We hear from members of the research team about the results from March’s general population poll, including answers to some new questions.
Mike McShane: Hello and welcome back to another edition of EdChoice Chats. This is Mike McShane, director of national research at EdChoice. You are joining us for another one of our monthly tracker podcasts. For those of you who may not know, we partner with the, I think they call themselves some kind of intelligence firm, basically like a polling outfit called Morning Consult, and every month we poll a nationally representative sample of Americans. Today, we’re going to be talking about our poll that we had in the field from March 15th to March 19th, 2022. We surveyed 2200 of our fellow citizens. We over-sample parents, so we make sure to have a nice big sample of them as well, so we’ll be talking about both of those. By “we,” I mean, my colleague, John Kristof. John, great to be chatting with you again
John Kristof: As always.
Mike McShane: Poll was in the field from March 15th to March 19th. Obviously, this represents a really interesting time in, honestly, it’s weird to say this, but a kind of interesting time in American history as the coronavirus really recedes, it recedes from the public consciousness, recedes, most of the restrictions that we see in places across the country have been stopped at this point, and so, I mean, a place to start where I think this shows up incredibly clearly is this question that we’ve been asking for months over a year, based on what you’ve seen, read or heard about the coronavirus outbreak so far, how comfortable are you with your child or children attending school right now? In the highest number, I think, by a country mile we have ever recorded in the middle of March, 82% of parents said that they were comfortable, that’s people who said they were very comfortable and people who said they were somewhat comfortable, that is up eight points from February, and those saying that they were uncomfortable were only 16%, down, six points from February. Is this it, John? Is this sucker in the rear-view mirror?
John Kristof: There have been so many times we have asked that question in the past couple years that it feels so dangerous to say anything.
Mike McShane: I will personally hold you accountable if we have some new variant that comes out. But anyway.
John Kristof: Yeah, it is my fault. It feels that way sometimes. But I feel like I can say this, this is the kind of number that when I saw this made me feel like, okay, we are in a post-COVID phase, at least as a cultural phenomenon in the world of education, so that’s about all the caveats that I can put in there.
Mike McShane:
No, but I think that’s right. I think that’s actually the right way of talking about it.
John Kristof: Yeah, because obviously, there are still COVID cases happening in the United States and there’s still people, unfortunately, who are losing their lives to COVID in the United States, but at the same time, case numbers are as low as they were after that first wave, after that first summer of COVID, before Delta made an appearance. I don’t know enough about the phrase to say definitively we’re in the endemic stage of coronavirus, but it feels like we are kind of getting there. That’s all, even on the science side of it, because there’s also the pandemic and how it’s affected us culturally, as a phenomenon, as something that is in the public consciousness, as something that is filtering all of our public decisions. I was thinking about this yesterday. I don’t remember the last time I heard “COVID” in a non-education context or not in something that I was specifically looking at for work. That is fascinating to me because that used to be what everything was about. I like to think that I’m an aware person, so if I am suddenly like, “Wait, I haven’t heard people talk about this in a while,” I would expect to see the kind of results we see in the poll here where 82% of parents, as you say, skyrocketing above anything that we’ve seen before are comfortable sending their kids back to school. I think that’s it, I think parents have seen what they needed to see, the vast majority of them.
Mike McShane: Yeah. Look, I think the way that you phrase is the right way of looking at it. Who knows what’s going to happen with the course of the actual disease of the coronavirus and what’s going to play out there, but as we’re seeing, I mean, folks are comfortable sending their kids back to school. We can say that. We can’t really necessarily predict the future, but in this time period, people seem comfortable with their kids going back to school, as you mentioned, whether that’s because we have reached some love of immunity, that people aren’t personally afraid of folks catching the coronavirus, whether schools have instituted enough things, and we’ll talk about that in a little bit, that there’s clearly some things that schools are still doing to try and mitigate the spread of the coronavirus, and they’re comfortable with that, but some amalgam of all of those things has said that parents are comfortable. It looks as this school year comes to a close, and I think depending on where you are around the country, we’ve got another two months or so, we’re going to see the vast majority of places, things, kids are back in school relatively normally. That’s how this school year will come to a close, which is wild. I mean, if we really think back passing the two-year mark at this point, this time two years ago, I mean, there were very few schools that were operating, some then opened up to finish that year, most big-city systems and others didn’t, but yeah, looks like, at least from that schooling perspective, parents are comfortable with folks going back, and that’s going to happen. That feeds into another question that we’ve been asking for a couple months now about mask and vaccine mandates. Now that a vaccine has been approved to prevent COVID, do you think it should be mandatory or encouraged for the following groups to …? We ask about masks and vaccines or should be mandatory, should they be forced to wear masks? Should they be forced to get vaccines? Interestingly, with varying spreads of how big, definitely masks are way down, people saying masks should be mandatory. For example, teachers, teachers working in public schools in February, I think about 50% of people said masks should be mandatory, it’s down seven points, so down to 43%. Students, age five to 11, it was, I think 42% in February, down 35%, also seven points there. The vaccine mandate bits, the losses are smaller. In some cases, no change at all. I think the biggest one we saw for groups was maybe three points. Some are actually going in the other direction, which I find kind of interesting as well. It seems like that is in line with people being more comfortable with folks going back to school, masks aren’t necessary, though this idea of vaccines does seem kind of baked in. I think people who think people should be vaccinated think that they should be vaccinated, even though this particular wave is subsiding, people still think people should be vaccinated, that that doesn’t move as much whereas masks, at least it seems like in our data masks are a little bit more context-dependent, coronavirus raging, people should wear masks, coronavirus receding, it should go away, whereas vaccines seem a bit more stable. I don’t know, did you see it the same way? What do you see?
John Kristof: Those are my interpretations as well. It’s worth noting. This is basically the second month in a row. We’ve seen these kinds of drops in favor for mask mandates with essentially no change in preference for vaccine mandates. This is the first time for example, this is the first time we’ve seen a higher preference for vaccine mandates for teachers than a mask mandate. That’s also the case for students 18 and older and professors and other staff working at colleges, universities, working with young people, 18 and older. There’s two things going on here, or rather, I think there’s two different philosophies that would lead someone to support a mask or a vaccine mandate. You’re seeing this play out. People will support a mask mandate for, as you said, a context-specific reason, where there’s some kind of time-sensitive reason to minimize COVID’s spread as much as possible, so we’re going to wear masks, but maybe some of those people don’t view that as a permanent need, but a context-specific need, whereas I think there’s another philosophy out there that vaccines are part of a routine and part of an expectation that we need to have. That goes along with the reasoning that part of reasons case numbers are as low as they are in now is because we’ve gotten vaccination rates as high as they have been, so we need to keep encouraging that to keep numbers down so that we don’t need to wear masks again. That is at least a prominent philosophy. There are a lot of schools and universities out there that require different kinds of vaccinations. Already, I know that there is a popular philosophy that you could incorporate COVID vaccines into those sets of requirements, and so you can still hold that philosophy and still think that COVID is not a major enough issue right now to warrant mask mandates. Case numbers can continue to go down and you would still have that philosophy. Long story short, I think we’re seeing something play out, like you mentioned earlier, Mike, that there are a decent number of people in the United States that view masks as time-sensitive or context-specific, whereas there’s a philosophy about how we should view vaccines. It’s worth noting, too, that the group of people who believe that vaccine should be encouraged, but not mandatory, also are not shrinking, so that speaks to you to whatever your philosophy about COVID vaccines are staying stable, so if you’re a person who thinks that vaccines are really important, but you aren’t comfortable with making someone do it to attend school or to go to their job, chances are you still feel the same about that now as you did when Omicron was rampant or COVID cases were higher, it’s just kind of baked into how you view these kinds of decisions.
Mike McShane: I agree with all of that. There’s one number in our polling that still kind of perplexes me how it sits with all the other numbers. Everything we’ve said, I think, thus far has followed a pretty clear trajectory, right? Cases declining, people don’t think you have to wear mask as much, people are more comfortable with their kids going back to school, makes sense, makes sense, make sense. But we ask this question, in the last month, have any of your children had to quarantine because of a coronavirus outbreak? Then we ask people, “Do you think this has been disruptive?” Of course, if you’ve been following our polling at all, obviously, huge majorities of parents who’ve had their kids quarantined have said it’s been hugely disruptive, not surprisingly. But 28% of parents who responded to our poll said that at least one of their kids has been quarantined. That seems to me to be a huge number, like one in four American school children have been quarantined in the last month. That strikes me as wild, and as parents are saying, super disruptive, but not this kind of return to normalcy and not this kind of… I think if my kid had to quarantine, I would be thinking like, “Oh, wow. Maybe this is still, I don’t know, maybe they think that it’s unnecessary, and it’s just a policy that folks have.” But I guess that’s the one number that still stands out to me is like a major intervention that schools are doing to try and mitigate the spread of the coronavirus, forcing kids to not come in, and so more than one in four American schoolchildren identified in that. I guess that would be mid-February to mid-March that was happening. All of this stuff that we’ve said is like, “School going back to normal, school’s going back to normal, school’s going back to normal.” This is one like blinking red light that says, “Schools are not going back to normal yet.”
John Kristof: Yeah. I mean, that’s a fair point. I had the same reaction because I was expecting this number to be lower based on everything else we were seeing. There’s a lot of different thoughts that go through my head because I think we were seeing a similar number to this the first time we asked this question, and I’m blanking on when this was, but it was like early winter, late fall. We saw this number and we’re like, “Man, that’s high,” and my first reaction to seeing this was, “Man, that’s high.” Then I was like, “Well, it is dead down like 11 percentage points from our February poll, so it is going in the right direction. Maybe we’ll see what happens in our April edition to see if it goes down another set of double-digit percentage points.” But still, compared to how much case numbers were dropping, I would’ve assumed this number. Would’ve dropped more. I guess what the signals is something that I just don’t have a lot of familiarity with, so I can’t speak to it other than what might guide some research that I do on this. Even though schools are maybe dropping a lot of mask mandates across the country and that’s one very visible sign of a school’s approach to COVID, maybe they haven’t changed their quarantining policy, where one kid tests positive, or a couple kids have been exposed, and are awaiting test results, then we’re going to do this whole remote situation. Maybe that’s still the case in a lot of districts across the country. I don’t know what numbers there are on that, but I guess those policies may still be in place at a higher degree than I would’ve assumed, which is interesting because my assumption would be, and I think you can make some interpretations based on our polling numbers, parents generally would view being forced to stay home from school as more disruptive than wearing a mask in school. Maybe if you’re slowly peeling away anti-COVID policies, maybe you would take away the quarantining thing before the mask thing. I’m not sure. It’s just a little bit of speculation on my part. My main takeaway is, well, I hope this keeps going down, otherwise I’m going to be very confused, so tune it next month to see if I’m very confused.
Mike McShane: Well, look, I mean, it’s interesting, too, though, because we’ve asked this, another question, do you feel things in K-12 by education are generally going in the right direction, or do you think they’ve gotten off on the wrong track? It seems to me, building off what you were saying, if there is that kind of incongruity, or if there’s, well, it’s still disruptive, and it’s not clear, why maybe that would make us think that parents would be less likely to say that school is on the right track. As it turns out, we have been seeing over the course of the past several months, a steady-ish decline in the percentage of parents who say across the board, whether they’re talking about the local school district, their state, or across the nation, I mean, we saw when we first asked this question, I think we have this going back to the slides that Morning Consult put together for us, if we go back to March of 2020, right, so two years ago, so we have these numbers for the last two years, 56% of parents said that they thought that their local school district was going in the right direction. It’s lower for the state. It was 51%. It’s lower still for the nation, 47%, some that we see regularly. People like their local district more than the state more than the feds. It increased. We saw a kind of rally around the flag in March and April where at least a local school district in the high 60s. It then slowly but surely fell off until November of ’20 when, I’ll just use the local numbers, it dropped down to 48%, slowly built again to June of ’21 where it hit 61%, and then ever since then, it’s been going down, maybe a little bit up, a little bit down, but now, we’re down to 49% of parents. Less than half think that their local school district is on the right track. 42% of people think that their state is on the right track and only 36%, just over a third of folks think the nation schools are going on the right track. Look, part of me says, “Maybe it’s because incongruous coronavirus policies where people say that they’re comfortable, and yet a quarter of their kids are quarantining,” that could lead to it. There are other things, which we’ll get into in a second that obviously there’s a lot of protesting or coverage of schools that maybe people don’t think are going well for either, cross-cutting reasons, but I mean, this does see seem to be… I’ll put it this way, we haven’t seen the numbers move in the other direction. As things have gone back to normal, we haven’t seen people say, “Oh, schools are on the right track.” I would’ve thought that’s what we would’ve seen, but that’s really not the case. Over the course of the last couple of months, we’ve seen a pretty steady decline in the percentage of parents who think schools are on the right track. Does this portend, as things get back to normal, people are less happy? That doesn’t seem to me to pretend good things, but I don’t know. You’re more youthful and optimistic than I am.
John Kristof: Yeah, maybe we’ll see. My first takeaway, this is a good linking point, actually, I think between the first part of the podcast here of results that we’re talking about and what we’re going to talk about in a few minutes because what I see here is a sign that people’s perception and their instincts and what they first think of when they think of challenges in education, arguably, for the first time since we started asking this question in early 2020, maybe for the first time, people aren’t thinking about COVID issues, they’re thinking about other things. Just because COVID is improving, and for example, different kinds of mandates are dropping in school districts across the country, parents are thinking about other things, and so those mandates going away aren’t making them feel better or worse about education because in comparison, the last time we’ve seen numbers this low was in winter of 2020, 2021, and things started reversing in the other direction when there was the news about vaccines and vaccines are going to be ready very soon. As vaccines started being take by more and more people started to trickle down to people who were younger and younger, feelings about the positivity about education were on the rise, and then they started to decline a little bit again when Omicron hit. Now that we’re on the other side of the Omicron wave, we would normally expect to see perceptions of K-12 education grow more optimistic, and we are not seeing it this time. Again, just going back to what I said earlier, I’m seeing signs that we are at a post-COVID phase, as far as COVID as a cultural phenomenon and as something that rests on with public consciousness, I think we are after that stage, and I think when we are asking parents a vague question about, “How do you feel K-12 education is going?”, they’re answering based off the K-12 issues that are top on their brain. The things that are on the top of their brain is not COVID anymore, it’s going to be other things, and they don’t feel very good about those other things, which is something that we might get to a little bit later.
Mike McShane: Yes. We asked a new question this month, one that I’m super excited to get to know the answer to. I think it feeds into this, just as you sort of teed that up, and then I had myself on mute, so as not to breathe into the microphone while you were being erudite there. You teed me up perfectly and then I don’t unmute myself correctly, I think. I don’t know if I turned my video off, but I turned the thing, but I then hit the wrong button right as you lead me in, so I stepped on the intro. If this was like an old James Brown record, you’d hear him yelling about me being fined for that, and I would pay it, But okay, new question on the poll this month. Obviously, we’ve heard lots of stories and seen on the news and covered, especially if you’re on social media in the education world about protests, school board meetings where people have been protesting, lots of controversy. But anytime you see this stuff on the news or you see stuff on social media, you just get this question of, “How representative is that?” Just because four school districts have protests at their school board meetings, there are close to 14,000 across the country, so it can look very quickly like the news can cut to six or seven different school board meetings and you’re like, “Oh, my goodness. This is a national phenomenon,” and it may not be. This is what it polling is for. We asked a question. We asked all adults and we asked school parents to try and see if there’s a difference, there wasn’t a huge one. But we asked, “To your knowledge, has there been a protest or other major disruption at your local school district board meeting in this current school year?” Then we asked, “If there has been, what was it about?” Now, 21% of all adults, about one in five said that there had been a protest or major disruption at their local school board, and of parents, it was lower, it was 16%, 16% of parents said that there had been a disruption. I’ve been trying to think through this. But John, I want to ask a question, is that a big number, or is that a small number? As soon as I got these results, that was the question that came to my head, which is, “Is that a big number or is that a small number?”
John Kristof: That’s such a good question because I was talking with Colin Ritter, one of our research assistants who wrote up the blog for this wave of tracking, which you’ll be able to see on our website. He and I had different instincts on it because his first interpretation was that, “Oh, this is actually pretty low,” and then my interpretation was, “Geez, that’s really high,” so I guess it just comes down to what you assume.
Mike McShane: It was like your expectations, right? It’s sort of like if you’ve been seeing on the news over and over and over again that this is a thing and it’s everywhere and then you just see a number like 16%, you say, “Oh, well, I thought it was like 90%,” and turns out that it’s 16. But on the flip side, if you say, “Well, this is actually a rare thing to happen,” and then you see 16%, again, if you think of something like 14,000 school districts, 16% of 14,000 is a big number, right, or if there’s like 15 million school children, and we think of 16% of their parents saying that this happened, then that’s a big number, right? I think it’s a question of expectations, is what did you think the number was going to be plays on it. I think if you think that protests have been super popular, or been happening a lot, I could see where you’d be like, “Yeah, it’s kind of a low number,” and the flip side is like, “No, it’s very rare to have, have a protest at something,” then you’d say, “Oh, that’s actually quite a high number.”
John Kristof: Yeah, I think so. I think for me, my interpretation was because I try to be skeptical of senses of, “This is what’s happening in schools in the United States.” I just have such a strong instinct of, “There’s several times more schools in the United States than there are McDonald’s,” and I can count those every couple city blocks. There’s a ton of schools. You’re going to be able to find an example of anything you want in a school in the United States and so I think I just have such a strong maybe pushing the other direction of like, “They can’t be that big,” until I look at the data and then we see the data and, “Oh, it’s actually like one in six, one in five people say that this happened in our local school district.” I guess the answer was somewhere in the middle, which it often is.
Mike McShane: Well, and here’s the other thing, too. As I mentioned earlier, we asked the second half of the question. The first one was just, “Has this happened?” The second question was, “What was the context of the protest? What were people protesting about?” Then we gave a sort of battery of potential answers. Again, I think at least the media that I consume, and I might just be putting my biases out there, I’ve been seeing huge amounts of coverage, of things like books in libraries, district curriculum, issues of race, issues of gender, LGBTQ issues, et cetera. Again, this is just in the last school year, so maybe I have some recency bias. But here’s the breakdown, so of that 16% of parents who said that there was a protest in their district, 63%, the largest number of them said that the protest was over masking. 51% said it was over vaccinations. 47% said it was other COVID 19 related decisions or policies. 32% said it was remote learning or in-person learning, which I think in many ways can be grouped along with the coronavirus. That’s one, two three, four. The top four all had to do with the coronavirus. They weren’t about content of what was being taught in school, history, science, any of those sorts of things. It was all coronavirus-related. Only in number five with 21% of respondents was at over racial issues, 20% said, LGBTQ issues, and 18% said that it was controversial books or materials. The rest of the ones that came out also at 18% was teacher pay or contract negotiations, 13% was school admissions policies, and 11% was school zoning or assignment boundary considerations. Again, to me, I think if I had been asked this question naively, in the sense of not having consumed social media or things in the last month or two, in my head, I think I would’ve come down with this response, “Well, obviously, it’s going to be coronavirus stuff. Coronavirus stuff was controversial. It was unclear what to do in cases and so you’re going to have people on either side and people to lose and so they’re going to protest.” I think it was my own kind of warped view that if you had asked me, though, this time I would’ve said, “Oh, my goodness, it’s got to be books. It’s got to be American history. It’s got to be issues of race, issues of gender, any of those sorts of things. That’s what people are protesting against.” As it turns out, no, it was pretty much, it was a lot of coronavirus, right? It was a lot of coronavirus and a lot of this other stuff, it’s just not nearly as prevalent, I think, as some people seem to make it out to be.
John Kristof: Yeah, and I think that’s a signal, too, that a lot of these protests because the question is, “Has there been one of these protests or disruptions this year?” That extends all the way back to August, September, and concerns about coronavirus and variants and things like that, for a lot of districts, this was their first time going back in-person, there was a lot of engagement across the board from parents trying to figure out what the best option was, school leaders trying to figure out what the best option was. Trying to think back to that time, again, understanding the state now to interpret what I was experiencing back then, okay, I can see how there was a lot of engagement from a lot of parents, a lot of stakeholders about what we should be doing, and a lot of disagreement about all those things. I do remember seeing news reports about a disruption going awry or a disruption being successful, however you want to look at it. Disruptions are still on the news now, and so yeah, there’s a lot fewer protests happening now because again, as we’ve mentioned before, the issues have changed, and not as many people have an interest maybe or a stake in the kind of a reaction or protection that they’re seeking from their school districts. There’s a lot fewer people who maybe feel that something like controversial books and materials is worth a disruption or worth of protesting as they felt about COVID in fall of 2021, so it is helpful to gather these data. It’s helpful to see these things ranked because it does help you interpret what you are seeing in the news because you can very well look at the protests happening now and see them just as intensely as you saw the protests happening in 2021. But in actuality, they were very different and engagement was very different in both of those senses. That probably means the people involved were also the very different, just the normal distribution bell curve kind of thing. I’m very glad that we asked this question and we offered all of these different explanations that people could give for why there was a protest because I think this is very informative and very helpful for interpreting news events about cultural issues going on in K-12 right now.
Mike McShane: Yeah. Look, I think another interesting, if you want to think of it as a debunking point, rather, is I heard multiple times in the pandemic, especially people who are maybe skeptical of school choice, rather, is when the pandemic’s over, people are going to want to go back to normal, so sure, there was interest in whatever, hybrid homeschooling, pandemic pods, private schooling, whatever it is in the associated policies, education savings account, school vouchers, tuition tax credits, charter schools, et cetera. But that’s just because the pandemic scrambled everything. When we go back to normal, people are going to kind of revert to the mean and want to go back to what they were doing before. Interestingly, Morning Consult made a lovely little chart for us here, where they looked at the support for, we looked at ESAs, school vouchers, and charter schools, just looking from February to March, again, in this time period where things are going back to normal, where you would think that the numbers of support, for people who support ESAs, vouchers, charter schools, folks would think that number would go down. That is not, in fact, what happened. Whether it is given with a description or not a description, so that’s we just say, “Education savings accounts, do you support them?” Or, do we give a definition of what they are across the board, there was more support in March than in February. For ESAs, it was up four points and two points with no description and description, respectively. School vouchers, four points and three points. Charter schools, one point and three points. One point if there’s no description, three point if there was a description. It seems like, and again, this is just one bit of data we’ll see in more and others, but as we go back to normal, this desire for school choice is not going away, and in these cases, we saw upticks. Am I crazy to think that, or does that sound like something potentially durable?
John Kristof: I think you have to conclude that it’s pretty durable. I mean, we see a couple percentage point decreases every once in a while, and almost always we see them rebound in the next month, so I think desire for school choice is pretty durable at this point. I think if you are a school choice opponent who is expecting preferences for school choice to decline as concerns about COVID stuff goes away, I just don’t think you’re finding evidence for that, at least in the kind of pull polling numbers we’ve done and polling numbers that I’ve seen elsewhere as well. Maybe you can make an argument that people again are just moving from COVID to other kind of cultural issues, but cultural issues are also not going to go away, which means that if there’s any interaction between ideas about cultural issues and school choice, that’s also going to be durable. But even if this is just about COVID, something that I feel pretty comfortable saying now is the way that a lot of parents will approach schooling has been completely revolutionized. It’s like you can’t put toothpaste back in the tube, you can’t unring a bell, and you can’t unengage parents from their kids’ education and the way that they have been forced to engage with their kids’ education over the last couple years, these parents have seen their kids learn more closely through remote learning than they have before. They’ve been forced to look at other educational options in ways that they haven’t before. They’ve had conversations about different schooling options and learning styles and things like that with friends and peers that they haven’t had before coronavirus and those conversations and different thinking, different approaches don’t just go away or get deleted now that COVID cases are improving. School choice and preferences for it, favor toward it is here to stay. That is not going to be dependent on high COVID cases or low COVID cases because people just don’t expect the normal now. People won’t expect the default because we’ve been forced out of the default and so there’s a lot of parents that are thinking about the best way to navigate the educational world now that they’ve been forced to think about it in different ways, so we’ll see how they interact with it, but parents are definitely thinking in this kind of alternative education direction.
Mike McShane: Well, look, I think that’s right. I think we should call it there. I can’t think of a better place to end this podcast because I think that’s right. For all of the doom and gloom that the month after month of the relentless march of this podcast where every month, we had to look at oftentimes quite disheartening statistics and figures, I think things like this where we’re actually pointing to a more positive future before we have a chance to throw anything negative in there, I’m calling it, I’m just stopping it right here. John Kristof, thank you so much for joining me today. It was a pleasure as always. I don’t know how many people enjoy listening to this podcast, but I enjoy making it with you. This is always a fun thing to do every month, so I appreciate you. I appreciate everybody on the EdChoice team who does all the work of making us coherent and edits this and publishes it and puts it out there and I appreciate everybody who’s listening to this. As always, you can follow us on social media, Facebook, Twitter. You can subscribe to this podcast, which would be awesome. You don’t just get this one, but I’m starting a new podcast series where I’m interviewing interesting people, I think it’s tentatively titled What’s Up? with Mike McShane. It also teaches you as a former English teacher, how important punctuation is, right, because like where that question mark sits actually leads to a drastically different question. Just to be clear, it’s What’s Up? with Mike McShane, not What’s Up with Mike McShane?
John Kristof: I was going to say, the title’s just asking a question that we ask at the office on a weekly basis.
Mike McShane: I was about to say, though that is a clearly popular question in many different quarters, you are not alone in asking that question. But anyway, that’s my long-winded way of saying subscribe to the podcast. Thank you everybody for listening. Thank you, John, and the EdChoice team, and I look forward to talking to all of you again on another edition of EdChoice Chats.