SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Hi, I am Zach Chase.

SPEAKER_01: 0:02

And I am Stephanie Melville.

SPEAKER_00: 0:04

And after a well-deserved break, we are back with this episode of Academic Distinctions. Three top stories from last week's Education News taken apart, diving in a little more deeply, giving some context. This week's stories, new proposed priority from the Federal Department of Education looks normal. What? And what the heck is going on with federal student loans? Also, we can fund some student mental health supports. Just some. So stick around. Alright, Stephanie, I've got the first one. You ready for this? Alright.

SPEAKER_01: 0:53

I am. Let's do it.

SPEAKER_00: 0:54

So you and I, you know, for those who aren't in the know, uh have some experience with federal policy work and the federal registry. And so this is not necessarily a news story as me being a big old nerd and reading an entry on the federal registry.

SPEAKER_01: 1:09

You are not a big old nerd, but thanks.

SPEAKER_00: 1:12

I I am a big old nerd. I willingly read something in courier new, so I'm gonna say big old nerd.

SPEAKER_01: 1:18

Okay, fine.

SPEAKER_00: 1:19

So last week the U.S. Department of Education proposed a new priority uh with definitions, uh, supplementing the existing priorities and definitions. And this one was really interesting because it is remarkably normal. And so for those of us who read these kinds of things and keep track of these kinds of things, this looks like it could have come from literally any administration. The the big piece here is that there is a kind of back to basics approach that has been starting for a while now, and it is calling on and saying there's going to be a priority for math education. And that's pretty normal. Um, I should also say that these priorities, there are two kinds of funding. One is formula funding. So these are your like Title I, Title II, special education, um, professional development based on student populations, states and then school districts get a certain amount of money based on their student population. These priorities focus on what the administration wants to give competitive grants to. So as different offices, if there are still any at the U.S. Department of Education, write competitive grants, these are what researchers or program leads might be applying for funding for. And they're saying one of the priorities that has to be written into those grants has to do with this. Now, why is this important? Well, it signals to the field where what's left of the Department of Education will be focusing. So it's not surprising, given the release of our most recent nape scores and kind of floundering student success around mathematics, that this would be a priority. Here's the thing that is also important, but not written into what is in the proposed priority. You have to remember that the administration across the board, not just in education, has prohibited any programs to receive federal funding that focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion. Right. So writing a grant that attempts to say we want to create a program to improve student math scores that leaves out considerations of the multiple factors that might be interacting to lower a student's achievement is going to be a real tightrope act, right? So poverty, we know poverty, income, makes a difference in student achievement. But that's an element of diversity, equity, and inclusion. We know that a student's gender identity can signal how well they or poorly they do on an exam as well. But considering gender or sex is no longer a component of these things because it could be considered diversity equity or inclusion. So on one hand, remarkably normal. Yes, of course we should be focusing on math scores. On the other hand, um, how are we gonna do that without actually understanding who the students are? Also, worth noting is there is language in here that is kind of like college isn't for everyone. And that is tot true. And there are two ways to take that. One, college isn't a great fit for some kids. That is not the road that they are on. I have taught many of them. Um, I think I'm raising at least one of them, and and that's totally fine. No shade. So there's the difference between saying college isn't a great fit for some kids, and then with this administration, there's a note of college isn't a great fit for some kinds of kids. That is a subtext that worries me greatly.

SPEAKER_01: 5:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 5:13

Ultimately, I think this is likely to fail because it is setting a mandate and priority while prohibiting the field from examining cause and consideration of how we make things better. And at the end, I'm a little worried that this is a way to justify the further dismantling of the Department of Education or moving toward the privatization of education, because we can now say we made it a priority and gave grants and nothing happened. Pay no attention to the hamstringing we did to programs and researchers' abilities to get to the roots of these problems. So very normal on the face, but taken in the context of everything else that's going on, not so normal.

SPEAKER_01: 5:56

When you're talking about the inability to take a look at what some of these root causes are for the problems that we're seeing, I it I couldn't help but look at this and be like, well, you know, averages are gonna average. Like if some groups improve, you know, and and make good improvements, while other groups either, you know, like plateau or drop even a little bit, we can still see an overall positive impact, right? It's it's the power of disaggregating the data that tells us where those impacts are happening, you know, what groups of kids are benefiting from the work that we're doing and what groups of kids might be um on on the harmful end of the practices that we are doing. It matters both ways. And looking at our different populations of students, that's how we figure out who we're leaving behind. Like you, I also read this document as kind of calling for vocational schools for quote, you know, like those kids, not these.

SPEAKER_00: 7:02

Without actually saying those kids, though.

SPEAKER_01: 7:04

Right. It's it's it's the it's the subtext, right? Like, I don't have a single problem for preparing students for what this document refers to as like the four E's, right? Like calling them out employment, enrollment, enlistment, entrepreneurship. Those four E's, great. They're wonderful. I'm just concerned with the call to improve mathematics instruction to promote student achievement through, quote, developing and implementing strategies that provide opportunities for the early identification and support for students struggling with foundational and developmental mathematic concepts.

SPEAKER_00: 7:42

Well, you have a problem with that?

SPEAKER_01: 7:44

I do. I do. Um it's like it's coded language for tracking. Track early, track often.

SPEAKER_00: 7:51

Oh, see, and I'm coming at it from an ELA background. To me, this feels like it is borrowing from the current movement where we recognize that a lack of foundational skills and literacy kind of keeps you from unlocking the whole comprehension and like and moving from learning to read to reading to learn.

SPEAKER_02: 8:09

Sure.

SPEAKER_00: 8:10

And so this language to me says like if you if your brain has an inability to make number sense, then we need to identify that earlier rather than keep piling on the expectations.

SPEAKER_01: 8:26

In mathematics classes or in mathematics instruction, very early on, we tell kids whether or not, or we let kids identify as whether or not they are math people. And we, in our conversations that we've had with Kathy Williams, for example, right? Like whether or not you are a math person is bogus. We are all math people. We all do mathematics. It's just what kind of math do we value?

SPEAKER_00: 8:52

The function of those like foundational understanding and assessments in in a literacy in like a an ELA environment is kind of misplaced if like copied and pasted onto a math environment.

SPEAKER_01: 9:06

Yes. 100%. Yes. When we talked to Kathy, and Kathy was talking about no, mathematics is slow. Mathematics is not fast. It's thoughtful. It's like you struggle through it. You are making meaning, you are making sense, like it is not a fast process. Problem solving should be a slower-paced thing where you are taking your time to make sure the thing that you're doing is right, the algorithm that you're running is correct. And the faster you go through with it, the more you focus on the rote memorization of things, this back-to-basics aspect of stuff in mathematics. It's just it's emphasizing the wrong thing. And we are very quickly going to swing back toward having mathematics be all about speed and memorization, procedural fluency as opposed to conceptual understanding. We're still just doing space race math in an AI era. We're just continuing to tell kids what way to do math is the right way to do math. And if you don't do it my way, you're not doing it correctly.

SPEAKER_00: 10:20

Hmm. All right. Well, speaking of things not adding up, my second story this week. One is a Newsweek article around student loan borrowers seeing payments surge under major changes. It's an analysis of the effects of the one big, beautiful bill now coming to play with student loans. The other article has to do with a recent American Federation of Teachers lawsuit against the Department of Education. That one comes from NPR. And I think it's worth saying, here's what's going on with federal student loans. So the Biden administration said we need to help folks get out of student loan debt from the federal government so the money can flow, so we can create intergenerational wealth and mobility. Yay! And then the GOP said, but Congress didn't say you could make the save plan, which was the new lower payment plan. And we all know how the GOP likes to hold a president's feet to the legislative fire and say only what Congress says is okay. It's ironic because it's not what's happening right now. No. And so they paused it all. And there's a case uh before the Supreme Court that says, you know, is the save plan constitutional? But while people who are on the save plan, such as yours, truly are waiting for that course, none of the kind of deferred payments count. Whereas during the kind of pandemic, the Biden administration said, you know what? We're gonna put this all on it's all deferred. And while it's deferred, the normal accounts that you would accrue toward public service loan forgiveness will count. So none of that's happening. They are just frozen. And you can move to an income uh-based repayment plan or maybe not, because those things are not moving either. So the AFT has sued on behalf of educators saying, hey, you got to get this stuff moving. The other piece that's important here is that there is a program for buyback. So if you are involved in or registered for public service loan forgiveness, like if you were a teacher who said, I want to do this, um, I'm guaranteeing at least 120 months of my life will be in public service after I get this degree. You can then buy back things. So maybe like yours truly, you went to grad school while you were in repayment. Now, if those payments were deferred, you can pay what you would have paid to buy back certain months to get to your 120. I literally have 118 payments made. And I have submitted over 60 days ago my application. All of the data are verified. But what the very nice person who was in the automated um studentaid.gov chat told me was that this has to go by three different people who then have to verify it multiple times before they can sign off. And they may escalate my case to have more people look at it. Again, these are all things that I'm not a big fan of AI automating everybody's job.

SPEAKER_01: 13:31

Right.

SPEAKER_00: 13:31

But but these are things, if you were going to cut the staff at the federal uh student aid office, these are all things that very, very much could have been automated. So that's where we stand right now. And it's a bunch of hooey.

SPEAKER_01: 13:47

This is not just for educators, right?

SPEAKER_00: 13:51

No. Any public service person may if the job that you have qualifies as public service, so a nonprofit organization, um, government work, those kinds of things. Now, the Trump administration did come in and say there are certain organizations who should not qualify as public service, even though they're nonprofits because they didn't like the the things that those organizations were doing. But more broadly, yes, any public service should count.

SPEAKER_01: 14:22

So they've lowered the borrowing limits, right?

SPEAKER_00: 14:24

Yes.

SPEAKER_01: 14:25

Okay, so that just means now if I was from a family in, you know, if if if if my family was middle or lower class, the amount of money that I would be able to take out uh in a student loan is lowered. And therefore, if I want to go to university that requires me to take out more, I would need to get uh an additional loan through like a private student loan. Through a bank. Through a bank, right? Which means now the interest rate can be higher. The payback plans can be different.

SPEAKER_00: 15:02

Right. There are certain protections that are afforded to folks who take out federal student loans. And so there are caps on those, which I believe the administration would argue this is how we are trying to lower the cost of college to students, kind of signaling to the quote unquote market of higher education. Listen, they're only going to be able to borrow so much from the federal government. So you might want to think about how you're going to lower the costs. It isn't a great plan because if you can't get your mortgage somewhere, you go somewhere else to get your mortgage. Right. Same idea uh with student loans as well. And different protections. If you get your student loans, for instance, from the federal government and you pass away, then that debt is no longer there. But there are some private institutions where if you get your student loans there, your children, your heirs could then be saddled with that private debt, depending on so there are protections that the federal student loan process affords borrowers that not all private institutions afford them.

SPEAKER_01: 16:09

Oh, that's a lot of fun.

SPEAKER_00: 16:10

Yeah. A lot of debt operates that way, right? So the key here is not that your next of kin would be saddled with this with debt because your next of kin could be saddled with a lot of debt.

SPEAKER_01: 16:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 16:25

The key here is that we had carved out a piece that said education is non-transferable. So the degree that you got from whatever higher education institution, and then if you pass away, it that that degree is gone as well. What becomes a possibility if if we have to go through certain private student loan lenders, is that that debt can pass on like a mortgage. It isn't always that way, but it could be. And we've lowered both the lifetime caps as well as the one-time caps for several of those loans, making it more difficult for people to move into certain professions.

SPEAKER_01: 17:06

By making it more difficult to get enough money in loans, you know, turning to private loans. You get the higher interest rates, you get the more expensive payments, more defaulting. This feels a lot like the big short, right? I'm not crazy. Am I crazy?

SPEAKER_00: 17:24

Income-driven repayment plans are still built into the law. So there are still low payment options for those who, after they graduate, aren't making a ton of money. The issue becomes the period of repayment before any forgiveness is optional is longer. So you are paying even if your payments are lower, they're still, you know, proportional to your income, and you will be paying them for a longer period of time. All right. As the great poets of old ABBA used to say money, money, money, money, money, money, money, money. But you've got something about like a good use of money, question mark.

SPEAKER_01: 18:08

Question mark, yeah. Um, you know what? Uh the money, money's back. K-12 dive got us um a headline that says education department brings back mental health grants. Yay! The money is back. We cut a billion dollars supporting student mental health in schools.

SPEAKER_00: 18:30

Okay.

SPEAKER_01: 18:31

Uh, and we, you know what, we're we're getting some of it back. We're getting 270 million dollars back. Not nothing, not nothing, but we are getting it back for um only school psychologists.

SPEAKER_00: 18:48

School psychologists instead of school psychologists and school social workers and school counselors.

SPEAKER_01: 18:56

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 18:58

Can I can I say a thing about that that I think the average listener may not understand?

SPEAKER_01: 19:05

Yes.

SPEAKER_00: 19:06

On the how much each of those roles costs ledger, the school psychologist is most likely to be the most expensive role. So in some cases, that may require a doctorate to be a school psychologist.

SPEAKER_01: 19:25

Correct.

SPEAKER_00: 19:26

Whereas a school social worker might only require a master's.

SPEAKER_01: 19:31

Right.

SPEAKER_00: 19:32

A ton of clinical hours, both of them. Um, and then a school counseling position could require a master's as well. So a psych position, a school psych, as it's referred to often in the shorthand, tends to be the more expensive of all of those three. So if you're talking about getting the most bodies in a school, you would say, I would say we're gonna fund all three of these dependent on which you think meets the needs of your population. But that's not yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 20:03

Nope, nope, it's not, it's not. It's uh meant to address the nationwide shortage of school psychologists.

SPEAKER_00: 20:10

Sure. We got a nationwide shortage of school everything, like insert here.

SPEAKER_01: 20:16

Yeah. Okay students. We have a shortage of students.

SPEAKER_00: 20:20

Fair enough. Fair enough.

SPEAKER_01: 20:24

Yeah. So the National Association of School Psychologists uh recommends that schools have one psychologist for every 500 students.

SPEAKER_00: 20:34

And what have we got on average?

SPEAKER_01: 20:36

On average, according to the Department of Education data from the 23-24 school year shows that that ratio is really more like one for every 1,065.

SPEAKER_00: 20:48

Okay. So in 2019, the ACLU found a ratio of one school social worker for every 2,106 students.

SPEAKER_01: 20:56

Oh.

SPEAKER_00: 20:57

Those are pre-pandemic numbers. We know we have an influx of sp of funding to improve that, so probably better now.

SPEAKER_01: 21:05

But probably not by much, if I had to guess.

unknown: 21:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 21:09

So to recap our stories from this week, there is a new priority proposed by the U.S. Department of Education focusing on real-world math and improving student math outcomes. It has a couple of different caveats in there. One on making sure we assess students early on for some sort of math disability, but that could oftentimes lead to tracking, as Stephanie pointed out. And it focuses a lot on maybe not college for everybody. And then making sure not college for everybody, the one big beautiful bill, uh, or one big beautiful act, I suppose.

SPEAKER_01: 21:45

One big beautiful bill act, ABBA. Not to be confused with ABBA.

SPEAKER_00: 21:51

Oh man, never confuse ABBA. Uh the one big beautiful bill act has uh started taking an effect and is going to increase student loan payment amounts, lower access to certain jobs, and higher education for some, or increase the likely high interest limits of credit and borrowing from private institutions. And finally, we're getting more school psychologists, but funded at just a little over a quarter of what they were funded at previously. So more of less, I suppose. Definitely. And those are the top three stories making academic distinctions this week. I'm Zach Chase.

SPEAKER_01: 22:31

I'm Stephanie Melville. And thanks for listening. Thanks so much for joining us today on this episode of Academic Distinctions. As always, we hope that you enjoyed today's episode and that you'll share it. Follow us on Instagram at Academic Distinctions Pod. Find us on Blue Sky at Fixing Schools, or find us on Facebook. As always, this is your call to action to share the podcast, like us, and subscribe. You can find us online at academicdistinctions.com. If you have a question for the pod or a topic you'd like us to dig into, email us at mail at academicdistinctions.com. Until next week, friends. This podcast is underwritten by the Federation of American Scientists. Find out more at FAS.org.