Jack Schneider is a historian of education. In this post, which he wrote at my request, he analyzes the new push for homeschooling. In the midst of the global pandemic, with millions of children quarantined at home, its not surprising that parents are compelled to be teachers. But how many parents will want to homeschool when real schools are one day available again?
Schneider writes:
Never let a good crisis go to waste. As any policy advocate knows, the destabilizing nature of an emergency creates a rare opportunity: sweeping change can happen quickly.
Both parties have a history of exploiting difficulties and disasters. During the Great Recession, for instance, the Obama administration pushed through a series of heavy-handed federal education reforms that might otherwise have met with stiff resistance. But during the COVID-19 pandemic, the most ambitious education proposals have come from Republicans, because the shuttering of schools has played to their advantage.
With state revenues shrinking before our eyes and schools forced online, conservatives have seized the opportunity to push for a number of long-standing pet projects: virtual schooling, spending cuts, union-busting, and privatization. Unthinkable in ordinary times, these ideologically-motivated reforms suddenly seem plausible.
Consider the recent push for homeschooling. The right has long made the case that public education is a waste of taxpayer funds and an offense to individual liberty. “Government schools,” as many conservatives deridingly call them, strip parents of their freedom to educate their children as they please; worse, they do so at an annual cost of nearly a trillion dollars. Homeschooling, by contrast, is defined by limited government oversight and costs taxpayers virtually nothing.
Homeschooling is no great evil. It predates formal schooling and has existed alongside the public education system for roughly two centuries. It also constitutes a small fraction of overall school enrollments in the United States.
Yet it is important to understand current advocacy for homeschooling as what it is: crisis-related opportunism. Homeschooling hasn’t suddenly become better or more appealing than it ever was. Instead, market-oriented conservatives understand that this is the best shot they’ve ever had at dismantling public education (an aim that Jennifer Berkshire and I detail in our book A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door). Homeschooling, for those like Betsy DeVos, is a means to that end.
A recent article in Education Next—a publication created by the conservative Hoover Institution—offers a perfect case in point. It may lead with the classic ideological argument—that homeschooling offers “the freedom to explore education as families see fit, with limited government oversight.” But the real aim of the piece is to persuade readers that our concerns about homeschooling are “overblown.” It’s a play for respectability—ammunition for the policy siege to come.
Yet the evidence on offer is hardly compelling. As we learn, homeschooled children go to museums and libraries somewhat more often than their public school counterparts—largely because they are not at school all day. They are slightly more likely to visit a zoo or aquarium. And they are 17 percentage points more likely to do arts and crafts projects. We are also told, as if we couldn’t have guessed, that homeschooled children are more likely to participate in family activities.
And that’s just about all.
There are some nods to the fact that homeschooling isn’t uniform—that families often band together, employ additional internet-based resources, and sometimes even participate in school-based activities. But on the whole, there is little evidence that homeschooling is a viable large-scale alternative to public education.
To his credit, the study’s author, Daniel Hamlin, doesn’t make that claim. But we need to imagine how such studies will be transformed as they careen across the internet, and as they are weaponized by ideologically-motivated legislators.
We must remember, too, that there is a cost to homeschooling. Most children who are homeschooled probably turn out just fine, though the truth is we don’t actually know—we don’t have the evidence. For many children, however, a shift away from school as we know it would be devastating. Their academic experiences would be more limited and their social experiences much narrower. They would lose out on nutrition and health services, miss opportunities to build interracial and cross-class friendships, and experience far more idiosyncratic forms of citizenship preparation. All of this, as we know from educational research, would most severely affect the least advantaged—those from historically marginalized racial groups and low-income families.
Despite the limited evidentiary base for homeschooling, and the serious concerns we should have, we can be sure that the push for widespread homeschooling will come. The present crisis is simply too good to waste. And given the nature of this emergency, the case for channeling funds directly to families—even if it is at the expense of public school budgets—is an easy one to make.
So, expect to see a sudden influx of research (and research-like products) that tells us to put our concerns aside, to embrace homeschooling for the time being, and to allow policy leaders to blaze a new trail. But read carefully, and remember that any changes implemented now may endure far into the future.
This article appeared on a business/investment site. Using the pod concept as a money-making opportunity due to drop in their health club attendance, an exclusive health/fitness chain on the west coast has partnered with KinderCare to provide alternative education options to members. I’ve emailed their main office to ask if the children of the nannies and housekeepers of these members will be eligible for “scholarships” and asked how they actually do scholarship outreach. Have not received a reply and doubt if I ever will. Educational inequity continues. We will beseeing more of this. https://www.benzinga.com/pressreleases/20/08/n16997373/the-bay-club-and-kindercare-education-team-up-to-support-families-with-distance-learning and https://lp.bayclubs.com/distance-learning-waitlist
Home schooling is the ideal model for libertarians. It works great on the prairie where women stay home, cook, clean, sew and take care of all the little ones. However, it is not a practical solutions for millions of people that live and work in this century. The pandemic is the excuse for Rand Paul’s new “choice” bill where the money follows the student. He says, ““As the impact of the ongoing pandemic and the government response efforts continue to place parents in situations requiring greater flexibility in balancing working and providing for their families’ critical needs, especially when educating their children at home, my SCHOOL Act grants them that flexibility by empowering them to use their own tax dollars to find the option that best fits their family’s needs and allowing them to reclaim a bit of stability in uncertain times,”
Its real goal is to amend two acts: the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. He wants to obliterate any legal protections that public education provides and turn parents into education shoppers.https://www.djournal.com/news/national/sen-paul-introduces-legislation-to-allow-federal-education-dollars-to-follow-students/article_1a9e8631-5f78-53b6-991c-e23264098e06.html
My daughter will not be sending my grandson back to school as long as we do not have a vaccine for Covid. Her school district is offering virtual instruction which she and my grandson dislike, but are resigned to use and build on, considering the risks in Texas at this time. Families have to decide what works best for them at this time. There are no easy solutions.
Time to go back to reading the Columbian Orator by candlelight, like the young Abraham Lincoln and the young Frederick Douglass! LOL.
Lincoln, btw, was a capacious reader. His reading included a little of everything–natural history, law, speeches, moral philosophy, poetry, drama, and fiction. He was a big reader of Shakespeare, as his writing and speaking style would suggest. A renaissance man.
And here’s Thomas Jefferson: “Thus a lively and lasting sense of filial duty is more effectually impressed on the mind of a son or daughter by reading King Lear, than by all the dry volumes of ethics, and divinity that ever were written.” And here’s the reading list Thomas Jefferson prepared for a young cousin, I believe it was:
Ancient History
The Histories Herodotus
History of the Peloponnesian War
Thucydides
Anabasis & Hellenica
Xenophon
Life of Alexander the Great
Quintus Curtius Rufus
The Gallic War & The Civil War
Julius Caesar
Antiquities Josephus
Lives Plutarch
Annals & Histories
Tacitus
History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Edward Gibbons
Philosophy
Works of Plato
Plato
Works of Cicero
Cicero
Morals Plutarch
Moral Epistles & Essays
Seneca
Memorabilia of Socrates Xenophon
Meditations Marcus Aurelius
The Enchiridion
Epictetus
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
John Locke
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
David Hume
Candide Voltaire
Introductory Discourse and the Free Inquiry
Conyers Middleton
Nicomachean Ethics
Aristotle
Literature/Epic Poetry/Plays
The Iliad & The Odyssey
Homer
The Aeneid
Virgil
Paradise Lost
John Milton
Oedipus Trilogy
Sophocles
Orestian Trilogy
Aeschylus
The Plays of Euripides
Euripides
Poems Horace
The Works of Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
The Misanthrope
Moliere
Gulliver’s Travels
Jonathan Swift
A Modest Proposal
Jonathan Swift
Don Quixote
Miguel de Cervantes
The Adventures of David Simple
Sarah Fielding
The Adventures of Roderick Random
Tobias Smollett
The Vicar of Wakefield
Oliver Goldsmith
Tristram Shandy
Laurence Sterne
The Canterbury Tales
Geoffrey Chaucer
Poems Edmund Waller
Politics/Religion/Modern History
Spirit of the Laws
Montesquieu
Two Treatises of Government
John Locke
Discourses Concerning Government
Algernon Sidney
The Bible
The History of America
William Robertson
Historical Review of Pennsylvania
Benjamin Franklin
A History of the Settlement of Virginia
Captain John Smith
Science
On Electricity
Benjamin Franklin
The Gentleman Farmer
Henry Home
The Horse Hoeing Husbandry
Jethro Tull (agronomist, not rock band, lol)
Buffon’s Natural History
Georges-Louis Leclerc
Anson’s Voyage Round the World
Richard Walter
Wow, wow, wow. Modern education is so radically different—and, probably, inferior.
I missed part of this conversation. Maybe that is why I do not understand what Ponderosa means by “modern education.”
What is a “modern education” and why is it “probably inferior” … to what, an old fashioned education like the Prussian model of obedience that sounds so much like what is going on in most publicly funded, secretive, and abusive, private sector charter schools?
So true. Jefferson wasn’t burdened with the inferiority of Louisa May Alcott, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Emile Zola, Willa Cather, Gustav Mahler, Susan B. Anthony, Ida Tarbell, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Erich Maria Remarque, P.G. Wodehouse, Maurice Ravel, Mohandas Gandhi, Aaron Copland, Willy Brandt (for you, Bob), Susan Sontag, Toni Morrison, Bob Dylan, James MacPherson, Diane Ravitch, Siddhartha Mukherjee, Steve Reich…. Radically inferior, if you will.
Oh come on Lloyd you’ve got to admit that studying those foundational Western-Civ texts has nothing to do w/ Prussian obedience or charter schools! Obviously there’s not room for all of Abe’s 200-yrs-ago syllabus in “modern education.” But I wuz robbed– not a single one of them, zero, nada was included in my ’50’s-’60’s K12 ed. Only the “accelerated” classes got exposed to even a few ancient foundational texts then, & today no kids are at all.
I’m smiling as I write this. I confess that I was so busy reading historical fiction, science fiction, and fantasy books, sometimes two a day, throughout middle and high school that I never paid much attention to what the always boring textbooks said.
And that explains my GPA when I graduated from high school. Not reading the homework assignments from the textbooks and guessing on tests, I barely squeaked through. I think a lot of my teachers “gave” me D’s as grades because they either felt sorry for me or saw me hiding my paperbacks inside my textbooks from where I saw at the back of each classroom and knew I was an avid reader but just not a reader of textbooks.
I read every historical fiction book I could get my hands on from the local town library and also the high school library on the British Empire (Horatio Hornblower the entire series, the entire Aubrey-Maturin series) Napoleon and his wars, the Revouliatnary War, The Civil War (read an entire series of about ten or more books just by one author), the wild wild west, the U.S. war against the native Americans, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, et al.
If you want to read about the history of the United States, most of it happens while the country is at war since the U.S. has been at war 225 out of 243 years since 1776.
This article just came to my inbox. I see this happening in my district too – families creating learning pods or homeschooling. It paints an even starker contrast to those districts in Arizona, Florida and Georgia being forced to open without the space and resources.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/08/08/metro/families-with-means-leave-public-schools-private-schools-or-learning-pods-raising-concerns-about-worsening-educational-inequality/?s_campaign=breakingnews:newsletter
I started to read the comments at the end of the article ……these commenters need to become teachers:
These are some of the comments following the article I posted above on the Globe’s website:
“Independent schools focus on students. Public schools focus on teachers. None of this is to be unexpected. In many communities, public school students will start the 2021 academic year two years behind their private school peers.”
“I’m pro-teacher and don’t like to bash them for no reason, but it’s sad that the school year was cut from 180 to 170 days, so teachers can get 10 days of training for remote learning. Why couldn’t they take those ten days from summer vacation? Nothing, not even a pandemic, will make a teacher give up even a day of their 15 weeks of paid vacation a year.”
“Absolutely right. Teacher unions are ruling the stay at home model. Private schools are not. Simple. If our kids can go to Walmart, they can Go to school. Priorities.”
“Catholic schools have been planning since last spring. Public schools needed more time to plan for it? What is wrong with this picture? Pls don’t babble on about poor teachers not being paid enough to work…..everyone on salary works until the job is complete. Not hourly.And Catholic school teachers are paid peanuts compared to public.”
And there are more where those came from. Time to turn off the computer and take a break.
One more Globe commenter’s comment before I log off. Why I am paying attention and reading them, I am not sure:
“Teachers are no longer working class. They are the best paid part timers I know.”
I think more people think this than we realize. You have to know a teacher or be a teacher to understand how all consuming it.
Or a parent… you would think, anyway. I had been a hisch Fr teacher w/5 preps at one point, so I certainly understood by the time I had school-aged kids that those marked-up hw papers, quizzes etc were produced nights & wkends. But perhaps even parents imagine that the planning & assessing & feedback for 4+ subjects/ groups is magically accomplished between 3-5pm plus a planning break. [RE: “part timers”].
Maybe “part timers” refers to 9-10wk summer break? Gee, I always thought that was to “compensate”– working 20% fewer hrs but making 30% less than those w/equivalent ed background. [As a corporate worker, I (like teachers) worked more like 60 hrs/wk, so we’ll call that part even– not talking working class jobs here]. As a young teacher, I was able to break even w/temp’y sec’y work summers, & I’ve known others who have house-painting gigs & the like. All lower-paying jobs: you end up working the same hrs as corporate staff but still pulling in 20% less..!!
The curious part of the post: “Teachers are no longer working class.”
When were they ever? This seems at first glance not to make sense. But this might be an older writer harking back to the day when mfg & even some residential trades pulled in a robust mid-class salary, as did teachers– ’70’s. Back then, he was blue-collar earning equiv to college-educated mid-class office worker [but w/o the same career path acquired thru advanced degree]. Teachers too then earned robust mid-class salary– but were reqd to have or shortly earn Master’s– which never earned as much as a master tradesman back then, unless they acquired addl post-grad credits & abandoned teaching for admin…].
When you factor in the cost of college for BA & MA since late ’80’s [& ballooning since then] combined w/ halving of state investment & consequent ballooning of stud debt grossly out of proportion to projected salary, the only thing ’70’s-era trade & teaching careers have any more is they’re both shot to hell.
And I should have added teachers’ stagnant salaries– they’re paid 14% less now (in equiv $’s) than in ’70’s.
The sad thing is, that poster– & his cohort of resentful older Trump-voters– have everything in common w/ today’s teachers, & for the same reasons. We are only divided by faux political propaganda.
And then finally a sane comment on the Globe post. It sounds like it could be written by someone who follows Diane:
“At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, it seems to me that a worse achievement gap and fury toward public schools are the only logical outcomes of the political choices that brought us here. If we had a strict early quarantine with mask requirements, rapid testing, and contact tracing, the virus would be gone and schools would be reopening. But here we are with insane politicization of a pandemic, ongoing school disruption, and a devastated economy. Stunningly, instead of blaming the leaders for failing to lead, people blame the teachers for being reluctant to die.
The oligarchs are doing better than ever. Discrediting public education and depriving the neediest kids of educational opportunities seems to be a feature, not a bug, in the Republican response to the pandemic.”
This is a better not for me to log off on.
The only way Homeschooling will become a “big thing” is if poor parents get paid several thousand dollars a year through public money to keep their kids home. That doesn’t mean those kids living in poverty will be homeschooled beyond sitting in front of a TV all day watching mind-numbing, brain-damaging programs or playing endless, violent video games that are also mind-numbing and brain-damaging.
Poverty is not only a weapon of the white rich like Betsy the Brutal DeVos, but a destructive brain-destructive disease that will keep many of those children in poverty.
Great video, Lloyd! Thanks for sharing it!
I have many friends who homeschool their children because of schedules that do not mesh with the daily schedule of the typical student. They travel a lot, their children go with them. It has always been unavoidable. For this group, I have sympathy.
Then there is another group. Their child is always in trouble, and they have always dealt with that trouble with avoidance. this exacerbates the trouble, of course. they pull the kid out of school. The friends of the kid still in my class regularly report on the activities of the child, who seems to think he can get done with school in a couple of hours a day.
There is an old saying about people who act as their own lawyers, something about having a fool for a counsel. I feel strongly about teachers in the same way.
Oops Lloyd I was drafting this while you published! The one and only thing that would increase homeschooling post-pandemic: paying families to do it. Does any state give a per-pupil allotment to homeschoolers, the way they do for charter-schoolers? I doubt it. I suspect even some rwnutjob taxpayers might balk at paying a family $15k/ yr to homeschool. But that’s what it would take to replace a year of minimum wage salary.
The whole business about well-off families paying for pod-teaching is irrelevant. The truly well-heeled are not in the pubschsys anyway. Upper-mid pubsch families w/nannies to guide online learning– or hiring teachers for “pods,” so what? Kids will be right back in pubsch when possible, to enjoy all the bennies of their high-cost schdistr. No one else can afford this for more than a few months if at all.
We talk a lot about exacerbating the inequities, but any crisis does that across the board (not just in ed) in our highly inequitable society. I’m hoping wealthier people learn from pandemic just how much of a drag on our economy it is– all the time– that such a large proportion of us live one paycheck/ one emergency away from poverty. And that low-mid/wkg/poor classes see their sheer numbers& think about what a powerful voting bloc they could be.
Here is what I was talking about when I mentioned paying parents to homeschool their children.
“Last week, U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos banned DACA students from receiving coronavirus aid. Now, it is being reported that she will use money from the nation’s COVID-19 relief fund to allocate microgrants for homeschooling to states and families.” …
“DeVos is known as an advocate for alternative education and for leaving public schools to fend for themselves. As a part of the microgrants, DeVos seeks to promote virtual learning. The funds that could be used to support public schools will be given to state agencies who opt-in to home school students.”
This piece mentions $180 million for those grants, but that is just the sliver in the door to keep it open. If Betsy the Beast gets what she wants by hook or crook (probably crook), the money will flow out that door to homeschool kids by the billions.
https://www.blackenterprise.com/education-secretary-betsy-devos-to-offer-homeschooling-microgrants-from-covid-19-relief-funds/
BTW, in the news today, Trump asked the Governor of North Carolina how he might get his face on Mt. Rushmore. She told him that the remaining space on the mountain is unstable.
But that’s perfect, isn’t it?
Aie yie yie. South Dakota.
You seem to have confused Mt. Rushmore with Mt. Pilot. Understandable mistake.
Yikes, Greg. Maybe I’m loosing it. I’ll keep sliding cognitively until people start mistaking me for Donald Trump.
Greg:
From Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America:
The same thing once happened to me. I remember mistaking a woman for a trout stream in Vermont, and I had to beg her pardon.
“Excuse me,” I said. “I thought you were a trout stream.”
“I’m not,” she said.
Have you read The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks?
If Sacks was still alive, he’d probably know exactly what Trump’s neurological disorder is. But that doesn’t mean anyone could fix Trump so he’d be a decent person instead of detestable. What is worse than detestable? If there is a word, please replace detestable with that one.
Yes. I read this book by Sacks. But we don’t need to resurrect Dr. Sacks to ascertain that Trump has Malignant Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
I think Trump has more than a malignant narcissistic personality disorder. I think he was born with severe dyslexia and also suffers from Attention Deficit Disorder and his narcissistic, criminal father refused to admit that he gave birth to a son that wasn’t the perfect future criminal type, so Trump never got the special ed support he should have gotten while he was growing up.
Probably so, Lloyd.
And you’re right, ofc, Lloyd, that there is such a strange disorder! Brautigan would have been surprised!
If Trump stays in power, he would have his face replace Lincoln or FDR even if they had to glue rock on top of rock. Blow of a nose and glue the new on in the same space.
But it would spoil the symmetry of the monument to have four men and one mollusk or whatever Trump is.
Trump is an illegal alien, a lump of something from one of the 27 moons around Uranus.
Actually, a Trump aide asked the Governor of South Dakota If it might be possible to add him to Mt. Rushmore. She asked a sculptor to create a four foot replica of the monument and added Trump. She gave it to him as a gift.
Thanks, Diane
perhaps he’d still have his head sculpted and the entire facade would come down: now that would be symbolic
That the rock is unstable is entirely appropriate. I say, go for it!
Trump would have a giant, gold mask of his head sculpted and then air lifted in to fit over one of the other president’s faces and bolted to the mountain. What president would Trump replace if he had that power?
Well, Trump clearly has a rivalry with Lincoln. But then, he just might not ever have heard of the others.
Well, didn’t Trump mention Washington’s Continental Army took over a bunch of airports so he must know something about George?
https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-trump-revolutionary-war-airport-memes-20190705-story.html
lol
Everyone thinks they can be a teacher … Until they actually have to do it.
I think a lot of parents are just now realizing that it ain’t as easy as they thought.
Of course, those who don’t have children or who have always had their children in private boarding schools will never have any clue what is involved.
The simple fact is, most parents are neither qualified nor inclined to homeschool their children.
Being able to read, write and do arithmetic is hardly a sufficient prerequisite for being a teacher.
I know parents who are going to homeschool their elementary school kids. It’s not that they think it will be easy and they know they aren’t qualified. This is not what they really want to do. What the transition to online learning showed these parents was that their young children were not able to navigate the hardware and needed to have a parent sit with them and help them with a mouse and making Googlemeets/Zoom work. Many parents reported that their kids wouldn’t communicate online or ask questions. With school starting online and the parents returning to work, they think it will be much easier to leave the child with an older sibling, grandparent or babysitter and then do the homeschool stuff in the evening since the parent won’t be available during the online school day. They have every intention to put their young children back into school once it is safe and schools reopen.
“Many parents reported that their kids wouldn’t communicate online or ask questions.”
Someone please tell these parents that many kids also do not communicate in class or ask questions.
Unfortunately, it’s very difficult to get reliable information on homeschooling. Most of the stats one sees are prepared and published by homeschooling advocacy groups, and states don’t keep reliable statistics on homeschooling and typically don’t ask a lot of questions that education policy makers might be interested in. I can’t see homeschooling becoming common, but who knows. I’m homeschooling a grandchild this fall so that she can avoid being exposed to the Coronavirus and bringing it home to her entire famiy.
Bob,
As a certified teacher, you would be excellent at home schooling. Most parents who home school are not certified teachers. And you are right about the homeschooling stats. They are unreliable.
I told her, Abigail, you are going to get so much knowledge, you’re going to have to grow another head to keep it all in.
I always thought Bob was certified. The teacher part, however, never registered. Will have to reassess.
Greg: LOL
But you are, Bob, as the Holly Hunter character in O Brother, Where Art Thou demanded her husband to be, bona fide.
Ha ha ha ha ha. Sarcasm: I’m sure tons of parents are going to want to keep their children at home from now on. Let the live-in nanny take care of them. Everyone can hire Mary Poppins with their extravagant incomes. Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, the medicine go down, the medicine
go
down.
I love this. The author spends 1 sentence talking about the Obama administration ramming through controversial reforms. Let conservatives try and do the same thing, and now the sky is falling.
Homeschooling depends upon the educational expertise of the parents. I doubt that very many parents have the knowledge to be experts in every field.
The most likely result would be extensive dumbing down of the population. Since the U.S. isn’t a sparkling example of smart, this isn’t a good move.
I think a lot of parents are really tired of trying to work on educational matters with their children through computer assigned tasks created by experts…teachers.
Home schooling as an alternative to public schools isn’t going anywhere.
No one in discussing the shift to home schooling ever mentions the substandard home conditions in which a substantial portion of our students live. Parents may be uneducated but more likely are druggies, unconcerned about and incapable of providing any sort of education for their children. Public schools are often considered babysitters for these parents, but in reality are the only hope their children have of breaking free of the cycle of poverty.
This post should be used in psychology 101 courses when they get to the lecture on projection. One of the more baffling and disgusting comments I’ve seen here in quite some time.
“Parents may be uneducated but more likely are druggies, unconcerned about and incapable of providing any sort of education for their children.”
That’s disgusting. And wrong. Sad what passes for discourse these days.
Thanks, Sue. I still remember the couple with 13 children in California who claimed they were homeschooling them but when authorities checked, they found the children abused, starved, some chained.
Google David and Louise Turpin. They were sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.
Until we address the economic and social issue at the level of families and communities, those schools in the neediest communities will continue to struggle.
The cycle of poverty could be described as “disgusting” – but Sue mentioning it is not. It’s real.