Rick Hess is Senior Fellow and Director of Education Policy Studies at American Enterprise Institute,

a regular columnist blogger at Education Week, author of numerous studies of school policies

and practices from his perch at AEI, and actually one of the more influential figures, I would say,

in the United States, in the last 20 years, on various aspects of school policies, school choice, parental rights, and

curriculum, even academic research, and so on. He has co-written with Michael McShane, a new volume

entitled Getting Education Right, a conservative vision for improving early childhood, K-12, and college. That is our topic today.

Welcome, Rick. Hey, good to be with you, Mark. Tell us, we'll go right to the title. We won't go to

page one. Tell us what actually makes a conservative in education. Sure. The first thing Mike and I try to do is disabuse folks that we're talking in

terms of politics and partisanship. You say conservative, you say progressive or liberal in 24,

and people immediately think Republican Democrat, how do you feel about Biden, Trump?

That's not what we have in mind. We're not

politicos. We're not political communications consultants. We don't need to worry about that.

What we're talking about is a set of values and dispositions that form kind of an intellectual

tradition of conservatism in this country. Lots of people, there's lots of good faith disagreement within

that coalition about how to apply those precepts. But they're pretty straightforward stuff that even

if we disagree about exactly how to apply them, that there's a lot of agreement on the right. We believe

that the family is a fundamental unit of a healthy society. We are skeptical of grand

utopian schemes and the notions of bureaucrats on high can figure out how to fix society.

We believe in the importance of hard work and merit and rigor. And we think it's important to defend these things unapologetically.

We believe America is a great and good place that has made enormous missteps and that we need

to be honest and reflective about where we've been as a country, but that we should cherish and

value both our history and the great works of civilization, of which it's been such a country, but that we should cherish and value both our history and the great

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