Max Eden joins us today. He is Research Fellow at American Enterprise Institute, where he directs the

Conservative Education Reform Network. He has just issued the 2024 edition of sketching a new

conservative education agenda. That's our topic today. Welcome, Mr. Eden. Yeah, thanks so much

for having me, Mark.

All right. Well, first tell us what CERN, the network. What does it do?

Yeah, so the conservative education reform network is kind of a subsidiary project of the American Enterprise Institute's education policy department. And for many years, for kind of the better part of the first two decades that AEI was in the business of education policy department. And for many years, for kind of the better part of the first two

decades that AEI was in the business of education policy, the discussion about education

policy was very much a beltway centric phenomenon that was conducted on a kind of bipartisan

basis, but a bipartisan basis that leaned kind of to the center left, right? So discussions were about

kind of topics that we all broadly agreed on. And then we were trying to move within the 40 to 60

yard lines on issues like standards and charter school policy and test-based teacher evaluation.

But that whole consensus kind of was absolutely demolished between, you know, the Obama era

overreach and the Trump slash also frankly teachers union reaction to that overreach, right?

So whereas from 2000 to 2015, you really had an era where you could get kind of Chamber of Commerce

people from the right and kind of civil rights

people from the left in the room to talk policy. The policy conversation in D.C. and the

education policy conversation in a national way just imploded from, I would say,

2016 to 2019. So around 2020, 2021, as my boss and colleague, Request, was kind of looking around and surveying the field and trying to figure out ways to, you know, to continue to play a productive role in the policy sphere, it was just eminently clear that what had been a bipartisan policy issue has become a partisan issue and what had been largely a national

issue has become functionally almost exclusively a state issue so CERN the conservative

education reform network was launched to kind of do the core things that AEI education

would always do which is not to push particular policies know, we take our C3 sets very seriously.

We don't take institutional positions, but we do try to highlight ideas that we think are

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