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Melissa Harris-Perry: Welcome to The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry.

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Melissa Harris-Perry: January 1 is when a new year officially begins, but for me and many others, the start of the year has always been September. A wonder woman lunchbox and a fresh new backpack, three-ring binders, and sharpened pencils. For me, these are the markers of new beginnings and endless possibilities. The school calendar is how I tell time.

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Melissa Harris-Perry: For many students, parents, teachers, and school staff, the start of this school year is filled with as much anxiety as it is anticipation. All this week here on The Takeaway, we're talking about heading back to school, and we'll be covering a wide range of topics with our series, School Principles. See what we did there? We wanted to start by hearing from you.

Ms. Smith: Hi, this is Ms. Smith calling from Charlotte, North Carolina. My biggest concerns about this school year is whether or not my child's teacher will stay employed or if she's going to quit, and I'm also worried about weapons in school, gunfire.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Well, Ms. Smith, it's a well-founded concern. According to Education Week, in 2022, there have been 29 school shootings in the US that resulted in injuries or deaths, and at least two have taken place already this school year. Plenty of you are worried about learning loss during the pandemic.

Speaker 3: Hi, my name is [unintelligible 00:01:50] Bradley. I'm from Surfside Beach, South Carolina. This year, teaching my kids seems to be a lot farther behind than they have in the last two years. Even though we made it through the pandemic, it seems like it's hit this year's group of kids a little bit harder than it has in the past.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Indeed, the National Center for Education Statistics recently looked at the education gap during the pandemic. Results showed a drop in reading and math scores for nine-year-olds. This was the largest average score decline in reading since 1990 and the first recorded decline in math scores since 1973. Add to that the effect of teacher shortages and the end of pandemic era school lunch waivers in the midst of rising food prices and, well, it's a lot to consider on top of just getting the kids ready and off to school every day. For more on all this, we spoke with--

John King: John King, President of the Education Trust, and former United States Secretary of Education.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, both of John's parents were educators, but he lost them both at a young age, and school became his haven and refuge. He went on to become a social studies teacher, a principal, the US Secretary of Education, and now a leading education researcher and policymaker. I asked John King to tell me a back-to-school story.

John King: I always worked really hard to make sure that the first day of class was fun and interesting, got us right into debating a challenging historical question, diving into primary source documents. When I was a middle school principal, I really encouraged teachers to think about how do you make the first day a day where when kids get off the bus, they're running up to their parent, and they're saying, "Oh, my gosh, Ms. Harris-Perry's class was amazing. I'm so excited to be in her class this year. We did this fun experiment, we learned this incredible new idea. We read this amazing poem."

I would say I worry that too often those first days of school are spent on procedures, and of course, we have to establish the norms and procedures and look at the syllabus, but the gift we can give is to make school really fun and interesting. When my kids have come home from school, that's what I want to hear, what got you excited about learning this school year?

Melissa Harris-Perry: John and I talked about more than what we can expect this school year. We also talked about whether or not 2023 is going to be normal.

John King: Well, we're certainly hopeful that it will be more normal. I think we'll still be navigating the challenges created by COVID. I'm sure there will still be situations where kids have to quarantine and so forth, but on the whole, this year should be the most normal year of the last three, and that's a good start. I know teachers and students are excited about that. Certainly, my daughter who just went back to high school is excited about that.

Melissa Harris-Perry: All right. Say a little bit more about that notion that she's excited about it, that she's feeling like, okay, normal would be a good thing. Do you think that young people are, for the most part, yearning for that sense of normalcy?

John King: Absolutely. You think about the impact of all the disruptions kids have experienced, particularly that year that for many kids around the country was almost entirely if not entirely virtual. That's incredibly difficult. So isolating for kids, separating them from their relationships with peers, with teachers. For my daughter, it was her freshman year that was virtual. She was in class with students and teachers all year that she'd never met in the real world.

Despite all the privileges we have, it was a really hard year for both of our daughters. Kids are excited, I think, to have extracurriculars, lunch, recess, opportunities to hang out with other kids, and supportive relationships with their teachers, and to have that be as normal as possible with as few interruptions due to COVID as possible.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Oh, John King, you are talking about normal school as though it was a good, positive, and affirmative experience for students. I thought that American schools were in a terrible crisis and had been long before the pandemic. Are you suggesting to me that schools were actually kind of okay?

John King: Well, I think both things are true. For many kids, school is the one place in their life that is safe, supportive, nurturing, consistent, stable. It certainly was for me when I was a kid and both my parents passed away, it was school that was the place of consistency. That said, there are schools where kids are experiencing bullying. There are huge equity gaps in our schools for low-income students, for students of color, disproportionate use of discipline with students of color, kids being suspended, even expelled from school. We even have schools still in this country that use corporal punishment. We've got lots of challenges, but on the whole, for most kids and teachers, school can be a very positive place.

I think we saw the toll when school was disrupted by COVID. Not just in terms of kids' academics, but their socio-emotional well-being.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm going to think about that a little bit because part of what I'm interested in digging into with you here a bit is what it is we think school is, what we think it's supposed to do, and what we think the crisis or the problems are. I remember being really affected by reading the book, The Manufactured Crisis, and the sense that maybe schools weren't, and particularly public schools, were not in as much of a crisis as we often talk about them as being in.

Obviously, you were in a position of federal policy leadership around that, you're currently in a position where you're overseeing tons of research. Is there a bottom line or a takeaway about our education system in this country?

John King: I think we saw during COVID how central schools are to the social fabric of the country. The CDC did surveys of young people during the heart of the COVID crisis when school was so disrupted and many schools were only virtual, and they found a huge mental health toll for kids. Something like 40% of students saying they experienced poor mental health during that pandemic. A large number of high school students saying that they were experiencing sadness, hopelessness. There's a lot to say about the role that schools can play as a social force in our society. That said, schools also have an important academic function, obviously.

We know kids lost ground when school was only virtual, and that's a problem. We saw just last week new national assessment results come out showing significant losses, particularly for the students who were already struggling, they lost the most ground during the COVID crisis. We have to be honest about those challenges and tackle them, but at the same time celebrate that schools are the heart of our democracy.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Let's talk about tackling those challenges of learning loss and that gap. Am I right that some of that gap in achievement as it's often described, and we can talk about whether or not actually an achievement, but what we typically describe as an achievement gap that some of that gap had actually been closing prior to the pandemic?

John King: Certainly over the 20-year period before the pandemic, we'd seen some closing of what we had at Ed Trust refer to as an opportunity gap, the gap between students of color and their white peers, the gap between low-income students and their more affluent peers, not nearly enough, but some closing. What we've seen from the COVID disruption is it had a more negative impact on the students who were most vulnerable. If schools had few resources, they struggled more with virtual learning. If schools were places that were under-resourced and didn't have the school counselors and mental health services we would want, they struggled more during the COVID period.

Unfortunately, the COVID disruptions have exacerbated the gaps.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Let's go back to that first question about it being normal. [chuckles] Should we be looking then for a new normal? I get that it is extraordinarily hard to both be living through a crisis, trying to learn from that crisis, and then implementing changes in response to what you're learning in that crisis all without necessarily a lot more resources, but should we be looking that this year will not be a return to something previous but allow us to build on whatever we learned in the context of education and schools during the pandemic?

John King: Let's hope that we can achieve a new, better, more equitable normal. Let's hope that we can learn from the evidence about what works to help students catch up who have lost ground, things like intensive tutoring, expanding learning time whether that's after school or in the summer, focusing on relationships and making sure kids have strong positive relationships, both with peers and with adults at school, investing in school counselors and mental health services, really acknowledging the socio-emotional toll of these last few years. If we could do those things, we would build a more equitable future.

If we could in states think about how we better allocate resources so that we're investing the most in the students who are most vulnerable, if we can not just continue to recruit and retain teachers but make sure we have a diverse teacher workforce, that would be a powerful step towards equity. I hope folks are fired up to get back into a school year that isn't just about getting back to how it was before COVID but actually building a better future.

Melissa Harris-Perry: As much as there are a lot of young people looking forward to things having some greater sense of normalcy, particularly in relationships, we also know that the question of that socio-emotional learning that didn't happen, those many days, weeks, months of isolation, of stress have real and continuing effects on our young people. We know in a lot of schools we're seeing an uptick in violence, in fighting, in stress. How can schools or how can we maybe help to prepare and support schools for managing the concerns that these young people are going to be bringing back into the classroom?

John King: There's really I think a couple dimensions. One is making sure that we have the resources for the kids who've experienced the greatest trauma. We have thousands upon thousands of kids who've lost family members to COVID, kids who lost homes, kids who were food insecure, kids whose day-to-day lives were terribly disrupted during this period. For those students, we've got to have intensive supports. Means we need more school counselors. As a country, we are not doing a good enough jobs staffing the role of school counselor. We have schools where a school counselor can be assigned to 500, 600, 700 students, impossible for them to support families effectively in that context.

We need more counselors, we need more mental health services for kids and their families, but then we need to rethink our approach to relationship building within schools. We've really got to make time and be intentional about how we help kids form real connections with peers, thinking about projects in the classroom that help students work collaboratively, learn to share, learn to disagree agreeably with their peers. We've got to think about extracurricular activities and social activities, enrichment programs as part of the school day, whether it's for some kids Model UN, for other kids a theater production, for other kids sports.

How we make sure that those opportunities exist for kids to build positive relationships, learn from the struggles that a team can experience, we've got to make sure that we're not just seeing schools as an academic enterprise, but a socio-emotional enterprise as well.

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Melissa Harris-Perry: All right, it's recess time, but we'll be back with more about what we should expect heading into the school year right here on The Takeaway. Stay with us.

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Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm back now with John King, former US Secretary of Education, and we're talking about how the COVID pandemic has changed schooling and what issues we still need to address. Speaking of changes, last week, New York City announced that there will be no more snow days for public school students. Instead, students will continue their classes remotely when the white stuff falls from the sky. Everybody loves a snow day, but John King did give us a little silver lighting.

John King: One positive coming out of the COVID experience is we've done a better job getting kids devices and internet access so that we can do things like provide remote learning when school is disrupted due to weather events, which we're going to see more frequently because of climate change, or the ability to offer opportunities to kids that might not have been available in their physical school through virtual learning. I think about the big gap we have as a country in access to advanced placement courses, particularly for low-income students and students of color. Well, now, we should never have to say again to a kid you can't take this class because it's not offered in your high school building.

We know that we can create through virtual learning access to AP, international baccalaureate, dual enrollment college courses, learning a language that you're interested in that maybe isn't taught by a teacher within your school building. That's a positive that we can take from this period.

Melissa Harris-Perry: We've been talking about schools primarily as places where students learn. They certainly are. They're also a place where a bunch of adults work. [chuckles] Teachers, administrators, all of the support staff from school nurses and counselors to those who are working as crossing guards, as school custodians. What is the school year looking like for the workplace? We know that teachers are saying burnout is a serious problem, there are teacher shortages, what can we do to improve the school day in the school year for teachers?

John King: Well, we certainly need to make sure that people are paid well. We see that in states where they have been slow to raise teacher pay, they're struggling even more with shortages in this moment. We got to make sure folks can earn a decent living. We've got to make sure that working conditions are good. If you're in a school where there's only one school counselor for 700 students, that's bad for the school counselor, but it's also bad for all the teachers in that building who can't get their kids the support they should have. We've also got to make sure that we provide good wages and benefits for some of the other folks who work in school buildings.

We see places that are struggling to recruit school bus drivers. Well, if that job is structured in a way where you get very low pay, you don't have access to benefits, it's going to be very hard to attract and retain good people to drive our kids safely. We've got to invest in those support roles, folks who work in the cafeteria, folks who work in more clerical functions in schools and districts. Those are vital roles to keep school districts working. Then, of course, we've got to as a culture, I think, celebrate educators.

I worry that in an environment where you've got folks on the right attacking teachers for teaching the truth about our history, you've got states like Florida attacking creating safe and supportive spaces for LGBTQ students, all of that makes it harder to show up every day as a teacher.

Melissa Harris-Perry: From Florida's Don't Say Gay Law as it's been called to these critiques, concerns around so-called critical race theory, to the banning of books in some schools and school districts. How worried are you about these kinds of developments in the past year or year and a half?

John King: Very worried. I taught high school and social studies. I believe deeply in the importance of providing kids with an honest account of our history, the good things, and also the places where we've fallen so far short of our democratic promise, whether we're talking about the institution of slavery or Japanese-American internment. We can't hide the hard parts of our history or we'll condemn future generations to repeating some of the ugliest parts of our history. I'm very worried about it. I think it reflects a broader trend of anti-democratic even fascist ideology that we're seeing pop up around the country.

The good news is I think most Americans, most parents, the vast majority of educators want to teach diverse authors in schools, want to teach a truthful version of our history. If we can appeal to that spirit, I think we can push back on some of this right-wing attack on public education.

Melissa Harris-Perry: The Uvalde school massacre, it wasn't only brutalizing for the community that lost all those children and teachers, but that fear, I know all of us as parents, on the one end, we're thrilled to be sending the kids back to school, waving goodbye, have a good day, but then every time there's a school shooting, there's that pit in your stomach, and maybe in Uvalde, perhaps more than in previous cases, because of what seems like this extraordinary failure of policing, and it makes you wonder if having nearly 400 armed law enforcement officers on site doesn't make our kids safe in school, what can?

John King: Look, we have too many dangerous weapons in our society, we make it too easy for folks to get really weapons of war. We have to change that. It was good to see some bipartisan progress on common sense gun laws. We have a much further distance to travel. We ought to ban assault weapons. We ought to make it much harder for young people to get access to weapons, rather require much more training, secure storage. There's a lot that I think most Americans would agree we could be doing.

Look, I live this fear as a parent. At the end of last school year, one day my wife and I got a text from our daughter who's still in high school saying she was hiding under a table in her classroom, and there was someone with a gun and the school was on lockdown. There are no words to describe the fear that we felt. Both of us just rushed to go to the school, not that there was anything we could particularly do, but just felt like we should be close. Eventually, it turned out someone had seen someone with a gun just outside of the building, the school did the right thing to have a lockdown, and it turned out to be fine, but that shouldn't be a part of being a public school parent in America, and it is because of guns.

We have to take a different approach to guns. Is there more we could do around mental health services and school counseling and things to make schools safer, more supportive communities for our kids? Absolutely. Are there smart things we can do around security and cameras and so forth to try to make our schools safer? Of course, but at the end of the day, the real answer lies in taking a different approach to our gun laws.

Melissa Harris-Perry: In a lot of ways, I traded that fear of getting that text, of getting that call, to a different fear of violence when my daughter finished up high school and headed off to college. Now the fear is the text or the phone call, not about an armed assailant, but potentially about an assailant who's a classmate, who's a friend, maybe who's a date. I know the stats around Higher Ed and sexual misconduct. I've been a college professor for 25 years. Can you talk to me about the current state of Title IX relative to higher Ed, and whether or not our campuses are safe for students of all genders from the potential for sexual violence?

John King: When we in the Obama administration looked at this issue, we saw a clear need for the federal government to play a much stronger role in ensuring that our Higher Ed institutions are taking action on incidents of sexual harassment and sexual assault. We took an approach to Title IX enforcement that tried to put much greater responsibility on administrators to take action and to protect students from harm. Unfortunately, the Trump administration rolled back the guidance that we put forward around Title IX. They tried to take an approach that really tilted the law in favor of folks who had committed sexual harassment and sexual assault.

It's a very dangerous approach, sent exactly the wrong message. The Biden administration now is in the process of revisiting all of this and putting forward an approach to Title IX that will again put the law on the side of safety, of course, ensure due process for those who are accused, but put the law on the side of keeping all of our kids and communities and our college students, many of whom are themselves parents, and this is a range from the 18-year-old, to the 55-year-old, making sure that campuses are safe places for them.

There's also a need for a cultural shift to how we think about issues of consent and making sure that young people understand that consent is required before moving forward in a relationship, and that there's a real responsibility to stand up when you see someone doing the wrong thing within your college community.

Melissa Harris-Perry: We often hear and I think maybe we even understand that for education to work at any level, K through 12, maybe a little bit less at the college level, [chuckles] but K through 12 at least, that parental engagement of some kind matters. I will say again, I'm not sure I need the parents to call me here at the [laughs] college, but we certainly know that for education to work for all of us that everybody's got to be involved. Parental involvement is an important part of that, but I'm also always interested in what community involvement looks like.

Can you talk to me a little bit about what it would mean, not only to be an advocate for your kid in your school, in your classroom, but what it might also mean to be an advocate for all of our kids in all of our classrooms, for those folks who are not raising K through 12s and have managed to maybe get the kids out of college, is there still a role for them in the back-to-school moment?

John King: Absolutely. You know what? At Ed Trust, this is a big focus of ours saying that the community has to take responsibility for the quality of schooling available to our kids, that the future of our democracy and our economy depend on it. We should all be concerned whether we have kids in school or not about how all these federal dollars are being used by school districts, and are they deploying them to prove in interventions like intensive tutoring to help students make up ground lost during COVID.

We should all have a stake in ensuring that our schools are diverse places where students are exposed to diversity amongst their peers, racial and socioeconomic diversity, where our teacher and school leader workforce is diverse. We all have a stake in a healthy, diverse society over the long run. We should all take an interest in whether or not our schools are safe places where kids can get good socio-emotional support and feel affirmed in their identity. These are community concerns. To me, that's the heart of the role of public schools in our society. They really are foundational for the health of communities.

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Melissa Harris-Perry: Thank you to John King, Ed Trust President and former US Secretary of Education.

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Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, if you haven't been in the classroom for a while, do you remember your favorite part of a new school year? Was it the new shoes or a new crew of friends, maybe even a sense that you could reinvent yourself anew? Or, maybe you remember the parts that were stressful, navigating new schedules, feeling like maybe you couldn't keep up, or gosh, sometimes just wondering if it was all a waste of time. We asked all of you what you were thinking about at the start of this school year, and some of you were pretty excited about the possibility of being back to normal.

Andrew: Hi. This is Andrew in Kalamazoo, Michigan. This year going into the school year I'm excited for so much, activities, and schedules, and new feelings with normalcy. I'm also anxious about all the same. I'm hoping that we can continue to find ways to recalibrate what is best for our children as we move forward.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Moving forward. Yes, but some had some real concerns about the lack of COVID precautions.

Gray: I'm excited for my kid to be back in school and going for a two-night field trip, but I'm anxious about having the disabled immunocompromised spouse in these times when caution, and testing, and tracking have been thrown to the wind. I feel like most of the vulnerable don't matter anymore and everyone expects caution to be tossed out by even those who are more vulnerable. My name is Gray [unintelligible 00:30:56] and I'm calling from Randolph, New Jersey.

Dee: Hey, this is Dee from Yonkers, New York. The thing that I am most concerned and anxious about is my children returning to school and being bullied for wearing masks. Unfortunately, there's still now a stigma that's out there for them to wear a mask, and I don't want them to bully anybody anymore than I want them to be bullied.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Teacher shortages, a problem facing districts across the country, that's something that many of you all were thinking about.

Ellen: I'm Ellen [unintelligible 00:31:27] from Seattle, Washington. My son was excited to start his first day of kindergarten on Monday but unfortunately, that will probably be delayed because of the teacher strike here in Seattle. He was excited but now it's more complicated.

Speaker 4: My kids are not back in school because I live in Seattle. I am fine with it though. I completely support the teachers and think they should strike until each classroom gets two special education aids, no questions asked.

Melissa: You all offered us even more.

Derek Martin: Hello. This is Derek Martin calling from Denver, Colorado. I think what gives me anxiety and or concern about my 12-year-old heading back in is the severity of the desire to have children in the classroom regardless of the situation. For example, Denver public schools right now is experiencing temperatures within the rooms of over 90 degrees. That's not a learning environment whatsoever, so they're letting students out early which is also an extremely privileged concept if you can pick your child up, and a lot of people cannot for those that have nine to fives that are in the office.

Shiloh Strawbridge: Hi, this is Shiloh Strawbridge calling from Vista, California. The teachers have had three years of trauma and stress, and so have the kids. Meanwhile, the teachers have so many kids in their classroom and they're expected to teach them to pass these standardized tests that don't actually look at the individual strengths of the kids, and the kids are tougher to teach now after three years of trauma themselves.

Speaker 5: My name is [unintelligible 00:33:16] calling from Livingston, New Jersey. I'm a bit anxious about not being able to afford daycare for my daughter because she's gotten so out of control but I'm super excited to have her play with other kids, socialize, learn new skills.

David: Hi, my name's David. I live in New Jersey. I worry for our children. I worry for my children. They've missed so much. Our children need every chance they can possibly get.

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Melissa Harris-Perry: As always, thanks to everybody who called in and shared your take with us. If you want to tell us how you're feeling or what you're thinking about at the start of this school year, then please call us. Call us at 877-869-8253, that's 1877-8-MY-TAKE.

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