Hoover Book Club: The Great School Rethink

>> Michael Hartney: Hello, I'm Michael Hartney, a Hoover fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. And welcome to the latest installment of the Hoover Book Club, where we bring Hoover fellows and friends together to discuss their writings. Today I'm pleased to be joined by Rick Hess, Rick is a senior fellow and director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

He's the author of Education Week's popular blog, Rick Hess, Straight up, an executive editor of Education Next, and a Forbes senior contributor. In the midst of doing all that, Rick has over the course of his career authored over a dozen books on school reform, the latest of which is the great school rethink, which we will discuss today.

In addition to his impressive academic credentials, and lengthy set of writings, I wanna mention two other things about Rick before we dive into our discussion. First is that before earning his fancy Harvard PhD, becoming a professor, and later a senior fellow at a posh Washington think tank, he actually began his career as a social studies teacher in Louisiana.

So, Rick's worn all sorts of hats in education, and I think that really comes through in the book that we'll discuss today. Second, and by way of disclosure, my first job in Washington, some 20 years ago was as Rick's intern when he was just starting out at AEI.

So, with that introduction, I'm sorry Rick, to date both of us, let's get into it, it's great to have you.

>> Rick Hess: Hey, it's great to see you, pal, good to be with you.

>> Michael Hartney: So Rick, your book comes at a really interesting time. We're in the aftermath of COVID, learning loss is a hot topic, maybe it should be even hotter than it is.

We have cultural issues that seem to be more at the forefront of what the media and advocates are talking about. And you come right out at the start of the book and say schools are organized in ways that waste time, overburden educators, misuse technology and alienate parents. Many advocates and policymakers, in light of all of that, are calling for a major reset to business as usual.

But I think what's striking about your book, at least as I understand it, is that in many ways you're calling for just the opposite, you're calling for more modesty. Assuming I have that right, can you lay that out for our audience? What you mean here by a rethink as opposed to a dramatic reset?

 

>> Rick Hess: Yeah, it's a great question, good to be with you, my friend. So look, I think for most of my professional career, going back to when I taught high school in the last century, school reform has been something that folks like us have been trying to do to parents and educators and communities.

These capital letter reforms, no child left behind, and a race to the top, and the common core, were dreamed up by folks in Washington or at foundations or the academy. And we tried to say, here's what you need to get better, and it turns out that folks generally rejected this stuff.

We wound up with enormous populist backlash against most of these efforts. Well, it seems to me, and I think this became clear at least to me, during the pandemic, and since, the part of what was going on is that parents have a pretty simple calculus. If you're a parent and you put your kid on the bus in the morning and that kid goes to school and comes home safe and has some friends, and a teacher, they like, you are generally gonna be like, okay, you guys are the experts, you must be doing your job, things are working.

And so, what happened was we were trying, and you used to hear folks like Margaret Spellings and Artie Duncan when they were secretary of Ed, really saying this. You guys don't understand how bad schools are, and people were saying, nah, I think we're okay. And I think what changed during the pandemic was suddenly schools weren't playing that custodial role.

They were like, yeah, you can't count on us, you keep your kid at home, and you troubleshoot, and you do the IT, and you be the homework, and your kid's gonna be isolated and socially disconnected. And when you're asking us to reopen, the unions are gonna say you're trying to kill our members.

And we're going to argue that your kids need to be masked, apparently in perpetuity, even when adults are running around without masks. And I think lots and lots of parents had their trust in schools rattled, in some cases shattered. And secondly, you had lots of educators who felt like, you know what, this system doesn't actually work that well for us.

We're being asked to teach in ways we were never trained to teach, we're shorthanded, we've lost our ability to connect with families. So, I think what's going on is for the first time in my professional life, we've got a scenario where the demand for change, for problem solving, is being led by parents and communities and educators.

So, there's a demand for it, rather than something that's being supplied and pushed by those of us on high. And now the trick is, what they're demanding is not necessarily us to reheat our grand reforms, you see some of this from the advocates. But what they want is people to help them figure out how to make kids feel safe and connected.

How do you actually get discipline in order? How do you actually get kids engaged in school? How do you recover for this massive learning loss? And it turns out that most of our usual recipes, more regular testing, spend more money, throw more bodies at the problem, dream up goofier and goofier new curricula, none of this actually seems to speak to the problem.

And so, for me, the humility and kinda the practicality of a rethink offers us, to my mind, a more rewarding place to start.

>> Michael Hartney: That's great, a lot to get into there. I think I'd just like to follow up, maybe by asking, to what extent do you talk in the book about how, and you've written about this elsewhere, that we have an education system in place, that we're asking it to do something it was never designed to do.

And as I read your book, that factors in strongly to your calculus here, that we should be thinking about little r reform, not necessarily reprising the big NCLB or race to the top. Can you sort of lay that out for our audience a little bit? What you mean when you say that the system we have today, we're asking it to do things it wasn't designed to do?

 

>> Rick Hess: Yeah, thanks, Mike, yeah, and the little r, big R distinction is something I sketched a number of years ago in letters to young Ed reformer. But the idea being there is reform, which is about solving the problems in front of us. And there's big r reform, which is about the national model, which we are going to impose to do these things.

And as a small c conservative, I tend to believe in small r reform more than these grandiose kinda policies. Yeah look, one of the things that sometimes gets lost in the back and forth about schooling is that schools were designed for a very different task than they're being asked to accomplish today.

The first public schools in the colonies were ordered by a Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1640s cuz they had a very particular problem. Any viewers who remember the crucible know what it was, they had a witch infestation, and they were worried that kids were becoming witches because they didn't read the Bible, so they were getting tricked by Satan into evil.

So, Massachusetts Bay Colony insisted that any township of 50 or more provide public school generally, at the local church. And the point was to have the kids learn to read the Bible, so that they couldn't get deluded by Satan, so that they would not become witches. That's a pretty different ask than what we're asking today, in fact, that was called the old Deluder Satan Act, which sounds real different for most education legislation today.

In the 1830s and 1840s, Horace Mann, who some of our viewers might remember, the executive secretary to the Massachusetts board of Ed, famous for launching the common school movement, he had a very particular mission. He had all these Catholics moving in after the potato famine in Ireland and from Southern and Eastern Europe.

And he wanted the kids to be less Catholic than their parents cuz he thought that was a threat to the republic. So, they needed cheap labor to staff these schools, and the problem was, in the early 1800s, 90% of teachers were men. It was thought to be inappropriate for women to engage with other people's kids outside the home.

So, in order to get cheap labor, Horace Mann had to feminize the teaching profession. So, look in terms of the mission of schools, what they were set up for, the staff of schools, the world today could not be more different. The Horace Mann model of we're gonna have women teach because every other professional avenue is closed to them, actually works pretty decently for about a century.

You touch on this in your most recent book, if I recall, that so long as college educated women could only be really teachers or nurses, we didn't have to worry much about competing for talent. As late as the 1950s, over half of college educated women became teachers. We could count on them teaching for 30 years cuz every other door was closed, and they weren't real mobile.

Well, today we've got a profoundly different labor market, it doesn't mean that teaching model that we used for much of the 1900s was a bad one. It's just that it fit that reality, it's a terrible fit for our reality. Trying to make kids literate so they don't get deluded by Satan isn't the wrong mission for schooling, it's just it was a mission for a particular era.

Today, in a post-industrial economy, education is geometrically more important in terms of kids fulfilling their potential, having professional opportunities in their lives, becoming engaged citizens. And then the third thing that's changed fundamentally, obviously, is the tools at our disposal. When I started teaching for pizza money, when I substitute teacher pizza money, back in college, back last century, if a kid was trying to set up a tutoring appointment, we had the yellow phone mounted on the kitchen wall that I would talk to him through.

Today, you can do one on one virtual tutoring with somebody who's got a PhD in Beijing if your kid's looking for a little one on one help in Mandarin, for 15 or 20 bucks an hour. It is just a fundamentally different set of tools at our disposal. So, if you think about missions changed, the workforce has changed, the tech has changed, it'd be kind of crazy to think that going about doing basically the same thing we used to do just a little better with a little more money, it seems ridiculous to expect that that's gonna get us where we want to go.

 

>> Michael Hartney: Great, so I think it's clear for our audience now that in calling for a grade school rethink, you're bringing some modesty to the table. And saying it's not so much that I have one prescription that every school district should adopt, but I think we need to fundamentally rethink some of the things we've been doing because they don't really make sense in light of the goals that we have for our education system today.

So, I think that's great, probably the most helpful thing to do next would be to go through kind of your five-pronged agenda. I mean, I'm sure you could have written 110 pronged, but you focus down on, I count five different areas where you think we could get a lot of bang for the buck, if you will, in terms of doing some rethinking.

And so, for our audience here, those are time, teaching, technology, school choice and relationships, and in particular, you mean here the relationship between schools and families. So, why don't we just take those in order, and you can give a nice sketch out for our audience in what ways we ought to be rethinking those things.

 

>> Rick Hess: Sure, let's try to, you know me, I can ramble. So, we'll try to keep it to kind of one key point per, if that works for you, look on time. The most important thing is New Mexico just spent hundreds of millions of dollars to extend its school year by two weeks.

You hear people who talk routinely about how we need longer days, longer years. The reality is the US, a kid spends about 100 hours more a year in school than the OECD norm. While it's true that nations like Japan and Germany have longer school years, they generally have shorter school days.

So, this notion that American kids need to spend a lot more time in school to catch up with their peers, I think is misguided. I think what's truer to say, is we spend enormous amounts of time in ways that are not engaging, not stimulating, not academically rigorous. So, it's not that we've got to be efficient, it's that we've got to be humane.

We shouldn't lock kids up and then bore them to death where nothing's happening, and I fear that's the case too often. A great example of this, there's a bunch of ways to get at this, but a great example is our friend Matt Kraft, who's a professor at Brown University, did a terrific study that should be done 50 times a year across this country.

But this is the only time it's been done, he took a bunch of grad students about four years ago, and sat in Providence schools in Rhode Island, and he tracked how often class gets interrupted, and what the interruptions are, and how long it goes for. They found that the average Providence classroom was interrupted about 2000 times a year.

That if you just add up, you're right, so we're not talking we want kids sitting staring at equations rather than playing on recess, no, no, no. I want kids learning equations, and I want them running around like wild, crazy people at recess, I think this is good for kids.

But what he's talking about is kids sitting there bored out of their skulls, while the teacher fights with some kid who forgot a bathroom pass, or some visitor who sticks their head in the room. Or some kid gets up without permission to sharpen a pencil, or some kid can't get their Wi-Fi to connect to their Chromebook.

All of these dumb interruptions, 2000 a year, if you add up the time in the typical classroom, it's 10 to 20 instructional days. I don't suspect Providence, we don't know because nobody studies this, I don't suspect that Providence is radically different. The reality is that even principals and superintendents who get lauded as brilliant, data driven maestros, the ones who you sit down with them and they can walk you through their test scores by subgroup, cut this way and that way, if you ask them, how's time getting used in your schools, they never have any sense of how that actually plays.

So, for me, the big question about time is not what's the right way, but what are we doing with it, and how do we start to use it well?

>> Michael Hartney: Yeah, you're suggesting here there's a lot of low hanging, fruit driven, it sounds like, not by policy necessarily, but maybe by custom, just having not looked at these things with fresh eyes, hence the title, The Great Rethink.

 

>> Rick Hess: Yeah, another great example is I did a book a decade ago, which you might remember, cage busting teacher. You would talk with several hundred recognized, accomplished, award winning teachers. One of the great unaddressed frustrations teachers will raise is morning announcements. For instance, a lot of schools have these morning homerooms or houses where they say they want teachers to take 15 minutes to get kids settled into the day, just talk to them.

And most good teachers at least, are like, what a great opportunity. But the problem is, they never know if morning announcements are gonna go off at the start of that period, or three minutes into that period, or five minutes in. They never know if morning announcements are gonna run two minutes or eight minutes.

So, teachers have got enough on their plate, they don't wanna spend a lot of time dreaming up things to do in the morning which are gonna be interrupted and then they're not able to complete. So, instead of using those 15 minutes, a whole lot of teachers just default, and they're like, well, talk to your neighbor.

And so, an opportunity to build an ethos or connect with kids, turns into 15 minutes of just do nothing, just play with your phone. That's an hour and a quarter a week, that's 40 hours a year, that's six or seven instructional days. So, there's these opportunities where just because we are inconveniencing teachers and kids, or because we're mindless, or because we're disorganized, this is stuff that we can start to address without ever needing to change a single law in the books.

 

>> Michael Hartney: Yeah, which again, I wanna emphasize for our audience here, what's key is that you're laying out practical solutions that don't require negotiating a different collective bargaining agreement, they don't require passing new legislation. But we know right now, given learning loss, that having more effective instruction, high dose tutoring, these sorts of things can move the needle for kids.

And perhaps just revisiting some of these basic customs that schools have been engaged in, they can make some headway on some of these things.

>> Rick Hess: Exactly.

>> Michael Hartney: All right, well, speaking of teachers, you were just mentioning them. Why don't we move to teaching and how we ought to rethink that?

What I found most interesting in that chapter was your discussion of their role. But also, you bring up teacher pay, and you have something very interesting to say about how, on the one hand, taxpayers haven't been cheapskates, but teachers also are right when they say they don't feel that they're getting their due in their paycheck.

So, maybe you could lay that out for us, what's going on with teachers?

>> Rick Hess: Yeah, so one way to think about this, there's about over three and a half million teachers in this country, right? We've both written about this, and what we've done, is we've increased the number of teachers relative to the number of kids by about 50% since the early 1970s.

Now, we've increased support staff and bureaucrats much faster still. But what's happened is we've added a lot more adults than we've got kids. And this has made it harder to be selective about who we hire because we need bodies. We need 300,000 plus bodies a year just to replace attrition in nation's classrooms.

It's made it harder for us to train everybody well cuz it's hard to train this many people really deliberately. It's also made it harder to pay people well, because the more people you spread the money over, especially with 12-month benefits for people who are on a ten- or 11-month contract, it just becomes hard to pay for quality when you're paying for quantity.

So, one of the big insights here is when I work with teacher groups, teacher leaders, what have you, one of the first things I'll do is I'll say, I want you to list, just take 15 minutes and list all the tasks you did in the last week. And it's no trouble at all for a half dozen teachers to list 50 or 100 tasks in 15 minutes.

And then I'll say, all right, do me a favor, let's put a star next to the five that you spent the most time on, and then let's circle the five that you think are most valuable for kids. And there's just a huge disconnect, teachers are doing tons of stuff and spending a lot of time on things that neither they nor probably most of your viewers would actually think are really important for impacting kids.

Now, this is not good in general, but it's especially bad when you think about those teachers who can be life changers, terrific early reading instructors, great mentors, that teacher who really can explain chemistry or algebra to a bunch of adolescents. If you look at other professions, architecture, law, engineering, medicine, they handle this differently.

They take very seriously that there's certain number of people who are really well trained, who are performing a really important role in those organizations, and they put them in a position where they do more of the stuff that really benefits their clients. And so, if you're that courtroom litigator, or if you're that lead architect, and then those people are supported by a team of folks who aren't necessarily as exquisitely trained or as experienced, and they spend time coaching them up and mentoring them and supporting them.

But also, the clients benefit from knowing that they are gonna be eyes on with the persons really good. And then, like in medicine, you get down to emergency medical techs, or intake coordinators who are handling paperwork and insurance forms and this kinda stuff. Well, what if we thought about teaching that way, instead of these three and a half million poorly paid women that Horace Mann dreamed of?

What if we think about teaching as a profession of distributed knowledge and there's outfits that are doing this. Bryan Hassel's Opportunity Culture at Public Impact North Carolina, the new education workforce that Carol Burseel and Brent Matter do in Arizona state, are starting to try to do baby steps into this.

Now, a lot of it requires changing rules, teacher of record requirements, collective bargaining agreements, that kinda stuff. But the upside, when we think about the profession, is one of the huge ones, is the ability to attract and really compensate people who are great at what they do. You mentioned that taxpayers have stepped up since nation at risk, we've doubled real per pupil after inflation and spending.

And just in the last 20 years, real per pupil affordable spending is up, even though unions pay is down. But it's also true that real teacher pay is down, now, why is that? It's because they're throwing so much money into so many bodies. If, for instance, we had simply decided to spend the money we had spent maintaining the ratio of teachers to kids that we had, say, in the 70s, and instead of investing in all that extra quantity, we had put those exact same dollars into teacher pay.

Average teachers' pay today would be $140,000, if we said well, we want classes brought down. So, we want some of that money on quantity, but some of it on quality. But we had dialed back the expenditures on bureaucrats, and if we right sized teacher collected bargaining benefits, it would be no trick at all to have average teacher pay in the US of $85, 90,000 or more.

So, we've made a conscious choice, to spend on quantity rather than quality, which has made it harder, has meant harder to find enough bodies, which means we rely on too many long-term subs. And it also means we don't keep or attract as many of the terrific stars as we'd like to because people who might be making $150 or $200,000 as lead teachers are often instead exploring other career alternatives that offer them more room for personal growth.

 

>> Michael Hartney: Yeah, and you do a great job in the book, I think, of laying out. There's a real specific example that you give around teaching reading. And then if you had a teacher who they were really effective at that, the data showed it, the principal, everyone in the building knew it, just the way that we do things.

That teacher's also spending the same amount of time on lunch duty, bus duty, teaching math, or what have you, rather than look at it organizationally, I think you say like some other organization would. You wouldn't take Steph Curry, the great three-point shooter, and ask him to play in the post, it just wouldn't make a lot of sense.

Maybe come back to this a little bit about what are the obstacles that preclude us from rethinking there. But I wanna make sure we get through all of the areas, so why don't we move next to technology? Now, this isn't an area where I have a lot of expertise, so perhaps you can kinda bring me up to speed.

But I will say the best riff in the entire book arguably, but certainly in that chapter for me, is when you say education technology is more often about the technology than the education. So, maybe with that as a lead in, you could tell us where are we falling short in terms of rethinking technology and how it can make schools better?

 

>> Rick Hess: Yeah, right, it's easy to get people to think about all the ways, even among all the AI over exuberance and stuff. It's easy for people to understand how this goes wrong, cuz anybody who's got kids or grandkids who watched them sit at the kitchen table in a Chromebook, the kid muted, their camera off.

It was almost like a hostage situation, watching some teacher who didn't know what they were doing on online instruction yammering for 75 minutes before they, the whole thing was not just horrific education, it was fundamentally inhumane. It sucked all the humanity out of school, so one good way to think about this is what's a really good example of using technology at school is a good way to think about this, I think.

And for me, if you wanna see the best example of technology really used properly at a high school. Go visit an outstanding high school varsity football team, and see what they're doing. Those of you old enough will remember, for instance, a high school team coach used to show them the plays by getting out a chalkboard or maybe a whiteboard.

And drawing up 22X's and O's and then drawing a bunch of arrows, and kids were like, what, where's that going? And it's hard to read and it gets messy, and then you wait for them to erase it and then draw up another one and do this again. And that would be a half hour to watch them draw up these shapes that nobody could make head or tail out of.

Today, those kids show up, they get handed an iPad that's got all the plays preloaded, all of the X's and O's, you can hit slow motion. They're all sitting there watching the coach get projected onto a screen. So, if somebody has a question, you can bring it back.

You can have jersey numbers on each of the little dots, so kids know who they are, who they're supposed to be looking for. You get out on the field, coaches try a position coach, somebody's dad who helps with the offensive line is trying to show a technique. They're showing it, and the kid can't see quite if they're doing it right or not.

So, the dad pulls out their iPhone, films for 10 seconds, waves the kid over. The kid and the coach are looking together in real time, talking about what the kid's doing, what's not right, kid can do it again. Coach can iterate, take another 10 seconds, give feedback real time, this is powerful learning, this is demonstration, this is practical application.

This is a real time trial and error, this is feedback, this is all of the stuff that we would love to see teachers doing with tech, but you rarely see in your typical high school English room or your elementary math classroom. Instead, what kids do is they spin around, and they spend half an hour on their Chromebook doing some exercise while the teacher works with three kids.

I don't say it's a teacher's fault, I think it's because we value good high school football coaching, the practice of it often more than we value helping teachers learn how to use this tech. The tech vendors just want to dump their tech into the schools. The superintendents just want to brag that they've got a one-to-one adoption model.

The teachers get their four shoddy days of flyby professional development. And what results is all of this tech, instead of making schools feel more vibrant and more engaging, often feels like it gets in the way of the learning. The real simple kind of lesson here is that tech, when it's used well, makes schools feel more human.

So, let me just take AI just for 60 seconds, just to give an example of how to think to about this. We're really concerned, quite appropriately, that kids are going to outsource all the work of your typical middle school or high school essay to AI, they should. We should be worried about this, they will, we know this because kids outsource it right now to Wikipedia.

Lots of kids will cut and paste paragraphs on Wikipedia, plug it in, fiddle with a couple words, stick a footnote, and that's how they do it. The problem is not so with Wikipedia, it's with teaching, which allows kids to do that. How do you stop kids from doing that?

Well, the teacher first asks the kids to come up with a thesis statement, and makes the kid explain it in front of the class, and take questions and talk about it. And then they have to come up with what would evidence look like, and they have to talk.

Then if they go home and cut and paste fine, but they then got to bring in the Wikipedia evidence and defend it and explain it. So, if kids are using Wikipedia like that, they're using it as a tool of their learning, rather instead of learning. But what we need to do is make sure the teachers are actually making sure kids are learning the stuff we need them to master.

Then there's room for kids to use technology in ways that maybe isn't ideal but doesn't kind of cut the heart out of the learning. What I'm concerned about is less the AI, than the fact that we don't know how to have kids' kind of learn, which means it's easy for them to turn to the AI instead of learning anything.

 

>> Michael Hartney: Great, next, I think we wanna talk about school choice, which the chapter on choice that you layout in terms of how we ought to rethink this thing. You come out and say, it's unfortunate, but debates over school choice too often become this sort of morality play where you've got people who support it, and then people who are anti-parents and don't want choice.

And you sort of lay out how that's unhelpful, so how should we be thinking about school choice? Keeping in mind that we're kind of having a school choice moment right now, we're seeing a lot of legislation being passed across the state, so you might weigh in on how that factors into what you think.

 

>> Rick Hess: Yeah, and I think we're having the school choice moment because events have overridden an unhelpful pro-choice narrative. Events have conspired to make us talk about choice in the right way, even when we haven't wanted to. Look, I mean, I think people on this call are generally gonna understand why choice is such a healthy thing.

And the reality is look, schooling, education, learning is nothing but a bundle of choices. Schools decide what kinda discipline models to adopt, how much homework they're gonna send. Teachers decide how to group kids or not to group kids. We decide whether to track kids, what materials are gonna get read, what classes middle schoolers or high schoolers are going to take.

Schooling is nothing but a bundle of a million choices made by families and educators. And so, the idea that somehow, we wanna draw a hard line and you can make all these other choices, but if the school district's not making ones that work for your kid, unless you have the means, we wanna trap you in a building.

First off, that's just weird, and it's just a bizarre kind of, the opponents of choice have been allowed to make choice seem weird or out of the norm. But look, the bigger point which I talk about is, there's two statements, one statement made by people who are supportive of educational choice is that families should be empowered.

They know their child best, they should have the right to get their kid in the learning environment that's gonna work for them. And this is why 75% of parents, 75% of respondents support pretty much any school choice opportunity you throw at them nowadays. The second statement is that public schools are anchors of their communities.

They're places where families meet their neighbors, where they get invested as members of a community, they're gathering spots. Whether it's Friday night football in Texas, or Tuesday night basketball in Indiana, these places have meaning. The only people who think you have to choose between those two statements are advocates and union hacks.

Any normal human being says, yes, both, I wanna empower parents, and I think public schools have a special place in our community. And what's weird is that for so many years, the school choice community has either said, no, no, no, we're gonna convince you that public schools are terrible.

And the public says, yeah, no, we don't actually agree and has tried to make some kind of weird cause out of like, empowering parents is just for the worst served in the urban core. What the pandemic did was the pandemic when schools were shut down, when parents in many places were told your kid can't come back for a year or more.

When schools, even after they reopened, would routinely shut down for a week or close classrooms for two weeks because somebody was identified as COVID positive, when they got in these fights about masking and vaccination. What it did was it said to all these parents, you know what, I like my public school, I still do, 75% still give their public school an A or B.

But I want options, I want choices, I don't have the same degree of blind trust that I used to have. And what that did, was that turned school choice from Medicaid, something that guilty Republicans did to help parents trapped in poverty, in unsafe, awful schools in urban core, into something that we did for lots of families across the country.

Lots of suburban parents who were frustrated by what they'd seen during the pandemic. Medicaid, school choice became Medicare, now the thing is, what a lot of these suburban parents want is not the right to change schools necessarily, they tend to like their schools, but that doesn't mean they like the long-term sub who teaches algebra.

That doesn't mean they like the craziness the school's teaching in its history curriculum. So, what they often want is not school choice, but educational choice. They want the ability to take certain courses online, to have more flexibility to do some kind of hybrid homeschooling model where the kid's home a couple days a week or one day a week.

They want more flexibility around career and technical education. So, the most powerful dynamics around educational choice is that we have now moved from this school choice model where you're allowed to move from school a to school b. And the energy in the states, as you point out, is really around education savings accounts, which conceptually say, yeah, you can move your kid from school A to school B or you have the opportunity to swap in another course.

Or we're not gonna force you to do it, cuz God knows most people have plenty on their plate. But if the options that exist aren't right for you, we're gonna give you many more degrees of freedom to put together the educational program that's gonna work for your kid.

And once you do that, you start to make school choice relevant to lots of families for whom it was previously somebody else's issue.

>> Michael Hartney: That's helpful because I think a lot of us have been looking at the survey data trying to say, wait, it's really hard to reconcile that most parents are still really enthusiastic at least their local public schools.

When they ask about the nations, of course it looks a little different, but they're enthusiastic about their local public schools. But at the same time they support all of the school choice questions. So, during the pandemic, this provides a nice framework for thinking about, but maybe that's not the paradox that we think it is necessarily.

 

>> Rick Hess: Yeah, and it's funny, it's Congress and Congressmen, right? Political scientists have been pointing this out for over half a century that you ask Americans, do you like Congress? And nobody says yes, and you ask them, do you like your Congressman, and everybody says yes. Well, why is that, and then what happens?

Because people are angry at Congress, do they then vote out their congressman? No, cuz it turns out that social tropic, that philosophical stuff is out there, but our reactions are grounded in what we really know. So, school choice advocates used to get tricked, they would see that Americans said public education is going the wrong direction, or that they're critical of it, and they go, uh-huh, we're gonna convince them to hate schools.

But what happens is when it comes, push comes to shove, people's reaction is, I like my local school, it's where we go to football games. And to the extent that the school choice community has gotten good at saying, it's not about hating your local school. It's about options, it's about opportunities, it's about ASAs which will open doors even if you like your local public schools.

Suddenly what's happened is it has invited millions of people to support educational choice who previously were leery cuz they didn't see any upside for them or their kids. And they were concerned about the disruptions it would wreak on their communities and their property values.

>> Michael Hartney: Again, I mean, the overarching theme here seems to be a robust appetite among the public for practical problem solving, not ideological posturing or politics, is what comes through in the book certainly.

Okay, so finally, that's a great transition then, you talk about rethinking the relationship between schools and families. And we're coming up, we have about ten minutes left or so, and I still want to get a few concluding questions. And so, maybe you could just very briefly tell us what you have in mind there in terms of rethinking that relationship.

And in particular, what came through for me in the book was your discussion about, in some cases, we might need to ask more of families or not be afraid to do so, what do you have in mind there?

>> Rick Hess: Yeah, so I think, first off look, outfits like Moms for Liberty, I think, are raising important points and are a hugely positive development, and predictably have been getting smeared by the New York Times NPR set, because they only like the right kind of parent advocacy.

But I think these speak to real concerns that schools have not been transparent during the pandemic, schools prioritize their employees over the kids. I think there's real issues, and educators and educational leaders need to do an infinitely better job of listening to parents and inviting them in, full stop.

That said, I think also there's an irony here that especially those of us on the right have sometimes kind of not been as clear about as we should. That back when I started in the stuff last century, I spent five years supervising student teachers in Boston, when I was doing my PhD up at Harvard.

And one of the things that was frighteningly easy to see and find then was teachers who would tell aspiring teachers, don't worry about that kid, you're not gonna teach him, you're not gonna reach him. It was just part of the vernacular, this was true in Louisiana, it was true everywhere.

One of the great triumphs of the last quarter century is a bipartisan accomplishment in which we changed the professional norms of teaching. By we, I don't mean you and me, I mean as a nation, the expectation now is that teachers are supposed to teach every kid. And you're not allowed to say, I can't teach that kid, that's just not part of how it works.

Now, they'll still whisper it in parking lots, but you no longer hear it said out loud in school building. And that has been a wonderful thing, but it's also had a downside that hasn't been appreciated. In telling educators, we're not gonna scapegoat kids and families, we've taken it too far.

Too many principals and superintendents and advocates now are terrified to say anything which suggests that parents or kids have responsibility. So, you have to look few and far between to find principals or education advocates who will say to parents, you gotta take away your kid's iPhone at 9 o'clock, and plug it in next to your bed in your room and tell them, no more until tomorrow.

There's few and far between who will tell them, it's time to do your homework now, who will say, you've got to go to bed now, who will say, you need to get your kid up on time and go to school. And if the kid misbehaves, you've got to back the teacher, we've gotten out of that habit.

We are so concerned about being seen as insensitive or is blaming the victim, that what it's like is, if I took one of my kids to see the pediatrician, and the pediatrician was like, Rick, Blake's a little heavy, you gotta cut back on the junk food. And first thing I do is I go home, and I open a bag of Doritos, and I say, hey, thanks for being a good sport at the doctor's office, go at it.

We wouldn't say she's a bad pediatrician, we would say there's gotta be a handshake between the physician and the parent, and we've lost sight of that. And what's happened is we've then made every academic failure, every social emotional challenge, we've made it the school's responsibility, which is unhealthy, and it's made teachers feel like they're being scapegoated.

So, we need to rediscover the ability to both talk seriously about teachers have to be responsible for doing their part. But we have to also be able to talk about what parents and kids have to do as responsible members of a school community, and we've got to stop being afraid to talk forthrightly about that stuff.

 

>> Michael Hartney: Great, well, that's a good summary of the book. I think I saved arguably the two toughest questions for last. We have just about five minutes left, so hopefully we can cover both of these. The first one is, I wanna sort of push a little bit on your insistence, which I think is wise, that the mistakes of previous reformers who were pushing NCLB or Race to the Top or big level reforms in places like Newark or DC is that they oftentimes ride roughshod, you say, over community concerns.

And their opponents, they just sort of tune them out. I'm very sympathetic to the argument, but I also wonder how you would sort of answer someone like a Michelle Rhee, who would say, look Rick, there are a lot of vested interests out there. There are a lot of opponents, if I don't go in sort of guns ablaze and then try to do what I can in my one or two years, then I'm not gonna accomplish anything.

So, I guess my question is, how can system leaders strike a balance between being bold, and also trying to be thoughtful and listen, as you suggest in the book.

>> Rick Hess: Yeah, that's a fantastic question, and I think viewers who remember kind of my commentary back when Michelle was chancellor is, for me, there's a huge difference between Michelle going into DC, and national programs imposed from Washington.

Michelle's teacher contract, for instance, powerfully changed the dynamic in that system. She was able to fundamentally change teacher evaluation in a way that was really helpful. I'm actually supportive of that because sometimes you need to go in, and it's like any other calcified, self-interested organization that's lost sight of its business.

Sometimes you need a CEO to go in and break a bunch of chunks. And I think that can be really healthy, and I think there were a number of superintendents. Joel Klein did that in New York City in really important ways. And some of this stuff got pushed back on by De Blasio and his Apparatchiks, but some of it's still with us today.

But I think the wrong lesson that the reform community took from that is, okay, they're able to go into this setting, and Michelle was able to do teacher evaluation in a way that was really impactful. What the reform community took from it was, teacher evaluation is one of the solutions.

So, that got written into Race to the Top in the stimulus back in 2009. And then the Department of Education pushed every state to go ahead and do some version of teacher eval. And it turned out the big rand study, for instance, of the Gates' quarter billion on this was that not only did this stuff not actually improve teaching or help attract or retain teachers, but it actually seemed to have perverse consequences.

So, for me, that's just one of those lifelong distinctions between the importance of us getting leaders who will do these things in ways that create opportunities to solve problems in a state or a system, versus rolling out one more layer of overreaching policy from Washington.

>> Michael Hartney: Okay, well, my last question for you is, I just would like you to say a little bit of something about the degree to which trying to rethink education requires us not to get so tethered to a very narrow definition of what public education is.

So, if you could just briefly tell our audience why is it so important to understand the definition of public education broadly rather than allow opponents of rethinking to use it as a cudgel for sort of shutting out certain ideas? And if you could just give us your thoughts on that real briefly.

 

>> Rick Hess: Yeah, a great analogy on this, a good way to think about this is about 10 or 20 years ago, I was writing a lot about educational leadership. And one of the problems with training educational leaders in ed schools is that they get cut off from whole fields of knowledge.

For years I was training educational leaders, principals and such, at the Rice business school, and also in some esteemed education schools. And in the business school, they were taking classes with folks who were gonna lead oil and gas companies or nonprofits, and they were learning about capital costs, and they were getting exposed to lots of ideas, lots of conversations.

When they get trained in schools of education, they get trained in a very narrow set of things by folks who were career lifers, either were educational leaders themselves or whole doctorates in educational leadership. And so, what you wind up with is a very inbred kind of narrow thought bubble that doesn't really know what it doesn't know.

Well, when I was writing about this, Diane Aravich, who I think many viewers know, who I like, and she said, Rick, you wanna train principals and superintendents to think like businesspeople rather than like educational leaders. And I'm, no, no, Diane, actually, that's not right, educational leaders are being trained the way business leaders were being trained in 1905.

There's a model of how you run a Model T Ford factory in which you do things very precise ways in accord with very clear hierarchies and bureaucracies. And that is the era in which modern educational leadership took shape. And while organizational leadership and lots of other walks of life has morphed and evolved and changed in the intervening century.

Because education lives in this own little island, and they train their own leaders' generation to the next, education leadership is still wedded to a vision of business leadership the way it was practiced a century ago. And I think that is the way to think about this public question, when we talk about expanding parental options, when we talk about rethinking how we compensate teachers, when we talk about taking a hard look at what schools would do with money, the union leaders and the Ed school crowd and their apologists will say, this is all part of a war on public education.

Well, what is public education? Public education is the business of spending the public's money in publicly empowered institutions with publicly employed professionals to educate the public's kids. There's no earthly reason to think that those professionals we employ need to be on a particular compensation schedule, that they ought to have benefits which are substantially more generous than benefits of other knowledge professionals.

There's no reason to think that we should hew to some particular calendar or schedule, that we should be hesitant to take a look at where dollars are spent or not spent. And I think one of the problems is by allowing them to frame it this way, too many reform and choice advocates in my professional career have said, okay, that's the battle line, you're for public education.

We're gonna say public education sucks, and then we're gonna try to talk about blowing it up, and the end of zip code education, and how public schools are failures. And it turns out the public kind of has a deep attachment to this idea that well, there are things that we care about as a national and local community around education.

And if you make yourself the enemy of public education, you make it very hard to win these debates on the merits. So, what we really need to do is challenge and educate, and explain that public education is public education, even if it looks profoundly different. So, long as it's an education that the public is paying for, so long as it's benefiting the public's kids, so long as the public is a voice, and is framing the machinery through which it's delivered, there's no reason to believe that education savings accounts, or micro schools, or charter teachers, or any of the other kind of opportunities I talk about.

There's no reason that anyone should not regard them as a manifestation of public education, just public education that's better suited to the needs of our kids and our communities in 2023.

>> Michael Hartney: Rick, as always, it's great to be with you, I think that's a great place to leave it, we could go on and on, but I'm going to encourage our audience to pick up your book.

They can find The Great School Rethink, right here is what it looks like, on Amazon, of course, and also at the Harvard Education Press website for purchase, thank you, my friend.

>> Rick Hess: Hey, thanks for having me bud, great to be with you.