This is Democracy – Episode 88: Education During the Coronavirus Crisis

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Dr. Jeremi Suri: Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy. For this episode, we are going to discuss an issue that’s been with us in our society for a long time, but also an issue of greater importance in our current moment because of the ways in which so many students are learning at home, not in their traditional schools. The topic is educational inequality and the ways in which different communities in our society seem to have very different educational experiences and different educational achievement rates. We have with us a colleague and friend who I think has done some of the deepest research on this, particularly looking at the data over time as well as the experiences of students in different contexts. This is my colleague, Paul von Hippel. He’s an Associate Professor of Public Policy, Sociology, Statistics and Data Science at the University of Texas at Austin. He’s best known for his work on summer learning, summer weight gain, I assume he means summer weight gain for students, not for everyone else, though that seems to happen for all of us, research design, and missing data. He works on evidence-based policy, education and inequality, and the obesity epidemic. This is why I love Paul, he’s an autodidact and a scholar of every sense. Before his academic career, he worked as a church music director, a data scientist, he worked in a bank working to prevent fraud, and now, he’s taking up jazz piano. We should have had you play the piano for our program, Paul.

Dr. Paul von Hippel: I couldn’t fit it into the car while I’m doing this interview.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Next time, we’ll have you on from Carnegie Hall how does that sound? Thank you for joining us, Paul. Before we turn to our discussion with Paul von Hippel, we have, of course, Zachary Suri’s, a scene setting poem. What is the title of your poem today, Zachary?

Zachary Suri: Hologram Semester.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Hologram Semester. I think I have a sense where this is going. Let’s hear it.

Zachary Suri: Hologram Semester. It is odd, Zoom, this semi-translucent slime through which we glare at each other from our bedrooms. One kid holds his sour-looking cat, another’s voice cracks up. I clipped my toenails out of sight, another types on a different computer. It is odd the magnet school we nearly all have internet. The teachers who send e-mail after e-mails, setting up our portal into 25 different lives, odd to find ourselves almost normal, two days into a hologram semester. I can only wonder what it’s like on the lonely virtual connections of other schools, what it’s like to be a high schooler right now without internet, or trying to make yourself care about fungi reproduction as your four-year-old little brother runs with scissors to the reflection on your dark school provided computer. With the quickly multiplying number of blank eyed teenagers looking at their parents through the quarantine glass, watching them wheeze for a ventilator, unaware completely of the teacher rattling off geometry to a non-existent classroom, floating between server signals somewhere in California. In this strange AirWave education, we all feel some debt of gratitude to the presence of television, or begin to understand the vital importance of toilet paper, trying to watch siblings or translate Latin in citywide bedrooms. In this odd moment of scholastic pixels, we all find ourselves relying on little signals, hidden allusions to remind ourselves that the world hasn’t disappeared. Emergency room, magnet school, food desert, or virtual classroom.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: It’s wonderful imagery, Zachary. What is your poem really about?

Zachary Suri: My poem is really about what it’s like now, the first week, at least for me, where we’re doing a completely online school in the midst of coronavirus. Really, how odd it is to have a virtual classroom, but at the same time, all the inherent inequalities in relying on the belief that everyone has access to internet, that everyone is able to do this, and how dangerous that can be.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: You feel the inequalities already?

Zachary Suri: I don’t personally feel the inequalities, but I think it’s so easy to see just based on the numbers looking at who has internet connection, that these divides go beyond just the circumstance that they’re really based on racial lines and where people live.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Great. That’s certainly an appropriate place to turn to Paul. Obviously, Paul, educational inequality is a long-standing problem in our society. Why is it such a problem? Why is it something we haven’t been able to fix?

Dr. Paul von Hippel: When you say our society, I think you’re talking about the US. The first thing I want to address is this idea that we have more educational inequality in the US than other developed countries. In fact, we don’t particularly. However you look at, if you look at the overall spread of children’s test scores, or the gap between rich and poor children, or between children with more and less educated parents, it’s not conspicuously bigger in the US than it is in other developed countries. When it comes to educational inequality, US isn’t the least unequal country, but it’s far from the most unequal country, we’re not an outlier. Americans find that hard to believe, we’re exceptionalists.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Right.

Dr. Paul von Hippel: We’d like to think that if we’re not the best at something, we must be the worst at something, but we’re not, we’re in the middle of the pack when it comes to inequality. In fact, over the last few years, I’ve learned at some countries that Americans think of as being homogeneous and egalitarian like Japan and South Korea have, by some measures, more unequal test scores than we do. We might think of those countries as being homogeneous, but the people live in those countries don’t necessarily see themselves that way. I’ve got a student from South Korea who is always telling me about the inequality between urban and rural areas in that country. If Americans have some idea that Koreans are uniformly high achieving, that’s not an idea that Koreans share.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Interesting. But nonetheless, our own ideals of what an educational system should look like and the opportunity that should be provided for all, that does not seem to be a reality in the way we wish it would be, correct?

Dr. Paul von Hippel: Horace Mann said his vision as one of the founders of the Common School Movement was that education would be the great equalizer, “It would be the balance wheel,” he said, “in the conditions of men.” It’s disappointing that we still have a great deal of inequality today. But where does that inequality come from? I look myself to the US context. We have this persistent idea that the fact that some kids score higher on tests and get further in school, that that has primarily to do with the school quality. That some kids just go to worst schools and therefore, they’re doomed to do poorly on tests and more likely to drop out and so on. Schools do matter for children’s success but they’re not the primary driver of inequality and educational outcomes. What really matters the most are the characteristics of the families. Families are much more important for children’s success than schools are. You can walk through any resource you want to. If you’re interested in school spending, you have to acknowledge that how much money your parents make is much more important than how much money your school spends. Whether your parents finished college matters much more than whether your teacher finished a Masters Degree. Number of children in your classroom matters much less than the number of children in your home, and whether they’re competing for the attention of one parent or have two or none, and on and on, it’s families mainly that makes the difference. The contribution of schools to inequality does matter, but it’s relatively small. The main source of inequality is really differences between families.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Has the growing inequality over the last three decades or so in income and living conditions among families. Is that therefore translated into growing inequality and educational achievement?

Dr. Paul von Hippel: Well, it’s an interesting story, because there are two trends pointing in opposite directions. The first one is the one that you’re talking about, is that families have been moving apart. Families are much more unequal today than they were in 1970 or 1940, and not just an income, they’re also more unequal in size. We’ve got more single parents raising multiple children and more married parents raising just one or two. Then more unequal in education. In 1970, coming from a highly educated family might mean that your father was a doctor and your mother was a nurse. But today, it could be that both parents are doctors. That’s not an uncommon scenario today. So there’s a lot more inequality between families. That might well have led to greater educational inequality, except that there’s this actually wonderful contrary success story that surprisingly few people know about, it’s hardly a secret. But surprisingly few people know about it or want to believe in, and that is that schools have moved in the opposite direction. They’ve grown dramatically more equal over the decades. Since the 1930s, state governments have taken on a growing share of school funding, and they’ve taken great strides to ensure that school spending is spread out across the state and is more unequal in different communities than it used to be. Stories varies from one state to another. Every state story is unique. But many poor districts are spending about as much or even a little more than middle-class districts today. Only the very richest districts are spending substantially more. So you’ve got these two contrary trends. You’ve got this increase in family inequality and you’ve got this buffering decrease in school inequality. Thank heaven the school spending laws have changed as they have, otherwise we’d have really dramatic spending differences between schools reinforcing what we see between families. What this means is that we’ve got, today compared to 1970, we’ve got more inequality between families, but less inequality between schools. How does that all balance out? That’s not a settled question. So there’s an influential study from 2011. It was in the New York Times and everything, reporting on achievement gaps between rich and poor children and increased by about 50 percent since 1970 and doubled since World War II. That’s a very compelling story for people who are concerned about the effects of family inequality. But last year or so, a couple of studies have come out that fail to replicate that result in new data. Both of the studies found that achievement gaps are more or less the same today as they were in 1970, and maybe a little smaller. So we really just don’t know. We’ve got these two trends, schools growing more equal, families growing more unequal, and they may have just cancel each other out or maybe that one is trumped the other. It’s not clear at the moment.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Got you. You’ve written recently, and I know you have a new piece that we’ll link to this podcast coming out on this. You’ve written that with regard to the coronavirus, whether the trends are moving toward more equality or not, that the virus and the way we’re reacting to it is likely to increase inequalities, is that true?

Dr. Paul von Hippel: Yeah. It’s been a really interesting moment for me because, a lot of researchers in the area of education are interested in ways that schools magnify inequality. I’ve taken, a small group of my colleagues have kind of taken a contrarian position in this debate. However, unequal schools are families who’re a lot more unequal, and in fact, schools do a lot to compensate for the inequality between families. It’s interesting, we’ve done this thought experiment for years, saying, “Well, imagine if we didn’t have schools, how unequal would kids be then?” Our argument is always been the kids will be more unequal. That was criticized as not being a very interesting argument for a while. But suddenly we find ourselves in that situation. Here we are in the counterfactual and it turns out what everybody is concerned about is that inequality is going to get worse. That tells me that, a lot of people are actually closet believers in this argument we’ve been making that families are more unequal than schools.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: As I understand, your argument is that with students like Zachary learning at home, that places much more of a burden on families, and that the family inequalities will translate more directly into the educational experiences, is that correct?

Dr. Paul von Hippel: Sure, yeah. Somebody like like Zachary who’s a self-starter and relatively advanced in his academic career, he’s got two highly educated parents. He’s going to be, okay, I’m not too worried about kids like Zachary. Kids I’m worried about are kids who have less educated parents, kids who have many siblings competing for their attention, kids who have maybe a poor Internet connection or a district that’s not handling things very well, and I’m more worried about younger kids than I am about older kids. A high school student who’s studying for the AP exam can do pretty well on their own if they’re a self-starter, but a preschooler or a kindergartener who their main job is really to learn to get along with other kids, I really don’t see how they’re able to do that when they’re cooped up at home with their families.

Zachary Suri: How does this translate though, in the way that schools are now interacting with kids? I’ve noticed just interacting with my friends and family that there’s really a big gap between how different schools are responding, how communicative they’re being and how they’re adjusting their curriculum.

Dr. Paul von Hippel: That’s true. You’re noticing that even in the Austin School District?

Zachary Suri: Yeah.

Dr. Paul von Hippel: Yeah. I’d like to hear more about what’s happening in Austin, I don’t have a child in the Austin public schools. But my observation from news coverage has been that our education system has become dramatically decentralized. States really aren’t setting standards at the moment. The state of Pennsylvania, for example, told the districts, and they just had to make a good faith effort to try and provide some distance learning. Some districts haven’t stepped up. Philadelphia, for example, has really been refusing to provide any distance learning since they closed on May 16th. So there’s just dramatic differences in how different districts are handling it. Until you spoke, I didn’t think about different schools in a district handling it differently as well. That’s going to contribute to inequality, it’s a different kind. I’m not sure they necessarily go together. You can be a poor child in a challenging family situation in a district that’s responding beautifully to the crisis, and you can be a well-off child with very supportive family in a district that’s responding badly. What you don’t want to be right now is a poor child in a district that’s responding poorly. Those are the kids that I’m really most worried about.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Right. But one of the points you made in your article that I read Paul, that really spoke to me was to highlight how big the different experience will be, how large the gap will be between, let’s say, two children at about the same grade level, where one is at home with two other siblings and a single parent who’s lost her job. Versus another family where you have two gainfully employed parents who also have flexibility in their work schedules. It seems to me those are going to be vastly different educational experiences, right?

Dr. Paul von Hippel: Yeah. They are going to be vastly different educational experiences. If the district is responding poorly, the well-educated parents are going to be a much better position to compensate for that than the single parent that you described who’s got three children at home. If the district isn’t offering meaningful distance education either, those kids are just going to go sideways from now until September. We know that’s going to be bad.

Zachary Suri: We’ve heard a lot about how technology helps us learn. But how does technology in this crisis exacerbate the divide between these two different types of students?

Dr. Paul von Hippel: Well, I’m not sure. I’m not sure the problem is as bad as it’s been made out to be. I just finished a piece for Education Next looking at the situation in Philadelphia. Philadelphia had what I think is some bad data suggesting that half the kids in that district didn’t have Internet access. That would be an example of exactly what you’re talking about, that some kids just not having the access to take advantage of the distance learning that’s being offered. In fact, it looks to me more like 80 or 90 percent of kids in Philadelphia had Internet access but the district just didn’t realize it. So the district hasn’t offered anything because it can’t offer it equitably. I think that’s going to have a negative effect on kids throughout Philadelphia, both the poor and the better off. But there are differences, rural areas are not as well wired as urban. Sub-urban areas, rural kids tend to be behind to the degree that those districts aren’t able to respond with a robust distance learning response, I think those kids are going to end up further behind at the end of all this than they started out. There are some ways in which the technology is going to reinforce some of the inequality, but there’s other ways in which the technology can compensate for it. So I think we’re really going to have to see, this is really a stress test for education technology that the education sector has been reluctant to adopt technology for a long time and now it’s being forced to do so in a hurry and we’re going to see what some of this technology is capable of and what isn’t ready for prime time.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Is there a historical analogy, we’ll talk about analogies to students being out of school in a minute. But is there historical analogy to such rapid use of new technology?

Dr. Paul von Hippel: That’s an interesting question. Are there crises that have thrust us into the arms of technology? I haven’t thought about this before. The one that occurs to me just off the cuff is World War II and how it accelerated the development of computers and radar and advanced weaponry, automation. I think that’s a good example. I’m not sure whether there’s been anything between then and now that’s so rapidly pushed us into the arms of technology. But it’s an interesting question.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: On that same note, thinking about historical analogies, one of the other really interesting things in your writing, Paul, to me, is how you talk about what we’ve learned from other periods when students have been forced to leave school for extended periods. You talk in your writing about school strikes, also about summer. What have we learned from these other experiences? What’s relevant for us thinking about today from that experience?

Dr. Paul von Hippel: In a sense the situation we’re in, what’s the cliche? You probably know who said this if it’s legitimately attributed to an individual, that history doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: That’s Mark Twain, but it’s apocryphal.

Dr. Paul von Hippel: It’s apocryphal. Okay. So somebody who was passing himself off as Mark Twain might have said that.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Yes.

Dr. Paul von Hippel: The situation that we’re in is literally unprecedented. We’ve never closed all schools nationwide for a period as long as this is going to be as far as I know. But there are examples of local school closures lasting months or even years. You mentioned a couple of them. There was a New York City teachers’ strike that lasted more than two months in 1968. There was another one less known to Americans in French-speaking part of Belgium that lasted for two months in 1990. There was massive resistance to desegregation in Virginia in the 1950s up to 1963, where basically white families walked out of schools or shut black families out of schools for months or years. Then there are these severe natural disasters, Hurricane Katrina is the one everybody wants to talk about right now. But there have been earthquakes and tsunamis, even plagues of locusts in Malawi that kept children home for periods of months or even years. We’ve seen this kind of thing before and it’s almost never good. So when students returned to the New York City schools after a two months strike in 1968, if you look in the New York Times from 1969, you find that their test scores came in about two months lower than kids the years before. Work on the French-speaking Belgian kids that were affected by the teachers’ strike in 1990 is really interesting, it compared them to kids who spoke Flemish in Belgium. The French-speaking kids fell further behind the Flemish-speaking kids. They were more likely to repeat grades, they didn’t advance as far in higher education. Katrina wasn’t good. The interruption of schooling in Katrina caused test scores to fall sharply among affected kids, although some of them got it back when they transferred to better schools in Texas after that, particularly those whose schools weren’t particularly good before the crisis. So there’s a little bit of silver lining there. But in general, interrupting school is not a good thing for a long time unless you’re able to compensate for it in some way later.

Zachary Suri: I remember my kindergarten year when we lived in Madison, Wisconsin. There was a huge teachers’ strike in 2011, and we were out of school for a few days. Wasn’t that many, but still that is the only memory I really have of that school year. It left an impression on me about school closures and how devastating they could be.

Dr. Paul von Hippel: It’s interesting, all these extended closures, there’s also this feeling of uncertainty which we have now. Just a couple of weeks ago, we were talking about maybe getting back to school in the second week of April, and nobody’s talking about that anymore. So it’s very strange because we don’t really know what we’re up against or how long we’re going to have to compensate for it. That was true in the teachers’ strikes as well.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: That uncertainty makes it, of course, very difficult for students as well as adults to focus.

Dr. Paul von Hippel: Yeah, that’s right.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Paul, for these other cases of school closures, do we see over many years that the lost learning time still remains significant?

Dr. Paul von Hippel: Yeah, I think the best research that’s been done on that topic, there’s been some on Katrina, but there you have to account for the fact that they finished in different schools than they started. The best research that I’ve seen that addresses what’s happening now most directly is what happened among French-speaking Belgium students who were affected by the 1990 strikes, and they never got it back. They didn’t advance as far in higher education. They were more likely to get the Belgian equivalent of an associate’s degree rather than a bachelor’s degree. This is a real lesson for us because it shows that if you don’t do anything to compensate children for the time that they’ve missed, they don’t automatically get it back. There’s no miracle, you really have to take steps.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: You’re a sociologist, I mean, do you think this will be a generational marker then for these students?

Dr. Paul von Hippel: Well, I’m hoping it’s not. I have a kind of manic depressive attitude toward the social sciences. I’m really worried that social scientists are just going to think, “Wow, this is really cool. It’ll be interesting to see what happens to these kids who are being deprived of an education.” There’ll be all these highly cited papers that come out about how awful it was for them. I’m really hoping that we can be more constructive in our involvement and actually engage policymakers into discussion about what we do to make it up to these kids so that they aren’t marked for the rest of their childhood and into adulthood.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: This is one of the reasons I really enjoy your work, because I do think there is a progressive impulse, a desire to use social science to improve our democracy at the core of your work Paul. On that note, what should we expect then when kids do go back to their schools, when Zachary goes back to his high school building, what should we expect?

Dr. Paul von Hippel: We’re still living with some uncertainty, so I’d like to think that kids are going to go back in the fall and that things will be normal from then on. But it’s possible as there is no vaccine, currently we don’t know how bad the infection rate is going to get, it’s possible that there will be continued interruptions. So I don’t know when the whole thing is over and that kind of uncertainty makes it very difficult to plan. But let’s assume for the moment that things are back to normal around Labor Day. What’s going to happen is kids are going to come back and a lot of them are going to be behind. The kids who are behind are more likely to be kids from poor families and more likely to be kids in districts that aren’t stepping up to the challenge right now. Some of those kids are going to be so far behind that they should probably repeat the grade that they’re in. If grade repetition was ever a good policy, this is the time to use it. But the difficulty that district leaders are going to have is that they’re not going to know who those kids are with much foresight because there isn’t going to be any testing most places this spring. Teachers have limited contact with students, so there’s not a whole lot to go on besides testing. I think what districts should do if things are back to normal in the fall is basically for the first week, there should be some pre-testing to identify kids who are in need of some kind of remediation. Whether that’s repeating a grade or Saturday school or something, the times got to be made up to the kids who suffered most from the lost time or they’re not going to get it back on their own. I also think, I mean, there are some districts where teachers essentially aren’t working right now. Philadelphia is an example, where teachers have actually been asked not to reach out to families, and so those teachers, in a sense, it would not be unreasonable to ask them to make up some of the lost time by extending the school year when kids come back and just really try and give back to get some of what they’ve lost. It’s not the teacher’s fault, it’s not the kid’s fault either, and the kids really need the time.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: It’s funny as you’re saying that Zachary’s face indicates that’s his nightmare scenario.

Dr. Paul von Hippel: Yeah, it’s not as bad as the nightmare we’re living in right now though. I think if we need an extra month or six weeks of school next year and we can get everybody back to where they should have been, that’s actually a pretty good outcome.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: I agree with that. I agree. Paul, we always like to close really thinking forward, and so beyond next fall, in the coming years, how can we as social scientists and as citizens who are concerned and thoughtful, how can we start to address these legacies and these complex outcomes?

Dr. Paul von Hippel: I think basically that the time’s got to be made up for the kids who’ve lost it and who need it the most. I’m a little bit optimistic actually about what we’re going to discover about what technology can be good for. I think in some ways education technology is going to be disappointing in this break, but we’re going to find out some things that it’s good for us. I read today my colleague Ben Riley tweeted he’s having conversations with district leaders and they’re saying, “Well, I guess there’s no excuse for having a snow day ever again.”

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Right.

Dr. Paul von Hippel: If it turns out that we all get trained in how to use Zoom, we can provide education through short interruptions in the future, that’s not such a bad thing to come out of the crisis. So I think there are going be some.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: I was thinking about that too, Paul. I was thinking that the various government agencies that fund educational research – and including the non-government agencies, like the Spence Foundation and others, right – should be funding very rigorous study of this online learning environment of what works and what doesn’t work and then implementing that, right?

Dr. Paul von Hippel: Yeah. There is just so much effective randomness in what’s happening now, in addition to some districts responding more effectively than others. Some districts are going to just stumble into technology that works pretty well, and others are going to stumble into technology that’s disappointing. And we should really learn everything we can from that.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Is there also something for families to learn? Is there something to think about in terms of how a family should be approaching education? I mean, the presumption we’ve had for a century and a half has been that school is something that happens outside the home. Should that be changed?

Dr. Paul von Hippel: Yeah, and that’s a class issue. So, there’s research on how people from different social classes view schools. Middle-class parents tend to be very interventionist when things aren’t going well for their child. They want to go in and meet with the teacher and try to get things back on track. Whereas poor families are more likely to take a hands-off attitude. And I think what this crisis is going to show everybody is that we can’t afford to take a hands-off attitude. And if it winds up that poor families end up being more involved in children’s schooling, then that can be a silver lining as well. I also think a lot of families are having some quality time together right now and hopefully discovering their bond in a way that would be difficult if we were all busy as we usually are.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: And it’s renewing for us the important role that we all have to play, as educators, as parents too, right?

Dr. Paul von Hippel: Yes.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: So Zachary, what do you think? Do you see some of these silver linings, and do you think these silver linings can be motivating for students like you?

Zachary Suri: I think that it offers us a real opportunity to remind ourselves how important school is in our lives and also, honestly, how much we miss it. I mean, I had so many friends who would complain about school all the time, but at the end of our long weeks of staying home alone, we miss school; and I think it really reminds us how valuable school is and how important our educational experiences are.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: And so Paul, that’s my last question to you: Will we as a society value education more coming out of this, especially the K-12 level? Or will we go back to where we before, where we’ve always valued it but it’s something that also gets forgotten on our priority list?

Dr. Paul von Hippel: Yeah, I think that’s gonna be unequal too. Zachary is not the first high school student that I’ve heard say that he misses the routine of going to school everyday and misses his friends and so on. My daughter does not particularly feel that way about going to school. And I think parents in Philadelphia feel pretty frustrated with the leadership in their district. So I think it’s going to change people’s attitudes towards schools; and in some areas, it’ll be a positive change.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Well that makes a lot of sense, and I guess it’s up to leadership at all levels – local, state, and national – to try to emphasize the positive elements of this and try to educate the educators about why this is so important.

Dr. Paul von Hippel: Mhm. And I think we’re getting an opportunity to see which districts have effective leaders who can handle a crisis and which don’t.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Yes, well said, well said. Well, Paul, thank you for sharing your insights – and these insights are so helpful because they’re based upon the kind of deep research you do that very few people do. And it’s so important that when we’re having these conversations, we’re bringing that research into the discussion and that we also encourage more of that research. I think one definite positive in this moment, as you said, we’re going to be able to study some things we couldn’t study before. And Zachary, thank you as always for your insightful poem and for sharing your experiences as – I guess, if Paul is a social scientist, you’re kind of the guinea pig for this, right, [LAUGHTER] as the person going through this all with so many students out there?

Thank you to all of our listeners. Thank you for taking the time away from your work and from helping your kids with their schoolwork to join us for this episode of This Is Democracy.

MALE 1: This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts Development Studio and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin.

MALE 2: The music in this episode was written and recorded by Harrison Lemke, and you can find his music at HarrisonLemke.com.

FEMALE 2: Subscribe and stay tuned for a new episode every Thursday featuring new perspectives on democracy.