Lizzy: Hi, I'm Lizzy Ghedi-Ehrlich.
Lisa: And I'm Lisa Herandez.
Lizzy: And we are your hosts for Scholar Strategy Networks, No Jargon. Each month we'll discuss an American policy problem with one of the nation's top researchers without using jargon.
Lisa: And an American problem coming up is back to school season that we gotta deal with, of course.
Lizzy: Opposite of a problem, one of the most exciting times of the year Lisa.
Lisa: Yes, absolutely. Kids are going back to school, you're getting their backpacks ready, all of that. And then you kind of have to think about what's going to happen within their school year, how you can prepare them for that in the best way possible. So it's definitely a time to think about problems before they arise.
Lizzy: Well, you're being very thoughtful right now, Lisa. That's true. I think most of us parents are excited for routines to be back in our lives, children to be out of the house, socializing with their peers. But I realize I'm speaking from a place that really assumes that that transition just magically happens without a lot of problems that I have to solve.
Back to school for me means walking down the street and bringing my kids to school, and then they're there, and then it's great for me. And it turns out that's pretty ideal. And I wish everyone lived that way, but they don't. And today we're actually going to be talking about absenteeism, what it is, what causes it, and what we gotta do about it.
Lisa: I imagine a lot more absences have been happening in the last couple of years, sickness and just all the things related to living in a COVID world and also, I don't know, maybe I'm looking into it too much, but I'm thinking about like online classes and things of that nature, like how does it work to have to do a little bit of hybrid work when you're absent and all of that.
Lizzy: I realize that I'm agreeing with you and I'm realizing that that's an assumption we both have. So I'm ready to unpack it and see what the research actually says. For this month's episode I spoke to Professor Sarah Winchell Lenhoff, an Associate Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at Wayne State University. She's the faculty director of the Detroit Partnership for Education Equity and Research, that's Detroit PEER. It's a research center at Wayne State that does work, including community-based research to improve student attendance and engagement in Detroit. Here's our conversation.
Lizzy: Professor Lenhoff, thanks so much for coming on No Jargon.
Sarah: Thanks for having me.
Lizzy: So we know that school start dates vary a lot in the US but this episode when folks are listening to it, it is August and that is officially back to school season in the American Mind. You're an education researcher, but you also spent a little time earlier in your career as a New York City public school teacher.
Can you tell us what that was like?
Sarah: I was fresh out of undergrad, 22, moved to New York from Georgia and had my first professional experience in the classroom and learned so much. I think the main thing that I learned was how amazing public school teachers are and how difficult that work is. And really, that amazing work that they're doing is in contexts where there's lots of challenges, right?
In New York and Detroit, where I live now, in urban cities and in rural areas, all across the country, public school teachers are doing the work to prepare our children and facing some tough challenges, many of which are outside of their control. So that's how that experience really informed the work that I wanted to do going into my doctorate and the work that I do now.
Lizzy: Tell us about that transition. What led you from being a public school teacher to studying educational policy? Did you bring those experiences with you? Was that always the plan? How did that inform that second phase of your life?
Sarah: For sure. I mean, I think I was a pretty idealistic 22-year-old. I thought I would change the world by being a classroom teacher, and you're definitely changing the world for individual kids. But I think my experience in the classroom really led me to understand how these larger systems that had to do with policy, social inequality, really informed and constrained the difference that I could make in the classroom.
And I left to get my PhD in Education Policy, in part because I wanted to see if I could use my career to influence those kinds of higher level systems. So I got my PhD in Education Policy at Michigan State. And was lucky enough to live in Detroit for the most part while I was in grad school and really came to love Detroit and one of those lucky academics who got a job where they live already.
I got a job at Wayne State a few years out of grad school. So I really came to want to do that policy level research in the place where I live in Detroit with the schools and community organizations that are working in the city.
Lizzy: Yeah, we've heard that story, that trajectory. So often it's the downstream, upstream sort of divide. I saw what it was like to be affected by policy and I learned that I really wanted to change those policies so that those effects could be different, so you're certainly not alone in that.
And that's a great frame up for some of the research that you conduct that we're going to be talking about. You're currently working on a book on chronic absenteeism in Detroit with your fellow SSN member and colleague at Detroit PEER, Jeremy Singer. And there's a pretty shocking statistic right there in the introduction, which is that at the end of the 2017-18 school year, 70% of the Detroit Public School District students were chronically absent.
And this is of course, pre-pandemic. So I think people immediately think of COVID, but COVID wasn't on the radar yet. So can you tell us what Chronic absenteeism is? What does chronically absent mean? And also what's going on here, or what was going on in the 2017-18 school year?
Sarah: Yeah, so chronic absenteeism, we typically use the definition of missing 10% of enrolled school days. For most students in the US that's about 180 days. So missing 18 days or more would qualify you as chronically absent, and it's really distinct from what we used to think of as truancy, which was sort of usually older kids skipping school purposefully not going to school.
Chronic absence really counts any day that students are missing, even if they're, maybe excused for illness or something like that. And the reason why folks latch on to the idea of chronic absence is because when kids miss high levels of school, they tend to have negative outcomes on their student performance and on their socio-emotional outcomes, they're much less likely to graduate.
And so paying attention to when school students miss a lot of school for whatever reason is important for school officials and they want to make sure that kids get back in school. In 2015, the federal government actually put chronic absence as an option for states to include in their school accountability frameworks.
Many states, most states across the country, including Michigan, did that. And so suddenly chronic absence was sort of a new measure that schools and districts were supposed to pay attention to, and many of them did. So in 2017-18, Detroit has faced these super high levels of chronic absenteeism based on data that we have. We think those levels were really high even before that time period.
Our research has really documented how the social inequality in Detroit is a major contributing factor to that. So other places that have deep poverty, high levels of unemployment, high levels of high housing instability, weak transportation systems tend to have lots of kids missing, lots of school days, and those are the factors that are really driving them to miss.
Lizzy: Got it. I mean, that was sort of my next question, was what causes this, it seems like something that we do understand, and that was interesting to me because I think there's such a huge difference between someone who's sick and, and needs to not be in school versus any other reason. And so to think of it as all of these things are still driven by this confluence of factors that might touch all of those different reasons.
I'm interested in sort of unpacking how that panoply of cause and effect is working together.
Sarah: Well, the basic calculus here is that the more students miss school, the more they're losing out on learning opportunities, right? They're not in the classroom. They're not getting the lesson from the teacher. They're not interacting with their peers around what they're learning. And so they miss that opportunity, and then it all, it has this cascading effect because when they come back, they might be behind. They might then therefore misbehave because they're behind and they don't understand what's going on.
And so there's been a lot of research documenting all the factors that are contributing to the mechanisms behind why absenteeism is a problem for students. That's a big one, right? So it's a problem for the individual child.
It can also be disruptive for the classroom. So we know that students who are the peers of chronically absent students tend to also have worse outcomes. We think that's because their teachers are then spending time trying to catch up students who are behind rather than pushing forward in the curriculum.
So there's all these sort of like, you know, web of effects that create this concern about students who are missing a lot of school.
Lizzy: Yeah. And would, do you find that Detroit is unique in this regard, or if we're having this level of chronic absenteeism, or is it really just about anywhere that those causal factors converge, no matter the size of the district or anything else that might affect, that would lead to the same rates of absenteeism?
Sarah: Yeah, I mean I think we tend to think of Detroit as having uniquely challenging conditions for student attendance that are of a piece with other places, that have those kinds of same conditions, maybe at a slightly less extreme level. So we did this study a while back looking at sort of citywide rates of poverty, of unemployment, of segregation across the country and, and correlated those with citywide chronic absence rates.
And we found that those factors are really correlated with chronic absenteeism. They just happen to be much worse in Detroit than in other places, so we're seeing the same patterns elsewhere, but Detroit has more extreme conditions.
Lizzy: And you looked a lot at data. This is a story that numbers can tell, but you also did some interviews with families and community members. Can you tell us more from that perspective of what this effect was?
Sarah: Yeah, we have interviewed over 50 families in Detroit about this issue over the last several years. I think a big takeaway from those interviews is that parents really want their children in school, parents across the economic distribution. I think there's still a lot of deficit thinking among practitioners, among policy makers about why students are missing.
A lot of people think, well, these families don't want to be in school. We did not find hardly any evidence of that. In fact, we found a lot of evidence that parents are going above and beyond to great lengths to try to get their kids to school in really challenging conditions. And so I think one effect that putting chronic absence into school accountability has had is that right now, principals, teachers, and other school staff are responsible for chronic absence, which makes them really want to improve attendance.
And sometimes that can translate into these kinds of negative interactions with parents where they're questioning why they're not there. They're maybe threatening to get them in trouble or send them to truancy court.
And that can have a really negative effect on the school family relationship, which then can result in more absence. Right. So what we found is that the best approach is building a relationship based on trust, on understanding, on the assumption that you want your children in school and how can we, how can we help, how can we remove barriers?
I have this story in my head, now it's been, I think six years since I interviewed this mom, Daisy and Detroit. She's a Black mom of two teenage girls, 14 and 15. And she described her routine for getting her children to school. And from my standpoint, I also have two children, it seems so complicated and difficult every single day. Right? So she had a car, she had to be at work before the children could go to school. And so she had her neighbor pick her children up in the morning and take them to school. And then she had her neighbor pick her up in her own car from work to then drive to school to get them every day.
It was this complicated map of routines. And what Daisy told us is, look, this is working for us now, but any one of these pieces falls apart, like my neighbor moves away, or I lose my car. For years she was using Lyfts to get her children to school and realized she couldn't afford that.
So it illustrates how parents are really doing a lot to try to get their children to school in different difficult circumstances. And policy really needs to figure out a way to better support them.
Lizzy: Yeah. You've mentioned school accountability frameworks a couple times school accountability frameworks and that sounds like an insider term that practitioners and people in schools are dealing with. Can you just outline for our listeners a little bit about what those are and how it sounds different?
It sounds like interventions are being tried out about how one might improve chronic absenteeism rates and we already have some pretty clear ideas about what's working and what isn't.
Sarah: Yeah, exactly. So people are probably familiar with No Child Left Behind, which created a school accountability system suddenly. Schools were held accountable and responsible for how much their students learned as measured on standardized tests. Well that whole idea continues and we've since added other measures to the idea of what schools should be held responsible for.
And now schools are held responsible for student attendance and chronic absence. It's one of these things that we use to say as a school, doing what it should be doing for its students. And that framework has really led schools to approach chronic absence in similar ways too, improving student performance, so they categorize students by how many days that they've missed. They design interventions and support for students based on how many days they've missed. Like you would for a student who was missing a certain section on their English language arts test, for instance. The problem with that is that absenteeism is complicated.
Students are missing for all kinds of different reasons. Those reasons may be different for any given day for the same child. And so you have a lot of folks in the school toiling away, working really hard to try to come up with these solutions, but they're really often misaligned with the key barriers to attendance like transportation and housing instability and safety that we've documented.
Lizzy: Yeah, but the school is held accountable in this policy framework. Tell us exactly what that means. Like what is the enforcement, if you've got low test scores, if your chronic absenteeism rates are rising, what happens to your school?
Sarah: Yeah. So in most states, including Michigan, the score or grade that you get at the state level that's your school’s grade. Maybe an A, B or maybe it has some number attached to it. It's put in these parent dashboards when parents are looking at schools, maybe trying to choose a school.
So it's part of you how you're judged at the state level and then beyond that, schools that score very low on those accountability measures tend to have more extreme intervention required by the state. So for instance, in Michigan we have the bottom 5% of schools in the state that, on that school accountability grade, have extreme kinds of levels of intervention required of oversight by the state.
They have to partner with certain institutions and institute certain kinds of monitoring of what they're doing. They have less autonomy to do what they want to do. So schools really don't want this sort of intervention.
Districts are really putting pressure on schools to improve their student attendance because of that and because they want kids in school too. I don't want to say it's all about accountability. They really want to improve, improve their attendance. They just have limited tools with which to do that.
Lizzy: Yeah. And of course we're talking about all this in a timeless sense. We're clearly in the present day, but we're missing what we're about to bring up, which is of course, the pandemic, which essentially upended the entire idea of absenteeism in-person schooling suddenly disappeared in figuring out how to make virtual school work for students, for families, for teachers, administrators was a hugely complex task.
What does your data show about how COVID-19 affected chronic absenteeism? Were we even able to get data from that time, or did it just change the entire rules of how we look at these things? What happened to students who weren't reliably making it to school once? Making it to school looked totally different than it had before?
Sarah: Yeah, it's really interesting. We have seen an almost universal uptick in chronic absence across the country. So districts that never experienced any problem with chronic absence are now suddenly seeing rates at 20%, 30%. We also saw an uptick in Detroit, although it wasn't as dramatic here 'cause we already had really high rates to begin with.
A lot of that initial uptick during 2021, we attribute based on our research in Detroit, largely to the problems of online education. So we both interviewed families and surveyed families during that time and found that many of them were experiencing a lot of challenges with managing online learning, either because of the technology, having problems connecting, having problems with their devices, or just managing their children, sometimes multiple children having to log on every day, sometimes sit for hours. I mean, I had a kindergartner at that time, right. She barely learned anything. I have to admit. I mean, it was really hard to keep her engaged and really attending school. So I do think that was a little bit of a blip year.
We don't have great data because schools weren't required to track attendance in the same way many of them were asking for. If a child logged in twice in a week, they were counted as present the whole week. So the numbers are really off. But then following that, once most children in the country were back to school in person, we still saw these elevated levels of chronic absence.
And to be honest, the research community is still trying to catch up, to figure out what's going on there. I try to be really cautious of theorizing without data, right, so I think there's much more to learn about what, if anything, has fundamentally changed about students' relationship to school.
Because our research was so clear prior to the pandemic on these kinds of social inequality issues driving attendance, I do wonder whether there's just a missing data point here about extreme housing instability, because housing instability has gone way up across the country. We've also had lots of changes in employment. I actually just finished a study on low wage workers in Detroit and many of them are low wage working $20 an hour or less. And they're also working from home.
I think there's a dynamic here that we just don't totally understand yet about how that might have changed attendance patterns. And then we've also seen these crises around transportation, right? Shortages in bus drivers, both for school buses and public transit. A lot of safety concerns about transit, and we know that transit is a big factor when it comes to school attendance. So I do think that some of these things we've documented previously still matter and may actually have just gotten worse in ways that we haven't quite captured in the data yet.
Lizzy: Right. Well, we'll definitely be looking out for that. As a non-researcher who's happy to simply apply my logic brain to what you said, I was like, well, if we know that these are the causal factors, and that was pretty clear, then if rates increase, then I would assume that the causal factors got worse and Just going to say that straight out. I'd love to have more people looking at that and seeing if we could tell that story a little bit better because I think that's just so critical for policymaking that's actually going to touch this as opposed to anything else that is really fully contained within the school.
I am seeing my kids even get sometimes, what is it called when you do show up, attendance awards, And I see what's happening here. I see this school that is trying to incentivize people to go, to make people proud of going to have ways that that information is communicated back to the parents. Like, oh, you've done a good job.
All I can ever think about is, if they get a cold, I should keep them out of school. What is that award really about? And it feels to me like another one of those very internally focused interventions, that is, educators and administrators who know people are watching them, who know that the problem is real.
Like they both actually want to solve it and they know that they need to be appearing to solve it and to, and to try different things. And I guess this is just my cry at them to say, I'm so sorry. I see what you're working with. We all want to fix this together. And I know that piece of paper that says, “thank you for coming all month,” sounds like maybe isn't going to do what it needs to do
Sarah: No, I'm so glad you brought this up, Lizzy, because this is something I encounter all the time. So I was talking about the schools that have limited tools. One of the tools I have is these sort of incentives, fun stuff for kids and—
Lizzy: —pizza party if your whole class is there for a certain amount of days.
Sarah: Exactly, schools across the country are doing this. They're doing it in Detroit, they're doing it everywhere. And I think it's so interesting because it is so misaligned with the fundamental reasons kids are missing. And in fact, there's actually very little research evidence that shows that these kinds of incentives work and there's actually some that shows that they can have a demotivating effect on attendance.
So students who are already coming to school are saying, I'm not coming to school for this award. So maybe I need to pull back a little bit. Maybe I'm doing too much here. So it's a real problem because there we're funneling resources into this thing that we, that feels relatively easy. That's it is within our control to do in schools, and yet it's not aligned to what the real challenges are.
Lizzy: Can you tell us, what about, have you seen more successful interventions or programs? Is there what's going on in Detroit that seems like it's working? Do you have examples from anywhere else that you'd like to see maybe proliferating more across districts?
Sarah: Sure. Detroit has made some major investments in just the last year or two, and so it's still a little bit too early to say how those are going to pay off. But I do want to mention, I think largely because they've learned a lot over the last decade about what hasn't worked, they've really pivoted to investing in these sorts of systems that could potentially reduce some of these external barriers.
So they now have almost a dozen school-based health centers that they've implemented in the last couple of years. They've put a school nurse in every single school building, which they say has had a dramatic effect on students leaving school in the middle of the school day when they're sick. Almost always when the child goes to see the school nurse, she assesses them and then sends them back to their classroom. So that's been great.
They've also made major investments in behavioral health, which we know has been a huge issue since the pandemic. And they're really also thinking about how to best support their students who are housing unstable. So they've invested a lot in trying to better identify those students and connect them with support. And also, there's federal funding through McKinney-Vento that can help those students.
So they're doing a lot and I'm hopeful that those changes will really result in some dramatic decreases in chronic absence. Across the country there's some really good evidence out of Connecticut that really intensive home visiting programs can have a big difference on attendance.
And we think that's largely because someone from the school is making this deep connection with a family in their home, trying to understand what's going on with them, and then almost working as a case manager to connect them with the kinds of resources they need to get to school. Those kinds of things are really costly.
Lizzy: Yeah, I was going to say, “wow, what a labor intensive”— I mean clearly that makes sense. We all need an individual case manager.
Sarah: Exactly. So I think our research really points to, yes, schools should be doing these things to the extent that they can, and also what do other external agencies need to start doing and monitoring around student attendance. How can we make chronic absence actually a measure that other government agencies and other nonprofits are looking at as a measure of success for their work? Because schools can't carry that burden alone.
Lizzy: Right. So clearly this is a multifaceted, systemic problem and a lot of the factors that are causing absenteeism are outside the schools. Those were super great examples that I'm actually really excited to hear about schools that are still working within their own school systems, like having a nurse, having a health center, having these resources within the school is definitely their purview, and yet it clearly has an eye on all of these things that are happening outside that one building. They're not directly related to classroom learning and things like that. It just sounds really holistic and evidence-based. And maybe that is the sole answer and I am perfectly happy with that.
But I also know that just like you and me, there's so many parents who are listening to us right now. And these are parents that are probably coming from a range of backgrounds, but I'm going to guess people who maybe have fewer of those barriers that others have to cross in order to successfully get their kids to school every day.
What about the individual and that parent community, that PTA level, are you seeing things that folks in their community schools could do to support those types of interventions? What's the role of someone who has a kid right now in all of this?
Sarah: Absolutely. I think one really clear takeaway from our work is that often when families have problems with attendance, it's because they don't have the adequate social support to fill in the gaps when unexpected things happen. So, you get called into work early, do you have a friend or a neighbor or a family member who you can call on to help get your kids to school? If your car breaks down, do you have someone you can call on? That kind of thing.
So I think one thing that individual parents can do is to work together within their school communities to build things like a school directory. One thing I've been really surprised as both a researcher and a parent is we don't have school directories anymore. When I was a kid, we had a list of every kid and their address and their phone number, and you could call them. We don't have that anymore
Lizzy: I honestly thought maybe somebody passed a law. Is it illegal for me to ask?
Sarah: I don't think it's illegal. It's just fallen by the wayside. It's something that I think PTA’s could work on. Let's just create a Google Sheet with everybody's contact information. If you don't want to put your info on there, that's fine.
Lizzy: That’s fine. It can be opt in.
Sarah: Yeah, and I think that's really helpful too because Detroit and lots of cities like Detroit have so much school choice, and so it's not as if your neighbor is likely to send their children to your child's school, right? People are living further away from their peers now, and so having some sort of database where you can go and say, okay, who might live adjacent to me who's going to my kids' school who could maybe pick up my child today? And then also just thinking creatively on the ground about, do we have some sort of carpooling thing? Can we invest PTA resources into an extra bus stop or into safe routes to school where we're making sure that sidewalks are clear of debris and there's lighting and stuff if students want to walk to school. These sorts of things can happen at the local level and I do think there's a lot of room for improvement there if we get this on the radar of everybody.
Lizzy: So you mentioned school choice. We know that's this program where instead of just going to one's neighborhood, school families can choose any school, uh, to send their child. And there's lots of discourse about that, but I haven't really heard it discussed in terms of absenteeism or any of the things that we've been talking about. Tell me more about that.
Sarah: So a lot of, especially urban metro areas have adopted school choice as a strategy for school improvement. And so we see a huge number of kids not going to their local neighborhood school, going to a charter school or maybe a school of choice for away from home, and that can really erode the sort of resources that a family has to get them to school, right? Because suddenly they don't have neighborhood children who are also going to the same school. They don't have other adults who can support them if something comes up. And at the same time, it creates this disconnection between where students live and their schools, such that schools are a little bit unaware potentially of what's going on in families kind of environments in their neighborhoods so that they're not fully tuned into how they can support them, and they're having to support students from all across the city. So, for instance, in Detroit, I live in a relatively small neighborhood. There's about 500 public school children who live in my neighborhood in Corktown in Detroit, and those 500 kids go to 90 different public schools.
So to think about how to support a community in creating the conditions for good students, student attendance, we really need to start thinking about how do we really invest in high-quality neighborhood public schools so that students feel like they want to go to the schools, families are bought into them, and you can create that more kind of community support when things come up.
I mean that's another effect of the pandemic because that network was set on pause for this really kind of weird, out-of-the-blue period, it takes effort to put that back. You don't immediately fall back into place with your relationships with those people who aren't your friends, they're just the people in your community.
Lizzy: And that's so critically important. But we had that big pause and it actually takes work to sort of put that back together as opposed to just magically waking it up and having it be there again. So I love that. After having this conversation, I now have less compunction about not asking that we put something like that in place this school year, because it has also really blown my mind. So, that's good and validating to learn.
There's another exciting development that I want to close us out with. Recently, you were among a group of researchers who were invited to the White House to talk about chronic absenteeism in K-12 schools. What was that like? I love hearing that the federal government is listening to this and recognizes that this is both a multifaceted issue that they have a role in, and also a really critical one for talking about student success. So tell us what you heard and saw.
Sarah: It was great. It was really cool to be White House campus and at this meeting. I want to thank my colleague Michael Godfrey, who really put this together. We think of him as the father of chronic absenteeism research. So he organized this meeting and I was really heartened to hear how the folks in the federal government who are advising the president in the domestic policy council as well as folks at IES, which the federal arm for funding research on education, are really invested in figuring out how to best support schools and districts who are facing this challenge post-COVID.
One takeaway for me was that they were really tuned in. They knew a lot about what schools were already doing. They were really interested in supporting research to better understand what's working and what's not. Another cool thing that I heard was that they're really thinking in this cross sector way.
So they're already working on joint guidance with the transportation department to think about how school districts and city transportation systems can better work together to support students and student attendance. They're thinking about issuing guidance with the Department of Health and Human Services to the same effect to think about how these organizations and agencies can work together to think of these creative solutions and coordinate resources. They're also really eager to make sure that school districts understand that they can use many of their title dollars, their federal dollars that they're getting for education, for these barrier removal strategies.
I think a lot of states even put unnecessary rules and regulations on how they can use those federal funds. At least from the federal government standpoint, they're saying, no, we want you to use these resources to reduce attendance because at the end of the day, no reading intervention is going to work if kids aren't in school to experience it.
Lizzy: Yeah. Love, love using evidence to actually solve the problem. That is, of course, obviously my favorite thing.
I'm feeling ready for back to school now more than I've talked to you. How about you?
Sarah: Yeah, definitely. My kids still have another month, but my niece in Georgia is going back to school tomorrow, so I'm crossing my fingers that she has a great year.
Lizzy: Oh my goodness. Me too. Georgia students, Godspeed to you all. Everyone else, I hope you have a wonderful school year. Thank you so much, Dr. Lenhoff, for joining us today.
Sarah: Thanks, Lizzy. Great talking to you.
Lizzy: And thanks everyone for listening. For more on Professor Lenhoff's work, check out our show notes at scholars.org/nojargon. No Jargon is the podcast of the Scholars Strategy Network, a nationwide organization connecting journalists, policymakers, and civic leaders with America's top researchers to improve policy and strengthen democracy.
And the producers of our show are Wendy Chow, our newest member, and we're so excited to have her producing today's episode with Dominik Doemer, our audio engineer is Peter Linnane, and if you liked the show, please subscribe and rate us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your shows. You can give us feedback on X, formerly known as Twitter, @NoJargonPodcast, or at our email address, nojargon@scholars org.