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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. With us now, the SUNY chancellor, John B. King. He has previously been the US education secretary under President Obama and has a lot to say about the Trump plan to abolish the Education Department like that this isn't just about reshuffling the federal bureaucracy. It'll hurt real families with students from preschool through college. He'll explain why he thinks so.

Chancellor King has also been the New York State education commissioner under Governor Andrew Cuomo. Chancellor King has a new book called Teacher By Teacher: The People Who Change Our Lives. It's a memoir and tribute to teachers and teaching mentors and mentoring, especially for those with problems at home. He also had a New York Times op-ed last week that ties the book to the news called The Trump Administration Is Trying to Unravel One of Our Greatest National Accomplishments. Chancellor King, as an Albany alum who cares about the SUNY system, welcome back to WNYC. Congratulations on the book.

Chancellor John B. King: Thanks so much. Excited to talk with you.

Brian Lehrer: Starting with the op-ed, what are you referring to as "one of our greatest national accomplishments"?

Chancellor King: Well, it's really that we as a country have had a long-standing commitment to expanding the circle of opportunity through education. You think about President Lincoln and the Morrill Act, dedicating land and resources to the creation of our public higher education system in this country. You think about Brown v. Board of Education and expanding access to opportunity by dismantling segregation. These were important steps. That tradition is part of who we are as Americans. It's painful to see the administration walking away from the idea that education is a national imperative.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, the principle there, as we're entering this country's 250th anniversary year, and as you put it in the op-ed that from our earliest days as a country, America has believed in public education as a vehicle for upward mobility. You just gave us an example or two of that. You see that as kind of a founding principle in this country's history despite the segregation and other inequalities that you also address?

Chancellor King: Yes, I think our history is one of progress in fits and starts with lots of struggles and challenges and shortcomings, but we've made progress by giving folks access to opportunity. Think about the GI Bill as folks were returning from World War II and the ways in which that changed, not only individuals' lives but whole families' trajectories by giving folks access to education.

Brian Lehrer: Now, Trump hasn't said anything like, "Don't make education the foundation of upward mobility." He says in his executive order, "The experiment of controlling American education through federal programs and dollars and the unaccountable bureaucracy," those dollars and programs support, "has plainly failed our children, our teachers, and our families."

He adds, "The taxpayers spend more than $60 billion annually on federal school funding. This money is largely distributed by one of the newest cabinet agencies, the Department of Education, which has existed for less than one-fifth of our nation's history." Chancellor King, he's arguing that history suggests you don't need to have a federal agency to have public education provide that upward mobility that you cite. How would you argue back at that?

Chancellor King: Let's acknowledge that there's a lot in there that's disingenuous. Taking the argument at its core, what I'd ask people to imagine in their mind's eye is the Norman Rockwell painting of Ruby Bridges. Such an iconic image. You think immediately of Ruby Bridges in the center, but who's standing around Ruby Bridges? US marshals. Well, why US marshals?

Because the school district of New Orleans, the state of Louisiana, were not willing to ensure that Ruby Bridges would have access to an equitable education. It took a federal role to ensure that that occurred. That's really the tradition of the federal role in education. Most decisions are made at the state and local level, but the federal government is there to ensure that the most vulnerable students are protected and getting the resources they need.

Brian Lehrer: To that point, are the programs you mentioned in your piece for students like those at risk, or just the way they're administered? Head Start for low-income kids to have preschool, Title I funding for K-12 with low-income populations, that is K-12 schools with low-income populations. Pell Grants at the college level, are they cutting those or just moving which department administers them?

Chancellor King: Well, that's the really sinister thing here. When you look at the proposals being discussed in Congress and the budget proposals put forward by the administration, what you see is a plan to cut these programs for the most vulnerable students. Plans to cut billions of dollars from K-12 that will result in larger class sizes, teacher layoffs, fewer enrichment opportunities for low-income students.

You see a plan to cut the Pell Grant program, which has been a point of access to higher education for generations of low-income Americans. You see plans to restrict the student loan program to make college less affordable for low and middle-income Americans. When they say it's just about bureaucratic reshuffling, that's really a cover for an effort to defund public education.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, to the message of Chancellor King's book, Teacher by Teacher, which we will get to, who has a story about a teacher who changed your life? We will hear at least one from Chancellor King, maybe more than one. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, call or text, or who has a question or opinion about dismantling the federal Education Department or, for that matter, who has a question about SUNY for the SUNY chancellor, John B. King? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692.

Staying on the Education Department and your op-ed, what many on the right will say thereafter is ending federal policies that they think indoctrinates students and more left or woke up as they call it, ideology, which leaving education back more in local control will remedy. What's your response to that?

Chancellor King: Look, again, the reality is most decisions about what books are read, what curriculum is taught, are made at the state and local level. I worry that this culture war's attack on teaching the truth about our history is very dangerous to the health of our democracy. There are things in our history that are hard to talk about. Slavery happened. It's real. The taking of the lands of Native Americans, that happened. That's a part of our history.

The history in this country of cycles of anti-immigrant sentiment. That's real. That's the truth. That's what occurred. I think we are strong enough in our democracy to talk about those hard things with students, just as we need to talk to them about the tremendous progress and achievements of our history, the powerful accomplishment of the American Constitution, the additions to that Constitution that were made during the Reconstruction era after the Civil War to expand the reach of American democracy.

Brian Lehrer: Those curriculum points that you're citing, are they mandated by the federal government currently through the Education Department?

Chancellor King: They aren't. That's the thing. The federal government actually is barred from mandating curriculum. These are decisions that are made school by school, classroom by classroom, sometimes at the district level. This is really a red herring, but it's intended to tap into culture war's sentiment that is real and that's out there that we've got to work through.

Brian Lehrer: Can you localize this for us at all in your current position as SUNY chancellor? Are there effects yet on the SUNY system of dismantling the Education Department to the extent that they already have, or of other policy changes, maybe research cuts or anything? Most of the press coverage is about private schools like Columbia and Harvard.

Chancellor King: Yes. Look, I'll tell you two areas where we're already seeing the impact. We've had multiple research grants that have been cut by the federal government arbitrarily without much explanation. These are grants that are helping to improve people's lives. I'm talking about research connected to cancer, Alzheimer's, research on the treatment of 9/11 first responders, research on how we combat misinformation and disinformation online.

Those areas of research, some have been cut. Some have been threatened with cuts that have been stopped by the courts. We're very worried about that. I agree with you. The attention has been on some of the Ivy League institutions that have been very much in the crosshairs of the administration, but the attack on research is being felt by virtually every research university in the country.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a phone call from Kylie in Ridgewood. That's Ridgewood, New Jersey, not Ridgewood, Queens for those wondering, who wants to put a spotlight on something else that she thinks is being cut by the Trump administration and education. Kylie, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Kylie: Hey, guys. Brian, you're a national treasure. I just wanted to point out that when the Rockwell painting with Ruby Bridges was brought up, that's a question of race. The federal funding being cut is also taking money away from special-education children. Those are kids who otherwise would not be able to have access to very well-trained professional teachers who know how to educate them. Taking federal funding away from special-ed kids is just beyond the pale, and something that I think most mainstream parents don't really consider how lucky they are that their kids can attend school. Special-ed parents are very aware how lucky we are to have access to a good public education that equalizes the playing field for those students.

Brian Lehrer: Do you have, as a special-ed parent, as I think you identified yourself as there, your eye on something in particular that's being cut that might affect your child's education?

Kylie: No, all the message boards that special-ed parents are on right now, it's a constant conversation. Every parent is saying, "How much funding is going to be cut from the special-ed programming, and how does that affect my kid?" Will there not be that access in the public schools? Some people go private. I totally respect that choice. What special-ed parents find is going private is typically not in your child's best interest, because public school teachers with a special education master's degree have the professional training to teach children in a way that private schools are not legally required to accommodate children. There's a huge, huge difference.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you for all that. Chancellor King, do you have your eye on special-ed funding, either in the budget bill that's going through Congress or as part of the Education Department DOGE cuts?

Chancellor King: Yes, one example that goes right to the heart of what Kylie was describing is the DOGE effort to get rid of the Office for Civil Rights at the Education Department. The Office for Civil Rights takes complaints when students' rights are violated based on race or sex or disability. A significant percentage of the complaints that they get are from families of students with disabilities who aren't getting the services that they're entitled to, whether it's because of something at the district or the state.

For whatever reason, they're not getting the support they need to be able to access education. It's the Department of Education that investigates those complaints and requires action from the district or state. Many of the people who used to do that work have now been laid off by the Trump administration. In fact, there are half as many people working at the US Education Department today as there were on January 20th. A significant number of those layoffs have been in the Office for Civil Rights.

Brian Lehrer: My guest, if you're just joining us, is SUNY Chancellor John King, who has a new book called Teacher By Teacher: The People Who Change Our Lives. We're going to keep it through the end of the hour. We will get to a legit book interview, I promise. You've done so much in education and you're still out there commenting on these things like we've been talking about like the Trump education policies.

I want to ask you a really big-picture education question because I looked up your history with this show and with all you've done, education commissioner in New York State, now SUNY Chancellor in between. You were the US education secretary under Obama. You've been coming on with us. I looked up your history with the show. It goes back to 2011, when you were the state education commissioner.

At that time, you were defending the system known as Common Core, controversial at the time, largely for its standardized test measures of both student and teacher performance. It was called Race to the Top under Obama. Some people may remember, an earlier version was No Child Left Behind under George W. Bush. Here's a very short snippet of an exchange we had on that show in 2011.

10 years after No Child Left Behind, five years after the state courts forced $2 billion more into the state's poor schools, why aren't things better than they are? This was supposed to be the decade that everyone got serious about educating urban kids and educating all kids.

Chancellor King: You're exactly right. I think how I'd frame it is that over the last decade or more, we've had a system that has been what I would characterize as high accountability, low support. We've pointed out where there are problems, which is an important first step, but we haven't necessarily provided the support to help teachers and schools get students where they need to be.

Brian Lehrer: Chancellor King, now, it's 24 years later. Are we still having the same national conversation about shortcomings, including disparate outcomes in our public education systems as we were having in 2011 as a country?

Chancellor King: Sadly, we see very similar disparities to the ones that we saw--

Brian Lehrer: Oh, 14. Just correcting myself, 14 years later.

Chancellor King: Yes, 14 years ago.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, but still plenty.

Chancellor King: Yes, yes, and sadly, we're still in a very similar situation. Actually, I would say our situation has been exacerbated. The challenges have been exacerbated by COVID, where we had such a huge disruption to American life and to American schools. Student performance today is actually below where it was before COVID. We have a huge national crisis of chronic absenteeism, kids who are missing 10% or more of the school year.

We've got a lot of work to do. That's one of the reasons why it's so disheartening that the Trump administration is focused on attacking the Education Department rather than putting forward initiatives that would help. We know that intensive tutoring with a high-quality tutor, with high-quality materials can help students make up ground. Why aren't we talking about investing more there, for example?

Brian Lehrer: How do you look back on the No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top era? As you know, so controversial in New York at the local city level under Mayor Bloomberg for how much standardized tests were used to evaluate teachers and students. How do you look back on that, or do you think we're still in that era and people just don't talk about it so much?

Chancellor King: I think if you look at the period from when No Child Left Behind was first passed, around 2000 to the end of the Obama administration, 2017, you do see real progress, particularly for low-income students, students of color, students who've been historically underserved. That progress really stops in 2017. Then, of course, with COVID, we slide backwards. There were some good things that were accomplished during that era, paying more attention to our gaps, but the point I was making to you back in 2011 around high accountability, low support, we still struggle with that.

We still aren't doing enough to invest in our schools, to provide teachers with the kinds of professional development they need, to provide the wraparound supports like mental health counseling that our schools need. We really need to refocus as a country, because how well our kids do in school is going to shape how strong our economy is and how strong our national security is.

Brian Lehrer: Any regrets on those programs and your support for them back then? Certainly, you know how much backlash there was from parents in the mid-20 teens. There was a movement to have their kids boycott the standardized tests, not even take them at certain grade levels. We know that teachers' unions were so unhappy about being evaluated to the extent that they were by the results of their students' standardized tests. Any regrets on how that went and your role in that back then?

Chancellor King: I reflect on this in the book. I think in the Obama administration, first term, a really ambitious agenda was set out that we were implementing in New York. It required changing standards for teaching and learning in English and math. It required rethinking teacher evaluation. It required building new data systems. It required trying to turn around struggling schools with chronically low graduation rates.

Doing all of that at the same time in the midst of coming out of a national recession was overwhelming for states and districts. I think some of the backlash really could be traced to the number of initiatives that were implemented simultaneously, a really limited resource environment. There may have been better sequencing that was possible of those initiatives and better communication with folks about what each of the initiatives was trying to accomplish.

I don't want to diminish some of the very real progress. There were high schools where the graduation rates were painfully low that were then redesigned with new schools that were getting dramatically better outcomes. We should celebrate that progress that was made during that period even as we learned lessons from the things that could have been done better.

Brian Lehrer: Listener writes in a text message in relation to your current position as SUNY chancellor, "Please ask about other pathways as you recently featured on your show," addressing me, "vocational education, et cetera." We did just recently complete a series on alternatives to a four-year college degree for having upward mobility in this country. I wonder if SUNY has changed in that respect.

Of course, those are primarily four-year colleges. There are also community colleges around the state, obviously. Have you changed with the amount of student debt that there is in this country relative to the four-year degree jobs that people are able to get, or just so other swaths of students don't get left behind? Have you changed at SUNY? Has SUNY changed to emphasize more vocational pathways, or is that more up to the high schools?

Chancellor King: The great news is we have literally everything at SUNY. We've got 64 campuses. 30 of them are community colleges. You can come to SUNY for a short-term workforce development program like welding. You can come to SUNY for a one-year credential that would allow you to work at the new chip fab that Micron is building in the Syracuse area. You could come to SUNY for an associate's degree in nursing that will lead you to a job where the salary could be anywhere from $70,000 to $80,000 a year.

You could come to SUNY for a bachelor's degree in literally any subject that you're interested in, from biology to math to English to computer science to game design. You can come to SUNY for every kind of graduate program you might imagine. Law school, medical school, architecture school, we've got it all. The governor just launched something called SUNY Reconnect, where adults 25 to 55 will be able to come to SUNY community colleges for free in high-demand workforce areas like advanced manufacturing, health care, cybersecurity, renewable energy.

Brian Lehrer: Is the Trump administration targeting of international students having an effect, or might it have an effect on SUNY? I know he singled out Harvard for having something like 25%, 30% international students and saying maybe up to 15%. Otherwise, the slot should be for Americans. Is that a factor at SUNY? Are you looking at things that may be imposed on you in that respect?

Chancellor King: We are worried about that. We've got about 6% of our students who are international students.

Brian Lehrer: Which is the national average, by the way, per what I read.

Chancellor King: Yes, we've got about 21,000 students who are international students. The two largest sending countries are India and China. We're watching very closely what the administration is doing. We're worried about it because international students are such an important part of American higher education. Our colleges and universities are the envy of the world.

The best talent in the world wants to come here to study at our institutions, to contribute to the research at our institutions. We will be diminished as a country without those international students. If you think about who's getting patents, who's building companies, who's helping drive our innovation economy, international students are playing a huge role there. We'll be worse off if the Trump administration blocks them, whether it's from Harvard or from higher education institutions more broadly.

Brian Lehrer: Making a segue to the content of your book, Monica in Kew Gardens, you're on WNYC with a story of a teacher who changed your life, right, Monica?

Monica: Absolutely.

Brian Lehrer: What you got?

Monica: Oh, dear. 10th-grade mathematics teacher. I was the absolute worst math student. If I got 50 right on a test, great. I got a math right. He had the ability to hit and explain things from one angle if you didn't get it that way from the next angle until you got it. The man opened my mind to the wonders, if you will, of mathematics. His name was David L. Mars.

Brian Lehrer: Monica, I'm going to leave it there because of noise in the background. I think it's the show actually on delay coming out of your radio, but a little hard for people to hear. Thank you for naming your teacher. We're going to give Chancellor King the opportunity to name at least one of his who comes up prominently in the book as we continue with the SUNY chancellor, John B. King. His new book is called Teacher By Teacher: The People Who Change Our Lives. From this point on, we'll invite more of your stories like that Joe in Crestwood. We see you. You'll be the next caller. A teacher or a mentor in the teaching profession who changed your life. 212-433-WNYC.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we continue with SUNY Chancellor John B. King, who has previously been the national education secretary and the New York State education commissioner. He's got a new book called Teacher By Teacher: The People Who Change Our Lives. Chancellor King, it's part-memoir, it's part-policy, but it's also very much about teachers. Why did you frame it around teachers in that way?

Chancellor King: I really wanted to thank teachers who saved my life and who are having a transformative impact for students every day. When I grew up in Brooklyn, went to PS 276 in Canarsie, my mom passed away October of my fourth-grade year. I lived alone with my dad, who was struggling with Alzheimer's. Home was incredibly difficult and scary and unstable.

Some nights, my father would talk to me. Some nights, he wouldn't say a word. Some nights, he'd be sad. Other nights, angry or even violent. I didn't know why. The thing that saved me was a teacher. Alan Osterweil, who was my teacher in fourth grade, fifth grade, and sixth grade, he looped with us, which was very unusual at the time. His classroom was amazing. We read The New York Times every day. We did productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream and Alice in Wonderland.

He took us to the Museum of Natural History and to the ballet and to the cloisters and just exposed us to a whole world beyond Canarsie, Brooklyn. The safety and sense of nurturing in his classroom was the one place where I could be a kid when I couldn't be a kid at home. When my dad passed when I was 12, I moved around different family members, different schools, but it was always teachers who gave me a sense of hope and purpose. That's really what I wanted to capture in the book.

Brian Lehrer: Any more teachers after Mr. Osterweil? You have another story?

Chancellor King: Yes, yes, I had this amazing teacher. I had a teacher, Ms. D, who was my seventh-grade social studies teacher. At that point, my father was very sick. Home was just awful. I would spend a lot of time in class thinking about my father, what was happening at home, what was going to happen that night. Was he okay? How could I keep surviving? How could I get food in our house? How could I keep our household going? In Ms. D's class, I remember, we did a project, an Aztec newscast.

At that moment, the most important thing in the world to me was to be the best Aztec sportscaster there had ever been. Her class was this place where she really fed our curiosity about history and about the world and made us so passionate about social studies that I was able to escape, at least for a few moments in her class, from all the things that were going on at home. I ended up becoming a high school social studies teacher, I think in no small part because of the great experience in Ms. D's classroom at Mark Twain Junior High School in Coney Island.

Brian Lehrer: Let's see. I think Joe in Crestwood, New York, wants to thank a high school social studies teacher. Joe, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Joe: Hi, Brian. Dr. King, I'd like to let you know about a teacher that I had when I was in 11th grade, going to a private high school in the Bronx. His name was Herbert Janick. He taught history in a way that superseded everything I had ever learned about history from other teachers prior to his teaching. He didn't assign us a textbook. He didn't give us the kinds of tests that were multiple choice, ABCD, true or false, that sort of thing.

He taught history with the idea of giving the student a sense of history is something that's alive. It's not just a bunch of objective questions. He had us read a book by, I still remember, Richard Hofstadter's American Political Tradition. Instead of a text, this was a series of essays about significant Americans in the lives of the culture they lived in throughout the last two centuries.

Anyway, having come from a curriculum where history was taught so differently, I immediately became very involved in learning more and more history and became interested in the teaching of history. As a retired teacher of history for the past 50 years, I taught on the college and high school level. I think it was Mr. Janick's teaching, making history come alive, that had put me solidly into the profession that I have enjoyed for the past 50 years. I was able to communicate with him when I found out he was teaching in Connecticut State University, Connecticut. We had lunch one day. It was a wonderful, wonderful experience to meet someone 30, 40 years later who has that influence in your life.

Brian Lehrer: That's a wonderful story. Thank you very much. Here's another one in a text, "Most influential teacher, Mr. Ed Grassel, eighth and ninth-grade math. He started each class by telling stories about his travels and other interesting world events. He helped me, a Puerto Rican girl growing up in Williamsburg whose parents had not even completed high school, to get to Stuyvesant and then drove me to visit Brown and advocated for my financial aid." That's a wonderful story.

I did see that you tie your respect for teachers, Chancellor King, to dismantling the Education Department and saying instead of doing that, we should be making teaching degrees free for people who commit to working in low-income urban and rural communities or in hard-to-staff subjects. I'm just curious if you think the current student loan forgiveness program for college grads in public service jobs satisfies that goal already.

Chancellor King: It's helpful. I'm certainly a fan of Public Service Loan Forgiveness, and I hope it's protected, but it's on the back end after you've done your years of service. You've got to put the money up front and borrow and have that debt hang over you, and then hope that at the end, there'll be the Public Service Loan Forgiveness there when you've completed your service. I'd love to see us flip that and say to young people who are thinking about teaching, "Thank you for wanting to be of service to the community." We're going to cover your education with a commitment that you'll spend, let's say, five years or seven years in one of these high-needs communities.

Brian Lehrer: Put it up front. Yes, interesting. All right, one more tribute to a teacher who changed their life. Margaret in Fairfield County, Connecticut, you're on WNYC. Hi, Margaret.

Margaret: Hi, Brian. Thank you so much. Thank you, Chancellor. This is an honor, and I'm so happy to share this story. I grew up in Westport, Connecticut, went to public schools. Out of high school, I didn't know what I wanted to do. I was sort of lost. I went to a community college, Norwalk Community College. One of the first courses I took was a study course for getting through college.

The instructor, the teacher there was Debbie Sherman. After one day, she looked at me. She said, "Margaret, you're very bright. You're going to go far." It really meant a lot to me, Brian, because I have a learning disability. I have dyslexia. Later in life, I found out I had ADHD. I never really thought I would go very far. [chuckles] I finished that course. I got into the nursing program at Norwalk Community College.

I got my RN. Then I went on and got my bachelor's at Fairfield University. Right now, I'm working for a large company. I'm in a management position. If it hadn't been for Debbie, I don't think I'd be where I am today. I'm greatly, greatly indebted to her. I don't know where she is, but I feel so proud that I can share this story. Just to tell everybody, don't give up. If you have a learning disability, get someone to really encourage you, and you can do well. You really can.

Brian Lehrer: Well, I hope she's listening and heard you break up a little bit as you were telling that story. Chancellor King, my producer, Mary, couldn't resist but to chime in, listening to Margaret to say, "Amazing how much a simple vote of confidence can change someone's life." You must be happy as SUNY chancellor that that was a community college teacher story.

Chancellor King: I love that story. It's a fantastic story. That's really what we hope to do at SUNY. It's why I love my job as chancellor. It's a chance to try to do for other young people what teachers did for me.

Brian Lehrer: In our last minute and a half, let me ask you one more politics question. You were state education commissioner when Andrew Cuomo was governor. Though, to be clear to our listeners, you weren't appointed by him but by the board of regents, but he was governor when you had that job. When Cuomo left office, and I'm sure this is going to come up in the mayoral debate tonight in some way or I imagine it will, he has been criticized for, as it's been characterized, forcing a tuition increase at SUNY and CUNY by cutting funding from state coffers to public education, and maybe not the biggest friend of SUNY in that respect. How do you look back on the Cuomo governorship in that respect, if you do?

Chancellor King: I think education was not necessarily at the top of the issue list for the governor because the state Education Department is administered by a board of regents that's separate from the governor. I think now, the question for the former governor and for all the candidates is, what's their plan to make outcomes better for students? Not just, what are the initiatives that they're going to out, but what's their plan to make sure that more students graduate from high school, ready for success in college and careers? What's their plan to make sure that education is the engine of economic mobility for New Yorkers that it should be?

Brian Lehrer: We're out of time, but you want to get specifics looking forward. I hear you. There, we leave it with SUNY Chancellor John King. His new book, Teacher By Teacher: The People Who Change Our Lives. Thank you so much. I always appreciate talking education with you.

Chancellor King: Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer Show is produced by Mary Croak, Lisa Allison, Amina Srna, Carl Boisrond, and Esperanza Rosenbaum. Zach Gottehrer-Cohen produces our Daily Politics Podcast. Our interns this summer are Adelina Romero and Vito Emanuel. Juliana Fonda at the audio controls.

 

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