Welcome to The Lost Debate, a show for political eclectics. I'm Robbie Gupta, and this is a special

episode. Longtime listeners will know I'm a former school principal and superintendent of a network

of charter schools in Tennessee and Mississippi. I care a lot about education, as I know many of you do.

And I've long felt like the national conversation,

whether it's in our politics or in our media,

is often lacking in ambition, nuance, and detail

on questions of K-12 education in particular.

And so what I want to do today is just take a step back

and talk about, like, what would

an ideal system or system of schools and supports the equivalent of what a K-12 system in my world,

what would that look like if I were designing a system? What kind of policy changes should we make?

And what kind of innovations should we see

both within schools and in communities? And so what I'm going to try to do here is be fairly

comprehensive, but I'm not going to hit everything. I'm not going to hit higher education,

for example. I'm going to barely touch pre-K and child care. I'll talk a little bit about it,

but not a ton. And I'll try to pick a few spots where I'll drill down. And my goal here is just to give

you a forward-looking vision of what a great education system should be. And I also want to work

within the constraints that exist. I don't want to just put a pie in the sky vision out there

that has no chance of ever being implemented. So I'm going to try to work within the bounds of

reality, but be ambitious within our reality. And what's fascinating about school and education

generally is it's one of the last remaining collective experiences left in American society.

It sure, you know, two students have the exact same experience, but we generally follow a similar

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