Chris Suellentrop

Damir Marusic

Hadley Robinson

Shadi Hamid

Heather Long

Monica Hesse

Subscribe to The Washington Post<a href="https://subscribe.washingtonpost.com/acquisition/?s_l=OFFSITE_PODCAST&amp;p=s_v&amp;s_dt=yearly&amp;utm[%E2%80%A6]e-podcast&amp;utm_medium=acq-nat&amp;utm_campaign=podcast-subs" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);"> </a><a href="https://subscribe.washingtonpost.com/acquisition/?s_l=OFFSITE_PODCAST&amp;p=s_v&amp;s_dt=yearly&amp;utm[%E2%80%A6]e-podcast&amp;utm_medium=acq-nat&amp;utm_campaign=podcast-subs" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">here</a>.

Many economists and politicians are alarmed that Americans, like others around the world, are having fewer kids. But is this really a problem?

The real reasons Americans are having fewer kids

Emma Munger

Eavesdrop on Post Opinions columnists as they have frank, thoughtful conversations about the news and cultural debates on everyone’s minds. 

Impromptu: The conversations before the columns 

Many economists and politicians are alarmed that Americans, like others around the world, are having fewer kids. But, apart from wanting a growing labor force, is this really a problem? Opinions columnists Shadi Hamid and Heather Long talk with Style columnist Monica Hesse about what’s really behind the baby bust and whether we just need to prepare for a lower fertility future. 

Charles Lane

Dana Milbank

Megan McArdle

Jim Geraghty

Columnists Charles Lane, Megan McArdle, Dana Milbank and Jim Geraghty discuss how much voters care about policy, whether Trump made any good points and how his false claims about pet-eating immigrants mask a genuine issue.

Our columnists discuss whether voters care about policy and how Trump's false claims about pet-eating immigrants mask a genuine issue.


What did we learn about Harris in the debate?

https://podcast.posttv.com/vitac-transcripts/da964683-3683-4e8d-86d9-24a566c36659_66e1fb932c2416258eb7f228-transcript.txt

Did the debate cause a vibe shift? Columnists Charles Lane, Megan McArdle, Dana Milbank and Jim Geraghty discuss how much voters care about policy, whether Trump made any good points and how his false claims about pet-eating immigrants mask a genuine issue.


Harris wiped the floor with Trump. But what did we learn about her?

Theodore R. Johnson

Richard Reeves

Subscribe to The Washington Post<a href="https://subscribe.washingtonpost.com/acquisition/?s_l=OFFSITE_PODCAST&amp;p=s_v&amp;s_dt=yearly&amp;utm[%E2%80%A6]e-podcast&amp;utm_medium=acq-nat&amp;utm_campaign=podcast-subs" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);"> </a><a href="https://subscribe.washingtonpost.com/acquisition/?s_l=OFFSITE_PODCAST&amp;p=s_v&amp;s_dt=yearly&amp;utm[%E2%80%A6]e-podcast&amp;utm_medium=acq-nat&amp;utm_campaign=podcast-subs" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">here</a>.

Columnists Theodore Johnson and Shadi Hamid talk with Richard Reeves about the dueling visions of masculinity on the political stage and a hopeful way forward.

What do men want?

https://podcast.posttv.com/vitac-transcripts/5358383d-e3b1-4f12-9d04-2417ccd6f938_66d76bf721808470fbf4f2a5-transcript.txt

The evidence is in. American men are facing a crisis — in health, in education and in the labor force. But under all of that runs deeper trends — disconnection, loneliness and a lack of role models. Columnists Theodore Johnson and Shadi Hamid talk with Richard Reeves, founder of the American Institute for Boys and Men, about the dueling visions of masculinity on the political stage and a hopeful way forward for the modern man. 

Daniel Pink

Alexandra Petri

As American kids head back to school, columnist Daniel Pink makes the case for paying teachers more money. High-quality teachers, he argues, significantly improve student learning, so shouldn’t they be paid as much as somebody assessing insurance premiums on your car? Plus, humor columnist Alexandra Petri discusses sending her child to school for the first time.&nbsp;

As American kids head back to school, columnist Daniel Pink makes the case for paying teachers significantly more money.

Why not pay teachers $100,000?

>> Hadley Robinson:: This is "Impromptu" from Washington Post Opinions, where, each week, we bring you the conversations our columnists are having about the most pressing issues on their minds. I'm Hadley Robinson. I produce the show. And this week, we're going to bring you inside a conversation that contributing columnist Daniel Pink has been having with our readers for much of this year. He's been writing a column asking a simple-yet-provocative question -- "Why not?" Here's what Dan had to say about his "Why Not" project. >> Daniel Pink> Well, what we decided to do is a different kind of opinion writing, that instead of saying, "I'm certain that my point of view is right," we decided to take interesting, unusual ideas and say, "Why not try this?" Show that openness is more valuable than cynicism. We're trying to foster conversation rather than conversion, and we're trying to just generate some curiosity and a sense of possibility. >> Hadley Robinson:: I asked him to read this particular column because it got a lot of us talking and carried some controversy with it. So, here's Daniel Pink asking the question, "Why not pay teachers $100,000?" >> Daniel Pink> Adam DiPerna always had to hold it in. As a Spanish teacher at Gerald G. Huesken Middle School in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, he'd arrive in his classroom at 7:10 a.m. each day and cannonball into a morning that left no time for a bathroom break. He'd teach back-to-back-to-back classes until his lunch period, 27 minutes, during which you also had to heat and eat the food he brought from home, e-mail parents about problems and absences, and field questions from students. After school, he coached wrestling, advised the student council, and chaired the GHMS World Language Department. Work, from grading papers to preparing lessons, spilled into the evenings and weekends he wanted to spend with his wife and three kids. For his efforts, DiPerna, with a Bucknell University diploma and a master's degree in education, earned less than any college graduate he knew. So last year, after a decade and a half in the classroom, he quit teaching to take a job as a sales representative at a large packaging company, trading a life of conjugated verbs for a new life of corrugated cardboard. "I wanted to be a public servant," DiPerna, who's 42, told me. "I did not get into teaching to make a lot of money, but I also didn't get into it to barely scrape by." He earned more in his first partial year as a paper salesman than in his 15th year as a top-rated teacher. "I get paid more money," he said, "and I can listen to the call of nature." DiPerna's gain is America's loss. Four years after the onset of the pandemic, students across the country are still struggling. Test scores are falling. Absenteeism is rising. Meanwhile, about 44% of U.S. schools face a teacher shortage. If we're serious about hanging on to capable educators and attracting new ones, we should start treating them like true professionals, and one place to begin is compensation. Why not pay America's teachers a minimum salary of $100,000 a year? The average annual salary for public-school teachers during 2021 and 2022 was $66,397, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. That's a nearly 8% pay cut, in inflation-adjusted terms, from a decade ago. Salary isn't the only reason educators exit the profession, but whether they work in suburban New York or rural Mississippi, teachers earn significantly less than they could in other fields. The Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, calls this difference "the teacher-pay penalty." EPI calculated that, in 2022, teachers earned only 74 cents on the dollar compared with comparably educated professionals. The right-leaning Hoover Institution reached a similar conclusion in its 2020 report on educator compensation, showing that even adjusting for factors such as talent and experience, teachers are paid 22% less than they would be if they were in jobs in the U.S. economy outside of teaching. Nothing against actuaries -- median salary $113,990 -- but isn't helping a first grader learn to read as valuable as assessing insurance premiums on your Hyundai Elantra? For all the education fads of the past 50 years, researchers have found that what matters most for student learning, more than reducing class size or handing out iPads, is a high-quality teacher. One study by Harvard University economist Raj Chetty and his colleagues determined that students with effective teachers in fourth grade were more likely to attend and graduate from college as young adults and to earn more than their peers during their careers. Some states and localities have attempted to address the compensation problem with complicated pay-for-performance schemes that award teachers bonuses hinged on student test scores. The results of those efforts have been iffy at best, scandalous at worst, says Barbara Biasi, a labor economist at Yale University. But her research has found that raising base pay for effective teachers, a simpler solution, deepen student learning and keeps good teachers on the job. Higher base pay also reduces dropout rates and narrows the achievement gaps between white and black students, as well as white and Hispanic students, according to other studies. Raising teacher pay is also the rare 2024 policy proposal whose supports spans the ideological divide. Senator Bernie Sanders, the independent from Vermont, has introduced legislation requiring a federal minimum teacher salary of $60,000 per year. Tennessee, led by Republican Governor Bill Lee and an overwhelmingly Republican legislature, last year approved a law raising minimum teacher salaries in the state to $50,000 by 2026. But those well-intentioned initiatives are "take two aspirin and call me in the morning" remedies. We need a defibrillator, a serious jolt to awaken the patient from a near-death experience. A $100,000 base salary would deliver that shock. It would also jolt public budgets. And many ideas we'll explore in this "Why Not" project would save money. This one is pricy. A back-of-the-envelope calculation -- if it requires about $35,000 per teacher just to raise average pay to six figures and the United States employs more than 3 million public-school teachers, the total cost would be north of $100 billion. Are you feeling defibrillated? Although that figure represents just five and a half weeks of Medicare spending, or well under half of the Pentagon's weapons budget, it's still a massive annual sum. The federal government, which supplies about 7% of K-12 funding, shouldn't finance the whole cost. It could establish a matching program to share the burden, say, $50 billion from the federal pot, $50 billion from states and localities. But that $100 billion would also likely mean raising taxes. Biasi and other scholars I spoke with questioned whether taxpayers would be willing to foot the bill. That's why this hefty pay raise comes with two strings attached. First, a longer school year. Eliminating summer break might spark a national uprising among 8-year-olds and tourist-industry executives, but the nine-month school year is a relic. Not many kids spend July tending the soybean crop and preparing for harvest. Professionals work year round. Teachers should, too. A longer school year could also reduce summer learning loss. Second, greater accountability. Many teachers are excellent, some are heroic, but any parent knows that a few just aren't up to the job. Under current employment arrangements, it's difficult to steer these underperformers out of the profession. And with pay based largely on seniority, mediocre teachers lack much incentive to depart or even to improve. Low-performing, less-committed peers erode the morale of the majority of teachers who do their jobs well. Treating all teachers like professionals means showing a few teachers the door. One mark of a winning idea is that it offers something for everyone to hate. Higher taxes would enrage conservatives. Reduced job security for public employees would infuriate liberals. So far, so good. But many complicated issues remain to be worked out. How should we adjust for differences in cost of living? How would the pay scale evolve? What are the fairest ways to evaluate teachers? Yet, even skeptical economists have a soft spot for a radical increase in teacher pay. That's because "It calls attention to a real and pressing problem," one professor at Wayne State University told me. Biasi, the Yale professor, a mother of two toddlers, told me -- and here, I'm quoting again -- "As a parent, it strikes me as a good idea. It seems like a good use of money." And perhaps it would encourage talented college graduates to consider teaching instead of banking and keep all-star educators like DiPerna in the classroom. "I wasn't looking to make a fortune," DiPerna told me from his basement office between sales calls. "$100,000? That would have been enough for me." >> Hadley Robinson:: Read some of Daniel Pink's other big ideas as part of his "Why Not" series in The Washington Post. We'll put a link to the columns in our show notes. We'd love to hear what you think of Dan's ideas. E-mail us a voice memo at impromptu@washpost.com. But before you go, here's a quick word from our humor columnist Alexandra Petri. >> Alexandra Petri> It's back-to-school week or, in our case, to-school-the-first-time week. My toddler is finally undergoing her Pokémon evolution to preschooler and will develop a more powerful attack and sprout wings. They asked us what her goals are for preschool. I love having to set a goal for a preschooler. It's like, we'd like her to be able to think about the Roman Empire by the time the school year is over. She doesn't need to know anything correct about it. She just needs to know enough to entertain herself. Or I hope she'll learn what art supplies you can eat and which ones you can't. I am nervous that we haven't done a good job of explaining school to her. It's a building where you go and have to exist in relationship with others. You have to go there and see people you didn't pick out, but you'll like them. The only thing you have in common is your age, which, for now, is all you need to have in common. Eventually, you might have interests and get mad that we're just trying to get you to hang out because you're both the same age. This will come back when you're 26 and both lawyers. Talk to Gregory. He also was born in a year and does litigation. I'm trying to think of the schools in her books. School is either a group of fish or it's where Miss Frizzle goes and kidnaps you and sends you to drill into the earth. Which I hope won't happen. Sounds like an OSHA violation. I'm always impressed by educators describing what a bunch of 3-year-olds are doing in a formal way. "They are experimenting with physics" -- their block tower has just fallen over. "They are engaging in tactile exploration" -- someone is rubbing pudding on a wall. "She is exploring dance" -- someone is flailing wildly with both arms and legs while music plays in an unrelated way. Why are people never this charitable about me when I am dancing? That's what I want to know. This is why they pay teachers the big bucks. Or should. >> Hadley Robinson> I'm so glad to share with you some of the amazing work that Washington Post Opinions does that doesn't always make it into audio form, so thanks for tuning in. We'll be back next week with a regular "Impromptu" show. See you then.


https://podcast.posttv.com/vitac-transcripts/70182ca5-b732-457c-863f-9a43eea7a4f8_66ce2e47af1e3e262657263a-transcript.txt

As American kids head back to school, columnist Daniel Pink makes the case for paying teachers more money. High-quality teachers, he argues, significantly improve student learning, so shouldn’t they be paid as much as somebody assessing insurance premiums on your car? Plus, humor columnist Alexandra Petri discusses sending her child to school for the first time. 

Jonathan Capehart

Jennifer Rubin

Our columnists do the math on what percentage of the Democrats’ energy is from excitement, relief and just avoiding existential dread.

Out with the old at the DNC

https://podcast.posttv.com/vitac-transcripts/e703f726-d8d3-4406-93b5-343091962e9b_66c50645af1e3e262657229c-transcript.txt

We are in Chicago, where it's Kamala Harris's party now. Columnists Dana Milbank, Jennifer Rubin, Jonathan Capehart and Jim Geraghty discuss why gender isn’t being talked about in this campaign so far, and they do the math on what percentage of the Democrats’ energy is from excitement, relief and just avoiding existential dread.


A little-known secret: Washington Post Opinions columnists like talking to one another. They don’t always agree, of course, but they are in almost constant conversation – testing their ideas, refining their thoughts and sometimes changing their minds. Now you can listen in on some of those conversations. Each week on “Impromptu,” Post columnists go beyond hot takes and have personal, candid conversations on the latest topics in news and culture that we can't stop thinking about. Listen in on the conversations that happen before the columns are written. New episodes every Wednesday. 

Washington Post Opinions columnists offer frank commentary in conversation about the latest news moments

Impromptu podcast from Washington Post Opinions

A little-known secret: Washington Post Opinions columnists like talking to one another. They don’t always agree, of course, but they are in almost constant conversation – testing their ideas, refining their thoughts and sometimes changing their minds. Now you can listen in on some of those conversations. Each week on “Impromptu,” Post columnists go beyond hot takes and have personal, candid conversations on the latest topics in news and culture that we can't stop thinking about. Listen in on the conversations that happen before the columns are written. New episodes every Wednesday.

Frank, thoughtful conversations on the news and cultural debates we can’t stop thinking about, from Post Opinions columnists.

The real reasons Americans are having fewer kids

The real reasons Americans are having fewer kids

Harris wiped the floor with Trump. But what did we learn about her?

What do men want?

Why not pay teachers $100,000?

Out with the old at the DNC

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