Please note: This transcript was automatically generated. We have reviewed it to ensure it reflects the original conversation, but we may not have caught every transcription error.

Christopher Saldaña: Hi everyone. I'm Chris Saldana and this is the National Education Policy Center Talks Education podcast. In this month's podcast, we spoke with Dr. Kevin Welner and Robert Kim. Kevin is a research professor at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education and the Director of the National Education Policy Center.

Robert Kim oversees and directs programs and activities at the Education Law Center. Both are experts in education, law, and policy. In this month's podcast, Kevin and Robert help us make sense of recent changes in federal K 12 education policy and law.

So there's been a lot of rhetoric, obviously coming from the current Trump administration about the role of the federal government and its relationship with K 12 public schools.

And though for listeners who aren't familiar with the role of the federal government in K 12 education, what role does it play? And how has that role changed over time?

Kevin Welner: The expansion of the federal role in education policy and funding was initially very slow starting with some data gathering and then with the Smith Hughes Act of 1917, which provided funding for vocational education and then of course, the GI Bill of 1944, providing funding for higher education for returning veterans.

And then we had the post sputnik investment in math, science with foreign language education. That was 58. But the real expansion of the federal role began in the 1960s. In short succession, we had, among other smaller initiatives, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act or ESEA in 65, the Higher Education Act, also 65 PL 94 1 42, now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act or IDEA and 75.

We also saw the adoption of key civil rights laws, including the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which includes Title VI and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 72 and Section 5 0 4, the Rehabilitation Act of 73. And then the equal education opportunities after 74. So along the way, Congress also created the Office of Civil Rights in 1966.

And notably, all of this preceded the formation of the US Department of Education, which was 1979. At that time with the creation of the Department of Ed they created among other things the What's Now or what in 2002, was renamed the Institute of Education Sciences or IES, which is in charge of research and data collection.

The past 45 years or so have seen a bit of a push and pull with regard to some federal priorities, but not others. For the most part, the funding and administrative machinery moved along steadily from administration to administration with Congress continuing to fund major programs at consistent levels.

But before we move on to what's happened since Trump took office in January, I want to set the stage as to why there might now be some backlash against federal involvement in education. The No Child Left Behind Act, which was passed in 2001, involved a big expansion of the federal rule. And in that the high stakes testing regime effectively reshaped a lot of what happened in public schools throughout the country.

Some subjects like art and music and social studies, and even science to some extent sidelined particularly in schools serving more marginalized and minoritized entities sidelined in order to devote more time and resources to the math and reading, the most tested subjects. Those math and English language arts classes were themselves restructured to spend more time preparing students to do well on test questions.

So this resulted in some backlash to federal interference. And then during the Obama administration, two things happened at essentially the same time. The recession prompted the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009, which included the $4.35 billion race to the top program. And the NCLB shit was hitting the fan (pardon my French).

Old timers might remember that after five years of not making adequate yearly progress, schools faced restructuring. And those AYP targets had by 2011 hit unreachable levels. That year, 80% of schools were predicted to not hit AYP targets. So Education Secretary Army Duncan initiated something he called NCLB flexibility pursuant to which he would grab NCLB waivers to states that adopted policies that he favored, many of which were similar to the approaches founded through Race to the Top, such as test-based teacher evaluations. So crucially, one of the policies he pushed was the adoption of college and career ready standards. And the Common Core State standards initiative, along with related assessments, were correspondingly being pushed by the Gates Foundation and allies.

So these two efforts, Race to the Top and NCLB flexibility, particularly common Core again resulted in a backlash against federal involvement in states’ control of education. Congress, for instance, responded by including a provision in the new law that replaced NCLB, the Every Student Succeeds Act, that essentially repeats other statutory language that are really already had been on the books prohibiting the Department of Education from meddling in local curriculum decisions. I think that's all crucial context to trust statements about dismantling the Department of Education and returning education to the states, as I hope we’ll discuss, that's really not what he's putting in key ways.

He's been expanding the federal reach into all sorts of areas and interfering with local decision making.

Christopher Saldaña: Bob let me turn to you. What are some of the changes that the current administration has made to the federal role in K 12 public education and what are the justifications for these changes?

Robert Kim: We know that when we talk about recent changes in federal policy, I think we could go on for a long time, but I think, why don't we, for purposes of this discussion, talk about changes in the last six or seven months or so. And go from there. But I do think building on what Kevin had been talking about it's fair to say notwithstanding the more recent policy changes through the last couple of administrations, including Democratic ones preceding Trump, or in between Trump 1.0. I it's fair to characterize recent federal, relatively recent federal involvement in education as being primarily dedicated to helping what we sometimes called at risk youth, underserved populations, students living in poverty or close to the poverty line. The entire federal apparatus notwithstanding more recent policy changes that were more accountability edged was dedicated to really helping underserved students. So when we talk about recent federal education changes, education policy changes, we have to focus thinking about the last eight months or so, as doing a couple of really big things to damage that long-term legacy and that long-term federal role of helping underserved students. We have to talk about, I think first and foremost, the dismantling of the Federal Department of Education. My organization, Education Law Center, is involved in one of the lawsuits trying to counteract or oppose that dismantling of Federal Cabinet agency dedicated to advancing that federal role in education to help underserved student populations. And the dismantling is one recent change that is gonna continue, is currently having and will continue to have profound impacts. Part and parcel with that dismantling is the dismantling or reductions and threaten reductions of money and resources to states and districts to support underserved or at risk student populations.

And we've talked about the infrastructure of the federal government as one lever that's being exercised by Trump administration. And another lever is the actual budget cuts that are being exercised by Congress and the White House. So we have and this is coming in multiple iterations, right in stages. We have the impounded money from the 2025 federal budget that was recently restored after litigation but was threatening at one point to cut off $7 billion of promised money this year to school districts. It has had a catastrophic effect. Even it's the money, even though the money's coming a little bit late now, finally.

Then we have the one big, beautiful bill act. What is it? How many Bs are in that acronym? The reconciliation bill, which enacted a bunch of cuts in and outside of education really we can talk about social welfare cuts to things around education, but that affects students and families of students.

Housing insecurity now, food insecurity from the reduction in Snap benefits, health insecurity as a result of Medicaid cuts. So these cuts really also affect the ability of students all over the country to be ready to learn. And then on top of that, we have the proposed cuts that are now being debated in Congress by the White House for this coming school year and next year.

And so we've, we now hear from the White House that they want to eliminate so many programs, cut billions from federal programs meant for underserved students and enact that as part of next year's budget. That's now being debated by Congress. The House is proposing to cut Title I, the main funding vehicle for student living in poverty, in schools across the country.

They're proposing to cut Title I by 27% this year. So all of these cuts and we're not even talking about some more ad hoc cuts that have been made in the first eight months of the Trump administration to research, education research to teacher preparation grants, all of those things, those, that's another layer of sort of ad hoc cuts.

But these big waves of policy moves to shrink the federal role and federal money in education are really damaging. And I think the final thing I'll say here is that as part of these cuts, the dismantling of the infrastructure of the federal department and the money cuts there's a real big change in civil rights enforcement across the country.

This is night and day from January 19. And we, we know that as part of the federal dismantling OCR, the Office for Civil Rights has been critically hampered. The enforcement staff is where I used to work there. By the way. The enforcement staff's more than half cut. And civil rights enforcement has been really turned on its head, and a lot of people are saying, and I think there's a lot of truth to this, that civil rights enforcement is being weaponized in ways that we couldn't have imagined eight months ago or nine months ago.

Things like race discrimination and sex discrimination not being enforced under those federal statutes, Title IX and Title vi. In ways that we would normally think of when we think of civil rights enforcement, but really being used in particular ways to go after specific discreet and vulnerable populations like transgender students, immigrant students, LGBTQ students, so forth. So I think these are some major federal changes that are coming down the pike. I think Kevin and I will hope to impart from this discussion why this is happening. Kevin already mentioned some of the themes, but it really has to do with this whole notion of returning control to the states, getting the federal government out of the business of education.

And really a push toward privatization of education and moving away from equity focused policies as part of the federal role. So I think those are some motivations behind some of these recent policy changes

Kevin Welner: that another big part of the reconciliation Act is this program to create tax credited it's kind the terminology is problematic. But this is, we refer to it as the SGO program is you'll also hear people refer to a school choice or voucher program. SGO program is probably the most accurate. But what SGO stands for is scholarship granting organization. And what the idea is that anyone who owes $1,700 individuals who owe $1,700 to the federal government can divert that $1,700 to these organizations, these nonprofits called SGOs, that then package the money and provide them to students. And the money can be used for the broad scope of the laws written to include everything that the coverdale scholarships, coverdale accounts can cover, which includes private school tuition, but also includes several other things. There’s a lot going on right there that the money wouldn't start flowing until the beginning of 2007.

 Robert Kim: 2027, right?

Yeah, 2027, I'm sorry. The decisions have to be made by individual states as to whether or not they want to opt into the program. And opting in is clearly a step toward privatization of education particularly in states that, that opt in under rules that you move a great deal of the money toward private school tuition.

The pre, the US Treasury Department has to come up with regulations pursuant to the statute of the US Treasury Department is being tasked with. Coming up with regulations that, that fill in a lot of gaps that are left in the legislation. So it's a little unclear about what the rules will be that schools, that states would opt in under.

But that shift toward privatization with clear implications for loss of statutory protections for vulnerable populations. That's a big a big thing that I think a lot of us in education aren't talking enough about right now.

Christopher Saldaña: I wanna go back to a point that you made, Kevin, at the end of your response around the frustrations that happened after No Child Left Behind and after Race to the Top. Because you made this point about whether what we're seeing now is aligned, the changes that we're seeing now in terms of the policy changes are aligned with some of those frustrations, I imagine that post-trial, no Child Left Behind, the High Stakes accountability movement, school closures.

There was a lot of frustration that existed in places that probably vote in a diverse, in diverse ways. But when you think about the, and Bob, the policy changes that you described, when you think about the actions that the federal government is taking, and we put aside the rhetoric for a minute, is that really aligned with those maybe very real frustrations that were coming out of what maybe it could be argued with some federal overreach in terms of what schools were being asked to do and the pressures that were being put upon them?

Kevin Welner: I think that the themes that Bob mentioned explain a lot more about what's going on than a sincere desire to pull the federal government away from involvement in education. If you look at what's being cut and what's being enhanced, you see a fairly clear picture of a move away from equity and a move to privatization.

So for example, if you think about the federal overreach taking place right now, which is very inconsistent with this idea of moving education decisions back to the states, think about the executive orders concerning DEI or the anti LGBTQ, specifically anti-trans actions. Even there's an executive order threatening to withhold federal funding from schools that require students to get COVID vaccines.

But just another, just concretely, I'll give you two examples of what I'm talking about. There is an executive order called Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 schooling. That was in January. So that was one of the early ones threatening to withhold funding under Title IX and tTtle VI, from what the administration describes as gender, ideology and discriminatory equity ideology unquote in the classroom. There was also a guidance issued on February 14th. It's been enjoined actually currently, but it's the guidance tried to extend the rule. If you do, you, do you remember the anti-affirmative action case students referred admission as the came down a couple years ago, from a few years ago from the US Supreme Court dealing with Harvard and University of North Carolina.

The court has used, excuse me, the administration has used that case to try to extend the reasoning of that case to attack policies, local policies that are race neutral, that do not include any individualized use of the person's race. And said those are also unconstitutional if the underlying goals motivating the policymakers to adopt those race neutral policies have a racial equity focus.

So those attempts to really intervene. Think about the attempts that here in, in Denver public schools and few other places across the country, the administration is trying to micromanage district policies, the school policies around bathrooms whether it would have all gender bathrooms in schools, those that is not very consistent with this idea of getting the federal government out of local decisioning.

Robert Kim: Yeah. So you, yeah, just on that. So then you have this language on talking outta both sides of your mouth. The one purported mantra is to return control to the states. But then you have these super uber aggressive maneuvers by Trump administration to really impose another kind of orthodoxy over schools to control all aspects of campus life through this overwhelming and all encompassing anti DEI, anti DEI push. So it's really a significant amount of overreach into campus operations, with that February 14th guidance Kevin was talking about to, to end DEI across campuses in, in ways that could affect both K-12 and are affecting both K-12 and higher ed institutions.

All of that's being done under this guise of civil rights, enforcing civil rights rather than what they're really doing, which is going against civil rights. We, I just wanna mention also that this is another vehicle for shrinking the federal government 'cause you know that the Trump administrations, they're going after, we've seen in the news every week they go after institutions notably higher ed institutions, but not only to take away funds, billions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars in funds saying that they're acting in ways that are promoting an illegal DEI.

And that is bypassing so many procedural mechanisms in place before you take away those hundreds of millions or billions of dollars from a school. There's a lot of due process. There's a lot of back and forth investigation hearings, discovery, things that, that as lawyers really this is our bread and butter in terms of how you go about investigating whether a school is violating civil rights in some way.

So this the Trump administration's shrinking, the federal government, they're shrinking school budgets and using civil rights as the tool to do that while violating all kinds of laws that would prevent that kind of unilateral action from taking place without a whole lot of deliberation and decision-making that needs to, that would need to happen ordinarily prior to such a dramatic move.

Christopher Saldaña: It's one of the justifications, which you've both already said. That we wanna get the federal government out of education so that states are free to make their decisions so that local school districts are free to make their decisions. But when you think about the kinds of pressures, Kevin, you mentioned the executive order on DEI and quote unquote indoctrination.

And Bob, you've mentioned the way that the Office of Civil Rights is being utilized currently. How are these kinds of pressures gonna impact what school districts do in terms of like graduations for African American students and programs that exist to support students of different identities if there's threats attached to money?

Robert Kim: It's really tough because I think that school districts are gonna be facing a whole lot of pressures here to comply and even pre comply. We should note that there's, that a lot of these policies that Trump has been enacting, including the DEI anti DEI policy and guidance, and a lot of enforcement actions are emanating from that policy have been held to be unconstitutional by courts. But February 14th guidance was on the same day in April, ruled probably unconstitutional. It was a preliminary ruling, but in all likelihood unconstitutional by three separate federal district court judges on the same day. Ruled that it was unconstitutional.

And as a lawyer for a school district you'd be it's very understandable. You'd be like before we go through all these hoops and just give away the farm here in terms of what we're doing here why don't we just we should parse and see how this plays out in the course.

But the pressures that districts are already facing, they're already suffering from budget cuts. Even from before when Trump was in office. Now there's these threats and actual cuts coming down the pike, which is gonna affect adequacy and equity of school budgets across the country.

In the face of all of that. And the wanting to not be targeted specifically by the Trump administration 'cause we know they are targeting individual institutions and entities for investigation. There's a, there's an overwhelming and almost understandable temptation to pre comply and to say, okay, whatever you want us to do or not do, we're gonna we're going to comply and therefore we're gonna take away programs intended for certain minority populations or populations of English learners or populations or programs, sorry for English learners or programs for students of other needs or immigrant students, students who come from backgrounds not speaking English at home. So that's the real worry and the fear here is that the financial pressure on top of the enforcement pressure from this administration is going to lead to a lot of pre-compliance, even before even those courts may eventually later rule these policies to really be unlawful and should never been enacted in the first place.

Kevin Welner: Yeah, there's a second type of intimidation that I think we should talk about here, and Bob touched on a really important one. But I think understanding what's going on in our schools right now requires us to also talk about what's going on with ice. That schools, teachers, and certainly students and families and communities are all attempting to go about the business of education in this context of very strong intimidation and disruption.

Christopher Saldaña: When we think about some of the voucher programs at the state level, whether it's Arizona or policy change that's happened in Ohio or Florida, I imagine this current change is a very small one at the federal level, but what have we seen at the state level that helps us understand how this the introduction of a voucher program or a, voucher like program at the federal level might expand over time?

Kevin Welner: So the way that these, that this new program that I'm calling the SGO program, but you'll also hear referred to as a School Choice adoption program, the way that this policy works is that an individual taxpayer who owes $1,700 or more can donate that amount up to $1,700 to a scholarship granting organization, which is a nonprofit within a state.

And that that amount that's donated gets a hundred percent tax credit from the federal government. So it's just actually shifting federal tax money into this program. The program then says, and again, it's written very broadly, but an individual state might be able to make it more narrow. But the broadest understanding of it is that any of the current categories under the coverdale investment law, which is like a tax deferred family way to pay for various educational expenses, originally higher education, and now other expenses. So the coverdale laws existed for a while. It includes various program categories including tutoring, including afterschool programs, including books and computers and including private school tuition.

So the idea is that these STOs, which are created and authorized within a state then can collect taxpayer donations and then can package those donations together, those amounts together to give the money to a family to use for any of these expenses. That will almost certainly, in the states that you are asking about, places like Florida, be used to fund private school tuition.

Overwhelmingly in other states, they might, that the state policy structure might not. In theory might not include private school tuition. Again, it depends on what the Treasury Department regulations allow. And certainly might incentivize or create programs that are, make it more easy to fund things like tutoring and afterschool programs.

So there's a real open question about what those programs will look like in, in states that have long rejected vouchers. So here in Colorado, we have had vouchers on the ballot two and a half times, twice, where it was very clearly vouchers. And then most recently, an initiative that was unclear about whether it was about vouchers or not.

But all three were rejected by the voters. So the idea of us then opting into a voucher program would go against clear voter intent. But the law is structured in a way to create financial and fiscal pressure for states to adopt the policy. So we're enough holding power right now. I expect what we know from voucher research is that when we have these programs that subsidize private school tuition, students do worse when they opt in.

The research that we have is limited by most states because they don't allow data collection, they don't provide for data collection. So we don't really know what's happening. But in the states that have large scale or what we call semi universal policies, the research is very clear that students suffer a huge harm when they use these voucher policies, particularly in math.

That's strong evidence that this is not beneficial, that part of the policy at least, would not be beneficial. But we have also seen after that research comp came out, we've seen lots of states adopting voucher policies and expanding voucher policies. So the research isn’t guiding policy is what I want to say.

Another really important thing to understand from the voucher research is who benefits what we see in the case of these large scale voucher policies, these sort of non-targeted voucher policies that, where a large group of families is eligible. And I should note that the eligibility under this new policy is 80 to 90% of students in a given state, depending on the state, that those result in a “rich get richer, poor get poorer” or certainly a rich get richer policy.

So the money goes to communities and families that already have more resources. And that's not surprising. If you think about the dynamics of school choice and the dynamics of donations. People provide money for their own kids, for their neighbor's kids, for their own communities, for their neighbor, that sort of thing.

And we see that empirically in places where it's been studied. So that's a real, if we think about the larger discussion we're having, about the harms that have taken place over the last seven months, don't expect this SGO program with the quote new, unquote, money being brought into education.

Don't expect that to help. It's gonna, it's gonna help the wealthy in the places where it's adopted.

Robert Kim: Just to add to that, the. Let's take a step back and think about what's happened with vouchers nationally at the state level. Forget about the federal program, but we've had since the pandemic it's been a five alarm fire with we had zero universal voucher states five plus years ago, say around plus or minus a year or two there.

But to what, 18 or 19 states in the last count? It goes up every couple of months. That are now where any student under a state program can take taxpayer dollars, including money meant for a public school and go to a private school either continue going to a private school so they don't have to have gone to a public school ever to use that taxpayer money for a private education or homeschooling.

And most of the private education is religious in nature, 'cause most private schools are religious in nature. That has been happening at a very alarming rate. The transfer of public to private in the education sphere over since the pandemic. We all know this, it's common news. So in that context, we add on top of that a federal voucher program essentially, which then would extend to all of the states.

The majority of states now have some kind of voucher program. This would extend to all states potentially including those that don't have any kind of state voucher program. And what we've seen is that. State voucher programs that begin small in nature only meant for a certain sector of let's say students living in poverty or a certain income level, or students with disabilities, for example, for those small or more geographically limited voucher programs to then expand over time to become close to being universal, where any student not limited by geography, where a status can take advantage of those funds. And a worry here is like, when you think about the state voucher context and the struggles we've seen in this arena is that the federal voucher program allows for a foothold to be gained even in those states that currently have resisted vouchers a foothold to be gained for then there to be rapid expansion in those states.

And that's at the expense of, literally at the expense of public schools and maintaining public school systems across these states.

Kevin Welner: There's another way that these different issues we're discussing interact. If you think about the cuts to the Office of Civil Rights, that the largest category of complaints that the Office of Civil Rights addresses are students with disabilities.

And when a student with disabilities moves from a public school to a private school using one of these voucher like plans, they lose IDEA protections; they lose most civil rights protections. And so it's a double whammy for those students in terms of the infrastructure of protections and funding and procedures that have been built up to protect students with disabilities is crumbling under these changes.

Robert Kim: Yeah. Yeah. And those schools, most of the private schools, as we just talked about, are religious in nature. And so with this Supreme Court and the way the law has been moving, even in the voucher space you even have plurality of private schools that have First Amendment rights, not to follow civil rights laws to have their own free exercise to do what they want to hire, who they want to accept.

Students without disabilities, who don't, who only speak English, who are not LGBTQ plus and who are not immigrants, et cetera. You can go down the list but that actually in the way that the law is developing, it's. Kevin knows almost more than anybody in the country is that we have now have this super empowered religious free exercise doctrine developing that empowers those very educational institutions that are then accepting more and more public funds to matriculate students and then not, and the exempt from the rest of the Constitution because of the First Amendment rights that they do enjoy.

Christopher Saldaña: So you've both outlined a number of concerns. I wanna end by asking you what can folks do, right? You have parents who are reading this news and listening to you and students and communities and even educators who are thinking about what can I do to push back against some of these changes?

Or what's my role in all of this? If they were here in the room with us, what would you, how would you encourage them to engage with some of these policy changes or to think about some of the shifts in the federal role in public education.

Robert Kim: I, I will say, I think, look, we are at a, this is a historic moment in terms of the development of this country.

I don't think we've experienced in recent history the kinds of challenges that are being posed by the current federal administration. And certainly but not limited to the educational sphere. But I think that hopefully, as with all things this is, there are pendulum swings in terms of civil rights and advancements in our society.

I am hopeful, and I could be very pollyannaish and naive in this regard, but I'm hopeful that what we are seeing is in fact one of the last big pushes among the conservative, let's say conservative white Christian nationalist movement to maintain and aggregate power and wealth. And that in fact, because of the significant overreaches by this faction, which has, that has formed an alliance with the Republican party establishment that we will see a pendulum switch swing in the other direction and that there will be a new galvanized opposition to all of this.

And there may be even ways in which in the future there could be a greater ability to, among the left and progressives, to challenge inequality of large systems and sectors, including, but not limited to education. In part because, and I don't subscribe to this necessarily, but we will have moved away from thinking about race and identity as causes in and of themselves.

But we all have been, we will have been pushed by this, these incredible actions to think about all of the inequalities writ large structurally in our society that transcend issues like race and identity, that really go to the huge structural gaps that we have in our society that Kevin and others have written about these ginormous opportunity gaps between the haves and have nots in our country.

So I'm hopeful that we are in a period where we're going through the worst of the worst right now, but that will eventually it will cause a momentum switch that we'll will, that we will hopefully enjoy, or future generations will enjoy for some time to come up.

Kevin Welner: Yeah I think we have to feel as hopeful as we can each muster. These are dark times in a lot of ways. I will circle back to something Bob said earlier to lead off, which is don't pre comply. I think that part of what's going on with this administration's attempts to intimidate people through extra legal mandates is resulting in way too much pre-compliance.

What Timothy Schneider calls obeying in advance. These overreaches, as long they not make their way to the current Supreme Court, they're being held back, they're being overturned. And that is important to keep in mind. Resist that urge to, to pre comply. Concretely, I think also to go back to the SGO program, the school Choice Voucher program, depending on how you wanna word it in the reconciliation bill, governors should say no to the federal voucher push. Governors in states that are that have not adopted vouchers in the past, that have rejected vouchers in the past. Generally not election of Donald Trump in the first place probably should resist Trump's attempt to push vouchers into those states.

At the very least, wait until the Treasury Department regulations come out and make it clear that if the Treasury department's regulations don't include flexibility to shape that SGO program to avoid voucher introduction in the state, that if that flexibility isn't there, that the states will not participate.

And then I would add Bob mentioned briefly the successful pushback to the Trump administration's attempt to impound or withhold fiscal year 25 money in education. That pushback was successful in large part because Republican senators heard from their constituents and then Trump heard from those Republican senators saying, we, we need this money, put this money back.

So those senators haven't often used their power to push back. But they can, and constituents should speak to their senators, particularly republican senators, often to let them know how important dedication is in their states. We know that Title I money, for example provides a greater proportion of education money in red states than in blue states.

So there are constituent concerns that should be heard. And then I think there's a, there's an important role that we all have in terms of telling our stories. So states need to document the harmful impact of cuts in their jurisdictions. That storytelling by states and by individuals within states is important for people like Bob who are engaged in active litigation.

And also for people engaged in policy advocacy. Tell stories, tell personal stories in public groups, on social media and through traditional media. I think those stories need to be heard in order for people to understand concretely what these cuts are doing.

Christopher Saldaña: Thank you, Kevin and Bob for being on this month's podcast.

As always, we hope you're safe and healthy. And remember, for the latest analysis on education policy, you should subscribe to the NEPC newsletter at nepc.colorado.edu.