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Aug. 19, 2024 - Doug Collins Podcast
29:44
The Teachers Union and Education
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You want to listen to a podcast?
By who?
Georgia GOP Congressman Doug Collins.
How is it?
The greatest thing I have ever heard in my whole life.
I could not believe my ears.
In this house, wherever the rules are disregarded, chaos and mob rule.
It has been said today, where is bravery?
I'll tell you where bravery is found and courage is found.
It's found in this minority who has lived through the last year of nothing but rules being broken, people being put down, questions not being answered, and this majority say, be damned with anything else.
We're going to impeach and do whatever we want to do.
Why?
Because we won an election.
I guarantee you, one day you'll be back in the minority and it ain't gonna be that fun.
Hey everybody, welcome to the Doug Collins Podcast.
Glad to have you with us.
Hey, I'm getting a lot of emails.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Go to thedougcollinspodcast.com, hit that email button.
If you want me for speaking engagements, if you want to just talk about the podcast, complain about the podcast, you know, as I always say, you know, Questions, comments, loving disagreements, that's all where we go on the email.
But a lot of good stuff lately on our email blast.
Glad to hear you're listening and also responding to it because, again, we don't respond to this stuff.
We don't actually put our views out there and we don't understand it.
We become a low propensity, low educated voter, and that's not what we need at this time.
Let me just, conservatives out there especially, liberals, I know you listen, I hear from you.
But look, you're dependent on low information voters that the mainstream media force feeds the lines that the Democratic Party's putting out.
And look, Hey, that's fair game.
I'm not one of those that gripe.
As you know on this podcast, I don't gripe about the media.
It is who it is.
It's like gravity.
It's a fact of life.
I don't try to change gravity.
I work around gravity.
And so we got to work around the fact that the media is now propped up Paris.
But these low information voters, we've got to get the right information to.
And one of the big areas that is often on the left in particular because they have become Engrained in the Democratic Party, and that is the teachers' unions and education.
It has become the big part.
Donald Trump the other night on his Elon Musk spaces said that he wanted to do away with the Department of Education.
Couldn't be in more agreement with that.
Why are we putting middlemen in Washington, D.C. who sit in cubicles, who've never taught in the classroom, determining where money goes when we could simply be funding or, you know, if we needed to from somehow federal level to help with agriculture, to help with the food program, to help with everything else?
We can do that.
But actually doing it out of Washington, a bad idea.
So again, we're going to talk about that today.
I've got a great guest on coming up this morning.
Angela's going to be with us to talk education.
You're going to want to miss this.
This will be one of those that you can take to your friends, take to your folks in your neighborhoods, and get them understanding some of the myths about education and some of the things that we can actually do about it.
So right after the break, we'll be right back.
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All right.
We're back here on the podcast.
Glad to have you.
Angela, welcome to the podcast.
I'm glad to have you with us.
We're going to talk education.
It's dear and dear to my heart on this because as all my listeners know, Lisa taught for 31 years in the public school system.
I saw it from the ground up over those 31 years of looking at the craziness.
Angela, glad to have you with us this morning.
It's great to be with you, Doug.
Thank you so much for having me.
Tell us what I always like to do, and I shared this with you before.
I always like to let our guests have a few minutes just to say, how did you get to where you're at?
I mean, nobody just all of a sudden, you know, just appeared and said, okay, I'm on a podcast.
This is what I talk about.
What brought you to where you're at right now?
Give us sort of your background, where you're from, all that kind of good stuff that brought you to where you're at now.
Well, first things first, I am a very proud Georgian, and I also very proudly served in the Trump administration as a press secretary in the Department of Education.
I was there when COVID hit, and it was a front row seat to, quite frankly, things that I can't unsee.
The education system was nothing to write home about, quite frankly.
Before COVID and afterwards, it's really in a state of crisis.
So following the Trump administration, I have stayed in the fight for education.
I'm the spokesperson for the Defense of Freedom Institute and a visiting fellow at the Independent Women's Forum.
So you're from Georgia.
Okay, you done opened the door here.
We're Georgia folks here.
I know you're in Atlanta now, and you've already told me what area of Atlanta.
So anybody ever tells me they're from Atlanta, I say, okay, you got to do better than that.
You got to tell me where you're from in Atlanta.
Are you from Inside the Beltway in Atlanta originally, or are you from other parts?
I'm not.
I'm from Marietta East Cobb, and I am a very proud public charter school graduate from Walton High School.
Walton High School.
I love it.
There's a lot of Walton High School around everywhere else in Cobb County.
Great place.
Where'd you go to school?
Where'd you go after Walton?
I went to Georgetown University.
I started off at their school foreign service for my undergrad and stayed on for a master's in liberal studies, which I promise is not what it sounds like.
I studied.
I get it.
When I was in Congress, I had two ladies who worked for me in my lead shop.
Both became my legislative directors.
One was my first legislative director.
The other one came on after that.
One is, her name is Jennifer Belair.
Now she married my chief of staff.
And the other was Sally Rose Larson.
And two of the best non-attorney, attorney-legislative people I've ever had that I've ever seen with lawyers.
But Sally Rose went to Georgetown as well.
That's amazing.
I love to see our Georgetown Hoyas go on to do some cool things.
Yeah, so she was there as well.
Good stuff as we look at it.
But here's the thing as we look at it, getting into education.
Let's do some calling back.
You mentioned COVID. We'll get back to COVID here in a minute.
But one of the biggest myths out there when I was in state legislatures and in Georgia and others is this idea that if you hear it in TVs, you hear it in movies and everything else, if you just fund education, then everything, all the problems go away.
I blame that as a myth.
Am I telling the truth?
You are absolutely telling the truth.
I don't know if there's any more pervasive lie in education today than the idea that the system is underfunded.
Now, the United States right now, most places in this country, spend about $15,000 to $18,000 per student per year.
That's a lot of money.
It is more per student than nearly any other country on Earth, and yet our results in the international rankings are pretty dismal.
Especially after the COVID-related school closures.
The issue is that very little of that funding actually makes it to the classroom.
I would imagine that your wife can speak from experience about how teachers need more resources from their schools.
But what happens is that there are layers and layers of bureaucracy very often in many states put in place by the teacher unions that do nothing much but absorb funding.
So that's how we end up with a very well-funded school system And yet, so many times, teachers are forced to pay out of pocket for their own school supplies, and that's just something that never needs to be happening.
Yeah.
Well, let's think about this.
You know, normally, okay, and again, this goes to, you know, what you're looking for.
I can buy a Ford.
I drive a Ford F-250 truck.
It gets me to do anything I want.
I can pull anything.
I can go to the farm.
I can do whatever I want to do with it, all right?
Now, I can go buy a Ford.
More expensive truck.
I can buy a new EV Tesla truck.
I can get it stuck.
I can do it.
But it doesn't mean that I'm getting better at what the job is.
And I think this is the concern that we have.
You talked about teachers paying out of pocket.
Believe me, I've funded more of education than I ever want to fund through, not just my property taxes, but through my bride.
And we've been, you know, like I said, she was 31 years, we've been married 36, and so I've seen it with my three kids.
Here's the problem.
In the state of Georgia, and we'll speak to the state of Georgia, and numbers bear out across the country, the city of Atlanta school system, is one of the highest per student funded FTE full-time equivalent in the state of Georgia and has some of the absolutely worst test scores when it comes to testing.
If you can't get a better example of that, then I don't know why.
But how do we break through in states that don't have teachers?
Now, I disagree.
In Georgia, they say we don't have teachers' unions, but they're called PAGE and GAE, Georgia Association of Educators and Professional Educators of Georgia.
PAGE, and I don't care if they don't like what I say or not, they act like a union.
They talk like a union.
They say, oh, we're not a union.
Yeah, they are, okay?
They just can't do collective bargaining in Georgia.
But across the country, Unions do provide that filter that causes this to happen.
How do we break this myth?
Now, we admit it's a myth, but how do we break it?
I think we have the best data point that we may ever possibly have in this fight.
After COVID hit and there were three waves of COVID funding that were meant to help keep learning going and then later on to remediate learning loss.
In total, Congress allocated nearly $190 billion for K-12 public education relief.
So if the left was right, if the unions and pseudo unions were right, that massive influx of funding should have solved all our educational problems.
And instead, what happened?
Test scores fell off a cliff.
So anytime somebody perpetuates that myth of, oh, we just need more money, we just need more money, you just had all the money in the world.
The last wave of it is slated to expire on September 30th.
And I think the more people become aware of just how much money is out there and how poorly it has been used, the The faster we're going to get that myth to go away.
I agree.
But also, though, isn't it ingrained a little bit?
And let's get into a little deeper topic here, okay?
Because funding...
Now, I will agree that we've got an issue that we need to properly prepare our students and that a kid in the middle of an urban blight area should get the same education as a Walton High graduate, you know, out in Cobb County.
Yes.
And for those who may be wondering about that on the podcast, we're only talking about 20-something miles, okay?
The literally, it's a zip code issue.
And with a county and a city.
But the other issue is, is that when we take the, how we get this money, and this is the essence of the problem here in Georgia, and it is the essence of the problem, and I've talked to other states as well, and that is property tax.
Most of our education is built on the back of property tax, and then it's assessed through a different way of funding formulas on who gets what and everything else.
Is there a way we can break that formula?
Because I believe that is also a formula that is holding us back in true educational funding, but also in how we distribute it.
I believe you're absolutely correct, and different states handle it differently, but pretty much everywhere has some sort of a balancing mechanism in place where places that are going to have less property tax, maybe not enough to run a school effectively, are going to get a little bit more help overall from the state.
At the federal level, we have Title I schools.
But the fact is that Far too little money is making it into the classroom.
And that's like when you hear proposals to abolish the Department of Education, which for somebody who worked there and absolutely loved it, I could not agree more.
I believe that that department takes in billions upon billions of dollars every year.
And what's the return on that investment?
Test scores have hardly budged since the department was created.
So I am all for getting rid of the Department of Education, or at least vastly changing the form in which it exists, so we could block grant that money to the states.
That means more funding for everybody, less red tape for everybody.
Everybody wins.
I agree.
Well, you know, look, and please hear me.
What was it that Betsy actually said about?
She walked around and she didn't know what half the people did.
And I think that's an issue.
Wouldn't it be better for all of these, you know, education, and I call it a little bit educrats, because that's sort of what it's become.
It's its own thing.
What if you took, and how many people do you think was in just the physical plant there in D.C.? Take a guess at how many people worked out of those buildings.
Oh, probably a couple thousand.
Wouldn't it be amazing to send a couple of thousand of those out to an inner city school district that was having trouble getting teachers?
I am all for it.
That's the problem is we've got too many bureaucrats and not enough teachers.
Post-COVID, there are actually more public school employees teaching about a million fewer.
Actually, I may be wrong on that number, but teaching many, many less kids than they were before the pandemic.
So you hear people talk about this teacher shortage.
And yes, we need more great teachers.
But what there is not is a school employee shortage.
There are so many administrators out there who, just like so many people up at the Federal Department of Ed, are collecting a paycheck and nobody really knows what impact they're having on education.
Yeah, I've always said this about government, you know, federal employees.
Look, and I've been very honest about this.
I believe that Americans are the hardest working, most conscientious people when it comes to truly working.
I believe there's a work ethic in America that's eroding, don't get me wrong, but I believe it is there.
And that if you give somebody a government job in a cubicle in D.C. and tell them this is what they're going to do, most of them, and I'm being I think very kind, but I would say most of them want to do a good job.
They don't want to just sit there and run through their Facebook page all day.
They want to do something.
So they feel like they have to do something.
It's called makeup work, what we used to always say.
So they dig a hole in the morning and they fill it back in the afternoon.
And that's what they do all the time.
And so this is where you get the regulatory burdens.
This is where you get the craziness of the stuff that my wife ended up filling out more forms.
than anything else, and we're missing the bottom line.
You know what we've talked about so far, Angela Ness, and I don't want to bring this up.
You and I have talked about for about, you know, we're all going up on about 15 minutes now, and we've not mentioned the very purpose of education yet, and that is the key.
We've not talked about the kids yet.
Yep.
You mentioned it briefly with the COVID and the test scores.
We talk about them as if they're numbers, okay?
Right.
And that's a sad statement because at the end of the day, I believe the bigger issue with education is...
Feel free to disagree or not.
For all of the talk, we do not value education in this country anymore.
We have taken the value out of education.
And because of a lot of the problems, to the point now, as a parent told my wife one day at a meeting, a PTO meeting, a parent-teacher thing that they had in the middle of the year, quit sending homework home for my kids.
I send them to school for that.
I don't do it.
Wow.
That parent is basically telling that kid, I don't care about you.
Absolutely awful.
Oh gosh, that breaks my heart to hear.
And I can also tell you that there are probably a million versions of that kid across the country in that family where the parents are not being supportive because, I mean, look, when people have gone through an education system that they know doesn't value them, I believe kids are smart, they pick up on this stuff, it becomes harder for them to value that education for the next generation because they haven't seen what real education means.
There is this new, and I use scare quotes around new for a reason here, but trend in especially early to elementary education called classical learning, which says, unapologetically, we are going to build great citizens who think critically and are prepared not just for college and career, but to go on and have a successful life in whatever they want to do because they've got the great foundation.
You say classical learning and everybody goes, oh, that new thing.
No, it is the oldest form of education there is.
If you go back hundreds of years, even if you go back just a couple hundred years and look at the one-room schoolhouse, that's what all education was.
But when we switched over as a country, as a society, to its factory learning model, the real beauty of education got lost.
Bureaucracy has only made the problem worse.
And I would bet that your wife has taught generations of kids and seen what works and what doesn't inside a classroom.
Every single teacher I have met and gotten to know has said that teaching the fundamentals is what brings them joy and what brings their kids joy.
Nobody remembers filling out a coloring worksheet of, like, the countries of Europe.
But people remember a great book that their English teacher had them read, or they remember something cool they did in science class.
It's about that creating that foundational love of learning that so many people just aren't getting today.
Well, and I think you're hitting it, and that goes back to basic skills of Krip.
Look, I will take somebody who can think and write upon anything else.
And as someone who is hired Many, many people.
It is amazing to me.
We always used to require in our office, especially for our legislative folks, our policy directors, and definitely our communications people, they had to provide a writing sample.
And it was not one that they could provide to us.
We gave them in their interview, they had to come in, they came in for the interview, we gave them two topics that at that interview they had to write on off the cuff.
Because we didn't want it prepared.
We wanted to see how they could actually formulate a thought.
And as my law school professor, you know, there's two trains of thought.
I have a master of divinity and I have a law degree in the switcher.
Sounds like two strange things, but it's, you know, from faith perspective, it's grace and law.
My law degree taught me to be precise.
My law degree taught me to hit an issue and discuss the preciseness.
My master's divinity said, and I had a professor one time who said, you know, graze where you want, but give your own milk.
In other words, go wherever you took, take in everything you can, but at the end of the day, make it yours.
And so this is what's missing in our educational system today many times is because we've gotten off of having to teach everything else in the world, plus curriculum changes.
And this is where the Department of Ed in DC is a big driver.
And I'm not going to get off into the, you know, all the...
I'm not even going to go there with all the choice of educations and all these other things that are out there.
But it's taking us away from the basics of critical thinking.
We're bringing up a generation that does not know how to think.
And I think that's our biggest problem right now.
Yes, and to build on that, not only can this rising generation not really think critically, not because they're not intelligent, I believe every kid is bright and has wonderful potential, but because that potential's never really been fostered.
And this bears this out.
I know everyone on earth hates to talk about standardized testing.
Everyone on earth hates to take a standardized test.
Teaching to the test is an incredible disservice to so many kids.
But what we do know from these tests, particularly the nation's report card, is it takes the temperature of American education, gives us a snapshot of one moment in time.
And it shows us that kids are missing the basics.
Now, here is where things get worse.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I do believe it's so important for people to know.
Graduation rates in this country are really, really high.
Proficiency rates are really, really low.
So even when a student is coming home with good grades, you know, getting that high school diploma, that doesn't really mean that they've learned much because the incentive for the school and the district is to just rubber stamp them along to the next grade.
Just print the diploma with very little regard for what the student has actually learned.
Yep.
Look, I can give an example.
I had my wife.
I mean, after a while in the classroom, it's like anything else.
You know, everybody says, oh, I want the new outsider, everything.
Well, you want an educator that knows what they're doing.
You want an educator who's been in the classroom, who listens to the kids.
They know their kids better than anybody because they're with them eight hours a day.
And they know their ins and outs.
She had a student that in one year that she was teaching, within the first two weeks, she taught fifth grade.
Now, think about this.
Fifth grade, the kid couldn't read it.
Okay.
They had trouble with numbers.
Kid couldn't read.
Had a learning disability.
My wife said, here's the problem.
We see it.
Let's get her help.
It took four months of testing And going through, talking to the parent and everything else to make the diagnosis, so to speak, that my wife made in two days of having the child.
This child ended up, again, getting passed through the system for this problem that we're now rewarding the wrong metrics.
And I think I have a school superintendent.
He and I agree on most things.
We disagree on some, but more of the bureaucracy style.
But the education part is testing I believe, like in the state of Georgia, they give these tests like they do everywhere else because they have to fill out the form.
By the end of the year, they give an end-of-the-year test.
And this superintendent one time told me this.
He said, Doug, he said, if you were to go in your wife's fifth grade class and give that test that you normally give in April that they all prepare for, you give it to that class, you would have about 65% or 70% of those kids pass it in August.
Wow.
So think about this.
They would pass it in August.
You'd have about another 25% or 20% or something.
Let's just say 70. I'll use even numbers here.
70% that would pass it.
He said you would have another 20% that would be within 10 points of passing, 15 points of passing.
Enough to say, you know, get a little bit of fifth grade and they could pass it.
And you'd have 10% that needed remedial help.
He said, why am I forced to keep the 70%?
He said, you want to know the problem?
He said, I now have to teach 70% of the kids stuff they already know.
They get bored, they get tired, they get tired because I'm having to teach to the 10%.
Yup.
There's your problem.
And why can we not make the educrats in DC and other places understand that concept and rethink how we're doing education?
I think the bureaucrats are incentivized not to pay attention to the real problems.
They are very, very content not just to treat every student as a number, as a little data point in a machine somewhere, but they're content to do the same to teachers.
And I believe that true education freedom is bigger than school choice.
It actually means empowering teachers and trusting great teachers like your wife who know their students so well.
One of the biggest One of the problems with the way most public schools are set up is that they're on a banned system for salary, pay, compensation, you know, whatever a district chooses to call it.
But that holds great teachers back.
It protects teachers who maybe aren't doing such a good job, maybe don't have any business being in the classroom.
But it holds back teachers who deserve to be paid really, really well for the amazing work they do.
You look at Randi Weingarten, who was behind so many of the continued COVID school closures, she makes almost a half a million dollars a year.
I believe great teachers should be making that kind of money and not their union bosses, but it It can't happen because of the powers that be that are very content with this factory schooling model that doesn't trust teachers to assess where their students are.
It doesn't trust families or really even listen to families at all in many cases about what their students need.
So a true localized education system that pays attention to the individual student, to the individual family, is what is going to work better for anyone because it matches them up with the level of education they need.
Yeah.
Well, I think, look, that was made very clear, and I mentioned earlier that Paige and the rest of them, GA in Georgia, are not collective bargaining because we don't have collective bargaining for public employees in Georgia.
Right.
And so it's a right to work state.
However, about 15 years ago, there was a choice.
There was a lot of educational funding that was going on, and there was a choice given because it had some money that was going to be moved.
And basically, they were saying, look, we're going to move this money here, and it would go to the classrooms and help, or we're going to You know, we can do this or we're going to take away the right to directly withdraw union dues, basically what it is, from the paycheck.
You know what they, both PAGE and GHOs?
The union dues being directly brought out of the checks.
That just, that tells you everything you need to know about those groups.
And because, again, they don't look at it in the same way.
This is where we've got to get back to.
I love this discussion, Angela, and I think this is the conversations we've got to have about what is actually helping our kids.
But it's also got to be a reality check for parents in this country.
If you want to have kids who are addicted to this or they're addicted to a computer, they may or may not know how to make a living, and They go and get educational degrees that they can't use, and then they use – they're in student loan debt, they're in everything else.
But yet, in high schools, we're not teaching – there's just differences.
We've got to get back to a holistic education.
Education means you know how to think critically, you know how to read, you know how to write, and you know how to do math.
That's your basics.
Social studies and civics are also in part of that.
But then, if you've got a kid who wants to work on cars, then train them how to work on computers and cars.
If you've got a kid who wants to work with their hands and build stuff, let them build stuff.
That is a valid profession that's making more money than most professionals who are on TV, okay?
Let's just be honest about that.
But we've got to get back to an educational system that values education.
Look at our founding fathers.
Look at our great people.
They read.
They learned.
It was a lifelong experience.
And too many adults today have quit reading.
They quit learning.
And this is why we're seeing what we're seeing.
We could go on for days about this.
And tell the folks how we can get, how if they want to find out more about what your organization does and others, how can they do that?
Well, if you want to find me on Twitter, my handle is Angela L. Moravito, but what you should really check out is the Defense of Freedom Institute.
That's DFIPolicy.org and DFIPolicy on every major social platform.
There we go.
Folks, that's how you do it.
We got to get involved in education and that's the only way to do it is to talk about it, be honest about it.
And this is a great way as I started the whole podcast all about the low information voter.
Most people just, they check out, they send their kids to school and they don't really think about it.
They'll go to the parent-teacher meetings, they'll go to those things.
But at the end of the day, are you challenging your kid?
Are you putting as much emphasis on them reading a book as you do them playing baseball in which they'll never make a living at?
Okay, let's think about this for a minute.
For all of you tribal baseball parents out there, I love you.
But are you putting that much time in your kids' homework?
Are you putting that much time in your work?
Because if you were, look, that's what they're going to do for a living.
Baseball is 1% of that group, and less than that for most of you.
You've got to understand that.
I know that's harsh, but look, you've got to.
Angela, thanks for bringing the truth.
Folks, that's it for the Doug Collins Podcast.
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