SPENCER: Jack, welcome.

JACK: Hey, great to be here.

SPENCER: So how bad are things today in U.S. education?

JACK: As someone who's coming in with a bold new education reform initiative, I think some would think, "Oh, I have a responsibility to sit here and tell you that things are terrible in U.S. education, that they've never been worse." There is a case that can be made for that; there are areas that are very clearly in decline, and there are some pretty clear crisis points. For example, if you look at the National Assessment of Educational Progress, you can see pretty major declines in both mathematics and reading across almost every state, with only one or two states doing better than they were pre-pandemic. There are some real challenges like that. But on the whole, what I'd say about U.S. education is that it's, in many ways, about the same state that it's been for many decades, with less everything being terrible and more everything being stagnant, with the same battles being fought, the same reform initiatives being proposed, the same struggles, the same mistakes being made and then not learned from. It's not that things are terrible, per se. It's just that things could be a lot better, and they're not really going anywhere.

SPENCER: What has kept things stagnant?

JACK: The case I would make for it is that if you look at what classrooms look like and what the goal for them has been for at least 50 years, since at least around the time special education laws were passed, the answer is, basically, we try our hardest to provide the same universal curriculum for everyone. There are going to be some marginal adjustments here or there when this universal curriculum doesn't quite work out. If a student is particularly talented, you might give them a few advanced classes, direct them to challenge problems, or let them move a year ahead. If students are struggling, you'll try to pull them up to age-level work, but you don't really see anything trying to push people away from one solitary, universal path.

SPENCER: My assumption is that a lot of money is going into special ed. How much is actually going into it, and what is that money going to right now?

JACK: Yeah, there is a tremendous amount of money going to special ed in education. It's about 25% of the budget of any given district, and similarly, large chunks of state and federal funding go into it. The answer to what it's going into varies. You have some small proportion of students who take a tremendous amount of effort to care for, and they functionally just have full-time caretakers. They have schools with much smaller student-to-teacher ratios and aides working around the clock with them. Then you have other students who have somewhat less restrictive environments and students who just have certain amounts of support in a regular classroom environment. So what's it going into varies a lot by student.

SPENCER: How well would you say that special ed funding is going in terms of its uses?

JACK: Yeah, in a lot of ways, special education funding is working well. There is a sense in which parts of it are a never-ending money pit, and it can happen to go in a sort of one-way ratchet, where people will keep looking for more and more funding. There are elements of it that demand more and more funding. Some of the students who need the most support have care that can get extraordinarily expensive, so there is that. But by and large, I wouldn't say that special education is where the problem is per se. Special education has its role; it has its place. A lot of very passionate and caring teachers are looking to help these students and doing the best they can in difficult positions.

SPENCER: If you could reform how schools operate, what is the crux of what you do?

JACK: The crux of what I would do doesn't have to do with special ed so much as it has to do with the other side of the spectrum. Ever since you had schools focused in this sort of universal direction, you've had initiatives like No Child Left Behind that function in a mindset of wanting every student to reach approximately this level, and once they get above this level, we'll more or less forget about them. Alongside that, you've had initiatives to what's called D Track classes, where you try to, for example, compress all of the math curriculum. Instead of having an honors class and a regular class, you have it all in one class. You have students progress in a unitary track through all of that. If you look at the data, and if you look at how people actually acquire skills in other areas, anytime people are serious about acquiring a skill — in athletics, in music, in chess, anything like that — you never group everyone who is the same age together, toss them in a bunch, and tell a teacher, "Hey, with these 30 people who are at radically different areas, teach them all this one unitary thing." What you do is look at the specific level someone is at, teach them, and support them precisely where they are. There are many recommendations that I'd make within education, but my biggest one by far is that ability grouping over age grouping makes sense in education. It fundamentally makes sense to say, "Rather than wanting all students of a certain age to reach the same level at the same time, and if someone's not reaching that level, something's wrong, and if someone's reaching that level, you forget about them," to say, "Where are students actually at, and what will actually help any given student?" To give students the tools to go as far and as fast as they want to go, whether or not they are at the level they are nominally supposed to be at for their age.

SPENCER: What is the evidence that splitting up students by ability or where they're at right now, rather than grouping them together, actually works better?

JACK: It's a good question, and this has been a contentious issue. One reason it's been so contentious is that, quite frankly, education research is and has been in a pretty bad state, and most of the really good research on education-related topics comes not from education schools, but from adjacent departments, from economics departments, from psychology departments, and so forth that dip into it while education schools take a while to really adapt to these best practices. You've had a long-running debate that sort of got launched by Jeannie Oakes' 1980s book, Keeping Track, which was more of a qualitative than anything seriously quantitative study that basically argued that schools with these multi-track systems underserved the lower tracks and that it was bad, which kicked off a lot of conversations. It sort of set the tone in the education sphere for saying this is bad. But when you had people look at the actual research around meta-analyses, you had two narratives emerge from it, one led by someone named Robert Slavin and another led by researchers named Chen-Lin and James Kulik, where they both ran meta-analyses and looked at more or less the same set of studies. Slavin said, "Okay, tracking doesn't really make a difference, but it's inegalitarian, and therefore we should oppose it."

SPENCER: To clarify, tracking means splitting students by ability level, rather than lumping everyone of the same age in the same classroom, is that correct?

JACK: Yes, that is correct. The Kuliks, on the other hand, said, "Hold on, Slavin just cut out every study for gifted children, including gifted students, stating these ones don't meet his inclusion criteria. He cut out anything where they seriously changed the curriculum. What he found in his meta-analysis was that if you simply shuffle students around and don't change the curriculum, then nothing really happens." When you include things like gifted programs or serious curricular changes, you find consistently that ability grouping and anything that accelerates high-achieving students through the curriculum has pretty large positive impacts on their learning and doesn't have negative impacts elsewhere. I'm personally optimistic as well. If you look at some of the most effective programs, they can be more effective for students learning at all levels, not just the top ones. In terms of meta-analyses and the research backing, it's unambiguous that ability grouping works better for high-achieving students.

SPENCER: You're saying that the best evidence for high-achieving students is that they do better if you put them in these tracking programs. We don't know whether this helps lower-achieving students, or it's less clear at this point. Is that right?

JACK: Yes. One thing you can look at is a really large study from the 1960s called Project Follow Through, which aimed to compare elementary school curricula to see which one was best. There was struggle and an ongoing debate, particularly at the time between child-centered constructivist methods of teaching, which involved asking the child a lot of questions and having them figure things out on their own, versus more direct methods, where you tell the child what to do, and then they do it. All these curricula were laid out, and one in particular, direct instruction, was massively more effective than the other curricula. For political reasons, the people running the study disregarded this. There was a lot of money and funding going into these other programs, and no one really wanted to shut them down, so they all just kept getting funded. Direct instruction became a curiosity of the education establishment, used more in special education settings than in other settings, aside from a few niche elementary schools that do well. Direct instruction is a pretty ability grouping-focused curriculum, and it makes a lot of other changes alongside the ability grouping, aligning more with the cognitive science of learning. It was demonstrated to be effective at every level, not just at the top level. When looking at reliability, the research and meta-analysis suggest impact at the top level. When you look at things like direct instruction, it suggests impact at every level. In general, the common theme is that when you look at things that align with the cognitive science of learning, and part of that is ability grouping, students do, in fact, do better.

SPENCER: Now we're talking about studies that make measurements about how good different approaches are. But how do you actually measure this? You can do standardized testing. Is that the main way to measure it? Is that a good way to measure it?

JACK: In general, it's going to be test scores. People can criticize standardized tests, and people can criticize other tests, and I'm sympathetic to some of those criticisms on the margins, but ultimately, you will want to find a measurement. Historically, test scores have been used, and in general, test scores, at least for the purpose of measuring progress relative to these things, get the job done.

SPENCER: Basically, to summarize your position, if we were to take students and put them on separate tracks based on ability level and where they're at right now, you think that you would see an improvement in test scores for the highest students, the students doing the best right now, that they would accelerate, and the lower students that are doing less well right now, you think probably would also accelerate, but it's less clear that will definitely be a win. Is that right?

JACK: I want to emphasize that, while ability grouping is a big part of what I'm focused on, alongside that, there's a much broader project of just taking the cognitive science of learning more seriously. I think if you get in a mindset of the goal is to teach to someone's ability, not to age, and if you start incorporating more of the principles of cognitive science of learning, then you can reasonably expect improvements at every level.

SPENCER: What does that involve, the cognitive science of learning? What are some of the things that you feel we've learned about how education should work, but it's not necessarily incorporated in schools today?

JACK: A good question. There are a lot of principles that are pretty well understood at this point to be really effective in terms of actual learning. The problem is that there's a truism of education that what you like doesn't work, and what works you won't like. A lot of the things that are most effective in learning will feel less effective as people are going through them and will be harder and, in some ways, more irritating to do than other things.

SPENCER: For the student or the teacher, or both?

JACK: For both, in a lot of ways. For example, spaced repetition is one of the most well understood and most reliable mechanisms. If you review something within a day, and then within a few days, and then within a couple of weeks, and then within a few more weeks, spacing out your further practice sessions further away each time, you will remember it a lot better than if you space it out in even chunks along that whole way, like studying it once, then studying it again in two weeks, then studying it again two weeks later. Spaced repetition tries to map the times you review things to the forgetting curve, that is, to review things right when you're on the verge of forgetting them, which turns out to be a lot more effective than other methods of review. That's useful, but it's also pretty irritating to work into practice, and so a lot of people simply don't. Or, as another example, if you are comparing blocked practice versus interleaving, that is, if you are saying, "Should I study topics one at a time, focus, focus, focus, another topic, focus, focus, focus, another topic, focus, focus, focus, or should I mix things together and do a bit of one and then a bit of another?" Blocked practice is more convenient and feels more intuitive and feels like you're learning more in a row with that, whereas interleaved practice will consistently leave people remembering more and having learning stick longer. There are a lot of things like that.

SPENCER: You might think that educators, whose whole job is around doing effective education, should know about these results and be integrating them into the classroom already.

JACK: There are some movements. You have groups like Deans for Impact that are trying to get more of a focus on the science of learning, and you have some teachers who are trying to get more of a focus on the science of learning. But the reality is that if you look at education schools, that is, the schools that train teachers, they have always been a little bit of a black sheep at universities, in the sense that they're somewhat halfway between a vocational school and research institutions. They operate, in some ways, a lot like business schools, where they are not as focused on the nuts and bolts of how to accomplish things as they are on a series of squishy, often faddish, often ideologically driven points that don't really cut to the heart of the subject that they are ostensibly teaching. Quite frankly, the training for educators is just incredibly poor in the United States.

SPENCER: You mentioned ideological trends. What are some examples where you think that ideology is preventing them from learning good epistemic practices or good educational practices?

JACK: Here I'll point as an example that there's a reason I refer back to it so much. Ability grouping is one thing that if you go into any education school in the country, more or less, you will hear horror stories about ability grouping, and you will hear why it doesn't make sense and why schools should be detracked and why it's not appropriate to teach students in homogeneous classrooms, and they don't really have sound backing for that. It's not something that has been arrived at from a dispassionate look at the research. It is based on an ideological opposition to it.

SPENCER: If you were to steel-man their perspective, what do you think the strongest arguments they have against doing it are?

JACK: So the steel-man for it, and the reason people are wary of it, is it comes from a very egalitarian frame and from a noble impulse of wanting to help the weakest students and wanting to help the people who are worse off. They will see things that help stronger students as further privileging the privileged, essentially. Their job is to use education as a tool of equalization and as a tool to raise everyone to the same level, and they worry that focusing more on the stronger students would mean leaving the other ones behind. They worry that you would create a sort of pseudo caste system in education, where you're putting all your resources towards the top students and not helping the disadvantaged students. They worry that there would be both race and class differences between the tracks that would leave the lower tracks worse served. I'm not going to say that it is completely impossible that something like that would ever happen. What I would say rather is that what I take from all of that is not to never do this sort of thing, but to devote a lot of resources to the disadvantaged. If we're saying, "Let's have a class to help students like this," then let's actually help students like that. Let's do what we're already doing, which is pouring a lot more resources towards the bottom end, towards special education, things like that, and really take the project of building well-resourced classrooms with those people seriously, rather than saying, "We want to slow down the fastest students because they're getting ahead of the others," which I think is the destructive form of their approach.

SPENCER: When we talk about the cognitive science of learning, these different results you mentioned, there are others. Usually, learning works better when you have to try to generate the answer yourself rather than just reread the answer over and over again. There's a whole bunch of these in the literature. What do you think teachers in education schools would say about why they aren't using them? Would they say that they are actually using the science here? Or would they say, "No, the science is actually wrong, or the science leaves out important details about how to implement things in practice," what's the counterargument here?

JACK: That's a good question. Not being in that position, I'm not going to be able to provide a perfect answer for what they would say. I would say that it's not necessarily that there's this deep opposition to it all. It's just that they have other priorities that they are more interested in. For example, you have a lot of education programs and a lot of situations where teachers are just trying to tick a box. They understand that if they go through this program, they will come out the other end with a pay raise, get a master's degree, and so forth. They need this credential. The programs are tailored to be fairly easy and fairly routine to get through for that. There are some where my understanding is they are incorporating more of these and looking at them more seriously and slowly doing it. Part of it is just that things are slow to evolve, and fads stick around. An example of a fad that stuck around for a long while, and hopefully it's starting to fade, is the idea in a lot of education departments that students would learn better if you taught them visually, auditorily, or kinesthetically. This was an attractive idea in education schools, but pretty quickly in the literature, people looked in and found, "Okay, there isn't actually any evidence for this. This is something that has strong support." But it's one of those many intuitively appealing ideas that has taken a long while to get rooted out of all the curricula because people want it to be true. That's how I would describe a lot of things in education. People find things they want to be true, and then they stick them in, and those things become deep-rooted.

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SPENCER: One technique that I've seen in use over the last few years is that students would hold little symbols that they could flip to red or green. Throughout the teaching sessions, the teachers would ask the students questions, and the students would have to give their answer in real time, like, "Yes or no. Do you think that's true? Do you not think that's true?" My understanding is that this is an evidence-based technique, and it's begun to roll out and is getting used more and more. I don't know whether it's used to any significant extent still, but it does seem like a positive movement. I'm curious if you're aware of that kind of technique.

JACK: I'm loosely aware of that one. You're right. It's a generally positive movement. I have nothing against that. There are things like that that sometimes come out, and there's slow drifting towards good things at times.

SPENCER: I have my own personal experience from my school growing up, and you have your own personal experience from your school, but it's sort of hard to take a bird's eye view and say, "What is school really like today? What is a student actually experiencing?" When I was in school, a lot of it was lecture-based. We did also have activities, but I would say a lot of it was lectures. There was a lot of memorization. In some subjects, there was a lot of essay writing where you had to analyze something, and it often felt like you wanted to figure out what the teacher wanted you to say about that thing. There was a lot of guessing what the teacher thought. I'm curious, how much do we know about what is actually happening in classrooms today? How would you describe what is happening? How does this or how does a different time break down? How do the activities break down?

JACK: Yeah, so when you're looking at classrooms, it's important to emphasize that education is at once very homogenous and very heterogeneous. It's homogenous in the sense that there is what some researchers have called the grammar of schooling that has stayed very consistent across many places for a long time and has proven very resistant to change. Primarily, age-based grouping is very consistent and resistant to change. That is 50 to 60 minute blocks of time that students spend in any given class before going to another class. That's pretty consistent and resistant to change. Then you have things that vary place to place, such as policies around acceleration and grouping. When you look at education policy, the map is extremely district-based; you have to go into any given district and say, "What are the specific policies of this district? What are the specific trends? What specific schools does it offer?" It's very hard to look at from a bird's eye view. But there are those more fundamental things, like the grammar of schooling. In terms of what it looks like now, there are fads that come and go, and there are curricular changes that come and go, but by and large, the classroom experience that one person has, the thing that you're picturing as your typical classroom, is usually not going to be that far off from other classrooms.

SPENCER: So is it still mainly students sitting in a classroom, listening to the teacher talk, pausing every once in a while for a small activity, but a lot of lectures and a lot of memorization?

JACK: You'll have that. You'll have a lot of classes that focus more on project-based learning, different trends there, but yeah, you have lectures and project-based learning. It's not like there's one consistent mode for all classes, but there's still a lot of that.

SPENCER: And what is project-based learning?

JACK: Project-based learning is where teachers orient their classroom around students. You have this project to complete. Here are the ways to complete it, and then students, say, like you're working on a poster, for example, instead of working through a hierarchical, ordered curriculum and memorizing things.

SPENCER: One objection that I think would come up for a lot of people when you're talking about breaking students out by skill level or what their current knowledge level is, is how do you actually do this logistically? You have a bunch of kids in a room; how do you break people out by skill and organize it all?

JACK: It's a good question. One thing I can point to is the ways that have pretty consistently been done that are under attack in some places. For example, you can look at the way mathematics grouping usually works, and there have been a lot of pushes against this, notably in California, but many other districts as well. Some students will take pre-algebra, some students will take algebra, some students will take geometry, and you'll take a different subject a different year, depending on what you've done leading up to that, what you're ready for, and so forth. Students will just sign up for different classes. That's the most basic form of ability grouping. You're just saying you offer this number of classes. Students will sign up for the regular track, will sign up for the honors track, or will sign up for whatever class they want, and then they go for that. You can also have more flexible grouping patterns, say at the elementary school level. What direct instruction does is it will test students pretty regularly and have a few different classrooms for these students to go into. Depending on their tests, they are teaching them in, say, multi-week chunks, and then testing at the end, seeing, "Do you move up? Do you stay? Where do you go?" And maintaining much more flexible ability groups that change many times over the course of the year. You have those regular ones that are annual based, and those are the more typical ones, and you have more flexible ones that are more often used at the elementary school level.

SPENCER: So are these approaches basically barely used right now, and you want to get them used to a significant extent, or are they actually being used where there are a lot of these honors classes, et cetera, and you're just trying to push it further?

JACK: So look, my ideal would be to shift more towards ability as the default over age as the default, where you're not saying different groups within the same age saying, "Go to this class, go to this class, go to this class," but you're sitting down, you're testing students and saying, "You're at this level, you're ready for this amount of this stage of the curriculum, go for that," and experiment with things out there. Ideally, I would say we should be doing this much more, but in terms of what's actually happening, I want to both defend the current forms of grouping, which are things like having different math classes depending on what students are ready for, offering gifted programs and making those gifted programs more robust, and expanding those gifted programs, because they vary a lot depending on the area. In terms of whether it is just a once-a-week pull-out section, or is it a more comprehensive curriculum that really pushes students beyond the default? So I would say, "Protect and expand these current gifted programs. Look at these accelerated tracks and how easy they are to access for any given student," and then things like direct instruction that are more rarely used, but also more experimental approaches. Part of what's important to emphasize with this, part of the reason that I'm building the Center for Educational Progress, and why I saw a space for it, is that, in general, the trend among policy, even though sorting by ability both works and is very popular in the general populace, the general policy trend has absolutely been against it. There was a major fight in California over whether algebra could be taught in the eighth grade or not, and they wanted to have a unified track where all students learn the same thing in every given grade, and they wanted to delay algebra until ninth grade in that track. So the fight was unified track with algebra in ninth grade, unified track with algebra in eighth grade. People fought for a long while. Ultimately, the voters pushed for eighth grade. But even there, I would say they really should be more serious about grouping students in terms of what the students are actually ready for. So yeah, there are fights like that in California. Another thing I'd point to are the attacks on selective schools such as Lowell (High School), and Thomas Jefferson (High School for Science and Technology), where coalitions have come up looking to weaken their admissions processes. My core message in response to all of these is that someone needs to be standing up there unambiguously to say, "Actually, there's a role for advanced classes. There's a role for pushing some students further in their curriculum when they're ready to go further in their curriculum. There's a role for these selective schools, and there's a role for more experimental methods that push things further and try more directions in terms of, 'are students ready to learn more? Great. Let's give them more.'"

SPENCER: Would you want to drop the notion of age groups altogether and say, "We don't even need a notion of age group in school? We just have a whole bunch of classes offered, and there's some kind of admission criteria for each class. Maybe it's based on a test." And then any student of any age can take any class, essentially?

JACK: For my pie-in-the-sky ideal, absolutely. Do I have a specific model in my head where I am certain every step of it would work? No, not at present. I can't say that I have all of the details for that worked out precisely. But as an ideal, absolutely, I would say that there's no fundamental reason why you want to have age as the default. If students are ready for more in any given subject, then it's appropriate to push them further in those subjects. I do think even in my pie-in-the-sky ideal, you might still have, say, a homeroom-type class. You might still have some subjects where you're like, "This really can just be presented to students of their age and let them socialize with kids their age." But yeah, by and large, in terms of what's pedagogically appropriate in any given subject, there's no reason to have it be sorted primarily by age.

SPENCER: We witnessed pushback against standardized testing as a concept. Do you think that that's connected to opposition to the ideas you're talking about?

JACK: Yeah, I do. The reality is that standardized testing lays bare a lot of the gaps that people are uneasy about, and there's a tendency when you see an uncomfortable reality to try to smash the thermometer rather than changing the weather, as it were. That is, when people see gaps in standardized test scores, when they see achievement gaps or anything like that, there's a tendency to attack the instrument and say, "We're not going to look at the instrument. We're not going to pay attention to it. We're going to try to discredit the instrument that measures the gaps rather than doing something about raising people's achievement." And I think it stems from exactly the same sort of thing.

SPENCER: So do you think that pushback against standardized testing is well-intentioned as a way to try to raise up all students, but they're just wrong about facts about the world?

JACK: I think almost everyone in education is well-intentioned. I think that everyone is passionate about kids. Everyone wants to help people learn. What I don't want to say is, "If we all agreed on facts, then everything would be fine, and we would all agree on what to do about things." And I think even well-intentioned people who agree broadly on the factual picture, are going to have different priorities. As an example here, I'd point to two people who I broadly agree with their view of the picture of the world as it is. That is Freddie de Boer and Bryan Caplan. Freddie de Boer wrote The Cult of Smart, which is a case for his ideal vision for education. And Bryan Caplan wrote The Case Against Education," which is his ideal. If you look at de Boer's ideal, you have a situation where he advocates basically for the Bernie Sanders 2016 platform. He has seven pages of Medicare for All in an education book. He talks about the non-cognitive benefits of education. He says, "Look, education can't possibly close gaps between people; that just fundamentally won't work that way. Therefore, we should focus on the non-cognitive elements. We should focus on providing a safe learning environment for people. We should focus on creating a world that is more egalitarian in general, and not try to make education the hub of this egalitarianism." And it's very much filtered through the lens of his communism. Bryan Caplan says, basically, "Oh, a lot of education is signaling. A lot of these education metrics don't work the way we want. A lot of interventions don't work the way we want. Therefore, because of that, we should radically defund government education in this way, this way, this way, and we should look to other routes, let people go into the workforce earlier," a lot of things that are very influenced by his anarcho-capitalist view of the world. And I don't think that understanding more facts would bring de Boer or Caplan any closer together. In fact, I know that understanding more facts wouldn't bring them closer together, because you could sit them down and they would nod to almost entirely the same factual picture. Given all of that, what I am trying to do is more or less establish a third pole in that, rather than saying, "Let's focus on these non-cognitive elements; we can't close gaps," or saying, "It's all signaling, so let's tear down." What I'm saying is, "My priority is understanding how to achieve excellence. My priority is in any given subject, understanding what does it actually take to reach the peak of this subject? What are the actual underlying mechanical steps that will make people achieve excellence in something?" And then whether or not we can close any given gap, whether or not we can use education to equalize everything, what we absolutely can do is use education to lift everyone and push everyone as close to those peaks as they are capable of and interested in going and encouraging them further and further up that ladder. So when I'm building up my ideal vision for education and comparing it to people who are opposing standardized tests or whatever, the reason I'm emphasizing all of this, when I'm comparing to these people, yes, I would say that these people are well-intentioned, but they're well-intentioned towards goals that I don't think properly appreciate the value of and the role of excellence, and no matter how well-intentioned, they end up obstructing this path towards excellence.

SPENCER: I remember reading what you said about your reaction to this project. I think the quote was, "I've never felt as strongly about another project in my life." Why is that?

JACK: Why do I feel strongly about this project? The core answer is that, when I was a very young child, I loved learning. As soon as I saw the opportunity to learn, I was... You can read my mom's journal entries for me as a very young kid, and she was talking about how this kid was always bragging about, "Oh, I can count backwards from 50 now," "Oh, I know the alphabet now," "Oh, I can read now." Then the second I got into school, the first entry she has after I'm in school says, "Jack is in school now. He won't talk about it much. He says he likes it fine, but also says he wishes he were in first grade and that he misses preschool. I wonder if he is a bit lost, still and bored, wondering when the action begins." That tension has defined my whole life, this tension of really loving learning, sincerely loving learning, and every time I was in school, being deeply and fundamentally frustrated that it did not seem to take this process towards excellence seriously. It did not seem to be encouraging people, pushing them, lifting them, inspiring them in the way that I want to see people encouraged, pushed, lifted, and inspired. It didn't seem to care if someone was ready for more. It didn't seem to care if someone was more curious about a subject. My impression of the education system was that it was very much focused on shuffling people down the same universal track, and as soon as it felt like it didn't need to give them attention or push them, it just stopped. The older I got, the more seriously I looked at the education system and felt very deeply, very fundamentally, that anytime I found someone in it that was pushing something towards more excellence, doing something more compelling, I thought it was the most incredible project I'd seen. For example, when I found the curriculum Art of Problem Solving in mathematics, which focuses on building out a richer, more in-depth mathematical curriculum aimed at contest math, I was entranced and overjoyed by the beauty of it. It is ultimately the curriculum that international mathematics Olympiad contestants tend to use when they're progressing through math. So why do I feel so strongly about this project of excellence in education? Because I have never seen the education system as a whole pursue excellence in the way I would want it to, and I've only seen people around the fringes of it pursuing it. When I sat down and wanted to study what the process of learning looks like, what the mechanics of learning look like, what the underlying way people achieve excellence looks like, I couldn't go to school and study education for this. If I had gone to school and studied education, it would not have gotten me anywhere near what I wanted; it would have taught me, quite frankly, a bunch of fads and rubbish. I do not think that is right. Fundamentally, I do not think that is the way things should be. I think there should be a seriousness about what it takes to achieve excellence in any given domain, and people should have good answers to that.

SPENCER: I understand that No Child Left Behind had a lot of support. It was actually a bipartisan policy, and obviously it was intended to improve the education system. What do you think went so wrong with it? If it didn't actually improve outcomes, which I'm going to guess you would say it didn't, what do you think was the mistake that people were making?

JACK: It pushed the outcomes up a bit, and then pretty quickly, you hit the limits of what its standards and accountability approach could achieve. Fundamentally, the mistake people were making with it is not a mysterious mistake, and it's not a mistake that was unknown at the time. It's not the first time that people made that mistake, and that mistake was treating the goal of education as getting all students up to the same level. In No Child Left Behind, it was a particularly poisonous form of this, where you had a goal of getting every school up to the same arbitrary "proficient" level within 12 years, with a certain percentage "proficient" in any given school.

SPENCER: That was a school-level requirement. So no matter how bad the school started off, or how difficult the situation was, or how little education the students in that school had had prior, it didn't matter.

JACK: Right. And you would have funding carrots and sticks on whether they were making appropriate yearly progress towards the school. Ultimately, they were like, we will accomplish this goal within 12 years, all schools will get to the same level. What I want to emphasize is the day they made that goal, anyone informed could have told them it was wrong. The day they made that goal, anyone informed could have told them it was incoherent. It did not make sense. It would never happen. That was not how schools functioned. But they made that goal anyway because, I would argue, they wanted to maintain a certain pie-in-the-sky idealism about if you just say, "We will get everyone to the same level," then people will figure out a way to get everyone to the same level and make it happen. I think that was the original sin of it, and the thing that made it so pernicious to me, this thing that made No Child Left Behind so poisonous, is that suddenly you're taking teachers and students and parents in the most difficult schools, in the most difficult situations, the ones who needed the most support and were in hard positions, and you were telling them, you are all failing. You teachers are failing your students, you parents are failing your kids. You kids are failing to learn because you haven't reached this arbitrary level that other schools are reaching. We're going to punish you and yell at you and attack you for not reaching this level, and we are going to conclude you are fundamentally deficient in something because you're not reaching this level. I think that was extremely warping, and it wasn't at all the first time that sort of thing had happened.

SPENCER: So what do you think a sensible version of that would have been? What kind of goal could they have set for schools that actually would have provided the right incentives?

JACK: It's a good question in terms of what would provide the right incentives. I think the answer is, don't treat standardized test scores as punitive. Don't look at them and say you are hitting this standardized test score, therefore you are succeeding, therefore you are failing. Treat them as diagnostic. Any time you have a test score in anything, it is incredibly useful information telling you, "This is where the student is at. This is where these students are at." A positive version of it all would shift from test scores as the reasons we see something as a good school versus a bad school. Test scores as the measure of success. Test scores as the metric to test scores as the clue that tells us what students need at any given time. Rather than looking at a school that has all students at a really high level on a test that, say, a selective public school likes to advance and will achieve automatically because students have tested into those schools, you should be asking, is this a good school for students who have an average high level? When you look at a school that has students who are below "proficient" at any given level, who are progressing at a slower pace, what you want to ask is not, "How can we get these students up to this level of proficiency and make this school an average school by these metrics?" You want to say, "Is the curriculum appropriately tailored to students of this level to help this specific group of students make progress in effective ways, from where they're at towards where their goals are?" I think shifting to that mindset, rather than test scores telling you whether your school's success or failure, to test scores telling you what level you need to be targeting your curriculum to would be a really important shift.

SPENCER: What about giving schools incentives that are based on the change in students? If you have students come in as freshmen in high school, you give them test scores to measure where they're at and you say, "Okay, we're going to give you incentives or rewards or punishments based on, relative to their starting test scores, how they're doing two years later," let's say.

JACK: Yeah. So that's been tried and that's been done. I would say I'm not going to hold myself out as an expert in value-added metrics. I've looked somewhat at them, but I haven't dived deeply enough into them to be confident in the areas they succeed and fail, other than saying that they do succeed and fail in some areas. It's really hard to isolate the effects of any given class versus just the effects of student quality, student preparation, and things like that. When you're tying incentives to it, when you're tying punishments and rewards to it, you wind up creating a sort of Goodhart's Law situation. You wind up having people optimize towards these incentives in ways that often distort things. Here, I'll give an example of something I mean relative to this: in recent years, AP tests have been getting easier. There are a lot of AP classes where the tests are suddenly a lot easier to pass than they were a few years ago. The reason for that is that AP scores are seen as such a good metric, such a positive trait of a school and a positive trait of students, that there are a lot of incentives to let more people pass AP tests. There are a lot of incentives for any given school to encourage students into AP classes. As soon as you have more students in those AP classes, there are incentives to have them pass the tests, and if more students are failing, then the answer is to make the tests easier so more students can pass. As soon as you introduce a lot of incentives like this and a lot of characteristics like this, that sort of thing is going to happen, which isn't to say all these incentives and all these value-added metrics for all these scores have no role, just that you need to be wary about giving perverse incentives.

SPENCER: It seems that if you make schools reward or punish based on test scores, there's going to be a strong incentive to focus your curriculum more and more around exactly what's being tested, which also seems undesirable, at least from my perspective. Generally speaking, the tests are not so perfect that you could say, "Just because someone did well, it means that they learned what they're supposed to learn." They're supposed to be proxies for something else, the thing we care more deeply about. Would you agree with that?

JACK: I'm a bit of a cynic about that, and the reason I'm a bit of a cynic about it is that I think it lets people off the hook. If you're saying, "Oh, there's this mysterious thing we care more deeply about that we can't test in any way, shape, or form, we cannot possibly create a test that captures the nuances of this," then you don't really ever have to demonstrate that you're doing anything at all. You can go into a classroom, come out the other end, and have no real skills gained and no real knowledge gained. I would say that most tests we have now are imperfect, but fundamentally, I take metrics very seriously, and I take building better tests and building better measures of things very seriously. If you look at any given skill, if you look at chess, if you look at music, you ultimately will have someone able to determine, "Yes, this person is playing chess effectively," versus playing chess ineffectively. You'll have a music teacher who's able to determine if this person can play this song well, and this person can play the song poorly. It's not always going to be like sitting down and taking a multiple-choice test for this, but there will be measures to say this person is good at this thing or this person is bad at this thing. As soon as someone tries to run away from those measures as a whole, the sense I get when that happens is not that they are trying to capture something more fundamental and something more perfect than the testing, so much as they're just trying to fuzz the measures as a whole and avoid the hard questions of whether this is actually helping people progress.

SPENCER: So if you got your wish and you were able to roll out exactly the kind of system you prefer, would you use testing as a way to reward schools, or would it only be a way of testing students in order to help them figure out what tracks they should be in? If you're not using it to reward and punish schools, how do you know if the system is working as a whole?

JACK: That's a good question. My answer is, I don't think I would use tests to reward or punish schools. I don't see anything appropriate or effective in that, but I think that even without rewards or punishments, when you have good data on what's happening, you can still get an idea of what's working and what's not. When you're going into them and checking, you can still get an idea of what's working and what's not.

SPENCER: It's more assessment, rather than you're not using rewards and punishments, but you're using testing to see how well the system is working.

JACK: Exactly, exactly. And yeah, I think that tests as diagnostics for both schools and students are very useful. Tests as creating this system of rewards and punishments get more distorting, and I think that the high-stakes system has its issues.

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SPENCER: It seems like a fundamental idea here is that students have different capabilities at every given moment in time. You take Student A and Student B, and they're not both necessarily ready for the same material, and there could be a lot of factors involved there, but this does seem to be somewhat ideological, where some people don't want to admit that students are coming in at very different levels, or maybe they're willing to accept that they come at different levels in certain ways, but not in other ways. How do you think about that?

JACK: The way I think about it, people can take this in different directions in terms of trying to determine cause, trying to determine fundamental underlying reasons, and so forth. I don't see any real reason to focus on the fundamental underlying reasons compared to focusing on the reality that people are at different levels. And you're right, there is sort of a wish-casting tendency to say everything equalizes out. We all have our different strengths. Gardner's multiple intelligences, I feel, is the most refined form of this, where I say some kids are good at one thing, some kids are good at another. It's not that there's no truth to it, but I think there's less truth than we would hope. More importantly than that, though, is the question of when you're looking at people as they are, they're going to be in any subject unambiguously at different levels. If you have a student who is struggling with arithmetic, that doesn't mean they'll always be struggling with arithmetic. They'll get through arithmetic at some point. They can move on to algebra, they can study geometry, they can study other things, but they are not going to suddenly stop struggling with arithmetic when you stick them in an algebra class and say, "Now you're doing algebra." That struggling with arithmetic will slow them down, will make them miserable, and will make them bounce off the class, and will make them hate the class further up when they're doing that. And that can apply to any given skill. So, yeah, I think that fundamentally, there is something of an ideological tendency for people to be uncomfortable with the idea of handling people at the level they're at that needs to be sort of shaken out of.

SPENCER: So from your point of view, it doesn't really matter if the reason students are struggling is because they have mental health issues, or they have a difficult home environment, or they have a lower IQ, or they are experiencing discrimination. The point is just that they are at a lower level, and they need to be at a class level that is able to meet them where they are, which will hopefully accelerate their learning, regardless of the underlying cause.

JACK: Right, exactly. I think it is totally understandable and appropriate for people to be concerned about whether this means giving up on students. It's really important to ensure that it doesn't mean giving up on students. To ensure that when you are saying, "We're going to meet these students where they're at." You are actually meeting them where they're at, and you're actually providing them instruction tailored to what they need. But yeah, ultimately, it doesn't matter. In a math class, it does not matter the reason you don't know how to do an integral. If you don't know how to do an integral, then you're going to struggle in calculus. The correct answer to that is not to rush people through things and hope that they'll figure out along the way what they're missing. The correct response is to drill in and to say, "This is the level that you're at, this is the instruction that you need, and to provide them instruction tailored to that until they're ready to move on."

SPENCER: One of the principles you talk about with regard to learning is that progress is constrained by interests over intelligence. What do you mean by that, and how does that fit in here?

JACK: Yeah, what I mean by that is I take intelligence research pretty seriously, and I take the role of intelligence in things pretty seriously. But the more you look at expertise research alongside intelligence research, the more you realize that the specific details of how talent emerges are a lot messier than just intelligence and the specific details of how expertise emerges. You're not going to find just the smartest people immediately becoming the fastest and the best in everything. You'll find some of that. You'll find more intelligent people generally do well in things, but in any given domain, any given person can progress, almost without exception. And there's a question of how much they can progress, and there's a question of how quickly they can progress. There's a question of if the effort is worth it at any given time, but there is not usually a question of whether they can progress at all. If they are serious, if they are focused, if people are training them effectively, and if they're doing the things that work, then there is going to be some way to progress. So the question from the perspective of a student or from the perspective of a teacher should not usually be, "Is this person smart enough to do this?" Even though intelligence is real, even though intelligence matters, even though there is clearly a role for it. The question should be, "How difficult will this be for this person to do, and are they ready to put in the work to make that happen? And are we ready to provide the support to make that happen?" You should have a clear-eyed view of precisely what it will take for someone to reach the next level, and you shouldn't sugarcoat it, and you shouldn't say, "Oh, it'll be trivial for you, or everyone will reach this level at the same pace, or anything like that." But part of giving people a realistic view is telling them, "Yeah, you can progress. There are clear, understood ways where you can progress. This will work, and this will work, and you can do these things, and we want to enable you to do these things."

SPENCER: Sometimes in discussions of education, it comes up that in, let's say, more difficult neighborhoods, a lot of a teacher's job is just to try to get kids to behave and to focus, and that until you have those basics in place, it's really hard to teach them anything. And that a lot of educating ends up being classroom management. To what extent do you see that as a big problem, and what do you think we can do about that?

JACK: Yeah, I think that it's a very real problem. And you're right, classroom management is a big part of the picture in a lot of places. That's one reason why I talk about education requiring order. Quite frankly, I think that in terms of, there's always this battle between progressives and traditionalists in education, in terms of what's the appropriate level of discipline, what's the appropriate level of structure, I do think that you absolutely need to be able to have an environment in classrooms where people can sit down and learn, and you need to be able to rely on that. So in general, I don't know that I personally have a lot of unique insight to add on the order front, other than saying that I think the people who are talking about taking phones out of classrooms are absolutely right. People who are talking about the need for ordered classrooms, the need to remove extremely disruptive students, and the need to really make sure that there is a situation conducive to learning, and do what it takes to create a situation conducive to learning. Yeah, I think that those are high priorities, and those are sort of prerequisites for any serious in-classroom learning.

SPENCER: I think of education as an area that's sort of famously difficult to get traction in, where changing things seems to be really hard. How do you think about how you're going to actually try to get your ideas into classrooms?

JACK: It's a good question. I would say that in some ways changing things is very hard, and in some ways changing things is very easy. As an example, I have a friend who's a dean of a Catholic school who is working with the CEP, and we've talked about education ideas for a long while. Based on the things we were talking about, he provided more ability grouping in his mathematics classes, and it worked very, very well. He looked around and saw a need for a logic tournament that would help people be inspired towards logic. He just went out and built that. I have someone I'm working with who is looking at building a private school in Phoenix, Arizona, and you can just go and do that. I have another friend who's built a micro school and is focused on putting the right cognitive science principles in that, and that micro school is working well. In terms of working around the edges of the system, it's surprisingly easy to sit down and build something meaningful around the edges of the system. In terms of controlling the levers of the system itself, obviously, that's harder, and shifting that behemoth is a struggle. But even there, maybe it's naive optimism, but there are areas where I'm pretty optimistic that you can make progress pretty quickly. For example, you look at schools like Stuyvesant and Thomas Jefferson, and you look at all the controversy around them and the admission techniques that they are using. One question that I don't think people have been asking nearly enough is, "Why don't we have more schools like that?" These are public schools, and these are often treated as the crown schools of the communities that they're in. Community members value them. People appreciate them. They're taken seriously. They bring prestige to an area. If you look at a lot of states, I don't think there is fundamental opposition to schools like this. They don't have any schools like it. For example, in Utah, my home state, there is no Thomas Jefferson High School of Utah. There is no Stuyvesant High School of Utah. There's no flagship crown public school that is a selective, serious institution that tries to get people to progress to as high a level as they can. That just doesn't exist. I don't think it doesn't exist because there's this deep-running ideological resistance in Utah to the idea of having a school like that. I think it doesn't exist because nobody has really put it forward and said, "Here's what it would take, and here's how it would be helpful." And nobody has made it a thing in the right way. My answer in terms of the system as a whole is there are ways to tinker around the edges, and those shouldn't be discounted. There are going to be levers in various districts, levers in various states, and levers at the national level that can and should be pulled once you have this orientation towards excellence. Some of them will be very, very hard to pull, but I think a lot of them will be surprisingly easy.

SPENCER: Jack, before we wrap up, I wanted to ask you about some maybe semi-related but quite different work that you've done as a freelance investigative journalist, if you will, where you've looked into different topics. One of those topics that you wrote about is the FAA hiring scandal. Do you want to tell us about that?

JACK: Yeah, absolutely. And I'll say that you mentioned it as sort of related. I would say it's more closely related than superficially it might seem. The FAA, for a long while, the way it would train air traffic controllers, or the way it would choose air traffic controllers, it had a network of schools set up, the Collegiate Training Initiative schools, CTI schools, and it had students from those schools, primarily from those schools, along with other people who were interested in becoming air traffic controllers, take an aptitude test called the AT-SAT. Based on their scores on the aptitude test, if they got a high enough score and if they met the other requirements, they were eligible to become air traffic controllers. In 2014, the FAA decided to overhaul its hiring process completely. It sent out a letter on New Year's Eve 2013 to all these CTI schools and told them, from now on, the degrees that students have been working to get from your schools don't count for anything for us, and anyone who has already taken this aptitude test and is waiting for admittance to become an air traffic controller, even if they passed everything, even if they were fully qualified, their test scores are voided. Instead, the FAA said people would need to pass a biographical questionnaire to be considered for admittance, and people didn't know what this biographical questionnaire was at first, but when they went and took it, it had questions like, "What was the lowest grade you got in high school?" And unbeknownst to them, the answer the FAA was looking for was "science," or "What was the lowest grade you got in college?" And unbeknownst to them, the answer the FAA was looking for was "history."

SPENCER: Wait, so you're saying if they said their lowest grade was in science, they got bonus points? They were more likely to get hired?

JACK: Yes, that was the highest weighted question on the test: What was your lowest grade in high school science? And the other lowest grade in college that you got 15 points for answering science and zero points for answering anything else on this? It was full of really weird things. How much of a risk taker are you? The more of a risk taker they were, the more points they got on it.

SPENCER: Not exactly what you'd want for the people directing traffic in your airport, right?

JACK: Not necessarily. This biographical questionnaire knocked out more than 90% of applicants in the years that it was used. It really shattered the FAA's hiring pipeline and took several years and an act of Congress to overturn. It just didn't get much focus or coverage until Fox Business did an investigation. A couple of others did it until I started talking about it last year and seeing what was going on.

SPENCER: So why did they make this change to the program? It just seems so odd. Why would you introduce this biographical questionnaire? Did people have problems with the current pipeline? Did they see the pipeline as not working as it was?

JACK: So if you look at it, there has been a long conversation, even from the time that the aptitude test was designed, about the trade-offs between disparate impact and performance on the job. They found that the aptitude test they were using exhibited significant disparate impact but was highly effective, so they made the test a little less effective to try to reduce disparate impact and ultimately reduced the minimum passing score on the test to something that about 95% of people would pass. But then they hired most people from a band that about 60% of people taking the test would pass, which brought a lot of disparate impact back. The same people who had asked them to reduce the score in the first place were put out and looked at and were like, "Okay, well, this test still has a lot of disparate impact." There was a struggle for about 10 years, discussion back and forth over what should be done with this research. They looked for alternative measures they could use, and they didn't really find an alternative measure that would be effective without having that disparate impact. But they did commission someone to write a barrier analysis and to talk about the role of disparate impact and to advocate for a shift to a two-step process. They never had any substantive backing in terms of whether this will improve or maintain performance, and in fact, they talked explicitly about the ways that it would degrade performance to do it. There was enough political pressure from within and without that they elected to overhaul the hiring process.

SPENCER: Did the new process have any measurement of skill, or was it just completely based on biographical information?

JACK: It was technically a two-stage process. The first stage was this biographical assessment that, again, was more or less just a completely random, non-selective process, but they did still have people take the aptitude test. However, my understanding is after this 2014 change. Before, they took about 87% of controllers from the "well-qualified band" that 60% of people passed. Afterwards, the minimum passing score again knocked out only about 5% of people. As long as you were not in the bottom 5%, maybe up to 10% of test takers, you would be qualified for the air traffic control job after taking that. While technically, they still had multiple steps, they made it much easier in terms of actual aptitude to make it in. That didn't mean that people would be able to make it through the academy and make it through air traffic control without actually demonstrating proficiency in it, but it meant that for the next few years, the failure rate at the Air Traffic Control Training Academy spiked significantly, and training times went up, and there were more problems downstream as a result.

SPENCER: Did it kind of defeat the purpose of why people were going through the training so the training no longer made sense?

JACK: Yeah. So the Collegiate Training Initiative schools, the CTI schools, the entire pitch of them, and the FAA explicitly was telling people, "If you want to become an air traffic controller, you go to this school, this is the way to do it, and this will get you a guaranteed — not guaranteed — but if you make it through and if you pass all the qualifications, you will be highly likely to get a job with us." And that was their value proposition. That was the reason they existed. So as soon as they removed that, and eventually they brought it back in part, but it was sort of too late. As soon as they removed that, suddenly, all these people who had these degrees and were focused on this had gone into debt for nothing, had gotten these degrees for nothing. It was just completely useless, and yeah, so it ruined the point of all that prior training completely, and those schools have never fully recovered from it. A lot of them still exist, but they have a lot more trouble justifying themselves now that the FAA sort of threw them under the bus a while ago, and that relation has been slowly mending, but yeah, so it defeated the purpose of that prior training. Once you got really into the pipeline, and once you were hired and they were sending you to the academy in Oklahoma City, that training still mattered.

SPENCER: Do you think that this screw-up puts us at significant risk in terms of danger on flights?

JACK: Not exactly. It has increased risk. The main thing it's done is there is a shortage of traffic controllers. During the time that this was going on, that shortage was not just not being corrected, it was being exacerbated. The total number of air traffic controllers was going down steadily every year that this was in place. The air traffic control hiring pipeline takes a while. It takes even longer to get people assigned to the busiest facilities, and so when they significantly weaken the selection effect and significantly weaken the pipeline and damage the pipeline, the result of that, fundamentally, is that you are going to have more shortages. So the way I would put it is, does it mean that you're going to have a wildly unqualified air traffic controller guiding your plane down? No. Does it mean that you will have busier, more stressed, more overworked air traffic controllers, and does it mean that you'll have some people who wind up going to less busy airfields, or wind up getting promoted out of frontline roles quickly? Yeah, it does mean some of that, and it does mean a general degradation of performance to one degree or another. Yeah, I would say it has degraded performance. It's one of many factors, as one of several factors. I don't want to come in and say this is the one key to understanding everything, so much as this is a part of the picture that the FAA mostly obscured for many years.

SPENCER: Are there people that defend it and say no, this was the right thing to do, or is everyone just basically like this was a crazy decision at this point?

JACK: At this point, almost no one will defend the biographical questionnaire as written, and it took years of FOIA requests and years of pressure to get the FAA to release and reveal what was going on with the questionnaire. Jorge, one controller who got screwed over by this for a while, fought them for a long time in court to get them to give up some of the documents. Once the full story is out, people don't defend it so much as just ignore it or minimize it. In the New York Times, for example, they'll frame it as, "A lawsuit filed by a conservative organization around some hiring change the FAA made," and they just won't go into much detail. No one who goes into a lot of detail about it winds up coming away saying, "Oh yeah, this biographical assessment made sense, and it worked well." You don't have anyone defending it outright, but there's a lot of minimization and a lot of ignorance around it still.

SPENCER: It sounds like the media on the right was more willing to pick this up, whereas the media on the left kind of wouldn't pick it up initially. Is that correct?

JACK: Yeah, absolutely. For a long time, only right-wing sources would touch it, and then my attention got drawn to it because, honestly, the biographical questionnaire sounded kind of too crazy to be true. I was poking at it and made a petty bet with someone that I could do a better job than all these right-wing sources at covering it further. Quite frankly, I did a better job than all these right-wing sources at covering it anyway. As soon as I did that, it went pretty viral among right-wing sources. No left-wing sources really touched it, and no mainstream ones really did. I was pretty frustrated by that because it really felt like something that I wanted to be handled before it could be abused and to be fixed before it could cause more of a problem. But, yeah, it was mostly ignored by mainstream outlets this time around. Now that there have been some recent tragic crashes, some mainstream outlets are more curious and are looking at it more. Vox published a good piece on it. I'm hearing about a couple of pieces in the pipeline that outlets might be touching more. But yeah, it went extremely viral on the right wing. It got mentioned in a recent executive order by Trump, but mainstream outlets have been a lot slower to touch it.

SPENCER: You can certainly see why people would want to increase representation of underprivileged groups. They took this unfortunate action where they created a sort of nonsense biographical questionnaire that made really no sense whatsoever in order to try to solve this problem, which is obviously not a good solution. But it seems like there are better solutions. For example, they could have done outreach into underprivileged communities and encouraged them to apply, provided extra training to help them be qualified for the different programs, etc. What would you see as a good way to try to achieve the same ends that they were trying to achieve without kind of destroying the whole pipeline?

JACK: It's a good question, and that's something that a lot of people impacted by the lawsuit were really passionate about. This is actually one reason why it's so tragic that it was not handled properly for so long. If you look at the people fighting, Moranda Reilly is the one who initially blew the whistle on some of the messiness of the biographical questionnaire. It didn't get to the cheating scandal, but she blew the whistle on a cheating scandal that was going on with it, and she organized a lot of people around trying to bring justice for it. She is a passionate advocate for more women in aviation. She has gone around and brought Title One students to the airport to have their first experience seeing airplanes up close and encourage people towards it. From her and from a lot of the people involved in it, what they want is to look for opportunities for meaningful outreach, for good outreach, things that actually Trump's executive order that was signed alongside everything else. What they don't want is lowering the bar. They have always tried to make this really clear; they really do support different forms of outreach and different forms of how we can encourage more people and bring more people into this and get more people excited about this. The trouble comes when you change the standard and neglect safety standards for that goal.

SPENCER: Jack, thanks so much for coming on.

JACK: Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure.

[outro]

JOSH: A listener asks: "Have you purchased anything recently, say less than $100, that you really enjoyed or thought was excellent?"

SPENCER: Yes, I purchased a pair of wireless headphones. They're about $25, and you can actually wear them while you're sleeping. They're kind of designed to be worn while you're sleeping. I find them really useful because it often takes me a long time to fall asleep. And so what I do is when I get in bed, I can just put something on that's kind of relaxing and listen to it. And I can actually fall asleep with them on. And because they're connected to each other, they don't get lost and disappear when I wake up. So they're easy to find even if they fall off. So I find that quite nice, quite useful.