Now that you mentioned your book, you mentioned a very important space that is the center of your book, which is the sanctuary school idea, right? So can you explain to our listeners more what is that and why those are important and why there are challenges around them? Sure,

absolutely.

So part of my orientation as an educator and as an academic is that schools are often asked to solve our society's problems, and when they don't, are often blamed for creating those problems or continuing those problems.

And I think public schools are part of webs of social supports that help hold up and sustain a healthy society, along with things like health care and housing and food security, but they're often left to do all of those things on their own.

And so as a scholar, I was really interested in finding schools that were doing incredible work despite failures of the social welfare system and fissures in that social contract.

And one of the groups of kids that public schools traditionally do not serve well are kids who are older and learning English, which it's about a million kids across the country who are considered English learners or multilingual learners or English as new language students, depending on what state you're in.

who typically don't graduate at very high rates, who some reporting, for example, by Joe Napolitano, immigrant students, kids who are new to the country and learning English in high school are often the least likely to graduate across the whole country and oftentimes are prevented from even enrolling.

Well,