Childcare and Education In An Election Year - What You Need to Know

Welcome to another enlightening episode of Impacting the Classroom. Today, we are joined by Oliver Spurgeon III, an esteemed education policy advocate with a unique perspective shaped by his diverse educational journey and extensive experience on Capitol Hill. In this episode, we dig into the intricacies of education policies from both the Republican and Democratic viewpoints, explore the cultural and financial challenges facing modern education, and discuss the significant role advocacy plays in shaping the future of our classrooms.

Our discussion delves into the varying educational platforms, highlighting how Democrats aim to improve mental health support, address funding disparities, and uphold tenure for experienced teachers. At the same time, Republicans focus on reducing educational spending, eliminating tenure, and promoting merit-based rewards. Oliver sheds light on the potential consequences of these divergent approaches on teachers and students, particularly those in challenging classroom environments. We also tackle the sensitive topics of representation and access for minority children, the burden on low-income families, and the controversial debates over charter schools and education savings accounts.

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 Marnetta: Hi listeners! It’s me Marnetta Larrimer, host, here at Impacting the Classroom. You know the drill. We want to know what's impacting the classroom. With elections around the corner, our guest today will share with us what we need to be paying attention to in the world of ECE policy during the election year. Today, we have with us Oliver Spurgeon III. Welcome, Oliver.
 
Oliver: Thanks for having me. 

Marnetta: Wonderful. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? 

Oliver: Of course. I'm originally from Atlanta, Georgia. I grew up going to a small private school. I was in class with the same 30 kids from the time that I was in first grade to ninth grade and then decided it was time to jump into the big pool, went to public school, and graduated with over a thousand kids in my graduating class.

I went from super small to really big and saw some of the challenges that I'm now working on as an education policy advocate in Washington. Each day I get to work on behalf of organizations that are helping to shape the future of young learners working on everything from K-12 education, Head Start, pre-K, and childcare issues. 

We're really trying to make the mark so that legislators in Washington understand what families are focused on and what's going to make a difference for our youngest learners in the classroom so thanks for having me. 

Marnetta: Oh, I feel like we're gonna have a great conversation. Your educational experiences are what drove you to your career path?

Oliver: That's it. It was obviously the biggest differentiator and I saw that from a really young age, having that strong foundation and going to a really small school and then going to that big school and just seeing the inequities that some kids faced. It was in the middle of Buckhead in Atlanta.It's a really wealthy district, but they had a busing program. 

We brought kids in from some impoverished neighborhoods. Some kids were able to walk to school and you saw those distinctions and those outcomes that we struggle with and that school struggles with when you've got kids who step into the classroom and they've got different advantages and disadvantages that they're wrestling with as those educators are trying to pour into each and every kid.

Seeing that and knowing that I wanted to make a difference in the policy landscape, when I had an opportunity to work on Capitol Hill, my boss said what do you want to focus on and what do you want to learn? I said education policy is the thing that is going to make the difference for kids back home and around the country. I've been doing that for a number of years. 

I also did a bit of out-of-school time work and summer work as well. When I left Congress and worked on Capitol Hill, I lobbied for the parks and recs nationally, really trying to make sure that in those summer months, we could stop the summer slide and ensure that kids kept those gains. Then, more importantly, they didn't go hungry in the summer months as well. Doing a lot of complimentary work on what happens with school meals and making sure that kids have the nutrients they need to succeed in the classroom. Looking forward to this conversation. 

Marnetta: Yes, so thank you for all of that. Yeah and I love that you use the word summer slide instead of learning loss. That sounds just far more equitable and realistic to what we're looking at in those summer months. Thank you for providing because I was going to follow up with an example like what did you see? What was the specific catalyst in your experience that really catapulted your career? 

I appreciate you naturally going into it and letting me know. I also commend you for being such a young person and being so aware. Oftentimes, as an adult, you look back and like yeah you're reflecting, but in that moment, you're just like this ain't right and just taking all that in that just says that you're moving in your purpose. 

Oliver: Of course, kids are really astute and they can see social disadvantages. The difficult thing for them is that they don't have the wherewithal or the ability to change the circumstances that they are trying to navigate or that their friends are trying to navigate. I would say I'm uniquely blessed but also challenged to also help Congress and folks on the Hill try and fix some of the things that we're wrestling with in the classroom and that folks around the country are wrestling with too. I think we all want the same thing, really good outcomes, but people have different ideas about how to get there. 

Marnetta: Let's get to the meat of it. Because we have this really electrifying thing happening around us. We have these elections coming and all the shenanigans and things that come with an election which is also being polarized by the people who are running for these offices. We want to know what educators, educational leaders, and people who care about children's education and their future, should be paying attention to during this election cycle. 

Oliver: Let's start off at a really high level. The two parties have divergent philosophies about how they're approaching education this cycle. The Republican's platform talks about doing away with the Department of Education and returning administration and regulation back to the States.

Another strong point that they're making is not necessarily about how we teach, but about what we teach in the classroom. You've seen some of the culture wars over the past number of years, talking about book bans, talking about returning prayer to schools, talking about reading the Bible. These have been lingering cultural issues that have driven, I would say, electoral outcomes, but I'm not really sure there's a strong connection to success in the classroom.

If you look at the platform that Democrats put forward, it's a bit more robust. The Republican platform was about 20 or so pages altogether and the Democratic platform was about 99 pages. There's just a lot more that's spelled out in there.  

The first thing that they touch on is guaranteed access to universal Pre-K, pre-K3, and pre-K4 and then also a strong push for making sure that there's access to child care for families who aren't in that system yet and trying to make sure that they have the tax credits to pay for that so that they're not burdened with the out of pocket costs. 

Both parties really understand and both candidates have really said already that this is really about a focus on families knowing that popular issues are going to be at the front of the conversation and have been at the front of the political context for the duration of this campaign and especially since Kamala Harris jumped in. You've seen both candidates, which is good, wrap their arms around an expanded and more robust child tax credit. Families will hopefully be able to lower the out-of-pocket burden and then spread that to success in the classroom. 

The Democratic platform takes it a bit further. They talk about improving the environment for mental health support and ensuring that students and teachers have what they need  to remove some of that stigma and bias that kids trying to access that coming out of the classroom face. Then, more importantly, there's a broader conversation about money happening here as well. The Republican platform correctly notes that we spend a lot of money more than most countries on education and really get poor outcomes because of it. 

The Democratic platform takes a bit of a different approach and says that wealthier districts in the country, because of the focus on using property taxes to fund education, get about 20% more compared to under-poverished regions despite them having more kids. They leverage that and say, we want to put more money into Title I and impact aid to level the playing field for kids who are in inner-city schools, or poorer schools, so they don't have the tax base to drive success in the classroom. Two different philosophies, two different approaches, no matter what side of the aisle you're on.  

Marnetta: A lot to unpack. You said so many things, I have so many notes. I'm going to attack it one thing at a time.  When we talk about removing tenure, how do you think that would impact an already struggling workforce in education?

Oliver: Since the pandemic, you've heard teachers in red states and blue states talk about the difficulties of trying to stay in the classroom. Kids are still returning every fall with more and more challenges and it's increasing the burden on teachers who are forced to do more with less. The tax base hasn't come back to the same place in large school systems that are in the inner urban core and inner cities and so classroom sizes are growing and teachers are having to do a lot more to get those same outcomes that they were getting pre-pandemic. 

The juxtaposition to doing away with tenure on the Republican platform was pushing more success outcomes and focusing on merit aid. Trying to ensure that for the teachers who are doing really well and who do have students who are acing tests and are just testing out of this world, performing out of this world, those teachers and only those teachers are the ones who will succeed.  

Democrats have a bit of a different idea about how that works. For a long time, they've had a focus on ensuring that teachers who have been in the classroom for a long time can also get a bit of a plus-up in their annual paychecks to ensure that because they know that you're a successful educator, you've got a bit of expertise under your belt. The assumption is that what comes with that is experience and wisdom and better outcomes as well. 

The Democratic platform focuses on tenure as a way to ensure that kids are going to see some success in the classroom. The parties have different ideas about how to foster teacher success and also to attract folks to the workforce.  

Marnetta: Yeah, I am still struggling, right? Because when I think about my time in the classroom, there are inequities even in that. I would always have classrooms of challenging students because I could handle it. As a Black woman, I got this. My partner across the hall did not have the same type of time with her students. We were expected to produce the same outcomes, but I had a lot more barriers to get there. 

For situations like that, I feel like the merit aid is so unfair because if you have a classroom of 20–30 students who are all academically struggling and you're doing all of the things and things are based on these test results. It's just unfair especially when you have a whole nother classroom that has none of those barriers or challenges. I don't want to call them barriers because they're children. I struggle with that because it's not for lack of knowing what to do, how to do it right, but with the systems that are in place, they're not really working for you all the time as an educator. That's all I'm going to say about that.  I don't know if you have anything to follow up with that. 

Let's talk about doing away with the DOE, which, oh, that's all. I don't think U react big enough because when I think it might sound joyous and I think depending on what kind of state you live in, it could be beautiful, but I don't even want them to. What are your thoughts around that?

Oliver: I think this goes to the party's bigger thoughts about bureaucracy altogether. For decades, Republicans have talked about cutting red tape, removing the burden, this administrative state and really letting innovation kind of foster and flourish locally. This argument of abolishing the Department of Education really plays into that idea that there are a bunch of bureaucrats in Washington. They're not in the classroom. They're not really doing much beyond doling out money to improve outcomes and if we kind of remove all the money that was spent on the Department of Education, send it out as grants across the country, then somehow or another, we can actually improve outcomes and readjust that spending.

It's a bit of a dollars and cents approach, as opposed to something that's really focused on what it means to track those outcomes. I don't think it means that this is honestly going to be a reality. I mean, there's a lot that goes into doing away with the DOE and what it means for kids around the country, what it means for states around the country. We already talked about some of the advantages and disadvantages that kids come into the classroom with. Obviously, removing some of that money that DOE is pushing out some of those formulas that they're tracking to ensure that kids have at least some of that money somewhat equal outcomes, or at least complimentary outcomes in the classroom.

That could be problematic for schools that are already struggling and for districts that are already running into challenges with things around mental health, around infrastructure, and around the ability to accommodate students in the classroom. At the outset of our conversation, we talked about the fact that class sizes are growing in so many places and it's hard to accommodate that. I can't imagine what would happen if that additional support that comes from Washington lost what it would mean for kids like the ones that I was in school with in Atlanta, where I already had a graduating class of a thousand kids in high school. It was a big school.  

Marnetta: Yeah, very big. You saw my eyes. I was like oh, my school is big. I'm going to be breathing a lot during this episode. 

Oliver: That's okay.

Marnetta: You mentioned CRT, hot, hot, hot, hot topic. I think my struggle is the misunderstanding of critical race theory and what it entails. Let's talk about that a little bit more. First of all, do you mind sharing your thoughts around CRT? 

Oliver: I'm not a CRT expert, but we work with clients that had to navigate the book ban head-on in libraries around the country. These are the issues that, frankly, don't do anything to improve access for kids who need to be reading more at their younger age not less. The fact that we're talking about removing certain subjects from the classroom or removing the focus area in certain subjects puts certain kids at a disadvantage. Certain kids who want to see imagery or hear about folks from the past who reflect their background, their values and their ways of thought. It's tough to see that those things might be taken in the classroom and that they're already being removed. 

If you think about what's happening in Florida with the removal of black history at some of the colleges and universities,  this is going to have a long-term effect on kids for generations to come who didn't have that kind of foundation and that kind of knowledge in their formative years.
One of the other really interesting areas of conflict that I've seen in the two parties' platforms is around the focus on civics. One of the parties is talking about the fact that we don't need civics in the classroom anymore and that we can figure out our own curriculums for how we teach about the country's history and what it means rather than having a kind of standardized approach so that kids in Alaska in Anchorage and kids in Atlanta are learning the same set of facts. 

Once again, when we think about, as kids graduate, as they move on to college and they go to higher education, some kids are going to come in with a different foundation of knowledge than others. Depending on where they go to school, they might be at a disadvantage altogether just because the state that they're from decided to say we don't need that particular curriculum. We don't want those particular ideas taught or we just don't think that's a good idea.  

Marnetta: I love our educators, but sometimes we can be dangerous with our own platforms and the access we have to children. I appreciate that. I agree with everything that you said, so thanks for saying it out loud. Definitely, as a mother of brown children, it’s concerning. I know that for me, it wasn't until I got to college that I really gotta see myself reflected in material. I'm just like, how did we miss a whole section? What happened? 

I know the impact it had on me. People shouldn't have to wait until they have complete control of their education to seek those. It should be a natural part of learning about the country. I was like woah, we skipped that part.  

Oliver: The classroom and libraries used to be a place where all folks could come and kind of see themselves and learn about things that they found interesting and that's no longer the case anymore.  

Marnetta: Yeah, that's sad, because even if it's not being taught, I guess as a parent, I could go outta my way to create access so we're putting more ownness on the parents and the families. But again, that feels like a burden also. 

Oliver: Frankly, it expands the opportunity gap even further than it already is. For parents who are single, who are low-income, it's tough to do the kind of out-of-school time work and access out-of-school time services that can help corner those kids when they're already struggling to make ends meet and they might not have enough time because they have to work two jobs. Those resources that used to be in the classroom where the kid could go read in the after school hours and learn about those sorts of things. Those resources aren't there anymore. 

Marnetta: Yeah. I'm just getting sadder and sadder. But there's hope, right? 

Oliver: There's plenty of hope. 

Marnetta: There's lots of hope, so let's talk about that. What are some of the angles that policymakers and politicians are taking when addressing education? Things like school readiness, workforce, security, all those things.

Oliver: I think it's a really good place when it comes to school readiness because of the focus on families and particularly with Kamala entering the race and populism, both parties are talking about making sure that families and kids are prepared to succeed. As I mentioned earlier, there's that big focus on the child tax credit, and it seems like both parties are taking an interest in what happens with young folks earlier and earlier.

This is good because hopefully, no matter the party, we're going to be seeing some of these inputs coming in. The fact that families will have more dollars in their pockets means they will be able to afford education in their particular choice of education. 

Some folks, some parties rather, are talking about making sure there is access to charter schools, but they're doing it in different ways. Republicans are talking about the fact that education savings accounts need to be made available for families who want to put money aside to pursue private school. That's not a bad idea, and it's an option for them. 

Democrats are talking about making sure that charters are an option, but only if it doesn't suck away dollars or accountability for those charters in comparison to traditional public schools. Both parties have ideas about how to make school readiness an option and access an option, but they're going about it in tremendously different ways.

I don't have an opinion either way about which one is better. Families will have the option to choose what works for them. The goal is to make sure that the pathway to get there is as easy as possible. Unfortunately, that pathway has become a bit more difficult for some school systems recently because of the financial circumstances that they found themselves in. 

Marnetta: Wonderful. Thank you for that. I want to talk a little bit more about child care right in their early childhood. Is ECE, education, and child care, a bipartisan concern at all?

Oliver: I think early childhood access and childcare is a bipartisan concern. Both parties have been getting it left and right from parents, and young kids, talking about the fact that childcare is insanely expensive. I've got a three-year-old and it is a huge point of contention about the fact that we have to pay to get our kid care because we have to go to work each day and it's hard. 

Families have to make choices about what they're going to do to ensure their kids are taken care of. For some parents, that means one spouse stays home because it's cheaper than paying for child care and some are blessed that they can be able to afford to pay out of pocket and then go to work. But it's not easy for anyone. 

Because a lot of the folks in Washington are in their 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s, and their kids went to school decades ago, they're a bit unaware of the actual costs that young parents, and not even young parents, are facing trying to pay for their kids to access childcare. 

As they hear that many of them are trying to think of different ways to figure out how they can do this. Some folks are focusing on expanding the workforce, trying to ensure that there are incentives in place for folks who work in the early childhood space to expand their education, to pursue higher education, to obtain certificates. 

Some folks have focused more on the spending side trying to increase salaries, bonuses, and payments so that more folks will be attracted to the workforce. Some more moderate members think it's got to be an all-of-the-above approach where we both spend money to increase the salary and also expand the base by saying you can make a career out of this by going to college and getting higher education focused in the early childhood space.

There are a number of ways that people are thinking about it. Unfortunately, because the prior Congress has seen so many challenges around education in the first place, it's just had a hard time breaking through.

The issues of the day around the border and spending crisis and health care and huge fights around and in the party on the Republican side around the speaker so much of that political oxygen, which is sucked up throughout the past two years, they just couldn't get the early childhood agenda and child care issues on the floor of the House and Senate to fix it. 

It's not that it isn't a priority. There's just a lot of other issues that we're competing with in the early childhood space and Congress just couldn't get it to the agenda. There are folks fighting to make it a reality every day, but those are the things that we're really focused on. It's both an access cost and an incentive issue.  

Marnetta: Thank you for answering that. Another hot topic in this political climate that we're in has been Project 2025. My first question is, did you read it?  

Oliver: I read enough of it to disrupt my sleep and know what it means for the folks that I've been working on behalf of for decades. In the education space, one of the concerning pieces for me was the fact that they talked about zeroing out the Head Start program. I've got friends and family that were Head Start kids and so I know what it means to have those investments early on so the kids can have a really strong footing as they enter the classroom for their formative years. 

Really removing that base of support and that injection of funding and those resources that go into it and the wraparound services that many Head Start providers provide families as well, it's going to mean that so much is taken away from young learners and they're going to lose out.

That was included in there. It wasn't super comprehensive in the early childhood space, but that was one of the things that they identified that made me lose a bit of hair and gain a bit more weight because I was just so stressed out about it. 

I don't think that's going to come to fruition. There's been a lot of talk about Project 2025. The Trump campaign has distanced itself from Project 2025. The former president has said that he knows nothing about Project 2025 and Democrats have made it and did make it a marquee focus of the DNC a couple of weeks ago, talking about some of the impacts for what it means for families and kids and folks of all different backgrounds.

I don't know that it's going to be the focus if Republicans get elected and if President Trump gets elected. It would basically have to run the table in Congress and take control of the Senate as well, keep control of the House, and then President Trump would have to win the election in order to actually implement any of what we saw in Project 2025.

The odds of that happening are just really, really tough right now. The electoral map is a bit of a mess in each chamber and so we will see what happens in Congress but the main thing that folks in the early childhood space should be worried about is the fact that they were proposing cutting investments in young kids because we know, and the data has shown, that it makes a difference in both kids success in the classroom and also in the lifetime earnings of those kids once they get to and through college.

Marnetta: I didn't get through it either and I don't really know anybody in my network like that did. Lots of conversations around it. In what you did read, are there any possible benefits of Project 2025?  

Oliver: The document was really focused on slimming down and streamlining the size of government and so a lot of it focused on ensuring that parents had more parental rights and this plays into the conversation that we talked about earlier around removing some of those more controversial books that local school councils deem are kind of inappropriate for young learners and then retrofitting and reformatting some of the curriculums to remove things like black history in the classroom, RCT, or things that other parents might deem inappropriate for young folks that they think are too political. That was really the scope of the focus on the education front. Then a bit about doing away with unions at the federal level and teachers' unions as well because they've been reliable voters and donors for Democrats for years. 

Marnetta: A little birdie told me that you have a wealth of knowledge around AI?

Oliver: Yeah, I have a bit of a bit of a background in AI. I can talk about that too. 

Marnetta: I wanted to talk about AI and schools and how it could be used in a way that benefits education, as opposed to how we see it happening. 

Oliver: I think in the same way that schools are learning how to harness AI for the good and so that it's not something that can be used to kind of hold back innovation, hold back success,  folks in Washington are also trying to wrap their heads around what this means for kids in the classroom and also what it means for outcomes. 

As much as we've seen some of the popularity of things like ChatGPT and the ability to ask questions and have them answered immediately in a really comprehensive manner, there are a lot of organizations around the country that are looking at these tools as ways to kind of track teacher success and then also to improve those outcomes by suggesting prompts or helping teachers improve their curriculum design. There are kinds of ways to amplify what teachers are already doing to help kids succeed in a way that would not be available if the technology were not there. 

There are some things that they're also struggling with in Washington because we haven't been able to create a kind of standardized framework for AI platforms, a lot of folks are worried about what it means for bias in the outcomes of these platforms. Because humans are naturally building these things and putting these things together, and they come with their own senses of bias that the platforms can basically take those inputs and then have negative impacts on kids in the classroom based upon their race, their background, their religion as they're analyzing tests, as they're analyzing essays, as they're reading through the inputs that are coming in.

We've got to make sure that the technology, as it goes forward, is really doing this with a kind of blind eye to who's coming in and what it's reading is kind of standardized no matter who the test taker is and no matter what information is going in. 

But the two parties in Washington really can't agree on what that system should look like.  A lot of folks want there to be an opportunity for the government and for colleges and universities to test out any kind of AI platform or AI platforms that will have implications for kids success in the classroom or for things like access to credit or access to housing or banking or what have you to be tested out before they are released publicly.

Other folks think that's a bad idea because it will hold back and slow the innovation that we're receiving. There's a bit of a philosophical discussion happening in Washington that's going to have implications for kids in the classroom and also for the success and innovation of folks around the country, no matter what industry you're in.

I think a lot of teachers, employees, et cetera, are worried about the fact that at some point these platforms might advance to a point where they are made less relevant or irrelevant because kids will be able to, at some point, learn from “the robots, the machines, or the software” and the impact of teachers and that knowledge that they developed and that human impact, it won't be as important to ensure that kids can get to and through college if they have success in the classroom. 

There's also that kind of push and pull trying to ensure that as the technology advances and develops the highly qualified teachers who've been doing this for decades who have all this knowledge and expertise and have seen kids excel and flourish in the classroom. They won't be pushed aside by some software that is not as expensive as it costs to employ an entire wing of teachers in classrooms, but they can, for the most part, replicate results by reviewing tests and reviewing the information that they're putting out and kids are receiving.

There's a bit of a push and pull. They haven't quite figured it out and there's going to be a lot of development on this to come. I thought at some point, they were actually going to be able to focus on other issues that kids are facing in the classroom, using some of these AI-generated platforms to put forth like sexually explicit materials and deep fakes of other kids. 

We've seen a lot of news about that. We've seen instances where young folks have been harmed, and it's led to some of those mental health challenges that we talked about earlier. It's seen as though Congress is going to be able to rally around the flagpole, and really try and address some of the softer issues that they're struggling with around AI, but that's not going to be the case either. 
It just seems that we've gotten too far into this congressional session and so they're going to have to wait to see if they can address some of the issues around the CSAM and other sexually explicit materials that kids are using as well. That is something we can discuss another day. 

Marnetta: That's a whole nother segment.  I will say educators, you're not going anywhere. As much as computers can do in technology, that social-emotional base that we know that children need in order to thrive and that drives our education, it needs human connection and interactions for that. We're safe there. No worries. 

Thank you so much. This has been such a great session. I'm curious to know, in your role, what does a day looks like for you. But also I want to know what fulfills you in your field. 

Oliver: This is honestly servant leadership. I am helping small organizations and a lot of nonprofit providers of Head Start who don't have the expertise to know how to navigate Congress, to know how to write bills, helping introduce them to really powerful people and staff who are experts on education. 

Many of the staff work at education policy in Washington and Congress and the White House were at one point teachers so they're committed and they really understand what it takes to have success in the classroom. It doesn't matter whether that's in a Republican administration or a Democratic administration. These are folks who want to see kids succeed. They just have different ideas about doing it. 

I and my colleagues at ArentFox have the pleasure of helping so many great organizations around the country who are committed to seeing kids win in the classroom, helping them navigate the halls of power, and ensuring that the people who are writing these bills and are going to be shaping education policy for the next 5, 10, 15 years, understand the needs of our kids. They understand the needs of kids who might be a bit nontraditional, kids who have disabilities, and kids who may not learn the same as others, and they understand that everyone might need a different approach and that if we standardize something too minutely folks could be disadvantaged. 

It really is a pleasure. I've loved every bit of it, but there's a lot of work to do to ensure that every single kid in the country has a good shot at a good education. 

Marnetta: I think we have a great advocate in you, Oliver. Thank you. Thank you. This will be my final question and you could take as long with it as you'd like. What I'd like to know is what else should our audience know that they might not be aware of. What else do you want to share with us? But also, what are you hoping for in the next year?  

Oliver: We have about six months. It's September, so we'll call it five months until the next administration takes shape. For advocates around the country, no matter whether you're Republican or Democrat, you should be thinking about ensuring that you want the next administration to know what your priorities are. What it means for their education policy agenda and ultimately what it means for the kids whose minds you're trying to shape and who you're hoping to succeed in the classroom, even if they are young learners, two and three and four, there are things that they can do year over year, day over day today to help succeed. 

It feels like sometimes what's happening in Washington is just so divorced from what educators are doing in the classroom day to day and so they need to hear your stories. They need to hear how the work you're doing is making huge changes in the development of young kids already and they need to hear that the foundation you're setting is going to set the path as these kids become the future leaders of tomorrow, as they open businesses, as they go to school, as they join corporations.
Every single Fortune 500 company talks about the fact that they want a strong, vibrant, and educated populace because they know that they need workers who are great and smart and that starts with the investments that we make today in education. 

I want you to think about what's going to happen five months from now, no matter whether you're Republican or Democrat, I would implore all of you to try and come to Washington. If you can track me down, you have my email address. We are happy to set up virtual meetings with folks and my teams so that they can talk with policymakers in Washington and talk about the difference that child care makes for them. Talk about the difference that Head Start makes for your kids. Talk about the difference that the CLASS system makes for kids and teacher advancement in the classroom. 

These are the kinds of things that policymakers need to hear so that they can understand and connect the dots from the kind of theoretical and heady conversations that they're often having in Washington and the kind of realistic challenges that parents are facing and that kids are facing when they don't have the best inputs coming in and the kind of best opportunities for success. We've all got to engage in our own different ways to make educational success in the classroom as good as it can be.  

Marnetta: I appreciate that you made yourself accessible to the people. Just know that you're getting ready to be just obliterated. I hope you're ready.  

Oliver: That's what we're here for. That's what we're here for.
 
Marnetta: Including me. I'm like, hey, so let's talk about it. 

Oliver: That’s right. If you want to come to Washington, come on up, wear comfortable shoes, we will walk you up and down the halls of Congress, we will take you to the White House, and hopefully introduce you to some folks who want to see the kids that you're serving succeed. Let me know. I'm always happy to chat. 

Marnetta: Yeah, that sounds like a trip. Alright. Oliver, thank you so much. 

Oliver: Of course, this has been fantastic. 

Marnetta: Yes, this is great. Okay. Alright, listeners, hope you enjoyed today's conversation and we hope you follow along for another great session. 

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You can find today's episode and transcript on our website, teachstone.com/podcasts. As always behind great leading and teaching are powerful interactions. Let's build that culture together. See you soon.