Educast 3000 Goes to Washington

Welcome to Educast three thousand. It's the most transformative time in the history of education.


So join us as we break down the fourth wall and reflect on what's happening, the good, the bad, and even the chaotic. Here's your hosts, Melissa Lobel and Ryan Lufkin.


Hello, and welcome to another exciting episode of Educast three thousand. I'm your cohost, Ryan Lufkin.


And I'm your other cohost, Melissa Lobo. And we're joined today with a wonderful guest, one of our own internal leaders within our organization, doctor Tracy Weeks.


Tracy is our senior director of educational policy and strategy.


But more than that, she has become our, I will say guru or Guru.


I second the guru. Yes.


I love that. Right? Okay. We're gonna hold on to guru then. So she's become our guru in helping to understand this changing policy landscape, particularly in the United States, but then also how the rest of the world is reacting to that.


Before we jump in with Tracy, I do wanna make sure everybody all of our listeners understand this isn't about a political viewpoint. This is about helping to bring to all of our listeners some of just the basics around what is going on at a very high level and areas of where y'all should be maybe thinking about following or even following up with some of the resources that we'll link in the episode notes. So, again, not a policy perspective per se, but more informational to help you navigate as we all are trying to navigate what is going on in the world today. Absolutely.


Awesome. Well, Tracy, Melissa and I already know and love you. But for our listeners, tell us a little bit about your background and why you've ended up as our guru for everything government relations.


Right. Well, I flipped a coin. No. So I have been an educator for most of my career.


I've been a classroom teacher at the high school level. I've worked at the both at the school and the district level in instructional technology and media. I've worked at the state level in North Carolina. I led our statewide virtual school, and then I was the chief academic officer for the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, and also should throw in there only because we've had a couple other North Carolina Teaching Fellows who have been guests on this program that I was also a recipient and participant in that program during my time at UNC, so always thankful for that program as well, But it was in my role at the state level that I first really got my taste of working with education policy because you have to when you're at the state level.


Right? You know, particularly in North Carolina, all of our state board members were appointed by governors and approved by our state legislature.


Our funding all came from our state legislature. So if we wanted to do some new big initiative, we had to go make our case, right, for why we needed the state to invest in those. And, certainly, we were also responsible for carrying out and implementing any of the initiatives that got passed into law. So, you know, if the state decided that we were gonna have statewide testing, then it was up to the Department of Public Instruction to actually figure out what that was gonna look like and make it happen.


Right? So there's a lot of that that doesn't necessarily get sight decided by the Department of Public Instruction, but does get implemented by them. So then I went on to work at the national level. I led an organization called CEDA, where I worked with all the different state departments of education and their EdTech leadership.


And so there, I got to put my foot into federal policy. So we worked closely and would do a lot of advocacy efforts with Congress, with the White House.


And, you know, I came on during, really, during Obama's second term when digital learning and computer science was a really big effort that was going on, so there was a lot going on during that time. So I got to know a lot of the other organizations that were also doing similar work and just really fell in love with public policy and the ways that it affects education and and really affects it all the way down to the teacher and the student level. So at Instructure, you know, when I came on, we didn't really have an effort early on to do that, but I think that our leadership really saw that there was a need to understand this. So I was really excited to get to participate and sort of fill that void there.


And your timing, we've talked about that, but your timing couldn't have been better as far as as the need for you here at Instructure.


So So true.


So true. You've absolutely helped us navigate internally this really changing landscape.


Yeah. Lot going on.


Oh, yeah. So you know the drill, Tracy.


We always ask our guests favorite learning moment? And we're not gonna let you get away with this conversation without sharing one of yours. And again, the rules are, it can be something that where you were the learner, where you were a teacher, or you observed it at something with your children, something more broadly that you've witnessed. Share one of your favorite learning moments with us.


So, you know, the one I think about is about my own learning journey, and it was in eighth grade in my algebra one class. And I'll tell you, like many students, I was a hot mess in middle school. I mean, h o t.


So, you know, like, I didn't turn in a lot of my work. So I was one of those super smart kids who was terribly unorganized and just, you know, was flying by the seat of my pants to get things turned in and stuff like that. But I can remember in eighth grade, mister Hennis, my math teacher, decided that he was gonna take our school for the first time to the math counts contest for middle school students. And so we had, you know, did some internal testing and stuff like that, and I was one of the top scorers in our class, so I got to be on the team.


And it was the first time that I saw myself as good in math. Right? Like, exceptionally good in math. Like, I knew I was a smart kid.


I'd always done well in things, but I'd never internalized myself as smart in math.


And then that, like, it just was a badge that suddenly I knew what I owned, and I went forward and ultimately became a math teacher. Right? But I just think now with all I've learned how important it is, especially for young girls, to almost explicitly be told, you are smart in math or science or any of these STEM fields because I don't know that we think that about ourselves. We just think we're doing what we're supposed to do and turning in the stuff when we turn it in. But, you know, I I think that that's just something that we almost need to be explicitly told, and I was, and I'm so thankful for that because it completely changed my mindset for learning going forward.


I love that story. First of all, there's a pattern. I don't know if you've noticed this, Ryan, but a lot of these stories are about math, which is fascinating.


Like it is. Yeah.


They really are. But most of the stories that we tend to hear are ones where somebody wasn't doing well. And I think what happens just in general sorry if I'm gonna get a little esoteric here, but I think what happens in general is we spend so much times on the things that we aren't good at or where our weaknesses are that we forget to recognize our strengths. And sometimes we didn't even know what our strengths are or where our superpowers are. And to your point as a little girl in in eighth grade, you know, that's really empowering. Whether you choose to do something with that or not, that makes such a difference in your own understanding of self.


So thank you for sharing that story.


Junior high age and just being able to hang your hat on being good at something like that. Right?


Like, acknowledged Right.


Stamp of approval that you are good at that, I think, is so confidence building.


So I Yeah.


Yeah. Love that. Alright. Thank you for sharing that. I'm gonna keep with this theme of being good at something.


And one of the things that I think you're really particularly good at is staying calm and sane and informed in this crazy world right now. Okay? So there's so much change going on. Before we even dig into what that change is, how are you keeping up to date?


What do you do? Give our listeners some ideas or tactics, and how are you staying calm and sane as you're watching so many things change so quickly.


What and Melissa's not saying is I'm the one that gets spun up and she has to talk off the ledge.


So you're the you're the calm one that brings us the zen Very, very true.


Right. So okay. So thing one is that I try to pull from lots of different sources. Right? So I try not to rely on just one bucket because every single bucket, no matter where you're getting it from, has some bias one way or the other going on. Right? So I try to pull from lots of different places.


Yes. I pay attention to the mainstream media, also things like Politico, but we also are so fortunate to be partners with a number of organizations, and I know we'll talk about that a little bit later. But there are a lot of organizations out there whose primary role is advocacy and working closely in this space, and so they often have early conversations with policymakers and kind of have a sense of what's coming down the road. And so getting that heads up is nice because it lets you have a chance to breathe before it really hits the news cycle.


Sometimes I don't get that sometimes we're learning it at the same time as everybody else. So I think, you know, that's thing one is being able to get it from lots of different places and from places you trust and especially if you even better if you have those opportunities to be able to go back and ask questions, you know, and get clarity. That's thing one. Thing two is understanding that, particularly with mainstream media, the headline is scary on purpose.


Yes. You might have discussed this a couple of times.


So the there's lots of research out there that shows that media gets more clicks if they make someone mad or sad.


Right? Angry or terrified. Right? Those are gonna get the most clicks. And so a lot of the headlines are really scary headlines, and sometimes all it takes is going in and reading the article and realizing, okay.


Well, it's really not as scary. Sometimes it is as scary. I mean, you know, it just is sometimes.


But I think being able to kind of dig beneath the headline is one thing and not overreacting to the headline, which is really easy to do. And then I think, you know, also kind of understanding what the processes and procedures. So, like, when they come out and say, for instance, you know, a a recent one, the president is planning to cut the budgets. Okay.


Well, yes. And he did this in his first term. He put that out there. But guess what?


Whether it's at the federal level or at the state level, there is a process to budget making. And either and whoever is the head, so whether it's the president or the governor in a state, they always get the first pass of proposing their budget to that would support their efforts. Right? And then they give it to the legislative body, whether that's Congress or the state legislature, and they say, thank you for your input, and we're just gonna put it right here on this pile and decide what things we wanna put through, and we're gonna make our budget based on what we wanna do.


Do we take that into consideration?


Sometimes, depending on what the relationship is between the head of state and the legislative body, and sometimes they don't take it into account at all. So, you know, there have been times in the past where prior presidents have, you know, tried to reduce or cut, and in the end, education got a bump. You know? Got, you know, got actually got more money than was planned in the previous year.


So we just have to take a breath and and sometimes contextualize it and know where it is. You know? Similar things when when we hear headlines like the US Department of Ed is gonna be dismantled. Okay.


Well, that is what the administration would like to push for and advocate for, but it's not actually up to them. It's up to Congress to do this. So the president has to go in and convince and make his case and get enough people on his side to actually make that happen. So I think sometimes understanding that just because somebody wants something to happen doesn't automatically mean it is gonna happen.


And I think that's a really important thing to remember. And that's both for good things and for scary things.


Yeah. Yeah. I think one of the things that's different about with the current situation is just the sheer kind of volume of those scary headlines and that it feels like kind of a constant drumbeat. So walk us through some of the biggest changes, actual changes, thus far for especially for k twelve in the in the US.


Well, k twelve, some of it we actually knew was coming even before it was gonna happen no matter who was president this time around. Right? Because the biggest thing that's happening in k twelve right now is affecting the k twelve budgets. So over the last, you know, four or five years through three different major stimulus funds that came out of COVID, there has been just a hugely atypical surplus of federal funding that has gone into k twelve education in particular.


It's not ever happened like this before.


It likely won't ever happen.


Unprecedented. Yeah.


Right. And we always knew that it had an end date, and we've been talking about this funding cliff for years. We've known it was coming. Now one of the things that has happened right here recently is that right at the end of the Biden administration, they decided to grant a six month extension to any states that had not completely spent down their funds, and so many states had gone into contracts.


The Trump administration has put out that they actually don't plan to honor those six month extensions, and, actually, anything that had not been spent as of this past March is no longer eligible, which has put some states into a scramble mode for contracts they may have already entered into, which may mean, depending on the contract, some of them they may be able to get out of. Some of them they may have to dip into their own funds that they had intended to use for other things. Right? So it's been an atypical time, because, typically, the federal budget isn't that large a percentage of the k twelve budget.


It just has been for the last few years, and a lot of things were put into place. A lot of technology was purchased during that time. And by the way, those laptops and Chromebooks are all aging out right now and need to be refreshed. Yeah.


And so there's no more I see that with my son's Chromebook that he brings home.


It's It's not in the best shape right now. Yeah.


Right. And so now states have to figure out how to do this. But what also happened during this time is that many states had a budget surplus that went on, a, because of an influx of federal funds.


Also, it just there wasn't as much spending that happened. So they had a surplus in many states. And so there are several states, many, many states, that actually decided that they wanted to give those funds back to the taxpayers and implemented large tax cuts, which, you know, yay for our pocketbooks, you know, for that. But what that means is they now don't have funds sitting in the coffers to take up a lot of these programs.


And and by far, this is not every state, but there are quite a number of states where we have seen this happen. And so now we've got, you know, these districts and states who are trying to figure out how do they continue. And it's not just technology, by the way. Some of it, they hired extra staff during this time.


They put in summer learning programs during this time, after school programs, feeding programs. So there is a lot. And, by the way, new air conditioning systems and ventilation systems went in during this time. So a lot happened that some of them are now aging out and states are faced with, do we just cut all those things off, and what happens if we do?


So let's take the technology piece right here. Right? So a lot of folks shifted to digital curriculum at this time because everybody had a laptop, And, you know, the kids have their laptop. They're still getting face to face learning, but they're engaged, you know, getting the content and and turning in their assignments online.


Well, if they don't have the laptops, that makes it much more difficult to do that. But your curriculum is now online. They haven't really been buying textbooks over the last few years.


So either they're gonna have to replace the laptops or they've gotta go back to buying textbooks again. So it's not like a cost neutral situation. Something has to happen.


Yeah. And knowing those, what I really value about some of those changes that you shared is that it's education sits in a larger ecosystem. Right? And non education decisions impact how education's funded and impact how it's organized and structured. You also mentioned that not a lot of the K-twelve resources and budget comes from the federal funding mechanisms. That is something that I think particularly for our listeners outside of the US, I did early on in my career, I did a master's degree in educational policy, and that was surprising to me because I always had assumed that so much of the education resources in k twelve and higher education came from the federal government, and it's actually a small portion of it.


It is a small.


Yeah. It's still directive, but it's a small portion.


Yeah. It's a small portion. By far, it's mostly coming from our state coffers that that pay for those, some local funds, some federal funds. But what the federal funds do cover are some pretty critical programs.


Right? So we would refer to it as IDEA. Really, this is, you know, helping your students with special needs. We have what are called titled programs.


Title one helps schools that are in, low income areas, you know, low economic areas to try to help balance that out. Our title three funds help our English language learners. And, you know, then we've got title two and title four funds that support teachers as per you know, professional learners and and so on. So, you know, they don't cover broad education, but if they go away, these are some of the things and some of those critical populations in schools that states are gonna have to figure out how to support.


But I do wanna be clear. Nobody's talking about those funds going away quite yet. While there, you know, are some things in the president's budget, I'm not so sure congress is gonna buy into that. The bigger talk is whether or not it gets kind of all smooshed together into one big block grant and just say, we're gonna give you all the federal funds in one big block to the state.


Now you decide how you're going to divvy it up.


One other point too that's really interesting specifically about that, Tracy, that surprised me, and I think a lot of people may not know this as well, is a lot of those funding streams are out of the Department of Education. They sit in commerce, HUD, in other areas.


So even as we see the headlines around dismantling the Department of Education, that doesn't mean that correct me if I'm wrong. It doesn't mean that every educational resource, funding source, service is gonna be immediately cut alongside it because some of these are from other departments and other areas within the government.


Yeah. And and historically, they've been for those. They were centralized in the department of ed, but they will could go back. And that has been sort of the party line of this administration, just like you're saying is, know, once upon a time, there wasn't a Department of Ed. In fact, it's it's a fairly new you know, nineteen seventy eight is is when it was actually created.


So it's slightly younger than I am.


But Yeah. Not by much, but a little bit. But these funds did come from other places, and that that's been the story is we will just send them back to other places and have those administered through other resources. The burden that that then could put on the states is there's always been reporting that has to happen, and it's already hard enough to collect data from all your districts, put it in one format, and send it to the department of ed. Now they'll have to collect it from them and then put it in the format that each of these different departments are gonna ask for. So So it's gonna be real interesting, a, to see if it really does get passed around to these other departments and what that reporting structure looks like because that could be a good sized burden on the states.


That is so helpful, just sort of understanding, again, structure process and the landscape. If we can just pivot just a little bit to higher education. Right? The conversations are different in higher education. Walk us through the basics of what's impacting higher ed in the US.


So the big difference with higher ed is that any federal funds for higher ed really kind of went into a couple of different places. Most of it actually went in the form of Pell grants, grants that go directly to students. Right? So it's not like the institution was receiving money. The students were receiving money to then be able to afford to go to the university.


Then the other big pots, there is a little bit of money that went to universities, but it's not a huge amount. The other big buckets came in the form of research grants. Right? And so that's what a lot of folks have been seeing in the news is basically either cutting things like the National Institute of Health grants, the IES grants.


There's there's NSF grants, and, you know, there's a whole alphabet soup. But what you need to know is there are research grants that many of these universities have really counted on as a major part of their budget. And, really, when we're talking about that, we are talking about your, like, research one institutions, you know, that have worried most about this, but it does affect many other colleges and universities along the way. But these are the ones that either are being just outright cut or being used as leverage to gain compliance on other initiatives, whether they're DEI initiatives.


They sometimes fall into the title six or title nine initiatives, often tied to things like transgender participation in sports.


So you see things in the news that there are some social issues that this administration is very focused on and is frankly unhappy with the way things and I'll also say the other big one is dealing with antisemitism on campuses or their perceptions of how Yeah. That is happening and how the college administrations are or are not dealing with that. And so they're trying to hold some of this grant money as leverage for compliance to other issues.


Yeah. And for folks that are looking at that research funding, it's not as though that research funding in in higher education is going to larger higher education funding coffers. Right? It's it's actually targeted research.


So part of the concern as I understand it too or or conversation that's happening is what are the outputs of that research. And, again, that's where different administrations align differently into what kinds of research they wanna see. And this is where the conversation surfacing around, should that research be done by the private sector or by higher education? So not yeah.


I think that's where as we're all kinda navigating through this, it's been helpful for me to to remember that lens of how and where do we wanna produce medical research. You know? How do we learn and wanna produce research in all of the fields that impact our daily lives? Where should that sit is part of the debate.


Absolutely. And so it's whether this is should be outsourced and privatized or whether it should continue to be a part of what the universities do as part of their work for the federal government. Now, the impact on higher ed and what we're already seeing is holding back of they may not be taking in as many students in certain fields because they don't know if they're going to have the faculty to be able to teach all of those students. It's affecting graduate students.


There may not be as many postdoctorative or graduate school positions out there again from faculty. So we're actually already starting to see some of those effects as universities try to mitigate. And I I think that's important to understand. This is really important, both with k twelve and higher ed.


There is a lot in flux right now. While a lot of desires and announcements have happened, laws have not next necessarily actually been passed to cover all of these and or many of them are caught up in court proceedings.


And so what we have going on right now in education writ large is a whole lot of unknown, which actually sets up this level of nervousness and hesitancy of, I don't know if I wanna move forward and do something new because I don't know if the funding's gonna be there or not. So there's just a little bit of, I think, a little bit of nerves going on right now that folks are really trying to mitigate and understand things as the best they can and not overpromise and under deliver.


Yeah. Mhmm. How do some of the legislative decisions that aren't necessarily education specific? How are they impacting education? I mean, one of those being immigration policy. Right?


Absolutely. So immigration policy is definitely affecting, I would say, both our higher ed and our k twelve, but I'll talk about higher ed first. So it's affecting the visas of some of our college students. I know that there has been some concern with that.


I know that there have been students that have been afraid to go home from the holidays because they don't know if they're going to be readmitted into the country to go back to school. We do know that there have been a presence of ICE, you know, on college campuses and near k twelve schools. You know, we we've heard reports of some of that. So I do think that that is causing, again, concern for the student community in particular.


And, I mean, frankly, it will affect the enrollments and such of our our higher ed institutions, ultimately. Yeah.


Yeah. Yeah. We've seen this pattern globally where certain higher education institutions or segments of that sector are particularly reliant on large international populations. Australia struggled with this a little bit. We're seeing the UK struggle with this and some other countries.


And to make a quick shift into not being able to have that same level of international students also impacts their budgets, but then can impact just the experiences, the programs, everything you've already described, Tracy. It's been interesting as we've watched this too, not only the fear, concern, and sort of protection that they're trying to put in place, but how is this impacting their overall business so that they can be sustainable in an era where maybe they cannot have as many international students as they've had in the past. Absolutely. Where do tariffs play into all this? Do they play into this at all?


So they do, but maybe not in the ways you'd expect. But you gotta remember that whether it's a higher ed or a k twelve school, they have to buy things. They have to buy technology. That's right. Right? That's right. They have to buy air conditioning systems and buses and, you know, potentially, books and desks and food.


Right? Yeah.


They buy all of these things. Right? And so, absolutely, as tariffs may affect any of those products and markets. So while they're not necessarily producing goods, they are consumers of this. And so that's already gonna eat into the budgets.


When you think about, you know, different states have different allocations that usually they put a dollar. You know, am I gonna spend a hundred dollars per student, sixty dollars per student? And this is how much funding you get. And and that's where you get into some of those, I think, concerns at the k twelve level with our public schools when they see students leaving and going, whether it's to private schools, to charter schools, homeschooling.


If they're leaving the sort of proper public school, then those are dollars that the school system is losing, basically, because those dollars aren't coming because they come based on how many students they have in the building. That's why attendance is so important on those. So and so that's where you'll see some of those, you know, concerns and and where you see those some of those conversations around. School vouchers, so that's, you know, another program out there that can help private schools, but is a perceived harm to public schools.


So there are a lot of things that can be impacting the budgets of our public schools in particular.


Yeah. It is creating a sense of insecurity, a sense of doubt, like, kind of freezing people. How are both k twelve and higher ed institutions coping so far with the are we how many days in? Right.


We're a little over a hundred. Right? Yeah. So I I think we probably you know, our states and our districts are a diverse set of of institutions.


And so I think we have a lot of different types of reactions depending on where you are, what populations you serve, and how some of these things may or may not be impacting you. So we see in some states, we see them saying, keep calm and carry on until it's a law. It's not a law. You do you.


We're not pulling back on things. We see other states who were actually trying to mirror some of the things that are going on at the federal level, you know, who are implementing their own Doge type sort of examinations at the state level. Maybe a a little scaled back, but we we do see examples of state level versions of that. I think depending on the type of state and and I don't even think we can say statewide.


I think it even gets down to the district. You see different approaches to DEI, and and there are some schools and states that have said, you can keep all your money because we're we think these are important programs, and we wanna keep these. And then there are others that had already kind of pushed against those efforts years ago, and it's not gonna make a difference because they're already there. So I think there's a lot of variability across the schools, to be quite honest.


I'm curious too as you were talking about that and sort of the variability within the US. If we start to look outside of the US and maybe less around the delivery of education that maybe more for countries outside of the US that are leveraging US based technologies, like educational technology or other US based resources, how are all the changes affecting them? What are we starting to see surface as they're trying to navigate all of the changes that's happening outside of their own country, but that has an impact on how they may deliver education.


You know, I have heard questions that range from what's going on with data privacy in the US and how could that impact what we do in our country depending on what kind of technology. Like, if they're getting content from a content provider, is that content now being scrubbed in certain ways that they may wanna take a look at? I think that, you know, certainly, some of the tariffs could have an impact on what they're purchasing and doing there as well. So, you know, I think it could impact them in a lot of different ways, but, you know, I think that they are keeping a close eye, and and that's another place that I would really encourage. Don't be afraid to have conversations because the headlines that you see coming out of the news can be misleading and can make things sound like they're a done deal when it's really just the beginning of the conversation.


We've seen that with some of the AI executive orders on AI and education and things like that. They've kind of teased the idea of, national AI literacy framework, right, with no timeline really established to deliver that. And I know there's some working groups associated with AI, and the idea is that they're trying to remove some of the regulation to hopefully, not all of it, but some of the regulation in order to free up, you know, AI to be a little more innovative, that kind of thing.


Well and you know what? We'd actually be in good company when it comes to looking at AI literacy efforts. Well, there are several other countries that have have actually I mean, China has announced that it's gonna start it as early as six years old, starting in the fall.


I'm a huge advocate for a k twelve level, you know, because we've got a I coined the term AI feral children crashing onto, onto higher education in a couple of years because I don't think AI is being addressed.


You know, I see it with my kids' school. They've banned all the AI tools from their Chromebooks, but students are using their phones and using other tools. So I think the better we can actually get something the sooner we get something like that established, the better off we'd be. So Agree. It is in that kind of wait and see mode. Right?


Right. And it's that international impact again of, like, it's not just you know, as we think about ourselves as educators, well, we definitely ground ourselves into our community. We know our schools, our districts. We then, you know, start to expand and ground ourselves in our states, in our country.


We're really a global education community, and there have been some really great associations that have surfaced around this. I know I know, Ryan, you were particularly interested in in leaning in here. Where you know, like UNESCO, for example, or you've seen Ryan, you've seen some really great stuff around AI literacy. That's what made me think of it.


What role do associations play in all of this?


So they're gonna become vital. And and, actually, they were even during the first Trump administration.


Necessarily picking on the Trump administration in this. It's just this is the formula. In his first administration, while he didn't go after dismantling the Department of Ed, it was certainly they didn't necessarily staff all the roles. It was pretty lean in a lot of areas, and our education associations had to step up during that time. So it's actually a role that they've been in before. Whether it's US associations, you know, like ISTE, CETA, EDUCAUSE, KOSEN. There's a whole lot about soup, but I don't wanna, you know and then we get global.


We've got UNESCO.


Yeah.


Right? There's so many out there, and here's where they're playing a major role. They are out there providing research and resources out there. This is an area that that USED typically, you know, would lead in. And in fact, we know that many of their resources were taken down, but guess what? These associations have archived them and posted them right back out.


Promise. They're all available still, which is amazing. Yes.


But then they're all out there, you know, kind of leading the way. UNESCO has done a tremendous amount, as you said, around AI literacy.


That's great.


I know there are some other organizations that have done this. But, you know, for instance, CETA, along with a handful of other organizations, actually, is who USED outsourced to write the current version of the National EdTech Plan that was just put out in the past year, and so they're very familiar with sort of what the research says and how to align and can continue to carry that water because they helped write it and develop it anyway. So now they can just take it on, and and the organizations that all participated in that can help lead with it. And I think that you know?


And so, Ryan, you mentioned, you know, getting this task force, this AI task force. Well, in the past, I would have expected that the Department of Education would have been definitely a part of leading that effort. I don't know that I would expect that necessarily going forward if we're working on trying to dismantle. I don't know that we're gonna see big new efforts come out of that, but I certainly hope that they do include many of these organizations in it along with industry partners.


So for our listeners that may not have access to some of the same tools and resources you do, what would be some go to resources to stay on top of these changes?


There are several places that have some really good newsletters.


Whiteboard Advisors has a newsletter that you can sign up for that will give you updates, and and they try to keep a a nonpartisan view of things and really try to kind of just lay it out of this That's true. It's clear. Yeah.


And so on. I think depending on what your role in education is so for instance, if you're a state leader, state ed tech leader, you should certainly be queued into CETA. They've got things going on. Our district leaders should be listening to Kosen. Digital Promise has information. So I think looking to your membership organizations, depending on what your role is, is really important. I think you mentioned some of those, like, you know, Digital Promise serves everyone.


If you're, you know, Global, UNESCO, there's actually quite a number of them.


Share a lot of the links to what Tracy's talking about here in the in the show notes as well.


Yeah. Yeah. I just think staying in tune with those, and they're trying to put out some good information.


And, usually, there's someone at the district or state level who's somewhat in tune. Then the question is just whether whether or not they're communicating back.


And, I mean, from a recommendation standpoint, you kinda hit on it earlier, but that idea of, like, not buying into the alarmist headlines necessarily, but digging a little bit deeper and understanding the full context. Context.


And don't feed into it either. You're gonna get some alarmist stuff sent to you on Facebook and everywhere else, and it's got some pants on fire. And, honestly, what's scary about that is, like, each nugget in it is not necessarily false. But when it gets contextualized in a certain way, it doesn't really add up to the whole picture.


We've had some great conversations about that where I'll I'll be like, did you see the satellite? And you're like, the flip side of that is there's actually there's a silver lining there. Right? I mean, so, you know, having those conversations with you, you're a level headed voice, which I always appreciate.


Well and and the last piece of advice that you gave at the beginning that I'll just echo again is no process. And this is where brushing off your US history. I was a history teacher, so maybe perhaps I'm and I taught economics and government. So perhaps I'm particularly fond of this, but just remembering what process looks like or or reeducating yourself of what process looks like so that you can watch some of these proposed changes as they move through the queue and understand where and how to respond to it as they're doing so.


So I think that's also really good advice, and, you know, and hopefully, we'll be able to share some more resources. I know some some different higher education institutions are doing this in even k twelve where there's quick refresher courses around what does process look like. Because it is raising not only are there questions around why and how are we doing this, but it's like, well, okay. How would this happen?


Like, how do you know? So I think there's some opportunities there as well.


At a time where we're frankly educate. We have leaders who want to really kind of test those limits and push on those and really question. I'm framing this in the most positive light I can. They are questioning where those lies in the sand really are.


Yeah. Yeah. And so we're gonna see some of these battles play out in the courts and so on and and see what this is. And I know that you can get this one piece online, but I will tell you, my daughter went to Barnes and Noble and got a pocket sized little pamphlet of the US constitution that she just keeps in her backpack.


And it is just I mean, you're just easy to thumb through.


Kinda everybody should probably have one.


I was just thinking I'm gonna go I gotta go dig up Schoolhouse Rock and play I'm just a bill for my kids Yes. Later today. So Yes. Yeah.


I love that. I love that. Yes. Well, Tracy, thank you so much for this conversation. Absolutely. Really, I think this will help just set some groundwork. We'll have lots of links in this.


Again, from a truly nonpartisan perspective, just being informed and understanding how to navigate such such change, I think, is really important for all of us. And I I hope this helped all of our listeners do that. It certainly helped me. I know our conversations with Ryan as well.


It really helps around us in staying calm and steady, but also understanding how how the world's changing.


So thank you so much for being here, Tracy.


It was my pleasure. Thanks for having me.


Thanks for listening to this episode of Educast three thousand. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and drop us a review on your favorite podcast player so you don't miss an episode. If you have a topic you'd like us to explore more, please email us at InstructureCast at Instructure dot com, or you can drop us a line on any of the socials. You can find more contact info in the show notes. Thanks for listening, and we'll catch you on the next episode of Educast three thousand.