Show Notes: 

Read Schoolhouse Burning by Derek W. Black. 

Secure tickets to this year’s SchoolCEO Conference Sept. 24th-25th to see keynote speaker Derek W. Black.

Subscribe to our newsletter at https://www.schoolceo.com/subscribe-now/. 

Visit us at schoolceo.com and connect with SchoolCEO on LinkedIn or X/Twitter @school_ceo. 

If you have a story you’d like to share with the SchoolCEO team, email us at eileen@schoolceo.com or schedule a call.

SchoolCEO is powered by Apptegy, the maker of the leading K-12 communications and brand management platform.

Episode Transcript

Eileen Beard: Hi, guys. Welcome to the SchoolCEO Podcast. I’m your host, Eileen Beard. We’re going to take a short break from our regularly scheduled programming to replay this 2021 episode of the podcast featuring Schoolhouse Burning author and SchoolCEO Conference keynote speaker Derek W. Black. 

However, it’s apt for the issues we’ve been discussing in recent episodes—threats to school communications departments everywhere. The negativity in the national narrative on public education is one of the biggest threats to your work—making it more difficult to persuade families to choose public education over private schools or other options. And that narrative is exactly the problem Black’s book, Schoolhouse Burning, contends with. 

In Schoolhouse Burning, Black tells the history of our nation’s founding and the establishment of the constitutional right to education. Our democracy, he writes, “has been strengthened when our commitment to public education has been strongest and weakened when such a commitment has been lacking”. 

Don’t forget to snag your tickets to this year’s SchoolCEO Conference Sept. 24th and 25th in Little Rock, Arkansas to see Black speak. 

And without further ado, here’s our full interview with Derek W. Black…

Michael: We're really excited for today's podcast because today, we actually have a professor Derek w Black who is an education law professor at the University of South Carolina. And he recently wrote a book called schoolhouse burning, public education and the assault on American democracy. And so really excited to dive into his book, but also especially some of the issues that a lot of school districts and school boards are facing right now. So, Derek, thanks so much for joining us on the podcast today.

Derek Black: Yeah. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

Michael: Yep. Well, before we jump into the book, which I'm really excited about, just to give everybody some context, I actually read Schoolhouse Burning. It's either right before or right after the the insurrection of the capital on January So for me, was kind of right about perfect timing to read the book and how public education has informed American democracy. So we do wanna dive into that. But before we actually got into some of the substance of the book, I wanted to ask a little bit about your background and kind of how you actually got into the field of education law to begin with. And so could you actually share a little bit about yourself, like where you grew up and kind of what led you to where you are today?

Derek Black: Yeah. I mean, I think the answer to the question of how I came to education law is really self realization in many respects. We have our own experiences, and we don't reflect on them in the immediacy, but over time, we kind of look back and either figure out how everything worked out or we construct our own narratives. And I grew up and went to a lot of different schools as a young person, had family breakups and that sort of thing. And it wasn't until middle school that I finally came to a school system that I stuck at, and that was Clinton Schools in Clinton, Tennessee. Clinton, Tennessee was the first school district in the South, the first traditionally white school in the South to graduate an African American student. So it was the first place that Thurgood Marshall went after Brown versus Board. Now, that was before my time, but that little sleepy town had a lot of history, and as I learned more, I reflected back on, oh yeah, know that place I used to play pickup basketball at. That's the one room school that all the African American children used to go to, just a few 100 yards behind the place where I went to middle school. And so I had this general sense of history, but as I also reflected back on myself, I fully appreciated that I wouldn't be here on this podcast with you today. I wouldn't be a professor if it wasn't for the loving arms of school teachers that sort of wrapped themselves around me and didn't let me fail even when I wanted to fail, even when I tried to undermine myself. I had people who kept me on track. And so I talk about in the book that public education is the intergenerational inheritance that we give to one another, that we pass on, that we've been passing on for two hundred years at least here, and that it is the only inheritance that disadvantaged children really receive in America. And so I got mine, and I feel obligated to pass that on to others.

Michael: And so when you mentioned that this inheritance, like public education being the only inheritance that disadvantaged children receive, I guess, what impact did public education have on your life specifically?

Derek Black: I think, first of all, going to to Clinton High School, which which did have this history of school integration and a community that did, come together eventually around that issue was meaningful to me. Just adults who weren't related to me but thought it was their job to make me succeed in life was incredibly important. I tell a story in the book. I was back at my old high school telling this story recently and they laughed. I'm not sure why they laughed because I don't know the backstory. But in any event, when I was a sophomore in high school, an English class said, hey, who wants to be in AP English? Here's the form. Have your mom and dad fill it out and bring it back in if you want to be considered. Well, when they described the amount of work, Derek Black, being who Derek Black was, said, Chad, that doesn't sound interesting to me. I crumpled up, threw it in the trash can, and and it never saw my home. The next year when I showed up, and I think I guess it was first period and I was in AP English, I was confused. I literally raised my hand. I said, Ms. Calhoun, I'm not supposed to be here. And she said, That's okay, we'll talk about it after class. And we never talked about it after class, right? And that is sort of one small piece of my story because that certainly helped me grow and get a good education. And there's other little examples like that. I talk about making a zero on a math on an algebra two class because I wasn't sleeping at home and I was making up for that time in algebra in the mornings when we had a student teacher and she didn't sort of weigh heavily on us, but my normal Algebra two teacher sensed that something was going on. He and she allowed me to take the test over again. I made 100 and the rest is history. It's those type of things, like real humans, real teachers, real children you know, trying trying to move us forward that made all the difference in my life.

Michael: And I was really interested in that aspect of seeing, like, this place of history firsthand and actually going through that. You know, we're based in Little Rock, Arkansas, where, obviously, there's Central High School where the Little Rock nine happened. I mean, just honestly and our old office was just really a couple blocks away. And that's something that, you know, honestly, we see all the time. And so just kinda curious for you, like, what what impact did that have on you, maybe even subconsciously early on, seeing kind of this place where this, you know, integration history happened?

Derek Black: Well, I mean, first of all, I'll say, you know, the Little Rock and Clinton, connections are are very deep if if you look at them in history. Clinton precedes Little Rock. Clinton is actually bombed during desegregation. They'd already integrated for a year, and then it was bombed. The National Guard comes out. So local folks know that story well. Historians know that story well. But most people couldn't put their finger on the map and tell you where Clinton, Tennessee is or even which side of Tennessee it is. And that's just because we're a small community. But, you know, it had a slightly different effect on me than if I had been in a big community because when we watched the black and white reel to reel footage of our community, of Clinton, Tennessee, and they put the names and the streets up there, like, we knew who the protesters were. We knew that that was such and such's grandfather. And so that sent chills down our spine in a way that it might not if you're from a larger geography, that we knew the places, the building, the people. And even now, when we go back and I didn't realize this until more recently that there's now a monument up on the hill where I used to pick up basketball in the one room African American school. There's a monument of all the children who walked off the hill. It was eleven that day. And there's the pictures and the names, and what I did not realize until I went to that monument was that those last names were the same last names of all my classmates. And so again, the small town community really brings it home and personalizes it in a way that a larger system may not.

Brittany: Yeah. So how did you go from feeling that sense of place and the power of sense of place to choosing education law?

Derek Black: So I ended up, I should say, when I was an undergraduate, I had a religious studies class that met right after another class that was African American studies class, and the professor who taught the African American studies class, he, just as a nice guy, and sometimes we would just chat because he was slow getting out and maybe I was early getting in, I don't know. But like young people do, was like, well, he seems like a pretty nice guy, I'll just take his class. And so I took his class the next semester, and it was a class on topics and racism. And so that really sort of got me into the study of African American studies that ended up becoming one of my majors at the University of Tennessee. And of course, that history is always deeply embedded in education and integration. So I got very interested in civil rights issues. I got a little bit of advocacy on campus. And I think one thing just tumbled into another. When I went to law school, wanted to do civil rights work. It just so happened that the first place that made me an offer was the Office for Civil Rights at the United States Department of Education. And it just sort of clicked. And the assignment they gave me that first summer was to write a report on the educational benefits of school diversity. This was before Grutter versus Bollinger had been decided, announcing that that was permissible. So I got a front row seat or working seat to the research that went into school diversity as a compelling interest under the jurisprudence. And I think this is a testament to experiences matter. In the same way that I said, teachers matter, like individual teachers doing something for an individual student really changes the course of their life. Well, an experience at the US Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights, had I went to work at HUD, Housing and Urban Development, maybe I would have been a housing attorney and been far less satisfied with that, to be to be quite frank. But but nonetheless, that opportunity, I think, set set a path for me.

Michael: And so you've worked at the OCR. I know you've actually dealt with civil rights lawsuits pertaining to education in the past. So I was curious, especially for the superintendents listening to this podcast, I wanna just give some context. Like, what has been your relationship to public school districts within your, like, professional career as an attorney?

Derek Black: Yeah. I mean, it it it has it has shifted over time, and and it shifts because of what the issues are. So I started out as a civil rights lawyer, and my primary job would have been to sue school districts, to be to be quite frank. Now I wasn't certainly suing some of them. And, you know, school desegregation has waned to to a certain extent. And anti discrimination law is actually much much harder to very hard to win a case, notwithstanding what what people on on television might say. And what I began transitioning towards at Howard University School of Law, again, my life coming full circle at the sort of place where Thurgood Marshall spearheaded this work back in the thirties, forties, and fifties. But at Howard, I began to focus a lot more on school funding, sort of statewide school funding inequity, and that is not a superintendent's fault. That's not a school district's fault. That is a state legislator's fault. A lot of times, your racial discrimination, although it can happen at a statewide level and historically has, is more localized quite often, or at least may appear to be more localized. But school funding, state policy, statewide policy, it's district versus the state or students versus the state. So then I began to position myself, not because I wanted to, that's just the nature of the work as being, how can I help students and school districts sort of achieve their common goal? And the state is the impediment quite often on that. And then, over the last decade or so, what we've really had is a war on teachers, you know, a war on public education, and that has called upon me to be a defender of public education writ large, a defender of teachers. And that kind of puts me in a tricky position at times because, some of my maybe former allies or people who perceive that's like, well, you're defending all of this discrimination and racism that happens in schools, or you're defending bad teachers or ineffective teachers. And I think we really have to separate out systems issues from aberrational issues. We have systems that are designed to make schools funded unequally. We have systems that are designed to, in my opinion, promote pedagogy that may not be helpful to students or teachers. The fact that we may have individual teachers who aren't good regardless of what system they are in doesn't mean that it's wrong for me to attack those systems. So what we really have quite often today, and superintendents can really appreciate this, is detractors taking anecdotes as a basis for attacking the system Rather than recognizing the value of that system, they're actually trying to undermine that system. And that that's that is unfortunately a terrible place where we find ourselves right now.

Michael: You mean that it's more complicated and it's not a monolith?

Derek Black: Yeah. You know, and even you know, and look. Hey. I I throw out, all manner of critique for for charter schools. But I when I remember, I'm always, apt to say we can't paint charter schools with a broad brush. It is not the case that all charter schools are bad. There are charter schools that are diverse by design. There are charter schools who serve ELL and LGBTQ youth that their home district is not doing a very good job at. There are some charter schools that are significantly outperforming their local counterparts. But I've used the word some quite a bit, right, to say that those are sort of examples. I think the problem is the overall system is not designed to produce those some outcomes that I just discussed now. And that, quite frankly, is also a position that I've evolved on over time. I early on talked about charters as being an empty vessel, that we could make with them what we wanted. And what I've found is that we aren't really making with them what we want, that large institutional actors are making with them something that I think is problematic.

Michael: So wanted to move on to the book, Schoolhouse Burning, because again, I I know I mentioned and read it. Brittany read it as well. So not just, you know, having you on just talking about this. I really do really do like the book, because you put a lot of the conversations around public education in its historical context. And you you talked about kind of some of the assault that's happening on public education right now. And so I was just kinda curious what did lead you to wanting to write schoolhouse burning, which I'm assuming you started kind of before the pandemic and before a lot of people started focusing a lot on education when when could the COVID pandemic happen?

Derek Black: Yeah. I probably started thinking about that book in 2018 or something like that, working on it, maybe 2019. And the very earliest iteration, I I might say, was almost like a fanboy, to be honest. I was like, look at all these grassroots people taking it to the streets and lifting up the claims that academics like myself might write about for a decade, but nobody really cares. It's like they are making real what I spend my time thinking about all day. And I was like, I've got to amplify that or be a fanboy or whatever. So unfortunate part of that is that my agent told me education policy books don't sell. So if you think you're going to write a book about education policy and all these wonky things, go back to NYU Press or Yale or Harvard or something, but they're not having that at Barnes and So we worked on it for a while, we sort of thought about it. And one of the points that I came to in my mind over the course of writing the book is that you cannot Well, if you understand the last decade as maybe being a perfect storm, and a perfect storm that combines the underfunding of schools with the attack on teachers, with the calls for private choice, with the radical expansion of vouchers and charters. If you see that, and that descriptively is accurate, right, if you sort of look at those policy forces, it's very difficult to interpret a perfect storm when you stand in the middle of it. Those policies get loaded down with the wonky stuff that finds themselves in state house testimony or policy reports, but the rest of the public doesn't care about. And even the people waging those battles in state houses and federal level, they're arguing about data. Well, is this leading to a better result or might it leave or what's the prediction? And I said, look, I say this early in the book, we could have, I could write a book about the policy end, the empirical end of these. But I said, I think the only way you get a good handle on these policies is to zoom out and simply ask what values do they represent. And understanding them as value choices before you even go to the question of empirical results requires a much wider lens. And so that's what forced me to zoom out, to try to go to the beginning of our national commitment to public education, and identify the very high level values that are being pursued across time, sometimes good, but most of time good, sometimes bad, and to say where does this current agenda fit? Does it fit on the better side of history or the worst side of history? And I think that's a bit more objective and reasonable place to approach it from so that it doesn't become a shouting match about individual ideology. It becomes sort of a collective wisdom question across time. And so that's the book I tried to write. And I learned a lot in writing it, that there's there's a lot more to that story than than I had ever appreciated until I started writing the book.

Michael: Well, I like when you say it's value choices because a lot times I feel like we don't necessarily think about that. Or I mean, I know in the book you've mentioned that every state constitution has a commitment to public education, free public education for for for all citizens. There are certain values that that led to that decision to put that in the constitution. Right? You would not have codified it in what is the supreme law of each state that if it wasn't something that was valued. So I think that's a really interesting way to look at it is, okay, backing up to the values. And so if we were to do that, I guess, how does that reshape our views of policy or or how we talk about policy?

Derek Black: Well, I mean, just just to add a little bit of context to to to what you're asking. So I articulate the nation's founding as being an experiment in democracy. Right? That at that moment in time, the world was ruled by kings and queens. Right? And The United States had just fought a war to to get out from underneath the king. Now, some thought, let's just make George Washington the king. That that that got shot down, fortunately. So the other option is to turn it over to the people. Right? Something that didn't really exist. And when we say turn over the people, we talk about relatively wealthy elite white men saying, rather than us just run this thing ourselves, we're going to let cobblers and tailors and dock workers vote. Now, of course, women and African Americans were excluded at that time and even some white men without land, but they're saying, let's turn it over to them. Now, if you're George Soros or Donald Trump of the world, at that time, you're gonna be a little bit anxious about letting your workers decide your future. And what the the founding fathers were were quite adamant about was that if we're gonna do this thing, we have to make sure that people cast their votes intelligently. And the only way that we can hope to have, intelligent vote casting is through education of all the people. And the only way that we can hope to have education of all the people is for the state, for the state to take responsibility, not the market, but the state, as a self preservation of democracy to make sure that the people who show up to vote are well educated.

Michael: When you say state, do you mean state in, like, the political sense of, like, the country, or you say state in terms of the states?

Derek Black: I mean, the country overall, right, as a state, the country state. Right? And then that gets sort of brought now you have this open question of now who is at what level of the state should be responsible for this delivery. Right? Should it be the United States government? Should it be the individual states? And I talk about this in the book. The detractors of the right to education say, well, the word education doesn't appear in the federal constitution. States will be able to do whatever they want to. My response to that is actually the federal government made a commitment and mandate for public education before we even had a United States constitution, and that was in the Northwest Ordinance, that at least as to, the land outside the colonies, right, the other you know, we had We had a few states, for the rest, right, this 30 some odd other that we have, that they would be obligated to carve up into squares the remainder of the land of The United States Of America into little towns. And in the center lot of every town would be a public school, and the outerlying lots of those towns would be used to generate resources for those schools. So that is a plan that predates the United States Constitution. Now, this isn't really in the book. It's more about other scholarship. There is a commitment to localism, though. So we have a federal mandate, but it is the local state or the local entity that is obligated with carrying out that quote unquote federal mandate. And so it's been a weird relationship. Don't think they obviously couldn't perceive the complexity of the modern day. But that is the original relationship established at the nation's founding to make sure. And so today, I say, look, if what we have is calls or sort of an attack on the theory of public education itself, and that's what we have. They say, oh, is the nanny state. These are government schools. They're indoctrinating children. They're depriving people of freedom. Know, they're loony tunes on critical race theory. On and on and on. Let's get rid of public education altogether. Now, you know, I'm not gonna sit here and tell you there aren't any flaws in public education. But if we go back to that original founding, the idea is it's only the state. Well, actually, the state must do this to preserve itself. Otherwise, we're going to have vast disparities. And also, as James Adams says, or John Adams, I'm sorry, says, very early on, he said it's actually more in the interests of the elites that we have public schools than anything else. Right? Because it is the common experience of the highest ranks of society with the lowest ranks of society all being lifted to an equal plane in education that will ensure this democratic project doesn't devolve into pitched forks and chaos.

Brittany: Why do you think it is that this connection between education and democracy is not something that we hear a lot about? You know, we hear about schools needing to prepare students for the workforce. We hear about schools needing to, like, have more technology or, you know, preparing students for college. But I feel like this idea of students as future citizens is something that you really only hear in the context of a civics class. And as we know, civics education is not something that has been overemphasized, at least in the last couple decades.

Derek Black: Yeah, well, there's a couple of things going on, right? I mean, is true that our businesses generate a lot of taxes. Our large capital holders create a lot of taxes. And so there is this tension. There is this tension about the accumulation of public resources and the diversion of them to or what some people would call the diversion, but the sort of spending of those resources on regular people. And you've got sort of, you might say, the capitalists saying, well, if I'm going spend money on these kids, I want them to come work for me and be able to do my job for me. The flip side of that is, well, wait a minute, though. The only reason we even have these things to begin with is for the preservation of democracy. So it would be foolish for me to suggest that capitalist interests have not been a central part of the expansion of public education as well. It's like, well, if we've got to do this, we being capitalists, then we're going to influence its direction. But the other part of it is that, and some of the people that have reviewed and commented on my book have pointed this out, is that when you read the literature on education and democracy, that it is often puffery. You know, it kinda sounds good, but there isn't a lot of substance behind it. Google, you know, education and democracy, you'll pull up a lot of books and you read them and they're just kinda like it's kind of a sales pitch of sorts. What I think sets mine aside is that this this isn't a sales pitch. This is actually a historical tradition and commitment that's very deep. Now you could say, you could say, well, but was this just Thomas Jefferson's sales pitch? So what this really is is just an old sales pitch? You can make that claim, although I will tell you without boring the readers, there's enough implementation, failures, and successes across time to suggest, no, this isn't just a sales pitch. It was a theory and an idea of the founders that has borne itself out to be true across time.

Michael: And that's what I actually really did like about your book is that you use a lot of, like, original documents to support this idea from o over time. Right? I mean, starting, like you mentioned, preconstitution before the United States existed to all the way to now. I'm thinking about school districts, and I know you mentioned the word indoctrination and, you know, how people like to throw that word around, which is kinda ridiculous considering, you know, how, I mean, school districts are each individual. You know, school district kinda runs itself. It's it's it's kind of this whole idea of indoctrinating people is just kinda ridiculous. But it does sound like school districts have a really big opportunity to highlight, like, this history and highlight where, like, these values come from. And you talked about, for example, like Northwest Ordinance. I mean, in a lot of states like, you know, Ohio, Nebraska, all those, you can look at the school district and still see, like, the impacts of the Northwest Ordinance on the school district and the way that, you know, the plots of land are built out, and you can see that there. And so kinda like you were talking about with your own experience in Clinton. So I was kinda curious. I mean, do you feel like schools should be more proactive in promoting this idea of of the connection to democracy?

Derek Black: I think they should. But before I even say, let me just say, you know, because I think people can appreciate this, I remember as a child going to Kings Island Theme Park in Ohio. And for those of us from south of the Mason Dixon Line, when you cross over from Kentucky into Ohio or Kentucky into Indiana, Illinois, etcetera, like, the political boundaries are a lot different there. I'm like, what is this? Like, everything is square. You know? Like, where I'm from, there is not a square county in the state of Tennessee. In fact, I don't know if there's a square county in the South anywhere. Right? But when you go to Ohio, I mean, they're they're as they're as straight as can be. And that is because the Northwest Ordinance carved up that land and all the rest of it into square little districts and square little towns with schools being in the middle square of all of it. So, you know, I I and I think this goes actually kinda back to your your your Clinton question earlier. Right? I think giving some context, some feeling, something that you can see and experience, I think really embeds a thought and an idea and experience in teaching more than anything else. Now I'm outside of my expertise. Brittany's the public school teacher in the group here, not me. But I am an educator at the higher education level. So that's a great one. And I think by then telling a story about the Northwest Ordinance or a democracy that sort of really brings it home is important. I mean, I tell you, this just shows how sort of maybe quirky or boring I am. But I love looking at old school houses. Like when I started this book, I spent so much time on the internet, and you don't see any of this in the book, but I spent so much time on the internet just looking at old, I was like, can I find the oldest school building built? And in this state, in that state, and then it's like, in trying to put together, well, knew this city came first, so it's high school ought to be older than that one. It's, I think that now kids maybe not care as much about that, but I think the point being finding that avenue. And one of the reasons why looking for those pictures for me was so important was that I really understood that this was the first physical structure that these communities are building on the frontier, Right? Like, we use words like frontier. Like, what does that mean? You know? We sort of describe in these sort of vague terms. But then you really look at a picture and go, you know, these 30 people in the plains, and they build this building because the Northwest Ordinance said build it here, right, and then put to it. And so I think it is a story that that's really worth telling. You know, I have given a few lectures and and and hope to be doing even more about the post Civil War period when public education really gets started here in the South. And I think that is a great venue. And the children that I've taught, middle school children and elementary school children I've taught about this, they really latch on to a story about the first schools in their states and the public schools for African Americans in their states. So you're teaching an education story, you're teaching a story about the Constitution, you're teaching a story about race, and they ask lots of good questions. But aside from just making things interesting, and really coming back to your question, Michael, you said you read this book you know, right after the insurrection. Well, I was set to deliver a talk on January 7 for the US Capitol Historical Society. Oh, wow. And they wanted me yeah. They wanted me to talk about my book, Education is a Civil Right. Well, of course, the capital had had had been under siege less than twenty four hours earlier. So they called me, and I thought, well, they're canceling. You know? I would I'd have why would we do this stupid book talk? And they said, well, we'd like you still to do it, but can you do it about the insurrection? And I said, sure. And as I began to prepare my remarks, what I found was I didn't actually have to change them that much. Right? I had to account for what had happened on that day. But the key question that I was trying to answer was what is the commitment of the rule of law of individuals who would engage in that type of insurrection? What type of anti citizenship values do they represent? And what's all the stuff that our schools are supposed to be doing that's different than that? And I don't think our schools alone could stop January 7. Would be preposterous. But do they play a huge role in shaping the culture, in shaping the values, in shaping our sense of the rule of law? Yes, they do. You know, there's a famous Goss v Lopez, which probably a lot of superintendents know that case name. Goss v Lopez is the case in which the Supreme Court says that any time you suspend or expel a student, they have to get due process. Oh crap, now we've to have hearings and appeals and all of this. But there's this line in there where the Supreme Court says the public schools are the first experience that individuals have with government. And if what we have is a suspension and expulsion, which is the first contested experience with government that isn't perceived as being fair, then you have forever negatively shaped and bent a child towards having a negative sort of perception of its relationship to the state. I mean, that's quite an insightful point to make about school discipline, right? And we can take this to everything else that a school does as well.

Brittany: Yeah, so when you were talking about this relationship between democracy and school, so I was thinking about my own experience. So I've been a senior teacher teaching rhetoric before, and I have taken that charge of preparing students for citizenship very, very seriously, including holding voter voter registration drives where we registered every kid in the senior class who was eligible to vote. And I remember, like, in retrospect, telling people about this in the community. And I would get one of two responses. I would get, oh, that's amazing. Or I would get a response of, wow, that terrifies me. And I feel that, like that second response says something about some sort of distrust that has developed for schools. And, you know, in thinking about the legitimacy of public education, which is a major thesis of your book, like, does that distrust come from? And I feel like it you know, how does it play a role in, like, what is going on now?

Derek Black: There certainly are individuals who are fomenting that distrust, right? So let's just talk about them first as a subset of the problem. I talk about this in the book that the Koch brothers and Davosses of the world had been spending enormous amounts of money to shrink the footprint of government. Now, when you're talking about shrinking the footprint of government at the federal level, you're talking about Social Security, Medicare, and the military. Most people don't, high income taxpayers, they like guns and war to protect our stuff. So we're really talking about I don't mean that in a derogatory sense, but we're talking about shrinking Medicare, shrinking Social Security rights. We've seen all that. We saw the Obamacare fights and all that. When you come to the state and local level, the number one line item ticket is public schools. So if you're anti tax, if you're anti big government, then you're anti public education because that is government at the state and local level. All that's meaningfully left over other than that is the fire and the police, neither of which are actually all that consuming in the grand scope of things. And you sort of see those as basic necessities. So you've just got this libertarian notion that we ought to be paying fewer taxes and public schools are part of the problem. And so what they're doing is sort of attacking the public education project using different rhetoric, different tactics. But I see it as primarily being how can we shrink government's footprint. And you've got this other group that just sort of the evolving tensions around religion as religion plays a smaller place in society or at least public spaces across time, this sort of feeling that that's the public school's fault. And not only are public schools exiting from the conversation of religion, they believe that they're being anti religious at school. And so you've got that strain going in there as well. And then you've got the other problem, which I am quite blunt about as a civil rights advocate throughout my career, which is we have public school systems in this country that for never one day in the history of this nation have ever fully served those communities. Those communities are skeptical, for good reason, of the state and its failure to ever live up to it. So you kind of have at least three, and there's probably a fourth and a fifth, but it's three different constituencies here, significant constituencies, that are posing real challenges to the public education project.

Michael: And so I wanna touch on that just a little bit about these, you know, these constituencies because I know you didn't talk in the book about, like, this commitment to public education, universal public education. But you also do acknowledge how America has not lived up to that commitment and how there have been feelings. And, obviously, you've seen us firsthand as you've you've brought suits against school districts that have not been upholding that. So I was curious, though, like, when you're looking at the public right now or you're looking at public opinion right now, there seems to be kind of almost two extremes of one end of, you know, America has only been great and has never done anything wrong. And on the other end is that everything America's done has is fraught with problems and and needs to kinda be taken out. But it sounds like from, you know, with the book that when it comes to public education, yes, there are failures, but overarching, there has been this, overall commitment. So I was wondering, have we lost some of this nuance when it comes to I mean, not just, obviously, politics, but specifically when it comes to public education?

Derek Black: Oh, I mean, every day that the TV and internet continue to exist, we lose a little bit of nuance. We maybe add a little bit as well, but we lose it. But answer your question, what I might call the dueling frameworks of the 1619 Project and President Trump's 1776 commission began, I think there's a reality that I say exists in the middle, which is maybe more about me than reality. But I think there is a reality, or there is a perception, right? I mean, I think when you And I think you framed it, or I think I heard you say it rightly, Michael, which is there's a perception about history. We might say that's the 1776 perception, and then there's a 1619 I hesitate to put the word perception on it, but sort of perception. But both of them are talking about the same underlying facts quite often, but interpreting them with different meaning, or sort of attributing different meaning to them. So without picking sides or saying one is right or one is wrong, I will tell you that the meaning that I interpret that I think exists in the middle, which is America begins as an incredibly ambitious and wonderful idea. It has at no point in its history ever achieved any of those ideas. It has gone backwards at points on those ideas. But the story of America that I tell in this book, and I think the one that we need to tell in our schools, is an America with a great idea that's been forever reaching for it. And by reaching, that may often mean oppressed people reaching for the idea of America and oppressors trying to stop them. But, you know, there's a there's a what I find just an incredible passage by Abraham Lincoln and that I put in my book that I think sums this up. He said, when the founders wrote that all men are created equal, they knew very well that at that moment men and women were in chains. They knew at that very moment that there wasn't going to be freedom anytime in the close future in America. But what Lincoln does in trying to rearticulate the nation and says is that they wrote those words down not because they were true at that moment, but because at some point in the distant future, right, that we could reach back on those ideas and insist, and insist based upon the wisdom of an old idea that schools should not just be for white people or white men, that they should be for all and they shouldn't be segregated. We could go on and on and on. And that's the way, rightly or wrongly, I try to sort of live out my career is to say, no, you know, these old guys weren't perfect. We all know they were flawed, but they really did have some great ideas. And I say, so great, so great of an idea that they themselves were not willing to live up to it. Alright? And we say the same things with our state education clauses. Fantastic ideas that call upon the state to do more than it's ever done in its history. And we're on the project to doing that. And so I tell the book as being American democracy and sort of reaching forward, as we say, we often talk about, that education walks right beside that, is that these American ideas find themselves in public schools, and we reach for them. And then we have people punch us in the face and move us back, we reach for them again. But we're always reaching. And I think that's the way that I see it. That's the way I try to tell it.

Michael: And so I feel like this is a good time to transition into what a lot of superintendents are probably either facing themselves or have heard about, and you kind of have mentioned this a little bit, but this community members that have been really opposed to the idea of, for example, critical race theory. That's been thrown around a lot. It's been talked about on Tucker Carlson. I think NPR said something like, you know, 13,000 times over the last month, or 1,300 times. Mean, so this is obviously coming out a lot. It's now we're even seeing school boards are having protests at them. There have been people challenging school boards and elections. And then NBC News just recently, came out with a report that even groups like the Heritage Foundation and and Alec have been actually supporting financially as well as propping up and encouraging a lot of these anti CRT movements that are targeting specifically school boards. And so wanted to transition a a little bit. How does this, like, anti CRT movement as well as some of these conservative actors propping this up, how does that fit into this, like, long term trajectory that you've written about in the book?

Derek Black: Well, let me first say that I'm I'm sure a lot of superintendents out there scratch their heads when they hear this stuff, because first, they're not really sure what critical race theory is. And second, whatever it is, they didn't know their schools were teaching it. And third, if they were teaching it, they might ask them why they weren't teaching the state standardized curriculum or something like that because they've got tests coming up. So yeah, I mean, and the other thing here, which superintendents, I think, will all agree with me, there's probably nothing that a superintendent hates more than controversy. Right? Like, you just you just don't want it. Right? It's just, keep things quiet. Keep, you know, keep the trains running. You know, let's make the bells ring on time. Make sure everyone has food and the administered tests. Don't have time for it. Don't don't want the phone calls, etcetera, etcetera. So, I think people who believe that our schools are indoctrinating children, they haven't been in school in a long time. Mean, there's certainly norms that are taught about civics and things that Brittany was raising earlier. And I'm all for indoctrinating kids in the rule of law. Sorry. I'm all for indoctrinating them on their need to vote and participate. But we get beyond that. We may put facts. We put facts in front of children, and they react to them. But we're not indoctrinating them, don't have time for it. Schools don't want to be sued. So then what's going on here? Are there some schools that have maybe gone further? That's sure, but aberrational at best. And if they're doing it, I almost guarantee you they're not doing it in schools where there's a lot of people who disagree with them. They're doing it where it's like kumbaya and everybody's singing the same song or something like that. But I think this is coming from a very dangerous place in my mind. Because if we look at that history that I talk about in the book, what we see is that public education as an institution is the most bipartisan public project that we have. You look at local school boards, right? The superintendents know, unless there's some aberration out there everywhere I've lived, they're nonpartisan. You actually don't even put an R or D next to your name when you run for school board. And we have various other actors, you know, at the state school board or at the state superintendent that we try. There's lots of different methods, but we try as best to insulate them from the political process. Because the idea is it's kinda like you've got a job to do and it's not a political one. At least it's not political beyond the idea of making good citizens and and making good workers. But beyond that, you know, this isn't political. And, you know, you'd look at election returns. Historically, political opinions about public education haven't diverged that much between political party. There was a study in the South. There was only like this is like four or five years ago, I talk about this in the book, no more than three or four percentage points separating Democrats from Republicans on questions of equal school funding, adequate school funding, do we need to do more for teachers? Everyone is kind of on the same page when it comes to education. No Child Left Behind, like it or like it or hate it, 85% of congress, both parties vote for it. Every Student Succeeds Act, like it or or not, 85%. Right? This is just what America does, support its public schools, theoretically. Whatever that means, support your schools. What's dangerous, it seems to me, about this critical race theory conversation is that it is trying to politicize the public education project, project, to divide people and their commitment to public education based upon ideology that really has nothing to do with the public education at all, or at least very little to do with it. And to have people, you know, Brittany asked about where is this sort of anti school group coming from. Well, this measure Well, first of all, my understanding that these folks are pushing this issue, not because they actually wanna change what's taught at schools, not because they're worried about what's being taught at schools, but because they want to rack up more wins in the midterm elections and retake the United States House of Representatives, which in large part has nothing to do whatsoever with what's taught on a daily basis in schools. But the side effect of such a project, the drawing of lines, the drawing of swords and sides, is to create and expand that anti public education group on what is either making a mountain out of a mo hill or a bold faced lie, one or the other. But either way, it it divides people in a very problematic way. And and that scares me because, you know, in 2018, 2019, I saw people, right, in the reddest of red states. Right? It starts in West Virginia, 75% vote for Trump. The red for Ed, that's where it starts. And then it goes to, you know, Kentucky, which I think he was 65 or so percent there. It goes to Oklahoma. It goes to Arizona. Right? It goes to Trump country and says, we want more for our schools and our students. And these are you know, here in South Carolina, it was a Trump voter who who led the sort of demand of our US senators to know why is it that you think you should vote for Betsy DeVos to be secretary of education. Right? She organized 5,000 people for a town hall. Right? Trump voters. And and that gave me made me feel warm inside for public education, and this current situation is moving in the exact opposite direction, and that that scares me. I was talking to a colleague yesterday. I hold out hope that regular people that aren't sort of on the polarized sides of this, that sort of big fat middle, hopefully realize that this is a bunch of nonsense and they're not really paying that much attention. It's like, yeah, I guess it's all over the media, but hopefully everyone else is just at the beach. You know? Yeah.

Michael: Yeah. Well, and when we're looking at, like, parents, I mean, I I imagine for a lot of these families, like, parents, like, for them, it is a genuine concern about things being taught. Right? If you know, especially a lot of them starting out. But like you're saying, this is something that there's, frankly, something much more nefarious behind the scenes that's really pushing. And in fact, Steve Bannon in a in his podcast, unfortunately, I had to listen to it from a couple weeks ago. He had a quote in there saying that the path to save the nation is very simple. It's going to go through the school boards. And he actually even specifically mentions the Tea Party and how that was the largest wave of, change in, in the house representatives since, like, FDR and talking about how this is the next move. And so it really does seem like this is about putting more people into congress to be able to do what they want in in congress, not about what's actually happening in the schools, not about what's actually being taught in the classroom.

Derek Black: Let's hope that they they don't prove to be prescient on that. But the one thing, though, that is true across time that this this situates itself in is that people who cannot have their way in the real world have a tendency to try to have their way in the microcosm of schools. Right? You don't like the way society's morals are going? Well, rather than trying to convince your friends or your family or your neighbors or your elected officials to see things your way, you try to shove it down some kid's throat or make life hell for the superintendent and the teachers. Maybe you can get your way there. It's like a lot easier actually sometimes to push around teachers and superintendents than it is.

Michael: Because like you mentioned, they don't want controversy.

Derek Black: They don't want con you know what? You you make a perfect point that I wasn't making. They don't want controversy. So if I just go down there and and raise, you know, raise a big stink, maybe I'll get my way. Right? And so this has played out across time. And super sensitivity. Right? Oh no, they weren't having a debate in class. They were indoctrinating my child. Right? That type of thing. And so we've seen this across. We see this with issues of communism way back. We see this issue with Vietnam War. We see this issue with religion. But we've seen this across time. And so I do think you know, you have the big actors that you referenced, Michael, trying to achieve, other objectives. But then, you know, we do have these other people that are worried about the direction of culture, and they're very susceptible to being scared and taking that out on their local schools.

Michael: Well, I think that that's a really good point because and obviously, we've talked to other superintendents about, like, media literacy and things like that. I know that's one one topic that a lot of superintendents out there have really started to focus on, especially, you know, lately. But what I thought was really interesting was when you're talking about, you know, being skeptical of even, like, progressive policies, because I think if you were, you know, from outer space and dropped into America right now, you would on the surface think, oh, wow. Well, I guess Democrats are all pro public ed and conservatives are all against public ed. But, I mean, if you go back to, you know, the Obama era, right, it was it was Arnd Duncan who was the one really pushing charter schools and really pushing school choice. And so it is something where it seems like we need to really question and make sure that we're not just, you know, as public ed advocates just kind of being fanboys of one group or the other, because at some point, it seems like they're probably going to work against public ed too.

Derek Black: You're right. Yeah. But bad ideas come from both sides of the aisle. I sometimes wonder that whether some of my friends have been a little bit hesitant to fully embrace or publicly embrace my book because of the harshness with which it deals with Arne Duncan and President Obama early on. And to be clear, was a member of the Obama Biden transition team. So I would have been happy to take an appointment with them. But that doesn't mean that everything Arne Duncan did was anywhere close to being right. So so, yeah, I think we we have to we have to be critical and and and thoughtful. And so often we're not. Now I will say this, so that people don't think I'm a curmudgeon. So after tussling with this in my mind for a couple of weeks and feeling bad that I had, or disloyal or whatever it was, that I had some critiques of the way that advocates on my side of the quote unquote fence are dealing with things, I said to, I think it was my wife and son that I was walking with at the time, I said, you know what? Academics have time for nuance. You know, staffers have time to construct policies that make sense. And you know what? Those ideas and those policies never see the light of day. Really the only way that the world ever changes is through blunt hammers and blunt force. And so maybe, you know, maybe these young people, maybe these advocates, maybe they're just actually are smarter than me on this. And they say, look, Derek, you're right, like as a matter of policy and thinking and teaching, but what we teach in school, the way we treat people in society will never change if we're waiting on everyone to listen to nuanced, thoughtful people like yourself. We need blunt hammers to change the system. I don't know if that's true or not, but it seems to me that that's a reasonable position to take.

Brittany: And thinking about these blunt hammers, and in thinking about what's happening in school boards right now, like what advice would you have for a superintendent trying to navigate protests at their school board and navigate questions about CRT? How can they get through this?

Derek Black: Well, I mean, I think they have to unfortunately carve out some time in their calendars. And I say this, and I said this before we had the CRT stuff. I wrote a kind of a, you know, I didn't call it an open letter to Miguel Cardona, but it was sort of what he ought to set his goals with. And I think it's relationship building. I say at the end of the book that we need to be willing to have uncomfortable conversations. And not that we're going to change our policies on how we treat LGBTQ youth, not that we're going to change our policies on what we're teaching, assuming that what we're teaching is correct, not that we're to change any of that. But that we understand and appreciate that people have anxieties and have different opinions. And to bring them in to the schoolhouse for school townhouse talks, individual media, whatever it is, so that we as a community deal with this. Now, if what we have are outsiders, you know, Washington DC, outsiders trying to interfere with our family, our community, I think it's appropriate to shut those people out. But within our school community, we need to have conversations. And maybe we leave that meeting in just as much disagreement as we were before we entered the door. But if we understand one another a little bit better, if we respect each other a little bit more when we leave that room, hopefully we can agree to disagree about some stuff, or at least give each other the benefit of the doubt. Going back to the points about how I succeeded or didn't succeed and things that I did wrong, I had people that were willing to give me the benefit of the doubt. Maybe when I didn't deserve it. And that made all the difference in the world of my life. I think that makes all the difference in the way that schools function.

Michael: Well, I do wanna just maybe touch on your some big ideas here. And because obviously, you've in the book, you take a pretty long term look at the view of public education as well as its impact on democracy specifically. And so, I think you even mentioned this a little bit in the book about how your understandings of American democracy have changed and how evolved. I think you even mentioned how you used to think it was, impenetrable and it could never go away, and now that it's changed a little bit. And so I was wondering, from your perspective with being an education law scholar, how has your understanding of American democracy and whether or not the experiment is working, how has that evolved and changed over time?

Derek Black: Well, on one level, we we we've seen far worse than this. Right? We saw the creation of a system of slavery under the umbrella of democracy. We saw the removal of a system of slavery under the umbrella of democracy, and then the reimplantation and removal of Jim Crow. So I think this pales in comparison to that. And we certainly saw, as I mentioned earlier, what became my middle school was bombed to prevent 11 African American children from staying So yes, school board elections, to win a midterm election, kind of small potatoes in that respect. But when I watched January 7 unfold on on TV, maybe it's just because I'm alive now, but it it struck me as different than anything in modern experience. And by modern, I kinda mean twentieth, twenty first century stuff, at least on the home front. Right? And and this is as a lawyer, the reason why I say that is that when I saw people waving flags on the capital steps, it looked like to me an occupying force. It looked like a hill that had been taken in Vietnam, or a building that had been taken in Vietnam, or in Russia. And that is not something that I could have ever imagined could happen in America. And maybe you just sort of ride it up to like underestimating the other side, being too comfortable in our modern world. The sun has always come up, and so it'll come up tomorrow. Democracy has always survived. It'll survive tomorrow. And so you get a little bit too relaxed. Because there's always been we had the Oklahoma City bombing, which is more egregious in some respect. It took human life. So I don't know. It's so emotional and raw for all of But it was the first vision I ever had of a force occupying America, an un American force occupying the seat of power. And that, I think, it just reminds us. I don't think it changed. It reminds us as to how fragile democracy is. Number one, that there's always resistance to it. And number two, that the important back breaking day to day work we must do and will always need to do for as long as humans exist and we have a place called America, it's the work that we will day to day have to do to reinforce our democracy. We are not genetically, biologically hardwired to see the greater good. Humans are biologically hardwired to eat the food that they need right now and the smarter ones to kind of save a little bit until tomorrow, to keep off invaders and that sort of thing. To go back to John Adams, I guess I've got him four or five times in this, the project is to see the common good. Right? What is the thing that benefits us all? And that's that's not something that we're hardwired to do, and public schools help us help us do that.

Michael: So just to wrap up, for the superintendents out there that are listening, I mean, did you have any advice or any words for them that you'd wanna share?

Derek Black: Yeah. I mean, I I I do think that as they find themselves in these incredibly tricky situations around false claims of critical race theory and harboring, you know, ineffective teachers and all this type of stuff, that I think put your best foot forward. And by that, mean, let's talk about the values that I think we do all hold common. And it sounds easy, but let's focus more on what brings us together than what separates us. And I think we take for granted, right, until we see a January 7, what brings us together, and to just lead with that. Because I think that regardless of the complaints that may show up on your doorstep, the public survey data shows that there's a very deep well of support for public education. There's a very deep well of support for public school teachers that it is the experience, the singular experience that 90% of America has shared together. And it is part of our roots. And to just try to bring us together around those, there's tough conversations we can't run from. But I think emphasizing what brings us together is important. And as a matter of stating those values, I think, again, it helps build that trust that you know what, we may disagree on some things, but we all are trying to do the same thing at large scale level.

Michael: Thank you so much, Derek. Really do appreciate you being on today.

Derek Black: I really appreciate you having me. Thanks.