Catholic schools are closing their doors all across America, leaving future generations with nowhere to turn for the high-quality academics and values-based education so many families are seeking. The number of students attending Catholic schools in the US fell from about 5.2 million in 1965 to around two million in 2008.
Pioneer Institute believes these schools are worth preserving. For over a decade, we have raised our voice in support of these excellent academic options, and tools such as tax credit scholarships that would enable more families to attend.
Pioneer has held public forums, published research on the benefits of Catholic education, on successful models such as Cristo Rey, and on policy changes that would stop the Massachusetts education department from depriving religious school students of special needs services and school nurses. The Institute has also convened key stakeholders, appeared in local and national press, filed amicus briefs, produced a feature a documentary film, and much more.
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TRANSCRIPT
The Learning Curve Podcast
Jonathan Eig on MLK
January 15, 2024
[00:00:24] Albert: Well, hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Learning Curve podcast. I’m your host, Albert Cheng, from the University of Arkansas. Co-hosting with me today is our friend, my friend, Alisha Searcy. Hey, Alisha, how’s it going?
[00:00:37] Alisha: Hello, Albert. Wonderful. Great to be with you again.
[00:00:41] Albert: Yeah, that’s right. And happy Martin Luther King Day. We’re meeting here to broadcast this episode to commemorate that. And yeah, we’ve got an exciting guest, Jonathan Eig, who’s the author of the definitive biography of Dr. King. And so, we’re looking forward to sitting down with him and learning more about his life.
[00:01:01] Alisha: I live in Atlanta, so, you know, clearly, I’ve interacted with the King family and know a lot about his history, but I’m very interested to hear more and learn more. I think her was, King was such a fascinating figure in a lot of ways. So, I’m very much looking forward to this and of course celebrating his birthday and his legacy.
[00:01:22] Albert: Yeah. Yeah. Well, first up some news and maybe just speaking about reform — you know, this is not civil rights reform necessarily, but education reform — I want to point out an article in Education Next written by Sue Walsh, it’s actually a piece written in memory of Linda Brown. And so, in case listeners aren’t familiar, Linda Brown was a major school reform figure particularly in Massachusetts, but also nationwide. Years ago, in the early days of the charter movement she started the Charter Resource Center here at Pioneer which eventually became the Building Excellent Schools initiative that she managed and ran for many years training — I don’t know what — it’s hundreds of charter school leaders across the country! The article referred to her as the Yoda of the charter school movement. And really, she trained a lot of the school leaders, the other Jedi, I guess, if you will. A lot of thanks goes out to her. We really wouldn’t have a lot of the excellent charter schools that are out there today if it weren’t for her. So, really want to recognize her passing. Happened last year on Christmas Day, actually. I just want to point listeners out to learn more about her life and legacy at the article at Ed Next.
[00:02:32] Alisha: Absolutely. And we thank her for her work. I remember when she passed Dr. Howard Fuller, who’s a mentor of mine, tweeted about it and what a force she was. So, we are grateful for her work, and I happen to lead a couple of the schools of the founder who went through BES. So, her legacy is tremendous and spans across this country. And so, we thank her for her work and her legacy. And I can only imagine how difficult it was for her, at the start of all of this. And so, I don’t think it’s an accident that we’re talking about her work and the trails that she blazed on Dr King’s birthday. I’m one of those people who believe that education is a civil rights issue, and so, it’s important to acknowledge those who have sacrificed and done a whole lot of work to help us get to where we are.
[00:03:23] Albert: Yeah. Yeah, that’s absolutely right. The charter school movement is just over 30 years old. You know, 30 years is about the time period for a generation. So, we’re always looking out for the next generation of leaders in the school reform movement.
[00:03:35] Alisha: That’s right. Step up, because we need you!
[00:03:38] Albert: Yeah, that’s right. Well, what have you got on your docket for, in terms of news?
[00:03:42] Alisha: So, very interesting story. Utah has no plans to change the lowest-in-nation education spending, officials say. And this is a piece from the Salt Lake Tribune. And so, Albert, we all know this ongoing debate about “we need more money in education. If we just had more money, we could just fix everything.” And I do not subscribe to that philosophy. I don’t think we have a money problem in education, I think we have a priority problem. And so, this article is very interesting. So, a few facts that I learned, I didn’t know this about Utah. They remain one of the lowest education spending states in the country and were the lowest for two decades until 2021. And now they’re 49 only bested by Idaho which is now the lowest in the country. And so, we’re talking $9,095 per student as compared to the state of New York, whose average per-pupil spending is, get this, $26,000. And I’m not picking on New York, there’s obviously economies of scale and all of that. And I’ll talk about poverty in a second. But what’s interesting here is that despite Utah being one of the lowest in the country in terms of spending, they’re actually outperforming other states who spend a lot more in some of the most critical areas.
[00:05:06] Alisha: So, for example, in math, Utah is tied with Massachusetts, which, by the way, spends more than double what Idaho does. And they have the highest percentage of eighth graders scoring above proficiency as of 2022. Same thing. And they’re number five when it comes to fourth graders scoring above proficiency in math, and similar numbers for fourth and eighth grade in terms of leading in the country, in the top 10.
[00:05:31] Alisha: And so, I think it, again, begs the question. But before I got too excited, I realized that Utah doesn’t quite have it all together. It turns out that less than half of their third graders are reading on grade level. So, they’ve got some work to do. The good news is they are going to be spending, I think it’s $11 million out of their $1 billion of COVID funding to focus on literacy.
[00:05:57] Alisha: The question is, when you identify what the problem is, how do you direct those resources in the right place for the right reasons for the right people. So it’ll be interesting to see what happens, but at the end of the day I think it’s important to have these conversations about the impact of funding. The last thing I want to mention that can’t be lost in this conversation is the rate of child poverty. Can I ignore the impact that poverty has on educational outcomes? It’s not an excuse. I’m not one of those people who believes it’s an excuse, but you do have to acknowledge: If a student doesn’t have a home, if they didn’t eat this morning, they’re probably going to have a challenge learning. So, when you look at Utah, they have an 8 percent child poverty rate compared to Georgia where I live, it’s 20 percent. And so that makes a difference, interesting article. I appreciate it. I think it’s an important conversation that we need to continue to have, and we need to decide, I think as a country and as states, how do we get the biggest bang for our buck so that we can compete lik eUtah, and our states can all be at the top. And it’s not about the money, but it’s about our priorities and how we best spend those dollars.
[00:07:10] Albert: Well, yeah, this is the perennial question in education. How do we use our resources well and deliver it to the students and families that need it the most. And, you know, at the same time, how do we set up policies and build institutions that support children and their homes and their families? There’s a lot to the big picture here and it takes all of us and it takes all of us. So, let’s see what happens in Utah. And in the meantime, stick with us coming up after the break. Again, we have Jonathan Eig, who’s going to sit down and chat with us about Dr. Martin Luther King.
[00:08:07] Albert: Jonathan Eig is the best-selling author of six books, including his most recent, King A Life, which was nominated for the National Book Award, and the New York Times hailed it as the definitive biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. Jonathan’s previous book, Ali: A Life, won a 2018 Penn America Literary Award, and Esquire magazine named it one of the 25 greatest biographies of all time.
[00:08:35] Albert: He also served as consulting producer for the PBS series Muhammad Ali, directed by Ken Burns. Jonathan’s first book, Luckiest Man, The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig, reached number 10 on the New York Times bestseller list and won the Casey Award. His books have been listed among the best of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, and translated into more than a dozen languages. Jonathan appeared on the Today Show, NPR’s Fresh Air, and the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. He studied journalism at Northwestern University and went on to work as a reporter for the New Orleans Times Picayune, and the Dallas Morning News, Chicago Magazine, and The Wall Street Journal. He lives in Chicago. Jonathan, it’s really great to have you on the show.
[00:09:20] Jonathan: Thank you. It’s good to talk to you.
[00:09:24] Albert: Let’s start with a couple questions about some of Dr. Martin Luther King’s background and influences. So, as we celebrate his life and legacy and in your definitive biography, king of Life you emphasize his deep faith as a Baptist pastor. So, could you talk a bit more about that? Share with us what we know about. His role as a young spiritual leader and preacher in Montgomery, Alabama especially during the largely female-led bus boycott from 1955 to ‘56.
[00:09:52] Jonathan: You know, when you think about what made King the right person in that moment, well, obviously, a lot of things had to come together for him to be the leader of that bus boycott. And as you hinted, it was really the women who prepared for that moment, who had prepared for years and who organized the boycott. It was women out there distributing the flyers and urging people to stay off the buses. How does King become the leader? It’s because he is a preacher for one thing. And that gives him a position of authority in this very still sexist world and time in which he was living. It’s also because he’s new in town and he hadn’t made any enemies yet, but it’s really his religion that allows him to speak to this group and to unite people and to inspire people. He’s a preacher, he’s a son of a preacher, and the grandson of a preacher and he sees the Bible as something that’s in conflict with American society, and you know, the black social gospel says that the job is to bring those things into alliance, into harmony, that it’s the job of the church, it’s the job of preachers, it’s the job of Christians to change the world until people really are all equal in the eyes of God and in the eyes of their government too.
[00:11:02] Albert: Yeah, well, so, you know, speaking of preaching and, you know, you gave many, many speeches. I’m thinking of Langston Hughes, actually, just to get to another influence his famous poem “Harlem, a Dream Deferred. That poem strongly influenced Martin Luther King’s sermons and speeches about dreams. Could you just talk a bit more about his literary background about, you know, his knowledge of the Bible, scripture, history, founding documents, other poems, hymns, spirituals, like did those, some of those literary works influence him?
[00:11:33] Jonathan: You know, it’s important to remember that King was learning to preach before he could read, and he absorbed so much in his lessons he would travel the neighborhood and listen to different preachers. He would listen to preachers on the radio, and he would listen to poems in school. And it all went into this great mind of his, and it all churned around and came out in different ways. But he was really a borrower. It got him in trouble sometimes. He was accused of plagiarism and he was guilty of plagiarism. But I think he saw himself, again, as a preacher, which meant that he wasn’t so much worried about originality. He was focused on inspiring an audience. And if he heard a line from Langston Hughes and he could mix that with something from the Bible and mix that with something from the constitution, he was like a jazz musician, clipping phrases from here and from there and, imitating other jazz musicians.
[00:12:25] Albert: That’s an excellent way put it, fascinating way. Just as a jazz, a literary jazz musician, if you kind of mush those two together. Yeah. Um, moving on to, another important influence is his wife. So, you talk about Coretta Scott King a lot in your biography, they married in 1953 on the lawn of her parents’ house in her Alabama hometown. Had four children. talk a bit more about Coretta Scott King. you know, her background, what their marriage was like, what their family was like.
[00:12:51] Jonathan: I really felt like it was important to give her a more prominent role in this book. She is often, like a lot of women of her era, has been overlooked, assigned to this role as being the supporter. and we fail to appreciate just how important and how much of an inspiration she was. And, when King met Coretta, they were students, he was at Boston University, and she was at the New England Conservatory of Music. He was dating a lot of women. And you have to ask yourself, why Coretta? And I think it’s because she was an activist. She had a career already in activism. She’d been to Antioch, you know, an integrated white college. She’d been involved in all kinds of protest movements and King hadn’t done anything yet at that point. So, he thought that he could learn from her and that’s to his credit. He continued to learn from her. He continued to be pushed by her to be more aggressive, to think more globally about his role as an activist. He didn’t always appreciate that. He didn’t give her the opportunities that he should have. He was still, you know, mired in his own prejudices, but I think that Coretta really hasn’t been fully appreciated throughout the history of as we tell these stories.
[00:14:00] Albert: Well, so let’s get into some of the actual work and activism. As you note Dr King co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the late ‘50s and then played a secondary role in the Freedom Rides in 1961. and Southern Christian Leadership Conference also, I mean, they’re involved with the efforts at Albany, Georgia in ‘61, ‘62, but they were largely unsuccessful. Talk about this period of King’s work and the lessons that learned from the experiences at that time.
[00:14:31] Jonathan: You know, King was 26 years old when he became the leader of the Montgomery bus boycott. Like, I don’t remember that. I don’t even want to think about how little I was accomplishing at age 26. After that, he even writes to one of his college professors. What am I supposed to do now? I feel like I’ve peaked at 26. People are going to be expecting miracles from me, and I don’t know what to do. So, he tries and fails a number of times. We see him really struggling. He starts the Southern Christian Leadership Conference but doesn’t really have a plan for how he’s going to make it a success. He undertakes these movements in places like St. Augustine and Albany, Georgia, and they don’t go very well. It looks like he’s kind of defeated in these places by the white power structure. That he starts these protests, but it’s not really clear what he’s trying to accomplish. It’s not as simple as integrating buses, and he leaves those towns without really much to show for it. So King is adapting, he’s learning. You know, other people are now having some success with student sit -ins at lunch counters and on, on the buses, the freedom rides, as you mentioned. And King, to his credit, doesn’t try to take over those movements. He helps where he can. He’s showing some humility. He’s listening. He’s learning. And he’s trying to figure out how to make the next movement a success. So, it’s a really great moment to see young King learning and learning from his mistakes.
[00:15:49] Albert: Well, so speaking of all the other people involved in, the civil rights movement, it’s been noted that at times that it was Dr. King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference who are leading and other times it was students and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, for instance. You know, there were other civil rights figures — Diane Nash, Bob Moses. Could you talk about the relationship between Dr. King and the CLC and all these other entities within the civil rights movement?
[00:16:18] Jonathan: It was a challenge, you know, it was a challenge and an opportunity. So, you know, King comes along and out of nowhere After years of seeing groups like the NAACP really leading the way he’s a superstar and he’s attracting all this attention and he’s also kind of a threat in some ways to the establishment and by the time he’s 30 years old, he’s a threat to the NAACP in one way, but he’s also, too conservative for some of the younger activists. They’re starting to call him De Lord, as if he’s like, you know, high and mighty and out of touch with the young people in the movement. So, really difficult. King’s got to navigate a very difficult path. And I think that’s one of his great skills is that he’s a great listener. He’s open to learning from others. He’s not trying. To hog the spotlight. He wants to work with others. And, you know, even people like Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael come away really impressed when they spend time with King, they go in skeptically and they come out really admiring. And he was just a great coalition builder in spite of everything.
[00:17:16] Albert: Well, we could use a lot of coalition building these days, too.
[00:17:18] Jonathan: Yes. Even a little would be good. Yeah.
[00:17:26] Alisha: So, Jonathan, thanks for being here. I’m very fascinated by your work. And as someone who grew up in the NAACP and learned a lot about these figures through the years, it’s quite interesting to get your perspective. And so, one of my favorite pieces of literature I will call in our history is the Letter from a Birmingham Jail. And so, I would love for you to talk about Reverend Shuttlesworth and how he worked to have the S.E.L.C. And Dr. King comes to Birmingham, Alabama for direct action and what many regarded as the most segregated city in the south, and to talk about what you know about Dr. King and his time in Birmingham and the participation of Reverend Shuttlesworth and the students and the protest there. And of course, the letter from the Birmingham jail.
[00:18:13] Jonathan: Thank you so much for asking that because, you know, Reverend Shuttlesworth does not get the attention he deserves. We should someday, I think — I predict we’ll see a movie and certainly another book or two written about him because he’s just such a fascinating figure and he’s a great example of how King is being pushed by people who want to put the pedal to the metal. They’re saying we’re not being aggressive enough. We’re not aiming high enough. And Shuttlesworth — after King fails in places like St. Augustine and Albany — Shuttlesworth is saying come to Birmingham. Birmingham is the most racist city. They call it Bombingham because, you know, there’s so many bombs going off. White people are blowing up black churches, black homes. Shuttlesworth’s home was destroyed by a bomb. It was a miracle that he survived. And, you would think King might say, why would I want to go to the most difficult, most dangerous place?
[00:19:02] Jonathan: But that’s a testament to, you know, the persuasiveness of Shuttlesworth, but also to the understanding that King has of his role. That his role is to shine a light on America’s racism, its discrimination, to show the world what black people are facing, especially in the Deep South at that point. And he goes to Birmingham knowing that it’s going to be difficult. And, he would say afterwards, or, you know, some of his supporters would say afterwards that they had this Operation C for Conflict their plan was to stir a conflict, but they did not have a plan going in. They only said that afterwards. Their plan was to just go in and see what happens. And that’s what makes it so powerful. That’s why the letter from Birmingham jail is so powerful because it’s a spontaneous act of passion and protest.
[00:19:49] Alisha: Wow. Very powerful time. So, in 1963, 250,000 demonstrators marched to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., where Dr. King gave his famous — now we know as “I Have a Dream” speech. And then a year later in 1964, he won the Nobel Peace Prize. Can you talk about these events and the famous speeches Dr. King delivered at those?
[00:20:12] Jonathan: The March on Washington is King’s most famous moment. Of course, we all know “I Have a Dream.” Every kid learns it in kindergarten now. But it’s important to remember that he didn’t plan to give that part of the speech. What he planned to say and remember also that it was the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. What he wrote in the prepared portion of that speech, and what he delivered in the prepared portion of his speech, was a really harsh criticism of America and its debt that it owed the people whose families, whose ancestors had been enslaved. He talked about the fact that. There was a moral reckoning that needed to be made, that a check had been written and it had come back with insufficient funds. America would not be able to move on until it atoned for the sin of slavery. He talked about police brutality in that speech. That was, you know, the speech he intended to give. And we forget about that part because he gave this beautiful sermon at the end where he improvised and talked about his dream. And in some ways, it overshadows what was really important about that speech. But that having been said, you know, the “I Have a Dream” part of the speech really was beautiful and inspiring, and it made a lot of people, in particular white Americans, feel like, wow, we can change. Maybe we can do better. That was a moment. It was a moment where I think America looked like it might finally turn the corner.
[00:21:32] Alisha: Maybe we could stand to hear that one more time, right?
[00:21:35] Jonathan: Yeah, no question. But you know, part of the problem is that there’s always a backlash. And the people who don’t want to see change react to that. And you see a couple of things happen right after the March on Washington. You see the FBI produce a memo that’s saying because of that speech, because of King’s power to unite black and white Americans, we must view him as a threat, the greatest threat in America right now when it comes to race. You know, how sad is that? And then of course, soon after that memo is written, we get the bombing of the church in Birmingham with these innocent little girls are killed. And that’s because members of the Klan, white racists in Alabama, don’t want to see King’s dream fulfilled. And they’re going to do everything they can to stop it, including murder.
[00:22:22] Alisha: When Americans think about Dr. King and the civil rights era, they most often remember events in the American South, but Dr. King said his 1966 Chicago campaign was among his worst encounters with racism. Can you talk about Dr. King’s life experiences and how they differed in Northern and Southern cities?
[00:22:42] Jonathan: Yeah, that’s a really important subject too. It’s worth noting that King was talking about Northern racism, really his whole career, when he would travel to raise money in places like New York and Chicago, he would call out their own problems. He would say, yes, I’m fighting it out in Birmingham, I’m marching in Selma, but don’t forget you’ve got segregation here in the North too. You’ve got discrimination in hiring and in housing here, too. And by the time a little bit later, by the mid-sixties, he starts to focus his attention on that.
[00:23:11] Jonathan: He says it’s not enough anymore to work on desegregation in the South and voting rights. He would be hypocritical if he didn’t take action. And that’s why he begins to focus on the North. He moves to Chicago — my hometown in 1966 — moves into an apartment in North Lawndale. And tries to call attention to the fact that so many poor people in Chicago, and in particular poor black people, are living in these really dehumanizing conditions, and that landlords are making money on the poverty of their tenants, and he really wants to the nation see that this deeply ingrained racism affects the whole country, and it doesn’t go so well, you know, the media doesn’t like it.
[00:23:54] Jonathan: Northern politicians really just do their best to get him out of town and hope that he’ll go away. And King doesn’t get the kind of results that he’s looking for. And he begins to lose popularity. He begins to lose effectiveness. By 1967, I think 35 percent, only 35 percent of Americans said they approved of Martin Luther King’s tactics in Gallup polls. And he was getting frustrated. He felt like people weren’t, didn’t want to listen when he talked about Northern racism.
[00:24:19] Alisha: The epitome of leadership is hard and lonely, right? Doing the right work, but not very popular.
[00:24:26] Jonathan: That’s absolutely right. And I do think, you know, he felt lonely. I think he felt sad. We have the transcripts of his phone calls because the FBI was taping his calls and bugging his hotel rooms. And we can read what he was saying in his private moments to his friends, to his closest friends and allies. And he was depressed. He felt like people had given up on his dream and that it was turning into a nightmare. It’s really sad. It’s heartbreaking to read those transcripts.
[00:24:52] Alisha: Wow. I didn’t know that. So, in 1967 and ‘68, Dr. King and SELC launched the Poor People’s Campaign, which took him to Memphis and supported the striking sanitation workers. Can you talk about the message and the meaning of what was then his last speech entitled, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” and the days leading up to his assassination on April 4, 1968.
[00:25:15] Jonathan: Yeah. So, as I said, he felt like people weren’t listening to him anymore and that people didn’t want to talk about segregation and, discrimination in the North. And they didn’t want to hear what he had to say about the Vietnam War. And instead of, you know, giving up or deciding he was going to take some time off. He decided he was going to go all in. He was going to prepare his biggest protest of all, and he called it the poor people’s campaign. He was going to bring thousands and thousands of people to Washington, D.C. And they were basically going to occupy Washington, shut down the government, if necessary, until we reckoned with the discrimination with the income inequality that was plaguing this country — and it wasn’t going that well.
[00:25:55] Jonathan: King was having trouble recruiting, but it scared our government, it scared the president, it scared the FBI. They saw this as a terrible threat, and they ramped up their efforts to try to disrupt and discredit King. You know, at the same time, he was asked to go to Memphis to support the striking sanitation workers and his friends, his allies all said, don’t go, it’s just a bunch of garbage workers that, you know, you’ve got bigger problems. You got this poor people’s campaign to prepare for, but King felt like he had to go, that these were exactly the people that he cared about, these are the people he was trying to help. And that’s why he wanted to make a poor people’s campaign because these sanitation workers were working for low wages in unsafe conditions and he had to call it out.
[00:26:39] Jonathan: So, he was in Memphis and maybe didn’t have to be there. And that’s of course where he was assassinated. And as you mentioned, he gave one speech the night before he was killed. And people feel like maybe he forsesaw his own assassination, because he said that in that speech, like anyone else, I’d like to live a long life, but I know that that might not be for me. And it doesn’t matter now, because all that matters is that I do what I believe, that I fight for what’s right, and that I do what God put me on Earth here to do. And, he said, I may not reach the promised land, but I have seen the promised land, and I know that together as a people, we will get there.
[00:27:16] Alisha: Just a remarkable human being with such a tremendous burden that he carried. My last question for you before I ask you to read an excerpt from your book given the current state of national affairs, how should public officials, parents, schools alike draw on lessons and teachings from Dr. King’s life to better understand race. And provide higher quality, spiritual and political leadership to America?
[00:27:44] Jonathan: Wow. That’s a big question. You know, I think it’s great that we have a national holiday for King now, and it’s great that we have a monument for him. Monuments are easy to overlook and national holidays. It’s easy to stick with the simplified, safe version of King that we want to teach. It’s easy to talk about a dream and judging people by the content of their character. We need to remind people that King was a radical and that we can handle the truth of what he was trying to tell us. We don’t need to water it down. He was trying to tell us that if we didn’t address income inequality, if we didn’t address the roots of racism, if we didn’t atone for the sin of slavery, that we were going to continue to have the same problems over and over again.
[00:28:32] Jonathan: We were going to continue to find ourselves in conflict with one another. We would continue to treat people as other and as inferior and that we can do better if we just face the facts and deal with the truth. So I think that, you know, we should teach kids about it, “I Have a Dream,” but we should teach them about the first half of that speech too. We should make sure we teach them about the Letter from a Birmingham Jail. We should teach them that our own government, which celebrates him now with a national holiday, set out to destroy him.
[00:29:00] Alisha: Thank you for that. Wow. Would you read for us an excerpt from your book, so that our listeners can hear a part of your writing?
[00:29:11] Jonathan: All right, I’m going to read the very end because this is what I was just talking about. That we now have — just to set it up here — we have a thousand streets named after King, we have hundreds of schools we have watered down his message, and here’s what I say at the end of this epilogue: “Our simplified celebration of King comes at a cost. It saps the strength of his philosophical and intellectual contributions. It undercuts his power to inspire change. Even after Americans elected a black man as president, and after that president, Barack Obama, placed a bust of King in the Oval Office, the nation remains wracked with racism, ethnonationalism, cultural division, residential and educational segregation, economic inequality, violence, and a fading sense of hope that government, or anyone, will ever fix these problems. Where do we go from here? In spite of the way America treated him, King still had faith when he asked that question. Today, his words might help us make our way through these troubled times. But only if we actually read them, only if we embrace the complicated King, the flawed King, the human King, the radical King. Only if we see and hear him clearly again, as America saw and heard him once before. Our very survival, he wrote, depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant, and to face the challenge of change. Amen.”
[00:30:40] Alisha: Wooh! Jonathan, thank you for this powerful, remarkable, exceptional, maybe even call to action to all of us as we celebrate the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Thank you so much for being with us.
Albert: Thank you, Jonathan.
[00:30:57] Jonathan: Thanks for all the great questions. I enjoyed talking to you.
[00:31:17] Albert: Great interview. Great interview indeed. Absolutely learned a lot. Well, before we close out first, we have the Tweet of the Week, which comes from our friends at Education Next from this year’s top 20 EdNext articles of 2023. Supreme Court opens a path to religious charter schools, but the trail ahead holds twists and turns. And this was an article written last year by Professor Nicole Garnett. Check it out if you missed it last year, it’s a fascinating article. I mean, she’s a legal expert on education law and it’s an article about the possibility of religious charter schools. So, check that one out, but also check out the rest of the top 20 articles from Education Next from 2023. It gives us a nice, brief digest of what happened last year. Alisha, thanks for being with me on the show again. Great to co-host with you as always.
[00:32:10] Alisha: Absolutely. Thanks for having me. This was great today.
[00:32:13] Albert: All right. And that brings us to the end of this week’s episode. Join us next week as we talk to Cara Candal, who is the vice president of policy for ExcelinEd. And she’s going to join us as we kick off National School Choice Week for 2024. So, join us next week as we sit down and chat with her with all things school choice. But until then, I hope you have a great day, and I’ll see you next week.
[00:32:39] Alisha: Happy King Day!
This week on The Learning Curve, guest co-hosts Prof. Albert Cheng of the University of Arkansas and Alisha Searcy interview New York Times best-selling biographer of MLK, Jonathan Eig. Mr. Eig delves into MLK’s early spiritual leadership, the influence of Langston Hughes on his speeches, his relationship with his wife, Coretta Scott King, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s challenges. He explores historic events in Birmingham, Alabama, the March on Washington, MLK’s struggles in Chicago, the Poor People’s Campaign, and the events leading to MLK’s assassination in 1968. Eig underscores the multifaceted aspects of MLK’s life and provides insights on drawing lessons for contemporary challenges in race relations and leadership. Mr. Eig closes the interview with a reading from his book, King: A Life.
Stories of the Week: Albert reflects on a story from Education Next a memoriam for former Pioneer Institute and national charter school leader Linda Brown; Alisha reviews a story in The Salt Lake Tribune on how Utah has no plans to change it’s lowest-in-nation education spending.
Guest:
Jonathan Eig is the bestselling author of six books, including his most recent King: A Life, which was nominated for the National Book Award and The New York Times hailed it as the definitive biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. Jonathan’s previous book, Ali: A Life, won a 2018 PEN America Literary Award, and Esquire magazine named it one of the 25 greatest biographies of all time. He also served as consulting producer for the PBS series Muhammad Ali, directed by Ken Burns. Jonathan’s first book, Luckiest Man:The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig, reached No. 10 on the New York Times bestseller list and won the Casey Award. His books have been listed among the best of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, and translated into more than a dozen languages. Jonathan’s appeared on the Today Show, NPR’s Fresh Air, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. He studied journalism at Northwestern University, and went on to work as a reporter for The New Orleans Times-Picayune, The Dallas Morning News, Chicago Magazine, and The Wall Street Journal. He lives in Chicago.
Tweet of the Week:
The state’s fiscal picture in January 2024 looks drastically different than it did in January 2023. There is a lot of speculation on both sides of the aisle as to why that is and/or who is to blame. I will add my opinion into the fray.
Last January, the state was flush with cash. Tax collections exceeded expectations, the federal government’s largesse funded a Transitional Escrow Account that had a balance of over $1 billion, and the Stabilization Fund was at an all-time high with a balance of over $8 billion.
Just two months earlier, in November 2022, the state had returned almost $3 billion in excess tax receipts to taxpayers per a little-known, voter-approved statutory requirement. The Pew Charitable Trusts summed up the situation this way: “Higher-than-forecasted tax revenue growth, historic federal aid, and record financial reserves have buttressed states’ fiscal positions over the past two budget years.”
In recognition that the economic outlook was changing due to high inflation and interest rates, geopolitical threats, uncertain monetary policy, and an end to federal assistance, experts projected that state revenues would grow by a modest 1.6 percent in FY 2024. This would provide state coffers with $40.4 billion in tax revenue collections, or $642 million more than last year for the operating budget that began on July 1, 2023.
Maura Healey was sworn in as governor in January 2023. She increased projected revenue collections by $150 million for FY2023 and vowed to fulfill her campaign promise of providing tax relief. She filed a bill to provide $1 billion in tax cuts. A version of that bill was enacted in October of 2023 that is estimated to reduce tax collections by $580 million in FY2024.
Since the start of FY2024 on July 1, 2023, the state has experienced six straight months of revenues falling short of expectations. The Healey administration indicated earlier this month that Massachusetts is looking at a $1 billion deficit for FY2024 and proceeded to make unilateral budget cuts totaling about $385 million.
Opponents of the tax cuts are quick to cite them as the cause of the revenue shortfall, even though not a single income tax return for the 2023 tax year has come due yet. Opponents of the millionaire’s tax point to the uptick in out-migration of high-income Massachusetts residents as a result of the income surtax as the reason the state is not meeting its revenue projections.
That is also a faulty argument, because even if that turns out to be true in the future, only estimated payments of tax liability for those affected taxpayers have been made so far, making it impossible for now to calculate final tax collection amounts resulting from the surtax.
The reasons for the sudden reversal of fortunes are likely far more complicated than those proposed by folks on either side of the tax divide. They include:
The single biggest factor, however, is the unprecedented growth of the state budget since FY2021. The $15 billion increase in state spending contextualizes the seemingly modest projected revenue growth of 1.6 percent for FY2024 by highlighting that the base is very inflated. Budget writers also assumed that 1.6 percent growth rate rather than the median rate of 1.3 percent proffered at the consensus revenue hearing, further inflating tax collection estimates. The sizable growth in state spending makes clear that the spending adjustments required to get the budget in balance will not be “cutting to the bone.”
To address the current shortfall, Gov. Healey chose to make unilateral cuts rather than tapping into state reserves to address the immediate shortfall, a wise move given the credit rating agencies’ preference for this option over using the Rainy Day fund when it isn’t raining.
Rather than speculating on the causes of the revenue shortfall, which are numerous, a more constructive exercise for lawmakers would be to think carefully about how to right-size the state budget after the unsustainable spending spree of the past two years.
A comprehensive review of state agencies and programs with recommendations for how to make state government function more efficiently would be a great place to start.
Read a transcript
The Learning Curve Gabby Thomas
[00:00:27] Albert: Good day, everyone. Welcome to another episode of The Learning Curve podcast. I’m your host, Albert Cheng from the university of Arkansas and co-hosting with me today is Alisha Searcy. Hey, Alisha, how’s it going?
[00:00:41] Alisha: Oh, wonderful, Albert, how are you doing?
[00:00:43] Albert: Fine. Doing fine. Yeah, that’s right. I don’t know if I’ve wished you that since we were last together last year.
[00:00:50] Alisha: That’s right. It’s good to be back.
[00:00:52] Albert: Yeah. So, we’re going to have Gabby Thomas, American Olympian, coming up after the break. But before that let’s talk some news, [00:01:00] Alisha. I want to talk about a story that came out recently. It’s actually an opinion piece put out by the editorial board of the New York Post, and the title is Test Scores Prove Charter Schools Win Again: Time to Lift the Cap.”
[00:01:13] Albert: And it actually reminds me of the days when I was living in Massachusetts. I was in Massachusetts back in ‘16. I think that was the year when there was a ballot measure to lift the cap on charter schools there. And despite all the great evidence of improved test scores and student outcomes that referendum got defeated. And so there’s still that cap there. And yeah, I was actually quite surprised that that happened there, despite all the positive evidence on charters in Massachusetts. And so, it looks like we got a similar political situation brewing in New York and don’t know if you’ve had to deal with this. I mean, in Georgia, you’ve got an interesting charter situation there yourself, right?
[00:01:51] Alisha: We do, and frankly, our laws are pretty strong and unbiased because I helped pass some of them when I was in the legislature. But I think we’re lucky that we don’t have to deal with caps. I think the caps are done by school boards who don’t tend to approve them. I think in the last eight years, we may have had two charter schools approved. And so, what we’ve done instead is pass a constitutional amendment. That allows the state to authorize charter schools. But to your point, it’s frustrating for me. I am a charter supporter. I know that that’s not always the most popular view, but I just believe in parents having access to all options within the public school system.
[00:02:28] Alisha: And so, I think this is an example of how adults kind of get in the way of what’s best for kids. If you see the research says that charter schools are performing well, and in some cases, better, why not make sure that’s an option for families who want it? It doesn’t mean that we don’t want all public schools to work, especially traditional public schools.
[00:02:51] Alisha: But why not allow parents like myself — I have three school aged children at home. Not every kid is the same. Not every kid learns the same. And so, I think how about in 2024 let’s be hopeful that adults will get out of the way of doing what’s best for kids. Follow the research, right, and the science, and say, what’s best for my kid, what’s best for the kids in our community. How can we make sure that all of our public schools work regardless of what they’re called?
[00:03:18] Albert: I’m definitely in agreement with that. Any way to expand educational opportunity, really, to give these opportunities for kids that could really benefit from them. So, I’m, with you there. What story caught your eye recently?
[00:03:31] Alisha: So Chalkbeat has this great article about the issues to watch for 2024. Came out January 2, by Erica Meltzer. You know, it talks about everything, which I think is interesting to watch, right? So, first there’s the big one, I think, across the country is the fact that there may be a fiscal cliff. If you follow the work of Marguerite Rosa, I happened to go through the certification program that she does through Georgetown. It was incredible. I highly recommend it. But she’s a brilliant economist. If you don’t even know if that’s her real title, but smart woman who talks about education and finances.
[00:04:11] Alisha: And so, she’s been warning districts for the last couple of years that there might be a fiscal cliff because the end of those ESSER funds. And so, as a reminder, $190 billion has been given to districts in three waves over the pandemic. And so far, $122 billion of those dollars have been spent or committed by districts. And still, there are going to be $68 billion that need to be spent by the fall of this year, 2024. And so, there’s a concern because some districts use this money well for one-time type programs. Some of them use them for great programs, like for counseling and tutoring, help families find housing. The problem is, Albert, though, that when these funds end in the fall, you know, did they make the right financial decisions to make sure that this money could go on, right, past this time? Can they continue to support these programs? How are students and families going to be impacted with the end of these funds? I think all of us need to pay attention to our individual school districts, our individual states, to pay attention to how these funds were spent.
[00:05:23] Alisha: Unfortunately, in my state, the Department of Education is not actually tracking what districts are doing, and so it will be very difficult to figure that out, but in states where they have been tracking, I want us all to pay attention to what districts have done, and hopefully using these funds have had a great impact. A couple of other issues that have come up are that they’re saying that we should watch the effect that migrant students, particularly in the areas of like New York and Chicago, right, where they’ve come in from Central and South America needing a lot of services. And so, as we know, as a result of COVID and even before that, our own students have needed services in terms of mental health and wraparound services for students who are in poverty. So now these districts, and I think Denver is another one that comes to mind, they really have had a serious issue trying to help support these students who need a lot of help, right? We’re talking about kids who have serious emotional wounds from the things that they’ve seen and experienced on their journeys to the United States. Some of them are sleeping outside in tents. They’re, you know, navigating a new school system and so there’s a lot that the students are dealing with — the migrant students I’m talking — as well as the districts themselves, who are having to grapple with these issues financially, socially, academically. So, there’s a lot to watch there.
[00:06:45] Alisha: And then there are a lot of other issues, but the other one that I’ll mention is this whole ChatGPT issue. Those of us who are following this somewhat, and I can’t say I’m an expert in this, but I’ve certainly played with this tool a little bit in some of my work in K-12 education. I think people are concerned about how this is going to impact K-12 learning, and so far, the research is saying that there’s not an increase in student cheating because of ChatGPT, which I hope says kids actually want to learn and they have learned how to use this tool in a way that’s not about cheating, but it’s really about learning. And so again, I think so many issues in education are adult problems. And so, I’m hoping that adults will embrace ChatGPT and AI tools and implement them in a way that really helps to foster learning in classrooms. So that’ll be a huge issue to watch in 2024 as well.
[00:07:40] Albert: Yeah, I encourage listeners to check out that article. I mean, there’s a whole rundown of a lot of stories to pay attention to. And yeah, we’ll see how 2024 plays out another year. And it should be an exciting one. Absolutely. Well, speaking of excitement coming up after the break, stick with us, ‘cause we’ve got Gabby Thomas joining us on this show, American [00:08:00] Olympian.
[00:08:00] Albert: Gabby Thomas is a world-class American track athlete in the 100- and 200-meters sprint. She won the bronze medal in the 200 meters and a silver medal as part of the women’s 4×100 meters relay at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics in summer 2023. She claimed the 200-meter silver medal in the World Athletics Championships in Budapest with a time of 21.81 seconds. She would also go on to win the gold as part of Team USA in the women’s 4×100 meters relay final with a championship record of 41.03 seconds. A graduate of Harvard University, she studied neurobiology and global health as an undergraduate. Thomas is pursuing a master’s degree in epidemiology at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston at their Austin regional campus. Gabby, it’s great to have you on the show, welcome.
[00:09:16] Gabby: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
[00:09:18] Albert: Let’s talk a little bit about your background and, growing up and some of your, formative experiences. So, you grew up in the Pioneer Valley of Western Mass. and attended the Williston Northampton School. Yeah, share with our listeners a little bit about your family, formative educational experiences, mentors, heroines, heroes. How did it all shape you to become a world-class athlete who also pursued — I mean, you’re working on an advanced degree in science as well!
[00:09:44] Gabby: Yeah. Yeah. I actually graduated in May, which is really exciting, but yeah, thank you. Thank you. grew up in Massachusetts, Western Massachusetts, and I went to Williston Northhampton School, which is kind of the smaller boarding school in the area. One of the most unique and helpful things about being in that type of environment was really like the familial atmosphere of being there. So especially being at Williston but even in Western Mass., you just have this community of people around you. And I tell people this all the time: When you’re trying to do something different in your life or embark on a new journey or have success in any area, you really want to focus on the environment that you’re in and the community that you’re a part of and surrounding yourself with people who are helping you grow.
[00:10:25] Gabby: And Western Massachusetts and Williston was exactly that for me. And going into it, I didn’t know that that’s what I was getting, right? I didn’t know that’s the kind of environment I’d be growing up in when my mom moved my brother and I up to Western Massachusetts, but that’s what I got. And I was surrounded by, you know, friends who we had really, really good and tight friendships. And we did sports together. We took our challenging classes together. We did all of our extracurricular activities together. I had coaches who were also my teachers. And so, they helped me grow in every avenue of my life and followed me in every part of it.
[00:10:58] Gabby: And were really committed to my development as a person. You know, with sports, outside of sports, with my friendships, with my family. And so,I had all of that and I don’t even think I realized it at the time, but as I look back and think about it, I mean, that was a huge part of my success because I felt so comfortable, you know, making mistakes with them, growing with them.
[00:11:18] Gabby: And one person that really comes to mind as you asked me, this question is my algebra teacher and my track coach, Mrs. McCullough. I hated algebra, but she was my math teacher and, she made, you know, I just loved her and she helped me so much with it. And she was really invested in me, and she’s still invested in me to this day. And she’s one of the, my biggest mentors and, and influences in my life. But that comes from being in that type of environment, having so many people who genuinely care about you.
[00:11:47] Albert: Yeah, yeah, that sounds like a great experience and I hope Ms. McCullough — might have to send her this show and hear that shout-out.
[00:11:53] Gabby: Yeah, and then you know that goes same with my family You know, I grew up with my mom in a single mother household and my twin brother. So, it was the three of us in the household and my mom was just the same way, very driven. Very invested in my development as a person. She was never too too stressed out about, the outcome, you know, upgrades or the outcome of, of what I did in sports, but it was always just about the journey and developing myself into the best version of myself that I could be across anything that I was doing. So, I think that’s just a really special part of my upbringing.
[00:12:23] Albert: Well, so let’s talk after Williston — you went off to Harvard and studied neurobiology and you ran NCAA track while you were there. So, at Harvard, you won 22 conference titles across three years in various track events. You know, set school and Ivy league records in 100 meters, 200 meters, indoor 60 meters. I don’t know, maybe the list could go on. Could you talk about those experiences? I mean, really in particular, how did you grow as an athlete from high school to college? And then how’d you balance the demands of being a student and an elite track competitor?
[00:12:58] Gabby: Oh my gosh. I mean, I will tell anyone that listens that that transition from high school to collegiate track and field was the roughest time period for me, I think, of my life to date. I don’t think understood demands that being a collegiate D1 athlete took from us. Coming from someone did sports and it was fun for me and it, you know, wasn’t the end-all, be-all of my activities and what I was doing. But yeah, so I mean, I arrived there and one reason I chose Harvard goes back to the environment factor was I understood that I had a coach who was very invested in our development and I had teammates who were trying to develop and create this culture at Harvard.
[00:13:35] Gabby: Of a very elite D1 track school. So, they were trying to compete with the likes of Oregon’s LSU, Florida’s, you know, that, that was kind of what we were going towards. And I wanted to be a part of that. And so, I don’t think I understood what it took to be a part of that when I arrived. So, one day my coach, he just sat me down and said, Hey, look, this isn’t intramurals, like we’re here to actually make a difference in the NCAA and do something special. So ,if you want to be a part of that, let me know. And then I had to have a mindset shift pretty quickly after that. I just kind of pulled it together. I always, you know, I say, if you want to do something, you figure out a way to get it done.
[00:14:06] Gabby: And I was really passionate about track, and I was growing to love it. And so, I just had to get it done. It became time management and just making time for what you prioritize and what you care about. So that meant going out a lot less with my friends. It meant eating healthier, you know, it meant getting my schoolwork done. It meant getting my schoolwork done in time so that I wasn’t stressed about it. Going into practice because stress can also affect your training. I did all of that, but I think at the end of the day, if anyone’s listening and they want to know how to balance those demands, I think it’s about really enjoying what you’re doing. Major in something that you are passionate about and that you want to learn and then do a sport and be in an environment of teammates that you want to be a part of. Because if you don’t want to do it, you’re just not going to do it well.
[00:14:47] Albert: Well, so, speaking of the end of your, NCAA career, really, you decided to forego that final year of eligibility and turn pro. Signed a contract, New Balance, moved to Texas. Talk about that transition. You know, what was it like going from high performing NCAA athlete to then The next level being a professional sprinter? And what were some of the key decisions you had to make to really take your track career to the next level?
[00:15:15] Gabby: You know, that was also a very difficult transition. Any transition, any extreme transition is going to be difficult, right? But that was tough. I didn’t understand what it means to be a pro athlete either. And a lot of people don’t know what it means to be a pro track and field athlete. You only think it’s serious every Olympic year, right? You don’t realize how much goes into it and how much you need to be competing. Because nobody knows how much we’re competing as track athletes. So, and I also had to be very independent. So, in college, your coach is telling you exactly what to do all the time. When you’re a pro athlete, that’s not the case. You are a professional and you were expected to make decisions for yourself. I’m not sure that I had gained that maturity at my first year of being a pro. I ended up learning and figuring it out.
[00:15:51] Gabby: And you just have so much more responsibility. You know, now you have an agent, you have, you know, a team of people that you have to work with. And I was so young, you know, when you go pro after college, you’re still so young. And now you have all of these things to worry about. But the transition at Harvard made it definitely easier.
[00:16:09] Gabby: I was able to continue to train with my Harvard teammates, train with my Harvard coach, and then New Balance is right next door headquartered in Boston. So, it was a very, very natural partnership with them. So that was great. But then I decided that I did want to take my training to the next level and move to train with people who have Olympic medals.
[00:16:27] Gabby: My coach who also had Olympic medals and just warmer weather. It’s easier to sprint in warmer weather, to be honest, you miss a lot less training. My Harvard coach, he couldn’t control that, but so yeah, I moved down figured it out, you know, that very different training regimen.
[00:16:43] Gabby: But it ended up working out for the best and I love my group, I love my coach, and I love my teammates., and I love Austin, Texas. So, once I moved to Texas, everything, you know, went smoothly after the COVID year, we couldn’t compete that year, but after that I just, took it year by year and it’s been great.
[00:16:59] Albert: And so at the U.S. Olympic trials in June of 2021 and of course, it seems weird to say 2021 trials because the Olympics were delayed due to the pandemic. So, your 200 meters time of 21.61 seconds was the second fastest ever, surpassed only by Florence Griffith Joyner’s 1988 world record. Tell us about that moment, how it felt to qualify for the Olympics, you know, how it felt to run such an elite time and, really get to that level?
[00:17:27] Gabby: That moment to me was very surreal. I was training all year, honestly, all two years because of COVID for the Olympic trials. But it just never felt like it was a given to me that I was going to be an Olympian or make the team. I remember my plan after graduating from Harvard was to try to make the Olympics, you know, go move to Texas, go give it what I could, and then after that, go get my master’s in public health and just continue on with the career that I had originally intended to do.
[00:17:54] Gabby: And so, when I actually made the Olympic team, that was an incredible shock for me, [00:18:00] but then to make it and then become a gold medal favorite with my 21.61 time was something beyond my wildest dreams, you know, to make the Olympic team, you have to be top three in your given discipline. And so, I just expected to be in that mix. I didn’t expect to win with that kind of time. That shifted my entire mindset surrounding track. I mean, everything changed within that millisecond. So now I was, yeah, I was going to the Olympics. I was a gold medal favorite. And I knew that I wasn’t going to be retiring anytime soon. I knew that, OK, well, I’m going to go to this Tokyo Olympics and most likely start training for the Paris Olympics soon after.
[00:18:33] Alisha: Gabby, I’m just so fascinated by you for a lot of reasons. And I love how reflective you are about your life and your upbringing and your education. And as an educator, I think there’s a lot to learn about how you were educated and what we can do for other students. So, thanks. It’s great to talk to you. So, I want to continue on this track about the Olympics, which is so incredible. And to hear you say you didn’t even expect that it was going to happen is incredible, but it really just speaks to how hard you work, right.
[00:19:02] Alisha: And that you were able to accomplish this. And so, at the Olympics in Tokyo, you won the bronze medal in the 200 meters, running a time of 21.87. And then three days later, you and Team USA qualify for the finals of the women’s 4×100 meters relay, where you were an anchor, and the team won the silver medal. So, can you talk about what that’s like, being in the Olympics, winning, and receiving Olympic medals, and experiencing winning medals as an individual as part of a relay team?
[00:19:34] Gabby: Yeah. I mean, being in the Olympics was — that was a strange time, I think, for everyone just because it was a COVID Olympics and nobody was there. However, being at the Olympics was a lot of fun. I mean, you train and work so hard to be there. And when you finally are there, you can finally enjoy, you know, all the work that you’ve put in and just being in the village with other athletes that you admire and, seeing some mobiles right across the sidewalk and like, it’s amazing. And just being in that company and the competition of it is also so much fun because right, you’re training all season to be there and now you’re finally here and you can just do what you do. So, the nerves are, you know, you’re still nervous, but it’s just like this really fun, this is what I meant to do type of — And I remember running the race and just think, you know, the 200 final at the Olympics. And I was like, well, I’m here. This is what I’ve worked for. I’m just going to go have fun and give it all I’ve got. And I remember crossing the line and not even being sure if I had medaled because it was, I felt like it was so tight between me and Shelly and Fraser Price.
[00:20:37] Gabby: But then I looked up and they were telling me that I had medaled and come get my American flag and it was, it was unbelievable. I couldn’t, I like, again, I just couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe that I was in that position. So yeah, that, that was incredible. And then after that, getting to run on the 4×100 relay. Running on a relay is just so much fun.
[00:20:56] Gabby: Having an individual metal, you have this immense sense of pride and accomplishment. It’s an amazing feeling and no one can take that medal from you, but having a relay medal, it just feels bigger than yourself and you’ve really come together with the team to accomplish something really exciting and really historic and it’s kind of different. They’re both amazing, but having a relay medal just, it is really special, special feeling. And it’s the kind of bond that you have with your teammates and girls that also can’t be taken away.
[00:21:24] Alisha: Yes, quite a very special sorority or fraternity, I’m guessing. Incredible. So, Gabby, another reflection question. You said after the Olympics quote, everything I’ve been working for essentially two years was just over. I won the medals, but it was just still over. And I was like, OK, what do I do now? And so, can you talk about what it was like in terms of the media attention and how you got reacclimated to your life with family, friends, and school once you returned home from the Olympics?
[00:21:57] Gabby: That was a really weird feeling, too, that nobody really talks about is, once you’ve put all that work and you’re on such an emotional high being at the Olympics, and then it is over. Immediately when you come back and you’re kind of left with just a lot of like downtime a lot of people asking about the Olympics and stuff like that. And there’s a lot of media kind of responsibilities. And so, it was a huge shift. For me, in terms of my lifestyle and how I was interacting with everyone around me. And so, yeah, that took some getting used to, definitely. They call it the Olympic crash. just something that people don’t really talk about very much, especially to the media. And so, getting reacclimated with everyone took time. I ended up getting a therapist just because felt like I had gotten to this point in my life where I needed that and trying to maintain some type of normalcy. With my family and friends and trying to stay structured with my school work as well.
[00:23:00] Gabby: Yeah. So yeah, it was a lot to kind of tackle, and it was a lot to go through very abruptly. But I’ve gotten ahold of it. And then I just went through another major championships since last season, and I feel like I’ve kind of gotten it under my belt.
[00:23:13] Alisha: Absolutely. Thank you for sharing that. That’s so important and another great lesson for people. Thank you for that. So, I want to shift because not only are you an Olympic medalist you’re also quite brilliant. And so, I want to talk about your remarkable achievements. Not only as a you are not only a world-class track sprinter, but you’ve also accomplished an enormous amount in your academic work at Harvard, and as you mentioned, just graduated from the University of Texas. And so, can you talk to us about your studies, your research in, neurobiology, epidemiology, public health? Can you talk more about your interest, how you got there and what that work is like for you now?
[00:23:53] Gabby: When I was in high school, knew that I wanted to do neurobiology. I think I was a last semester junior/first semester senior at that point when I had made that decision and I wanted to do research on autism because you know, my little brother has autism and then my twin brother had ADHD that he was struggling with and with school just made it a lot more difficult for him, and so I know I wanted to do that and I wanted to go to a college that had a good neuro program, fortunately, Harvard worked out and I figured that would be a great neuro program for me.
[00:24:25] Gabby: So, I went to Harvard and I ended up doing neurobiology with a minor in global health and health policy and with a lot of these courses that I was taking, I started taking some of these biology courses and also complementing them with some sociology courses. I started to become increasingly aware about the medical health disparities and specifically race disparities in the healthcare field. I was just mind blown. And at the time it wasn’t something that was kind of at the forefront of the media and what we were talking about. Fortunately, that did come a little bit later. And especially with COVID people started having those discussions more publicly, but that really. Validated my interest in the field and it also validated me going into my master’s program. So, by the time COVID had hit, I had already been accepted into my master’s in epidemiology at UT. That was something that I decided to do before graduating from Harvard as well.
[00:25:18] Gabby: And part of my decision to move to Austin, Texas and train with this group was because I knew that I would get to go to the University of Texas and get my master’s there while I trained for the Olympics. So that was always part of the plan. And it was either going to be Austin or somewhere in L.A. The University of Texas was just a great fit for me, and so I wanted to combat race disparities, and I felt like epidemiology would give me a great foundation for going into that and continuing to do research, and public health was just at the forefront of my mind. It’s what I wanted to do when I finished running, I wanted to go into healthcare administration and be CEO and run a hospital one day and make these changes as I saw fit.
[00:25:55] Gabby: I loved it. I just graduated in May and I did — a lot of my research was actually ended up being on sleep epidemiology. Because that’s something that is very, very important in my life, especially as a pro athlete, but it’s also something that has a huge race disparity. And sleep health is something that really is not talked about. And it’s a huge epidemic in our country and has very, very severe effects on your overall health, long-term health and especially your cardiovascular health and African Americans in our country are being affected by that more prominently than anything else. And that’s also due to, like, lifestyle factors, but also just other things that we’re not looking at.
[00:26:33] Gabby: And so, I just got really into that during my masters, but really, that’s the path and journey that got me into that line of study, and I’ve loved it and I’m really excited about it. And since graduating, I started volunteering at a clinic here in Austin and it provides healthcare services to people who don’t have health insurance or very limited health insurance. So, I have, you know, a set number of patients and cases that I follow just to make sure that they are getting the healthcare services they need. And making sure that they’re keeping up with their appointments and helping them with some lifestyle factors that are within their control. So, it’s really meaningful work and I think it’s a good use of my degree for now until I can retire and continue.
[00:27:15] Alisha: Outstanding. You are just so phenomenal. I’ve got one more question for you. And you mentioned that you just won silver medal in the 200 meters at the World Athletics Championships. Congratulations.
Gabby: Thank you.
Alisha: With a time of 21.81. And so, you also won the gold medal as part of Team USA in the 4×100 meters relay final with a championship record of 41.03 seconds. Amazing. So, would you talk about these achievements as well as your future plans in 2024 Olympics in Paris?
[00:27:51] Gabby: Yeah. So, the world championships this year was really exciting because I actually was injured in 2022. So, coming back in 2023 and getting to run for Team USA again was really important to me. Yeah, sitting out in 2022 was very hard. And a lot of times your comeback season after an injury is really telling and indicative of your future success because injuries can be a huge mental setback for a lot of athletes. And kind of throw off the momentum. So, I mean, this season, this last season was my best one yet. Silver medal at a major championship is great. Great performance for me at the championship and I had a PB at our trials. So, it was really good. And then Team USA, our 4×100 relay was historic. I mean, we had a championship record, and we all came together and worked really well. And I think that bodes well for our Olympics, especially coming and competing against the Jamaican team, which is, known for being amazing.
[00:28:45] Gabby: So it was great and really promising and it’s great momentum going into the Olympic year. So now we’re in 2024, and we’re preparing for the Paris Olympics, and training is going well and I have high expectations for myself. I just plan to keep improving and getting better. And, you know, I did bronze and then I did silver.
[00:29:04] Gabby: So, the goal now is to keep improving and go for a gold. So, I”m loving it. loving track. I’m loving training and competing is going well, so. Yeah, I’m really looking forward to the Paris Olympics.
[00:29:14] Alisha: Incredible. This has been so awesome talking to you. I am personally very excited to see your contributions both in public health and as a pro athlete and an Olympic star. So, thank you, thank you so much for joining us.
[00:29:30] Gabby: Thank you for having me.
[00:29:50] Albert: Great interview, indeed. And now just to wrap up, the Tweet of the Week comes from the Hechinger Report. In this tiny and shrinking Mississippi County, getting a college degree means leaving home behind. And Alisha, this was a fascinating read for me. Actually I don’t know if you’re familiar with the essayist and poet Wendell Berry, but really reminded me about a lot of what he’s written in the past. Really this is an article that talks about this really rural Mississippi County where there’s only 42 adults that have a college degree, and I forget the exact population, I believe there’s over a thousand people, and so we’re talking very, very few people with a college degree, and I think it captures the situation in a lot of our rural areas where we push kids to get into college and really college does give them access to a lot of other opportunities, but, you know, for a lot of these kids who go on to graduate from rural areas there’s not that many opportunities in their hometowns and so they end up leaving and you almost perpetuate this cycle of, these rural communities where there’s really little opportunity. And anyway, it does I think give us a lot of fodder for reflection. What would it look like to have postsecondary education kind of encourage, not just kids leaving their homes behind, but even encouraging them to perhaps even move back and think about how to really enrich that area and, renew their, hometown.
[00:31:12] Albert: So, take a look that read. I know there’s a lot of other complicated issues, particularly in, this county. I mean, with the racial past that’s been there some socioeconomic and business interests. And so, it’s complicated, but caused me to really reflect a lot.
[00:31:26] Alisha: Yeah. And I think it’s important to note, right, that there are communities that have figured this out, right? You get industry involved, you get the school system involved, government involved, and you create a pipeline where young people get a great education in their K-12 system. They go off to college, they come back, they start businesses, right?
[00:31:44] Alisha: You train the people that work there. So, it’s definitely something that can be overcome, but it requires big thinking and vision. And so, my hope is that as these students go off to college, that they will feel that sense of ownership in their community and want to come back. Create some of these [00:32:00] opportunities for those coming behind them.
[00:32:03] Albert: Thank you, Alisha, for joining me this week It’s always great to be with you.
[00:32:08] Alisha: Thank you great to be with you, Albert.
[00:32:10] Albert: Well, anyway, that’s it for this edition of the Learning Curve podcast. Join us next week. We have Jonathan Eig, who’s going to join us and talk about his biography of Martin Luther King. Until then, be well, everybody. Take care.
This week on The Learning Curve, guest co-hosts Prof. Albert Cheng of the University of Arkansas and Alisha Searcy interview Gabby Thomas, a world-class track sprinter and Olympian, originally from the Pioneer Valley in western Massachusetts. She shares her journey from the Williston Northampton School to Harvard, where she balanced neurobiology studies with winning 22 track titles. Transitioning to professional sprinting, she qualified for the Tokyo Olympics, winning bronze and silver medals. In addition to track sprinting, Ms. Thomas excels academically, focusing on neurobiology and global public health. She recently graduated from the University of Texas Health Science Center with a master’s degree in epidemiology. After medal-winning performances at the 2023 World Athletics Championships this past summer, Ms. Thomas shares how she’s looking ahead to the 2024 Olympics in Paris.
Stories of the Week: Albert comments on a story from New York Post about charter schools improved test scores; Alisha reviews a story in Chalkbeat regarding issues to watch for in 2024.
Guest:
Gabrielle Thomas is a world-class American track athlete in the 100 and 200 meters sprints. She won the bronze medal in the 200 meters and a silver medal as part of the women’s 4×100 meters relay at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. In summer 2023, she claimed the 200 meters silver medal in the World Athletics Championships in Budapest with a time of 21.81 seconds. She would also go on to win the gold as part of Team U.S.A. in the women’s 4×100 meters relay final with a championship record of 41.03 seconds. A graduate of Harvard University, she studied neurobiology and global health as an undergraduate. Thomas recently earned her master’s degree in epidemiology at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston at their Austin regional campus.
Tweet of the Week:
https://x.com/hechingerreport/status/1742221714979783061?s=20
In Massachusetts, the Know-Nothing amendments prevent more than 100,000 urban families with children in chronically underperforming school districts from receiving scholarship vouchers that would allow them access to additional educational alternatives. These legal barriers, also known as Blaine amendments, restrict government funding from flowing to religiously affiliated organizations in nearly 40 states and are a violation of the first and fourteenth amendments.
The U.S. Supreme Court will hear a case this year, Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, that could end these amendments. In 2018, Pioneer produced a 30-minute documentary on the impact of the Blaine amendments on families in Massachusetts, Georgia, and Michigan.
“She’s a good girl. She helps me a lot. She has big, big dreams. I don’t have the money, but she has big dreams. I hope she’s going to get everything, but she works so hard. She works so hard in school.”
“Our family is needing to make some really big sacrifices because we believe this is important, and so, we’re basically going to do whatever it takes… Sometimes we look at each other and go ‘I don’t know if I can do it again another month…’”
“A lot of the families have to sacrifice and work multiple jobs… And just scraping together enough money to just make tuition, just the basics.”
“It is discriminatory, that parents who want to choose an alternative to public school for their children, would not in any way receive any compensation for that, whether it be tax credit, whether it be a voucher…”
In the 1840s, nativist movement leaders formed official political parties and local chapters of the national Native American Party (later the American Party), although they continued to be commonly known as the Know-Nothing Party. Politicians sought to insert provisions into state constitutions against Catholics who refused to renounce the pope. The Know-Nothing movement brought bigotry and hatred to a new level of violence and organization.
The party’s legacy endured in the post-Civil War era, with laws and constitutional amendments it supported, still today severely limiting parents’ educational choices. A federal constitutional amendment was proposed by Speaker of the House James Blaine prohibiting money raised by taxation in any State to be under the control of any religious sect; nor shall any money so raised or lands so devoted be divided between religious sects or denominations. These were then named the Blaine Amendments of 1875.
in recent decades, often in response to challenges to school choice programs, the U.S. Supreme Court has demonstrated great interest in examining the issues of educational alternatives and attempts limit parental options. Massachusetts plays a key role in this debate. The Bay State was a key center of the Know-Nothing movement and has the oldest version of Anti-Aid Amendments in the nation, as well as a second such amendment approved in 1917. Two-fifths of Massachusetts residents are Catholic, and its Catholic schools outperform the state’s public schools, which are the best in the nation.
Help families like the Costons in Michigan to end the bigoted Blaine amendments in their state that are blocking tuition scholarships and other types of financial support that would make it possible for families to send their children to high-quality schools that are best suited for their children.
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TRANSCRIPT
The Learning Curve Podcast
Jonathan Eig on MLK
January 15, 2024
[00:00:24] Albert: Well, hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Learning Curve podcast. I’m your host, Albert Cheng, from the University of Arkansas. Co-hosting with me today is our friend, my friend, Alisha Searcy. Hey, Alisha, how’s it going?
[00:00:37] Alisha: Hello, Albert. Wonderful. Great to be with you again.
[00:00:41] Albert: Yeah, that’s right. And happy Martin Luther King Day. We’re meeting here to broadcast this episode to commemorate that. And yeah, we’ve got an exciting guest, Jonathan Eig, who’s the author of the definitive biography of Dr. King. And so, we’re looking forward to sitting down with him and learning more about his life.
[00:01:01] Alisha: I live in Atlanta, so, you know, clearly, I’ve interacted with the King family and know a lot about his history, but I’m very interested to hear more and learn more. I think her was, King was such a fascinating figure in a lot of ways. So, I’m very much looking forward to this and of course celebrating his birthday and his legacy.
[00:01:22] Albert: Yeah. Yeah. Well, first up some news and maybe just speaking about reform — you know, this is not civil rights reform necessarily, but education reform — I want to point out an article in Education Next written by Sue Walsh, it’s actually a piece written in memory of Linda Brown. And so, in case listeners aren’t familiar, Linda Brown was a major school reform figure particularly in Massachusetts, but also nationwide. Years ago, in the early days of the charter movement she started the Charter Resource Center here at Pioneer which eventually became the Building Excellent Schools initiative that she managed and ran for many years training — I don’t know what — it’s hundreds of charter school leaders across the country! The article referred to her as the Yoda of the charter school movement. And really, she trained a lot of the school leaders, the other Jedi, I guess, if you will. A lot of thanks goes out to her. We really wouldn’t have a lot of the excellent charter schools that are out there today if it weren’t for her. So, really want to recognize her passing. Happened last year on Christmas Day, actually. I just want to point listeners out to learn more about her life and legacy at the article at Ed Next.
[00:02:32] Alisha: Absolutely. And we thank her for her work. I remember when she passed Dr. Howard Fuller, who’s a mentor of mine, tweeted about it and what a force she was. So, we are grateful for her work, and I happen to lead a couple of the schools of the founder who went through BES. So, her legacy is tremendous and spans across this country. And so, we thank her for her work and her legacy. And I can only imagine how difficult it was for her, at the start of all of this. And so, I don’t think it’s an accident that we’re talking about her work and the trails that she blazed on Dr King’s birthday. I’m one of those people who believe that education is a civil rights issue, and so, it’s important to acknowledge those who have sacrificed and done a whole lot of work to help us get to where we are.
[00:03:23] Albert: Yeah. Yeah, that’s absolutely right. The charter school movement is just over 30 years old. You know, 30 years is about the time period for a generation. So, we’re always looking out for the next generation of leaders in the school reform movement.
[00:03:35] Alisha: That’s right. Step up, because we need you!
[00:03:38] Albert: Yeah, that’s right. Well, what have you got on your docket for, in terms of news?
[00:03:42] Alisha: So, very interesting story. Utah has no plans to change the lowest-in-nation education spending, officials say. And this is a piece from the Salt Lake Tribune. And so, Albert, we all know this ongoing debate about “we need more money in education. If we just had more money, we could just fix everything.” And I do not subscribe to that philosophy. I don’t think we have a money problem in education, I think we have a priority problem. And so, this article is very interesting. So, a few facts that I learned, I didn’t know this about Utah. They remain one of the lowest education spending states in the country and were the lowest for two decades until 2021. And now they’re 49 only bested by Idaho which is now the lowest in the country. And so, we’re talking $9,095 per student as compared to the state of New York, whose average per-pupil spending is, get this, $26,000. And I’m not picking on New York, there’s obviously economies of scale and all of that. And I’ll talk about poverty in a second. But what’s interesting here is that despite Utah being one of the lowest in the country in terms of spending, they’re actually outperforming other states who spend a lot more in some of the most critical areas.
[00:05:06] Alisha: So, for example, in math, Utah is tied with Massachusetts, which, by the way, spends more than double what Idaho does. And they have the highest percentage of eighth graders scoring above proficiency as of 2022. Same thing. And they’re number five when it comes to fourth graders scoring above proficiency in math, and similar numbers for fourth and eighth grade in terms of leading in the country, in the top 10.
[00:05:31] Alisha: And so, I think it, again, begs the question. But before I got too excited, I realized that Utah doesn’t quite have it all together. It turns out that less than half of their third graders are reading on grade level. So, they’ve got some work to do. The good news is they are going to be spending, I think it’s $11 million out of their $1 billion of COVID funding to focus on literacy.
[00:05:57] Alisha: The question is, when you identify what the problem is, how do you direct those resources in the right place for the right reasons for the right people. So it’ll be interesting to see what happens, but at the end of the day I think it’s important to have these conversations about the impact of funding. The last thing I want to mention that can’t be lost in this conversation is the rate of child poverty. Can I ignore the impact that poverty has on educational outcomes? It’s not an excuse. I’m not one of those people who believes it’s an excuse, but you do have to acknowledge: If a student doesn’t have a home, if they didn’t eat this morning, they’re probably going to have a challenge learning. So, when you look at Utah, they have an 8 percent child poverty rate compared to Georgia where I live, it’s 20 percent. And so that makes a difference, interesting article. I appreciate it. I think it’s an important conversation that we need to continue to have, and we need to decide, I think as a country and as states, how do we get the biggest bang for our buck so that we can compete lik eUtah, and our states can all be at the top. And it’s not about the money, but it’s about our priorities and how we best spend those dollars.
[00:07:10] Albert: Well, yeah, this is the perennial question in education. How do we use our resources well and deliver it to the students and families that need it the most. And, you know, at the same time, how do we set up policies and build institutions that support children and their homes and their families? There’s a lot to the big picture here and it takes all of us and it takes all of us. So, let’s see what happens in Utah. And in the meantime, stick with us coming up after the break. Again, we have Jonathan Eig, who’s going to sit down and chat with us about Dr. Martin Luther King.
[00:08:07] Albert: Jonathan Eig is the best-selling author of six books, including his most recent, King A Life, which was nominated for the National Book Award, and the New York Times hailed it as the definitive biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. Jonathan’s previous book, Ali: A Life, won a 2018 Penn America Literary Award, and Esquire magazine named it one of the 25 greatest biographies of all time.
[00:08:35] Albert: He also served as consulting producer for the PBS series Muhammad Ali, directed by Ken Burns. Jonathan’s first book, Luckiest Man, The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig, reached number 10 on the New York Times bestseller list and won the Casey Award. His books have been listed among the best of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, and translated into more than a dozen languages. Jonathan appeared on the Today Show, NPR’s Fresh Air, and the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. He studied journalism at Northwestern University and went on to work as a reporter for the New Orleans Times Picayune, and the Dallas Morning News, Chicago Magazine, and The Wall Street Journal. He lives in Chicago. Jonathan, it’s really great to have you on the show.
[00:09:20] Jonathan: Thank you. It’s good to talk to you.
[00:09:24] Albert: Let’s start with a couple questions about some of Dr. Martin Luther King’s background and influences. So, as we celebrate his life and legacy and in your definitive biography, king of Life you emphasize his deep faith as a Baptist pastor. So, could you talk a bit more about that? Share with us what we know about. His role as a young spiritual leader and preacher in Montgomery, Alabama especially during the largely female-led bus boycott from 1955 to ‘56.
[00:09:52] Jonathan: You know, when you think about what made King the right person in that moment, well, obviously, a lot of things had to come together for him to be the leader of that bus boycott. And as you hinted, it was really the women who prepared for that moment, who had prepared for years and who organized the boycott. It was women out there distributing the flyers and urging people to stay off the buses. How does King become the leader? It’s because he is a preacher for one thing. And that gives him a position of authority in this very still sexist world and time in which he was living. It’s also because he’s new in town and he hadn’t made any enemies yet, but it’s really his religion that allows him to speak to this group and to unite people and to inspire people. He’s a preacher, he’s a son of a preacher, and the grandson of a preacher and he sees the Bible as something that’s in conflict with American society, and you know, the black social gospel says that the job is to bring those things into alliance, into harmony, that it’s the job of the church, it’s the job of preachers, it’s the job of Christians to change the world until people really are all equal in the eyes of God and in the eyes of their government too.
[00:11:02] Albert: Yeah, well, so, you know, speaking of preaching and, you know, you gave many, many speeches. I’m thinking of Langston Hughes, actually, just to get to another influence his famous poem “Harlem, a Dream Deferred. That poem strongly influenced Martin Luther King’s sermons and speeches about dreams. Could you just talk a bit more about his literary background about, you know, his knowledge of the Bible, scripture, history, founding documents, other poems, hymns, spirituals, like did those, some of those literary works influence him?
[00:11:33] Jonathan: You know, it’s important to remember that King was learning to preach before he could read, and he absorbed so much in his lessons he would travel the neighborhood and listen to different preachers. He would listen to preachers on the radio, and he would listen to poems in school. And it all went into this great mind of his, and it all churned around and came out in different ways. But he was really a borrower. It got him in trouble sometimes. He was accused of plagiarism and he was guilty of plagiarism. But I think he saw himself, again, as a preacher, which meant that he wasn’t so much worried about originality. He was focused on inspiring an audience. And if he heard a line from Langston Hughes and he could mix that with something from the Bible and mix that with something from the constitution, he was like a jazz musician, clipping phrases from here and from there and, imitating other jazz musicians.
[00:12:25] Albert: That’s an excellent way put it, fascinating way. Just as a jazz, a literary jazz musician, if you kind of mush those two together. Yeah. Um, moving on to, another important influence is his wife. So, you talk about Coretta Scott King a lot in your biography, they married in 1953 on the lawn of her parents’ house in her Alabama hometown. Had four children. talk a bit more about Coretta Scott King. you know, her background, what their marriage was like, what their family was like.
[00:12:51] Jonathan: I really felt like it was important to give her a more prominent role in this book. She is often, like a lot of women of her era, has been overlooked, assigned to this role as being the supporter. and we fail to appreciate just how important and how much of an inspiration she was. And, when King met Coretta, they were students, he was at Boston University, and she was at the New England Conservatory of Music. He was dating a lot of women. And you have to ask yourself, why Coretta? And I think it’s because she was an activist. She had a career already in activism. She’d been to Antioch, you know, an integrated white college. She’d been involved in all kinds of protest movements and King hadn’t done anything yet at that point. So, he thought that he could learn from her and that’s to his credit. He continued to learn from her. He continued to be pushed by her to be more aggressive, to think more globally about his role as an activist. He didn’t always appreciate that. He didn’t give her the opportunities that he should have. He was still, you know, mired in his own prejudices, but I think that Coretta really hasn’t been fully appreciated throughout the history of as we tell these stories.
[00:14:00] Albert: Well, so let’s get into some of the actual work and activism. As you note Dr King co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the late ‘50s and then played a secondary role in the Freedom Rides in 1961. and Southern Christian Leadership Conference also, I mean, they’re involved with the efforts at Albany, Georgia in ‘61, ‘62, but they were largely unsuccessful. Talk about this period of King’s work and the lessons that learned from the experiences at that time.
[00:14:31] Jonathan: You know, King was 26 years old when he became the leader of the Montgomery bus boycott. Like, I don’t remember that. I don’t even want to think about how little I was accomplishing at age 26. After that, he even writes to one of his college professors. What am I supposed to do now? I feel like I’ve peaked at 26. People are going to be expecting miracles from me, and I don’t know what to do. So, he tries and fails a number of times. We see him really struggling. He starts the Southern Christian Leadership Conference but doesn’t really have a plan for how he’s going to make it a success. He undertakes these movements in places like St. Augustine and Albany, Georgia, and they don’t go very well. It looks like he’s kind of defeated in these places by the white power structure. That he starts these protests, but it’s not really clear what he’s trying to accomplish. It’s not as simple as integrating buses, and he leaves those towns without really much to show for it. So King is adapting, he’s learning. You know, other people are now having some success with student sit -ins at lunch counters and on, on the buses, the freedom rides, as you mentioned. And King, to his credit, doesn’t try to take over those movements. He helps where he can. He’s showing some humility. He’s listening. He’s learning. And he’s trying to figure out how to make the next movement a success. So, it’s a really great moment to see young King learning and learning from his mistakes.
[00:15:49] Albert: Well, so speaking of all the other people involved in, the civil rights movement, it’s been noted that at times that it was Dr. King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference who are leading and other times it was students and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, for instance. You know, there were other civil rights figures — Diane Nash, Bob Moses. Could you talk about the relationship between Dr. King and the CLC and all these other entities within the civil rights movement?
[00:16:18] Jonathan: It was a challenge, you know, it was a challenge and an opportunity. So, you know, King comes along and out of nowhere After years of seeing groups like the NAACP really leading the way he’s a superstar and he’s attracting all this attention and he’s also kind of a threat in some ways to the establishment and by the time he’s 30 years old, he’s a threat to the NAACP in one way, but he’s also, too conservative for some of the younger activists. They’re starting to call him De Lord, as if he’s like, you know, high and mighty and out of touch with the young people in the movement. So, really difficult. King’s got to navigate a very difficult path. And I think that’s one of his great skills is that he’s a great listener. He’s open to learning from others. He’s not trying. To hog the spotlight. He wants to work with others. And, you know, even people like Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael come away really impressed when they spend time with King, they go in skeptically and they come out really admiring. And he was just a great coalition builder in spite of everything.
[00:17:16] Albert: Well, we could use a lot of coalition building these days, too.
[00:17:18] Jonathan: Yes. Even a little would be good. Yeah.
[00:17:26] Alisha: So, Jonathan, thanks for being here. I’m very fascinated by your work. And as someone who grew up in the NAACP and learned a lot about these figures through the years, it’s quite interesting to get your perspective. And so, one of my favorite pieces of literature I will call in our history is the Letter from a Birmingham Jail. And so, I would love for you to talk about Reverend Shuttlesworth and how he worked to have the S.E.L.C. And Dr. King comes to Birmingham, Alabama for direct action and what many regarded as the most segregated city in the south, and to talk about what you know about Dr. King and his time in Birmingham and the participation of Reverend Shuttlesworth and the students and the protest there. And of course, the letter from the Birmingham jail.
[00:18:13] Jonathan: Thank you so much for asking that because, you know, Reverend Shuttlesworth does not get the attention he deserves. We should someday, I think — I predict we’ll see a movie and certainly another book or two written about him because he’s just such a fascinating figure and he’s a great example of how King is being pushed by people who want to put the pedal to the metal. They’re saying we’re not being aggressive enough. We’re not aiming high enough. And Shuttlesworth — after King fails in places like St. Augustine and Albany — Shuttlesworth is saying come to Birmingham. Birmingham is the most racist city. They call it Bombingham because, you know, there’s so many bombs going off. White people are blowing up black churches, black homes. Shuttlesworth’s home was destroyed by a bomb. It was a miracle that he survived. And, you would think King might say, why would I want to go to the most difficult, most dangerous place?
[00:19:02] Jonathan: But that’s a testament to, you know, the persuasiveness of Shuttlesworth, but also to the understanding that King has of his role. That his role is to shine a light on America’s racism, its discrimination, to show the world what black people are facing, especially in the Deep South at that point. And he goes to Birmingham knowing that it’s going to be difficult. And, he would say afterwards, or, you know, some of his supporters would say afterwards that they had this Operation C for Conflict their plan was to stir a conflict, but they did not have a plan going in. They only said that afterwards. Their plan was to just go in and see what happens. And that’s what makes it so powerful. That’s why the letter from Birmingham jail is so powerful because it’s a spontaneous act of passion and protest.
[00:19:49] Alisha: Wow. Very powerful time. So, in 1963, 250,000 demonstrators marched to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., where Dr. King gave his famous — now we know as “I Have a Dream” speech. And then a year later in 1964, he won the Nobel Peace Prize. Can you talk about these events and the famous speeches Dr. King delivered at those?
[00:20:12] Jonathan: The March on Washington is King’s most famous moment. Of course, we all know “I Have a Dream.” Every kid learns it in kindergarten now. But it’s important to remember that he didn’t plan to give that part of the speech. What he planned to say and remember also that it was the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. What he wrote in the prepared portion of that speech, and what he delivered in the prepared portion of his speech, was a really harsh criticism of America and its debt that it owed the people whose families, whose ancestors had been enslaved. He talked about the fact that. There was a moral reckoning that needed to be made, that a check had been written and it had come back with insufficient funds. America would not be able to move on until it atoned for the sin of slavery. He talked about police brutality in that speech. That was, you know, the speech he intended to give. And we forget about that part because he gave this beautiful sermon at the end where he improvised and talked about his dream. And in some ways, it overshadows what was really important about that speech. But that having been said, you know, the “I Have a Dream” part of the speech really was beautiful and inspiring, and it made a lot of people, in particular white Americans, feel like, wow, we can change. Maybe we can do better. That was a moment. It was a moment where I think America looked like it might finally turn the corner.
[00:21:32] Alisha: Maybe we could stand to hear that one more time, right?
[00:21:35] Jonathan: Yeah, no question. But you know, part of the problem is that there’s always a backlash. And the people who don’t want to see change react to that. And you see a couple of things happen right after the March on Washington. You see the FBI produce a memo that’s saying because of that speech, because of King’s power to unite black and white Americans, we must view him as a threat, the greatest threat in America right now when it comes to race. You know, how sad is that? And then of course, soon after that memo is written, we get the bombing of the church in Birmingham with these innocent little girls are killed. And that’s because members of the Klan, white racists in Alabama, don’t want to see King’s dream fulfilled. And they’re going to do everything they can to stop it, including murder.
[00:22:22] Alisha: When Americans think about Dr. King and the civil rights era, they most often remember events in the American South, but Dr. King said his 1966 Chicago campaign was among his worst encounters with racism. Can you talk about Dr. King’s life experiences and how they differed in Northern and Southern cities?
[00:22:42] Jonathan: Yeah, that’s a really important subject too. It’s worth noting that King was talking about Northern racism, really his whole career, when he would travel to raise money in places like New York and Chicago, he would call out their own problems. He would say, yes, I’m fighting it out in Birmingham, I’m marching in Selma, but don’t forget you’ve got segregation here in the North too. You’ve got discrimination in hiring and in housing here, too. And by the time a little bit later, by the mid-sixties, he starts to focus his attention on that.
[00:23:11] Jonathan: He says it’s not enough anymore to work on desegregation in the South and voting rights. He would be hypocritical if he didn’t take action. And that’s why he begins to focus on the North. He moves to Chicago — my hometown in 1966 — moves into an apartment in North Lawndale. And tries to call attention to the fact that so many poor people in Chicago, and in particular poor black people, are living in these really dehumanizing conditions, and that landlords are making money on the poverty of their tenants, and he really wants to the nation see that this deeply ingrained racism affects the whole country, and it doesn’t go so well, you know, the media doesn’t like it.
[00:23:54] Jonathan: Northern politicians really just do their best to get him out of town and hope that he’ll go away. And King doesn’t get the kind of results that he’s looking for. And he begins to lose popularity. He begins to lose effectiveness. By 1967, I think 35 percent, only 35 percent of Americans said they approved of Martin Luther King’s tactics in Gallup polls. And he was getting frustrated. He felt like people weren’t, didn’t want to listen when he talked about Northern racism.
[00:24:19] Alisha: The epitome of leadership is hard and lonely, right? Doing the right work, but not very popular.
[00:24:26] Jonathan: That’s absolutely right. And I do think, you know, he felt lonely. I think he felt sad. We have the transcripts of his phone calls because the FBI was taping his calls and bugging his hotel rooms. And we can read what he was saying in his private moments to his friends, to his closest friends and allies. And he was depressed. He felt like people had given up on his dream and that it was turning into a nightmare. It’s really sad. It’s heartbreaking to read those transcripts.
[00:24:52] Alisha: Wow. I didn’t know that. So, in 1967 and ‘68, Dr. King and SELC launched the Poor People’s Campaign, which took him to Memphis and supported the striking sanitation workers. Can you talk about the message and the meaning of what was then his last speech entitled, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” and the days leading up to his assassination on April 4, 1968.
[00:25:15] Jonathan: Yeah. So, as I said, he felt like people weren’t listening to him anymore and that people didn’t want to talk about segregation and, discrimination in the North. And they didn’t want to hear what he had to say about the Vietnam War. And instead of, you know, giving up or deciding he was going to take some time off. He decided he was going to go all in. He was going to prepare his biggest protest of all, and he called it the poor people’s campaign. He was going to bring thousands and thousands of people to Washington, D.C. And they were basically going to occupy Washington, shut down the government, if necessary, until we reckoned with the discrimination with the income inequality that was plaguing this country — and it wasn’t going that well.
[00:25:55] Jonathan: King was having trouble recruiting, but it scared our government, it scared the president, it scared the FBI. They saw this as a terrible threat, and they ramped up their efforts to try to disrupt and discredit King. You know, at the same time, he was asked to go to Memphis to support the striking sanitation workers and his friends, his allies all said, don’t go, it’s just a bunch of garbage workers that, you know, you’ve got bigger problems. You got this poor people’s campaign to prepare for, but King felt like he had to go, that these were exactly the people that he cared about, these are the people he was trying to help. And that’s why he wanted to make a poor people’s campaign because these sanitation workers were working for low wages in unsafe conditions and he had to call it out.
[00:26:39] Jonathan: So, he was in Memphis and maybe didn’t have to be there. And that’s of course where he was assassinated. And as you mentioned, he gave one speech the night before he was killed. And people feel like maybe he forsesaw his own assassination, because he said that in that speech, like anyone else, I’d like to live a long life, but I know that that might not be for me. And it doesn’t matter now, because all that matters is that I do what I believe, that I fight for what’s right, and that I do what God put me on Earth here to do. And, he said, I may not reach the promised land, but I have seen the promised land, and I know that together as a people, we will get there.
[00:27:16] Alisha: Just a remarkable human being with such a tremendous burden that he carried. My last question for you before I ask you to read an excerpt from your book given the current state of national affairs, how should public officials, parents, schools alike draw on lessons and teachings from Dr. King’s life to better understand race. And provide higher quality, spiritual and political leadership to America?
[00:27:44] Jonathan: Wow. That’s a big question. You know, I think it’s great that we have a national holiday for King now, and it’s great that we have a monument for him. Monuments are easy to overlook and national holidays. It’s easy to stick with the simplified, safe version of King that we want to teach. It’s easy to talk about a dream and judging people by the content of their character. We need to remind people that King was a radical and that we can handle the truth of what he was trying to tell us. We don’t need to water it down. He was trying to tell us that if we didn’t address income inequality, if we didn’t address the roots of racism, if we didn’t atone for the sin of slavery, that we were going to continue to have the same problems over and over again.
[00:28:32] Jonathan: We were going to continue to find ourselves in conflict with one another. We would continue to treat people as other and as inferior and that we can do better if we just face the facts and deal with the truth. So I think that, you know, we should teach kids about it, “I Have a Dream,” but we should teach them about the first half of that speech too. We should make sure we teach them about the Letter from a Birmingham Jail. We should teach them that our own government, which celebrates him now with a national holiday, set out to destroy him.
[00:29:00] Alisha: Thank you for that. Wow. Would you read for us an excerpt from your book, so that our listeners can hear a part of your writing?
[00:29:11] Jonathan: All right, I’m going to read the very end because this is what I was just talking about. That we now have — just to set it up here — we have a thousand streets named after King, we have hundreds of schools we have watered down his message, and here’s what I say at the end of this epilogue: “Our simplified celebration of King comes at a cost. It saps the strength of his philosophical and intellectual contributions. It undercuts his power to inspire change. Even after Americans elected a black man as president, and after that president, Barack Obama, placed a bust of King in the Oval Office, the nation remains wracked with racism, ethnonationalism, cultural division, residential and educational segregation, economic inequality, violence, and a fading sense of hope that government, or anyone, will ever fix these problems. Where do we go from here? In spite of the way America treated him, King still had faith when he asked that question. Today, his words might help us make our way through these troubled times. But only if we actually read them, only if we embrace the complicated King, the flawed King, the human King, the radical King. Only if we see and hear him clearly again, as America saw and heard him once before. Our very survival, he wrote, depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant, and to face the challenge of change. Amen.”
[00:30:40] Alisha: Wooh! Jonathan, thank you for this powerful, remarkable, exceptional, maybe even call to action to all of us as we celebrate the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Thank you so much for being with us.
Albert: Thank you, Jonathan.
[00:30:57] Jonathan: Thanks for all the great questions. I enjoyed talking to you.
[00:31:17] Albert: Great interview. Great interview indeed. Absolutely learned a lot. Well, before we close out first, we have the Tweet of the Week, which comes from our friends at Education Next from this year’s top 20 EdNext articles of 2023. Supreme Court opens a path to religious charter schools, but the trail ahead holds twists and turns. And this was an article written last year by Professor Nicole Garnett. Check it out if you missed it last year, it’s a fascinating article. I mean, she’s a legal expert on education law and it’s an article about the possibility of religious charter schools. So, check that one out, but also check out the rest of the top 20 articles from Education Next from 2023. It gives us a nice, brief digest of what happened last year. Alisha, thanks for being with me on the show again. Great to co-host with you as always.
[00:32:10] Alisha: Absolutely. Thanks for having me. This was great today.
[00:32:13] Albert: All right. And that brings us to the end of this week’s episode. Join us next week as we talk to Cara Candal, who is the vice president of policy for ExcelinEd. And she’s going to join us as we kick off National School Choice Week for 2024. So, join us next week as we sit down and chat with her with all things school choice. But until then, I hope you have a great day, and I’ll see you next week.
[00:32:39] Alisha: Happy King Day!
This week on The Learning Curve, guest co-hosts Prof. Albert Cheng of the University of Arkansas and Alisha Searcy interview New York Times best-selling biographer of MLK, Jonathan Eig. Mr. Eig delves into MLK’s early spiritual leadership, the influence of Langston Hughes on his speeches, his relationship with his wife, Coretta Scott King, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s challenges. He explores historic events in Birmingham, Alabama, the March on Washington, MLK’s struggles in Chicago, the Poor People’s Campaign, and the events leading to MLK’s assassination in 1968. Eig underscores the multifaceted aspects of MLK’s life and provides insights on drawing lessons for contemporary challenges in race relations and leadership. Mr. Eig closes the interview with a reading from his book, King: A Life.
Stories of the Week: Albert reflects on a story from Education Next a memoriam for former Pioneer Institute and national charter school leader Linda Brown; Alisha reviews a story in The Salt Lake Tribune on how Utah has no plans to change it’s lowest-in-nation education spending.
Guest:
Jonathan Eig is the bestselling author of six books, including his most recent King: A Life, which was nominated for the National Book Award and The New York Times hailed it as the definitive biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. Jonathan’s previous book, Ali: A Life, won a 2018 PEN America Literary Award, and Esquire magazine named it one of the 25 greatest biographies of all time. He also served as consulting producer for the PBS series Muhammad Ali, directed by Ken Burns. Jonathan’s first book, Luckiest Man:The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig, reached No. 10 on the New York Times bestseller list and won the Casey Award. His books have been listed among the best of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, and translated into more than a dozen languages. Jonathan’s appeared on the Today Show, NPR’s Fresh Air, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. He studied journalism at Northwestern University, and went on to work as a reporter for The New Orleans Times-Picayune, The Dallas Morning News, Chicago Magazine, and The Wall Street Journal. He lives in Chicago.
Tweet of the Week:
The state’s fiscal picture in January 2024 looks drastically different than it did in January 2023. There is a lot of speculation on both sides of the aisle as to why that is and/or who is to blame. I will add my opinion into the fray.
Last January, the state was flush with cash. Tax collections exceeded expectations, the federal government’s largesse funded a Transitional Escrow Account that had a balance of over $1 billion, and the Stabilization Fund was at an all-time high with a balance of over $8 billion.
Just two months earlier, in November 2022, the state had returned almost $3 billion in excess tax receipts to taxpayers per a little-known, voter-approved statutory requirement. The Pew Charitable Trusts summed up the situation this way: “Higher-than-forecasted tax revenue growth, historic federal aid, and record financial reserves have buttressed states’ fiscal positions over the past two budget years.”
In recognition that the economic outlook was changing due to high inflation and interest rates, geopolitical threats, uncertain monetary policy, and an end to federal assistance, experts projected that state revenues would grow by a modest 1.6 percent in FY 2024. This would provide state coffers with $40.4 billion in tax revenue collections, or $642 million more than last year for the operating budget that began on July 1, 2023.
Maura Healey was sworn in as governor in January 2023. She increased projected revenue collections by $150 million for FY2023 and vowed to fulfill her campaign promise of providing tax relief. She filed a bill to provide $1 billion in tax cuts. A version of that bill was enacted in October of 2023 that is estimated to reduce tax collections by $580 million in FY2024.
Since the start of FY2024 on July 1, 2023, the state has experienced six straight months of revenues falling short of expectations. The Healey administration indicated earlier this month that Massachusetts is looking at a $1 billion deficit for FY2024 and proceeded to make unilateral budget cuts totaling about $385 million.
Opponents of the tax cuts are quick to cite them as the cause of the revenue shortfall, even though not a single income tax return for the 2023 tax year has come due yet. Opponents of the millionaire’s tax point to the uptick in out-migration of high-income Massachusetts residents as a result of the income surtax as the reason the state is not meeting its revenue projections.
That is also a faulty argument, because even if that turns out to be true in the future, only estimated payments of tax liability for those affected taxpayers have been made so far, making it impossible for now to calculate final tax collection amounts resulting from the surtax.
The reasons for the sudden reversal of fortunes are likely far more complicated than those proposed by folks on either side of the tax divide. They include:
The single biggest factor, however, is the unprecedented growth of the state budget since FY2021. The $15 billion increase in state spending contextualizes the seemingly modest projected revenue growth of 1.6 percent for FY2024 by highlighting that the base is very inflated. Budget writers also assumed that 1.6 percent growth rate rather than the median rate of 1.3 percent proffered at the consensus revenue hearing, further inflating tax collection estimates. The sizable growth in state spending makes clear that the spending adjustments required to get the budget in balance will not be “cutting to the bone.”
To address the current shortfall, Gov. Healey chose to make unilateral cuts rather than tapping into state reserves to address the immediate shortfall, a wise move given the credit rating agencies’ preference for this option over using the Rainy Day fund when it isn’t raining.
Rather than speculating on the causes of the revenue shortfall, which are numerous, a more constructive exercise for lawmakers would be to think carefully about how to right-size the state budget after the unsustainable spending spree of the past two years.
A comprehensive review of state agencies and programs with recommendations for how to make state government function more efficiently would be a great place to start.
Read a transcript
The Learning Curve Gabby Thomas
[00:00:27] Albert: Good day, everyone. Welcome to another episode of The Learning Curve podcast. I’m your host, Albert Cheng from the university of Arkansas and co-hosting with me today is Alisha Searcy. Hey, Alisha, how’s it going?
[00:00:41] Alisha: Oh, wonderful, Albert, how are you doing?
[00:00:43] Albert: Fine. Doing fine. Yeah, that’s right. I don’t know if I’ve wished you that since we were last together last year.
[00:00:50] Alisha: That’s right. It’s good to be back.
[00:00:52] Albert: Yeah. So, we’re going to have Gabby Thomas, American Olympian, coming up after the break. But before that let’s talk some news, [00:01:00] Alisha. I want to talk about a story that came out recently. It’s actually an opinion piece put out by the editorial board of the New York Post, and the title is Test Scores Prove Charter Schools Win Again: Time to Lift the Cap.”
[00:01:13] Albert: And it actually reminds me of the days when I was living in Massachusetts. I was in Massachusetts back in ‘16. I think that was the year when there was a ballot measure to lift the cap on charter schools there. And despite all the great evidence of improved test scores and student outcomes that referendum got defeated. And so there’s still that cap there. And yeah, I was actually quite surprised that that happened there, despite all the positive evidence on charters in Massachusetts. And so, it looks like we got a similar political situation brewing in New York and don’t know if you’ve had to deal with this. I mean, in Georgia, you’ve got an interesting charter situation there yourself, right?
[00:01:51] Alisha: We do, and frankly, our laws are pretty strong and unbiased because I helped pass some of them when I was in the legislature. But I think we’re lucky that we don’t have to deal with caps. I think the caps are done by school boards who don’t tend to approve them. I think in the last eight years, we may have had two charter schools approved. And so, what we’ve done instead is pass a constitutional amendment. That allows the state to authorize charter schools. But to your point, it’s frustrating for me. I am a charter supporter. I know that that’s not always the most popular view, but I just believe in parents having access to all options within the public school system.
[00:02:28] Alisha: And so, I think this is an example of how adults kind of get in the way of what’s best for kids. If you see the research says that charter schools are performing well, and in some cases, better, why not make sure that’s an option for families who want it? It doesn’t mean that we don’t want all public schools to work, especially traditional public schools.
[00:02:51] Alisha: But why not allow parents like myself — I have three school aged children at home. Not every kid is the same. Not every kid learns the same. And so, I think how about in 2024 let’s be hopeful that adults will get out of the way of doing what’s best for kids. Follow the research, right, and the science, and say, what’s best for my kid, what’s best for the kids in our community. How can we make sure that all of our public schools work regardless of what they’re called?
[00:03:18] Albert: I’m definitely in agreement with that. Any way to expand educational opportunity, really, to give these opportunities for kids that could really benefit from them. So, I’m, with you there. What story caught your eye recently?
[00:03:31] Alisha: So Chalkbeat has this great article about the issues to watch for 2024. Came out January 2, by Erica Meltzer. You know, it talks about everything, which I think is interesting to watch, right? So, first there’s the big one, I think, across the country is the fact that there may be a fiscal cliff. If you follow the work of Marguerite Rosa, I happened to go through the certification program that she does through Georgetown. It was incredible. I highly recommend it. But she’s a brilliant economist. If you don’t even know if that’s her real title, but smart woman who talks about education and finances.
[00:04:11] Alisha: And so, she’s been warning districts for the last couple of years that there might be a fiscal cliff because the end of those ESSER funds. And so, as a reminder, $190 billion has been given to districts in three waves over the pandemic. And so far, $122 billion of those dollars have been spent or committed by districts. And still, there are going to be $68 billion that need to be spent by the fall of this year, 2024. And so, there’s a concern because some districts use this money well for one-time type programs. Some of them use them for great programs, like for counseling and tutoring, help families find housing. The problem is, Albert, though, that when these funds end in the fall, you know, did they make the right financial decisions to make sure that this money could go on, right, past this time? Can they continue to support these programs? How are students and families going to be impacted with the end of these funds? I think all of us need to pay attention to our individual school districts, our individual states, to pay attention to how these funds were spent.
[00:05:23] Alisha: Unfortunately, in my state, the Department of Education is not actually tracking what districts are doing, and so it will be very difficult to figure that out, but in states where they have been tracking, I want us all to pay attention to what districts have done, and hopefully using these funds have had a great impact. A couple of other issues that have come up are that they’re saying that we should watch the effect that migrant students, particularly in the areas of like New York and Chicago, right, where they’ve come in from Central and South America needing a lot of services. And so, as we know, as a result of COVID and even before that, our own students have needed services in terms of mental health and wraparound services for students who are in poverty. So now these districts, and I think Denver is another one that comes to mind, they really have had a serious issue trying to help support these students who need a lot of help, right? We’re talking about kids who have serious emotional wounds from the things that they’ve seen and experienced on their journeys to the United States. Some of them are sleeping outside in tents. They’re, you know, navigating a new school system and so there’s a lot that the students are dealing with — the migrant students I’m talking — as well as the districts themselves, who are having to grapple with these issues financially, socially, academically. So, there’s a lot to watch there.
[00:06:45] Alisha: And then there are a lot of other issues, but the other one that I’ll mention is this whole ChatGPT issue. Those of us who are following this somewhat, and I can’t say I’m an expert in this, but I’ve certainly played with this tool a little bit in some of my work in K-12 education. I think people are concerned about how this is going to impact K-12 learning, and so far, the research is saying that there’s not an increase in student cheating because of ChatGPT, which I hope says kids actually want to learn and they have learned how to use this tool in a way that’s not about cheating, but it’s really about learning. And so again, I think so many issues in education are adult problems. And so, I’m hoping that adults will embrace ChatGPT and AI tools and implement them in a way that really helps to foster learning in classrooms. So that’ll be a huge issue to watch in 2024 as well.
[00:07:40] Albert: Yeah, I encourage listeners to check out that article. I mean, there’s a whole rundown of a lot of stories to pay attention to. And yeah, we’ll see how 2024 plays out another year. And it should be an exciting one. Absolutely. Well, speaking of excitement coming up after the break, stick with us, ‘cause we’ve got Gabby Thomas joining us on this show, American [00:08:00] Olympian.
[00:08:00] Albert: Gabby Thomas is a world-class American track athlete in the 100- and 200-meters sprint. She won the bronze medal in the 200 meters and a silver medal as part of the women’s 4×100 meters relay at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics in summer 2023. She claimed the 200-meter silver medal in the World Athletics Championships in Budapest with a time of 21.81 seconds. She would also go on to win the gold as part of Team USA in the women’s 4×100 meters relay final with a championship record of 41.03 seconds. A graduate of Harvard University, she studied neurobiology and global health as an undergraduate. Thomas is pursuing a master’s degree in epidemiology at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston at their Austin regional campus. Gabby, it’s great to have you on the show, welcome.
[00:09:16] Gabby: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
[00:09:18] Albert: Let’s talk a little bit about your background and, growing up and some of your, formative experiences. So, you grew up in the Pioneer Valley of Western Mass. and attended the Williston Northampton School. Yeah, share with our listeners a little bit about your family, formative educational experiences, mentors, heroines, heroes. How did it all shape you to become a world-class athlete who also pursued — I mean, you’re working on an advanced degree in science as well!
[00:09:44] Gabby: Yeah. Yeah. I actually graduated in May, which is really exciting, but yeah, thank you. Thank you. grew up in Massachusetts, Western Massachusetts, and I went to Williston Northhampton School, which is kind of the smaller boarding school in the area. One of the most unique and helpful things about being in that type of environment was really like the familial atmosphere of being there. So especially being at Williston but even in Western Mass., you just have this community of people around you. And I tell people this all the time: When you’re trying to do something different in your life or embark on a new journey or have success in any area, you really want to focus on the environment that you’re in and the community that you’re a part of and surrounding yourself with people who are helping you grow.
[00:10:25] Gabby: And Western Massachusetts and Williston was exactly that for me. And going into it, I didn’t know that that’s what I was getting, right? I didn’t know that’s the kind of environment I’d be growing up in when my mom moved my brother and I up to Western Massachusetts, but that’s what I got. And I was surrounded by, you know, friends who we had really, really good and tight friendships. And we did sports together. We took our challenging classes together. We did all of our extracurricular activities together. I had coaches who were also my teachers. And so, they helped me grow in every avenue of my life and followed me in every part of it.
[00:10:58] Gabby: And were really committed to my development as a person. You know, with sports, outside of sports, with my friendships, with my family. And so,I had all of that and I don’t even think I realized it at the time, but as I look back and think about it, I mean, that was a huge part of my success because I felt so comfortable, you know, making mistakes with them, growing with them.
[00:11:18] Gabby: And one person that really comes to mind as you asked me, this question is my algebra teacher and my track coach, Mrs. McCullough. I hated algebra, but she was my math teacher and, she made, you know, I just loved her and she helped me so much with it. And she was really invested in me, and she’s still invested in me to this day. And she’s one of the, my biggest mentors and, and influences in my life. But that comes from being in that type of environment, having so many people who genuinely care about you.
[00:11:47] Albert: Yeah, yeah, that sounds like a great experience and I hope Ms. McCullough — might have to send her this show and hear that shout-out.
[00:11:53] Gabby: Yeah, and then you know that goes same with my family You know, I grew up with my mom in a single mother household and my twin brother. So, it was the three of us in the household and my mom was just the same way, very driven. Very invested in my development as a person. She was never too too stressed out about, the outcome, you know, upgrades or the outcome of, of what I did in sports, but it was always just about the journey and developing myself into the best version of myself that I could be across anything that I was doing. So, I think that’s just a really special part of my upbringing.
[00:12:23] Albert: Well, so let’s talk after Williston — you went off to Harvard and studied neurobiology and you ran NCAA track while you were there. So, at Harvard, you won 22 conference titles across three years in various track events. You know, set school and Ivy league records in 100 meters, 200 meters, indoor 60 meters. I don’t know, maybe the list could go on. Could you talk about those experiences? I mean, really in particular, how did you grow as an athlete from high school to college? And then how’d you balance the demands of being a student and an elite track competitor?
[00:12:58] Gabby: Oh my gosh. I mean, I will tell anyone that listens that that transition from high school to collegiate track and field was the roughest time period for me, I think, of my life to date. I don’t think understood demands that being a collegiate D1 athlete took from us. Coming from someone did sports and it was fun for me and it, you know, wasn’t the end-all, be-all of my activities and what I was doing. But yeah, so I mean, I arrived there and one reason I chose Harvard goes back to the environment factor was I understood that I had a coach who was very invested in our development and I had teammates who were trying to develop and create this culture at Harvard.
[00:13:35] Gabby: Of a very elite D1 track school. So, they were trying to compete with the likes of Oregon’s LSU, Florida’s, you know, that, that was kind of what we were going towards. And I wanted to be a part of that. And so, I don’t think I understood what it took to be a part of that when I arrived. So, one day my coach, he just sat me down and said, Hey, look, this isn’t intramurals, like we’re here to actually make a difference in the NCAA and do something special. So ,if you want to be a part of that, let me know. And then I had to have a mindset shift pretty quickly after that. I just kind of pulled it together. I always, you know, I say, if you want to do something, you figure out a way to get it done.
[00:14:06] Gabby: And I was really passionate about track, and I was growing to love it. And so, I just had to get it done. It became time management and just making time for what you prioritize and what you care about. So that meant going out a lot less with my friends. It meant eating healthier, you know, it meant getting my schoolwork done. It meant getting my schoolwork done in time so that I wasn’t stressed about it. Going into practice because stress can also affect your training. I did all of that, but I think at the end of the day, if anyone’s listening and they want to know how to balance those demands, I think it’s about really enjoying what you’re doing. Major in something that you are passionate about and that you want to learn and then do a sport and be in an environment of teammates that you want to be a part of. Because if you don’t want to do it, you’re just not going to do it well.
[00:14:47] Albert: Well, so, speaking of the end of your, NCAA career, really, you decided to forego that final year of eligibility and turn pro. Signed a contract, New Balance, moved to Texas. Talk about that transition. You know, what was it like going from high performing NCAA athlete to then The next level being a professional sprinter? And what were some of the key decisions you had to make to really take your track career to the next level?
[00:15:15] Gabby: You know, that was also a very difficult transition. Any transition, any extreme transition is going to be difficult, right? But that was tough. I didn’t understand what it means to be a pro athlete either. And a lot of people don’t know what it means to be a pro track and field athlete. You only think it’s serious every Olympic year, right? You don’t realize how much goes into it and how much you need to be competing. Because nobody knows how much we’re competing as track athletes. So, and I also had to be very independent. So, in college, your coach is telling you exactly what to do all the time. When you’re a pro athlete, that’s not the case. You are a professional and you were expected to make decisions for yourself. I’m not sure that I had gained that maturity at my first year of being a pro. I ended up learning and figuring it out.
[00:15:51] Gabby: And you just have so much more responsibility. You know, now you have an agent, you have, you know, a team of people that you have to work with. And I was so young, you know, when you go pro after college, you’re still so young. And now you have all of these things to worry about. But the transition at Harvard made it definitely easier.
[00:16:09] Gabby: I was able to continue to train with my Harvard teammates, train with my Harvard coach, and then New Balance is right next door headquartered in Boston. So, it was a very, very natural partnership with them. So that was great. But then I decided that I did want to take my training to the next level and move to train with people who have Olympic medals.
[00:16:27] Gabby: My coach who also had Olympic medals and just warmer weather. It’s easier to sprint in warmer weather, to be honest, you miss a lot less training. My Harvard coach, he couldn’t control that, but so yeah, I moved down figured it out, you know, that very different training regimen.
[00:16:43] Gabby: But it ended up working out for the best and I love my group, I love my coach, and I love my teammates., and I love Austin, Texas. So, once I moved to Texas, everything, you know, went smoothly after the COVID year, we couldn’t compete that year, but after that I just, took it year by year and it’s been great.
[00:16:59] Albert: And so at the U.S. Olympic trials in June of 2021 and of course, it seems weird to say 2021 trials because the Olympics were delayed due to the pandemic. So, your 200 meters time of 21.61 seconds was the second fastest ever, surpassed only by Florence Griffith Joyner’s 1988 world record. Tell us about that moment, how it felt to qualify for the Olympics, you know, how it felt to run such an elite time and, really get to that level?
[00:17:27] Gabby: That moment to me was very surreal. I was training all year, honestly, all two years because of COVID for the Olympic trials. But it just never felt like it was a given to me that I was going to be an Olympian or make the team. I remember my plan after graduating from Harvard was to try to make the Olympics, you know, go move to Texas, go give it what I could, and then after that, go get my master’s in public health and just continue on with the career that I had originally intended to do.
[00:17:54] Gabby: And so, when I actually made the Olympic team, that was an incredible shock for me, [00:18:00] but then to make it and then become a gold medal favorite with my 21.61 time was something beyond my wildest dreams, you know, to make the Olympic team, you have to be top three in your given discipline. And so, I just expected to be in that mix. I didn’t expect to win with that kind of time. That shifted my entire mindset surrounding track. I mean, everything changed within that millisecond. So now I was, yeah, I was going to the Olympics. I was a gold medal favorite. And I knew that I wasn’t going to be retiring anytime soon. I knew that, OK, well, I’m going to go to this Tokyo Olympics and most likely start training for the Paris Olympics soon after.
[00:18:33] Alisha: Gabby, I’m just so fascinated by you for a lot of reasons. And I love how reflective you are about your life and your upbringing and your education. And as an educator, I think there’s a lot to learn about how you were educated and what we can do for other students. So, thanks. It’s great to talk to you. So, I want to continue on this track about the Olympics, which is so incredible. And to hear you say you didn’t even expect that it was going to happen is incredible, but it really just speaks to how hard you work, right.
[00:19:02] Alisha: And that you were able to accomplish this. And so, at the Olympics in Tokyo, you won the bronze medal in the 200 meters, running a time of 21.87. And then three days later, you and Team USA qualify for the finals of the women’s 4×100 meters relay, where you were an anchor, and the team won the silver medal. So, can you talk about what that’s like, being in the Olympics, winning, and receiving Olympic medals, and experiencing winning medals as an individual as part of a relay team?
[00:19:34] Gabby: Yeah. I mean, being in the Olympics was — that was a strange time, I think, for everyone just because it was a COVID Olympics and nobody was there. However, being at the Olympics was a lot of fun. I mean, you train and work so hard to be there. And when you finally are there, you can finally enjoy, you know, all the work that you’ve put in and just being in the village with other athletes that you admire and, seeing some mobiles right across the sidewalk and like, it’s amazing. And just being in that company and the competition of it is also so much fun because right, you’re training all season to be there and now you’re finally here and you can just do what you do. So, the nerves are, you know, you’re still nervous, but it’s just like this really fun, this is what I meant to do type of — And I remember running the race and just think, you know, the 200 final at the Olympics. And I was like, well, I’m here. This is what I’ve worked for. I’m just going to go have fun and give it all I’ve got. And I remember crossing the line and not even being sure if I had medaled because it was, I felt like it was so tight between me and Shelly and Fraser Price.
[00:20:37] Gabby: But then I looked up and they were telling me that I had medaled and come get my American flag and it was, it was unbelievable. I couldn’t, I like, again, I just couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe that I was in that position. So yeah, that, that was incredible. And then after that, getting to run on the 4×100 relay. Running on a relay is just so much fun.
[00:20:56] Gabby: Having an individual metal, you have this immense sense of pride and accomplishment. It’s an amazing feeling and no one can take that medal from you, but having a relay medal, it just feels bigger than yourself and you’ve really come together with the team to accomplish something really exciting and really historic and it’s kind of different. They’re both amazing, but having a relay medal just, it is really special, special feeling. And it’s the kind of bond that you have with your teammates and girls that also can’t be taken away.
[00:21:24] Alisha: Yes, quite a very special sorority or fraternity, I’m guessing. Incredible. So, Gabby, another reflection question. You said after the Olympics quote, everything I’ve been working for essentially two years was just over. I won the medals, but it was just still over. And I was like, OK, what do I do now? And so, can you talk about what it was like in terms of the media attention and how you got reacclimated to your life with family, friends, and school once you returned home from the Olympics?
[00:21:57] Gabby: That was a really weird feeling, too, that nobody really talks about is, once you’ve put all that work and you’re on such an emotional high being at the Olympics, and then it is over. Immediately when you come back and you’re kind of left with just a lot of like downtime a lot of people asking about the Olympics and stuff like that. And there’s a lot of media kind of responsibilities. And so, it was a huge shift. For me, in terms of my lifestyle and how I was interacting with everyone around me. And so, yeah, that took some getting used to, definitely. They call it the Olympic crash. just something that people don’t really talk about very much, especially to the media. And so, getting reacclimated with everyone took time. I ended up getting a therapist just because felt like I had gotten to this point in my life where I needed that and trying to maintain some type of normalcy. With my family and friends and trying to stay structured with my school work as well.
[00:23:00] Gabby: Yeah. So yeah, it was a lot to kind of tackle, and it was a lot to go through very abruptly. But I’ve gotten ahold of it. And then I just went through another major championships since last season, and I feel like I’ve kind of gotten it under my belt.
[00:23:13] Alisha: Absolutely. Thank you for sharing that. That’s so important and another great lesson for people. Thank you for that. So, I want to shift because not only are you an Olympic medalist you’re also quite brilliant. And so, I want to talk about your remarkable achievements. Not only as a you are not only a world-class track sprinter, but you’ve also accomplished an enormous amount in your academic work at Harvard, and as you mentioned, just graduated from the University of Texas. And so, can you talk to us about your studies, your research in, neurobiology, epidemiology, public health? Can you talk more about your interest, how you got there and what that work is like for you now?
[00:23:53] Gabby: When I was in high school, knew that I wanted to do neurobiology. I think I was a last semester junior/first semester senior at that point when I had made that decision and I wanted to do research on autism because you know, my little brother has autism and then my twin brother had ADHD that he was struggling with and with school just made it a lot more difficult for him, and so I know I wanted to do that and I wanted to go to a college that had a good neuro program, fortunately, Harvard worked out and I figured that would be a great neuro program for me.
[00:24:25] Gabby: So, I went to Harvard and I ended up doing neurobiology with a minor in global health and health policy and with a lot of these courses that I was taking, I started taking some of these biology courses and also complementing them with some sociology courses. I started to become increasingly aware about the medical health disparities and specifically race disparities in the healthcare field. I was just mind blown. And at the time it wasn’t something that was kind of at the forefront of the media and what we were talking about. Fortunately, that did come a little bit later. And especially with COVID people started having those discussions more publicly, but that really. Validated my interest in the field and it also validated me going into my master’s program. So, by the time COVID had hit, I had already been accepted into my master’s in epidemiology at UT. That was something that I decided to do before graduating from Harvard as well.
[00:25:18] Gabby: And part of my decision to move to Austin, Texas and train with this group was because I knew that I would get to go to the University of Texas and get my master’s there while I trained for the Olympics. So that was always part of the plan. And it was either going to be Austin or somewhere in L.A. The University of Texas was just a great fit for me, and so I wanted to combat race disparities, and I felt like epidemiology would give me a great foundation for going into that and continuing to do research, and public health was just at the forefront of my mind. It’s what I wanted to do when I finished running, I wanted to go into healthcare administration and be CEO and run a hospital one day and make these changes as I saw fit.
[00:25:55] Gabby: I loved it. I just graduated in May and I did — a lot of my research was actually ended up being on sleep epidemiology. Because that’s something that is very, very important in my life, especially as a pro athlete, but it’s also something that has a huge race disparity. And sleep health is something that really is not talked about. And it’s a huge epidemic in our country and has very, very severe effects on your overall health, long-term health and especially your cardiovascular health and African Americans in our country are being affected by that more prominently than anything else. And that’s also due to, like, lifestyle factors, but also just other things that we’re not looking at.
[00:26:33] Gabby: And so, I just got really into that during my masters, but really, that’s the path and journey that got me into that line of study, and I’ve loved it and I’m really excited about it. And since graduating, I started volunteering at a clinic here in Austin and it provides healthcare services to people who don’t have health insurance or very limited health insurance. So, I have, you know, a set number of patients and cases that I follow just to make sure that they are getting the healthcare services they need. And making sure that they’re keeping up with their appointments and helping them with some lifestyle factors that are within their control. So, it’s really meaningful work and I think it’s a good use of my degree for now until I can retire and continue.
[00:27:15] Alisha: Outstanding. You are just so phenomenal. I’ve got one more question for you. And you mentioned that you just won silver medal in the 200 meters at the World Athletics Championships. Congratulations.
Gabby: Thank you.
Alisha: With a time of 21.81. And so, you also won the gold medal as part of Team USA in the 4×100 meters relay final with a championship record of 41.03 seconds. Amazing. So, would you talk about these achievements as well as your future plans in 2024 Olympics in Paris?
[00:27:51] Gabby: Yeah. So, the world championships this year was really exciting because I actually was injured in 2022. So, coming back in 2023 and getting to run for Team USA again was really important to me. Yeah, sitting out in 2022 was very hard. And a lot of times your comeback season after an injury is really telling and indicative of your future success because injuries can be a huge mental setback for a lot of athletes. And kind of throw off the momentum. So, I mean, this season, this last season was my best one yet. Silver medal at a major championship is great. Great performance for me at the championship and I had a PB at our trials. So, it was really good. And then Team USA, our 4×100 relay was historic. I mean, we had a championship record, and we all came together and worked really well. And I think that bodes well for our Olympics, especially coming and competing against the Jamaican team, which is, known for being amazing.
[00:28:45] Gabby: So it was great and really promising and it’s great momentum going into the Olympic year. So now we’re in 2024, and we’re preparing for the Paris Olympics, and training is going well and I have high expectations for myself. I just plan to keep improving and getting better. And, you know, I did bronze and then I did silver.
[00:29:04] Gabby: So, the goal now is to keep improving and go for a gold. So, I”m loving it. loving track. I’m loving training and competing is going well, so. Yeah, I’m really looking forward to the Paris Olympics.
[00:29:14] Alisha: Incredible. This has been so awesome talking to you. I am personally very excited to see your contributions both in public health and as a pro athlete and an Olympic star. So, thank you, thank you so much for joining us.
[00:29:30] Gabby: Thank you for having me.
[00:29:50] Albert: Great interview, indeed. And now just to wrap up, the Tweet of the Week comes from the Hechinger Report. In this tiny and shrinking Mississippi County, getting a college degree means leaving home behind. And Alisha, this was a fascinating read for me. Actually I don’t know if you’re familiar with the essayist and poet Wendell Berry, but really reminded me about a lot of what he’s written in the past. Really this is an article that talks about this really rural Mississippi County where there’s only 42 adults that have a college degree, and I forget the exact population, I believe there’s over a thousand people, and so we’re talking very, very few people with a college degree, and I think it captures the situation in a lot of our rural areas where we push kids to get into college and really college does give them access to a lot of other opportunities, but, you know, for a lot of these kids who go on to graduate from rural areas there’s not that many opportunities in their hometowns and so they end up leaving and you almost perpetuate this cycle of, these rural communities where there’s really little opportunity. And anyway, it does I think give us a lot of fodder for reflection. What would it look like to have postsecondary education kind of encourage, not just kids leaving their homes behind, but even encouraging them to perhaps even move back and think about how to really enrich that area and, renew their, hometown.
[00:31:12] Albert: So, take a look that read. I know there’s a lot of other complicated issues, particularly in, this county. I mean, with the racial past that’s been there some socioeconomic and business interests. And so, it’s complicated, but caused me to really reflect a lot.
[00:31:26] Alisha: Yeah. And I think it’s important to note, right, that there are communities that have figured this out, right? You get industry involved, you get the school system involved, government involved, and you create a pipeline where young people get a great education in their K-12 system. They go off to college, they come back, they start businesses, right?
[00:31:44] Alisha: You train the people that work there. So, it’s definitely something that can be overcome, but it requires big thinking and vision. And so, my hope is that as these students go off to college, that they will feel that sense of ownership in their community and want to come back. Create some of these [00:32:00] opportunities for those coming behind them.
[00:32:03] Albert: Thank you, Alisha, for joining me this week It’s always great to be with you.
[00:32:08] Alisha: Thank you great to be with you, Albert.
[00:32:10] Albert: Well, anyway, that’s it for this edition of the Learning Curve podcast. Join us next week. We have Jonathan Eig, who’s going to join us and talk about his biography of Martin Luther King. Until then, be well, everybody. Take care.
This week on The Learning Curve, guest co-hosts Prof. Albert Cheng of the University of Arkansas and Alisha Searcy interview Gabby Thomas, a world-class track sprinter and Olympian, originally from the Pioneer Valley in western Massachusetts. She shares her journey from the Williston Northampton School to Harvard, where she balanced neurobiology studies with winning 22 track titles. Transitioning to professional sprinting, she qualified for the Tokyo Olympics, winning bronze and silver medals. In addition to track sprinting, Ms. Thomas excels academically, focusing on neurobiology and global public health. She recently graduated from the University of Texas Health Science Center with a master’s degree in epidemiology. After medal-winning performances at the 2023 World Athletics Championships this past summer, Ms. Thomas shares how she’s looking ahead to the 2024 Olympics in Paris.
Stories of the Week: Albert comments on a story from New York Post about charter schools improved test scores; Alisha reviews a story in Chalkbeat regarding issues to watch for in 2024.
Guest:
Gabrielle Thomas is a world-class American track athlete in the 100 and 200 meters sprints. She won the bronze medal in the 200 meters and a silver medal as part of the women’s 4×100 meters relay at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. In summer 2023, she claimed the 200 meters silver medal in the World Athletics Championships in Budapest with a time of 21.81 seconds. She would also go on to win the gold as part of Team U.S.A. in the women’s 4×100 meters relay final with a championship record of 41.03 seconds. A graduate of Harvard University, she studied neurobiology and global health as an undergraduate. Thomas recently earned her master’s degree in epidemiology at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston at their Austin regional campus.
Tweet of the Week:
https://x.com/hechingerreport/status/1742221714979783061?s=20
NYT Bestseller Jonathan Eig on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
/in Education, Featured, Learning Curve, News, Podcast /by Editorial StaffRead a transcript
TRANSCRIPT
The Learning Curve Podcast
Jonathan Eig on MLK
January 15, 2024
[00:00:24] Albert: Well, hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Learning Curve podcast. I’m your host, Albert Cheng, from the University of Arkansas. Co-hosting with me today is our friend, my friend, Alisha Searcy. Hey, Alisha, how’s it going?
[00:00:37] Alisha: Hello, Albert. Wonderful. Great to be with you again.
[00:00:41] Albert: Yeah, that’s right. And happy Martin Luther King Day. We’re meeting here to broadcast this episode to commemorate that. And yeah, we’ve got an exciting guest, Jonathan Eig, who’s the author of the definitive biography of Dr. King. And so, we’re looking forward to sitting down with him and learning more about his life.
[00:01:01] Alisha: I live in Atlanta, so, you know, clearly, I’ve interacted with the King family and know a lot about his history, but I’m very interested to hear more and learn more. I think her was, King was such a fascinating figure in a lot of ways. So, I’m very much looking forward to this and of course celebrating his birthday and his legacy.
[00:01:22] Albert: Yeah. Yeah. Well, first up some news and maybe just speaking about reform — you know, this is not civil rights reform necessarily, but education reform — I want to point out an article in Education Next written by Sue Walsh, it’s actually a piece written in memory of Linda Brown. And so, in case listeners aren’t familiar, Linda Brown was a major school reform figure particularly in Massachusetts, but also nationwide. Years ago, in the early days of the charter movement she started the Charter Resource Center here at Pioneer which eventually became the Building Excellent Schools initiative that she managed and ran for many years training — I don’t know what — it’s hundreds of charter school leaders across the country! The article referred to her as the Yoda of the charter school movement. And really, she trained a lot of the school leaders, the other Jedi, I guess, if you will. A lot of thanks goes out to her. We really wouldn’t have a lot of the excellent charter schools that are out there today if it weren’t for her. So, really want to recognize her passing. Happened last year on Christmas Day, actually. I just want to point listeners out to learn more about her life and legacy at the article at Ed Next.
[00:02:32] Alisha: Absolutely. And we thank her for her work. I remember when she passed Dr. Howard Fuller, who’s a mentor of mine, tweeted about it and what a force she was. So, we are grateful for her work, and I happen to lead a couple of the schools of the founder who went through BES. So, her legacy is tremendous and spans across this country. And so, we thank her for her work and her legacy. And I can only imagine how difficult it was for her, at the start of all of this. And so, I don’t think it’s an accident that we’re talking about her work and the trails that she blazed on Dr King’s birthday. I’m one of those people who believe that education is a civil rights issue, and so, it’s important to acknowledge those who have sacrificed and done a whole lot of work to help us get to where we are.
[00:03:23] Albert: Yeah. Yeah, that’s absolutely right. The charter school movement is just over 30 years old. You know, 30 years is about the time period for a generation. So, we’re always looking out for the next generation of leaders in the school reform movement.
[00:03:35] Alisha: That’s right. Step up, because we need you!
[00:03:38] Albert: Yeah, that’s right. Well, what have you got on your docket for, in terms of news?
[00:03:42] Alisha: So, very interesting story. Utah has no plans to change the lowest-in-nation education spending, officials say. And this is a piece from the Salt Lake Tribune. And so, Albert, we all know this ongoing debate about “we need more money in education. If we just had more money, we could just fix everything.” And I do not subscribe to that philosophy. I don’t think we have a money problem in education, I think we have a priority problem. And so, this article is very interesting. So, a few facts that I learned, I didn’t know this about Utah. They remain one of the lowest education spending states in the country and were the lowest for two decades until 2021. And now they’re 49 only bested by Idaho which is now the lowest in the country. And so, we’re talking $9,095 per student as compared to the state of New York, whose average per-pupil spending is, get this, $26,000. And I’m not picking on New York, there’s obviously economies of scale and all of that. And I’ll talk about poverty in a second. But what’s interesting here is that despite Utah being one of the lowest in the country in terms of spending, they’re actually outperforming other states who spend a lot more in some of the most critical areas.
[00:05:06] Alisha: So, for example, in math, Utah is tied with Massachusetts, which, by the way, spends more than double what Idaho does. And they have the highest percentage of eighth graders scoring above proficiency as of 2022. Same thing. And they’re number five when it comes to fourth graders scoring above proficiency in math, and similar numbers for fourth and eighth grade in terms of leading in the country, in the top 10.
[00:05:31] Alisha: And so, I think it, again, begs the question. But before I got too excited, I realized that Utah doesn’t quite have it all together. It turns out that less than half of their third graders are reading on grade level. So, they’ve got some work to do. The good news is they are going to be spending, I think it’s $11 million out of their $1 billion of COVID funding to focus on literacy.
[00:05:57] Alisha: The question is, when you identify what the problem is, how do you direct those resources in the right place for the right reasons for the right people. So it’ll be interesting to see what happens, but at the end of the day I think it’s important to have these conversations about the impact of funding. The last thing I want to mention that can’t be lost in this conversation is the rate of child poverty. Can I ignore the impact that poverty has on educational outcomes? It’s not an excuse. I’m not one of those people who believes it’s an excuse, but you do have to acknowledge: If a student doesn’t have a home, if they didn’t eat this morning, they’re probably going to have a challenge learning. So, when you look at Utah, they have an 8 percent child poverty rate compared to Georgia where I live, it’s 20 percent. And so that makes a difference, interesting article. I appreciate it. I think it’s an important conversation that we need to continue to have, and we need to decide, I think as a country and as states, how do we get the biggest bang for our buck so that we can compete lik eUtah, and our states can all be at the top. And it’s not about the money, but it’s about our priorities and how we best spend those dollars.
[00:07:10] Albert: Well, yeah, this is the perennial question in education. How do we use our resources well and deliver it to the students and families that need it the most. And, you know, at the same time, how do we set up policies and build institutions that support children and their homes and their families? There’s a lot to the big picture here and it takes all of us and it takes all of us. So, let’s see what happens in Utah. And in the meantime, stick with us coming up after the break. Again, we have Jonathan Eig, who’s going to sit down and chat with us about Dr. Martin Luther King.
[00:08:07] Albert: Jonathan Eig is the best-selling author of six books, including his most recent, King A Life, which was nominated for the National Book Award, and the New York Times hailed it as the definitive biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. Jonathan’s previous book, Ali: A Life, won a 2018 Penn America Literary Award, and Esquire magazine named it one of the 25 greatest biographies of all time.
[00:08:35] Albert: He also served as consulting producer for the PBS series Muhammad Ali, directed by Ken Burns. Jonathan’s first book, Luckiest Man, The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig, reached number 10 on the New York Times bestseller list and won the Casey Award. His books have been listed among the best of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, and translated into more than a dozen languages. Jonathan appeared on the Today Show, NPR’s Fresh Air, and the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. He studied journalism at Northwestern University and went on to work as a reporter for the New Orleans Times Picayune, and the Dallas Morning News, Chicago Magazine, and The Wall Street Journal. He lives in Chicago. Jonathan, it’s really great to have you on the show.
[00:09:20] Jonathan: Thank you. It’s good to talk to you.
[00:09:24] Albert: Let’s start with a couple questions about some of Dr. Martin Luther King’s background and influences. So, as we celebrate his life and legacy and in your definitive biography, king of Life you emphasize his deep faith as a Baptist pastor. So, could you talk a bit more about that? Share with us what we know about. His role as a young spiritual leader and preacher in Montgomery, Alabama especially during the largely female-led bus boycott from 1955 to ‘56.
[00:09:52] Jonathan: You know, when you think about what made King the right person in that moment, well, obviously, a lot of things had to come together for him to be the leader of that bus boycott. And as you hinted, it was really the women who prepared for that moment, who had prepared for years and who organized the boycott. It was women out there distributing the flyers and urging people to stay off the buses. How does King become the leader? It’s because he is a preacher for one thing. And that gives him a position of authority in this very still sexist world and time in which he was living. It’s also because he’s new in town and he hadn’t made any enemies yet, but it’s really his religion that allows him to speak to this group and to unite people and to inspire people. He’s a preacher, he’s a son of a preacher, and the grandson of a preacher and he sees the Bible as something that’s in conflict with American society, and you know, the black social gospel says that the job is to bring those things into alliance, into harmony, that it’s the job of the church, it’s the job of preachers, it’s the job of Christians to change the world until people really are all equal in the eyes of God and in the eyes of their government too.
[00:11:02] Albert: Yeah, well, so, you know, speaking of preaching and, you know, you gave many, many speeches. I’m thinking of Langston Hughes, actually, just to get to another influence his famous poem “Harlem, a Dream Deferred. That poem strongly influenced Martin Luther King’s sermons and speeches about dreams. Could you just talk a bit more about his literary background about, you know, his knowledge of the Bible, scripture, history, founding documents, other poems, hymns, spirituals, like did those, some of those literary works influence him?
[00:11:33] Jonathan: You know, it’s important to remember that King was learning to preach before he could read, and he absorbed so much in his lessons he would travel the neighborhood and listen to different preachers. He would listen to preachers on the radio, and he would listen to poems in school. And it all went into this great mind of his, and it all churned around and came out in different ways. But he was really a borrower. It got him in trouble sometimes. He was accused of plagiarism and he was guilty of plagiarism. But I think he saw himself, again, as a preacher, which meant that he wasn’t so much worried about originality. He was focused on inspiring an audience. And if he heard a line from Langston Hughes and he could mix that with something from the Bible and mix that with something from the constitution, he was like a jazz musician, clipping phrases from here and from there and, imitating other jazz musicians.
[00:12:25] Albert: That’s an excellent way put it, fascinating way. Just as a jazz, a literary jazz musician, if you kind of mush those two together. Yeah. Um, moving on to, another important influence is his wife. So, you talk about Coretta Scott King a lot in your biography, they married in 1953 on the lawn of her parents’ house in her Alabama hometown. Had four children. talk a bit more about Coretta Scott King. you know, her background, what their marriage was like, what their family was like.
[00:12:51] Jonathan: I really felt like it was important to give her a more prominent role in this book. She is often, like a lot of women of her era, has been overlooked, assigned to this role as being the supporter. and we fail to appreciate just how important and how much of an inspiration she was. And, when King met Coretta, they were students, he was at Boston University, and she was at the New England Conservatory of Music. He was dating a lot of women. And you have to ask yourself, why Coretta? And I think it’s because she was an activist. She had a career already in activism. She’d been to Antioch, you know, an integrated white college. She’d been involved in all kinds of protest movements and King hadn’t done anything yet at that point. So, he thought that he could learn from her and that’s to his credit. He continued to learn from her. He continued to be pushed by her to be more aggressive, to think more globally about his role as an activist. He didn’t always appreciate that. He didn’t give her the opportunities that he should have. He was still, you know, mired in his own prejudices, but I think that Coretta really hasn’t been fully appreciated throughout the history of as we tell these stories.
[00:14:00] Albert: Well, so let’s get into some of the actual work and activism. As you note Dr King co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the late ‘50s and then played a secondary role in the Freedom Rides in 1961. and Southern Christian Leadership Conference also, I mean, they’re involved with the efforts at Albany, Georgia in ‘61, ‘62, but they were largely unsuccessful. Talk about this period of King’s work and the lessons that learned from the experiences at that time.
[00:14:31] Jonathan: You know, King was 26 years old when he became the leader of the Montgomery bus boycott. Like, I don’t remember that. I don’t even want to think about how little I was accomplishing at age 26. After that, he even writes to one of his college professors. What am I supposed to do now? I feel like I’ve peaked at 26. People are going to be expecting miracles from me, and I don’t know what to do. So, he tries and fails a number of times. We see him really struggling. He starts the Southern Christian Leadership Conference but doesn’t really have a plan for how he’s going to make it a success. He undertakes these movements in places like St. Augustine and Albany, Georgia, and they don’t go very well. It looks like he’s kind of defeated in these places by the white power structure. That he starts these protests, but it’s not really clear what he’s trying to accomplish. It’s not as simple as integrating buses, and he leaves those towns without really much to show for it. So King is adapting, he’s learning. You know, other people are now having some success with student sit -ins at lunch counters and on, on the buses, the freedom rides, as you mentioned. And King, to his credit, doesn’t try to take over those movements. He helps where he can. He’s showing some humility. He’s listening. He’s learning. And he’s trying to figure out how to make the next movement a success. So, it’s a really great moment to see young King learning and learning from his mistakes.
[00:15:49] Albert: Well, so speaking of all the other people involved in, the civil rights movement, it’s been noted that at times that it was Dr. King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference who are leading and other times it was students and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, for instance. You know, there were other civil rights figures — Diane Nash, Bob Moses. Could you talk about the relationship between Dr. King and the CLC and all these other entities within the civil rights movement?
[00:16:18] Jonathan: It was a challenge, you know, it was a challenge and an opportunity. So, you know, King comes along and out of nowhere After years of seeing groups like the NAACP really leading the way he’s a superstar and he’s attracting all this attention and he’s also kind of a threat in some ways to the establishment and by the time he’s 30 years old, he’s a threat to the NAACP in one way, but he’s also, too conservative for some of the younger activists. They’re starting to call him De Lord, as if he’s like, you know, high and mighty and out of touch with the young people in the movement. So, really difficult. King’s got to navigate a very difficult path. And I think that’s one of his great skills is that he’s a great listener. He’s open to learning from others. He’s not trying. To hog the spotlight. He wants to work with others. And, you know, even people like Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael come away really impressed when they spend time with King, they go in skeptically and they come out really admiring. And he was just a great coalition builder in spite of everything.
[00:17:16] Albert: Well, we could use a lot of coalition building these days, too.
[00:17:18] Jonathan: Yes. Even a little would be good. Yeah.
[00:17:26] Alisha: So, Jonathan, thanks for being here. I’m very fascinated by your work. And as someone who grew up in the NAACP and learned a lot about these figures through the years, it’s quite interesting to get your perspective. And so, one of my favorite pieces of literature I will call in our history is the Letter from a Birmingham Jail. And so, I would love for you to talk about Reverend Shuttlesworth and how he worked to have the S.E.L.C. And Dr. King comes to Birmingham, Alabama for direct action and what many regarded as the most segregated city in the south, and to talk about what you know about Dr. King and his time in Birmingham and the participation of Reverend Shuttlesworth and the students and the protest there. And of course, the letter from the Birmingham jail.
[00:18:13] Jonathan: Thank you so much for asking that because, you know, Reverend Shuttlesworth does not get the attention he deserves. We should someday, I think — I predict we’ll see a movie and certainly another book or two written about him because he’s just such a fascinating figure and he’s a great example of how King is being pushed by people who want to put the pedal to the metal. They’re saying we’re not being aggressive enough. We’re not aiming high enough. And Shuttlesworth — after King fails in places like St. Augustine and Albany — Shuttlesworth is saying come to Birmingham. Birmingham is the most racist city. They call it Bombingham because, you know, there’s so many bombs going off. White people are blowing up black churches, black homes. Shuttlesworth’s home was destroyed by a bomb. It was a miracle that he survived. And, you would think King might say, why would I want to go to the most difficult, most dangerous place?
[00:19:02] Jonathan: But that’s a testament to, you know, the persuasiveness of Shuttlesworth, but also to the understanding that King has of his role. That his role is to shine a light on America’s racism, its discrimination, to show the world what black people are facing, especially in the Deep South at that point. And he goes to Birmingham knowing that it’s going to be difficult. And, he would say afterwards, or, you know, some of his supporters would say afterwards that they had this Operation C for Conflict their plan was to stir a conflict, but they did not have a plan going in. They only said that afterwards. Their plan was to just go in and see what happens. And that’s what makes it so powerful. That’s why the letter from Birmingham jail is so powerful because it’s a spontaneous act of passion and protest.
[00:19:49] Alisha: Wow. Very powerful time. So, in 1963, 250,000 demonstrators marched to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., where Dr. King gave his famous — now we know as “I Have a Dream” speech. And then a year later in 1964, he won the Nobel Peace Prize. Can you talk about these events and the famous speeches Dr. King delivered at those?
[00:20:12] Jonathan: The March on Washington is King’s most famous moment. Of course, we all know “I Have a Dream.” Every kid learns it in kindergarten now. But it’s important to remember that he didn’t plan to give that part of the speech. What he planned to say and remember also that it was the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. What he wrote in the prepared portion of that speech, and what he delivered in the prepared portion of his speech, was a really harsh criticism of America and its debt that it owed the people whose families, whose ancestors had been enslaved. He talked about the fact that. There was a moral reckoning that needed to be made, that a check had been written and it had come back with insufficient funds. America would not be able to move on until it atoned for the sin of slavery. He talked about police brutality in that speech. That was, you know, the speech he intended to give. And we forget about that part because he gave this beautiful sermon at the end where he improvised and talked about his dream. And in some ways, it overshadows what was really important about that speech. But that having been said, you know, the “I Have a Dream” part of the speech really was beautiful and inspiring, and it made a lot of people, in particular white Americans, feel like, wow, we can change. Maybe we can do better. That was a moment. It was a moment where I think America looked like it might finally turn the corner.
[00:21:32] Alisha: Maybe we could stand to hear that one more time, right?
[00:21:35] Jonathan: Yeah, no question. But you know, part of the problem is that there’s always a backlash. And the people who don’t want to see change react to that. And you see a couple of things happen right after the March on Washington. You see the FBI produce a memo that’s saying because of that speech, because of King’s power to unite black and white Americans, we must view him as a threat, the greatest threat in America right now when it comes to race. You know, how sad is that? And then of course, soon after that memo is written, we get the bombing of the church in Birmingham with these innocent little girls are killed. And that’s because members of the Klan, white racists in Alabama, don’t want to see King’s dream fulfilled. And they’re going to do everything they can to stop it, including murder.
[00:22:22] Alisha: When Americans think about Dr. King and the civil rights era, they most often remember events in the American South, but Dr. King said his 1966 Chicago campaign was among his worst encounters with racism. Can you talk about Dr. King’s life experiences and how they differed in Northern and Southern cities?
[00:22:42] Jonathan: Yeah, that’s a really important subject too. It’s worth noting that King was talking about Northern racism, really his whole career, when he would travel to raise money in places like New York and Chicago, he would call out their own problems. He would say, yes, I’m fighting it out in Birmingham, I’m marching in Selma, but don’t forget you’ve got segregation here in the North too. You’ve got discrimination in hiring and in housing here, too. And by the time a little bit later, by the mid-sixties, he starts to focus his attention on that.
[00:23:11] Jonathan: He says it’s not enough anymore to work on desegregation in the South and voting rights. He would be hypocritical if he didn’t take action. And that’s why he begins to focus on the North. He moves to Chicago — my hometown in 1966 — moves into an apartment in North Lawndale. And tries to call attention to the fact that so many poor people in Chicago, and in particular poor black people, are living in these really dehumanizing conditions, and that landlords are making money on the poverty of their tenants, and he really wants to the nation see that this deeply ingrained racism affects the whole country, and it doesn’t go so well, you know, the media doesn’t like it.
[00:23:54] Jonathan: Northern politicians really just do their best to get him out of town and hope that he’ll go away. And King doesn’t get the kind of results that he’s looking for. And he begins to lose popularity. He begins to lose effectiveness. By 1967, I think 35 percent, only 35 percent of Americans said they approved of Martin Luther King’s tactics in Gallup polls. And he was getting frustrated. He felt like people weren’t, didn’t want to listen when he talked about Northern racism.
[00:24:19] Alisha: The epitome of leadership is hard and lonely, right? Doing the right work, but not very popular.
[00:24:26] Jonathan: That’s absolutely right. And I do think, you know, he felt lonely. I think he felt sad. We have the transcripts of his phone calls because the FBI was taping his calls and bugging his hotel rooms. And we can read what he was saying in his private moments to his friends, to his closest friends and allies. And he was depressed. He felt like people had given up on his dream and that it was turning into a nightmare. It’s really sad. It’s heartbreaking to read those transcripts.
[00:24:52] Alisha: Wow. I didn’t know that. So, in 1967 and ‘68, Dr. King and SELC launched the Poor People’s Campaign, which took him to Memphis and supported the striking sanitation workers. Can you talk about the message and the meaning of what was then his last speech entitled, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” and the days leading up to his assassination on April 4, 1968.
[00:25:15] Jonathan: Yeah. So, as I said, he felt like people weren’t listening to him anymore and that people didn’t want to talk about segregation and, discrimination in the North. And they didn’t want to hear what he had to say about the Vietnam War. And instead of, you know, giving up or deciding he was going to take some time off. He decided he was going to go all in. He was going to prepare his biggest protest of all, and he called it the poor people’s campaign. He was going to bring thousands and thousands of people to Washington, D.C. And they were basically going to occupy Washington, shut down the government, if necessary, until we reckoned with the discrimination with the income inequality that was plaguing this country — and it wasn’t going that well.
[00:25:55] Jonathan: King was having trouble recruiting, but it scared our government, it scared the president, it scared the FBI. They saw this as a terrible threat, and they ramped up their efforts to try to disrupt and discredit King. You know, at the same time, he was asked to go to Memphis to support the striking sanitation workers and his friends, his allies all said, don’t go, it’s just a bunch of garbage workers that, you know, you’ve got bigger problems. You got this poor people’s campaign to prepare for, but King felt like he had to go, that these were exactly the people that he cared about, these are the people he was trying to help. And that’s why he wanted to make a poor people’s campaign because these sanitation workers were working for low wages in unsafe conditions and he had to call it out.
[00:26:39] Jonathan: So, he was in Memphis and maybe didn’t have to be there. And that’s of course where he was assassinated. And as you mentioned, he gave one speech the night before he was killed. And people feel like maybe he forsesaw his own assassination, because he said that in that speech, like anyone else, I’d like to live a long life, but I know that that might not be for me. And it doesn’t matter now, because all that matters is that I do what I believe, that I fight for what’s right, and that I do what God put me on Earth here to do. And, he said, I may not reach the promised land, but I have seen the promised land, and I know that together as a people, we will get there.
[00:27:16] Alisha: Just a remarkable human being with such a tremendous burden that he carried. My last question for you before I ask you to read an excerpt from your book given the current state of national affairs, how should public officials, parents, schools alike draw on lessons and teachings from Dr. King’s life to better understand race. And provide higher quality, spiritual and political leadership to America?
[00:27:44] Jonathan: Wow. That’s a big question. You know, I think it’s great that we have a national holiday for King now, and it’s great that we have a monument for him. Monuments are easy to overlook and national holidays. It’s easy to stick with the simplified, safe version of King that we want to teach. It’s easy to talk about a dream and judging people by the content of their character. We need to remind people that King was a radical and that we can handle the truth of what he was trying to tell us. We don’t need to water it down. He was trying to tell us that if we didn’t address income inequality, if we didn’t address the roots of racism, if we didn’t atone for the sin of slavery, that we were going to continue to have the same problems over and over again.
[00:28:32] Jonathan: We were going to continue to find ourselves in conflict with one another. We would continue to treat people as other and as inferior and that we can do better if we just face the facts and deal with the truth. So I think that, you know, we should teach kids about it, “I Have a Dream,” but we should teach them about the first half of that speech too. We should make sure we teach them about the Letter from a Birmingham Jail. We should teach them that our own government, which celebrates him now with a national holiday, set out to destroy him.
[00:29:00] Alisha: Thank you for that. Wow. Would you read for us an excerpt from your book, so that our listeners can hear a part of your writing?
[00:29:11] Jonathan: All right, I’m going to read the very end because this is what I was just talking about. That we now have — just to set it up here — we have a thousand streets named after King, we have hundreds of schools we have watered down his message, and here’s what I say at the end of this epilogue: “Our simplified celebration of King comes at a cost. It saps the strength of his philosophical and intellectual contributions. It undercuts his power to inspire change. Even after Americans elected a black man as president, and after that president, Barack Obama, placed a bust of King in the Oval Office, the nation remains wracked with racism, ethnonationalism, cultural division, residential and educational segregation, economic inequality, violence, and a fading sense of hope that government, or anyone, will ever fix these problems. Where do we go from here? In spite of the way America treated him, King still had faith when he asked that question. Today, his words might help us make our way through these troubled times. But only if we actually read them, only if we embrace the complicated King, the flawed King, the human King, the radical King. Only if we see and hear him clearly again, as America saw and heard him once before. Our very survival, he wrote, depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant, and to face the challenge of change. Amen.”
[00:30:40] Alisha: Wooh! Jonathan, thank you for this powerful, remarkable, exceptional, maybe even call to action to all of us as we celebrate the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Thank you so much for being with us.
Albert: Thank you, Jonathan.
[00:30:57] Jonathan: Thanks for all the great questions. I enjoyed talking to you.
[00:31:17] Albert: Great interview. Great interview indeed. Absolutely learned a lot. Well, before we close out first, we have the Tweet of the Week, which comes from our friends at Education Next from this year’s top 20 EdNext articles of 2023. Supreme Court opens a path to religious charter schools, but the trail ahead holds twists and turns. And this was an article written last year by Professor Nicole Garnett. Check it out if you missed it last year, it’s a fascinating article. I mean, she’s a legal expert on education law and it’s an article about the possibility of religious charter schools. So, check that one out, but also check out the rest of the top 20 articles from Education Next from 2023. It gives us a nice, brief digest of what happened last year. Alisha, thanks for being with me on the show again. Great to co-host with you as always.
[00:32:10] Alisha: Absolutely. Thanks for having me. This was great today.
[00:32:13] Albert: All right. And that brings us to the end of this week’s episode. Join us next week as we talk to Cara Candal, who is the vice president of policy for ExcelinEd. And she’s going to join us as we kick off National School Choice Week for 2024. So, join us next week as we sit down and chat with her with all things school choice. But until then, I hope you have a great day, and I’ll see you next week.
[00:32:39] Alisha: Happy King Day!
This week on The Learning Curve, guest co-hosts Prof. Albert Cheng of the University of Arkansas and Alisha Searcy interview New York Times best-selling biographer of MLK, Jonathan Eig. Mr. Eig delves into MLK’s early spiritual leadership, the influence of Langston Hughes on his speeches, his relationship with his wife, Coretta Scott King, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s challenges. He explores historic events in Birmingham, Alabama, the March on Washington, MLK’s struggles in Chicago, the Poor People’s Campaign, and the events leading to MLK’s assassination in 1968. Eig underscores the multifaceted aspects of MLK’s life and provides insights on drawing lessons for contemporary challenges in race relations and leadership. Mr. Eig closes the interview with a reading from his book, King: A Life.
Stories of the Week: Albert reflects on a story from Education Next a memoriam for former Pioneer Institute and national charter school leader Linda Brown; Alisha reviews a story in The Salt Lake Tribune on how Utah has no plans to change it’s lowest-in-nation education spending.
Guest:
Tweet of the Week:
https://x.com/EducationNext/status/1743973293340664302?s=20
My Musings on Massachusetts’ Fiscal Picture
/in Blog, Blog: Economy, Economic Opportunity, Economic Opportunity, Featured, News, Pioneer Research /by Eileen McAnnenyThe state’s fiscal picture in January 2024 looks drastically different than it did in January 2023. There is a lot of speculation on both sides of the aisle as to why that is and/or who is to blame. I will add my opinion into the fray.
Last January, the state was flush with cash. Tax collections exceeded expectations, the federal government’s largesse funded a Transitional Escrow Account that had a balance of over $1 billion, and the Stabilization Fund was at an all-time high with a balance of over $8 billion.
Just two months earlier, in November 2022, the state had returned almost $3 billion in excess tax receipts to taxpayers per a little-known, voter-approved statutory requirement. The Pew Charitable Trusts summed up the situation this way: “Higher-than-forecasted tax revenue growth, historic federal aid, and record financial reserves have buttressed states’ fiscal positions over the past two budget years.”
In recognition that the economic outlook was changing due to high inflation and interest rates, geopolitical threats, uncertain monetary policy, and an end to federal assistance, experts projected that state revenues would grow by a modest 1.6 percent in FY 2024. This would provide state coffers with $40.4 billion in tax revenue collections, or $642 million more than last year for the operating budget that began on July 1, 2023.
Maura Healey was sworn in as governor in January 2023. She increased projected revenue collections by $150 million for FY2023 and vowed to fulfill her campaign promise of providing tax relief. She filed a bill to provide $1 billion in tax cuts. A version of that bill was enacted in October of 2023 that is estimated to reduce tax collections by $580 million in FY2024.
Since the start of FY2024 on July 1, 2023, the state has experienced six straight months of revenues falling short of expectations. The Healey administration indicated earlier this month that Massachusetts is looking at a $1 billion deficit for FY2024 and proceeded to make unilateral budget cuts totaling about $385 million.
Opponents of the tax cuts are quick to cite them as the cause of the revenue shortfall, even though not a single income tax return for the 2023 tax year has come due yet. Opponents of the millionaire’s tax point to the uptick in out-migration of high-income Massachusetts residents as a result of the income surtax as the reason the state is not meeting its revenue projections.
That is also a faulty argument, because even if that turns out to be true in the future, only estimated payments of tax liability for those affected taxpayers have been made so far, making it impossible for now to calculate final tax collection amounts resulting from the surtax.
The reasons for the sudden reversal of fortunes are likely far more complicated than those proposed by folks on either side of the tax divide. They include:
The single biggest factor, however, is the unprecedented growth of the state budget since FY2021. The $15 billion increase in state spending contextualizes the seemingly modest projected revenue growth of 1.6 percent for FY2024 by highlighting that the base is very inflated. Budget writers also assumed that 1.6 percent growth rate rather than the median rate of 1.3 percent proffered at the consensus revenue hearing, further inflating tax collection estimates. The sizable growth in state spending makes clear that the spending adjustments required to get the budget in balance will not be “cutting to the bone.”
To address the current shortfall, Gov. Healey chose to make unilateral cuts rather than tapping into state reserves to address the immediate shortfall, a wise move given the credit rating agencies’ preference for this option over using the Rainy Day fund when it isn’t raining.
Rather than speculating on the causes of the revenue shortfall, which are numerous, a more constructive exercise for lawmakers would be to think carefully about how to right-size the state budget after the unsustainable spending spree of the past two years.
A comprehensive review of state agencies and programs with recommendations for how to make state government function more efficiently would be a great place to start.
Olympic Track Medalist Gabby Thomas
/in Education, Featured, Learning Curve, News, Podcast /by Editorial StaffRead a transcript
The Learning Curve Gabby Thomas
[00:00:27] Albert: Good day, everyone. Welcome to another episode of The Learning Curve podcast. I’m your host, Albert Cheng from the university of Arkansas and co-hosting with me today is Alisha Searcy. Hey, Alisha, how’s it going?
[00:00:41] Alisha: Oh, wonderful, Albert, how are you doing?
[00:00:43] Albert: Fine. Doing fine. Yeah, that’s right. I don’t know if I’ve wished you that since we were last together last year.
[00:00:50] Alisha: That’s right. It’s good to be back.
[00:00:52] Albert: Yeah. So, we’re going to have Gabby Thomas, American Olympian, coming up after the break. But before that let’s talk some news, [00:01:00] Alisha. I want to talk about a story that came out recently. It’s actually an opinion piece put out by the editorial board of the New York Post, and the title is Test Scores Prove Charter Schools Win Again: Time to Lift the Cap.”
[00:01:13] Albert: And it actually reminds me of the days when I was living in Massachusetts. I was in Massachusetts back in ‘16. I think that was the year when there was a ballot measure to lift the cap on charter schools there. And despite all the great evidence of improved test scores and student outcomes that referendum got defeated. And so there’s still that cap there. And yeah, I was actually quite surprised that that happened there, despite all the positive evidence on charters in Massachusetts. And so, it looks like we got a similar political situation brewing in New York and don’t know if you’ve had to deal with this. I mean, in Georgia, you’ve got an interesting charter situation there yourself, right?
[00:01:51] Alisha: We do, and frankly, our laws are pretty strong and unbiased because I helped pass some of them when I was in the legislature. But I think we’re lucky that we don’t have to deal with caps. I think the caps are done by school boards who don’t tend to approve them. I think in the last eight years, we may have had two charter schools approved. And so, what we’ve done instead is pass a constitutional amendment. That allows the state to authorize charter schools. But to your point, it’s frustrating for me. I am a charter supporter. I know that that’s not always the most popular view, but I just believe in parents having access to all options within the public school system.
[00:02:28] Alisha: And so, I think this is an example of how adults kind of get in the way of what’s best for kids. If you see the research says that charter schools are performing well, and in some cases, better, why not make sure that’s an option for families who want it? It doesn’t mean that we don’t want all public schools to work, especially traditional public schools.
[00:02:51] Alisha: But why not allow parents like myself — I have three school aged children at home. Not every kid is the same. Not every kid learns the same. And so, I think how about in 2024 let’s be hopeful that adults will get out of the way of doing what’s best for kids. Follow the research, right, and the science, and say, what’s best for my kid, what’s best for the kids in our community. How can we make sure that all of our public schools work regardless of what they’re called?
[00:03:18] Albert: I’m definitely in agreement with that. Any way to expand educational opportunity, really, to give these opportunities for kids that could really benefit from them. So, I’m, with you there. What story caught your eye recently?
[00:03:31] Alisha: So Chalkbeat has this great article about the issues to watch for 2024. Came out January 2, by Erica Meltzer. You know, it talks about everything, which I think is interesting to watch, right? So, first there’s the big one, I think, across the country is the fact that there may be a fiscal cliff. If you follow the work of Marguerite Rosa, I happened to go through the certification program that she does through Georgetown. It was incredible. I highly recommend it. But she’s a brilliant economist. If you don’t even know if that’s her real title, but smart woman who talks about education and finances.
[00:04:11] Alisha: And so, she’s been warning districts for the last couple of years that there might be a fiscal cliff because the end of those ESSER funds. And so, as a reminder, $190 billion has been given to districts in three waves over the pandemic. And so far, $122 billion of those dollars have been spent or committed by districts. And still, there are going to be $68 billion that need to be spent by the fall of this year, 2024. And so, there’s a concern because some districts use this money well for one-time type programs. Some of them use them for great programs, like for counseling and tutoring, help families find housing. The problem is, Albert, though, that when these funds end in the fall, you know, did they make the right financial decisions to make sure that this money could go on, right, past this time? Can they continue to support these programs? How are students and families going to be impacted with the end of these funds? I think all of us need to pay attention to our individual school districts, our individual states, to pay attention to how these funds were spent.
[00:05:23] Alisha: Unfortunately, in my state, the Department of Education is not actually tracking what districts are doing, and so it will be very difficult to figure that out, but in states where they have been tracking, I want us all to pay attention to what districts have done, and hopefully using these funds have had a great impact. A couple of other issues that have come up are that they’re saying that we should watch the effect that migrant students, particularly in the areas of like New York and Chicago, right, where they’ve come in from Central and South America needing a lot of services. And so, as we know, as a result of COVID and even before that, our own students have needed services in terms of mental health and wraparound services for students who are in poverty. So now these districts, and I think Denver is another one that comes to mind, they really have had a serious issue trying to help support these students who need a lot of help, right? We’re talking about kids who have serious emotional wounds from the things that they’ve seen and experienced on their journeys to the United States. Some of them are sleeping outside in tents. They’re, you know, navigating a new school system and so there’s a lot that the students are dealing with — the migrant students I’m talking — as well as the districts themselves, who are having to grapple with these issues financially, socially, academically. So, there’s a lot to watch there.
[00:06:45] Alisha: And then there are a lot of other issues, but the other one that I’ll mention is this whole ChatGPT issue. Those of us who are following this somewhat, and I can’t say I’m an expert in this, but I’ve certainly played with this tool a little bit in some of my work in K-12 education. I think people are concerned about how this is going to impact K-12 learning, and so far, the research is saying that there’s not an increase in student cheating because of ChatGPT, which I hope says kids actually want to learn and they have learned how to use this tool in a way that’s not about cheating, but it’s really about learning. And so again, I think so many issues in education are adult problems. And so, I’m hoping that adults will embrace ChatGPT and AI tools and implement them in a way that really helps to foster learning in classrooms. So that’ll be a huge issue to watch in 2024 as well.
[00:07:40] Albert: Yeah, I encourage listeners to check out that article. I mean, there’s a whole rundown of a lot of stories to pay attention to. And yeah, we’ll see how 2024 plays out another year. And it should be an exciting one. Absolutely. Well, speaking of excitement coming up after the break, stick with us, ‘cause we’ve got Gabby Thomas joining us on this show, American [00:08:00] Olympian.
[00:08:00] Albert: Gabby Thomas is a world-class American track athlete in the 100- and 200-meters sprint. She won the bronze medal in the 200 meters and a silver medal as part of the women’s 4×100 meters relay at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics in summer 2023. She claimed the 200-meter silver medal in the World Athletics Championships in Budapest with a time of 21.81 seconds. She would also go on to win the gold as part of Team USA in the women’s 4×100 meters relay final with a championship record of 41.03 seconds. A graduate of Harvard University, she studied neurobiology and global health as an undergraduate. Thomas is pursuing a master’s degree in epidemiology at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston at their Austin regional campus. Gabby, it’s great to have you on the show, welcome.
[00:09:16] Gabby: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
[00:09:18] Albert: Let’s talk a little bit about your background and, growing up and some of your, formative experiences. So, you grew up in the Pioneer Valley of Western Mass. and attended the Williston Northampton School. Yeah, share with our listeners a little bit about your family, formative educational experiences, mentors, heroines, heroes. How did it all shape you to become a world-class athlete who also pursued — I mean, you’re working on an advanced degree in science as well!
[00:09:44] Gabby: Yeah. Yeah. I actually graduated in May, which is really exciting, but yeah, thank you. Thank you. grew up in Massachusetts, Western Massachusetts, and I went to Williston Northhampton School, which is kind of the smaller boarding school in the area. One of the most unique and helpful things about being in that type of environment was really like the familial atmosphere of being there. So especially being at Williston but even in Western Mass., you just have this community of people around you. And I tell people this all the time: When you’re trying to do something different in your life or embark on a new journey or have success in any area, you really want to focus on the environment that you’re in and the community that you’re a part of and surrounding yourself with people who are helping you grow.
[00:10:25] Gabby: And Western Massachusetts and Williston was exactly that for me. And going into it, I didn’t know that that’s what I was getting, right? I didn’t know that’s the kind of environment I’d be growing up in when my mom moved my brother and I up to Western Massachusetts, but that’s what I got. And I was surrounded by, you know, friends who we had really, really good and tight friendships. And we did sports together. We took our challenging classes together. We did all of our extracurricular activities together. I had coaches who were also my teachers. And so, they helped me grow in every avenue of my life and followed me in every part of it.
[00:10:58] Gabby: And were really committed to my development as a person. You know, with sports, outside of sports, with my friendships, with my family. And so,I had all of that and I don’t even think I realized it at the time, but as I look back and think about it, I mean, that was a huge part of my success because I felt so comfortable, you know, making mistakes with them, growing with them.
[00:11:18] Gabby: And one person that really comes to mind as you asked me, this question is my algebra teacher and my track coach, Mrs. McCullough. I hated algebra, but she was my math teacher and, she made, you know, I just loved her and she helped me so much with it. And she was really invested in me, and she’s still invested in me to this day. And she’s one of the, my biggest mentors and, and influences in my life. But that comes from being in that type of environment, having so many people who genuinely care about you.
[00:11:47] Albert: Yeah, yeah, that sounds like a great experience and I hope Ms. McCullough — might have to send her this show and hear that shout-out.
[00:11:53] Gabby: Yeah, and then you know that goes same with my family You know, I grew up with my mom in a single mother household and my twin brother. So, it was the three of us in the household and my mom was just the same way, very driven. Very invested in my development as a person. She was never too too stressed out about, the outcome, you know, upgrades or the outcome of, of what I did in sports, but it was always just about the journey and developing myself into the best version of myself that I could be across anything that I was doing. So, I think that’s just a really special part of my upbringing.
[00:12:23] Albert: Well, so let’s talk after Williston — you went off to Harvard and studied neurobiology and you ran NCAA track while you were there. So, at Harvard, you won 22 conference titles across three years in various track events. You know, set school and Ivy league records in 100 meters, 200 meters, indoor 60 meters. I don’t know, maybe the list could go on. Could you talk about those experiences? I mean, really in particular, how did you grow as an athlete from high school to college? And then how’d you balance the demands of being a student and an elite track competitor?
[00:12:58] Gabby: Oh my gosh. I mean, I will tell anyone that listens that that transition from high school to collegiate track and field was the roughest time period for me, I think, of my life to date. I don’t think understood demands that being a collegiate D1 athlete took from us. Coming from someone did sports and it was fun for me and it, you know, wasn’t the end-all, be-all of my activities and what I was doing. But yeah, so I mean, I arrived there and one reason I chose Harvard goes back to the environment factor was I understood that I had a coach who was very invested in our development and I had teammates who were trying to develop and create this culture at Harvard.
[00:13:35] Gabby: Of a very elite D1 track school. So, they were trying to compete with the likes of Oregon’s LSU, Florida’s, you know, that, that was kind of what we were going towards. And I wanted to be a part of that. And so, I don’t think I understood what it took to be a part of that when I arrived. So, one day my coach, he just sat me down and said, Hey, look, this isn’t intramurals, like we’re here to actually make a difference in the NCAA and do something special. So ,if you want to be a part of that, let me know. And then I had to have a mindset shift pretty quickly after that. I just kind of pulled it together. I always, you know, I say, if you want to do something, you figure out a way to get it done.
[00:14:06] Gabby: And I was really passionate about track, and I was growing to love it. And so, I just had to get it done. It became time management and just making time for what you prioritize and what you care about. So that meant going out a lot less with my friends. It meant eating healthier, you know, it meant getting my schoolwork done. It meant getting my schoolwork done in time so that I wasn’t stressed about it. Going into practice because stress can also affect your training. I did all of that, but I think at the end of the day, if anyone’s listening and they want to know how to balance those demands, I think it’s about really enjoying what you’re doing. Major in something that you are passionate about and that you want to learn and then do a sport and be in an environment of teammates that you want to be a part of. Because if you don’t want to do it, you’re just not going to do it well.
[00:14:47] Albert: Well, so, speaking of the end of your, NCAA career, really, you decided to forego that final year of eligibility and turn pro. Signed a contract, New Balance, moved to Texas. Talk about that transition. You know, what was it like going from high performing NCAA athlete to then The next level being a professional sprinter? And what were some of the key decisions you had to make to really take your track career to the next level?
[00:15:15] Gabby: You know, that was also a very difficult transition. Any transition, any extreme transition is going to be difficult, right? But that was tough. I didn’t understand what it means to be a pro athlete either. And a lot of people don’t know what it means to be a pro track and field athlete. You only think it’s serious every Olympic year, right? You don’t realize how much goes into it and how much you need to be competing. Because nobody knows how much we’re competing as track athletes. So, and I also had to be very independent. So, in college, your coach is telling you exactly what to do all the time. When you’re a pro athlete, that’s not the case. You are a professional and you were expected to make decisions for yourself. I’m not sure that I had gained that maturity at my first year of being a pro. I ended up learning and figuring it out.
[00:15:51] Gabby: And you just have so much more responsibility. You know, now you have an agent, you have, you know, a team of people that you have to work with. And I was so young, you know, when you go pro after college, you’re still so young. And now you have all of these things to worry about. But the transition at Harvard made it definitely easier.
[00:16:09] Gabby: I was able to continue to train with my Harvard teammates, train with my Harvard coach, and then New Balance is right next door headquartered in Boston. So, it was a very, very natural partnership with them. So that was great. But then I decided that I did want to take my training to the next level and move to train with people who have Olympic medals.
[00:16:27] Gabby: My coach who also had Olympic medals and just warmer weather. It’s easier to sprint in warmer weather, to be honest, you miss a lot less training. My Harvard coach, he couldn’t control that, but so yeah, I moved down figured it out, you know, that very different training regimen.
[00:16:43] Gabby: But it ended up working out for the best and I love my group, I love my coach, and I love my teammates., and I love Austin, Texas. So, once I moved to Texas, everything, you know, went smoothly after the COVID year, we couldn’t compete that year, but after that I just, took it year by year and it’s been great.
[00:16:59] Albert: And so at the U.S. Olympic trials in June of 2021 and of course, it seems weird to say 2021 trials because the Olympics were delayed due to the pandemic. So, your 200 meters time of 21.61 seconds was the second fastest ever, surpassed only by Florence Griffith Joyner’s 1988 world record. Tell us about that moment, how it felt to qualify for the Olympics, you know, how it felt to run such an elite time and, really get to that level?
[00:17:27] Gabby: That moment to me was very surreal. I was training all year, honestly, all two years because of COVID for the Olympic trials. But it just never felt like it was a given to me that I was going to be an Olympian or make the team. I remember my plan after graduating from Harvard was to try to make the Olympics, you know, go move to Texas, go give it what I could, and then after that, go get my master’s in public health and just continue on with the career that I had originally intended to do.
[00:17:54] Gabby: And so, when I actually made the Olympic team, that was an incredible shock for me, [00:18:00] but then to make it and then become a gold medal favorite with my 21.61 time was something beyond my wildest dreams, you know, to make the Olympic team, you have to be top three in your given discipline. And so, I just expected to be in that mix. I didn’t expect to win with that kind of time. That shifted my entire mindset surrounding track. I mean, everything changed within that millisecond. So now I was, yeah, I was going to the Olympics. I was a gold medal favorite. And I knew that I wasn’t going to be retiring anytime soon. I knew that, OK, well, I’m going to go to this Tokyo Olympics and most likely start training for the Paris Olympics soon after.
[00:18:33] Alisha: Gabby, I’m just so fascinated by you for a lot of reasons. And I love how reflective you are about your life and your upbringing and your education. And as an educator, I think there’s a lot to learn about how you were educated and what we can do for other students. So, thanks. It’s great to talk to you. So, I want to continue on this track about the Olympics, which is so incredible. And to hear you say you didn’t even expect that it was going to happen is incredible, but it really just speaks to how hard you work, right.
[00:19:02] Alisha: And that you were able to accomplish this. And so, at the Olympics in Tokyo, you won the bronze medal in the 200 meters, running a time of 21.87. And then three days later, you and Team USA qualify for the finals of the women’s 4×100 meters relay, where you were an anchor, and the team won the silver medal. So, can you talk about what that’s like, being in the Olympics, winning, and receiving Olympic medals, and experiencing winning medals as an individual as part of a relay team?
[00:19:34] Gabby: Yeah. I mean, being in the Olympics was — that was a strange time, I think, for everyone just because it was a COVID Olympics and nobody was there. However, being at the Olympics was a lot of fun. I mean, you train and work so hard to be there. And when you finally are there, you can finally enjoy, you know, all the work that you’ve put in and just being in the village with other athletes that you admire and, seeing some mobiles right across the sidewalk and like, it’s amazing. And just being in that company and the competition of it is also so much fun because right, you’re training all season to be there and now you’re finally here and you can just do what you do. So, the nerves are, you know, you’re still nervous, but it’s just like this really fun, this is what I meant to do type of — And I remember running the race and just think, you know, the 200 final at the Olympics. And I was like, well, I’m here. This is what I’ve worked for. I’m just going to go have fun and give it all I’ve got. And I remember crossing the line and not even being sure if I had medaled because it was, I felt like it was so tight between me and Shelly and Fraser Price.
[00:20:37] Gabby: But then I looked up and they were telling me that I had medaled and come get my American flag and it was, it was unbelievable. I couldn’t, I like, again, I just couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe that I was in that position. So yeah, that, that was incredible. And then after that, getting to run on the 4×100 relay. Running on a relay is just so much fun.
[00:20:56] Gabby: Having an individual metal, you have this immense sense of pride and accomplishment. It’s an amazing feeling and no one can take that medal from you, but having a relay medal, it just feels bigger than yourself and you’ve really come together with the team to accomplish something really exciting and really historic and it’s kind of different. They’re both amazing, but having a relay medal just, it is really special, special feeling. And it’s the kind of bond that you have with your teammates and girls that also can’t be taken away.
[00:21:24] Alisha: Yes, quite a very special sorority or fraternity, I’m guessing. Incredible. So, Gabby, another reflection question. You said after the Olympics quote, everything I’ve been working for essentially two years was just over. I won the medals, but it was just still over. And I was like, OK, what do I do now? And so, can you talk about what it was like in terms of the media attention and how you got reacclimated to your life with family, friends, and school once you returned home from the Olympics?
[00:21:57] Gabby: That was a really weird feeling, too, that nobody really talks about is, once you’ve put all that work and you’re on such an emotional high being at the Olympics, and then it is over. Immediately when you come back and you’re kind of left with just a lot of like downtime a lot of people asking about the Olympics and stuff like that. And there’s a lot of media kind of responsibilities. And so, it was a huge shift. For me, in terms of my lifestyle and how I was interacting with everyone around me. And so, yeah, that took some getting used to, definitely. They call it the Olympic crash. just something that people don’t really talk about very much, especially to the media. And so, getting reacclimated with everyone took time. I ended up getting a therapist just because felt like I had gotten to this point in my life where I needed that and trying to maintain some type of normalcy. With my family and friends and trying to stay structured with my school work as well.
[00:23:00] Gabby: Yeah. So yeah, it was a lot to kind of tackle, and it was a lot to go through very abruptly. But I’ve gotten ahold of it. And then I just went through another major championships since last season, and I feel like I’ve kind of gotten it under my belt.
[00:23:13] Alisha: Absolutely. Thank you for sharing that. That’s so important and another great lesson for people. Thank you for that. So, I want to shift because not only are you an Olympic medalist you’re also quite brilliant. And so, I want to talk about your remarkable achievements. Not only as a you are not only a world-class track sprinter, but you’ve also accomplished an enormous amount in your academic work at Harvard, and as you mentioned, just graduated from the University of Texas. And so, can you talk to us about your studies, your research in, neurobiology, epidemiology, public health? Can you talk more about your interest, how you got there and what that work is like for you now?
[00:23:53] Gabby: When I was in high school, knew that I wanted to do neurobiology. I think I was a last semester junior/first semester senior at that point when I had made that decision and I wanted to do research on autism because you know, my little brother has autism and then my twin brother had ADHD that he was struggling with and with school just made it a lot more difficult for him, and so I know I wanted to do that and I wanted to go to a college that had a good neuro program, fortunately, Harvard worked out and I figured that would be a great neuro program for me.
[00:24:25] Gabby: So, I went to Harvard and I ended up doing neurobiology with a minor in global health and health policy and with a lot of these courses that I was taking, I started taking some of these biology courses and also complementing them with some sociology courses. I started to become increasingly aware about the medical health disparities and specifically race disparities in the healthcare field. I was just mind blown. And at the time it wasn’t something that was kind of at the forefront of the media and what we were talking about. Fortunately, that did come a little bit later. And especially with COVID people started having those discussions more publicly, but that really. Validated my interest in the field and it also validated me going into my master’s program. So, by the time COVID had hit, I had already been accepted into my master’s in epidemiology at UT. That was something that I decided to do before graduating from Harvard as well.
[00:25:18] Gabby: And part of my decision to move to Austin, Texas and train with this group was because I knew that I would get to go to the University of Texas and get my master’s there while I trained for the Olympics. So that was always part of the plan. And it was either going to be Austin or somewhere in L.A. The University of Texas was just a great fit for me, and so I wanted to combat race disparities, and I felt like epidemiology would give me a great foundation for going into that and continuing to do research, and public health was just at the forefront of my mind. It’s what I wanted to do when I finished running, I wanted to go into healthcare administration and be CEO and run a hospital one day and make these changes as I saw fit.
[00:25:55] Gabby: I loved it. I just graduated in May and I did — a lot of my research was actually ended up being on sleep epidemiology. Because that’s something that is very, very important in my life, especially as a pro athlete, but it’s also something that has a huge race disparity. And sleep health is something that really is not talked about. And it’s a huge epidemic in our country and has very, very severe effects on your overall health, long-term health and especially your cardiovascular health and African Americans in our country are being affected by that more prominently than anything else. And that’s also due to, like, lifestyle factors, but also just other things that we’re not looking at.
[00:26:33] Gabby: And so, I just got really into that during my masters, but really, that’s the path and journey that got me into that line of study, and I’ve loved it and I’m really excited about it. And since graduating, I started volunteering at a clinic here in Austin and it provides healthcare services to people who don’t have health insurance or very limited health insurance. So, I have, you know, a set number of patients and cases that I follow just to make sure that they are getting the healthcare services they need. And making sure that they’re keeping up with their appointments and helping them with some lifestyle factors that are within their control. So, it’s really meaningful work and I think it’s a good use of my degree for now until I can retire and continue.
[00:27:15] Alisha: Outstanding. You are just so phenomenal. I’ve got one more question for you. And you mentioned that you just won silver medal in the 200 meters at the World Athletics Championships. Congratulations.
Gabby: Thank you.
Alisha: With a time of 21.81. And so, you also won the gold medal as part of Team USA in the 4×100 meters relay final with a championship record of 41.03 seconds. Amazing. So, would you talk about these achievements as well as your future plans in 2024 Olympics in Paris?
[00:27:51] Gabby: Yeah. So, the world championships this year was really exciting because I actually was injured in 2022. So, coming back in 2023 and getting to run for Team USA again was really important to me. Yeah, sitting out in 2022 was very hard. And a lot of times your comeback season after an injury is really telling and indicative of your future success because injuries can be a huge mental setback for a lot of athletes. And kind of throw off the momentum. So, I mean, this season, this last season was my best one yet. Silver medal at a major championship is great. Great performance for me at the championship and I had a PB at our trials. So, it was really good. And then Team USA, our 4×100 relay was historic. I mean, we had a championship record, and we all came together and worked really well. And I think that bodes well for our Olympics, especially coming and competing against the Jamaican team, which is, known for being amazing.
[00:28:45] Gabby: So it was great and really promising and it’s great momentum going into the Olympic year. So now we’re in 2024, and we’re preparing for the Paris Olympics, and training is going well and I have high expectations for myself. I just plan to keep improving and getting better. And, you know, I did bronze and then I did silver.
[00:29:04] Gabby: So, the goal now is to keep improving and go for a gold. So, I”m loving it. loving track. I’m loving training and competing is going well, so. Yeah, I’m really looking forward to the Paris Olympics.
[00:29:14] Alisha: Incredible. This has been so awesome talking to you. I am personally very excited to see your contributions both in public health and as a pro athlete and an Olympic star. So, thank you, thank you so much for joining us.
[00:29:30] Gabby: Thank you for having me.
[00:29:50] Albert: Great interview, indeed. And now just to wrap up, the Tweet of the Week comes from the Hechinger Report. In this tiny and shrinking Mississippi County, getting a college degree means leaving home behind. And Alisha, this was a fascinating read for me. Actually I don’t know if you’re familiar with the essayist and poet Wendell Berry, but really reminded me about a lot of what he’s written in the past. Really this is an article that talks about this really rural Mississippi County where there’s only 42 adults that have a college degree, and I forget the exact population, I believe there’s over a thousand people, and so we’re talking very, very few people with a college degree, and I think it captures the situation in a lot of our rural areas where we push kids to get into college and really college does give them access to a lot of other opportunities, but, you know, for a lot of these kids who go on to graduate from rural areas there’s not that many opportunities in their hometowns and so they end up leaving and you almost perpetuate this cycle of, these rural communities where there’s really little opportunity. And anyway, it does I think give us a lot of fodder for reflection. What would it look like to have postsecondary education kind of encourage, not just kids leaving their homes behind, but even encouraging them to perhaps even move back and think about how to really enrich that area and, renew their, hometown.
[00:31:12] Albert: So, take a look that read. I know there’s a lot of other complicated issues, particularly in, this county. I mean, with the racial past that’s been there some socioeconomic and business interests. And so, it’s complicated, but caused me to really reflect a lot.
[00:31:26] Alisha: Yeah. And I think it’s important to note, right, that there are communities that have figured this out, right? You get industry involved, you get the school system involved, government involved, and you create a pipeline where young people get a great education in their K-12 system. They go off to college, they come back, they start businesses, right?
[00:31:44] Alisha: You train the people that work there. So, it’s definitely something that can be overcome, but it requires big thinking and vision. And so, my hope is that as these students go off to college, that they will feel that sense of ownership in their community and want to come back. Create some of these [00:32:00] opportunities for those coming behind them.
[00:32:03] Albert: Thank you, Alisha, for joining me this week It’s always great to be with you.
[00:32:08] Alisha: Thank you great to be with you, Albert.
[00:32:10] Albert: Well, anyway, that’s it for this edition of the Learning Curve podcast. Join us next week. We have Jonathan Eig, who’s going to join us and talk about his biography of Martin Luther King. Until then, be well, everybody. Take care.
This week on The Learning Curve, guest co-hosts Prof. Albert Cheng of the University of Arkansas and Alisha Searcy interview Gabby Thomas, a world-class track sprinter and Olympian, originally from the Pioneer Valley in western Massachusetts. She shares her journey from the Williston Northampton School to Harvard, where she balanced neurobiology studies with winning 22 track titles. Transitioning to professional sprinting, she qualified for the Tokyo Olympics, winning bronze and silver medals. In addition to track sprinting, Ms. Thomas excels academically, focusing on neurobiology and global public health. She recently graduated from the University of Texas Health Science Center with a master’s degree in epidemiology. After medal-winning performances at the 2023 World Athletics Championships this past summer, Ms. Thomas shares how she’s looking ahead to the 2024 Olympics in Paris.
Stories of the Week: Albert comments on a story from New York Post about charter schools improved test scores; Alisha reviews a story in Chalkbeat regarding issues to watch for in 2024.
Guest:
Tweet of the Week:
https://x.com/hechingerreport/status/1742221714979783061?s=20