TRANSCRIPT AND VIDEO AVAILABLE: Classroom Controversies Expert Panel Q&A

What: Live Expert Panel on Trending Back to School News 

Teachers, students, and their parents are navigating sensitive subjects such as phone bans, political polarization, and debates over curriculum and teaching methods. Binghamton University experts will discuss the controversies looming over our schools in a live Q&A with media covering the issues.

Who: Binghamton University Faculty

• Suzanne McLeod, PhD, Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership
• Lightning Jay, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Teaching Learning and Educational Leadership
• Kathleen Provinzano, PhD, Associate Professor CCPA Social Work

When: August 27th, 2024, 11:00 AM EDT

Where: Newswise Live Zoom Room (address will be included in follow-up email)

Media Register to Attend

Transcript:

Newswise: Hello and welcome to this newswise live expert panel. Today, We have three faculty members from Binghamton University to discuss issues related to back to school and controversies in America's classrooms. So to begin, I would like to start off with lightning Jay, and ask you, Lightning if you could introduce yourself and then tell us a little bit about these phone bans. The list of phone bans in different states across the country is growing, and what do you think is the benefit of this policy, and what challenges might teachers face for that?

Lightning Jay: My name is Lightning Jay. I'm an assistant professor here at Binghamton University in the Department of teaching, learning and educational leadership. There's been a lot of conversation around phones over the past couple of years, and increasingly we're seeing bans come into schools, either at school level or state level, or internationally, even some countries are discussing, I know Ireland was talking about, potentially a nationwide ban on phones in schools. And I think that this is worth talking about. And I think about it in terms of, there are three questions in STEM for this, like, what do phones mean for learning within the classroom? What do phones mean for teaching within the classroom, and what a school? What do phones mean for school communities? And I think on two of these issues, the research is pretty strong and pretty, pretty much closed to my mind. How do phones affect learning. Generally speaking, they harm learning. Phones are generally bad for learning. The most important resource within a classroom is attention. What we know about attention is if when you are not focused, you will not retain information. When you are not focused, you will not build new skill sets and phones are well designed to suck attention. There have been studies that have been done that had people take a test under three different conditions. The first condition, they had their phones face down on the desk in front of them. The second condition, they had the phone in their pocket. So in the third condition, they had their phone out of the room entirely. And what we found, or what was found, was that the people who had the phone entirely out of the room performed markedly better than people who had their phones accessible, even if the information was not visible. So just having phones around our young people harms their capacity to learn. We know about the effect that's called the distraction contagion, or attention contagion, that and there's research that shows if someone is distracted on their phone, the next two people, two to three people closest to them, will also retain less of a lesson. So phones hurt the person on the phone and they hurt the learning of the people around them. I think there's really good research to justify a phone ban. What does it mean for teachers? That's the second part of the question. Well, for teachers, their attention is valuable too, when teachers also have finite attention spans, and when teachers are paying attention to whether a student is averting their eyes, or whether or whether they're looking on their phone, when a teacher's cognitive load is focused on how long has that student been in the bathroom, and are they actually in the bathroom, or are they on their phone in a place that's hard to see, that teacher is less able to focus on teaching and learning, so her phones are not only making learning worse. Phones in the classroom actually make teaching worse, and what I've seen in a lot of schools is the principal or the administration or superintendent or whoever, when they pass a dam on, they say there's no phones allowed. Oftentimes, that falls on the teacher to be the enforcement mechanism, and the teacher has to take up their attention and their cognitive load to be searching for phones and from class to class. There's different rules. There's different degrees of teacher attention on it becomes this huge energy suck away from the work of teaching when it's when teachers are left to handle it on a kind of per classroom basis. So the final thing that I think so, I think that those things we know are not good. What I think we don't yet know is the 30s, which is, how are phones affecting our the school community? When school phone bans work, it tends to be done by the school, by the administration taking the responsibility for we're going to make sure that students' phones are not present in class. You focus on teaching teachers and the other element of this is families. Families are often the ones giving children phones. Families are often chatting, emailing, texting students during class. Thier families want connectivity with their students. And so I think that's that's to me, where there's a tricky space is where schools have to figure out how to honor parents desire to be connected with and communicate with their students, and students you know may have to go pick up their little sister, or students may have legitimate needs that we need to find other solutions for. For a long time, the standard was, if you needed to talk to your student, you would call the main office. I personally, I'm not sure why that standard isn't something we can return back to, but that's something that requires consensus building. We can't just assume families are ready to do to make that move. And also, we're dealing with families and students who have now been acculturated into having a phone, so if we just take their phones away, we can't assume that things kind of snap back to the pre to pre phone times. We have to assume that students are now used to communicating with each other over Snapchat rather than over lunchroom table. So schools have an obligation to do some rebuilding work around social skills, around what does it look like to get attention to be connected in the absence of phones? So it's not just I think the phone bans are an important step for teaching and learning, but when we think about the importance of community, how do we bring families in? How do we make schools an environment that's welcoming and safe? How do we actually relearn the work of being together? I think that the phone bans can only be considered a start to a much larger mission and a much larger piece of work.

Newswise: Next we'll go to Sue and Sue, If you could please introduce yourself in your job title, and tell us about chronic absenteeism. How is this affecting students' achievement and What can schools do about it?

Suzanne McLeod: Thank you. Suzanne McLeod, I am the coordinator of educational leadership here at Binghamton University in the Department of teaching, learning and educational leadership, Chronic absenteeism kind of burst onto the scene about a decade ago with a report from The Department of Education that sounded the alarm and defined chronic absenteeism as a student missing 10% of their school year. So you have a 180 day school year. Generally nationwide, any child that exceeds 18 days either excused or unexcused, is defined by the federal government now is chronically absent. So the alarm went out a decade ago, 16% this is horrendous. What do we need to do then covid hit, and in our attempts to reopen schools. We have been living with a legacy of the shutdown of 2020, where we are looking more at for example, in New York State, last year, the New York State School Boards Association reported that 30% of high school students in New York State were chronically absent last year. The data, as you look, you know, back decades, generally supports the fact that your number one grade level that is chronically absent is kindergarten, and your number two a close second are your seniors. Kindergarten is often explained as first, it's the child's often first introduction to a large group of other children, and they're catching every possible virus that comes in. But don't discount a mindset of caregivers, where we are still thinking about kindergarten as we did when I was in kindergarten half a century ago, of, well, they're just going to play. You know, it's just a half a day of socialization. Kindergarten isn't that anymore. And then our seniors, of course, have senioritis. They're thinking they're already out of it. The research on chronic absenteeism basically shows three major deficits. The first is that, yes, it does affect your academic achievement, and that, you know, is pretty logical, if you're not there, you're not going to learn your math if you are not there, you are not going to learn to read. If you are not there, you are not going to be prepared for your standardized assessments or your regents exams here in New York State. Secondly, there is a pretty direct correlation between chronic absenteeism and later high school dropout rates. You look at Children's attendance as early elementary students, those that's a pretty strong predictor to Will they finish. And then the third is we are establishing adult later adult behaviors through habits of attendance at school, if I didn't go to school every day, why do I have to go to work every day? Why do I have, you know, to meet my obligations, whether it be college career or the military, post high school? So this is an area where all of the school districts that I work with are now focusing on that. If it's not one of their top goals for the year to reduce chronic absenteeism, it is absolutely in the top five.

Newswise: Thank you, Sue. We'll go next to Kathleen, and if you could introduce yourself and your job title and tell us about the community school model and how this can improve the collaboration between teachers and parents to create better outcomes for the students.

if you might need to unmute yourself. 

I'm unmuted. Can you hear me?
There you go. We can hear you. 

Oh, okay, sorry about that. 

Kathleen Provinzano: My name is Kathleen Provinzano. I’m an associate professor of community schools in the College of Community and Public Affairs at Binghamton University. So I think in the same way that community schools were kind of better positioned to help students and families and educators overcome many of the challenges that were associated with the covid 19 pandemic. They're well poised to kind of help, you know, educators and families overcome some of the topics that we're discussing on this call. So just, I guess briefly, to give a little bit of context about community schools. When you think about the community school strategy, think of it in terms of an approach to public schooling that transforms a school into a place where educators, local community members, families, students are really working together and collaboratively toward the primary goal of strengthening conditions for student learning, right? They're focused around healthy development for students. So collaboratively, you know, all of these interest to part interested parties, they organize these in and out of school resources and supports so that young people in all communities have access to equitable learning opportunities, and the collaboration is fostered through building strong and trusting relationships, you know, inclusive decision making, where family members and community members have a seat at the table. It's shifting to a more community centric approach to education, right? And the strategy is about promoting authentic connections between education and local context. So in the places where I've been able to do some work, this looks like educators and school leadership teams, who often are not living in the communities in which they're serving, engaging with community members outside of the school setting. So community events, being mindful about having a presence within communities that they are serving, getting to know community based organizations, all of the strengths and assets that local neighborhoods have to offer. It's about community school directors and teachers, you know, for example, you know, meeting new kindergarten students and families in their homes or in their neighborhoods before the first day of school starts, so that relationships and expectations can start to get established amongst all parties. And this is really how you kind of create a supportive network where students are better poised to perform academically because stronger connections have been made between the home, the school and the local community in which they reside. So you know, I think that when you're able to create those relationships. It has an impact on student outcomes in meaningful ways, and it also helps all of these interested parties to work together to overcome some of these specific challenges, related to chronic absenteeism, related to policy. And you know, what are we going to do with phones in our community? How can we collaboratively and collectively address these particular issues? So it really is about more inclusive decision making, which I think really better positions community, school environments and settings to be able to address some of these controversies and topics discussed.

Newswise: Thank you. Kathleen. So media on the call, if you have any questions, you can please chat those to me, and I will ask the panel. And I have also added the contact information for the communications manager Ryan at Binghamton University. If you'd like to follow up with any of the panelists, you can email Ryan, and he can help you get in touch with them. We'll go back ahead to Lightning and ask Lightning about kind of the current political hot button issues. It's an election year. There's a lot of debates happening between parents and school boards and teachers and administrators about things like curriculum and how certain subject matter is taught. What advice would you give to teachers how to deal with this and avoid accusations of wanting to indoctrinate students while still accomplishing an education for them?

Lightning: It's a good question. I'm a social studies expert. I trained social studies teachers. I was a social studies teacher, and so I think there are three points I want to hit in response to this idea of either controversy or politics in the classroom. The first, so as I'll tell you, those three points ahead of time, the first thing I want to say is it's always been there. The second thing I want to say related but distinct. It's already there, and then finally, we have to teach it. So let's talk about how, so when I say it's always been there, we have public schools in this country. They're democratic institutions. They were founded so that we could have a democracy. And they're funded by voting and taxpayers. So the idea that our schools, there are no schools outside of politics, and there's no curriculum that's outside of politics, if you look at the history of curriculum in the United States, it's always been fraught. It's always been something we argued about. In the 1930s Harold Rugg wrote the most popular, most widely adopted textbook in the United States, on the US, and they were in almost every classroom. And they were a model where the final year of high school students would take on issues in America or issues in American democracy. And as the United States went off to join the World War his textbooks were pulled. They were banned for daring to suggest that there were issues in America that we needed to talk about or learn about in the 1930s we had stuff to work on. In the 1930s and 1940s textbook publishers would routinely publish what they called a quote, unquote Mint Julep version of their textbooks, which was a version of the textbook marketed to southern states so that they could get a version of history without without having to address slavery, which is interesting if you start to think about the age of some of our senators and what they might have learned growing up in History in the 1970s when there were attempts to integrate, they called it integrating, or browning the textbook. Post The Brown v Board of Education, when there were tips and integration that were made, West Virginia was adopting a new history textbook that talked about the role that black Americans had in founding this country a radical group led by a preacher put bombs on school busses to prevent students from going to school to hear integrated history. So in this these stories continue. So the idea that American schools were ever apolitical is a fiction. We have political schools. They are political institutions, and to learn American history is to engage with politics. And we can't expect that there will be no controversy. There is controversy about what students could learn, but I want us to be really mindful of how we use that word, because what's controversial matters. States like Oklahoma have put forth legislation banning the teaching of quote, unquote, controversial issues. So when we're in public, and you're the media, when we're talking about the when we label a topic as controversy, it is actually feeding into a law of legal system that then bans teachers from talking about that thing. So I've heard people say the history of slavery is controversial. First off, it's not. It's a fact. It's a series of things that happen. There's no controversy about whether slavery existed or whether it was bad. No serious historian questions that. So there's no controversy there. But if you call it controversy, people in Oklahoma aren't allowed to learn about it. People in other states are not allowed to learn about it so we need to be really careful about what we call politics and the idea that we can have values free school. So that's my first point, and I know that's all a warm up to what Ryan actually asks. The second thing I want to name is that not only historically, are our schools political spaces, but today, they're political spaces because high schoolers are political beings. We're not encountering children as teachers. We don't encounter children before their parents. So I had a student who was teaching a lesson on just the structure of government, and he mentioned that there were two student teacher. He's getting trained to be a teacher. It's his first. It's actually, I think it was the first full lesson he led, and he said there are two party, two major parties in the United States. One is called the Republican Party, and the other party is called the Democratic Party. And a student in the back yelled out, all Democrats are baby killers, and the student in the front started crying and left the room. That's not a case of a student teacher indoctrinating students. That's not a controversy. He said, What is definitively a fact, there are major parties and the students are already political. So we are not interested as teachers. We are not introducing politics into the classroom. We are responding to the politics that are already there, and that's a different job, and I think that we need to be more cognizant of that in our public speech. We can go on on with examples, but we have students throwing I've seen I've seen high school students throw coins into the middle of the street, and you'll hear Jews, Jews, Jews to try to lure Jews into traffic. I've seen students draw swastikas in classrooms. I've seen students when their teacher says, can you make a utopian society. Bring to the front of the classroom a poster talking about how there would be no immigrants or LGBTQ people in their society. So these high school students, some of whom can vote, are not free politics. We're responding to politics that exist. So then, with that understanding, we can finally talk about, how do you actually teach politics? Well, the first is as a social studies teacher, or as a teacher in general, facts are our purview. We actually do have some authority to talk about what has happened and what has not happened. We have some authority to talk about what is real. And I see teachers concede that authority almost immediately. If you look at studies that say, What do teachers teach about slavery, the answer is very, very little, because they're scared. If you, look at the What do teachers teach about so I this study that's coming out right now that looks at the way that we teach the press the recent past, so I look at the 1950s to today, and look at how that shows up in history curricula around the country. I do this by analyzing the different state standards, the instructional standards, and what I find is that most state standards effectively end with the election of Ronald Reagan, a lot has happened since the election of Ronald Reagan, but because of this fear of controversy, because of this fear that they're not being taught, we are actually not requiring that students learn anything about the years since Ronald Reagan now, I graduated high school in 2005 which means I graduated high school 35 years after Martin Luther King was killed. Every high school taught about that because they recognized Martin Luther King had an important influence on the country, and you couldn't understand this country if you don't teach it. But it's now 35 years since Reagan's presidency, but we're not teaching that. I don't think you can understand this election if you don't know anything about Ronald Reagan, if you don't know anything about either of the bush presidencies, if you don't know anything about the first Trump presidency, if you don't know anything about the Obama presidency, interestingly, Obama does show up in state standards way more than the bushes or even President Trump. So there is ways in which our standards are not reflective of the past, and we know that when students bring politics into the classroom, it's impactful. We saw there's documented cases of racist comments and discrimination aimed at students of color and students from immigrant backgrounds. After the election of President Trump, happening within schools? There's certainly been a raft of legislation, which is well documented by pen America, attempting to muzzle and control what is taught in schools since, really, since around 2020, give or take. So we see these things flowing into our school spaces. So what are teachers to do? Well, the teachers need to establish facts, and then they need to give students space to reason. And we don't do that in most social studies classrooms, there's almost there's very little time when students have an opportunity to speak directly to one another. And yet, schools are public institution. They're one of our few times when people actually are in a space consistently with someone who might disagree with them. So it's a huge wasted opportunity for us to not be fostering the skills of dialog, fostering the skills of civic discourse in our classrooms. We know that the poorer a student is, or the more likely a classroom is to have racially minoritized or immigrant students, the less likely they are to have opportunities to actually talk to each other, the more likely they are to have a lecture based classroom. So there's inequity even within this. But what I want, I wish we would have, is that parents would ask students when they came home, who did you disagree with? What discussion did you have? What points did you What was your evidence? What was other people's evidence, that when they hear heard, that they would hear reports of their teachers, of teachers actually engaging students in discourse, in discourse and in dialog. Because these are consequential decisions that affect students lives. If you're a high schooler, you started high school with the assumption that your race might matter for where you applied for college, that you could get an abortion if you needed one. And we know high schoolers do get abortions and that a business would serve you regardless of your sexual orientation. And in many places, that's not true anymore, and high schoolers have no idea why. So I'm saying what I'm saying is we do a disservice when we don't introduce facts about this country to students, and we do them a disservice when we don't let them practice talking to each other with a teacher as a moderator who can ensure that the discussion is civil and who can ensure the discussion is fact based.

Newswise: Sue, we just heard from Lightning a little bit of what he hopes happens at the home after the student returns from school. So I want to ask you a little bit about some of that home life and parenting that teachers and administrators hope can help to improve students’ achievement with modern technology and lots of modern issues happening, things like smartphones, social media, these things are affecting kids’ mental health. Their bedtimes are all over the place. What kinds of issues and what sort of welfare in the home would you want to give advice to parents about so that their students can come to school more prepared and ready to achieve?

Sue: Thank you. So, Lightning, what you just said was all fascinating to me. On my news feed this morning was a short little piece from the Staten Island New York newspaper about banning cell phones in schools, but it took in a direction that I didn't anticipate, where it was reporting back and granted, this is not, you know, high level research, but it is reports from the field from Teachers, that teachers are saying that kids are self canceling themselves. They're not speaking up in class because they're afraid if they say anything, it's going to make its way onto social media, and they will then be harassed, or, even worse, canceled, ignored. And it gave me thought in terms of all the things we're talking about today. You know, Kathleen with community schools and the amazing. I was very fortunate as a superintendent to have a community schools model in my schools for over a decade while I was there, and the connections that the community schools coordinators could help the school make to agencies and to families was just immeasurably valuable. So you know, in terms of what would I say to parents, in terms of you're getting your kids ready to go to school, to be honest with you, I have a lot of empathy for parents, because they have a lot on their plate. In addition to being parents, many of them are working one maybe two jobs. They've got a lot going on. So to help them kind of keep it as simple as possible, I would suggest first of all, be aware of what your school's cell phone policies are and help support your child by following those policies. Don't be the parent who is texting constantly throughout the day, how's your day? How's your day, how's your day. Let your child have a measure of independence. The second thing is, be very aware of their social media presence. A big meta analysis was just released by the NIH and basically it pretty closely links psychological issues that kids have, eating disorders, that kids have, that kind of thing, to social media influences on them, so be aware of those now in terms of getting them out the door to school. Two things, first of all, be there all day, every day, unless this is what I said to my own children 30,40, years ago, unless you're bleeding, vomiting, or have a fever over 100 you're going to school. Try it's 180 days. Let's try to make this the year of as close to perfect attendance as we can get. And then the second thing is, there was a wonderful study that came out of UCLA School of Psychology over a decade ago about extracurricular activities. What I loved about this study is the sweet spot for extracurricular activities is two if you can get your children involved in two activities a year, and it doesn't matter sports or music or art or dance or belonging to your religious organization's youth group two has a direct impact on student achievement. And when UCLA looked at it more deeply, they saw that. First of all, it separated the kids from the phone, the social media, you know, all of those negative influences, because they were at practice for two and a half hours, or something like that every day. But secondly, through the activity, the kids affiliated to a group and learned social behaviors that they then carried into school. They learned how to take direction, let's say, from a coach that carried into school, and it overwhelmingly improved their achievement. So that's what I would be saying.

Newswise: Thank you Sue, Kathleen, in these kinds of community schools that you work with, what's the data show about how this helps the students to achieve and perform in school compared to their peers?

Kathleen: Yeah, great. I think community schools could really be places for a lot of these conversations and rational discourse, because they're built around or built upon inclusive environments, understanding of place and local context. So research typically has shown the positive effects of community schools on specific factors like family engagement, student attendance, efforts, chronic absenteeism, and some measures of achievement. But you have to be careful, because some of these studies have been limited, right in terms of their sample size and their capacity. So we can't really say causation, right, but we can show that there are some relationships between community school strategies and some of these outcomes in 2022 a working paper came out of Annenberg Institute at Brown University, focused on the New York City Community School movement, and really demonstrated that New York City is making a very worthy investment in their Community Schools Initiative, particularly as it relates to attendance and some measures of achievement. So we are seeing some positive results with community schools and the work in terms of my own work and the work that I've done. You know, my colleagues and I have looked at sustained impact of community school programming on a number of different academic outcomes for students. So we would look at students who attended a community school at an elementary level. You know, most community schools at that time were operating at the elementary level. So we worked with the school district and were able. Able to get important data on students that allowed us to look at students who attended an elementary school that was a community school in the district, and students who attended an elementary school in the district that was not a community school, and we followed those students into middle school, and then middle school was not a community school, we wanted to see how are students doing on academic outcomes, right, specifically, math and science end of year grades at eighth grade, because we know math and science grades at the end of eighth grade are, you know, good predictors of a number of different outcomes for students in terms of career and college readiness. And we found in our own work, students that attended the community school outperformed students who did not attend a community school. End of year course grades for mathematics and for science. So we're better prepared as they went, you know, entered high school than students who were not attending the community school at an elementary level, which had great implications for career and college readiness. So we're seeing some really good results with students who are attending community and school environments. And my colleagues and I at Binghamton University are trying to kind of advance this even a little bit further, and look at some of these other constructs that community schools are built upon, like family and community engagement and shared leadership practices and collaborative leadership. And we're working to develop a number of measures so that we can, you know, continue to do research in community school settings to see how are these particular constructs having an impact on a number of different student outcomes. So the results really are positive that we're seeing more work needs to be done in this space, but we're kind of advancing, I think, as a field, into that arena, and creating the research instruments and validating the research instruments that are necessary to do that work. So it's very promising. 

Newswise: Members of the media on the call please feel free to chat. Any questions for the panel. We have a question from Kyle at WBNG, With the current political landscape being so polarized, many students feel uncomfortable to discussing their political views. What has caused this shift in the discourse? It seems that political discussion just over a decade ago seemed much more tame and civil than today. Lightning, would you give us your thoughts on that question?

Lightning: Sure. It's a little so Kyle's question, and maybe you can add more in the chat, it seems like you're crossing kind of, it's a little bit unclear to me if the question is specifically about within schools or about kind of American discourse more broadly. You know, so I think that we may have some romanticized ideas about what political discourse was like in the past. Certainly, we have a lot of hours of both President Johnson and President Nixon, just extraordinary streams of expletives and racial slurs and the list continues on and on. So I don't know that our politicians necessarily spoke more nicely in general in the past. I mean, certainly I grew up when there's a lot of discussion of oral sex in the White House, which I don't know is like a more appropriate or, you know, communal or better political discourse. There were some pretty horrible things said in the 90s, from my memory as well. So I think that there are some questions about that and yet, but I want to talk about what's going on in schools, because I think there have been three really big shifts within schools. One the I'm gonna try to do this quick so kind of running through the Clinton administration, the Bush administration, into the Obama administration, there was actually, like, a relatively shared perspective on education reform. We had these big kind of standardized tests pushed by both Democrats and politicians. If you look at like the Bush administration, the first major act coming out of Congress after the September 11 attacks, is no child left behind. So education was this space where both parties were working on relatively similar perspectives, and that fell apart at the end of the Obama administration and, you know, and Betsy DeVos perspective was, was the first kind of education, first, ahead of the Department of Education, with a really radically different vision of what schools could be. So schools used to be a thing that Democrats and Republicans agreed upon. That's no longer true. Second thing that happened, uh. At the same moment was covid and the pandemic became a political tool, where anger, parents and family, anger around schools, around shutdowns, became politically useful. So just as there was Democrats and Republicans not agreeing on how schooling should be run. There's also this political wedge issue that gets picked up, you know, by media voices, and certainly by, you know, the same energy and anger that was brought to the tea party around taxation is transferred over into discussions about schooling. And so that's when we have these completely false stories around, you know, the most famous kind of hoax is the story of litter boxes in schools to cater to students who identify as cats. It's not true, but it just went all over the internet and media members picked it up like it was a real thing. Why? Because it benefits people with certain political agendas. So schools are being used as political cudgels in a way that wasn't feasible before. So, those are kind of two big national trends that have increased the pressure on teachers and increased the sense that the opinions of high schoolers are something that we need to really be on fire about, you know. So those are two things, but the third thing, and where I really focus my research on, is we don't teach people to talk to each other, and we can. So I've done research on historiography. So historiography is the type of academic arguments that historians have. It's very complex, but we did a study on the ways that historians thinking about what caused the persecution of Jews during the Nazi regime. And so there was an old you know, so in the 1960s and 70s, most historians would say, well, the German people were so scared of the Gestapo, they couldn't do anything but turn over to Jewish people and really, more recent historians have come back and said like, no. If you look at how many Gestapo and SS members there were in most rural areas of Germany, there were no Gestapo and Germans were self-reported in surveys, like, no, I wasn't that scared. So the idea that they were being compelled by Hitler's government has lost credibility over time. This is pretty academic stuff, and yet we found that when students sit and read different historians and they're taught about historiography, they rise to the challenge and they understand these changes. I've seen classrooms that argue. I've done research, looking at classrooms talking about what caused racial violence in Philadelphia. Now we start with the fact there were race riots in Philadelphia. Massive sections of the city were burnt. We're not asking students, in your opinion, was there racism in Philadelphia in the 1800s that's not a question. That's a fact. But why and what motivated these things is a real question, and it's a space where students can learn to disagree. It takes a certain kind of work from teachers, work that we need to train them in, work that we need to as community members demand that our teachers actually engage in and work that teachers need to feel safe to do, teachers especially social studies and teachers, feel like they are being scrutinized like that. They are under surveillance. And I think that that's true. I don't think they're wrong to feel that. So unless they get people showing up at school board school board meetings demanding, I want my kid to have a chance to talk about real history, unless they get notes to the principal saying, I heard the students had a debate about the election. Thank you. You know, please send Mr. Smith a note saying, Thank you. Unless teachers get positive messages, they're going to get scared by these. You know, the example that comes to mind is libs of Tiktok, who's effectively a political operative who makes a living posting decontextualized and clips of teaching. So we have a voice blaming teachers. We have a voice scaring teachers. But I don't hear the examples of positive teaching. I don't hear the examples of demands for engagement with these things. If you look in the National Social Studies, kind of the National Conference for social studies, they have bracketed out what is good social studies teaching, and it always comes back to dialog and discourse, because democracy comes back to dialog and discourse, but unless we demand those things from our schools, and unless we protect those things and our teachers, our students, young people won't learn them. So yes, our young people are probably scared of voicing opinions, because that's an uncomfortable, scary thing to do, but it's also a thing you can learn to do, and you will do it better when you are grounded in solid fact. But there is not, currently the political will behind that I see. There's not kind of a voluble political will demanding that we continue to update standards and update and push teaching further, even though we, those of us who study social studies, are churning out research on the possibility of students and how capable young people are to handle complexity and how capable young people are to sit with disagreement. So if we can get away from reporting on boogeyman and start reporting on what actually happens in classrooms. I think there's a lot of space for students to claim, their own space and to for I want there to be clubs where students are, you know, high school student, high school Democrats and high school Republicans, high school libertarians and high school. I want high schoolers to have engaged political identities. I want high schoolers to engage in protest and counter protest in ways that are respectful and in ways that are productive, but we're not. That's not that doesn't happen spontaneously. And we can't look at the kids and say, well, they don't know how to do this, just like we don't look at the kids and say, Man, they're really bad at reading, and throw up our hands. They're really bad at a specific skill set that we actually have hired professionals to do so, let social studies teachers do their job. Insist social studies teachers do their job, and I think that's how we make progress. 

Newswise: A lot of great discussion today. Thank you so much to all of the panelists, members of the media. If you want to follow up with any of the panelists, I've chatted again Ryan at Binghamton University's email address, and we'll provide a video and transcript. If you registered for today's event, we'll go ahead and send that to you based on you having registered. If you did not register and you just joined from a link, feel free to email us at [email protected], and we'll add you to the list to get that recording and a transcript. Thank you again to all of our panelists, and thank you to Binghamton University for working with us to put this all together with that I will say goodbye. Thank you. Namaste and good luck.