing to make this happen.
20:56For instance, they're trying to make sure the classrooms are smaller, that they are trying
21:00to make sure that there's more technology in the classroom and that there's more administrators
21:07and special ed teachers and all the rest of it.
21:09And it's essentially a jobs program for adults.
21:13It's it's that's a lot of what and I view New York City schools, especially
21:18because there's tremendous amount of waste, tremendous amount of spending, terrible grade scores.
21:22And they are not closing schools with the pace at which the education population is
21:29is dropping. Do you do I have a good grasp on that?
21:32You do. So, yeah, there's a whole bunch of mentions to New York.
21:38Yeah. And I think you named a lot of them.
21:39So in terms of spending far and away, the highest spending in the country.
21:43We did a poll of.
21:4523 ,000 parents, where we did something a little unique.
21:50We asked them, how much do you think your public school system spends per pupil
21:55on schools? And then we told them how much.
21:58Oh, this is what they say.
21:59Yeah. New York parents underestimated how much is spent on public schools more than any
22:05other state. They underestimated by more than $10 ,000.
22:09So they're not seeing it in the classroom, right?
22:13And I think this is the great risk of increased spending, is you can increase
22:17spending and never see the difference in terms of kids.
22:21They don't get more tutoring.
22:23They don't get more extracurriculars.
22:25They don't get better instruction.
22:27And that is, I think New York is a real cautionary tale of what happens
22:32when you increase spending without any other reforms.
22:34Well, not to make it so, the podcast, so New York City -centric, I just,
22:40I've lived here my whole life, and a lot of my friends work in the
22:43school system. And schools now have like four assistant principals per school.
22:49There's a million administrators, a million guidance counselors, and very little, very little that's going
22:58towards the actual betterment of the kids as far as being able to do the
23:01most basic things. Also, the number of second, English as a second language speakers are
23:06in schools. It's tremendous. I mean, that's just one little caveat of it.
23:10But so, I mean, there are a number of decent grammar schools or primary schools
23:17in New York in different parts of the city.
23:20However, unless your child goes to a specialized high school in the city, you almost
23:25absolutely need to send to private.
23:28There's, I would never send a kid.
23:31There's maybe, unless it's a specialized school in New York City, maybe there's maybe two
23:36in the whole borough of Queens County where I would say, oh, yes, send your
23:39kid to that kind of public high school.
23:41It's going to be good for them.
23:42They're terrible. They really are.
23:43They're awful. Yeah. If you look at the NAEP scores, so the NAEP is a
23:47federally administered test that's representative sample across all 50 states.
23:52New York City and New York State have experienced some of the biggest drops in
23:56math and reading in the entire country over the past 10, 15 years.
24:00So it is, I think what you're seeing anecdotally is backed up by the data.
24:05There's a real problem with, there's just this huge divergence.
24:08Costs are going up, achievements going down.
24:11At some point, you're going to reach a breaking point and families are moving away.
24:14Like you said, New York used to have 1 .2 million public school kids.
24:18Now, I think it's down to something like 800 ,000.
24:21It's a huge problem. Let me pivot away from students' classroom sizes for a second
24:25and talk about something else.
24:26I'm super interested in when it comes to education policy.
24:28L .A. Unify, which is not a school district I'm a big fan of and
24:33my nonprofit suing them right now, they did make a really good move, in my
24:38opinion, which was about to reduce screen time for kids.
24:42And in the last five years I've been in the education space, there has been
24:46an immense pivot where during COVID, you could not get enough computers and Chromebooks and
24:53all the rest and iPads in the classroom.
24:55And now there's been an immense backlash about having everything in the classroom, that technology
25:00has necessarily improved education as a whole.
25:02What are some trends we're seeing in education when it comes to technology in the
25:06classroom? Yeah. It's a great question.
25:09You know, it's funny, before COVID, my organization, 50Cam, had partnered with the National Alliance
25:14of Public Charter Schools and with the authorizing body for charter schools to put out
25:20a report looking at online charter schools and calling out that there seemed to be
25:25something about online education that wasn't working and that we needed to pay extra attention
25:30to anyone who wanted to run an online school to make sure kids were actually
25:33learning. And so when we went into COVID and all these kids were being put
25:38on Chromebooks, my antenna went up and I was very concerned that we would see
25:43what we saw in that small section of charter schools spread across the country.
25:46And that's exactly what we saw.
25:49We saw two things. One, achievement went way down.
25:52And the longer you were out of school, the longer achievement declined, the bigger the
25:58achievement declined. We also saw a huge divergence.
26:00So wealthy kids did pretty well.
26:02Low -income kids and kids who were already behind fell off a cliff.
26:06So you've seen an explosion in educational inequality.
26:09So that's a huge problem.
26:11So what happens after we bought all these Chromebooks and we bring kids back to
26:15school? Well, now we're using them every day.
26:17Why? Is it working? Not really.
26:20Not in most cases. So that's like that path dependence that sometimes kicks in.
26:25You do something because you started to do it.
26:26And it takes an extraordinary amount of effort to say, let's examine this and rethink
26:31it. So you saw that in two ways.
26:33You saw a huge push that's been quite successful and we've been a part of
26:37to say, get phones out of classrooms.
26:40Get them out of schools.
26:41And you've seen a lot of states doing that.
26:43I think a majority of states now have done that.
26:44But the next wave is to look at the devices that schools are putting in
26:48kids' hands and say, why does my second grader have a Chromebook?
26:52You know, why is my first grader coming home singing jingles from a commercial they
26:57learned on YouTube pre -roll on an iPad you gave them when I'm trying to
27:01keep them off screens? And I've never seen parents more fired up about this issue.
27:06Yeah. And the thing is, and this is what people really don't understand about education
27:12policy. And this is what people really don't understand about education policy.
27:13been my experience talking to administrators and teachers and parents for the last five years.
27:19It's oftentimes not the teacher that is pushing a lot of this.
27:24What happens so often is corporations go to these conventions, speak to superintendents and principals
27:32and high up administrators or even in the state government administrators and say, you're going
27:38to do magic with my product and please give me this contract, this local or
27:44state contract, and I will get all this stuff in and you're going to see
27:47your grades boost up. And they're just they're wind and dine.
27:51And that kind of thing that we see oftentimes that kind of lobbying like in
27:54Washington, it absolutely happens in local government when it comes to education.
27:58And they don't tell them that most of this technology is completely untested.
28:02Or if it is tested, it's tested among kids who have super high incomes, come
28:08from intact families with high IQs with lots of money and lots of resources.
28:13So they're testing that's not the mean for the average student.
28:16That's what we're seeing with these new schools where you like you have an AI
28:20teacher for one hour a day and then you like build your own business at
28:22nine years old. It's such a joke.
28:25It's not the mean student who's experiencing this.
28:28And and by the time it is tested on a broad basis, you are the
28:36damage is done for years of students.
28:38Like, I mean, it takes five years to really see an outcome.
28:41And that's also what we saw with I mean, this is a completely sidebar.
28:44But that's why we what we saw with reducing phonics in classrooms, they were like,
28:49absolutely, it's going to work great getting rid of phonics.
28:51And it worked terribly. And it took years to usher back.
28:55It's still not even ushered back in some places.
28:58But that's the what we saw with technology.
29:00Yeah, I think that's exactly right.
29:03Exactly right. So I think there's two dimensions to it.
29:05One is the public education system is a $1 trillion market in America.
29:12So that could be very appealing to businesses that are looking to grow that have
29:17invested in technology. And when they make a sale, it's more like they're lobbying, right?
29:23Because they have to go in and convince the government to hire them.
29:27The parents aren't involved, the kids aren't involved.
29:29So you could imagine outside of that confines, some innovative tools and approaches that parents
29:35want to take part in.
29:36That's great. And they're seeing it in real time.
29:38But when a system decides to do it, it's often done in behind closed doors
29:44in a way that we don't understand.
29:46So that's one thing. The other thing is the state of education research is terrible.
29:51It is very hard to do high quality research.
29:53So most of these programs have very little evidence, just kind of a thin brochure
29:58kind of set of statistics.
29:59And there was a recent study in Nature that looked at all sorts of studies
30:05and they tried to reproduce what they had done.
30:07The only field that had no successful reproductions of its research was the education field.
30:14So I think we have to be very skeptical of the claims made around these
30:17tools. Okay. Last question is a number of states, especially in the deep South, have
30:22seen tremendous gains when it comes to reading skills, especially fourth and third grade reading.
30:28And they are they spend far less per pupil than other states do.
30:33But they have yet done incredible things, especially for low income, marginalized students, black students.
30:40What could we be learning from the deep South, especially in these very progressive cities
30:45in the California and New York and New Jersey and other places that are seeing
30:49those same students fall through the cracks that they've been falling through for years?
30:53Yeah. So it's a great question.
30:55And it's something we've been beating the drum on.
30:58And I've been surprised by how much pushback we get.
31:01I think we live in an age where if you live in the, you know,
31:03the Northeast and blue states, you're not thinking about looking south.
31:07They're in a governor's race in New Jersey.
31:10This was brought up and the gubernatorial candidate was like, I have nothing to learn
31:14from Mississippi or Louisiana. We're in Louisiana.
31:18We have a state team there.
31:19Cade Brumley, their superintendent is amazing.
31:22I think there's a few things going on there.
31:24Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee. One is you mentioned phonics.
31:29I think the science of reading is alive and well in those Southern states, and
31:32it just simply works. So that's one thing.
31:36Two, they never gave up on testing.
31:38They use it really smartly.
31:40There's a lot of parent buy -in in our poll.
31:42We found a lot of support for it.
31:44So they're using tests to diagnose kids.
31:46They're also providing services. So if you fall behind in Tennessee, your kid falls behind,
31:50they're not reading on track, they get a tutor.
31:53That's something we pushed in Louisiana as well.
31:55And it's been very successful.
31:58And I think it hasn't become a partisan issue there.
32:02You know, everyone is bought into this idea.
32:04If we're going to succeed as a state, we need to do better in education.
32:08And they've just been, you know, year after year coming back and doing more.
32:11Okay. Where can people go to read more of your stuff, read what you've been
32:14putting out there in your nonprofit?
32:15So our website is 50can .org.
32:18So 50can .org. We have all of our reports there.
32:22You can also sign up for our newsletter, which we send out twice a month.
32:25We kind of call it the roundup.
32:27We bring together all the different resources.
32:29If you want to brave X, I'm on there at Mark Porter McGee.
32:35So you can follow me there.
32:36And I tweet out a lot of education research and other news.
32:41articles you might want to read yeah your your twitter is great so mark thanks
32:44for me on this podcast i really appreciate it yeah thank you now it's time
32:47for the ask me anything segment if you want to be part of the ask
32:49me anything segment email me ryan at numbers game podcast .com that's ryan and numbers
32:54plural numbers game podcast .com my favorite part of the show i love getting these
32:57questions first one comes to my buddy tristan he says i read these questions ahead
33:03of time you guys are very fiery uh in the last couple weeks he says
33:07how do we get rid of joe gruters he's the chairman of the rnc not
33:11sure why we didn't spend at all in the virginia dem gerrymander amendment especially since
33:16it's close to most people expected so they're saying they did spend money they're saying
33:19they spent 40 million dollars i kind of don't know where that money went i
33:23don't think that it went to the grassroots because the grassroots are saying they didn't
33:26get the money the number one job of the rnc chairman i want to say
33:30is people always blame the rnc chairman when anything goes wrong their number one job
33:34is to raise money and joe gruters is doing a good job raising money so
33:38i don't know who makes which calculations for which which decision especially with which elections
33:44but joe's primary job is to raise money and in that case he's doing a
33:49good job you may not like everything that's happening but i don't know i i've
33:53joe will sometimes like tweet tweets of mine joe gruters will like tweets of mine
33:58and they will be like the spiciest tweets imaginable i'm like okay what is joe
34:02gruters uh is he just liking everything or is he going after the really spicy
34:07ones um okay next question comes from fletcher he said i imagine in the next
34:1210 years or so the baby boomers will start to die off with that are
34:16gen x going to be as crazy as the boomers are we going to get
34:19a break from a generation before we get to the hell on earth that will
34:23be geriatric millennial theater again oh fletcher you are on fire um so gen xers
34:34are i mean the most republican generation that there is uh but baby boomers do
34:40vote more republican than democrat i think the question is do millennials get to a
34:44majority i mean millennials increase their support of republicans a lot in the last election
34:50cycle um but they didn't break 50 yet so do they break 50 percent or
34:55are they going to be more like their baby boomer parents which are more liberals
34:59i mean there is a generational flow of which generation raised you where you see
35:04a lot of breaks for politics i think that's why we're seeing a lot of
35:08especially young white gen zers um young white gen z men especially vote more republican
35:15they had gen x parents who are more conservative um uh so yeah i i
35:21don't know i i uh i think gen x's are pretty cool i like the
35:25movies that gen x has made um but yeah theater kid my fellow millennial theater
35:32kids um they are a bane on everybody's existence i don't know what to tell
35:39you i don't know if i don't know if we're gonna have that long of
35:41a break from them though but we might just skip over the gen xers entirely
35:44that would be the most gen x thing in the world if we never had
35:47a gen x present or anything like that because that's just how how we are
35:51uh gen x gets forgotten constantly but they are good people in my mind uh
35:55i love love early 90s everything okay next question comes from jim he says since
36:00the senate can make their own rules why can't you do why can't they pass
36:03the save america act if two major national polling companies have data that's from statistically
36:08significant polls showing that republicans democrats independents support an issue with 65 of each group
36:14over six months then 60 votes is not required um i guess is the rule
36:19i guess they want them to pass i know the wording would need to be
36:21tweaked but this would be the way the republican senate is responding to what citizens
36:25want without nuking the filibuster yeah i mean polls could be made to say anything
36:32i mean you'd have to they're not going to rely on polling right because you
36:36can make you could have democrats sponsor polls republican sponsor polls to kind of get
36:40whatever you want depending on how it's asked i wouldn't rely on that here's the
36:45problem with the whole nuking the filibuster thing even if you were there are 53
36:50republicans you have obviously susan collins who's in a blue state so i give her
36:55all the grace in the world for voting independently but she's good most of the
36:57time you have lisa murkowski who has no excuse she's from alaska she votes terribly
37:01she votes against the party constantly you have john curtis over in is that who
37:06is the senator from from utah one of the centers from utah i think it's
37:09curtis um terrible terrible terrible votes terrible terrible terrible terrible awful awful awful awful um
37:15he votes with democrats and breaks republicans on big things all the time you have
37:20mitch mcconnell who was still there and mitch mcconnell likes institutional republican stuff you have
37:25um yeah you have mcconnell you have murkowski you have you have rand paul who's
37:30very independent and does his own thing i think rand paul's the most independent senator
37:35um when it comes to big votes so yeah you don't have the votes that's
37:41that's the problem that's the problem the whole like let's nuke the filibuster thing even
37:45if you did republicans wouldn't have the votes for a lot of the stuff that
37:49they want they just wouldn't and that's why it makes no sense for them to
37:53nuke the filibuster for a bill that can't pass um and it can't pass because
37:58of people like because red states and this is the problem with red states red
38:02states elect a lot of weak republicans it is so frustrating and that that that
38:08that that that that that that that that that that that that that that that
38:08that that that that that that that that that that that that that that that
38:08that that that that that that that that that that that that that that that
38:08that that that that that that that that that that that that that that that
38:08that that that that that that that that that that that that that that that
38:08that that that that that that that that that that that that that that that
38:08that that that that that that that that that that that that that that that
38:08that that that that that that that that that that that that that that that
38:08that that that that that that that that that that that that that that that
38:08that that that that that that that that that that that that that that that
38:08that that that that that that that that that that that that that that that
38:08that that that that that that that that that that that that that that that
38:08that that that that that that that that that that that that that that that
38:08that that that that that that that that that that that that that that that
38:08that that that that that that that I think.
38:09not all of them. Some are very good, but a lot of them do a
38:12pretty bad job when it comes to vetting candidates.
38:15Okay, last message for the podcast.
38:17This comes from Patrick. He says, I'm a big fan of the show.
38:20You answered one of my questions on the podcast before and while a while ago
38:23when you wrote an article about the failures of George W.
38:26Bush's presidency based on my request via Twitter.
38:29I appreciate the interaction. My question relates to your recent episode on the Columbine school
38:34shooting. Have you ever read the book Why Meadow Died by Andrew Pollack?
38:37He's the father of a girl who was murdered at Marjory Stoneman Douglas school shooting.
38:41If you've read it, I want to know your thoughts regarding the claims of the
38:45book that the shooting was largely a result of red flags being ignored and excused.
38:50I was also wondering what your thoughts were on policy proposal suggestions.
38:54Okay, I read the book a long time ago, so I'm going to go off
38:58of memory. I haven't read it since it came out.
39:01We had the same publisher, Andrew and I, and I met him in person once
39:05and he was very, very nice.
39:07Um, this is, it's not that the red flags were going ignored necessarily.
39:13It's that there were, because of Obama, Obama's, um, education secretary, something called a dear
39:22colleague letter where they said, we need to end the quote school to prison pipeline.
39:29It completely made up liberal nonsensical theory on kids going from school to prison.
39:35And because primarily, um, people were getting arrested were black and Latino, black and Latinos
39:41have higher portions of violent crime per capita than whites and Asians do.
39:44It had nothing to do with like the school.
39:47It was so nonsensical, but because everything's about equity and racial equity, we had to
39:52experiment with more utter nonsense from the left.
39:55The thing that they insisted in the book was that because the shooter was Latino,
40:02I forget his last name was Ortiz or something like that, but I know he
40:05was Latino because he was Latino, uh, Florida at the time, which did have a
40:10Republican governor. Florida was not even making referrals of bad behavior to the police.
40:18There was no red flags.
40:19Florida has, I don't, I don't, they still have red flags laws, but they did
40:22at the time. Florida has red flag laws.
40:26Florida has laws to prevent a crazy person from owning a gun, which I mean,
40:31Florida, insert your Florida man joke here, but they had, they had all these measures
40:37about trying to prevent gun ownership from crazy.
40:40Maybe it wasn't in there yet.
40:41And it was after stone.
40:42I may be getting my timeline confused, but there was some laws that would have
40:46prevented had he shown and exhibited signs of bad behavior, of violent behavior, of violent
40:52threats. They were never taken to the police or taken to the next level because
40:57the education apparatus was more concerned with trying to prevent black and Latinos from going
41:03to jail. And they were concerned about making sure violent people were caught.
41:07Um, I will say I did a lot of school board elections over in, uh,
41:12Florida. There was one school district.
41:14I think it was Indian river.
41:16I believe allegedly, I'm pretty sure it's Indian river where they had a policy where
41:22they had, if they were going to suspend a white kid, they also had to
41:26suspend, or they were going to suspend a black or Latino kid.
41:29They also had to suspend a white kid because it had to be equitable numbers
41:32of suspension by race. And so, because blacks and Latinos were being suspended at higher
41:38rates, they either suspended more white kids or spend less black and Latino kids to
41:42make sure everything was racially equitable.
41:44It was, I believe I might be getting in the district wrong.
41:46I'll ask one of my, um, education people afterwards about the actual number, but I
41:51believe I'm correct. And about the place.
41:53I know that I know the policy I am correct on.
41:55Um, it is, it was insane.
41:57Like the racial equity stuff happened was going on way before George Floyd.
42:01It made things so much more worse, but they were trying to make absolutely everything
42:04equally equitable. And Obama did a lot of that stuff.
42:07And by saying, you can't, we have to stop the road, the prison to school
42:11pipeline or sorry, school to prison pipeline.
42:13Rather, uh, we are going to just not enforce any rules around, uh, black Latinos
42:18because we want to make sure they don't go to jail.
42:20Uh, stupid, stupid, stupid. I do believe that Andrew Pollack was correct when he was
42:24talking about that. That is also what we saw partially in Columbine, uh, not to
42:28the same degree. Obviously both kids were white.
42:30They had intact families and all the rest of it.
42:31But the fact that there was red flag after red flag, after red flag, and
42:36both the police ignored it.
42:37And more importantly, the parents ignored it, um, and didn't do the job of parenting,
42:42which they should have. Um, that's why people got away from it.
42:46And I find so often when we see these horrendous mass shootings, it, it's so
42:52rarely is it the people you're like, I could have never seen this happening.
42:56So rarely. Uh, so, you know, a lot of, this is sad, but true.
43:01So often it's the people you absolutely could see this happening or not you, but
43:06like people who knew that person where they're like, wow, yeah, I could, I could
43:10totally see that, that coming out.
43:12And so often the FBI is like, yeah, they were on our search watch list,
43:15but that were you watching?
43:17Why not them? I mean, what do you have to do?
43:19It's bizarre. Anyway, liked the book.
43:21Why Meadow died. I read it.
43:23I recommend it. And, um, I believe a lot of what he said.
43:26I think it was very appealing, um, or very not persuasive, not appealing.
43:30It's very persuasive book. All right.
43:32That's it for this episode.
43:33I will see you guys on Wednesday.
43:35Please like, and subscribe to this.
43:36podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts.
43:39I will talk to you guys then.
43:40Thank you. This is an iHeart Podcast.
43:46Guaranteed human.