The Education Gadfly Weekly

Not far from my backyard, two big public-school systems are on the verge of letting their attentiveness to equity and racial justice lead to consequences they may end up regretting. And that saddens me, both as their neighbor and as one who cherishes both pluribus and unum, both excellence and equity.

I joke that my visa for northern Virginia may have expired during Covid-19-induced travel constraints, yet Fairfax County is right across the Potomac, and Loudoun County isn’t much farther. The (normal) enrollment in their schools totals about 270,000 pupils, some 22 percent of all students across the Old Dominion. They’re big districts, and what they do gets noticed.

For thirty-five years, Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) has operated the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, one of the best known and most esteemed of America’s “exam schools,” probably the highest-scoring public school in the D.C. area and, in many years—according to U.S. News—the country’s best high school. (As one of Virginia’s nineteen “Governor’s Schools”, TJ—as it’s known—serves several other local districts, including Loudoun County, but four-fifths of its pupils typically reside in Fairfax.)

Admission to TJ is highly competitive—in most years, receiving about 3,300 applicants for 480 ninth grade openings—and has long relied primarily on test scores and grades to establish eligibility for consideration in a “holistic” process that resembles admission to an elite college. As with other such schools, famously including New York’s Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, this has resulted in a pupil population that doesn’t look much like the demographics of the districts that it serves. Simply put, the incoming class ends up with (proportionately) far too many Asian and White kids and not nearly enough “students of color.” Not many from low-income families, either.

Over the decades, this situation has prompted many criticisms and sparked numerous efforts to revamp admissions so as to yield a result more in line with the county’s demographics.

FCPS itself has documented six such attempts. As recounted by the Washington Post’s ace education columnist, Jay Mathews, these consisted of “a new outreach specialist position in 2011, a holistic review (that means looking at the whole kid) in 2013, lower minimum semifinalist requirements in 2014, a new problem-solving essay in 2015, cutting back the outreach specialist to a half-time position in 2016 and new admission tests in 2017.” And yet—Mathews quotes an FCPS self-study—“These changes have not made a significant impact on the application pool or admitted student demographics.”

So today the school board is weighing yet another move to diversify TJ’s entering class, by far the boldest yet. As Mathews wrote on Monday: “They want to raise the minimum core academic class grade-point average for admittance to Jefferson from 3.0 to 3.5. Then they want to choose the lucky winners in Fairfax County and four other participating districts based not on entrance test results, teacher recommendations and other quality measures—as they did before—but on random lotteries.”

In other words, they’ll raise the GPA threshold for getting into the pool of serious candidates, but then they’ll use a lottery to determine who from that pool actually gets in.

The district estimated that, had such an approach been used for this year’s entering class, 15 percent of the ninth grade would be Black or Hispanic and 10 percent would be low income, which for TJ would indeed be a large change. Mathews approves of the new plan. But of course there’s both political pushback and—for me—significant substantive concerns about how it will work.

Subsequent to Mathews’s writing, and in response to the predictable outcry over the new plan, the FCPS superintendent made a slight revision, such that the version being considered by the board will use familiar “holistic” admissions process for a hundred of each year’s new entrants to TJ and apply the new lottery method to “just” four hundred.

That makes middle school GPAs the key determinant for getting into the area’s top performing high school, and as everyone knows, GPAs are endlessly manipulable by middle school teachers and their superiors. It stands to reason that more than a few of them will be pressured (by students, parents, principals, school board members, activist groups, etc.)—to inflate a lot of grades to get a lot more kids into the eligibility pool. And what about all the kids who end up in that pool but don’t have any real spark or drive? TJ’s “holistic” approach, which looks at essays, interviews, recommendations, and such, seems far likelier to yield the kind of pupil population that is seriously motivated—over-achievers, OK—to make the most of the extraordinary instructional and curricular opportunities that this fine school offers. If four hundred kids start being admitted by lottery, even if they’ve all done well in middle school, how many of them will truly want to be there, and how many will have the personal qualities that lead them to prosper academically in high school and beyond?

Just as important, who has those qualities but won’t have this opportunity, just because their names didn’t get picked out of the hat?

I can’t fault the goal. What I can fault is FCPS’s inclination—much like New York City’s current leadership—to fiddle with the rationing system rather than either increasing the supply of TJ-style schools to meet the demand or doing something serious about the elementary and middle schools so that a more diverse population of kids is truly prepared to run on this fast track.

Up the road in prosperous Loudoun County, something far more worrying is about to get underway. On Monday, the school board will consider a draft plan to revise its rules for “professional conduct” by school staff, a plan that will punish employees—teachers included—who make “Any comments that are not in alignment with the school division's commitment to action-oriented equity practices.”

This is part of a larger plan “to combat systemic racism” throughout the system, which plan also includes potentially illegal preferences for Black and Hispanic students in the discipline realm, as well as a consultant-developed curriculum that focuses on “critical race theory.” The district’s far-reaching equity initiatives get truly Orwellian when we look closely at the draft “professional conduct” rules. Consider (with my emphasis added):

Unacceptable behavior includes but is not limited to...[d]isrespectful, discourteous, uncivil, disparaging, or demeaning words, gestures or actions.... Employees are expected to support the school division’s commitment to action-oriented equity practices through the performance of their job duties, as the Division engages in the disruption and dismantling of white supremacy, systemic racism, and language and actions motivated by race, religion, country of origin, gender identity, sexual orientation, and/or ability. Behavior that will not be tolerated includes but is not limited to...[h]arassing or discriminatory comments or conduct including speech or other telephone, electronic, or social media communication that...can reasonably be interpreted as discriminatory, racially or ethnically derogatory, defamatory, or as undermining the views, positions, goals, policies or public statements of the Loudoun County School Board or its Superintendent.... Any comments or actions that are not in alignment with the school division’s commitment to action-oriented equity practices.... This includes on-campus and off-campus speech, social media posts, and any other telephonic or electronic communication.

These rules will apply to all district employees 24/7, whether at work or at home or at the mall, whether in public and private, whether talking on the phone to one’s mother, writing a letter to the editor, campaigning for office (even within the union), or explaining to the HR office of another district why they might be seeking new employment. As I read it, the rules say they cannot utter or write anything that disagrees in any way with the superintendent of schools! Not just in the classroom, but also on vacation, in church, in the gym, wherever.

It’s well known that public school teachers don’t enjoy the First Amendment’s free speech protection when fulfilling their classroom duties. In 2006, the Supreme Court rejected “the notion that the First Amendment shields from discipline the expressions employees make pursuant to their professional duties. Our precedents do not support the existence of a constitutional cause of action behind every statement a public employee makes in the course of doing his or her job.”

But is there no limit to “doing one’s job”? If the Loudoun County school board adopts the proposed code of employee conduct, we can reasonably expect those limits to be explored in court. Unless, that is, every single teacher, custodian, bus driver, school secretary, and cafeteria worker is so intimidated that they don’t dare raise the issue. In which case 1984 will have reached Virginia about thirty-six years too late.

As at Thomas Jefferson High School, one is hard put to argue with the ends being pursued. But here, once again, the means being selected may do at least as much harm as good.

Of the nearly 2,000 public school students beginning high school in the South Bronx (District 8 of NYC public schools) in 2015, only 2 percent graduated ready for college four years later. A shocking 98 percent of students either dropped out of high school before completing their senior year—or they did manage to graduate, but would still be required to take remedial classes in community college due to low math and reading scores on state exams. By contrast, charter public schools in the South Bronx continued to outperform their district peers in both math and reading for third through eighth graders by a substantial margin in 2019, as shown in figure 1 below.

Figure 1: District versus charter school proficiency in English language arts and math, 2019

Source: New York City Charter School Center

It comes as no surprise that parents in this predominantly Black and Hispanic community, encompassing two of the poorest Congressional districts in the country, are desperate for higher quality education options. The NYC Charter Center reports that in the Bronx alone, more than 25,000 families applied for just over 9,000 available seats in Bronx charter schools.

Even so, in an attempt to curry favor for his failed presidential bid, NYC Mayor Bill DeBlasio angrily attacked charter schoola as part of his opening statement at the 2019 annual forum of the nation’s largest teachers union, the National Education Association. “I hate the privatizers and I want to stop them,” he said. “Get away from high-stakes testing, get away from charter schools. No federal funding for charter schools.”

These are not idle threats. DeBlasio, along with teachers unions and many Democrat elected officials, have consistently blocked legislation that would lift the numerical “cap” on new charter public schools in New York City. This all but ensures the nearly 16,000 Bronx parents on a waitlist for charter public schools will be forced to enroll their kids in district public schools that have been failing their community for generations.

The education of children

Why is there so much irrational opposition to low-income families who want nothing more than the opportunity to choose a high-quality public school for their child?

In his richly researched new book, Charter Schools and Their Enemies, author and economist Thomas Sowell poses the dilemma in this way: “Even the most successful charter schools have been bitterly attacked by teachers unions, by politicians, by the civil rights establishment and assorted others. How can success be so unwelcome?” Sowell answers this question with painstaking detail, revealing that these forces are really focused on protecting “adult vested interests in traditional unionized public schools,” and are committed to “limiting the exodus of students from traditional public schools to public charter schools.”

Throughout the book, Sowell attempts to correct falsehoods and distortions that anti-charter advocates keep repeating in hopes that lies ultimately become accepted truths. For example, given the frequent tendency for DeBlasio and allied opponents to falsely accuse charter schools of attempting to privatize education, Sowell offers a definition of these schools:

Public charter schools are public schools not created by the existing government education authorities, but by some private groups who gain government approval by meeting various preconditions set by the authorizing agencies. These agencies issue charters enabling these schools to operate as public schools eligible for taxpayer money and to enroll public students who apply.

On more than one occasion, Sowell feels he must italicize and remind the reader that “schools exist for the education of children,” not to “provide iron-clad jobs for teachers, billions of dollars in union dues, or a captive audience for indoctrinators.” Sowell reasonably establishes a singular general principle for evaluating any proposed reform to the education system: “How is this going to affect the education of children?” In the words of Sowell, “those who want to see quality education remain available to youngsters in low-income, minority neighborhoods must raise the question, again and again, when various policies and practices are proposed.”

Struck by the accomplishments of charter public schools, Sowell is compelled to envision the potential of the American system if all public schools adopted the same practices that have driven charter schools’ success. But he raises one important note of caution: “The implications of [charter schools’] existing achievement can be a game-changer in the field of education—to the extent that facts are known and heeded.”

Herein lies Sowell’s central aspiration and basic plea for fairness: If more people can “know and heed” the overwhelming evidence detailing the positive impact of charter schools on the education of children, perhaps more poor and minority students can have access to a “good education which is their biggest opportunity for a better life.”

That is why Sowell so meticulously sets up a data framework to contrast the achievement levels of students in district public schools to “truly comparable” students in charter public schools. Sowell uses the results of the 2018 New York State Education Department tests in math and English language arts, which are administered to all students in grades three through eight—whether those students are in district or charter public schools. He drills down even further to ensure he only compares students who share the same grade, racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic characteristics. Finally, he compares district public school students and charter public school students who are “co-located,” meaning their respective schools share the same building, and often even the same floors.

Applying all of these filters, Sowell identifies a significant sample of 23,000 district and charter public school students, all being educated in the same buildings. Sowell’s Appendix alone has more than one hundred pages of charts detailing the sixty-five co-located charter public schools in the city and how their respective students performed on state tests compared to similarly situated district public school students.

The results of this truly “apples-to-apples” comparison are impressive. While not every charter public school outperformed its co-located district public school in every grade, the difference was decisive in an overwhelming number of cases. For example, in the five buildings in which they were co-located with district public schools, a majority of the students in the KIPP charter network passed the 2018 math exams in twelve of their fourteen grade levels. By contrast, among the students in the traditional public schools sharing the same buildings, a majority passed the math exam in just one of their twenty grade levels.

Sowell’s analysis of charter school prowess is hardly an outlier. Just recently, Harvard professor Paul Peterson published a comprehensive, longitudinal study, finding:

Student cohorts in the charter sector made greater gains from 2005 to 2017 than did cohorts in the district sector. The difference in the trends in the two sectors amounts to nearly an additional half-year’s-worth of learning. The biggest gains are for African Americans and for students of low socioeconomic status attending charter schools.

The success of charter schools cannot be denied.

Fighting enemies, within and without

Yet, to anti-charter advocates, these facts are to be ignored, distorted, or discredited because the success of charter public schools has been achieved through unallowable means. And while the purveyors of these attacks remain an ominous and external threat to charter schools, there is a new development coming from within the sector that has the potential to undermine both the legacy and future of charter schools. Sowell refers to a “particularly striking—and perhaps dangerous—institutional change” occurring within leading charter schools to “promote anti-racist practices” that are much more likely to diminish the importance of individual student effort, sow greater racial division, and worst of all end up perpetuate disempowering stereotypes of Black Americans.

Perhaps a letter by Dave Levin, founder of the KIPP network, best exemplifies these new dangers. He recently apologized for how, over twenty-five years, he “as a white man ... and others, came up short in fully acknowledging the ways in which the [KIPP] school and organizational culture we built and how some of our practices perpetuated white supremacy and anti-Blackness.” Towards this end, KIPP has retired its longtime slogan “Work Hard, Be Nice” because “working hard and being nice is not going to dismantle systemic racism ... it suggests being compliant and submissive ... and it supports the illusion of meritocracy.”

It is not clear where these revelations from charter leaders are going. How can the practices that have yielded unbelievable gains for low-income, Black, and Brown children symbolize the perpetuation of white supremacy? These newly woke forces from within the charter sector threaten to inflict an even greater wound than the external oppositions that charter schools have now weathered for more than two decades. One has to hope they will not.

With formidable opponents attacking from the outside and corrosive ideologies now festering from within, it is a wonder the charter sector has managed to survive at all. Yet, according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, “charter schools serve 3.3 million students in America, and there are five million more who would attend a charter school if space were available.”

It is this part of the story—the David versus Goliath nature of the charter sector—that I wish Sowell had also chronicled. The enemies of charter school may be formidable, but the battle is not lost. There are successful strategies the sector has deployed to push back against the gargantuan opponents arrayed against it.

I would know. For the last decade, I was CEO of a network of charter public schools in the heart of the South Bronx and the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Our faculty had the solemn responsibility to educate more than 2,000 students—primarily low-income, Black, and Hispanic kids—whose parents chose our schools because they want their children to develop skills and habits that would help them achieve a better life, becoming the agents of their own uplift. I am now designing Vertex Partnership Academies, a new network of character-based, International Baccalaureate high schools that will open in the south Bronx.

Leaders in the charter sector do not take on the grueling work of launching these schools because we are anti-union or ruthless “privatizers.” We are motivated by families who do not have time to sit around while their child languishes and wait for the public school system to transform itself. What do you tell the twenty-two-year-old mom of a five-year-old who needs a great elementary kindergarten class for her child, today?

In the current moment of riots and protests demanding racial justice, rather than embarking on a White guilt trip down memory lane, charter leaders must stress their legacy of accomplishment, particularly in educating low-income, Black, and Hispanic students. And we have to elevate the voices of parents themselves as a force that unions and other anti-charter advocates cannot dismiss or ignore any longer. Our families do not believe their children are doomed to be shackled by the horrors of America’s legacy of slavery. That is why they crave the ability to choose the good schools that middle- and upper-income families take for granted.

When the charter sector faced an existential threat in New York in 2013, leaders mobilized nearly 17,000 parents, aunts, grandmothers, and other family members to march across the Brooklyn Bridge wearing shirts that said “We Fight Inequality” and “My Child, My Choice.” A few months later, caravans of busses with 11,000 family members trekked to bitter cold Albany to advocate for school choice.

Parents, mostly Black and Brown, argued that hundreds of thousands of kids were trapped in poorly performing schools, and that low-income families like them must be given the option to choose charter schools. Even Democratic politicians, who now had concentrations of high-performing charter schools within their districts, publicly signaled their support. Those efforts led to amazing legislative victories for increases in per pupil funding, permanent public funding for leasing private facilities, and more flexibility in how charter schools could recruit and professionally develop our faculty.

Perhaps Sowell desired for Charter Schools and Their Enemies to paint the most dire picture of the sector, lest we forget how fragile our hard-fought victories are. But, on behalf of the 16,000 children in the South Bronx, and the more than 5,000,000 families nationwide who are waiting for their child to find a spot in a charter school, let’s hope his sequel publication is entitled “How Charter Schools Overcame Their Enemies”—all while focusing on the education of children.

Editor’s note: This was first published by Law & Liberty.

Last month, Teachers College Press is releasing Getting the Most Bang for the Education Buck, a new volume edited by Rick Hess and Brandon Wright. I contributed a chapter to that volume, which I’ll get to in a moment. But before that, I just want to emphasize how important the project itself is.

It is practically heresy in the education policy world to question whether it would be wise to spend more money on K–12 education. The Biden campaign is promising to triple Title I funding, something that has been met with almost zero opposition.

The push for increased education funding frequently elides the tougher questions about what schools are doing with the money they already receive. According to the Digest of Education Statistics, American schools receive more than $14,300 per student, per year, on average. Based on the average 15.9 pupil/teacher ratio from the same document, that means that the typical American classroom brings in more than $227,000 in tax revenue. That is a lot of money. Where is it all going? Is it being put to its best use?

Interestingly, our own polling research regularly finds that people dramatically underestimate how much government spends on schools—and when given accurate information, the percentage of people who think spending is “too low” drops more than 20 percentage points.

This debate often also sidesteps other tough questions about government spending in general. If you head to your state’s capitol building when the budget is being drafted, you’ll hear advocates from many different sectors arguing for more funding. Legislators have a tough task. Not everyone can get all the funding that they want. When more money comes in via increased tax revenue, legislators have to ask where they should spend what economists call the marginal dollar. Should that new dollar go to K–12 schools? Early childhood education? Healthcare? Roads? It may be true that spending more money on K–12 education will lead to better results but spending elsewhere could do even more.

In short, one can still believe that “money matters” in education while asking these questions.

Asking tough questions is only going to become more important post-Covid-19. The shock from decreased tax revenue is going to make the next couple of years rough for state governments. K–12 schools, higher education, healthcare systems, and a host of other state functions are going to see big funding gaps, and legislatures are going to have to plug them in ways that will inevitably leave advocates disappointed.

This is all a roundabout way of saying that it is a worthwhile and important endeavor to ask, “Are we getting the most bang for what we are already spending on education?”

In my particular contribution to the volume, I profile three school systems: one public (the Miami-Dade public schools), one charter (The Academies of Math and Science), and one private (Seton Education Partners). All three have worked to get the most bang for the education buck, and all three offer lessons for schools looking to become more efficient and more effective.

Miami-Dade, and its superintendent Alberto Carvalho, teaches us that the “staffing surge” is not written in the stars. Miami-Dade focused its energy and its resources on the classroom and not the central office. From 1994 to 2017 the US K–12 student population grew 16 percent. Non-teaching staff grew 51 percent, far outpacing student growth. In Miami, while the student population grew 16 percent the non-teaching staff only grew 18 percent. Keeping administrative growth in line with student growth allowed them to spend more money in the classroom, hire more and better-paid teachers, and achieve strong results for a big city district.

The Academies of Math and Science offer a model for school construction and financing that can save money and create higher quality spaces for children to learn. They took advantage of Arizona’s Public School Credit Enhancement Program to save more than a million dollars on debt financing to pay for new buildings. They paired this cheaper debt with a rigorous commitment to value engineering, creating high functioning but low-cost buildings. In states and localities with population growth, finding ways to build school buildings in a cost-effective manner can free up money to spend in the classrooms within them.

Seton Education Partners offers a model for technology use that can help schools with low levels of funding provide high-quality instruction. They work with struggling Catholic schools, many of which operate on little more than widow’s mite and Novenas. By integrating technology-based instruction in a rotational model that has some students receiving in-person instruction and others working on computers, they help Catholic schools increase their class sizes and thus their revenue without dramatically increasing their costs.

Looking at all three of these different school models, one overarching lesson is that good financial stewardship is rewarded. Both the Academies of Math and Science and Seton Education Partners are growing to serve more and more students as their cost-effective models are proven to provide a solid product. Miami-Dade successfully lobbied for two major bond initiatives in 2012 and 2018, getting more money to modernize buildings and increase teacher salaries. Voters passed both handily.

While it may be gauche to talk about school spending effectiveness amongst education policy professionals, voters and community members are more than happy to. Those that want to see more education funding should be willing to make the case the money that is already being spent is being spent effectively. If they can’t, they shouldn’t be surprised when they don’t get any more.

Editor’s note: This was first published by Forbes.

Proponents of test-based accountability generally believe that robust systems—those that set high bars for achieving success, generate copious and transparent data, and impose substantive awards or consequences based on progress (or lack thereof)—are enough to boost student achievement. Another school of thought posits that more funding to schools does likewise. A recent working paper from the Annenberg Institute finds that these two policy levers each have their own strengths, but when they interact, accountability systems can increase the efficiency by which additional school dollars are spent.

Twenty five states enacted school finance reforms sometime between 1990 and 2011, following the wave of “adequacy” court cases that began in 1989, which were driven by provisions in state constitutions that required legislatures to guarantee a minimum level of free education to all students. The resulting school funding schemes substantially raised state transfers to low-income districts. At the same time, test-based accountability policies were gaining momentum. Although the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law ensured nationwide adoption of accountability, thirty states adopted consequential school accountability systems prior to NCLB’s 2002 enactment.

Researchers leverage variation in the timing of finance reforms relative to states’ adoption of test-based school accountability systems. They estimate and compare effects on student achievement in twenty-five “treatment states,” broken into two categories. One batch of thirteen states had test-based accountability in place at the time of their school finance reform. They define those states as “accountability” states. Another batch of twelve states did not have accountability systems in place and are designated “non-accountability” states. A control group consisted of twenty-three states without school finance reform during the study period.

They use NAEP restricted-use data for student achievement and data from the F-33 school district finance survey (made available by the National Center for Education Statistics) for revenues and expenditures. They also classify districts into income quintiles, focusing the analysis on the highest- and lowest-income districts.

Their key finding is that the effects of school finance reforms on student learning were driven entirely by those states that had test-based accountability in place at the time. For low-income districts in these states, results show that test scores improve around 0.012 of a standard deviation each year following a school finance reform. In contrast, the corresponding estimate for low-income districts in states without an accountability policy is only about one-third of this size. Moreover, after accounting for trends leading up to the finance reforms, the effect for accountability states remains the same in magnitude, but the effect for the non-accountability states is statistically insignificant. Thus they posit that school finance reforms “cause” test score increases in accountability states but not in non-accountability states. But they also test whether other things could explain the differences instead.

For instance, maybe the effect of the finance reforms on low-income district spending is larger in accountability states. Yet they find that the “resource effects” are largely similar. Specifically, low-income districts in non-accountability states—where they don’t find much evidence of student achievement gains—increase spending by around 9 percent on average following the finance reform; the comparable figure is 7 percent on average in accountability states, so not a huge difference.

All that said, footnote ten (!) in the report explains that the analysis does “not have statistical power to reject the null hypothesis that the effects in low-income districts between accountability and non-accountability states are the same. We can reject the one-sided hypothesis that the effect is larger in non-accountability states, however.” This somewhat covert admission surely weakens their bottom-line finding that effects are driven entirely by accountability states. Still, analysts performed enough due diligence to demonstrate some complementarity between test-based accountability systems and school finance reforms.

That means accountability policies can improve the efficiency of additional dollars spent, likely because they create rewards or sanctions for schools based on student performance. Of course, it makes sense that holding schools responsible for performance could make them think harder about how to direct new monies to meet the goals set out in their accountability plans.

Unfortunately, the concepts of consequential accountability and school finance have both taken on new meanings in this pandemic, and the risk of losing both—because of the unprecedented crisis and the economic downturn—is real in the wake of it. For the sake of students, we should hang on to both however we can and look forward to the time when they can complement one another once again.

SOURCE: Christian Buerger, Seung Hyeong Lee, & John D. Singleton, “Test-Based Accountability and the Effectiveness of School Finance Reforms,” retrieved from Annenberg Institute at Brown University (August 2020).

On this week’s podcast, Fordham’s Adam Tyner joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss the new study that he coauthored, “Social Studies Instruction and Reading Comprehension: Evidence from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study.” On the Research Minute, Amber Northern examines the effects of merit aid for low-income college students.

Amber's Research Minute

Joshua Angrist, David Autor, & Amanda Pallais, “Marginal Effects of Merit Aid for Low-Income Students,” School Effectiveness & Inequality Initiative Discussion Paper #2020.06 (September 2020).

The Education Gadfly Show is available on Google Podcasts, Libsyn, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, TuneIn, The Podcast App, PodBean, Podbay, Chartable, Castbox, and myTuner Radio.