2025 Hoover Institution Education Summit

>> Margaret E. Raymond: Foreign I would like to welcome you to the second Hoover Education Summit and thank you all very much for coming. Not only do we have an exciting program for you over the next day and a half, but we are delighted that the weather has decided to cooperate, at least here.

 

Everywhere else seems to be a chaos, so feel free to stay as long as you must and continue the visit in California. I'm just going to talk just a couple of logistical details to share with you. There's a slight change in the lineup tomorrow in the sense that we are going to be having our lunch speaker speak in Hauk before lunch.

 

We thought that that would be a nicer thing than trying to have him speak over people, people eating. So the implication of that is that you should carb up at breakfast because lunch is going to be late. The other thing that I want to mention is that you may notice slightly different way that we have set the tables tonight.

 

We started a tradition at the first summit which was instead of flowers, we had stacks of books and we're continuing that this time. As I was thinking about what kinds of books, I thought, wouldn't it be great to find a way to invite you to open your minds and have a different perspective to come to our meeting tomorrow with?

 

And so, having been a lifelong fan of these large format books, also known as coffee table books, I've spent the last year collecting them specifically to make them available to you. And so what I'm hoping you'll do is to take one of the coffee table books home with you and spend a few moments enjoying the perspective that it provides to you.

 

Think of it as a brain spa for five or ten minutes, and these books are yours to keep. But if you prefer to foster and not adopt, then I would invite you to return the book to us tomorrow. Please do not leave them in the hotel rooms because they will end up in the landfill.

 

And if you return the books tomorrow, we will have a trolley outside to collect them and we will find good homes for them. It will also give you the opportunity to shop the trolley in case you want a different book or books. So we would love to have you enjoy them, take them home, bring them back, whatever suits you.

 

I would also like to say that the privilege of introducing our dinner speaker falls to Eric Hanushek, who is gonna take the stage now and introduce her.

>> Eric Hanushek: I'd like to provide my own welcome to everybody who's made it here, avoiding fires, and snow and everything to get here.

 

I'm Eric Hanushek, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. And I have the distinct privilege of being able to introduce my boss, Condoleezza Rice. I think that everybody in this room knows a lot about our 66th Secretary of State. What fewer people in this room know is that she is really the poster child for this whole conference and what we're going to talk about for the next few days.

 

She was born in Montgomery, Alabama. That was the center of the segregated south at one point. And while the US Supreme Court had ruled on Brown versus the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas and outlawed segregated schools, the south resisted this opening up of schools to everybody. So when Condi had a chance to go to schools, she was not faced with the most the best kinds of schooling opportunities.

 

But while Condi had two parents that really valued education, she was not afforded the same opportunity to get a good public education. That leads me to be on this stage today and leads many of you to be in this audience. She had much poorer choices. But what she did have and what made her very lucky is that she had two parents who believed in education and had the ability to home school her, school her for part.

 

They could send her to a Catholic secondary school and support her education throughout. So when she then went on to college and obtained her BA and finally PhD in Political Science and International Relations, she had the basic skills that she needed for her remarkable academic and governmental career.

 

So with those degrees and that education, she could become a professor at Stanford University. She could become the Provost of Stanford University. She could go to work first in the State Department of President Jimmy Carter, who we honored today, but then become the National Security Advisor to George W Bush and then Secretary of State for George W Bush.

 

Of course, all of these intermediate steps allowed her to get to her highest job, which is being Director of the Hoover Institution. This history has led Conde to have a passion for for ensuring that all children have a high quality education. And she has emphasized education throughout her career, including in her international relations work where she and Joel Klein wrote a book on the importance of high quality education for US national security.

 

But she is here today to open the Hoover Education Summit that is designed to find ways to ensure that all children have a high quality education. So I give you Condi Rice.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Well, thanks, Rick, for that wonderful introduction. And I just want to say that I'm very proud as the director of the Hoover Institution, of the work that we do here in K12 education.

 

You are seeing some of the fruits of that with the Education Futures Council and the work that you'll share in and participate in tomorrow. But it's really a daily obsession, I would say, of people like Rick Hanushek and Mackie Raymond and others to try to bring the best research and the best ideas to To improving education for our children.

 

And so I'm delighted to have a chance to open this conference tonight. I want to thank you for giving your time. I want to thank you, as Rick said, for making it here. We know that there are a lot of conditions all over the country that make that not so easy.

 

But we'll remind you that you're actually in California, Northern California. It's beautiful, it's January, so welcome anytime, particularly when the weather's cold. You're always welcome here. When this was first mentioned to me that we might do this Education Futures Council, I have to tell you that I said to Mackie and Rick and Steve Bowen, why are we doing this again?

 

Because it seems that the country reaches a point and a kind of pitch of the intention to do something about K-12 education when there's Sputnik. We reach a fever pitch every time NAEP comes out. We reach a fever pitch whenever there's another OECD study that shows that the United States and our children are behind in math or in reading or whatever.

 

It reaches a fever pitch after COVID when we learn of the significant learning loss that our children have experienced. And so, why again? Why go at it again? Well, because we don't have a choice. I was with Joel Klein, a leader of a task force for the Council on Foreign Relations that brought the national security perspective in.

 

Not because we wanted to make education a national security issue, but because we wanted to say that if you think that the education of other people's children or the ill education of other people's children is not your problem, think again. Because the education, the ill education of other people's children will impact your life and the life of the country.

 

We wanted to bring a different audience into the discussion of education and education reform. And that audience has to be all of America. It has to be a country that finally says, this is a national disgrace, that so many of our children, particularly the poorest of our children, are left in a system in which many of them cannot read by third grade.

 

And we know if they can't read by third grade, they're probably not going to read. And so we hope that this effort will bring sometimes radical ideas. Maybe not all of them are good. But we wanted to challenge a group of people who are willing to spend a year together to think hard about how we address the operating system, as Mackie called it, of public education, so that maybe this time there's some kind of breakthrough, some lever, levers that we can use to make Change.

 

We've tried to make change in all kinds of ways. And I don't by any means want to denigrate the efforts of those who have had ideas, many best practices that are being carried out across the country. Legislators and school chiefs and parents and state governors who are trying.

 

But with all of those efforts, we still see that many people believe the best option for their children, and this includes parents, is not to be in a public school. I can tell you a story about that. I started with a friend out in East Palo Alto, a program called center for New Generation.

 

And it was a program of after school and summer programs for underserved kids. We were going after what we called strivers. So you only had to have a C average and a teacher's recommendation. And I would meet every year with, by the time they were ninth grade, the kids who were getting ready to, to high school, and they choose four or five of the most successful and they would bring them to lunch with me and I would say, where are you going to high school?

 

Because Ravenswood doesn't have a high school. And to a person they would try to name a private school. And you would say to this 14 year old, well, why are you going to private school? Because everybody knows they're better, they would say. That's an indictment of a country that has always believed that public education was a part of the birthright of democracy.

 

And so as much as I am a believer in school choice and an advocate for school choice, we have to do something about where the majority of kids will be educated, and that's in the public schools. The Education Futures Council talked about student-centered learning. And for some of us who aren't in the education business, we said, isn't that what this is all about?

 

And I learned that actually it's not what it's always about. And so going to the core of what we're trying to do is so critical. We wanted to talk about more innovative and adaptive systems. Someone said in an earlier meeting that essentially this system was designed 100 years ago and essentially it hasn't changed.

 

Can you think of any other part of American life about which you can say that responsive to local conditions? Because what it takes in La Verne, Alabama, might be different than what it takes in Los Angeles, California. And so we want it to, to think about a new bargain with teachers to emphasize their importance to society.

 

But the bargain is that as a profession, you take seriously the desire to get better, to perform better, to have merit recognized, not just time in the classroom. This piece of it was particularly important to me because my mom was a teacher. My dad was actually a high school guidance counselor, later on a university administrator.

 

And Rick rightly said that the schools in Alabama for black kids were not that great, but, boy, the teachers were fantastic. In some ways, it was a commentary on the society at the time that if you were a black woman, you probably were going to be a teacher or a nurse.

 

Those were your options. And so the best and the brightest went into teaching. And it was true also for black males. I will tell you that one of the most celebrated moments in the life of any family in Alabama was the new teachers convention at the beginning of September.

 

Now, I remember this because my mother's brother had gotten a teaching degree after having served in the armed forces. And I remembered the pride in my family that Aalto was going to be a teacher. What happened to that in this society? What happened to that kind of affirmation for communities?

 

What happened to that kind of affirmation that in my father's church, the new teachers had to stand up and be recognized because they were going to do the most important work? And so it has to be a bargain, but it has to be a bargain both ways. We have to recognize the urgency with brutal honesty.

 

I think we have to have a national conversation about the importance of education and this time, delivering. Now, there are four personal reasons that this is important to me. The first is you had to know the rices and the race. It was faith, family, and education. And education was something that could never be taken away from you.

 

In fact, my grandfather on my father's side was a sharecropper son in Eutaw, that would be E- U- T- A- W. I'm not kidding, Alabama, and when he was a young man, he decided he wanted to get book learning in a college. And so they told him about this, he asked where, how colored man could go to college.

 

They told him about this little Presbyterian school down the road called Stillman College. And so he saved up his cotton. He went to Stillman College, he got through his first year. Then they said, how are you going to pay for your second year? He said, I'm out of cotton.

 

They said, you're out of luck. But he was pretty quick thinker. He said, so how those boys going to college? They said they have what's called a scholarship. And if you wanted to be a Presbyterian minister, then you could have a scholarship, too. And my grandfather said, that is exactly what I had in mind.

 

And my family has been Presbyterian and college educated ever since. But, you know, we often talk about education in very instrumental ways. And I do believe that today we have many ways for people to have a decent living and have a good job and have the fulfillment of that.

 

You know, when the Founding Fathers talked about the pursuit of happiness, I really think you could call it the pursuit of fulfillment and, and, and having a good job and having a. That's really important. But whether you go to college or not, education does something else for you.

 

It lifts you up, it shows you horizons that you might otherwise not see. And that's what John W Rice Sr. understood. And he understood it was going to change the Rice legacy forever. In fact, it changed it so much that of course, my father was advanced degree, my mother's family, all advanced degrees.

 

And my Aunt Teresa, my Aunt Teresa went to the University of Wisconsin in 1952. She got a PhD in Victorian literature, she wrote books on Dickens. You think what I do is weird for a black person? She wrote books on Dickens. So education is, yes, a hand up and a way up, but it's also a lifting up of the human spirit.

 

So as a descendant of the rices and race, this matters to me. It matters to me as an educator. When I stand in front of my class at Stanford, I want to be sure that that fourth generation legatee is sitting next to the child of an itinerant farm worker.

 

And if that's not true, then we're missing something very important about the democratic tradition and the democratic enterprise. As a national security expert, I am concerned about our competitiveness as a country. I'm concerned that only 33% of the people who take the basic skills test to get into the military can pass it.

 

It is a matter of lost learning. It's a matter of drug addiction, it's a matter of poor health. But if you can fix that education piece, I'll bet you'll fix a lot of the other elements as well. And as a citizen, I'm always reminded that we in America have a rather odd compact as citizens.

 

If the proverbial man from Mars were to come down and say, what unites these Americans? They don't look the same. And you would have to say, yes, that's right, because you see, their ancestors have come up from all over the world and they're actually not united by ethnicity or nationality or religion.

 

He would say, what in world does unite them? Then you say, well, you see, they're united by this creed. It doesn't matter where you came from, it matters where you're going. You can come from humble circumstances and you can do great things and that's what unites them. Without a high quality education, when I can look at your zip code and tell whether that's going to be true for you, I can't make that promise, can I, that it doesn't matter where you came from, it matters where you're going.

 

And so this is the very fabric of who we are as a people. It's the very fabric of who we are as a society. And if we don't deliver on it, we deserve what we get. And right now we're starting to see the effects of having not delivered over many, many decades.

 

So we hope that this report, we hope that this council, we hope the discussion that you will have over the next day or so will push us yet again to try to think anew and to be inspired to let no barriers stay in the way of making sure that every child has that chance.

 

Thank you very much.

>> Eric Hanushek: We are going to open this up to questions and questions and answers, hopefully from the audience. But before we get into questions, as you have to get a microphone from one of our colleagues, part of the question is what we should be producing.

 

What does good education look like? And is there a simple answer to that or how does that fit into this discussion?

>> Condoleezza Rice: Well, the wraparound answer to that is that we will produce kids who are confident in their ability to do a few things and in which we can have confidence that they can do a few things.

 

And I actually do think it's, you know, we talk about, well, I was on a call today. We want them to have self esteem. We want them to be ready and prepared for a life of, of, of enjoyment and a life of fulfillment. All of that's true. But if they can't read, none of that is going to be true.

 

So let's start with they should have certain skills. They should be able to read. They should be able to do simple mathematics without a calculator. They should be able to have some ability to understand the world around them, including the technologies that frankly, they almost seem to have been born, come out of the womb able to work those little devices.

 

But do they understand that? Do they understand at some, some point in their lives, citizenship? Do they understand the importance at, in a little later in their lives of being able to listen to people who think differently? Do they understand how to make a point without being so?

 

It's a progression, but I think it starts with can you read? Can you access information? And then do you begin to have the judgment to know whether you're accessing information? That is true.

>> Eric Hanushek: So a second question that comes back to the Education Futures Council's report, it calls for fairly radical changes in the way we look at the system.

 

Many of them seem very sensible and commonsensical, but they're radical, given where we are. How do we get there? Do we ask the secretary of education in Washington, DC to dictate this?

>> Condoleezza Rice: Probably not. Look, one of the things that I've thought a lot about as the leader of an institute of several institutions, but also somebody who's had to manage issues and had to manage change, is the thing you can do is get the right level of responsibility and the right level of authority matched up.

 

And there are so many levels, particularly in K12 education, that I'm not sure we always think about who should be doing what. So there are things that the federal government should be doing, but let's be pretty clear on what those are. And it's probably that they don't have enough visibility into what's going on in a particular state or what's going on in a particular community to actually say useful things.

 

So what can they say useful things about and then align authority and responsibility so that the federal government is not dictating things that it doesn't understand? Then when you get to the state level, what is it that the state house is going to do that the legislature is going to do?

 

What still needs to be reserved for the school boards or for the state chiefs? What will be the role of parents in that? Because obviously the parent is with that child more than the teacher. And so I like to think of it in, in that way, when we understand that there's something that makes sense.

 

Where's, what's the right level of authority and responsibility to make sure that it gets done? So is this what you call flipping the system then? It's clearly flipping the system. I mean, I have to say, one of the great things about sitting through the Education Futures Council meetings is I no longer say, well, what do you mean?

 

Doesn't everybody do that? Because I mentioned it, when they said to me, well, the school should be student centered, I thought, well, that's a penetrating glimpse into the obvious. But of course, apparently not. And so bringing these things up in a way that we can be pretty brutally honest about what's not getting done.

 

What does it mean that the schools are not student centered? I heard it put in another way, which is too much of what we do in the schools is to make the life of the adults easier or more fulfilling or whatever. And so what does it really mean to be student centered and then try to go for it?

 

>> Eric Hanushek: So thank you, Condi. If people have any questions, we have a couple microphones on the side. If you would just give your name and then your question. And a question would be preferred over a statement. Good evening, Dr Rice.

>> Yolande Beckles: My name is Yolande Beckles, and I'm the executive director of the Knowledge Shop.

 

I drove at 4 o'clock this morning from fires in LA to get here to your education summit.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Thank you.

>> Yolande Beckles: And it's proving worth it, thank you. My question is, in the Knowledge Shop, we train particularly black and brown children. And I started it ten years ago, because as you can hear, I'm British, and I came here with two children who were math literate.

 

And when we got here, we said, America, what is this? And today my daughter is an astrophysicist, scientist, mathematician, and aerospace engineer for Rolls Royce. I say that because in the work that you're doing, please focus on parents and families. That's where in my work for ten years, I have found the change to really move the needle.

 

When you can develop, train and empower your parents to understand the kind of children that we're raising in a 21st century, that's what's going to move the agenda in America. It really is down to our families today. So as you think about your student-centered role, parents have to be at every table, including in this room, may I suggest.

 

>> Condoleezza Rice: Thank you, and I think you'll find that we've done that. I agree with you completely. I often say that the problem with my parents was that I had to try to stop them from going up to the school after every matter. And I would say sometimes as I got older, I can handle that, I can handle that.

 

But yes, parents are absolutely key.

>> Speaker 1: Madam Secretary, my honor, two questions, one professional, one personal. In my work with former secretary, the late Bill Brock, he discovered, with some patented technology from who are USC related, that if you looked at how close a child watched television between year one and year three.

 

One of those cognitive and perceptory tests would reveal that there was a complication with their left-right eye coordination, and no reading curriculum would fix that. You had to therapeutically address that. And so, so much has been delved into trying to get folks to read without looking at the cognition and the perceptive issues.

 

He said he could reduce the wrongfully referred special ed population by a third to a half. I wonder if that factors into potential learning reform. The personal question, because I don't know when I'll ever have a chance to ask this, is what is your favorite hymn? And is there anyone you would have preferred to do a duet on the piano with?

 

>> Condoleezza Rice: Thank you. Well, in terms of the point about cognition, now, look, we have a lot of science now. This is not my field, but I will tell you something. We have a lot of science now that is based very much on being able to understand how the brain actually works, right?

 

And when I became provost of Stanford in 1993, psychology and a lot of areas were still kind of social psychology. By the time I left in 1999, it was imaging that was dominant. And so we obviously need to tap into what is being learned and understood in the neurosciences.

 

You mentioned that I'm a pianist. I once did an experiment for them. They wanted to see, apparently the most complicated thing that a human being can do is to sight read music piano, because you have to read two different clefs this way and that way at the same time.

 

And they wanted to see how did the eye move when that's. Do you catch something in your peripheral vision? Are you catching that first or that first? And so they put electrodes on you and they kind of watch what your eyes do. So there are lots of ways now that I think we could tap into the science to understand how children learn, but then we have to actually put it into practice.

 

You know, I remember when computers came into the schools and you would go, and they were like, you know, and everybody was donating computers and they were stacking up in the corner because nobody really knew how to use them. So if we're going to employ technology, I think we're going to have to do it using the old fashioned method of let's make sure that the people who are going to have to do it really understand it and can use it.

 

But I think there's a lot of promise in the neurosciences. And my favorite hymn is Every hour.

>> Tyler Kramer: Dr Rice, thank you very much. I'm Tyler Kramer, and I'm not here in an official capacity, but I am a member of the National Assessment Governing Board for the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

 

My question, though, goes to your background as a political scientist. How are you going, or how would political scientists look at this in terms of changing the political behavior that supports the existing system versus what it takes to reflip it? And number two, where have we been successful in flipping the system in the past?

 

And thank you.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Yes, thank you. Well, you know, we've actually flipped a lot of systems, including, for instance, back when Bill Clinton did welfare reform. That was a very successful. Now, you ask yourself, how do you do it, right? Because there were a lot of interest arrayed around a certain kind of system.

 

On the other hand, we've not been able to do it around entitlements like Social Security. So I would, as a political scientist, always ask myself three questions. The first is, what in the incentive structure of the people who have to flip the system is preventing them to do so?

 

That's the first question. The second question is, who are the biggest culprits in having perverse incentives for those people? And the third is, how do you break through those incentives and who do you need to do that? If I think about the incentives and what the incentives are for politicians, it's getting reelected.

 

That takes a certain amount of support and money. And so if I go to the second, I say, where is some of this money coming from and the people who are most resistant to reform? And I say, is there a way to either change the incentives of the teachers unions or to sideline the teachers unions, right?

 

So, I actually worked with Randy Weingart at one point in this test course with Joel Klein. You know, maybe there's some way to get teachers unions to see that the incentives that they are producing for politicians who are dependent on them for funding and support are not good incentives.

 

I thought that after Covid, there was a moment to do that because the degree to which people didn't want kids to go back to school, I mean, who are we kidding? If Safeway baggers are essential personnel, why are teachers not essential personnel? I just didn't get it. And then there's the third.

 

Where does the pressure come from on politicians and those who are. Who need to change the incentives? And every effective revolutionary movement has also had a mass element to it. And I think people, parents, having watched what they watched during COVID are an element of that. I think business leaders are an element of that because they see that they're not getting the workers that they need.

 

I think the national security community is a part of that because we can't keep going on with only 33% of the people able to pass the basic skills test. And so I thought that part of the problem for the education community is too insular. It has to mobilize other parts of the society, parts of the polity that say we can't keep going this way.

 

One of the things that I hope we can do. I don't know if he's even here, but one of the members of, yeah, is over there. One of the members of our council is Andrew Luck, right? I'm hoping that Andrew, who coached in high school and as I remember, wants to do something for better coaching and so forth.

 

Now that's a community that ought to be mobilized. So think of the mass piece of it. While you're thinking about the incentives of politicians. I said to friends of mine at one point, where's your million person march for K12 education reform? Gets people's attention.

>> Eric Hanushek: We have time for one more question.

 

You've got it.

>> Van Scholes: Madam Secretary, thank you so much for actually setting a vision that unfortunately right now seems rare around improving public education. I guess I wanted to build a little bit on the last question. My name is Van Scholes. I'm from the Keystone Policy Center. What do you think?

 

What are some of the lessons learned? I mean, it was fun to walk across campus today. I started this journey 37 years ago and I've seen a lot of visions. I've seen a lot of movements, some of them successful, many of them not. What can we in the ed space learn?

 

And I think it's sometimes helpful to have somebody on the outside looking in.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Yes, I would encourage clarity, if you tell me as my Ed Council colleagues who are educators told me, saying that this should be student centered or child centered is a revelation, I would say that message needs to be out there, right?

 

That's a very clear message. That we've lost the focus on the child and all other kinds of things are getting in the way. I don't think I, I follow education reform. I don't think I knew that. Clarity, what is it, Rick asked at the beginning? What is it that they need to know?

 

What are we talking about? What about how can we make any progress if we don't assess? How can we do that? There's no other activity in the world that you can know what you're doing if you don't assess what you're doing. I think some very clear messages about why education reform is not taking hold in the way that it should.

 

Again, not to denigrate that. A lot of people have tried not to denigrate that. Some people have succeeded. That's not the point. But we haven't succeeded on a broad enough scale to make a difference to the country. And in that regard, people want to muddy the water all the time, right?

 

We know that life is tough in certain schools, that the problems that the child brings to the classroom are really, really tough. We know that the family structure is breaking down or has broken down in the United States. We know all of those things. But are we going to say those are challenges that we have to overcome?

 

Are we going to say they're excuses for not educating kids? And so I think some clarity from the education community about some of these things that you may believe we all should, we all take for granted when we don't all take them for granted. That's how I would speak to the outside community.

 

>> Yolande Beckles: Thank you.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Thanks very much.

>> Margaret Raymond: Welcome, this is the second Hoover Education Summit. I'm Macke Raymond, and I am a fellow here at Hoover. And I serve as the program director for the K12 Education Research Area here at the institution. We're still early enough in the year that New Year's resolutions are still a topic of conversation.

 

And my resolution for this year was to lead with gratitude. So my first thing is to express thanks to all of you for giving your time and your interest and your energy for being here today. I also want to thank Condoleezza Rice for an inspiring conversation last night.

 

I thought the way that she set things up for today was just remarkable and want to appreciate that. I also want to invite you to take a look around the room. We have amazing firepower here. Not only do we have members of our Education Futures Council and our Practitioners Council, these are leaders from around the country involved in education.

 

But lots of other folks who have leadership roles in the field are here as well. We have philanthropy, we have advocates, we have a number of Stanford's Distinguished Career Institute Fellows who are with us today. And we have a number of folks from Hoover who are spending the day with us, scholars and staff.

 

I want to offer a particular shout out to the events team and the folks from institutional programming who helped over months and months to bring this event to you today. And so I want to express my thanks and appreciation.

>> Margaret Raymond: My role today is as a master of ceremonies.

 

And when I talk to people who had done this before, it turns out there are two responsibilities that go with the job. The first is to keep the trains running on time. And I want to promise you I will, even though we got started a little late. Wanted to remind you, and for those who are new today to tell you, that we're changing the lineup.

 

We're going to have our lunch speaker speak here in Hauck Auditorium and then move into Blount for the meal. So please keep your seats after the Education Futures Council panel. The other part of the job is to set the frame for the day and to offer essentially the warm up act for the program that you'll see today.

 

And so I was thinking about how I would do that. And it seemed in this period of transition, politically, and all of the challenges that we're facing at our time, that we should not forget what are perhaps the three most important words in American governance. We the people.

 

Despite many sources of difference, we share foundational values about ourselves and our importance as members of our society. Dr Rice spoke last night about the social contract that we have with government and with each other, it's the envy of the world, and it's based on a principle of individual freedom without capricious interference from government.

 

We might not agree exactly on where the balance would be about how much government involvement we want, but the principle that we get to choose that is intact for everyone. And no matter what your demographics or your economic situation, we also share the interest and hope in seeing that our children assume lives of connection and purpose and respect.

 

Universal education is our testament to the belief that all children, all children, not only need, but deserve an equal footing in their preparation in life. Whether we deliver on that commitment as best we can is the topic of today's conversation. And I want to kick this off with three questions.

 

There's often a cartoon going on in my head, and one of them is a funhouse with all of those distorting mirrors that you can stand in front of, only this one operates in reverse. And so in my version, no matter how grotesque the figure is standing before the mirror, the reflection is one of normalcy.

 

And I think we would all imagine, we would all agree that the image that we have of our education system is a little bit twisted. I won't hammer on the details about student performance or the ways that we are walking back our commitment to rigorous standards and full preparation for kids, because we all know those details.

 

I don't know that we all, however, keep in mind what I call the happy hour stories that people tell of their nightmare experiences trying to navigate a system to get things done. Or the kind of heroism that we hold people in regard for when they manage to succeed, twisting themselves into pretzels and being successful in what they want to try to do within the system.

 

The lengths the families have to go to to get their students' needs met, the rise in the kind of frustration and despair that we hear from our educators and administrators. The working conditions that they're talking about aren't just about paint and plumbing. It's about the phenomenal Byzantine world in which they inhabit.

 

And teachers across the country tell us over and over again that it's just so hard. It's not just the classroom situation, it's all the other stuff that makes it so hard. These clues are sitting right here in plain sight. And just as the physical architecture of buildings has an impact on us, the ways of doing public education, I think, exert really strong forces on the results that we see.

 

And yet we continue to hold the thought that if we just keep doing the same thing, somehow we're going to be able to resolve all the problems, that what we see is, in fact, normal. Until now, we've just thought about the structure of our education system as a necessary evil.

 

But I want to advance the idea throughout the day that the current arrangements are neither sacrosanct, nor are they just. We need to step outside of our own frames of reference and see the larger picture and consider the huge drag that it exerts on this bedrock commitment that we have made to our children and to our future.

 

And so the first question that I want to ask today is, when do we say enough, no more? That's the first question. The second point is that we seem to have created a very bizarre duality in our education system. On the one hand, we seem to have increasing tolerance of underperformance in the system.

 

We seem to throw up our hands and say, well, that's just the way it is. For years, I expected that we could actually bring better information forward through the kinds of analysis that we do here at the Hoover Institution, through the lived experience of folks. We have successful models of education throughout our country, in all communities.

 

Some of our most recent work identified things called gap busting schools that are just extremely successful. And I had thought for years that schools that weren't doing so well would beat a hasty path to the door of those schools and be eager to learn about what they do.

 

Boy, was I dumb. It just doesn't happen. And so what happens is most of these great proof points of success, they stay isolated and we lose the chance of learning from them. We also lose the chance to leverage the many exceptional educators and administrators, simply because we refuse to acknowledge that real differences exist among them.

 

As a result, we sap the motivation and the inspiration of the better performers by insisting that they be treated the same as everyone else. And one of the things that I think is so exciting about some of the panels that you'll hear today are new thinking about how we can address that.

 

I think when you're resolving problems, that it's really important to actually have the correct questions in front of you. And I'd suggest to you that for decades now we've been missing some really important questions. And I think when things don't add up where you see lots and lots of work and somehow we're just not getting it done, that's the moment when you need to question some of our underlying assumptions.

 

And so much of what we have tried to do to improve education in the country today has either fallen apart, or if it's successful, we've had challenges in scaling them. That's what our first panel is going to address today. Why is that the case? And what do we think about that?

 

We also want to introduce a new project today, the Tectonics project, which is giving us a new ability to use data to understand how it could be that many of these unsuccessful efforts have occurred. And we're excited to share that work with you. And so the second question I want to pose as a framing question is, for an enterprise that's in the business of learning, how is it that we do such a lousy job about learning as a system?

 

How is it that we are not ourselves a learning organization and learning organism? And what can we do to change that? Seeing the evidence pile up about not fulfilling our commitments to a growing number of future citizens, the third question has to be, what should we do instead?

 

It's not an idle exercise. This isn't some icebreaker warmup question. In fact, it's about as serious a question as we can address. And it really goes to the heart of our shared values and our rights and duties as shareholders in our democracy to ensure that our public education institutions serve us and not the other way around.

 

So what would a new theory of action look like? We'll spend the rest of our day today exploring the ideas of the Education Futures Council report to try to answer that question. I'll wrap my remarks now with a quote from Einstein. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited, but imagination encircles the world.

 

So I invite you to spend the day with us imagining. It's low risk and it's calorie free. So with that, thanks again for being here, and let's get get underway with our first panel.

>> Stephen Bowen: All right, well, good morning, everybody, and thank you for being here with us and thank you, Mackie, for getting us warmed up and inspired to get ready to go. My name is Steve Bowen. I'm the executive director of the Hoover Education Success Initiative here at the Hoover Institution and thrilled to be here with this very distinguished panel to talk about the education reform journey of the last 40 years.

 

So I'm pleased to be joined by Rick Hanushek, who's the Paul and Gene Hanna Senior Fellow here at the Hoover Institution. Tom D is the Barnett Family professor at Stanford University's Graduate School of Education, and also senior fellow by courtesy here at the Hoover Institution. And Michael Hartney is the Bruni family Fellow here at Hoover as well, and associate professor at the Department of Political Science at Boston College.

 

And all three of these gentlemen wrote essays for a series that we completed last year, looking back on 40 years since a Nation at Risk. So we're going to start I'm going to ask you to go back in time to 1983. So Reagan's President, Michael Jackson's thriller is on the charts.

 

I was in eighth grade at the time. And in the middle of that year, in May of that year, this report came out, A Nation at Risk. Nobody really thought at the time that this was going to amount to much. This was a report that the secretary of education at that time, Terrence Bell, put forward as a way to kind of, you know, put some new ideas out there.

 

It actually was had a meteoric impact on education. This is an actual copy. Six million of these were printed. And it is estimated that in the years following the publication of this report, 6,000 education reform initiatives were launched, mostly at the state level in the years that followed, it was absolutely had a huge impact.

 

So what we're going to do today is back up a little bit in time. We're going to talk about the sort of world that the Nation at Risk report landed in. We're going to talk a little bit about what we all learned as a result of the reporting that we did looking at the reforms of the last several years that came out or were inspired by A Nation at Risk.

 

And we're going to bring ourselves right up to the present day and get a sense of what is the world that we're confronting now, both in terms of school reform and sort of where our students are. And that will sort of set the table for the rest of our programming today.

 

So I'm going to start, Rick, with you as the senior fellow to take us back in Time to the sort of late 60s, early 70s, the years running up to the publication of A Nation at Risk. A lot of transformation in the public education system at that time.

 

Can you do a little sort of landscape setting for us of that era? What were the problems that drove the development of this report? And then we'll get to the impact the report had.

>> Eric Hanushek: Sure, I'm happy to do that. There was an exciting time that started in, I would say, 1965, when President Lyndon Johnson declared the War on Poverty.

 

And his War on Poverty was directly related to the skills and human capital. And so many of the initiatives of the War on Poverty had to do with human capital. And that's when the federal government really became involved in education. Education is not mentioned in the Constitution and is excluded from lots of legal matters because of that.

 

But Lyndon Johnson introduced the elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, which is actually the current of what is the backbone of the current legislation on education. And it included Title one, which said, we have a group of people that is not being served. We're going to provide extra funding for poor children in this country, not to give them more money at the time.

 

We're going to give them the skills so that we don't have to in the future give them more money. This is followed a dozen years later with the original Special Education act, which I think was Education for All Handicapped Children act, which then became the idea of today, which was the second major thrust of federal government.

 

And you notice that they're on equity issues, and they're on equity issues that nobody today would disagree with. And then the third thing that you had mentioned in the background, of course, is 1954 and Brown versus the Board of Education, which is another recognition that there are parts of our population that is not being served.

 

And I think that those are the backbones that led up to A Nation at Risk, that we had announced principles of matters that we thought were important. And then there was the question about, well, were they working? And the whole issue is, were they succeeding? And in fact, none of those three elements that I mentioned has ever paid much attention to the outcomes.

 

They've been more driven by the inputs and the circumstances of schools as opposed to whether they were performing well.

>> Stephen Bowen: So, Michael, let me come to you. You've written a book about one of the other pieces that sort of emerged in that era, which is the rise of special interest groups into this space, particularly the teachers unions.

 

Love you to give a sense of kind of that changing of the political dynamic in that era. And what impact, if any, that may have had on sort of subsequent developments.

>> Michael Hartney: Yeah, I think one of the things that we tend to overlook is that before we had the era of A Nation at Risk followed by no Child Left behind, we forget about this era where it was essentially an era of no Adult Left Behind.

 

And I refer to that as the fact that 25 years before a Nation at Risk, the first state in the United States adopts a mandatory collective bargaining law for teachers. So that by the time the ink is drying on A Nation at Risk, two out of every three teachers in the United States are working under mandatory collective bargaining regimes.

 

And my research essentially shows that those bargaining regimes were not only important in terms of changing contracts that affected the day to day operation of schools. There's been a lot of research on that. But the laws were also fundamentally important in enabling teachers unions to organize and to mobilize their members politically to push back on the sort of reforms that came out of A Nation at Risk.

 

So my take on the situation is that a lot of those reforms were pretty weak. They weren't radical, they painted within the lines. And for the most part, the teachers unions used that political power to serve the narrow interests of their members and not to advance the interests of student learning.

 

And if that sounds like I'm being overly critical and biased, I would actually tell you that those aren't my words. Those are the words of former NEA President Bob Chase, who said that at the National Press Club in the early 1990s when he was essentially admitting that the unions had played a role as an obstacle in all of this.

 

>> Stephen Bowen: And if I can add, one of the things that's back in the news now with the new administration coming in, is the suggestion that maybe it's time to get rid of the Department of Education, which of course, was something else that came out in this era.

>> Michael Hartney: Yeah, for what it's worth, I think this debate, at least as it pertains to the unions, is a little more nuanced.

 

If you go back and you look at the origins of the department, it was a political payoff to the National Education association, but the American Federation of Teachers at the time was against it. So it's some inside baseball politics there. You know, I think it's fair to say the department has become an establishment blob, as it were, and it can be useful in the service of establishment interests.

 

But I think that as it pertains to the unions, that's sort of a side piece to the story, because the real power that the unions have that gets overlooked is in state and local politics, where at the local level, you know, when they endorse a candidate for school board, a candidate wins seven out of every 10 times.

 

And if you survey experts across state legislatures, the teachers unions typically outflank every organized interest group in the state capitol, so.

>> Stephen Bowen: So, Tom, let me come to you. So the report comes out. This was, at the time, it was just a government report. I don't think anybody really thought much of it.

 

If you read it, and it's well worth reading, it's extraordinarily well written, but it has very sort of alarming language about, you know, if. If this system was imposed by a foreign power, this would be an act of war, is all this kind of language. And what were the authors trying to say about what they thought ought to happen?

 

What was the message of A Nation at Risk, and what did they think needed to be fixed?

>> Thomas S. Dee: Yeah, thanks. I do want to linger on that really notable feature of A Nation at Risk. I mean, it's florid rhetoric, I think, was really a critical part of its impact.

 

And I'm mindful of this because of the remarks that Director Rice made last night around how can we think strategically and critically about forming political consensus in the current moment? And there is a power to rhetoric, and I think a nation of report really proved that out. Now, in terms of what they actually called out, it will feel frustratingly, embarrassingly familiar.

 

It underscored the fact that our students were dramatically underperforming relative to a variety of sensible internal domestic benchmarks for what are basic skills, proficiency, as well as with regard to international benchmarks. And it called out reports from colleges and the military and employers that they were having to undertake far too much remediation of the folks that were coming out of the school system.

 

But if you dig deeper into the report, there's some really important and interesting specifics. One of the most influential early criticisms from the report focused on high schools and the character of the curricula that was extant in high school at the time. They're calling it a cafeteria style curriculum I think is the phrase they used that it was too diffuse, unstructured, not enough emphasis on core academic content.

 

It instantiated low expectations. There had been a growing movement through the 70s of high school exit exams, but at that time they were really minimum competency exams that were testing skills at something like an eighth grade level. It also pointed out that many students had far too little core instructional time and that teachers were using poor pedagogical practices.

 

And then critically, a third component was underscoring how we were failing to recruit, retain and support highly effective teachers in the classroom and to create the kinds of high pay and working conditions and opportunities for professional advancement that would nurture a high performing teacher workforce.

>> Stephen Bowen: So you'd said at the top, this will will be discouragingly familiar.

 

Some of this, I mean, is our sense. Looking back after all these years, did they get it right? Was their argument the right argument that these were the things that needed to be fixed?

>> Thomas S. Dee: I think so. But, of course, consensus in education can be frustratingly elusive. I mean to start with what's positive and where I think there's broad agreement, part of another element of the interesting rhetoric in A Nation at Risk is it hearken to the idea of building a learning society, as the phrase it used.

 

And this is, we heard themes of this last night, the idea of a society that recognizes the foundational value of developing the capacity in our students, not just for them, but for us. And for really any dimension of social thriving or well being you might care to identify when you start thinking about how to nurture that, you invariably come back to education.

 

And so I think there's consensus about that. And among most observers, I think A Nation at Risk articulated a consensus around the importance of academic standards and high quality curricula and teachers and their professional practices. But it's when you start digging into the specific policy prescriptions that anchor those sort of, you know, shared goals, that consensus falls apart.

 

And I would argue we're in a position now where the consensus is weaker than it's ever been. I mean one of the things I'll sometimes point out to people, cuz it's in our recent historical memory, but it's such a contrast with where we are now is the kinda bipartisan consensus that existed just 10, 15, 20 years ago that allowed Senator Ted Kennedy to stand next to President George W Bush as they signed the new No Child Left Behind Act.

 

We're quite far from that.

>> Stephen Bowen: Seems like ancient history at this point. Yeah. So, okay, so Nation at Risk comes out. It inspires, particularly at the state level. We had a series of sort of reform minded governors who kind of picked up the ball and ran with it.

 

A lot of innovations begun the report that all three of you contributed to, looking back at various aspects of the reform movement that grew out of the report. So the question is, this report comes out, it has this huge impact, it launches all of these initiatives. I guess the question is, and what we tried to explore in our, in our report is, did any of it work?

 

Like, did we solve the problems that the proposal or the series of proposals in the report asked us to try and solve it? So, Tom, let me stay with you. Like, what's your sense of did it work? It got out there, it launched a bunch of these things.

 

Did they work? Did some of them work? What's our consensus about that?

>> Thomas S. Dee: Well, in one sense, I mean, the impact of the report has been extraordinary. I mean, it is the iconic defining document for this entire generational era of educational policy. But if, if we're really going to be honest with ourselves, I mean, we have to conclude that its summative effect has been at best, to make our education system a little less disappointing than it was a few years ago.

 

So at the time this was written, we are still at risk. We are still failing our children, especially our most vulnerable children, and by implications, failing ourselves as a society, as that learning society the report asked us to be. And that's particularly stark in the wake of the COVID 19 pandemic and frankly, the ways in which we're failing at academic recovery.

 

But on a more positive note, if we look at the specific reforms that came in the wake of this, there are proof points there for things that can work. So, for example, charter schools and school choice. Now, not every charter school is necessarily better than the traditional public school alternative, but we've seen from a certain tranche of charter schools and well identified studies that they can move the needle in dramatic ways for our most vulnerable students.

 

And that really matters because there is an argument, a pushback out there, that we're asking too much of schools, that schools can't be the single solution. And there's some rugged reason in that. But the success of charter schools that adopt very specific curricular and school management models in changing the lives of Of vulnerable students is a powerful rejoinder to that and I think underscores what schools can do to transform the lives of students.

 

And it's always been strange to me to hear from some educators deprecating what education can do. It seems odd to make education a career choice, if that's how you think of the affordances of what education can do. I would also underscore teacher assessment reforms. We've seen proof points in Washington, D.C. and a few other places about what these systems can achieve when they're well designed and well implemented.

 

And I want to talk about that challenge a little bit. But also underscore too the literature on school accountability. I think there's a consensus view among researchers that it has had some positive effects, but we haven't been able to sustain the energy around those accountability reforms. We've withdrawn from them arguably as we segue from no Child Left behind into the waiver era and into the Every Student Succeeds Act.

 

But I want to come back to both that and the teacher evaluation reforms because I think there's a great deal of misinformation about these proof points. So, for example, we know teacher assessments and incentive reforms, they're difficult to implement, but when they are done well, they're incredibly potent.

 

In the wake of early success in places like D.C. we saw some national efforts to scale these. So for example, the Teacher Incentive Fund was a stimulus funded program from around 15 years ago that tried to replicate some of those successes. And the Gates foundation funded expensive efforts and they didn't work.

 

Now, many people I think had some motivated reasoning in looking at that and saying, well, see, these reforms don't work. But I think a more careful reading of, that is that they weren't able to even implement those reforms. Well, to assess teachers, you need data systems, you need clear rubrics, you need clear communication of expectations.

 

And if you look closely at those initiatives, they were never able to achieve that and really never often didn't even make consequential personnel decisions based on that information. So we've learned these reforms can work, but I think we've also learned they're not just political. There are operational and logistical challenges to realizing their vision.

 

>> Stephen Bowen: It's all implementation.

>> Thomas S. Dee: Yes.

>> Stephen Bowen: Yeah. So Rick, your. The paper that you wrote for the series was about school finance. Certainly one of the things we hear constantly about turning around our schools is we need more money, we need more resources. They're under resourced. You wrote in your paper that with the single exception of a dip in revenues that Resulted from the 2008, recession, real per pupil spending, inflation adjusted, has risen steadily for more than 100 years of education.

 

2019, you said we were spending four times in real dollars what we were spending on schools in 1960. So what is your take on this argument that we need more resources, more money in schools, more spending in schools?

>> Eric Hanushek: I think the answer is obvious, and it picks up on what Tom was saying.

 

If you spend money well, you get good results. If you don't spend money well, you don't get good results. So much of the arguments about spending more money is immediately converted into let's raise all teachers salaries because if they are paid more, they'll do better. Where Tom remarked on Washington, D.C. later on we'll hear from Mike Miles, who is somewhere in this audience, who has shown that all of Dallas, Texas can improve if you spend the money related to the effectiveness of the teachers.

 

And we're now seeing that in Houston, where Mike is now spending the money on effective solutions is really valuable. But we've had this quadrupling of funding for schools in the last 60 years. And if you look at the things I mentioned before about the emphasis on closing achievement gaps and bringing up the poor, you see that achievement gaps have not moved at all in 50 years, even though that's where we argue we should be spending more money to deal with these achievement gaps and we should deal with those achievement gaps.

 

But the funding has not done anything. And it comes back to what Mackie said in the introduction. We're not learning from research, Washington, D.C. from Dallas, Texas, from Houston. We're not picking that up in other places.

>> Stephen Bowen: I'll come back in a minute to the question of why we have this churn where it seems like we're trying to reform all the time.

 

We don't seem to get anywhere. But Michael, before I get there, I want to reference the piece that you wrote for the series, which was about school governance. So we may have increased spending dramatically in 100 years, but the way we govern and run our schools has brought barely changed at all in 100 years.

 

That same model elective school board sort of professional management that's remained more or less the same. You wrote a paper about attempts to look at new ways to govern schools. What can you tell us about the governance reforms that have been tried in the last few years since the Nation Risk?

 

>> Michael Hartney: Yeah. So I think that the most obvious candidate for an exemplary story would be going back to Tom's discussion of Washington, D.C. where you had a really radical reform. When Michelle Rhee came in and had sole power over that district. And I think the evidence there jettison, having an elected school board run the show.

 

It worked. The union leader there at the time, who was Michelle's adversary in George Parker subsequently has talked very specifically about the fact that in the old days with the elected board, he could simply go down and say, we got you folks elected. You're going to block these tough reforms.

 

And he said, I had to actually start taking a hard look at the proposals she put forward, most notably the impact evaluation system, and evaluate whether they were good for kids because I couldn't just rely on blocking them any anymore. Now, do I think that we ought to have mayoral control in every district in the country?

 

Well, it really doesn't matter because most voters don't want that. I think one of the challenges here is that citizens, when you propose to take away an elected school board, they get very defensive about that. Of course, only 10% of them will show up to vote in those elections.

 

But symbolically, the challenge with governance is you can't just get rid of the public or make them feel like they don't have say over their public schools. That goes against the sort of Tocqueville notion of local control. But at the same time, I do think one of the reasons that Tom rightly points out that implementation has been a problem is that you don't have political coverage or the structures in place for leaders like Michelle Rhee or like Joel Klein working with Michael Bloomberg.

 

That's not the norm where they kind of have the flexibility to try some radical things. The two places that I typically point to as the proof points of urban school reform in the last 15 years, I mean, there are more than two, but I tend to focus on New Orleans and Washington, D.C. and New Orleans took an unprecedented storm to essentially go to an entirely choice-based system.

 

And, and D.C. took this radical change in governance.

>> Eric Hanushek: Can I just follow up quickly, we always immediately. Say, well, if we didn't have the teachers unions, things would be fine. And I think that we have to reconsider that also, because Texas has no collective bargaining and they have unions, of course, but they have no collective bargaining.

 

And you don't see that immediately leads all schools to do something radically different. It's a matter of learning from what is working and putting it in place. That is not just the unions, but it's an inertia in the system of not wanting to change.

>> Stephen Bowen: Well, let's, let's dig into that a little bit more because I do want to get to this question of this weird dichotomy where it seems like schools are trying new things all the time.

 

Like, I'm sure there are teachers in here, teachers who may be viewing this. You go back to school in the fall, you have your couple of teacher work days. When you start, you, some kind of new idea has come down from the district office. You learn that you now have to do this thing over here, the thing you did last year.

 

We're not doing that anymore. We're now doing this other thing. There's a new governor gets elected, a new state board they want to launch. It seems like there's just this incessant churn of reform. And yet, to your point, Tom, like, it doesn't seem like we're making headway. Is it the not learning piece?

 

Is it the sort of kludge of governance? Like, what is it that's getting in the way of really transforming these schools? Why is this so hard to do?

>> Thomas S. Dee: Well, I think there are multiple components to this. I mean, one is that we aren't as good as we should be at identifying what works.

 

Even 20 years into IES, that's still very much the case. There are many dimensions of teacher practice that, that rely on anecdotal evidence or folk wisdom. And to give you one illustrative example, I know many people in the room are probably familiar with the debate over the science of reading.

 

And this is just a classic example where there's pretty good evidence about how to teach kids early literacy, yet 75 to 80% of teachers of young children aren't doing it. So if you're not familiar with this, I can give you an example just from looking at the screen that's above here.

 

If you wanted to teach a child how to read the word education, a validated method would be to break its constituent parts into syllables and phonemes and support them in learning that. I remember being in first grade, having teachers clap out the syllables e-du-ca-ti-on. But there's the way teachers are taught to do this is based on a more romanticized view of children as natural learners.

 

We don't have to be so didactic. We just need to make them be attentive to the cues that surround them. So teachers instead would be trained to, well, look at the picture, what do you think that word is given that there's a picture there? And the student might say, I don't know, it looks like a book or a building.

 

I see a tower. Is this a castle? And you can see you're priming yourself to create a frustrated learner who doesn't know how to read. And so anyway, that's a problem. And again, 75 to 80% of teachers still use these so called cueing methods to teach early readers.

 

There's a lot of enthusiasm around changing that right now, but I'm not necessarily optimistic we'll be in a better place five or ten years from now. Because a lot of that enthusiasm is at a state level where there are laws that will declare for the science of reading.

 

The hard work isn't changing teacher practice. So that has to involve changes in the pre service training. Because the reason we've gotten in this situation is, the siloed academic scholarship, teaching the wrong way of reading is exactly in the spaces where teachers are trained and also, retraining for in-service teachers.

 

So it's those kinds of issues connecting evidence, not just policy, but to practice that inhabits the classroom spaces where teaching and learning actually occurs.

>> Stephen Bowen: And the prep programs that are training, right? Other thoughts about why this has proven so hard to transform these schools?

>> Michael Hartney: Well, I do want to just very briefly say I agree with Rick that it's not just a union issue.

 

I think it's an issue of vested interests wherever they may be. So school districts have a vested interest. Many of them unfortunately don't think about education in a way or school boards of. They think of the district schools or the schools that deserve the funding and the students.

 

So I think in general it's again, I keep going back to Tom saying we, we passed all these laws, we did all these things and then not much change. And I think if you look in the details here, if you look at say no Child Left behind and then what happened after years of failure, anytime the toughest medicine was put on the table, that was either associated with loss of jobs, that's the union piece, or loss of enrollment, that's the district piece, you invariably are going to get pushback.

 

And I just think that that's a log jam that we haven't really figured out, other than sort of building a parallel system with the charter space. We haven't really figured out how to convince traditional actors, other than, you know, you've got a handful of portfolio reform districts or a handful that have implemented it faithfully, it's hard to convince them to give up the power that they have.

 

>> Eric Hanushek: So there's one other dimension that I would like to mention, and that is, we've developed a certain complacency about how our schools are operating. Nothing is as clear of complacency than the reaction to the pandemic where we've had huge learning losses by all measures that are going to penalize the COVID cohort for their lifetime.

 

My estimates are that the average student during COVID who is in school K to 12 during COVID is gonna lose 6% of their lifetime earnings. If I told you that we're gonna put a 6% income tax surcharge on, there would be a riot. We've seen it in Kenya, the kind of riots we would get in the US but when people are faced with the magnitude of losses that come out regularly with the NAEP data and so forth, they say, that's too bad.

 

Well, maybe we should think about some tutoring programs or something like that without understanding the urgency and the emergency that is there.

>> Stephen Bowen: Come back to the question of research real quick. Tom, you said we don't do a really good job sort of understanding what works. Do you, as scholars, do the three of you feel like we do have a good handle on what works?

 

What's the status of education research these days, would you say, like, do we have a good sense? Is there more we need to do in the research space? The report that we're gonna reference today talks a lot about building knowledge bases and ports pouring more resources into research.

 

Where are we in terms of our understanding of what works in schools?

>> Thomas S. Dee: I would say in some cases, the science of reading being one example. We do have quite strong evidence. But there are many other folk practices that are popular among,

>> Stephen Bowen: Practices.

>> Thomas S. Dee: Yeah, yeah, that aren't really validated by evidence.

 

So I've been working a lot of focusing on curriculum and pedagogy recently, and in particular both math and reading. And I learned recently there's a very popular practice among early math instructors when they're trying to teach basic numeracy called subitizing, where instead of just asking a child to count 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, they might show them an array of dots and have them arrange them into groups and think about what they might sum to.

 

And there's some qualitative scholarship that suggests this might be very effective, and indeed it might be. And it's a popular part of teacher training. It has not been evaluated, though, so. So there are important examples like that, very granular ones that again are in those spaces where teaching and learning occurs that just don't have an evidentiary base.

 

And I know people always hate the reflexive analogy to medicine, but it's an apt one. Think about what happens when you go and meet with a doctor. You're sitting across someone who has been highly selected as a capable person, who's gone through rigorous, expensive training based on a corpus of largely high quality evidence.

 

And is there to interpret that evidence for you in your context. Can we really say the same is happening for teachers? You know, I really don't think so.

>> Eric Hanushek: So there are two different ways to look at the research evidence that exists. A lot of the research evidence is very micro-granular and detailed on do this and you might get the result of this learning.

 

At a larger level, there is no dispute within the research community about the power of effective teachers and the importance of having an effective teacher versus an ineffective teacher. There's also little dispute, although it's largely ignored, that Washington DC made dramatic changes in the way they evaluate and pay teachers and got results in terms of student learning.

 

There is no result in terms of Dallas, Texas that did away with the traditional experience and degree pay system. And in fact the whole system did better. And if you focus on the poorest schools, the most needy schools, that you can change those schools and bring them up dramatically.

 

There's no dispute in the research about that. And so it's not a matter of research, it's a matter of implementation in some sense.

>> Thomas S. Dee: Can I add on quickly to that too? I think there's an important point about DC that we sometimes forget. We only know about its impact, the impact of impact through a kind of historical happenstance.

 

The program's first year was the 2009-10 school year. By the fall of that year, the mayor had been voted out of office, Michelle Rhee was poised to resign, and many people thought the reforms were dead letter law and the incentives it created correspondingly had no impact then. It was just a weird and almost accidental political alignment that led the mayor, Vincent Gray, who was an opponent of impact, and Kaia Henderson, to keep the system.

 

And it was only then, once the system was more politically durable, that we saw the incentives it created start to drive felicitous outcomes for teachers and students. So I think there's a general lesson here that, you know, we have such a turnstile of superintendents and political leadership and a churn of reform, many of which may be effective, but they wink in and out of existence like subatomic particles before we can even understand what their impact might have been.

 

And so I think that's something else that really confounds the learning agenda.

>> Stephen Bowen: Lack of patience on the part of policy makers to let things grow and. I wanna be sure we have some time for questions, so be thinking about questions. But I want to bring us up to the present day.

 

So Rick, I'm gonna start with you. You spent a lot of your research time over the last couple of years looking at the impact of the COVID closures. You wrote a paper for Hoover about that. Tell us a little about sort of, and you mentioned this before briefly, the economic impact that we're confronting if we don't do something really dramatic here to turn schools around.

 

>> Eric Hanushek: Well, if you look very narrowly, we have consistent widespread evidence from both international tests, from the NAEP test and from some of the state tests about the fall in learning relative to kids before the COVID Now, that's a little bit crude, but it actually is not all that bad.

 

And the average student is going to lose 6% of his lifetime, his or her lifetime earnings from that loss unless it's corrected. Now we still have a time to correct it while kids are still in school, but we've already lost some 20 million kids who have left the K to 12 system.

 

And once they're out of the K to 12 system, there's very little way that this learning loss will be taken care of. The colleges adjust to having somewhat poor inputs and just change to build on that. The magnitudes of the national impact are so stunning that nobody ever believes me.

 

But if you look internationally, you see that the growth of nations depends upon the quality of its labor force, something that essentially no economist disagrees with. And what you see is a lower quality labor force in the future because the kids aren't learning as much. If you add up all the losses and effects on the nation as a whole, you're talking about something like $30 trillion.

 

And nobody quite knows what a trillion dollars is, but you can understand that that's like closing down the economy for one year. That's what the loss is. And it's spread across the future. And one other way to look at this, it's six times the total cost of the 2008 recession.

 

We think of the 2008 recession. We always go back to that, the Great Recession. We are gonna lose six times that amount. The difference here is that we don't have to lose it actually, because while the 2008 recession happened, we had the unemployment, we had the loss, productivity and so forth.

 

With the learning loss, we have a chance to come back and take care of that learning loss, to bring the kids back up. But if we just get the kids back to the schools as they were in March of 2020, we will not take care of any of those problems.

 

Just getting back to where we were leaves these deficits permanently. And that's what we're seeing in the NAEP results and so forth that we're struggling to get back to where we were in March of 2020, as opposed to making the schools better.

>> Stephen Bowen: So in an attempt to.

 

To address the COVID learning loss, the Federal Government poured $200 billion in ESSA relief funds into the schools. Michael, do we have any sense of, I mean, I know that money's still being spent, a lot of it and has been a lot of research done that we do have a good sense of how what districts did with the money, did it have impact?

 

Should we have hope that we're going to at least get somewhere back to where we were, or what do we know about the impact of attempts that were made to address learning loss?

>> Michael Hartney: Yeah, I'll let Tom talk about the positive, the one sort of positive example I think that's come out and worked.

 

But so one thing just to note off the start is that the public actually has very little idea that the federal government stepped up. Survey I did not that long ago revealed that most of the public thinks that the federal government either kept. Education funding flat or it cut it during the pandemic.

 

And why does that matter? I think it matters because the debates that are gonna be going across school districts this year and the next year about are they cutting funding is gonna look a lot different when voters don't realize that they had all of this temporary influx of cash.

 

So we have some research on whether it's had any impact, and so two fairly high quality studies. And it suggests that it did something, it had a bigger impact on low achieving students or lower income students that disproportionately received more of the money. But the average effects are not near enough to bring us back to where we were, which, as others have said, is not nearly good enough.

 

And the average masks a lot of variation. There's also a really important study out of Washington state, where Dan Goldhaber showed that the state spent its Covid relief money hiring 15,000 new school employees. I believe it was about 10,000 non-teachers and 5,000 teachers. And why does that matter?

 

Well, because this is temporary money, and when the districts run out, they're gonna obviously have big problems. So yeah, it's not a good picture.

>> Eric Hanushek: USA Chicago, Chicago is the poster child for bad use of ESSER funds. They've hired permanent staff and now they have the chaos in the whole governance of their schools and borrowing money to make up for next year's deficits.

 

>> Stephen Bowen: The fiscal cliff has come. Margaret Rosa, who you all know does a lot of work in this space, called it the bloodletting on a podcast that I heard the other day. With this money running out and now these districts having to scramble. Tom, you did a ton of work on chronic absenteeism.

 

I mean, these things might work if we got kids back into these buildings, but one of the things we found is a lot of these kids just vanished.

>> Thomas S. Dee: Yeah, it was really striking. I mean, it's hard to be at all optimistic in terms of where we are with regard to academic recovery from the pandemic.

 

We've seen 30 years of hard won test score gains evaporate. And as kids return to in-person instruction, we saw near doubling of chronic absenteeism rates. Prior to the pandemic, nationally, chronic absenteeism, which means missing 10% or more of school days for any reason, about 15% of students met that definition.

 

And that was considered problematic enough that it was instantiated in state accountability systems as that extra school quality indicator throughout the nation. As we returned to in-person instruction, that rate nearly doubled to nearly 30% of kids chronically absent. Now, there's been some improvement of that, but we're still 60% above that pre-pandemic baseline.

 

And this is gonna vex all our other academic recovery efforts, I mean, if kids aren't in the school. So it's a very real problem that schools are trying to confront at a time they're dealing with the fiscal cliff, they've lost federal pandemic aid. And they're now having to face the harsh fiscal realities of enrollment loss that occurred during the pandemic, particularly in response to school closures.

 

And I think some of our policy responses to this and the way we've been framing the discussion has been unhelpful. Cuz many people, the crisis rhetoric and education and people have been responding, my God, our hair's on fire, we need to flood the zone. Or as one commentary put it, do everything everywhere all at once.

 

And again, it is a serious problem, but I think we need to do the effective things that can be scaled and done with fidelity. And so one thing I would point out, just to be a little more optimistic. There's a really promising body of evidence based on experimental studies done in the field that simple forms of parental engagement can bring kids back into school.

 

Things like texting and postcards and reminding parents, hey, your kid's missing school. And psychologically thoughtful designs to that messaging, not just telling them they miss school, but saying, hey, their peers are in school at this level. That kinda social norming can be really impactful and it's effective at dollars per student.

 

So that's the kind of thing where I think a well-functioning system would have flooded the zone with that kind of capacity for schools. And many schools are doing it, but too many aren't. And I think that's an example of just the kind of low-hanging fruit we don't pluck in education reform.

 

>> Stephen Bowen: Well, I wanna open it up to questions from the audience. You'll see we have microphones in the aisles. And so if you've got a question, please come up to the mic, and let me just put this out. I say this as a former legislator to any other former legislators in here.

 

A question-

>> Stephen Bowen: Is you're seeking the opinion of someone else about something. Okay, so fair warning, Chris.

>> Chris Howard: No problem. Chris Howard, chief operating officer, executive vice president of Arizona State University, really enjoyed the conversation. So two questions. First one is to us, how many deans of schools of education are here?

 

No, no, no, no, that reform. David, how many deans? One, two, current deans of schools of education. Well, I run Arizona State, I don't run Stanford. She asked me where's the one from Stanford, I go, I don't know. I wish the one from Arizona State was here. But that strikes me as interesting because you talked about the different factions.

 

Schools of education are in some way faction, so I find that surprising. And what does that mean, that we have two out of many people here? That we don't think that deans of education are integral part of flooding the zone, so.

>> Stephen Bowen: Was there a question?

>> Chris Howard: Why aren't there more deans of education?

 

>> Stephen Bowen: Yeah.

>> Eric Hanushek: They're busy complying with various requirements that fall on higher education as with K to 12.

>> Chris Howard: And if they were here, what would you tell them? How's that?

>> Thomas S. Dee: Well, I'll add, I don't know if it's still active, but I recall the work of Ben Reilly and a group he founded called Deans for Impact.

 

That was seeking to bring more evidence to the kinds of preservice training teachers engaged in. And I think we are at a moment where there's a great deal of attention, I mean, a lot of it just sort of very political on higher education. But maybe that could create a moment for rethinking how we engage in teacher training.

 

And I wanna be mindful not everything has to be divisive and excoriating others. I mean, there might be some way to build consensus with, and I think your question is really salient. Because again, we're not gonna achieve the kinds of reform and outcomes we really want if we don't have high quality teachers doing evidence-based practices.

 

So the spaces where teachers are trained, the pathways they go through to get into the classroom merit our most careful attention.

>> Stephen Bowen: Yes, over here.

>> Gloria Lee: Hi, I'm Gloria Lee. I teach education entrepreneurship here on campus, and I appreciate the history lesson that you've provided. Thomas, you mentioned social norms, and yesterday, Secretary Rice talked about the celebrating Celebration of new teachers that she remembers from her childhood.

 

And I am wondering if you can comment on the way in which changing cultural and social norms, and particular the rugged individualism of American culture, has contributed to the arc that you have seen in education reform, thank you.

>> Thomas S. Dee: Yeah, it's a really interesting question, and I mean, what do you expect when you ask an economist to comment on changing culture?

 

It's not really in our wheelhouse. But I'll respond that I often find myself struck because we have a lot of honeyed rhetoric around how much we honor teachers. But when I reflect on it, it all feels rather infantilizing and saccharine to me. So one way to honor teachers is to, first of all, pay them as professionals and ask them to meet professional, professional standards.

 

Like, that's one of the instrumental ways we can do that. And I think if we had that kind of system, which again, D.C. has gotten really close to that, I think some of the cultural correlates that would go with that would soon follow. And just to underscore, for example, the last time I checked the pay scale in D.C public schools, a high performing teacher serving in a high poverty school could, within the space of five or six years, get to a salary of something like $130,000.

 

So that's the kind of shift. But it's not just money, it's money coupled with the respect that comes with clear professional expectations rather than that infantilizing praise.

>> Michael Hartney: I would just add very briefly that if I could wave a magic wand, I would have the teachers unions aft perhaps really be in the vanguard of turning the union into craft unionism, focusing on the true professionalism of their members.

 

There's a lot of work to be done around teacher prep that they could be shaking the trees on. And instead I feel like the union oftentimes focuses on teacher quantity rather than teacher quality. If we, you know, if we had the same number of adults in the building that we did 25, 30 years ago, we could be paying a mean salary of 130 or 140,000 without spending any more.

 

>> George Pendleton: Good morning, George Pendleton from Washington, I'm gonna follow the directive of my host, Mackey, and invoke imagination here first by quoting the late Jack Waltz when he says, when change on the outside is coming faster than change on the inside, the end is in sight. So if I were to imagine that there was a Hoover Institution or something like it back in biblical times during the 40 day and 40 night rain, I'd like to discover here who is the Noah on The horizon that would recognize that their environment is not going to be the same in 40 days.

 

Nothing is gonna be recognizable, and in order to prevail, we won't have academics asking, which way left, which way right, which way north, which right south? Are we going to find high ground? Who is the NOAA out there that is contemplating, almost like the folks down in LA right now that have been just obliterated?

 

Who is the NOAA in the learning world that is contemplating where we're going? And how long do you think could be 40 days? How long do you think we have to resolve getting to the next thing that resembles nothing like we have right now?

>> Eric Hanushek: So I think you're bringing up one really important point, and that is all of the examples that we've given of success in various parts of the country, and there are others also come back to leadership.

 

And having leadership at the top end of where is it Michelle Rhee and Adrian Fenty in D.C, is it Mike Miles and in Dallas, is it Jeb Bush in Florida? And you see that leadership has made a huge difference in a variety of places. And that's what your question brings up is do we, can we mobilize the leadership?

 

I think we have the capacity whether we can get people motivated to do it.

>> Thomas S. Dee: And that leadership has been critical to establishing the proof points we discussed. But I guess I would also caution against a kind of deus ex machina mindset that we can look to someone to save us, you know, from our calamity.

 

I think we should look at each other in the room and think about what each of us can be doing in support of this. And I'd like to think that for all of us, our research agendas, I think, have that character in terms of speaking to policy issues and the opportunities that are there.

 

So the challenge is how to create many NOAAs and do that sustainably and at scale.

>> Stephen Bowen: Can I actually ask a related question? One of the things, when the Futures Group was working on the report early on, there was discussion about national leadership. Where's the national leadership on this?

 

And we know from the reform history that, as you all said, a lot of these reforms were driven by governors, especially in the years right after Nation at Risk. It was Bill Clinton, all these governors that really tackled this. What kind of national leadership do we need? We're going to have a new secretary of Education under a new administration.

 

Should we be looking for some type of leadership from D.C. consistent with this message about how we need to transform, or is it as you said, Tom, folks in this room, other leaders in our communities, leaders at the state level, what should we be looking for from Washington?

 

>> Thomas S. Dee: Well, I'm mindful of what Director Rice said last night about every part of the system has its own affordances and capacity. So when I think nationally, one of the things I very much want to sustain is our assessment infrastructure because we're not going to understand our problems if we don't have the data to guide it.

 

And we're seeing why that national infrastructure is so important as a number of states kind of game the testing systems they have internally in ways that try to make the problems of academic covery evaporate.

>> Stephen Bowen: Great, next question.

>> Julie Dixon: Hi, Julie Dixon, I'm a civilian with a particular interest in reading and I wanna go back to that first question about the university schools of education.

 

Are you looking at their curricula and studying that? Lance Izuma speaks around California and he says that they're not learning, they're not being taught phonics. So he's with teachers who they're trying to teach that look at the pictures kind of thing and it's not working in elementary school and but they were not taught how to teach phonics.

 

Is this true? Are you seeing that?

>> Thomas S. Dee: It is true, and to be honest, it's so striking to me because it suggests we are failing on a mind numbing scale. For a generation we've been teaching this foundational academic skill poorly. The state of California recently had some legislation under consideration to declare for the science of reading and the teachers union spiked it.

 

But there is an example within California about how to do this right. There was a lawsuit that was brought by civil rights groups against the state because not teaching kids how to. Reed was seen as a civil rights issue. It's often framed that way. And as part of the settlement, the state made $50 million available for targeted intervention in around 70 of the lowest performing elementary schools.

 

And somehow this program got well designed in a kind of interesting way that I think has implications for how we think about school improvement more broadly. They set up the program so that there were clear guide rails aligned with the science of reading on how schools could spend the money.

 

But then ask schools to take ownership through their own literacy action plan. And we see some evidence that that both changed teacher practice and drove improvements in student outcomes.

>> Eric Hanushek: I wanna come back and add one other question though about what the schools of education are doing. Come back to Chris original question, there's not a lot of evidence that schools of education are anything do better at producing teachers than non-schools of education.

 

So we have Teach for America, we have all kinds of alternative certification programs and so forth that appear to do almost as well, if not better than schools of education on average. That's not to say that there aren't good schools of education and ones that do better at phonics and so forth.

 

But I don't think that's the place I would naturally look to make radical improvements in the schools by radically changing schools of education. Because I don't think first that they change very much or readily and secondly that they, even if pointed in the right direction, they would get there.

 

>> Tyler Kramer: Thank you, and Tyler Kramer, again, one question I have, and it actually follows exactly this, is that one of the major differences between obviously the medical profession and the legal profession and perhaps the teaching profession is professional responsibility and professional accountability. Personally, I note okay Lucy Calkins was sued this last month in Massachusetts.

 

Personally, okay, I understand that teachers in South Carolina could be sued personally, and that the district will not cover their legal dispenses. Having had a partner who was sued for $52 million and went through hell for a long time, I can tell you that it's a scary thing for a lawyer.

 

My question to you is when are we going to have personal accountability and for the professional responsibility within the system and is that a motivating factor and we're going to hear for the rest of the day?

>> Eric Hanushek: I'm not sure that the legal system is the way to improve our schools.

 

We have a fair amount of experience with the legal profession not doing particularly well. I think that personal responsibility, my definition of professional, is one who is willing to be held accountable for their performance. And by that simple definition we're not doing that now, we don't have professionals and it's not paying all teachers the same as accountants that's going to make them professional unless people take responsibility for their performance.

 

>> Stephen Bowen: Yes, ma'am.

>> Julie Pickren: Good morning, Julie Pickren, thank y'all first and foremost for this incredible discussion. But as someone who has written or advised education policy for more than half the states in the United States of America, there's been a lot of discussion about around the teachers unions.

 

But as someone who's been passing education policy now for several years, my biggest obstacle are the association of School Boards, the National association of School Boards, our state association of School Boards. Basically what boils down to is taxpayer funded lobbyists who are working in conjunction with the teacher unions, who are training our local elected officials and even sometimes our state elected officials on the importance of social issues and leaving education in the dust.

 

So have y'all done any studies around the impact and the professional development that these taxpayer funded lobbyists are providing?

>> Thomas S. Dee: Yeah, I wanna thank you for this because I think this is really underappreciated. When we talk about research to practice gaps, we invariably focus on teachers or school staff, but not the governance structure that is often driving what's going on in schools.

 

I mean, with 13,000 or so school districts, school board members who are community members don't necessarily have a good sense of what works in education. So there's a really important learning opportunity there that I think isn't a part of the discourse in the way it should be.

>> Julie Pickren: Thank you.

 

>> Stephen Bowen: Please.

>> Gabriella Mitchell: Hi, my name is Gabriella Mitchell, I'm a retired teacher, elementary for 28 years. Thank you, panelists, I think that your support, it's a vested interest for all of us here with the state of education. I just want to add from my experience that, you know, we have had the Common Core for reading and math because we've talked about both here.

 

And that has brought an elevated level of quality into education. I also want to acknowledge that I've read that there was one professor from Stanford on the Common Core panel for math. So I want to applaud you for those efforts. And like today I can see that you have this forward thinking around education.

 

So I think that when we look, you know, I just want to show when we look at reform that we do, you know, look at the whole picture in the sense of that education there is more quality there because of the Common Core. And I will just tell you, because I was in there, in the classrooms, I taught second grade for 24, first for one year and fifth grade for three.

 

So I've got a range of experience here in elementary. And I was able, because of Common Core math, I was able to have my kids become proficient in math. And so I came from a low income school, but then I ended retiring from a higher end school. But we still had the gaps.

 

But because of the Common Core we were able to close them. But having said all of this, there was a lot of pushback with the Common Core math, not with the reading, the end came with the math. And it is more rigorous, but it works. And I'm just here to tell you what I had to do is I had to do a lot of my planning around that for math on my own, okay?

 

So there's a lack of a plan of how to teach teachers how to do this and the same thing with the reading. So it's the whole gamut. So there needs to be clarity. So I wanna mention all of this because I think it's very important when you have a clear plan that you're looking at the parameters that are on the ground so.

 

And then the other piece that I wanted to address was that, you know, I think that having all these mechanisms in place, I think will take us, you know, further. I also heard about funding and the funding. I saw that there was a lot of funding. I saw manipulatives because we had very little manipulatives.

 

I had out of my pocket, spent from manipulatives. But I did see that change, like after like seven years of implementation, like 2017, I saw that schools were investing more on the manipulatives. For the math, that was good, but for the reading, when I went to that more affluent school, the PTO provided a lot of extra funding for me to have a library in my classroom that wasn't there for the lower income schools.

 

So all of these, all of these little, you know, nuggets of experience that I've, that I've experienced, I just wanted to share. So, thank you.

>> Stephen Bowen: Thank you. Can I ask a question off that Common Core was, we haven't really mentioned it. It's one of the major reform initiatives since the Nation at Risk.

 

The idea that we would build a common set of standards across the country. And the point was raised. I mean, it's still in place most state, but there certainly was a lot of pushback. Is there lessons learned from the Common Core experience around how we do reform? Well, what are the things we need to watch out for in Common Core.

 

Is there something to learn from that experience?

>> Thomas S. Dee: Well, I would say first of all, it underscores how the political divisiveness has grown. It began as the shared bipartisan effort and then sundered in this very partisan way. And it underscores the challenges we have about implementation.

>> Stephen Bowen: Right.

 

>> Thomas S. Dee: Getting teachers to have the right sort of practices, etc. I'm broadly in alignment with the principles of the Common Core State standards, but I also would wanna flag. It became in some places a kind of Trojan horse for bad ideas. And exhibit A would be the 2014 math reforms in the San Francisco school district.

 

You know, as part of their Common Core math reforms, they essentially made it impossible for, for 8th grade students to take algebra and delayed them all to taking it in ninth grade. And we've seen, and they've since rolled back that reform just in this current academic year, but it was harmful to kids.

 

We saw a substantial reduction in the share of San Francisco students that were taking up calculus and did nothing to improve equity in advanced math. So they're good principles, but-

>> Stephen Bowen: Implementation, it's all implementation.

>> Thomas S. Dee: And attention to the detail.

>> Michael Hartney: Yeah, I just wanna connect Tom's point about the politics here to something you asked earlier about Washington's role.

 

And you're absolutely right. You know, this was a Jeb Bush thing. And then when it became associated with Obama, became Very polarized. We've now seen this happen twice. We saw it that reopening schools in May of 2020 was not a partisan issue. And when President Trump was out there very forcefully in July saying reopen the schools, it became very partisan.

 

And where I'm a little worried right now headed into the new administration is if you look at the data on support for school choice, it actually remains certainly much more bipartisan than other issues. And so, I know the administration's going to come out probably with a federal proposal.

 

It's probably gonna be the case that the issue becomes more polarized. If it's something that you hear a lot from the administration and it becomes associated with Trump, I don't know if there's anything that can be done about that. But we're seeing history repeat itself.

>> Eric Hanushek: Can I bring up two quick points that relates to your comments from the teacher?

 

One of the things that I think is very common is that new ideas, new programs are sort of dumped down on the schools without preparing the teachers and providing the background and the help to implement these new things. And so, it's not completely surprising that it doesn't get implemented very well.

 

But the second point is that there is massive evidence about the failure of professional development, that professional development has not provided much in general the way it's done today. You have to believe that professional development would be useful, and conceptually it is, but the way it's done has not worked as a general rule.

 

>> Stephen Bowen: All right, I'm getting a flashing yellow light, so time is running out. One more question.

>> Jim Meadows: Jim Meadows, TDP Data Systems I just wonder, any thoughts about the state of research with deployment of AI and digitalization? What's being lost? What's being gained? I'm saying this in the context of maybe 15 years ago, they start dialing back on technology and cockpits because pilots were atrophying their skills.

 

I'm just thinking the context of cursive no longer being taught in school in California. So proactively, what are we going to gain? What are we going to lose as these things are being offloaded from us as humans?

>> Eric Hanushek: I think your question is ahead of all the research that the research hasn't caught up to, both where it might be useful and the effectiveness in different kinds of activities.

 

>> Thomas S. Dee: I think that's exactly right. I mean, we know it's incredibly powerful. But I am immediately suspicious of anyone who says they understand what the future of this will be. In the near term, though, I think we are seeing it has some affordances. For example, I have a colleague, Susanna Loeb, who studies tutoring and has found that providing the tutors with AI support so they can better engage with the child sitting across from them appears to be effective.

 

But I think the ways in which it's likely to have impact in the short term have to be very carefully curated. The idea that it can, in the near term, transform personalized learning, I think that's a heavier lift, in part because tech solutions, I think, often downplay the extent to which learning is a social activity activity.

 

>> Eric Hanushek: Good, Great.

>> Stephen Bowen: Well, I'm afraid we're out of time, but please join me in thanking our panel. Really appreciate it.

>> Margaret Raymond: Starting off the next session on the Tectonics project, to quote the inimitable Bob Dylan, the times they are changing. As we just saw, our panel painted a pretty sober picture of our shared desire to make our public education system work better for students and the frustration that our vast efforts in the past have had such low yields.

 

One point that they raised was about the problem of scaling successful models. There is a pretty rich literature about the difficulty of taking something that succeeds in one context and making it happen successfully in other contexts. And we wonder why. Well, we often blame the lovely term implementation fidelity, as though people are sneaking around with implementation as the reason that things get stuck when we're in scaling phase.

 

But is that really the case? Perhaps are we missing other explanations? And so the Hoover Education Tectonics Project is in its second year in an attempt to answer some of those questions. It's led by my colleague, Dr. James Lynn Woodworth. He goes by Lynn. And it's a new effort at the Hoover Institution to better understand our landscape.

 

Lynn has extraordinary expertise with data, particularly coming out of the national center for Education Statistics, where he served as commissioner for several years. And he has the amazing ability to use data to tell stories. He can see the terrain with numbers both past and present, and making some reasons, judgments about the future.

 

And so I think in the next few minutes, we want to try to see about these data visualizations that Dr. Woodward has created for you. And draw some inferences about the way that we might think new efforts for student improvement might come about and how they might differ from the last 40 years.

 

So let me call to the podium my colleague, Dr. Woodworth.

>> James Lynn Woodworth: Attributes are happening at increasing speeds, results in overall variation in community. This results in implications for traditional ways of providing education solutions that won't fit the evolving landscape. We hope that delivered to policymakers at all levels clear information about the communities they will better be informed as they make decisions about what programs and policies to support.

 

There are vast troves of data available to policymakers and to the public at large. But gathering it and presenting it in a digestible manner isn't straightforward, there's a gap between ready to use and those who are ready to use it. Bridging that gap can help policymakers and other stakeholders to understand the policies that are needed and if those policies are likely to function as intended.

 

For example, the graph here shows information on the number of teachers completing teacher preparation programs in the state. The red line shows where we project the number in 2028 based on historical data. The green dots represent the estimated gain from some proposed intervention that might increase the number of teachers.

 

Setting the stage, the right policies get targeted into the right places is the goal of the tectonics project. We also provide varying levels of support as direct access to the data, guided workbooks and policy primers to meet users at their knowledge level. We believe this methodology will open the data up to those users who don't have the time nor the expertise to separate the data gems from the dross of data.

 

Here you can see some of the topics that we currently have available. I'm gonna use one of these topics population shifts to demonstrate how policy changes vary at the school district level, which means policy solutions must also vary at the district level. So the US is experiencing significant transformations and we can see that in the data.

 

This map shows the domestic migration which is people moving from one state to another. Red indicates more people moving out of the state and blue more moving into that state. Life in the red states has grown so challenging that for many residents resulting in these people and companies even fleeing to the blue shaded states.

 

And these blue shaded states they go there cuz they feel there are gonna be more favorable conditions. This means we'll see increasing demand on the education systems in these blue shaded states and perhaps the need to restructure or even shutter schools in some of the red states. International immigration is another important shift.

 

Here we see that every state is a gainer with a darker state showing larger population increases. So for example, immigration in Texas and Florida is giving them a population bump in addition to the domestic migration. It's also easing the losses from migration in California and New York. But this means a state like Texas will not only have a boom in enrollment, which we have seen, but that communities in close proximity to each other may have different needs and demands.

 

Because of these changes, the policy response could go in one of two ways. Either become increasingly complex or simplify and provide flexibility to districts to use the resources as they see fit to meet the needs of their students and then hold those districts accountable for the results. So we saw in the previous slide that migration and immigration changes can have different intensities.

 

But we also see in this map that shows when each state became majority minority. That changes can also impact different parts of the country at different times. The complexity of the data reflects large variation in conditions that policymakers face when thinking about how to provide quality education for all their students.

 

While white students make up the largest group of students in the United States as a whole, that's not the case in every state. And even dividing by states doesn't tell the whole story. For instance, while Hispanic students make up the largest student group in the five southwestern states, we can see the differences in the percentages of students included in that largest group.

 

But these differences don't just exist between states, but within them as well, even at the down to the district level. So even though we think of education as a states right issue, these maps show how uniform policies crafted at the state level might not leverage the interest and assets of the communities.

 

The Tectonics Project has organized the data at the district level as well as other levels of aggregation. Our hope is that this resource will be valuable to a wide range of users, from local community actors to policy teams at the state and federal level. Change comes to communities at different rates in different times, and communities need to be able to adopt the educational solutions that match their circumstances and evolve them as conditions continue to change.

 

For example, these three districts all share borders and have some similarity in student composition in 2021. But they looked very different from each other in 1998, and they will likely look different from each other in 2038 as well. Now, I'm gonna focus on Clayton County School District just for a moment.

 

So what you're seeing here in the first column is the race and ethnicity composition of schools that are attended by black students. When we look at the race ethnicity composition of schools attended by Hispanic students in the middle and white students on the right, we see that they have similar profiles.

 

So in districts that have low levels of segregation that all three of the bars should look very similar like what we see here in Clayton County. If the schools are segregated by race and ethnicity, then sections of the three bars are gonna be uneven.

>> James Lynn Woodworth: If we go back to our three neighboring school districts that we saw just a moment ago, they had similar racial method compositions.

 

So let's start with Clayton county, the one we just saw where the bars are all equal and very similar. Now we see a little bit of difference between schools attended by white students in Henry county as compared to black and Hispanic students in Henry county.

>> James Lynn Woodworth: But in DeKalb, we see major differences in the race ethnic composition of schools attended by students of different races.

 

Clearly, Georgia's efforts to end school segregation have not achieved the same outcomes for these three neighboring districts. And remember, these are districts that actually share borders. Dekalb county needs a different solution to segregation than Henry and Clayton counties. So we're sharing these slides to make the larger point.

 

Any one of a number of forces could create impacts on the size and makeup of a school district, and the timing and magnitude of these impacts will differ,. When you add up all these forces together, different timing, different levels of disruption, the future policymaking looks very different now from the way we have operated in the past.

 

The Tectonics Project won't create new solutions, but we hope it will provide a valuable asset the data necessary to help tailor solutions to better reflect the local conditions. We have tried for years to treat variation between school districts as a problem to be solved. What if instead, we use variation as the foundation for a unique plan to find the right solution for each school's unique needs?

 

We need to find this better way. Now as I said, the tectonics site is available currently, we have those topics you saw before. We intend to continue to build on these topics on the tectonics page to include district level to national level data on new topics like economic factors.

 

Computer and Internet access, housing, social characteristics, even things like pollution exposure. These are just a few of the main topics that are left for us to explore now. We also welcome feedback from users to help them to locate and understand the data they most need. If we meet our goals, the Tectonics Project will support communities with a deep understanding of their districts so they can pursue successful programs and policies discussed in the Education Futures Council's report.

 

Now you can find our website at tectonics.hoover.stanford.edu. I will be available now via email to answer any questions you might have about tectonics and your interest in future work.

>> Presenter: High performing public schools are essential for our children, communities and a thriving democracy. The success or failure of our education system will have a lasting impact on our nation's future prosperity and security. Our collective responsibility is to ensure that every child is launched in life with the knowledge, skills, habits and mindsets to achieve their full potential.

 

Unfortunately, we're not getting the needed outcomes from our schools. Despite being one of the highest spenders on education globally, we are not seeing results. Scores on NAEP assessments In both the 4th and 8th grades are at their lowest point in decades. In mathematics, we are where we were in 2003.

 

The persistence of deep inequality in student outcomes plagued us as a nation before, during and after the COVID 19 pandemic. Despite decades of school reform efforts, we have failed to improve learning outcomes. These well-intentioned reforms have failed to create systemic progress, resulting in a cycle of mistrust and frustration.

 

Many families have moved away from public education and many enrolled students are chronically absent. As a nation, we cannot take our collective commitment to all students and families lightly. We know that our students deserve more. We have reached the point where this is no longer a matter of urgency.

 

It is now a national emergency. So the question is, what should we do instead? Hoover Institution Director Condoleezza Rice convened the Education Futures Council to wrestle with this question. This distinguished, bipartisan, and diverse group of thought leaders found that one key barrier to true reform is the structure of our public education system.

 

They concluded that a new operating system for the nation's schools is needed. What are the elements of this new system? The Council's proposal rests on four operating Our students need safe and healthy schools. Schools must be welcoming in orderly places where learning can happen and students and teachers can do their best work.

 

We need clear definitions of student success. Students, families, educators, and policymakers need a shared understanding of desired student outcomes. Let's be clear about what every student needs to know and be able to do to succeed in college, careers and civic life. We need to assess student progress regularly to ensure we're on track.

 

We need independent assessments that produce fair, valid, and reliable information on student learning in ways that make sense to families. Lastly, we need robust feedback and accountability systems to ensure that underperforming systems take action. Every successful enterprise needs to ensure that it consistently meets its goals and takes steps to continually improve.

 

For schools, the questions are simple. Are students achieving the outcomes we want? And if not, what will we do about it? These operating essentials are not new. For years, we've had standards for student outcomes testing programs to assess their learning and school accountability policies. But these critical foundations aren't enough on their own.

 

The system has gotten in the way of our progress for far too long. We've prioritized adult interests over student outcomes. Policymakers have imposed one size fits all solutions that are not responsive to local needs, leaving our schools with mixed messages about what they should focus on and how they will be judged.

 

We've created a culture of skepticism, resistance and mistrust that undermines the kind of collaboration and problem-solving we need to meet students needs. The Education Futures Council proposes a new approach as outlined in the report Ours to Solve once and for all. In the report, the Council calls on the nation to make new commitments in four key areas.

 

One, we must organize system-wide for student results. Student success must be the driving force behind all efforts to change. It must become the lens through which all education decisions are made and every agency and organization will use this heading to guide their work. It must be the system's true north and the unit of measure by which our efforts are judged.

 

Two, the time has come to flip the system and put schools and the communities they serve back in the driver's seat. As those closest to the needs of our students and families, our schools need the flexibility and capacity to act. In this new model, state and national level education agencies collect data, conduct research and and provide schools with strong examples of success from similar communities.

 

District and school leaders are ideally positioned to leverage these resources in the coaching of school teams to achieve effective results. State agencies will tie school performance to a progressive ladder of options for schools, such as flexible staffing or new instructional tools, and provide voluntary incentives to accelerate evidence-based changes in school practices.

 

These also address chronically underperforming schools, drawing on proven alternative approaches and strong community engagement. For schools, this means greater flexibility supported by knowledge and resources from other system actors, allowing them to focus on teaching and learning for every student. Three, for too long, distant policymakers in state capitals in Washington, D.C have tried to direct school activity from afar, using across the board regulations and mandates.

 

Beyond the problem of one size doesn't fit all, these directives shift resource focus away from instruction to ensuring compliance. They also signal that teachers and school leaders cannot be trusted to make the right decisions without guidance and regulation. Decades of reform efforts have piled mandate upon mandate on our schools, consuming their time and resources and frustrating teachers and school leaders.

 

Under this system, regulations give way to incentives that are aligned with desired student outcomes and are attractive and motivational for educators. Incentives have been proven tools to promote behavior in ways that directly align with overall goals. Evidence shows that students, families, teachers, and communities respond to incentives they perceive as working to their benefit.

 

4 In this new model, we must cultivate and reward professional mastery in the educator workforce. Our country boasts a wealth of committed, high caliber educators. Transforming their role and enhancing their professional standing is vital for attracting top talent in teaching and school leadership. Educators would hold themselves to high standards of performance with regular reviews, and the field would recognize teachers and leaders based on performance and provide substantial rewards for better impacts on student learning.

 

This shift is essential in ensuring the profession is recognized as fundamental to our nation's success. Even more important than this new model's elements is how they fit together. Each of the changes interacts with the others to integrate the system as a coherent whole. This is the ambitious yet achievable vision of the Education Futures Council.

 

It's a call to action and a stake in the ground, a demand for a collective change that puts our children first. This change will require challenging conversations and a commitment to prioritizing our children's future. It will also demand that we rethink the basic operations of a public education system that has largely remained unchanged for generations.

 

The stakes are high, but together we can forge a path forward and create a system that works for every child, every school, and every community.

>> Sally Bachofer: Good morning to everyone.

>> Jean-Claude Brizard: Good morning.

>> Frances Messano: Next time, walk on. Got music.

>> Sally Bachofer: Thanks. Team effort. And thanks for being with us here today.

 

I kind of feel like we made it, guys. We've been having this conversation for a little bit over a year and this is kind of, as Steve said yesterday coming out of this report and the project. And getting to share this work with all of you and hopefully everyone that you all know as well.

 

So thanks for joining us. This is a conversation with the Education Futures Council and I wanted to just say kind of thank you to our morning scaffolders, our morning table setters, who kicked off our conversation. And I think the video provides a great overview of the report itself.

 

Hopefully you guys all have a copy. It looks and feels amazing and it's got some really sharp content in it. And I think this video does a good job of kind of bringing everybody up to speed. We've been completely immersed in this work and so I'm glad that everybody kind of got this primer and is now with us and able to join the conversation.

 

I'm hoping that we're gonna be able to give a little bit of depth and color to how the EFC landed on the major components in the report that were outlined in the video. A little bit of kind of look back. We started our work together just like we started our day here in the auditorium.

 

We spent time reflecting on all of the school reform efforts that took place over the last 40 years and our own individual and collective experience. Experiences interacting with those school reform efforts as well. We spent some time taking a really hard look at student academic performance trends over the past 40 years.

 

Lynn and Mackey's work on the Tectonics project was also hugely impactful, I think, in setting the stage and getting our brains ready to think about the challenges ahead. And we did some conversation, kind of taking a peek around the corner about what is facing communities in schools and how we need to organize or as Mackie says.

 

Kind of think about that operating system at the core of K12 education and what we might need to do to be big and bold and try something different. So the council, I think landed pretty quickly on the need for dramatic change in K12 education. I think we were on team.

 

No more tinkering around the edges. JC I'm gonna kind of toss it to you for our first set of reflections. Why do you think the council zeroed in so quickly on big systems change? Take us back, kind of take us in the room to some of those early conversations and why that.

 

Why big? Why systems?

>> Jean-Claude Brizard: Sally, first of all, thank you it was a pleasure being a part of the conversation. As you can imagine, there are nuances in our discussion that's hard to show up in print. So we'll try to bring some of that to light as well too.

 

For example, one thing we discussed was what changed from 1983 to 2024. One thing we argued and talked about, for example, was that the School of Education and the School of Psychology in universities are not talking to each other. That wasn't a fact for a very, very long time.

 

So I wasn't surprised at all that we leaned quite a bit on this idea of systems change. And I'll bring some color to that as well too. Because not just your old fashioned discussion around systems change, but frankly thinking about what have we done in the past, what could be done differently now.

 

For example, we have focused on, for example, the LEA school school district system systems change. One question I often ask was at what altitude systems change? As a former superintendent, I can tell you that I live under the guidance, sometimes the thumb of a school district. I love working with David Steiner, for example, in New York, because David got it and understood the kind of strategic agility that was required understanding what happened in Albany, New York.

 

And what that meant for me in Rochester, New York or for that matter, Springfield to Chicago, and what that means for the classroom teacher. So that level of through line was really important to see, for example, what policies and practices could come from the state that would impact what happens in the classroom.

 

And we all know policy is a blunt instrument. It doesn't force anyone to do anything well. And we know most SCAs and some LEAs are compliance machines, right? I said this to David's team from Albany when I was in Rochester. We're very good at dotting eyes crossing T's.

 

My team was amazing at compliance, yet we had the largest, the highest classification rate, New York State. We had the lowest graduation four year graduation rate in New York State. So clearly the compliance was not driving any kind of innovation in the school system. I wanted change that very, very, very hard.

 

The second was on execution. So this idea of that through line was really, really important to understand the kind of systems design. And the altitude was really important, which is why it's so gratifying to have heard discussions around state, the SEA LEA combination work that could really happen.

 

And I remembered an early discussion when Common Core was coming out and we had a bunch of state chiefs, a bunch of school district superintendents. And David invited me to come to talk to folks in Washington around This. And we talked about the combination of that kind of work, which was really, really important in my current work, I am obsessed with this idea of regional clusters.

 

For example, we have a meeting coming up in Pittsburgh where 13 school districts are gonna come. And host discussions around innovation in a whole regional structure that I think is really, really fantastic. So I wasn't surprised. I think moving away from looking at the magic elixir, fix teachers, you fix it all, fix this, you fix it all kind of movement away was really, really gratifying for me in the discussion around systems design.

 

>> Sally Bachofer: Thank you. Francis, from your seat you work nationally. Why did systems make sense to you? What was compelling about, I think the EFC kind of focusing in on systems.

>> Frances Messano: Yeah, what was compelling to me is at new schools, what we're doing and also, hi, everyone. Good to be.

 

We're focusing on helping to get innovations off the ground. We're focused on bright spots and we're focused on this question. And I think oftentimes the critique of work that innovation organizations do is like, it's great that you have this wonderful example that's working in this specific community. But it actually hasn't grown and scaled to meet the size of the problem.

 

How do we make sure that as many students across communities around this country can benefit from what you're doing and learning? And so what I really appreciated about this opportunity to come together as a council was to ask those questions about. What is it that prevents really strong ideas from scaling and spreading?

 

What are the constraints? What are the barriers? And how do we use this as an opportunity right now to actually think anew about what our system needs to look like and how we need to design the fundamental components of our system. So it really prioritizes the student. It really prioritizes a much more responsive education system.

 

What might we have to do differently? And I think a lot of the times we're focused on individual ideas and how can those individual ideas go into a system that's actually not set up to receive it? Right, and so for me, really it's one of the questions that vexes us the most at new schools, right?

 

But how do we play a role in actually getting to this kind of scale change? And so this was an exciting opportunity to start thinking about.

>> Sally Bachofer: Yeah Andrew, you have lived your professional life embedded in super complex systems. Talk to us a little bit about your experience in complex systems and kind of how you brought that into our conversation when talking about K12 education.

 

>> Andrew Luck: Yeah and I'll preface this like why is a retired NFL quarterback and football guy here? And I think a little bit about Condi's a lot of points in Condi's speech last night that was really salient, including her incredulousness over student focused. Wait, it's not student focused on the K through 12 education.

 

Yeah, it's everybody's. It's everybody's challenge, it's everybody's problem. The stakeholders are everywhere. And I certainly feel that every day more having a 5 year old is going to go to kindergarten next year. So now I've got the parent hat. I'm a product of the public education system in this country, educated here, grew up here.

 

So I do think there's a level of building broader coalitions and stakeholders to get some level of change happening. Complex organizations role definition got to play in the NFL or on some high functioning teams. There's some Indianapolis people here who are not on some very low functioning team at times.

 

And one I saw a quote recently from the football world about quarterbacks and you might not know much about sports or football. But you probably know the word quarterback and that it holds know some importance in the sort of zeitgeist of football and popular culture really. And the quote was organizations fail young quarterbacks way faster, way quicker than young quarterbacks fail their organizations.

 

And I sort of maybe if we take out organization and put in system or take out and then take out quarterback. Put in student or teacher or administrator or whatever, or family that there may be some parallel there.

>> Sally Bachofer: Thank you, Francis. The council talked a lot about the potential and possibility of a new approach and a model.

 

It required everyone to kind of shut that part of their brain down that automatically goes to problem solving. And implementation of what does this look like in Miss Mary's classroom on a Tuesday morning with third graders around reading. So we had to put that aside. Mackie was phenomenal in coaching us towards, towards kind of staying at that system, staying at the big and visionary level.

 

Talk to us what it was like to kind of take that visioning stance and stay in that visioning stance during our conversations.

>> Frances Messano: Yeah, I know one of the biggest critiques about this report is that it does not have an implementation plan. I'm sure many of you in this room have read it and have been like I'm not sure how I feel about this.

 

Is this actually going to work? Is this actually feasible? Can we actually get to this vision? And I think the, I guess the ask that I would have of all of you in this room. And those outside of the room is I actually think we're in a moment in time right now where we have to suspend disbelief.

 

What we've been doing in education has not been working at scale. I don't have to repeat all the results that were shared in the first kind of opening session here about the stag meeting academic outcomes we see. And so yes, there were parts of the conversation that we had as a council where it was hard to not go into implementation.

 

But at the same time, I think what's needed most in this moment in time is we need to step back and have a new vision for how we are going to drive change. And it requires us to do fundamental system design and not do tangible anchoring around the edges, right?

 

Our conversation right now we're focusing on, yes, what is working, but it's not about a whole new way of thinking about how we engage in this process of educating our young people. To make sure that they are on this pathway to success. And so for me, yes, there were moments that it was hard, right?

 

Like I remember we were like, we have to talk about high dosage tutoring and all the evidence we have there. Let's talk about what needs to be true for, for teachers and educators and what we want to see there. But there's something here of like starting with what could a fundamentally different design look like?

 

Is there consensus there? Can we engage on the back and forth on what a design can look like? Then let's think about a part two. What are those core components? Then think about the part three, like maybe the additional examples we can share. And so for me, I was actually quite excited to engage in a broader visioning session, to think beyond the normal conversations, the business as usual conversations that we tend to have.

 

And at times it was difficult. It's interesting and love, I'm sure it'll come up in the Q and A to see where were you all experiencing tension? Where all were you like? I wonder if this could possibly work. What could be possible? And I would love for us to kind of engage in more in the what could be possible kind of discussions as a field.

 

I think that's what's needed most. I also think maybe because I lead an innovation organization. I'm just in the work of taking bets on visionary leaders with bold ideas for change, understanding that they haven't figured it all out, right? Sometimes they come to you with a business plan and what it is, the plan for possibility.

 

Maybe they've done some piloting and have some early evidence. But really what I think our work is ahead is to really think about how do we build from the strong bodies of evidence that exist. And how do we create the conditions and the opportunities for us to build new bodies of evidence, right?

 

To bring new practices and new approaches and new ways of understanding. And so for me, being able to be part of a conversation where we can Bring all of that ground in the evidence base, but also then think about possibility was really exciting.

>> Jean-Claude Brizard: Can I just add, I couldn't agree more, Francis.

 

One thing I would add is the facilitation was fantastic. There were times we almost got into the cell phone Ben conversation, right? Or student discipline, but we got pulled right back up because again, those are symptoms. Let's get straight to the malady and talk about what is that we actually need to do to move the system forward.

 

So the facilitation was actually fantastic. And I'll say. And what I love about having Andrew there was that some of the questions were direct and what may seem as a simple question got to the heart of the issue. I've always appreciated non sort of educators were part of my conversation because they pushed me to have a better argument and to revisit frankly the argument.

 

But sometimes when you're living in the water, you don't see the ocean. So that was really, really fantastic to have folks perhaps who are not educators who can push you to have a More cogent argument.

>> Sally Bachofer: JC do you think of yourself as a visionary? Do you live in that visioning, look forward world or were there parts of this that was kind of like pulling at your ankles down at the.

 

No. What's the implementation going to look like? What's the reality of it looking like on the ground?

>> Jean-Claude Brizard: So not to get hubris, I do think I am a visionary, but at the same time I'm a practitioner and I try to have that kind of strategic agility. My former boss, Alan Goldston Gates foundation, always talked to me about this, having that kind of strategic through line.

 

Even when I led Chicago Public Schools, I would walk into a classroom and see a particular practice in action. And wonder what I could do in my office to again help this teacher do a better job or to actually thrive. So I always made that connection and I always look for pivots within the system to move that one thing I did both in Rochester and Chicago, my mayor in Chicago, that I was nuts for doing this.

 

I hosted a monthly NPR show with a reporter, was Q and A with the public by myself. And folks said, how the hell do you do that when you're able to touch different parts of the system every single week? You can answer questions about food services, what's happening in that particular school, what's happening at a more macro level?

 

I really enjoyed that kind of conversation and forced me frankly to remain at the 30,000ft, but also to live at the ground level whenever I had to.

>> Sally Bachofer: Andrew, I want to pop back to the quote that. That you just shared with us about individual and system and quarterback and team or quarterback and system.

 

In thinking kind of at that 30,000 foot level, when in your professional career did you look and you saw that the system was helping you and when did it feel like you were fighting against or working against a system that was not oriented in your best interest when you're successful?

 

>> Andrew Luck: Yeah, that's a great question. And I think when there was clarity and vision and what our goal was as a team, it mattered. And I think about education and perhaps how complicated it is to get to a singular goal or a North Star or aims or aim.

 

And then when that goal got muddied, when it got political perhaps and other forces sort of showed up, it made it more difficult. And it certainly made it difficult to have, I think Professor D mentioned this, but fidelity through the system on every level, working towards. And in sports, it should be easy.

 

It's just winning, right? There's immediate feedback. You get a win or a loss. It doesn't seem that simple in the education world, but perhaps clarity around the goal. I think we tried to get there as a futurist council and I think we got close, really close. But I think that clarity of vision was an enabling condition for the really high functioning teams I was on.

 

>> Sally Bachofer: And was it easy when we were in the room and on the zooms for our conversations to have your brain towards that visionary orientation versus the kind of what was actually going to happen in the classroom or on the field at that moment to make, make it happen?

 

>> Andrew Luck: I think it was a fun intellectual exercise. I'm sure it was easy or not. It was a, it was a really incredible group to be a part of. And Chris Howard would sit up and ask questions or statement questions that he stated and asked like he did.

 

It was, I think it pushed us. I think Governor Daniels always had a perspective from his lived experience and his learned experience. It was a treat to be a part of.

>> Sally Bachofer: I'm gonna shift us towards the four commitments that were outlined in the video and in the report and kind of spend the next chunk of time digging into those.

 

And sharing insights around our conversations that we had together over the last course of last year. So the four components necessary within this new visioning model to ensure student success is first, the focus on organizing for student success. The middle two, flipping the system and minimizing mandates while embracing incentives.

 

And the last one, cultivating and rewarding professional mastery. So Frances, I'm hoping you can kinda kick us off with the first one and kind of get into organizing for student success. JC, I'm gonna assign you and me as recovering bureaucrats to tackle the middle two from systems leader perspectives.

 

And then, Andrew, I'm hoping that you're going to expand and help us kind of take us through around what we were talking about and what we were meaning and what we were hoping to start a conversation around. Rethinking educator success and engagement. So Frances, student success.

>> Frances Messano: Yeah, we talked a lot about this in the earlier conversations, but we don't currently have a system that's fully designed and fully responsive to the needs of students.

 

And we know that the needs of today's young people are greater than they've ever been and more diverse than they've ever been, right? We have the challenge of the level of variation, and we're, as we all have been talking about, have a system where we haven't really innovated on our approaches to really think about how do we best meet those needs of, let's say, the 30 students that are in a classroom taught by one teacher.

 

And so the whole core of this was to say, how can we allow for more flexibility? How can we allow for more responsiveness? And how do we start by first really thinking about what do our young people need? We're still debating as a field, what is the purpose of education, right?

 

What are we saying that we are going to ensure that every single young person leaves the K12 system equipped with. We have not fully come to consensus on that, and we started to put out a point of view on this question in the document. But to say that we know that young people need to have a strong academic foundation, right?

 

We're not debating that. But they also need a broader set of habits, mindsets, and skills to be successful not only in school, but in life. We'd also say they need to be equipped with a clear plan of what are they gonna do the moment they graduate from high school, right?

 

What are those next steps? And do you actually have what you need to be able to navigate those, right? But we're still debating. Is that the purpose? Right. Is it career readiness? Is it college readiness? What skills specifically? And I feel like that is a place where we need to come together and create much more consensus.

 

And we're starting to see a lot of consensus emerge in the various graduate profiles that different districts have as an example, and the ways in which new schools are being created, what they're designing around but we need to stamp that and I think come together to say, what does that look like?

 

And therefore, if that is our goal, if we're truly about equipping and supporting our young people, what does that then mean for the designs that are required within a school to enable that to come about? And for that to really happen, we need far more flexibility for school leaders and for educators to actually design environments that can be responsive to the very specific needs that the young people in their building have.

 

We know that every single community has a different set of needs, a different set of aspirations for their young people, and so it requires that flexibility. So so much of our conversation was about what would it look like if that were true, where schools were really equipped and freed up to be able to design in those kinds of ways.

 

And then what does that mean then for the other levels of the system in terms of really providing the kind of capacity building support, resource support, access to best practice knowledge, research data, right? What would it look like if all of the supporting entities around those schools were actually there to foster continuous improvement, learning, being grounded in evidence-based practices, right?

 

And so what we were talking about, like, what could be true if we actually thought about designing around students? And you know, what gives me hope is that this work is happening. It's just happening in pockets across the country. Right. We talked about some of this in the gap-busting charter school research where we're seeing some of those features in place.

 

We see it happening with traditional public schools within empowerment zones where there's greater levels of autonomy, et cetera. And so we're kind of saying, like, what could that look like if we saw that at a much greater scale and how do we put those conditions in place? And so it's incredibly hard work to do.

 

And I feel like we have examples of where this is taking place that provide a roadmap for how we might start to make that transition to truly being student centered.

>> Sally Bachofer: So last night, if you guys made it to the dinner conversation, Dr. Rice and her Q and A with Rick reflected on the fact that when we got to this place, there were some moments in the room where we all kind of looked at each other and there was this conversation about, well, isn't that the purpose of public education and isn't that what's actually happening in schools right now?

 

And then there was that, well, yeah, but it's not really and it's kinda complicated. Take us through one of those reflections, J.C., kind of that interplay between, well, like no, duh, that's actually what we're supposed to be doing versus what it actually looks like in schools.

>> Jean-Claude Brizard: Yeah.

 

And I also tried to connect that piece to more nuanced discussion about 40 years after. I did an experiment with my leadership team when I first joined my organization and I got a bunch of PhDs from Stanford, MIT, Harvard, you name it, tier one institutions. And I asked them on the Google Doc list of three things that made you successful in life, and I waited 20 minutes and a single person listed their academic credential.

 

I was so surprised whether this was a bunch of non-academic competencies they've developed. Yes, sometimes through these institutions, through their networks, etc. So the question of organizing for success and defining what success is goes beyond math and reading proficiency. We know those are critically important. I would not want to minimize that.

 

I've got three boys, I can tell you, I expect them to know how to read and write. That is not the North Star, right? So it's important for me as a parent that I expect more than that. But in so many of our institutions, that is the North Star, which is really unfortunate and we struggle to get there.

 

I'm not minimizing that. But if you think about that definition of success and, and then what do we need to do then to support that, I think is important. The question is, where does the work actually happen? It happens in our schools, it happens in our classrooms. Yes.

 

It was like, no da. This is supposed to be. But we've layered so many regulations and complexities to the system that we tend to forget what it is that we are there to do. And we seem to have to remind people this is about human development. It's about a person, a young person being successful in life.

 

However, we want to define that. So making the system respond to that, supporting that, I think has been a big part of our conversation and I think perhaps part of my training going back to working for Joel Klein in New York City, where Joel tried to flip that system in New York to a point where he even tried to get schools to buy services from central office.

 

If you didn't buy it, if your team couldn't sell it, then you died as a vertical. It may be a bit radical, but that was his way of trying to push the system to understand you are a service agency to where the work actually happens every single day in our schools, in our classrooms.

 

I'm hoping, frankly, as we think about flipping systems that the SCA becomes a service of the LEA, and the LEA becomes a service of the schools. The principal sees himself or herself as a principal teacher and support the folks in the classroom. We tend to forget. We tend to lay on more and more regulations, almost as if you're drowning and someone's trying to save you and you're fighting that person.

 

If it doesn't work, we add another layer of complexities to the system and only confuses what needs to happen in our schools.

>> Sally Bachofer: So you've taken us kind of into the middle two structural pieces. Talk a little bit about how, like, how critical is it to invert that pyramid, to flip the system?

 

I mean, could we do this without attacking that or rearranging the current?

>> Jean-Claude Brizard: It's hard. I mean, Joe with his tenacity, we only got partially there, frankly, in New York, I'll date myself a little bit. If you remember Heidi Hayes Jacobs in her work. I remember listening to her New Orleans when I was a principal.

 

She says that if you go to the average school, you find big people telling little people what to do every single day. And when I became a central office administrator, we found that central office administrators aspire together to tell principals what to do. And yet I kind of layered.

 

So there's not just a mechanical structural shift. There's a heart and minds push you got to get there, too. How do we get people to really become servant leaders who understand that the folks who are most important are the ones living in our schools? It is very, very hard to do.

 

So I would argue it's both the kind of incentive, the kind of push, but it's also a psychological piece as well to this work.

>> Sally Bachofer: Steve, I forgot to cue you. This is the time to hold up your regulation and mandate books. You guys have seen Steve's Roadshow.

 

It's spectacular. J.C., you and I actually met in one of these very complicated systems. And we have a third actor who was with us as well. I sat in the state Education department in Albany, New York. I was from the state, and I met J.C., who was the superintendent in Rochester.

 

And for a whole host of reasons, I had been sent many, many times to go pay attention to that district because as JC said, it was not doing well. Talk a little bit about as we think about the regulation, the mandate, and thank you for also bringing up kind of the culture and the hearts and minds piece of it.

 

What was that relationship like between your district and the state and how much of that was us? Just trying to figure out ways how to navigate around large rule books and maybe do some things and ask for permission later.

>> Jean-Claude Brizard: Absolutely. And by the way, very often it was Sally and I, in the backyard of my house, bottles of wine, going through what I needed from the state.

 

And I'm very lucky to have had David Steiner and John King as state chiefs because I would call them and say, my board is not going to let me do this. Can you fire a letter telling me what to do? So sometimes you have to understand how to navigate the system from the middle.

 

And so how do I get the sea and having an ally, like Sally as a emissary and say, this is what we need to get done. For example, I remembered when the cine list was going to come out and I was looking to redesign my high schools and I had again, remember, the lowest graduation rate in New York State.

 

I'm new to the district. I need to kick these things, but in a big way.

>> Sally Bachofer: And fast.

>> Jean-Claude Brizard: And fast. Because again, you don't have that much time, right? Three to four years if you're lucky, as a superintendent. And I wanted to redesign high schools. I mean, I came from New York City, I was head of high schools in New York City, managing 400 high schools.

 

I watch all of this. And I was a high school principal. What I needed was a latitude and the policy carve out from the state to do what I had to do. So a note to Sally to get to David to file a letter naming these following schools as failing schools gave me the latitude that when he from Rochester can tell you.

 

Sometimes, frankly, it was looking at my special ed classification and having a report from the Council of Great City Schools going to a local reporter, David Andrea, still remember his name and said, David, I'm going to give you an exclusive. And it became a Sunday above the fold headline about this special ed challenge in Rochester, New York.

 

That was a plant with him in the story to get my board to go 70 to allow me to do what I had to do. The advocates went nuts when they saw the headline. They came in my office and I said, if we don't succeed, I will stand next to you and announce the next consent decree in the city.

 

But if you challenge me now, you're gonna tie my hands and handcuff me from doing what I had to do. So getting the advocates, getting the state to work together to get my board to approve. But that was only part of the story. The second part is so effectively was sitting with my principals and I had leaders from NYU who are doing work in special ed hired by the state to come in and begin to get my principals to understand that you are doing this.

 

There's so many layers of this work, including suspensions. We had the highest suspension rate in the state. Imagine a system of 34,000 kids with 18,000 suspensions, 6,000 kids though, 18,000 times.

>> Sally Bachofer: And did the state regulations help you navigate that?

>> Jean-Claude Brizard: Not the regulations, no. But the support I got from the state that came from the push was really helpful because they hired the team from NYU to help us do this kind of work.

 

And we started talking about how we get this thing done. But we had to get. The adults learn how to behave as well too, to support the young people. But without that kind of again, strategic through line to get to the sea and the relationship that I had with the state to work with me as a local superintendent.

 

Not an adversarial way, in a collaborative way, was the way we should begin to move the system. I say one thing, frankly, that doesn't always work is that when you leave, things begin to fall, right? So we don't often have the relay race. You saw, for example, in Washington D.C with Michelle and Kaya.

 

Kaya is a dear friend and I can tell you that what happened in D.C Michelle set the stage, Kaya did the work. Let's be clear about that too. So that kind of relay race is really important to have in systems.

>> Sally Bachofer: People, teachers, educators. Andrew, the fourth part of this new vision and this new model really think about reprofessionalizing, thinking about how we treat success, support and set expectations and reward.

 

Quite frankly, incentivize our adults in classrooms and in buildings and systems. So walk us through the arc of that kind of conversation with the efc.

>> Andrew Luck: Absolutely, and I think a lot of it is a continuation of what Michael and Rick and Tom and Steve discussed. And as I realized when I started my master's in education here at Stanford a couple years ago, I realized the teacher conversation is like, it's a hot topic.

 

It has very strong opinions and often deferring opinions on it. And like probably everybody in this room, either are a teacher, worked at middle school, high school, elementary school, or have family who are teachers or. And or were impacted by a teacher in an incredibly positive way or perhaps a negative way in your life.

 

And so I'll put that aside for a second. I do also one of the things that our council kept coming back to and all conversation was and I think J.C. You talked about Rochester and the challenges there was Penny, this is a public good, that education is a public good and you can't get around that.

 

And certainly education, public education system works for a lot of people. It worked for me, but it fails way too many people and it fails way too many people that need it the most. And here are challenges in a place like Rochester of those who probably need it the most and folks working really hard to help.

 

But teachers. I think we had the medicine analogy pop up earlier in a conversation, in a fun conversation last night between the Futures Council with the Futures Council and the Practitioners Council around teachers. And autonomy and respect and authority and training. And obviously Michael brought up the teachers unions and AFT and other parts, it seems very complicated.

 

But there are some things that I think also seem simple, like that this doesn't work without teachers being set up to succeed and the teaching profession, profession being more professionalized. I feel very fortunate. I'm going to show a paucity of imagination and just go back to football. So I'm going to ask your apology beforehand.

 

But part of why sports has had such a huge impact on my life, especially football, is that my role was always clearly defined. I knew what was expected of me. I also knew the people next to me had their roles clearly defined. They were a little different roles, but we worked together and I was coached every day, right?

 

You play the game, but you practice 90% of the time. Not just practice, you watch practice. Everything you do is filmed. And you go and sit and talk about practice. You're talking about a learning environment. My gosh might seem paradoxical, but football was a learning environment. You learned individually, as a unit, group, as a team, collectively, all day long.

 

You couldn't help yourself. And you knew you had to go put yourself out there on the public stage, you know, once a week through a rhythm, whatever that is. And that schema exists in all sports. And obviously the higher up you go, the more resources are there, the better quality coaches, etc.

 

And so I don't think it does not seem like you have to look too far to find great examples of that in ways to help teachers. And I think the military is another fantastic example. And Dr Rice brought this up yesterday that I'm going to steal her example.

 

And there's another phrase from the world of football. The best coaches are great thieves. All coaches do is look around and see what other people are doing well and bring it in and tinker with it and make it fit their personnel, right? And I think perhaps principals is the analog for that, or teacher teachers, whatever that is.

 

But Conde talking about the difference between the Russian military and the American military, and that the American military. Our lieutenants in the field, have an incredible agency over decisions they make, but they have the might of resources, training, a framework. You know, they have been set up to succeed with standard operating procedures that have a corpus, a body of evidence behind it all pointed in one direction.

 

And while I know football might not have the corpus of evidence, you know, in peer reviewed journals that Tom D. Would challenge me on, on this, I do know there's evidence when you watch the game, the product out there that I want to believe we can work on.

 

So I'll get off my football Pedestal here for now. And also on the personal note, note that like my English teacher senior year of high school. I still am in contact and I imagine the same for still in contact with and had this incredible influence on my life and still does.

 

Like my high school football coaches, I had the opportunity to volunteer high school football coach for the past couple years at Pali High, the local school. And in the getting to live again in like a high school as an integral part of the fabric of a community on a Friday night.

 

And band and cheerleaders and the teachers being honored and the football team being played, I think there's a. I would hate to lose that in our culture. And it seems like the consequences could be very dire. And I'm not sure really how that fits in what puzzle piece that is, but it seems important.

 

>> Sally Bachofer: Before you step off your soapbox, can you. I want to reflect back to you that one of the things that I really appreciated about you during our conversations is you kind of continuously grounded us. And brought us back to thinking about the power of team. And individuals and team and what can happen when people work together to achieve that common goal.

 

And so within the context of kind of the fourth element related to teachers and teacher educators, talk to us a little bit about individual team. What happens if you don't know your role within that organization and what happens when you do, when there is clarity?

>> Andrew Luck: Yeah, absolutely.

 

Role clarity is so important. I think you learn really quickly in team sports that you truly are as good as your weakest link and the team fails if you. If your teammates aren't set up to succeed. Coaches were a massive part of that preparation. Learning individual accountability, perhaps motivated by team accountability.

 

I think the lessons of teamwork we all know and we all have lived. No one has gotten here alone in this room alone or anywhere alone. And perhaps we continue to lead into those values as well. And I have a, can I ask a question to J.C. and Francis and you, Sally?

 

Because it's been sitting on my mind since we were getting ready. Is that all right?

>> Sally Bachofer: Yeah, hang on. I'm just going to do one. Timing thing which is get your brains fired up. We want to open this up to conversation. So like before there's two mics in the aisle way.

 

So if you guys want to get jump in with us and have a conversation, please start to queue up. So back to you.

>> Andrew Luck: Yeah. This is something Dr. Rice said last night about levers and I. I'm curious to ask you, J.C. francis, you, Sally, what lever would you pull today, right now to help get this turned in a better direction?

 

>> Jean-Claude Brizard: I'm happy to start. I've been thinking about this. I was in Denmark a few weeks ago. I was asked a very similar question by the LEGO education group. And maybe a bit of a contradiction to myself here. I really believe that if we're to focus on next generation assessments, I'm talking about moving from assessment being an event, a place you go and do to being embedded in pedagogy and practice.

 

You think about what NCLB did for education, good, bad, whatever, right? It changed the conversation if we're to really move on that. And by the way, I know that Reed Hastings is with this. I was pushing Lego to think about investing in this idea of rethinking the way in which we assess to be embedded in pedagogy and practice in AI could be an enabler here.

 

You will change the conversation in teaching and learning.

>> Andrew Luck: Have an answer.

>> Frances Messano: Yeah, it's always hard when you have like the one lever. What I'll share with you all is. And I was starting to have this conversation with Jen from Med first last night. I think we're in this particular moment in time where we must act and we must act in a unified way where all of us are thinking about what is a specific role that we can play in getting towards a collective agenda and towards collective change in education right now.

 

And so I actually think one of the biggest levers that we can pull is we're so focused as individual actors, leaders and organizations is thinking about what's our specific spin on the thing that we want to talk about. But I actually think there's tons of alignment, right? But we're just so focused on talking about it in our particular way.

 

What I keep on wondering about is what if we let go of some of the ego associated with our specific framework or let go of some of the ego of some of the specific solutions how to go. And we actually brought it all together to say what is a coherent unifying vision that starts with strategy and then finds its way down to tactics.

 

To say this is how we need to move Together collectively in this moment in time. As part of that and part of the reason why I said yes to this council is I think as we do that and we do that dreaming together of what that work is, we also need to work with people we're not used to working with and building different kinds of coalitions where we're working across lines of difference.

 

We're at a place where we are very polarized. We're going to our own respective corners and we need to work with people we may not agree 100% of the time with to come to say, well, what do we agree on and what can we drive forward? And so I really feel like this moment and one of the biggest levers we can pull is about how we do this work together in coalition with each other, because our kids are depending on it.

 

It's about their features, but it's also about our features. And so it's like, I actually think what could be possible if we made a decision to operate ourselves, right? We talked about the Noahs earlier, right? Who are the new Noahs going to be? It's all of us. And so that's something that I've been thinking a lot about.

 

Do you want me to answer, too?

>> Jean-Claude Brizard: Yeah

>> Frances Messano: He asked you too, Sally.

>> Sally Bachofer: So I live kind of my life in policy, so my natural inclination is to go and pull a policy lever, to try to make something happen. But in thinking about this, Andrew, I.

 

I think we just have to do something. So I think my lever that I would pull is just action. I think for far too long we have waited to have the perfect or the ideal or there is, Francis, to your point, a new innovation or a new strategy.

 

And it is the advocacy and the communications and the marketing and the like. I'm going to die on that hill. And we're going all in on one thing, that it prevents us from just doing something. And I do think that if we start making small steps, I think if we start moving towards that true north, if we really are moving in that direction, that we can change the momentum of the system and we can start to see some changes in behavior and practice and outcomes for our kids and for our systems.

 

So I would say just do one thing, but, you know, being pulled towards and following that true north. So I have another question, a prompt as people start moving up towards the microphone. JC at one point during our conversations, you said if we were living in this new reality, in this new model that we have put out by the efc, that your day job would be much easier.

 

So tell me A little bit. It just stuck with me, I've been carrying that around. So why, if we oriented ourselves and we had this new system, new operating system, why would that make your day job easier?

>> Jean-Claude Brizard: A lot easier, and I'll be quick to allow for the questions.

 

One of the things we we have at Digital Promise is the League of Innovative School Districts that was created by Arnie Duncan back about 13 years ago. Right now 150 systems across the US and about maybe 15 around the world. These are practitioners city led systems who are looking to innovate and they want to be free to test, to try.

 

It would allow them to quickly go to town. Give you one example of one thing they're working on right now. We have six systems working with Amera Learning, Pen GSE, MDRC and Iterating on the integration of AI into the science of reading. These are teachers, principals, superintendents doing this as we speak right now.

 

You allow them to go to town. These folks will go to town. So it would make my life easier because they are really interested in innovating outside of the bureaucracy.

>> Sally Bachofer: Great, thank you. Hello. Name ready? Yes, you're ready go.

>> Speaker 6: Let me give you the question first and then

 

>> Sally Bachofer: You want to introduce yourself.

>> Speaker 6: Sorry. Let me give you the question first-

>> Sally Bachofer: Okay,then you'll doit.

>> Speaker 6: Then introduce you, then they'll do it because I share affinity with all four of you and want you to know that and to express appreciation to you. The question is wither philanthropy in this next phase, a lot of philanthropy was brought to the fore in the last period which has now faded away and there exists a lot of disappointment and frustration and confusion about what next might be done.

 

So we're going to have to distribute the effort. Well, aren't we across the voluntary sector and the public sector and the public and private providers if we're to get this right. My experience spans most of that. I'm the co founder, the founding chairman of Achievement first, which operates in New York City and in Providence and across Connecticut.

 

Thank you New Schools Venture Fund for your support in that. And then the co founder of the American Practice of Cambridge Education, which the successor organization to the Stupsky foundation which did interventions in, I think it was 42American school districts created by great Princeton University football player Larry Stupsky.

 

Where I was Chief Legacy Officer. So we've seen a lot and done a lot and philanthropy had a lot to do with the improvements made in in the last period. But what comes next and what should we say to the philanthropic sector about why they should reinvest and to what ends?

 

Thanks.

>> Sally Bachofer: Great question.

>> Speaker 6: Thank you.

>> Jean-Claude Brizard: Go quickly and maybe Francis a lot more. So I spent four years at the Gates foundation and I can tell that DNA actually really quite enjoyed. We look for market failures and what we could do to move that ball forward, but at the same time we thought about government philanthropy or government support to making this happen.

 

My current day job, I'm completely supported by corporate csr, by nsf, ies, Gates and others, frankly. And we all talk about ways of working together. We've launched projects with NSF, IES and the Gate's Foundation. So it is happening. I can't speak for every foundation, I can tell you, even the Oak foundation in Europe is funded a whole lot of variability work.

 

13 million over X. That science reading, AI stuff is all IES funded. So there is great interest in pushing that. At the same time, that sector could itself come together better to coalesce around specific key ideas as well. Agree.

>> Andrew Luck: Yeah, what I would add is there is no question that there is reduced philanthropy to support K12 initiatives right now.

 

And I think this is part of the rallying cry for why we need to be operating differently in this moment, right? We're seeing budgets get reduced, we're seeing open questions about how do you drive change, more interrogation of what's working, of course, the evidence base. But also more pessimism that new ideas are actually gonna work.

 

And I think what this requires is that we need to step up and to bring optimism back in. And that is part of the reason why I said, as my lever for change, how do we come together to share this inspiring vision of what could be. Because I think that is the only way we're gonna bring philanthropy back into the work at the levels that we have seen historically.

 

Folks are turning their attention away to other issues, to climate change. It was democracy. We'll see what's happening now in this next stage, right? It is certainly workforce development, but we know we're not gonna get the climate scientists we need in our future. We're not gonna get the kind of thriving society we want if we're not making these core investments in K12 education.

 

But that has not been a rallying cry for continued focus and continued investment. And so that is why I think we need to come Together and to say, what do we all collectively want to focus on? Because where we are seeing focus, it's much more on tactics, on the things where we feel like we know that it works, we just want to spread and scale it.

 

But we're not actually asking the bigger picture questions of the fact that we do need fundamental change to really get to these broader set of outcomes. That will get us to an education system that prepares our young people to meet the future that is here today, right? And so that's why I'm like, what could that look like?

 

What could the next step of this effort be? And the steps following that, right? Where we can get greater alignment. Because I think many funders are actually asking the same questions of what should we be focusing on? And it's on us to come together to say here's a blueprint, here's an answer.

 

So that is my hope of like what we can do and where we could out next.

>> Sally Bachofer: And while I would say there's not a chapter in the report titled philanthropy or directed at funders, very much part of this. One of the system actors called out and I think part of the solution and part of rethinking and redesigning that operating system.

 

>> Jean-Claude Brizard: Contradict a bit.

>> Frances Messano: Yeah, please.

>> Jean-Claude Brizard: I don't like contradicting Francis.

>> Frances Messano: You can, I will probably come back.

>> Jean-Claude Brizard: So I do agree around perhaps a tactical piece from philanthropy, which is sometimes a challenge as an organization. We drew 75 million Q3 alone this year in philanthropic support and funding.

 

So they are funding. The question is why they're funding.

>> Frances Messano: Yeah.

>> Jean-Claude Brizard: Where we live in that tech-enabled education, work in AI etc is hard, which makes us makes it easier for us to talk about science reading and artificial intelligence. Because we lean quite a bit on NSF and IES for funding.

 

That is happening as well too. With Verizon, corporate CSR we get ton of money on digital equity in providing devices, broadband, teaching, digital use, technology in the classroom. So it is happening. But sometimes. Yes, not the more macro.

>> Frances Messano: Yeah, and I think so. I think we're actually seeing similar things.

 

Like I think we see a lot of focus in very specific, more narrow areas. I think that is to me has been one of the biggest trends of like I think there was a more of an openness to a broader set of ideas. And now we're seeing much more narrowing into specific places where it's like if I can control the outcome, if I can get to a specific market share, if I can get to a specific level of scale, then right.

 

That I'll be able to drive change. And so I don't think we're saying different things. There are lots that's still getting funded. What I question is whether what's being funded is actually gonna get to the transformational level change that we're talking about. Seeing our system is still not meeting the needs of our young people.

 

And while I think all the ideas that we're advancing will drive change, will it get us to the level of change that we're talking about? Overall, I think that's the question. And I think we need as a field a stronger and better collective answer to guide our field level activities.

 

Thank you.

>> Sally Bachofer: Yes.

>> George Pendleton: Yes, good morning again, George Pendleton. Want to sort of do the second landing of my question this morning and use that axis imagination. In the 19th century, over half of the jobs in this country depended upon a horse because that was the mode of transport.

 

Now if we had been confined to figure out what to feed horses or do to horses to make them run faster and even fly, we would have never gotten to automobiles. We would never would have afford it. Never would have been a question of what's next. Again, what I'm trying to learn at this conference, if it's new schools, and I took the word schools out of it.

 

If I looked at the background of Andrew and asked, could we be moving to a world from teachers to coaches, do we need more coaches to sideline our kids? And what is the next thing that's going to skill human beings? Because we've got a military that's moving to unmanned vehicles to take care of military issues.

 

We've got different types of transportation modes. We're gonna have flying taxis. What is the thing that's commensurate in the learning world where we're not gonna be thinking about investing in supersizing the horse. But getting to the car, the plane, the things that can accomplish the job of helping those folks do this.

 

I really want to hear Andrew's perspectives.

>> Sally Bachofer: Here into your magic crystal balls. What is next? What's around the corner?

>> Jean-Claude Brizard: This is the life I live. So I'm happy to go because you guys go first if you want to go first. No, so we have to stay within the zone of proximal development of the sector, which is something I talk about very often, right.

 

But at the same time, we think about what we need to do to look around the corner. The idea, for example, that today's teaching profession is unsustainable. The one teacher, one partner is my colleague at ASU. Carl Basilo talks about is unsustainable. How do you rethink that whole mental model of teacher to think about team of adults, for example, supporting the learner variable needs of an individual child.

 

That includes technology innovation. I did a podcast with Paul Peterson from Hoover. I think it was yesterday, if Paul may be in the audience. He asked me why was there, what was their learning loss. It's a simple question, right? But it's a complex conversation. You, you think about what we have not prepared for in education to tackle what happened to us with the pandemic, what can happen with climate change as well too.

 

All that requires a rethinking. You think about the proliferation of artificial intelligence and what that means for the future, for the present, even workforce, and what needs to happen, frankly, for school. My organization plays from early learning through workforce innovation, and we think that through line on a regular basis.

 

Everything from the learning and employment record that will transform and change how we think about the student record. The work that Tim knows, I think is in the audience still, who does a Carnegie foundation for the Advancement of Teaching thinks about the Carnegie Unit replacing and changing that.

 

How we think about assessment, how we think about pedagogical practice and curricula, right? For example, reading science of reading AI, et cetera. Right now, we're thinking through very concrete examples of AI in social studies, in science, etc.

>> Sally Bachofer: JC I'm going to interrupt you because I heard you kind of have two different threads and I just want to press on them.

 

So one, I heard you give a little bit of a hearkening to we need to be students of history and think back to our panel this morning about what came before so we can be ready for what comes next.

>> Jean-Claude Brizard: Absolutely.

>> Sally Bachofer: And then the second part that I already talked about were kind of concrete pieces and I just want to encourage us not to go to the tinkering on the right edges going down into a rabbit hole of implementation.

 

But at the systems level, what is next if you kind of peer around the corner?

>> Jean-Claude Brizard: Yeah, no, So I think it's both. Again, it's that strategic through line and perhaps what maybe a Trojan horse that will change a whole system is a part of the conversation as well too, right?

 

So maybe the current construct of a school district is obsolete. My point around even the teaching profession, the way we talk about teacher is obsolete, right? All that needs to be picked apart. But it has to be baked in. Science has to be big in what we know works.

 

And there is a way of generating evidence. But my point is in staying within the zone of proximal development is you can't you think about how aviation works, for example, right? You don't build a full new airplane, put 400 people into it, just go fly it and test it.

 

It doesn't work, right? It's an iterative process you go through. I'm a commercial pilot. This is why I can talk about aviation, right? The iterative process that keeps people safe. We're talking about young people, human development. Right. So that iteration must exist. But you can leverage what is happening perhaps in workforce, what is happening in the present, in the future, to change the way we actually teach and not be shy about revisiting the structure that we built 100 years ago.

 

>> Sally Bachofer: Great.

>> Frances Messano: Yeah. Just if I can add. I know, I'll just do briefly. It was just like. I think part of what JC has been saying is like, we're operating a split screen strategy where we're thinking about we need to improve the current system as it is while bringing a new one about.

 

And as I think about some of the future system of what that could look like, we're seeing examples of this now, but how the walls of a school are porous. Like this idea of learning happening in a building starting at 8:00am and ending at 3:00. We're not doing that anymore.

 

Especially as we're starting to think about what are the broader sets of skills, habits and mindsets that young people need. I think where we're going is broadening our horizons of where that learning should be taking place and who should be providing that education, right? And so much of that is actually happening out in our communities.

 

I mean, Mike Miles, all the work that you had done around, what was it, future 2030, right? Work of thinking about, we should be engaging with the scientists in our local natural history museums, right? We should be talking with the local coaches in our sports teams, that we should be doing apprenticeships and engaging with businesses, right?

 

Like the idea that learning is happening in one particular place, right? I think that's the part that's outdated, that there's only one person you're learning from, it's a teacher. That is outdated, right? But we need to really think about what are all the systems in which we can coordinate this activity of learning.

 

We can document what young people are learning, what those competencies are, right? So that we can actually say, yes, you are prepared and ready for this next change chapter. But I think that is where we're going, where we're moving beyond learning, happening in a particular time, in a particular space, delivered by particular people, right?

 

And thinking about how our emergent technologies are helping to support that as well. I do not think we are supplanting humans in this very. I agreed with Thomas earlier, very relational experience of learning and engagement that needs to be central and core, but it is going to be very different and supported and supplemented by the emergent technologies that we have.

 

>> Sally Bachofer: Great. Luke.

>> Luke: Hi, Sally.

>> Sally Bachofer: Hi.

>> Luke: Good morning. Thank you all for the conversation. I'm Luke. I'm the director of City Year San Jose Silicon Valley. And our Organization works with 17 to 25 year olds serving in East Palo Alto and east side San Jose in schools of high needs.

 

And each day I'm inspired by system change by the young people that I work with, the 17 to 24 year olds who are in direct service now. I personally was a product of direct national service, worked for City Year, got me into teaching school leadership. And I'm noticing an audience that's absent from this discussion is young adults, young people who are going to be the future teachers, future leaders in our work and I guess in your work as a futures Council.

 

My question comes of where do you feel national service fits into the larger, broader systemic change that we have? And I guess more broad, more basically, where do young adults, 17, 24 year olds fit into this conversation around changing our system and making, making the differences that we all want to see.

 

Those were the folks that were in school during COVID experience pandemic learning. They're building connections and relationships with students on the ground. I don't think there's been any successful movement across our nation, country that didn't involve young people being part of it, being the leaders of it. And so in your discussions, where do, where do our young adults fit into the conversation?

 

>> Andrew Luck: Massive part of it. I distinctly remember very early on a conversation and Chris Howard surfaced this of him remembering taking a creed when he at the Air Force Academy and feeling that he was part of something way bigger than himself. And I think that ethos, national service and public good was a through line throughout the conversation.

 

I'm not sure I think to JC's point, I'm not sure if the nuance or parts that how it shows up in print captures some of the spirit. But yeah, part of it is to me like a sine qua non, like that which without this doesn't work without this.

 

I guess I'm sort of young relative to this, this, this audience in some ways, but without the younger folk, taking up, taking up the mantle.

>> Jean-Claude Brizard: You talked about the idea of civic identity as well, as part of the development of perhaps the non-academic development of young people as well too.

 

Which gets into this idea of volunteerism and knowing who you are in relation to your community and what you owe your community, what it owes you, or were part of our discussion, frankly, as well.

>> Andrew Luck: Thank you.

>> Jim Blue: Yes, I'll just add my three. Thank yous to everybody for the panel.

 

I'm asking a question out of frustration, and there's been a disconnect here. Last night Dr. Rice described how the labor union that represents teachers in elections has enormous political power. And then a panel earlier today laid out how they virtually have a veto power over any of the changes you're talking about.

 

So my question to you is, do politics matter? Do the teacher unions matter? And shouldn't we do something about that core problem so that we can actually get change in this country?

>> Sally Bachofer: Jim, can you introduce yourself too?

>> Jean-Claude Brizard: Who are you sir?

>> Sally Bachofer: You forgot to tell us who you were.

 

>> Frances Messano: Your name.

>> Sally Bachofer: I'm not going to let you off the hook.

>> Jim Blue: My name is Jim Blue.

>> Sally Bachofer: Thank you.

>> Jim Blue: I have been an advocate for change for some 30 years. I currently run a policy institute in Washington D.C. it's called Defense of Freedom Institute. And so that everyone is in on the joke, the acronym DFI is pronounced defy.

 

So forgive my defiant question.

>> Sally Bachofer: Politics. We talked a lot about politics.

>> Jean-Claude Brizard: A lot about politics. Yeah, I mean, I'll start. I mean, first of all, it does matter, as you well know. It does matter. The fact is, even today you're watching leadership leave systems because of politics, not because of the difficulties of the work, frankly.

 

At the same time, also heard today, which I completely agree with, that the teachers union. Yes, can be a tremendous challenge. One, who's dealt with two difficult unions in my maybe three, right? My career, that by itself is not the biggest challenge. When you think about even lifo.

 

Last in, first out, it doesn't exist in Chicago. Meaning you have life, you have seniority in your building, not across the system. So you don't really have LIFO in the city yet. The practices of Chicago public school is no different than New York City public schools. So there's also a practice challenge in the fact that people sometimes select, self edit, thinking I can't do the following.

 

So unions by themselves can be a massive challenge. Don't get me wrong. At the same time, they, if you remove them from the equation, doesn't make the system work any better or easier. You have other kinds of insurance challenges. If you look at right to work states and union states around practice and outcomes, yeah.

 

>> Speaker 10: That is in county.

>> Jean-Claude Brizard: Yes.

>> Speaker 10: In Texas, where there's no political partnership.

>> Jean-Claude Brizard: Yes.

>> Speaker 10: They have the same political power.

>> Jean-Claude Brizard: But not the same way in terms of, for example, in Chicago having a strike and shut the system down, right? Which they did and have done multiple, multiple times.

 

So my point is by itself is not a dependency that will make everything actually work. It does create a massive challenge. And I can tell you, I mean, having spent a ton of time in frustrated negotiations, and I know in New York, it's been documented, it's easier to bring someone to capital punishment when we had capital punishment in New York, than to fire a tenure teacher, or a tenure principal for that matter.

 

It took me five months to fire a tenure principal in New York, five months in trial, four days a week. That takes away from the work. So it does matter. And it's a huge challenge. My only point is by itself is not a panacea that fixes everything else.

 

>> Sally Bachofer: I think a lot of this also connected to our conversations around the system as it is currently set up. Putting adult interests before kid interests. So when it is about protecting the adults, when a lot of this work and kind of like the whiplash of reform happens on these four year political cycles, the incentives and where resources are put is very dependent on that cycle.

 

Not necessarily this concept of putting student academic outcomes at the center and designing around and for those outcomes, just other polls and outcomes.

>> Jean-Claude Brizard: One more challenge for this we have not talked about, I don't understand the concept of an elected state superintendent. And every state I've been in, California included, it stops so much of the work when you have someone who's beholden being elected.

 

We're beginning to work, for example, North Carolina, an amazing state superintendent, she wasn't reelected. Now we're thinking, does that continue or does that stop? So that whole concept, the construct, just makes no sense to me personally, but it exists in parts of our country.

>> Sally Bachofer: You're waiting, so we'll go to you and then you will be our last question.

 

Thank you for your patience.

>> Patrick Kelly: Thanks. Patrick Kelly. I'm a high school teacher from South Carolina and the report resonates with me for two reasons. Number one, because it's a systems look, and as the teacher, you get so bogged down in the weeds of taking attendance and entering grades and responding emails, you never get a systemic look.

 

So I love that approach and I love that it focuses on our collective call to education. That's something that resonates with me as an educator. It's why I get into the profession. My question is, in your deliberations as a council, did you wrestle with the fact that there are societal currents right now pushing against those two things?

 

You keep talking about reimagining an operating system. We're living in a moment where a lot of trends are toward just burning operating systems and institutions to the ground in the first place. And you talk about our Collective need to act. We're in a moment of a lot of individualism that pulls in the opposite direction of that.

 

So I'm wondering if you wrestled with that in your deliberations, and if not, how you think this would fit into that moment.

>> Jean-Claude Brizard: That's a good question. Maybe I'll go back on the hot seat again. I love these kinds of questions. I think what we see right now is perhaps a.

 

A symptoms of our failure, frankly, in education, right? A failure in our emocracy education, for example, right? All these things are part of that. I got some similar questions in Denmark, the richest country in the world. But the household education system was one question I got on the Fireside Chat.

 

And then what is happening in America right now? And for me, it goes back to what Adam. Sorry, Tucker NCE said so many years ago, what is happening is a failure of mass education. I think if we were to really focus on what matters about student outcome, including our focus on our democracy, frankly, you wouldn't see the kind of burning of the institutions that are the anchors, frankly, to our country.

 

It worries me greatly right now.

>> Frances Messano: Yeah, I wouldn't say we wrestled with it as much as we started off with a set of base assumptions. And I think one of those base assumptions is that we believe it is critical to preserve education, public education as a public good, right?

 

So starting from that point, right, you're saying there's something worth preserving in this institution or set of institutions that are educating the vast majority of young people in this country. But we do know that we need to do a fundamental redesign. So we didn't deliberate that kind of concept of institution because we actually said.

 

And this connects with this broader conversation about national service, right? We must, as a collective, preserve this institution so that we can have the sort of thriving democracy and society that we need. And yes, it goes against the current moment in time. And I think that's why, as we look at each other as the Noahs, right?

 

Like, the question that we have to ask each other is, what role do we want to play in preserving this institution for the collective? And therefore, what are our individual roles then? And ensuring that it is the best possible institution that's setting young people up for success. So we didn't grapple with it, but we kind of came together to say, this is so critical to our collective future, right?

 

But again, so what do we do now in this moment in time? If you have the answer for that, please jump back up to that, Ray-

>> Sally Bachofer: That's for the afternoon panel tell us how to make this actually happen.

>> Frances Messano: But I personally think we don't have a choice, that we must come together, right?

 

So then if that's true, and that is our baseline assumption, then what are we gonna do?

>> Sally Bachofer: Last question to you.

>> Speaker 12: So my question is, education is always slow to respond to success failures. In the corporate world, right, the American corporate world is very quick to respond.

 

The agility and response time is very, you know, it's pretty rapid because our corporations, our business owners depend on success, profitability, what works, right? A lot of you, I think everyone on this stage right now is a beneficiary of an American corporation that has funded your work or a business owner that has funded your work off of their profits.

 

So we saw in 2024, now moving into 2025, that the DEI policies in our corporate America have absolutely collapsed, right? We see Fortune 500 companies at a rapid rate abandoning their DEI policies. So what is happening in education to move from that? And then to move to, America is not a democracy, it's a constitutional republic.

 

And Declaration of Independence says all men are created equal. So where is the move in education to end equal outcomes and go back to our focus on equal opportunities?

>> Jean-Claude Brizard: On to Andrew, please.

>> Andrew Luck: I am so out of my depth to give that answer, back to you, JC.

 

>> Jean-Claude Brizard: So I'll perhaps maybe answer part of it. The idea of speed of response, right? So we are very, very slow in education to respond to that, notwithstanding. At the same time, I don't believe we should be as quick as the average corporation. Because you're dealing with people and humans and young people in their development, right?

 

I'm not saying we do this very well, but there needs to be a level of iteration that's based on what we know is working. I wish it was perfect like that, but it is not. Corporations fail, right? The same way in aviation. I mean, failure is unacceptable. They work on the Lean Six Sigma principle, right?

 

I wish in education would do the exact same thing as well, too. But the bottom line is, we can't be as quick, we have to be very careful. There's a fence here, there's a reason why the fence was put there. Let's understand that first, before you take it down, I'm only pushing my only point.

 

But in terms of what we teach, and by the way, it's not just right or left of center. I think both applies. There's a reason why we are where we are right now as a country. There's a desperation by a lot of people who have left behind. And if you read all the reports, primarily white Latino men, right, have been left behind this economic movement.

 

Our friends in Silicon Valley are doing quite well, right? When you go to Ohio, they're not doing so well. That's a failure, frankly, of us understanding the needs of the collective, making sure everyone's being successful. At the same time, we have to redefine success, like I said earlier, to beyond just proficiency.

 

To really elevate how we think about the development and the education of a human being is my push. We have not done that very well. I think NCLB was a way of holding us accountable for what we're not doing. At the same time, it narrowed the conversation. We need to expand the discussion without losing the fundamental push on accountability and outcome.

 

I don't want to lose that either. And I'm afraid in the pivot, we've lost our way and perhaps go too far to one dimension of the spectrum.

>> Sally Bachofer: Thank you. So thank you, thank you for engaging in conversation, Francis and Andrew and JC and Chris Howard, who's here in the room with us.

 

And Governor Mitch Daniels, who wasn't able to be here in the room today. Thank all of you for saying yes, first, when you got the phone call from Dr Rice, and thank you for being on this journey with us. The entire Hoover education team is just so happy that we are at this point.

 

And really thank you for sticking with us through this process.

>> Jean-Claude Brizard: Thank you.

>> Presenter: I'm really pleased to introduce Mariano-Florentino Cuellar, who's known everywhere as Tino. There's a chance that Tino holds the American record for a number of important positions that he has occupied over time. It's certainly clear on an age group competition and it might be true in an open competition.

 

Tino was born in Mexico, went partly to school while he was in Mexico, partly in the United States, has a Harvard BA magnet cum laude JD from Yale Law School and a PhD from Stanford Political Science Department. So he's got the educational credentials. I will just quickly list some of the entries in the competition to be the most important person that we know.

 

He was a Stanford law professor here teaching administrative law. And from there he went to work in the Biden administration, in the Biden Biden Obama Domestic Council and did work on a range of things, small issues like poverty, immigration and gays in the military. From there he came back to Stanford where he directed the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, still being a professor of law.

 

From that position he went to be a justice on the California State Supreme Court. And from the California Supreme Court he went to his current job as the 10th President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. And I've sort of skipped over little things like clerkships and so forth.

 

He has been a member of the Harvard Corporation and he's also the chair of the board of the Hewitt Foundation. So that's what I put out. And if anybody wants to challenge the open competition, you can do it now. The one thing that I would highlight that he's done is a matter that we overlapped in where he was co-chair of the Equity and Excellence Commission, which was a congressionally mandated commission that charged Arne Duncan, the Secretary of Education with putting together a commission to deal with, basically, disparities that had developed over time in our schools and how to deal with those.

 

The reason why that's important and I guess if you're involved in the international peace, you're used to negotiations and things. This was supposed to be a seven or eight member commission that ended up with 27 members on the commission. And, and Tino co chaired that commission. It had presidents of the AFT and nea.

 

It had the current president of the California State Board of Education and large number of lawyers and academics around the edges. So you can't imagine that a commission like this could ever agree on anything. And yet at the end there was a unanimous report. And I have as a proof of that the front page of this report which was for each and every child, which delved into many of the issues that were in A Nation at Risk and leads into, I think, the Education Futures Council work.

 

Tino, Tina will say a few words and then we'll have an open question and discussion.

>> Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar: Thank you, Rick, that's very kind. I cannot live up to that introduction, but I just want to say to all of you, I'm grateful for being here to reflect and come together on an issue that I know is of great importance to all of you and is of passionate interest and concern to me.

 

I should say it is interesting to me that Rick works in Silicon Valley, he's wearing a tie. I work in Washington DC and I'm not wearing a tie. There probably something wrong with that picture. About 12 years ago, the late Chris Edley and I wrapped up our role as co-chairs of the Equity and Excellence Commission, the Congress had asked Arne Duncan to convene.

 

Our goal in that commission was pretty straightforward, but you know how complicated it is. It was about how to make American K12 education achieve greater excellence. Now, we knew going into that process, we as two of 27 commissioners being the co chairs, that that's an enterprise that takes a lot of local knowledge of what happens in a classroom, how particular communities work, how parents see education, how funding works.

 

But we also were concerned with not letting that localized need for knowledge and for context deprive us from thinking about the reality that at scale, we are one country. And one country deserves to have an approach, a set of ideas about education that are worthy of a country with its great ambition and resources.

 

And what we found as we set out on that effort, that was both complicated and assisted by the fact that there were so many different kinds of voices on that commission, from union presidents to school choice advocates, to academics, to state superintendents, big city superintendents, teachers, business folks, folks from policy.

 

What we found is that if you understand American public education as a life changing element of the trajectory of almost every kid in America, to some degree, you also understand that there's this disconnect between what we try to achieve as a country and what actually gets achieved. Now, I don't want to suggest that what actually gets produced by the system of thousands of schools and school districts is not valuable.

 

There are moments of incredible magic that happen in classrooms. I have benefited from some of those when I was a kid going to school in Calexico, California. And so many of the long nights and discussions we had in the commission reflected an appreciation of what had been achieved.

 

But as we struggled with the reality of how the no Child Left behind law worked, the limited but important role of the federal government in this, the critical role of states and local communities, the disconnect between aspirations and reality. We came to realize this is critical, that money is only one piece of this puzzle.

 

And I suspect all of you agree with that. You cannot discount that sometimes money does make a difference in these school districts, but it also matters how that money is spent. And critically it also matters whether that money was spent and used in ways that actually had an impact and made a difference.

 

So I could be up here for much longer and tell you more about the commission itself, but I want to make some broader points. I will say that in the course of all those discussions we had, we did come up with some ideas that I'm happy to say found some outlet in the every student succeeds act, some other ideas that we believe had some impact at the local level, and still other ideas that are still sitting on the shelf and not yet implemented yet.

 

But as I look back over the last 12 and 13 years and think about the journey I've had in the courts and now leading a nonprofit, thinking about America's place in the world, I want to ultimately make seven points to you that I hope will help our conversation together.

 

Hopefully also to encourage some of the work that you're doing. The first one is simply to reiterate what we all know but is important to remind the public of, and that is that America and its place in the world depend critically on education. That nothing about America's economic role, its geopolitical position, the role of its military, our ability to shape the cultural narrative around the world with our media and our country and its traditions can be disconnected from what happens in our classrooms and in our schools.

 

And at the end of the day, if we have a vision for this country over the next 20 or 30 years about its ability to overcome its internal challenges, to help facilitate the world, growing incomes around the world, and effectively making the energy transition work that can stand up for democratic values, all of that ultimately depends on what happens in our classrooms.

 

An undereducated population lacks the skills to drive innovation and economic prosperity and the civic fabric that holds the country together. How does people have conversations across divides, bridge those divides, how they decide how to vote? And here in California, the initiative process may be a little crazy at the end of the day, but no matter where you vote in this country, how to make sense of that responsibility and that power and that right depends on education.

 

The second point is that back to 12, 13 years ago, when I had the privilege of serving with Rick on this commission, it was clear to all of us that one important ingredient to success in education was largely already present in America. And that is that, by and large, the country's population, its parents, its leaders, believed that a quality education should be available to all.

 

That seems like a simple thing, but if you have a comparative context, and my colleagues at Carnegie study every country in the world pretty much you will conclude that that is not necessarily the creed of every place in the world, but here in the US that is a belief.

 

And that means that if you are a kid that is growing up in a poor neighborhood in LA, and bless their hearts there, they're having some challenges right now as we speak. Or if you are in one of the richest neighborhoods in the country, whether you go to a public or a private school, you should have a quality education.

 

If you look closely not only at the rhetoric of leaders of our country, but also the law, state constitutions, you will find that often that ideal that I've just described is actually enshrined in constitutions. California's own constitution is an example. There is a right to an education that's discussed in that document.

 

That aspiration, though, falls short of reality too often. That's the third point. And that's why, largely, we've come together today. If you're intellectually honest, you have to recognize that while we manage to put millions of kids in classrooms of incredibly diverse backgrounds and provide them with teachers and sometimes also provide them with little help and technology and so on, the reality is that many kids in certain schools have incredible teachers, and others have teachers that aren't able to help them quite as much, that some have access to the latest technologies and others don't.

 

And that well beyond the questions of socioeconomic status in a community, the outcomes that you actually see from schools around the country vary enormously. We also know that whatever you say about the COVID pandemic, the reality is that that was a period that was enormously challenging for American kids.

 

And the results are evident not only in anecdote after anecdote, but in numbers that you can see with respect to demonstrated mathematics proficiency. Around eighth grade, before the pandemic, we had about 34% of kids reaching those metrics. Now it's closer to 26%. That's not something that should make anyone feel great about the country.

 

Certainly, if you go beyond simply proficiency and look at how long people are able to be in school and whether they're in school as long as they're supposed to, the numbers don't look great. About 26% of kids, based on some numbers that I've seen that you've probably seen, too, are absent more than 10% of the time.

 

There are many answers to the why question. Some of those are rooted in the imperfections of any human enterprise, to be honest. But others are reflective of the mix of values and incentives and goals and inputs into the system and at the end of the day, whatever the mix of dynamics that drive this reality, they are partly rooted in the fact that we have a broad Democratic politics, little D Democratic, and a lot of decentralization.

 

That can be a strength to some degree, but it could also be a persistent challenge. And in many ways the reason we are here today still is that some of those structural factors, the 19,000 school districts, the difficulty of understanding how to measure outcomes, remain a challenge today, just as they were 12 or 13 years ago.

 

But my next point is really about what has changed since 12 or 13 years ago. Back then there was a degree of polarization in the country, but nothing quite like what we're living through now. Back then, compromise was much more possible than it is now. So in the years just before I ended up co chairing that commission, I worked in the Obama White House, and many of the issues I worked on involving the justice system or public health or regulatory reform garnered bipartisan support in Congress.

 

Whether it was food safety, or the role of tobacco, or civil rights or drug treatment, or regulatory reform to make the system more efficient, you could reliably imagine legislation garnering the kind of support that would make bridges be built across divides. One thing that has changed is that that is not completely absent, but it's far more difficult now than it was 12 or 13 years ago.

 

Building on that polarization that's reflected in part on cultural and other disputes about what happens in the classroom or on curriculum around the meaning of what we teach are challenges involving technology. And here I'll just note as somebody who's had the parent kids, the judgment calls that even very engaged families have around social media around mobile technology are not easy.

 

We can't expect those to be done perfectly inside schools. It's a joint process of trying to figure out what the right norm should be. And it is a losing battle. Often if you are trying to tell a 14 or 15 or 16 year old what to do with their social media.

 

We can tell each other many stories about this, but suffice to say that one of my experiences as a parent involved my daughter. And I won't tell you what age it was, but I'll just tell you she came to my wife and me and said, you know, I just want you to know what it feels like when my friends have access to a smartphone and I don't.

 

And what it feels like is I show up on Monday and they're laughing at all these jokes that they've been exchanging over their devices and I have to pretend I know what they're talking about and I don't. And needless to say, my wife and I were moved by that to some degree.

 

A third difference. Today we are on the cusp of far greater innovation around artificial intelligence. You've probably gotten tired of hearing those words, artificial intelligence. For what it's worth, I started getting interested in this a good number of years ago, in part because I expected that changes in AI would really affect the legal system and what we expect from it.

 

But I don't wanna sound like all the hype you hear is exactly right. I do want to say that if you're going to make an argument that the most advanced generative models today are not going to progress much more, I think the burden is on you to kind of explain why, because I think in most respects, I would argue the most compelling arguments favor the conclusion that we're going to see that these capabilities that allow these models to generate incredibly advanced mathematical analysis in some cases are likely to get more energy efficient to produce cheaper and therefore more easy to diffuse.

 

So these models have already largely mastered verbal communications. They're in the process of mastering nonverbal communication, and they're in the process of mastering very advanced mathematical reasoning. For a system that is partly trying to educate kids not only to be civically engaged, but also productive and able to earn a living, that's a challenge.

 

It's a worthy one of an ambitious country. How to figure out what mix of exposure to this technology, embedding of this technology in our curriculum and our learning, versus leaving it to one side to make sure certain cognitive abilities develop as they should and is going to be something that should occupy us substantially and cannot be ignored.

 

The sixth point is that the fate of the reform enterprise, the effort to make the system how it works now better, depends not only on wisdom and idealism, but on pragmatism. And here I just want to note that the report that you all are discussing today, to my mind, suggests how to move in a productive direction, how to create a fairly simple framework that allows for a large coalition to come together.

 

Why do coalitions matter? In the international work we do at Carnegie, we're constantly thinking about coalitions. If you want the US to be engaged in the world, you have to ask yourself, how do different parts of the country see that and understand it? If the US is going to effectively deal with the threat to Ukraine and the threat to the international system that that represents, what other countries can be persuaded that they have a stake in it too?

 

What does it mean for them? So when I think about this reform effort, I think about five key tenets. These are my words, but they are, in a way, I think, fairly aligned with the report you're discussing that could probably lead to a large coalition. The first is to invest in measurable excellence.

 

Not to content ourselves with thinking that we have some great schools in the country, some extraordinary teachers, some amazing classrooms. But to ask what is the level of excellence we should be trying to achieve? Even beyond that, how do we compare to other countries? How do we compare to America's best self?

 

And without going crazy on thinking that any classroom interaction can be reduced to a quantitative metric, how do we get the right mix of quantitative and qualitative tools to give us a feel for what is happening in those classrooms in real time, how much value is being added?

 

I would Note here that 12 or 13 years ago I would have made the case to you that literacy and math was so critical that maybe that should really have front and center priority relative to everything else. Today, I would say something slightly different. I think that the math and literacy stuff is important, but when I think about how to get through this moment civically, how to deal with AI stuff, it feels to me that a set of civic skills and capacities to compromise, to build coalitions, to listen actively, to understand, how to build support for a point of view, to navigate a room that's filled with contending voices, is almost as important.

 

Second is to reiterate the commitment to widely distributing opportunity and knowledge. That is to say, to not content ourselves with having some great schools, but to think about what the bottom of the range in terms of opportunity and socioeconomic status is experiencing and understand that that is going to require, and this is not unrelated to the work we've been doing at the Hewlett foundation is going to require a lot of experimentation at the local level, that what is going to work perfectly in Palo Alto is not going to work perfectly in Redwood City or in Calexico, potentially.

 

The third is to stay with a focus on caring adults, including teachers, and to remember the transformative impact that caring adults can have on kids that feel vulnerable. And ultimately how absolutely central, even in a technology focused world, effective teaching can be. What can we do to prepare those teachers effectively?

 

Are there even virtual reality simulations that can help us? Are there new ways of freeing up teacher time to have them focus more time on what really matters? Similar conversation happening in health care. The fourth point is this aspect of coalition building and looking for coalitions that are broad, that are not getting caught up in the details and having fights about things that don't matter.

 

But at the same time, don't lose the focus on the broader purpose and the substance and the need for change. And last but not least, to build a culture of continuous improvement, to think about what it means for every school in the country to find some way and the resources necessary to to be questioning its practices and asking what else needs to happen.

 

A lot of other narratives about what's happening, what could improve, could be put on the table. I would submit a number of them are too simple, including like we need to spend more money, which you already heard me say I'm skeptical about. But I do want to admit in closing that this is not a simple agenda, that it is ambitious, that it takes a lot of effort, that there'll be plenty of people who will argue, and maybe rightly so, about the details.

 

But I don't want to think about the alternative. I think anybody ultimately, and I'll close with this, who thinks that the aspiration we have and the level of achievement we have already delivered on education at the K12 public education level is adequate for this kind of world? I would have to be persuaded.

 

I feel like we have a lot more to do in the 20 years to come. We've seen some progress since the report, but in many respects I'm here to say that the challenges that we laid out 13 years ago remain with us. Thank you very much.

>> Presenter: Thank you very much, Tino, that was great.

 

We're going to open this up to the general audience in a minute, but just a couple questions that get your reaction to the ideas of making schools available to all were really made public with Lyndon Johnson in the mid-60s. And then we spent some time earlier in the day on A Nation at Risk.

 

And then we get down to our commission report, and you layer on to that the fact that achievement gaps haven't closed over that 60 year period. What's your take on that? Should we just keep saying the gaps are there or is there something we can do? You've sort of laid out a few ideas, but are you optimistic or?

 

>> Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar: So it's hard to be optimistic, but at the same time, I think it's important to recognize that we have not. Stood still completely. So we could talk about Mississippi, for example. And it's probably come up here that some of what seems to have worked in really increasing literacy outcomes, there is a single minded focus.

 

And that in a way, I admit, cuts a little against my point about broadening the focus from literacy and math to include a kind of civic capacity. But I do think there is something to the idea that without getting overly reductive or running into the bustle of anxiety about national standards, one could have a jurisdiction saying we're gonna diagnose a problem here locally.

 

And here in Mississippi, it's a little different from what might be playing out in Iowa or in California. And we're gonna set some priorities and some goals. I'll add one more thing, which is it is not a small thing to achieve the level of diffusion of education opportunities we have have achieved.

 

And again, I'm not satisfied. But I think we have effectively broadened higher education for a giant population in America. We can talk about its own shortcomings, and there are many. But that kind of effort and ambition is reflected in other incredible things the country has done. We could talk about mobilization in World War II, we could talk about dramatic increases in air quality, notwithstanding what we're seeing in Southern California right now.

 

We can talk about winning the Cold War. And I'm reluctant to give up on that level of ambition.

>> Presenter: So you've spent a large part of your life and career talking about regulations and administrative justice and so forth. How do we get the balance between regulating good things and trying to just.

 

You seem to be moving away from any regulatory solutions, but toward more output-based kinds of solutions.

>> Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar: I think it's right that you've gotta figure, what are your goals? And then have a little flexibility in reaching them. The work of Gillian Hadfield on regulatory markets has been influential to me.

 

But at the same time, I think it's important to realize that there are always some needs that are best served by being exactly clear about what's allowable and what's not allowable. I mean, look, it is helpful to think about how the US with all its failures and limitations, compares to so many other countries in the world.

 

And I do think that if you look at the entire mix of our political economy and compare it to Europe, to Japan, to any other advanced industrialized country at scale. Like it's one thing to be Denmark or Singapore, but if you're actually the kind of country that has counties that are larger than whole countries, then we have to understand that the enterprise of governing is Hard.

 

And I'll share with you just one manifestation of that that I think is pretty relevant to education, but is also relevant to national security, to environment, to other things I've worked on. And that is, as an American, you should want three things from your government most of the time.

 

You should want it to be efficient, to use dollars as smartly as possible and have it be as lean as possible. You should want it to be procedurally fair, to not treat you in an arbitrary way. If you and I are similarly situated, would not have you pay a quarter of the taxes that I pay.

 

And then three, you should have it be democratically responsive so that if there's a vote and an election, the elections matter. We just had one at the federal level, that's going to matter. I try to tell my administrative law students you can generally have two out of the three, but actually having all three is often incredibly difficult.

 

That's not a reason to stop pushing for the system to work better. But I do think many of the challenges we've had in education are rooted in that. And I'll give you an example. So I'm a big advocate of more local control for funding. I supported the local control funding formula for California.

 

I think that work nicely fit with what we talked about in the commission. But let's be perfectly clear, more local control means more variation how the money spent. And less of a certainty that if you're a disabled student and you're in two different places in California, that you will get exactly the same experience.

 

>> Presenter: So one final question, then we'll get to the audience. You spent a lot of time in the White House and working on national event affairs. What's the role of the federal government in this education activity?

>> Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar: Small but important, all of you know the facts and figures at the end of the day.

 

Depending on exactly how you count, it's 1 in $10 or so. But I found it to be a real revelation to spend time working at the state government level, in part because California is very big, obviously. So if you're working in a state supreme Court, you see this incredible snapshot of a very large and complicated place.

 

And it's environment problems, and where water's running out, where criminal justice is more of an issue, what's happening in the schools. But you do get the sense that much more so than Americans tend to realize so much of the action is at the state and local level. I mean, just as it's true that federal education spending is only a tiny fraction of the Total, that story is more generally true if you look at headcount in the federal government versus the states.

 

And I'm not saying the states and localities are perfectly efficient or we can't imagine changing that, but a vastly greater proportion of overall government employment is in the states and localities. If you take transfer payments and defense spending and debt service out of the equation, the lion's share of spending is at the state and local level.

 

I guess what I found working at the state level is that's not only an abstract thing. The courts that I used to visit when I would travel up and down the state and meet with state trial court judges, they are literally close to the people. There's very little filter between a family that's dealing with the agonizing problem of they're dissolving their marriage.

 

They've got a kid, you know, does the kid have an interpreter? Like, all those problems are very visceral and real. And I think one of the recurring challenges at the federal level, no matter who's in charge, is how not to lose that texture of closeness to the reality of things.

 

Which is why I think that continuous improvement point is always going to be about innovation playing out a little bit differently in different parts of the country.

>> Speaker 3: Yes, thanks. I want to thank you for your comments, Tino, and for being here today. Most of you don't know that he was actually in D.C. at the White House yesterday and flew back overnight to be able to be with us.

 

So thank you for your sacrifice and your service.

>> Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar: The weather's better here, by the way.

>> Speaker 3: Thank you. There is a question here, actually. We keep talking about the fact that we're not serving our students today as well as we possibly could. But I don't think we're talking enough about what I call the second generation problem, which is that we actually started disregarding students in growing numbers decades ago.

 

And so what we're having now are parents who themselves were not recipients of strong educational foundations, now being in charge and being a partner to education solutions for their children today. And part of that second generation problem is that they don't know the foundational things that they need in order to be strong partners and advocates for education, and they think survival in many ways is good enough for them.

 

So can you talk about the language that we use about describing the coming together that we need to have in our country in order to build the coalition for support for change? When in fact we have such a broad variation in the appetite, the interest, and the benefits of education, even among us as adults today.

 

>> Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar: So part of what I like about your question is the premise, which is that being a parent is difficult. And that even if you have a lot going for you and you're relatively prosperous, the judgment calls you have to make as a parent are difficult. And the deficits and challenges in our education system going across generations compound sometimes One piece of that puzzle to me, which is only partly an answer, but is about understanding that this increasing turn towards lifelong learning that we're seeing in higher ed for professional reasons has an element too, that is about families and it's about education, about how you can effectively manage what's happening in your family and help your kids through an increasingly complicated period of time.

 

I think there are ways to build that into the schools a little bit more. I've been impressed with the work of the After School alliance for many years as one example. But I also think it's important to realize that those efforts to sort of build communities of lifelong learners that are using learning partly to benefit their own kids, not just to advance their own careers is running into a reality which is.

 

And you know, scholars have written about this, you've probably seen different versions of this, but like, has America become a more atomized society, more come apart? To some degree, yes. Now it is true. We are still rooted in our families. And in fact, there's good data that over 20, 30 years families have not gotten more atomized.

 

And we're also deeply affiliated with certain national tribes we feel we belong to, some of them political. What seems to have suffered a little more, according to some, and I think this is quite plausible, is a kind of in between space where we're more disconnected from our village.

 

This isn't just COVID. I think the data suggests that people spend less time in coffee houses or doing community activities. There's a subplot about this might be about churches. And that lack of engagement, I think, makes it harder for the for best practices to diffuse in a more organic way.

 

So there's no perfect solution to that. But I think we have to start by being honest about the scale of what is afflicting us.

>> Speaker 3: That's great. I thank you very much.

>> Daniel Corr: Thanks for your comment, super interesting. My name is Daniel Corr and I'm president of Arizona Western College Community College in Yuma, Arizona.

 

Sunniest place on earth, go ahead and Google it.

>> Daniel Corr: It's a true fact. I also serve as president of the Arizona State Board of Education. Super interested about your thoughts on local control and would just pose the question how much local control is too much local control? We have some areas of rural Arizona, very rural, with multiple boards of education, K12, high school, even middle school.

 

How much is that is an impediment to the progress we're looking to make?

>> Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar: Thank you, great question, and thank you for your service. I guess I treat local control partly as a fact of life in that we're never going to quite get rid of the decentralization we have in some respects, right?

 

But the question ought to be, how can we better benefit from it and have it be less of a cost? Because this is a real cost, right? It's true that some local variation, some of what works in Santa Clara is not going to work in Redwood City. But it's also true that if we can't coordinate some things regionally, we have a real problem.

 

So I would start from the premise that some larger body, let's call it the state, is the best place to think about what outcomes we're really trying to achieve. And then beyond that, I think we'd all be better off with a greater degree of flexibility at the local level.

 

But perhaps also a little bit more honesty that sometimes there's too much localization. The courts are not a perfect analogy, but I can give you an example. When the federal judicial districts were drawn, they reflected the distribution of population in the late 19th century. So that means you've got a whole bunch of federal district judges per capita in Arkansas.

 

And I've nothing against Arkansas, my wife grew up in Oklahoma. Well, that maybe means I do have something against Arkansas. But anyway, but in California you have a much lower judge per capita basis. That's not ideal, I mean, we're competing with these great powers. We're trying to make the country benefit everybody.

 

We're dealing with these giant technological changes. So a little more flexibility in asking, can we consolidate some jurisdictions that really don't have justification? But philosophically, local control is key. It engages the community, it allows for local variation, as long as we're clear about the outcomes. Now let me add this little coda.

 

One thing that I think has also changed since the days when Rick and I were on the commission is that back then there was more hope and enthusiasm and optimism about a standards movement that was not top down from the federal government. It wasn't the secretary of education saying to states what they needed to teach, but it was the federal government and philanthropy as partners to try to bring about a little bit more coordination around standards so we could know how Arkansas and Oklahoma and Mississippi and Massachusetts and California were doing relative to each other.

 

I think it's fair to say this crowd knows that that enthusiasm has waned. And, you know, I would like to think that there's some balance we can strike. But I do think if you're going to set outcomes and provide for local flexibility, then there's a kind of trust but verify piece.

 

And this is where I still believe in some accountability to make sure we're headed in the right direction.

>> Presenter: Thank you, I think she was first.

>> Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar: Sorry.

>> Christina: Hi, I'm Christina, and I am on the Practitioners Council. I have a question with regards to civics and the use of the courts.

 

So Rhode Island family sued in the Cook v McKee case. And that was them saying that the state of Rhode Island had failed to prepare them to be adequate citizens. And it was a lot based on civics. But we know that case didn't win. However, that was like a window to peer into to see that parents and families are willing to challenge the education system and their rights in the court.

 

Do you foresee more of those kinds of challenges? And do you foresee that perhaps the courts will be more willing to adjudicate on those kinds of challenges?

>> Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar: Thank you. I remember many days of my time on the court, but one day I remember particularly, and I'm not going to go into all the details, but I'll just say is thinking through a petition we had that had to do with this kind of lawsuit in the California context.

 

And these are hard lawsuits, if you think about it from the perspective of these state courts that have to balance. If there's a right, but a vague right in the state constitution, how can you give it substance but not micromanage the legislature? It's a little bit related to the trade offs we were talking about involving local education.

 

But in that particular case, the state trial court, the trial judge that had heard the case, had found that there was a real problem, let me put it in a layperson's terms. And that there had been a lot of evidence offered to indicate that the right to an education that the California constitution provided and the equal protection provisions of the California constitution really were implicated in ways that called for a remedy to happen.

 

Now that quickly went up to the state appellate court because you can imagine if you're the defendant in that case, your school district thinking, well, last thing I want to deal with. I mean, I'm well intentioned, I want my kids to have better education, but I don't need a court telling me how to do this or like what is the court going to.

 

Then I order the legislature to do something different and so on. And the appellate court decided that the trial court had been wrong. Now this gives you and had cited that this was a little bit of a different case compared to most, that it threatened to kind of intrude a little bit too much in the province of the legislature.

 

The interesting but also the hard thing about my previous day job was that those were the things that came to us. And sometimes the hard questions were not just how are you going to decide the case? But should that case be granted review? Or do you just kind of let it be at the appellate level?

 

And in the end in that case, case, this is public record so I can talk about it. I was one of three justices that voted to take that case. You know, query whether we would have landed in one place or the other or somewhere in between, but at least to take on the responsibility of deciding it because there is such a right in the California Constitution.

 

In the end, the court did not take the case. But in answer to your question directly, I believe it is likely more of that litigation will happen for two reasons. I think the basic message that I tried to share with you today, I suspect is shared in this room.

 

And that is a belief that however good we're doing, we could do better. And that therefore, second, we have a responsibility as Americans who care about education to find the right way forward. Sometimes it's going to be to elect certain candidates to state legislatures or to think differently about how to run a school, or to persuade philanthropy to do something different or, or to maybe tweak something and teach our education, but that we're not as good as we can be.

 

Some folks will take that discussion into what then does the right to an education in the Rhode island constitution mean? And maybe I can come back with a case about that. But the last thing I'll say about this is that it's important to remember that a lot of these laws that we have on the books are not only meant to affect court judgments, they're effect to shape the public imagination and to affect what government agencies do and how they do it.

 

So I believe that my hope will be that that will actually push for more experimentation and innovation, more willingness to tweak how we do things so that over time we can learn from what's happening in different states.

>> Christina: Thank you.

>> Presenter: Thanks so much, one final question?

>> Speaker 6: Yes, Justice Quaylor, interestingly enough, my question was on your descent in Gara.

 

>> Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar: We teed it up perfectly.

>> Speaker 6: Yes, and so it followed directly. And I got it was an eloquent dissent, by the way. And thank you very much for the time that you put into thinking that one through. My question for you and that for those who are in the room who don't know about it ended up it was regarding dismissal, retention, and tenure rights for teachers and whether or not it is signed totally ineffective teachers to classrooms.

 

But my question for you is that the substance of the case was brought under equal protection theory. And is there another legal theory that you've gone through and thought of that might be successful before the court and would perhaps supersede the appellate court decision in the case?

>> Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar: Thank you, I appreciate the question and I'll say some things about it.

 

I haven't thought that through completely and don't want to do it quite in real time here completely. That said, you know, let me put it this way. I think litigation by its nature requires taking a legal goal or theory and fitting it to the facts, right? So let's just say that I think in that particular context, the crux of the claim was a kind of inequity that probably lent itself well to equal protection.

 

Can I imagine that across this very great and big country with lots of different states that, as Louis Brandeis said, are meant to be laboratories of democracy? And even in this great big state of California, there are other ways of making the case that a right to an education deserves a remedy using something other than equal protection.

 

Probably, yes, I'm gonna say, I mean, and it will depend a little bit on the specifics of the state laws, but I would say there are questions that are implicated that might involve statutes that have been promulgated by the legislature to give meaning to that right to an education.

 

You know, maybe there are questions involving due process in some states. I mean, generally speaking, not to get too technical, but we've gotten away from substance to due process a bit. But that's played out a little differently in some states relative to others. So I think maybe reinforcing my answer to the previous question.

 

Litigation is never a perfect remedy to anything like, let's be clear about that. But we don't live in a perfect world, we never have, right? And I think the interesting thing about the American legal system is like how do you deal with the second or third best world with a whole bunch of lawyers and powerful courts historically?

 

And what proper role can that play in reimagining coalitions? And I will say one more general thing before concluding on this one, which is sometimes being a legislator is difficult. I mean, it often is difficult, right, because you have to do all kinds of different things and you're assembling your own coalitions.

 

And there are states of the world where even a legislator who may not start off wanting to do something can benefit and end up in a better place by saying, you know what, on this one, actually the courts have tied our hands. We're gonna have to do something that might not be as easy to do.

 

So I just note that as one dimension of a larger debate about what's the right role for courts versus the legislature.

>> Presenter: Tina, wonderful time.

>> Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar: Thank you. Thank you for the work you do.

>> Jim Peyser: My name is Jim Pizer and the reason I'm here, other than moderating this panel, is that I'm a member of the Practitioners Council. I'm also the former Secretary of Education in Massachusetts and former Chair of the State Board of Education as well. And I'm joined here by Jeremy Tucker, who is the Superintendent of schools, the Liberty Public Schools in Kansas.

 

I guess it's how far outside of Kansas City?

>> Jeremy Tucker: Kansas City. On the Missouri side.

>> Jim Peyser: On the Missouri side, Yes.

>> Jeremy Tucker: I gotta clarify that.

>> Jim Peyser: Good point.

>> Jeremy Tucker: Yeah. Home of the Chiefs, by the way.

>> Jim Peyser: There we go. Liberty is home of the Chiefs.

>> Jeremy Tucker: Well, Kansas City.

 

>> Jim Peyser: Okay, that I know. And Philip Howard, who is an author and attorney who wrote a book years ago, I don't know how many, maybe 30 years ago, on the Death of Common Sense, which is a. Was sort of a watershed moment which has led to more books and more publishing on his part, but I think provocative part of the public policy dialogue, including in particular the one that we're having here today about the role of government and governance in public education, in particular its relationship to the autonomy and accountability in our public schools.

 

So this particular session is really focused on one of the central recommendations coming out of the Council's report, which is flipping the system or reversing the traditional hierarchy of our public education system, whereby state governments and district central offices establish detailed rules and regulations, issue prescriptive mandates that the schools are then expected to faithfully implement, and that the.

 

And the Council's recommendations are to flip that basic design or structure in such a way as to empower school leadership and school leadership teams to make decisions. And assigning the higher level sort of governance agencies the job of providing resources and support while maintaining and measuring baseline standards.

 

In other words, moving from a unitary school system to a system of distinctive and autonomous and accountable schools. In many respects, I think, as the report indicates, building on some of the lessons coming out of the charter sector, and particularly the gap busting schools that Mackie made reference to earlier today.

 

And the basic premise behind all this, of course, is that one size doesn't fit all, and that effective practice, and importantly, organizational change requires real agency and ownership on the part of the frontline educators and leaders who are actually doing the work with real children and real families and real communities, and that therefore schools should be primarily responsible or held primarily responsible for student outcomes rather than bureaucratic compliance.

 

So that's the big idea. And I know you've all heard about that through the course of the day, and that's certainly central to the. The Council's findings in the report. But as with any idea, it's easier said than done, which is what we're here today to discuss in this particular panel.

 

Trying to understand what a flip system would actually look like and how we would get from where we are to where we might want to be and doing so in a way that is balancing this imperative for autonomy with a similar imperative for accountability for results. So with that, let me, Phil, let me turn it over to you first to give us some sort of higher level framing, if you will, for this idea about why it's important to empower frontline leaders and workers, public and private and education and non education to have responsibility for making decisions for themselves without being sort of tied up in knots if you go with compliance.

 

>> Philip Howard: Well, thank you, Jim. Thanks to Hoover and Mackey for having me here. I have one idea in life which I've parlayed into seven books so far, which is that only humans make things happen. And whatever the systems are important and pedagogy and curriculum and all sorts of all that's important.

 

But the activating force in anything, except maybe an automatic check dispersal from Social Security or something, are humans, humans who make it happen. And we rebuilt our governing systems. And I'm starting above schools now, after the 1960s on the idea that public institutions could be run like a software program, and regulation could be a software program and all these institutes.

 

So never such a thing as a thousand page rule book before the 1960s. California has 750 pages of rules on sex education that the principals and teachers are supposed to comply with. That's 1 of like 100,000 pages of regulations that apply to the schools. And what all that does is it first gradually but then increasingly crowds out the room for human judgment.

 

And we created, and Miriam Friedman here who's an expert on special education, so she and I have worked together in the past on this. We've created this system also where if anybody complains or doesn't like what they're doing that they have a right to have a hearing. And then you're supposed to prove by objective evidence what's right or wrong.

 

Well, that's impossible. The subjective judgments needed to maintain order in a classroom or to do what's right or to balance the interests of one kid against another. Those judgments can't be dissected into component parts, they can be judged by other people. You can say that doesn't strike me as fair or something, but you can't put it through a legal sieve without actually distorting the judgment.

 

So I was asked to write a paper for this conference, which I honored to do. And I went back, I'm not an education expert, reading a lot of books and rereading books and such. I called up Rick Hest, who's at aei, who's an education expert, and I said, I've been reading all this material, and if I were like you, and I spent my life working on these issues, I think the thing to do is to commit suicide.

 

>> Jim Peyser: And on that happy note, we'll move immediately to the break.

>> Philip Howard: And so, because you get this idea of the wheel going round and round and round and round and nothing ever changing. And so I wrote a book, basically. I mean, I wrote the book, I could turn it into a book.

 

I wrote a paper on basically saying there's no such thing. Asserting, as a matter of fact, that you can't have a good school that doesn't have a good culture. And you can't have a good culture unless the educators feel they own their choices. The teacher has to feel that she is in control of the classroom, doesn't mean she's not subject to pedagogy.

 

And the principal can't inspire mutual trust among the teachers and everyone else if he or she doesn't have authority to maintain standards and values. They have to own it. They have to come to school and own it. And I assert this not as an argument, but as microeconomic truth.

 

I trained as an economist and did economics work before I became a lawyer. I just think it's true, and that has implications for the organization. Organization of schools which leads to the flipping of the.

>> Jim Peyser: Yeah, and you mentioned one thing, we can come back to this later too.

 

But that those decisions and those actions that are taken by an empowered educator, principal or teacher or what have you can be judged or second guessed. Any, any sort of sense for how that kind of process can work in a way that doesn't mean that everything you do is constantly under a microscope.

 

>> Philip Howard: Yes, I mean, the way any good school works, the way any good organization works is that people have values. There's an iterative process where people kind of work their way out or work their way in and such. The principle either inspires trust by the fairness and the quality of the judgments the principal makes or doesn't.

 

And the job of the people above the principal, the superintendent or whoever is to judge how good a job they're doing. I mean, the proof's in the pudding here, but it always involves choices that are inherently subjective that other people have to accept or not in the hierarchy or in the community, parents, et cetera.

 

It's very human.

>> Jim Peyser: I guess what you're leaning towards is that essentially judge my work by the outcome that I produce as opposed to second guess me for how I got there.

>> Philip Howard: As we learn from no Child Left behind, focusing too much on the outcome can lead to all kinds of other distortions.

 

So there is a kind of a trade. There are these really complex trade offs between and I agree that learning is the most important thing, you know, and you can in fact sort of judge that. And we should talk about, you know, kind of creating a better mechanism for moving forward and comparing how that works.

 

But fundamentally, within an organization, the person or the people in charge have to be able to make those judgments. If you don't trust the principal to be fair. I just have this discussion with Randy Weingarten. She said we need to have due process to protect against people who.

 

All these principals who abuse the teachers. I said, all the principals who abuse the teacher. She said, yes, we have to do birth. I said, why don't we do this? Why don't we have a parent teacher committee that has authority to veto any termination decision, Just have a check.

 

They know who the good teachers are and who aren't. Let them do that. No, that wouldn't be good enough, but of course it is good enough. So you can put a checker balance on any decision that you think is important, but you can't get rid of the fact that the principal's job is to judge in part of his job is how the teachers are doing so.

 

>> Jim Peyser: Jeremy, you're living this in Liberty and have helped design and create a system that has distinctive schools in them, that has authorities that are devolved down to the school level and maybe even beyond. I wonder if you could talk a little bit both about what the snapshot is of Liberty Public Schools, but also how you've gone about applying these sort of principles of autonomy and empowerment of educators in the real world.

 

>> Jeremy Tucker: No, that's great. I'd rather just sit and listen to Phil, honestly. But great to be part of the conversation. And I go back to grad school and a Scrabble word that I was introduced to, and that's this notion of the principle of subsidiarity. Right. And it's that idea that decision making needs to sit and live where decisions have the greatest impact.

 

And so when we think about autonomy, we could also insert the word agency, whether it's for our learners or whether it's for educators, administrators at the building level. I think that's the sweet spot. To your point earlier. And so our journey in Liberty Public Schools really started before my arrival.

 

I've been there now over a decade, which is a long run for a superintendent, but I think the value in that has resulted in being able to work alongside our board of education, our entire community, toward a lot of these aims. And so rewind with me for a second.

 

When I entered into Liberty Public Schools, coming from a rural district into a suburban district, there was a higher level of professionalism in part, but then also a little bit different expectation. And that's not to negate my experience in my rural community, because I had been there for many, many years in Southwest Missouri, just to acknowledge that there was a significant difference.

 

And so, as a leader, as leaders come and go in and out of systems, rural, suburban, urban, into charter space, just the acknowledgement that leadership needs to look different. And growing up, I had a lot of questions, and I thought I would enter into Liberty Public Schools with one simple question.

 

And that question was, what does it mean to be learner centered? And that's come up this week, right, in terms of, well, I thought we've always been learner centered. What are you talking about? And to look at it from a lifelong educator, in moving from the idea of aiming to the middle, you're going to lose some, you're going to get some, you're going to move on to the next unit, you're going to move on to the next grade level, you're going to move on to the next year, and that that's how the system works.

 

What we're talking about in terms of shifting toward being student centered or learner centered is really the foundational piece to flipping the system. And so we've been on this trajectory over the course of a 10 year period to not only answer that question, but as was alluded to earlier this morning, how can we make ourselves a learning system?

 

And that's not a new concept in education. It started several years ago out of Adlai Stevenson High School with this notion of learning communities. But it was relegated to the building level. And so we brought that notion all the way up to our Board of Education, where we begin our study sessions with our own professional learning.

 

As a board of Education, we've done a variety of book studies, we've done a variety of site visits. Some districts don't want their Board of Education members walking into their schools. Some districts want everything running through the superintendent of schools. That's not how we do things. We want our board to be informed because they represent our community.

 

They represent our parents and our families in a variety of industries and sectors. And so by chiseling away at all of this question around, what does it mean to be learner centered, we started identifying, you know, key ideas as far as, you know, values or, you know, priorities, aspirations, all the while effectuating our strategic plan that I had inherited.

 

That started to shift as we started thinking about, you know, putting those pieces together and creating new school models like a choice school, an elementary school that we had just opened the first year that I arrived that was choice based within our existing public school setting. Eventually, we've added a couple of micro schools.

 

Along the way, we've led our community in conversations around portraits of a graduate and what that looks like by engaging our students, our parents, our educators, our business leaders across the area around what are those knowledge areas or skills and dispositions that we need to identify that we want our kids to obtain while they're in school, but that are also portable into college or career or the workforce.

 

But at the same time, how do we reskill adults toward understanding those skills and dispositions and how they fit within content areas and grade levels? We've taken that a step further and we've identified learner progressions that then are in support of those portrait of a graduate areas. In terms of what does it look like for early childhood?

 

What does it look like. Look like for elementary? What does it look like for middle school and on into high school? All the while recognizing the reason why we're able to do some of this work is because of our unique context in Liberty Public Schools. We're not the same as downtown Kansas City and the circumstances that they face, and I acknowledge that.

 

But at the same time, I want those students to have the same opportunities that we might have in our school district, in our community. So the last thing I would say, Jim, to that piece, as we think about flipping the system, while you're able to do it in some systems and some districts, how might we position ourselves to help one another?

 

And that's what we've really taken on in our district in terms of being positioned for purpose and sharing and learning and growing one from another. Earlier it was mentioned this notion of, keep me accountable for my outcomes, don't worry about how I got there. I want to know how you got there, as do all of our area districts as we work to move our district forward, our region forward, as well as our state.

 

>> Jim Peyser: So one of the things that sort of jumps out from that description is the depth and persistence of engagement with the key stakeholders on this journey that you've been part of. I think, Phil, you've actually written about this too, about actually getting people in a room to try to solve a problem together.

 

Is the way you develop trust, is the way you come to, resolution of problems that may seem insoluble when, for example, a superintendent. And I've seen this certainly in a variety of places, but it's also true about political leaders. make a declaration, we're going to do this, and, you're all going to get on board.

 

Or they're in a sales mode as opposed to a problem solving mode. So is that a fair description of what you went through and how you got to this point, and B, to what extent is that? I think it's replicable. But how do you get people to sort of understand that that's the kind of work they need to do in order to get to the point you've gotten to?

 

>> Jeremy Tucker: Kenny Rogers lyrics comes to mind know when to hold them, know when to fold them right or there are times where you can be a little bit more forthright in terms of those declarations that need to occur, that need to happen other times when you have to bring people along with you.

 

And if you've ever spent any time in Missouri, the Show Me State, more often than not you need to work together to bring people along with you. And so there are a lot of examples of instances where perhaps it's planting seeds as a leader or exposing people to ideas or concepts, or intentionally bringing in a specific book to learn about examples across the country.

 

Or becoming members in the League of Innovative Schools to learn from other districts or across our nation. In other instances, the ideas actually come from outside of your leadership in partnering with other industry and other sectors. And there are some great examples of successes that we've had in partnering with other sectors to create opportunities for kids, real world learning experiences.

 

There are some other examples where that was just a complete flop from that standpoint. I think knowing your context and knowing how far you can get, how quickly allows for some longevity, but it also hopefully creates that staying power of concepts and innovation that outlasts the leader. That's really the true sign of a learning community.

 

>> Jim Peyser: And Phil, maybe from other sectors or other experiences that you've had, to what extent have you seen the power of that sort of collaborative problem solving and to the last point, the extent to which it makes whatever gets put into place sustainable over time?

>> Philip Howard: Well, it sounds like at liberty you have a fair amount of innovation and self questioning.

 

You're starting new micro schools. You have a lot of things going on there. And so the general point I'd make is that authority has a gravitational force. If people think that the people running the school can actually make changes and make a difference, then they will come closer, not only with their own ideas, but to avoid the lousy ideas of their neighbor because they may be influenced.

 

So it draws people together the same way litigants, when they're on the courthouse steps all of a sudden start talking because a decision might be coming down, right. And so the idea, the flipping the system idea, I think is powerful as a community dynamic, not only because it's empowering.

 

If someone has the power to make a decision, then your ideas can make a difference, right. Whether you're the teacher or a parent or community, right, so if the principal has no authority makes it, who cares? So I think it's so I think the idea of empowerment of the superintendent, the principal, everybody is incredibly, potentially engaging of the community and then similarly engaging of parents.

 

Who are probably, according to some people, the most important teachers in getting them involved in the education and the progress of their students and such. So just reason one for flipping the system is to give people the motivation and the opportunity to actually become part of an active, bridge, breathing, organic thing called their school system.

 

And their school, and just to jump to other experience, we're in a period in this country where the ground is shaking, right. We've just elected Donald Trump again. We have the Doge thing going. Everybody, two thirds of America thinks government needs major overhaul. All this kind of stuff.

 

There are no coherent visions about how to do any of that. Musk and those guys are into cutting what government does, but they're not actually have any ideas of how to make things work better. So I think there's actually a huge opportunity if all this could be crystallized into a new and more radical vision, that restoring community control, not of everything.

 

But of the operation of the schools is maybe in conjunction with some other things that we'll talk about, which some of which will be quite controversial, which we'll talk about, can really engage the public imagination and get us past what's been a kind of a steady loop of education reforms that don't do too much.

 

>> Jim Peyser: I guess, again, the thing I'm taking away from this discussion is one way of looking at sort of autonomy or empowering educators, if you will, is hands off. Go do whatever you want to do. Every man for himself. But what you're talking about and what both of you, I think, are describing is creating space for collaborative work to move communities, schools, or local school systems along together, and presumably in a way that's driving continuous improvement and better outcomes.

 

But is not just put the superintendent in charge or put the principal in charge and let him tell everybody what to do. That empowerment has much more to do with that collaboration and that team building. And in some ways, this gets to what Andrew Luck was talking about earlier and his football analogy.

 

The way in which football players are empowered is that they're part deep, deeply ingrained part of a team.

>> Jeremy Tucker: Yeah, and I think I go back to. To that notion of our collective learning, right? And so thinking about leadership differently from just a, hey, here's the list of compliance pieces that principals or district directors need to be thinking about when you gather together for a meeting.

 

We don't do that. Instead, we talk about leadership development and we talk about, for example, what I'm learning, right.? What I'm seeing and what I'm hearing. So takeaways from the Hoover Institution Summit will be on my radar for next week when I gather my leadership team together. But then when we talked yesterday about flipping the system, if this is brand new to you and you're reading the document for the first time as far as the report, you may come away with this picture of a complete automatic inversion.

 

Where I think we landed yesterday is, yeah, that's in part the end goal or perhaps the aspired vision, but perhaps it includes some guardrails along the way, right? Some parameters, and I think that's our approach in our district as far as idea sharing and thinking about doing things differently.

 

Whether it's project based learning or mastery based learning or project lead the way and how that's integrated into our science curriculum, providing those guardrails and then tasking our leaders and even down to our teachers. How does this show up in your classrooms or in your schools, allowing them to wrestle with it and come back kind of a show and tell as it relates to it, because more often than not.

 

They can tether to a lot of these concepts or ideas that may be deemed as innovation and that they actually show up in their schools. When we started our conversation around our portrait of a graduate and those skills and dispositions, initially it was, here we go, more on the plate, right?

 

We've heard that phrase before. Well, in reality, once they started unpacking and it's like, yeah, we do this, we do this. We talk about empathy, we talk about critical thinking. We teach our kids that as early as early childhood. And those conversations then allow us to coalesce around those commonalities or those themes that we share one with another across our schools or classrooms that then just continues to move us forward.

 

It's really organic in its inception.

>> Jim Peyser: So the idea of guardrails, I think, is an important one that we ought to dig a little deeper on. One sort of very specific part of that is there's currently a set of rules and regulations and mandates and what have you that govern public education.

 

And they sort of establish guardrails that are very sort of tight in your experience. And Phil, if you've got any Observations on this as well. What would be the big, top three things that you would want to remove from that book of regulations in order to provide more space for actual decision making at the local or school level?

 

>> Jeremy Tucker: Top three.

>> Jim Peyser: Top three.

>> Jeremy Tucker: My former commissioner of education is in the room in Missouri, and she and I have had a long relationship working together on some of this as it relates to how do we move things forward in Missouri. We talked a little bit earlier about funding and what that looks like.

 

And it's in its variations across the country that continues to be a challenge that in Missouri we can't necessarily undo because no one really has the history or the understanding on how to approach that. So that's probably an important piece is that more like restrictions on how funds can be spent as opposed to just general revenue?

 

It's not as much that as it is by zip code. We're still very much obviously property tax driven. And the result of that obviously is the haves and have nots. And so we're open for the conversation, but I don't know that anyone is eager to really take that on.

 

More recently, the conversations that we've had, and really this is item 2 and 3, would relate to accountability and assessment and that we're still a fairly traditional state in how we view assessment and approach that. Fairly traditional as it relates to accountability. Albeit we've been working on the conversations with various task force and groups and committees going on 16 years now.

 

And so we step in and out of these conversations, but really have seen more momentum in these last couple of years in working with our state Board of Education over the last two years, have taken 40 school districts into innovation zone status to be able to design new assessment and accountability structures.

 

Of course, then the federal implications of how do we pursue those waivers and so forth. What I have found is that oftentimes you look at policies or statutes or legislative provisions that you may be seeking waivers from, and lo and behold, they're connected to these pieces over here.

 

So what you were asking for actually isn't permissible because it's required over here. Does that make sense? And so we're in the throes of that of living in two, currently two accountability report cards, one from the state, one that's from these innovation zones, at the same time designing a new assessment system while beholden to the previous assessment system.

 

And so this conversation is really being led from the field in collaboration with our state department, Department of Education, with hopefully more to come.

>> Jim Peyser: So the premise behind the council's recommendations are that there is some kind of assessment and accountability system in order to, that's fair and valid and reliable.

 

>> Jeremy Tucker: Yeah,

>> Jim Peyser: all of those are like heavily freighted words that mean something to certainly to statisticians and psychometricians. But is it your expectation or hope that you that it's possible to actually develop a fair, valid, reliable assessment and accountability system that is actually sort of has high standards, if you will, and is meaningful and isn't just a watering down or tapering over?

 

>> Jeremy Tucker: And that's, that's a non negotiable for these districts that are part of the innovation zone. And if anything the work is actually more rigorous in that we're talking about competency based learning, we're talking about through your assessment. We're talking about both status and growth through year across years, all of those pieces working closely with several psychometricians in partnership with our state department of education to ensure that what we're thinking about designing, passes muster, so to speak.

 

And so I think all of those pieces coupled with, and we've not talked about this too much, relevant, engaging, meaningful experiences and that you can have the best standards in the world. But if kids aren't engaged and they don't see the relevance in those standards or the instruction that's occurring, then they're probably going to nod off, right.

 

And so how can we maintain high expectations in both spaces from a curricular, from an assessment standpoint, instructional standpoint. But also incorporate those experiential or real world learning experiences so that every kid as they graduate high school walks across the stage with not only a diploma in hand, but what we're calling a plus one experience.

 

That might be an internship, might be a client connected project, an industry recognized credential apprenticeship, significant dual credit attainment while in college or an early college experience.

>> Jim Peyser: And Phil, you've given this some thought. We've been talking about this a little bit. How would you, what's your sort of perspective on how we should approach this idea of maintaining the accountability and empowerment of the, of the folks on the local level, but at the same time having a meaningful accountability system?

 

>> Philip Howard: Well, first, accountability is vital in all organizations and societies. People, even informally are accountable to each other for their civility and fairness and everything else. And accountability is essential to, in an institution as essential to mutual trust. As I mentioned, people have to believe that everybody else is held to the same standards and that you want to come to work and feel pride in the school you work at.

 

It's because everybody's pulling their weight, and there's so many surveys. Of schools where teachers have gotten discouraged where performance doesn't matter, right? So we haven't talked about the unions yet. We'll talk about that presumably in a second, if no one has a gun here. And so there's been a lot of attention for our entire lifetimes on trying to make things better.

 

And the lawyers who are charged with trying to make things better invariably write more rules and procedures and forms to fill out and assessments. That's just how they do their job, what they do, right? No one that I can think of, except by starting new schools or charter schools, really has actually said, well, why don't we actually have a spring cleaning, why don't we have an audit and figure out what we're trying to accomplish and take the body of these rules, I mean, we're talking about shelves and shelves, volumes of forms and rules and such, and make it so that they become practical for the educators who are expected to comply with them and to do the assessments or whatever.

 

So having guidelines for assessments is a particularly good idea. Having 16 page guidelines for each teacher is required by the state of Nevada, which Rick Hess has written about, which takes literally weeks of professional time each year just to fill out the assessments is not a practical way of doing it.

 

You can evaluate teachers without having all these boxes to be filled out as if it's somehow a computer program. It's not. It's a judgment. And so I think there needs to be a kind of almost an audit of how much space is left over. What are our public, what do we need as guardrails, as legal guardrails?

 

And can they be done by principles instead of detailed rules that can be evaluated? Because many of them can be. They don't have to be specific rules that say exactly how to do this and that, they can be general principles. So that itself is a really radical idea.

 

Let's create, if you will, a new constitution for schools that includes assessments. Whatever we think is necessary, but also honors the fact that humans only have so much time and their main job is to focus on the students.

>> Jim Peyser: So one of the things that we talked about a little earlier offline was instead of relying at least solely on assessments, tests of student knowledge, that and data collection and filing reports and that sort of thing.

 

That's something that's more akin to the UK inspectorate system where people, let's call them experts, I know maybe that's a loaded word. But come in and go into classrooms, interview people and produce some kind of report about what's going on.

>> Philip Howard: Right, really important. So I know this controversial about whether it should be state level or any level or national level.

 

And I know there's a lot of controversy over what ought to be valued. How much do you value educational achievement and test scores and how much do you value other things? And I understand those are all complex issues. And I'm not, you know, I don't have an opinion on what the best balance is.

 

But having a centralized authority that comes in without any action forcing powers to evaluate all the schools in this country by the same set of standards would be useful, even if you disagree with the standards, because at least it's a frame of reference which then school districts or states or others could respond to or critique or whatever.

 

But at least you're all on the same page. And now as we were discussing, when no child left came behind committee, states adopted different standards, then they devalued the standards and then, yeah, it was just all over the place. They didn't mean anything. So. So I'm not a metrics person generally, but I do believe that organizations, particularly complex organizations with complex products, education, with very different inputs, many different children with very different aptitudes and background, you need a frame of reference.

 

And if I were setting up the radical agenda, which would include much more local autonomy, clear cutting most of the bureaucracy and replacing it with clearer standards and principles on things that are important, one of the things I would do is have a centralized mechanism for assessing children so at least we can compare them.

 

>> Jim Peyser: Yep, shifting gears a little bit. So empowering people is one thing, having those people be kind of ready and able to take advantage of that empowerment is another. And so I wonder from both of your perspectives, and maybe starting with you, Jeremy, what does it take? And I think you've already touched on some of this really, but what does it take to build the capacity of your team, of your school leaders, of your educators in order to be able to take advantage of the responsibilities that they've been given and the authorities that they, that they have to make decisions?

 

>> Jeremy Tucker: Yeah, it's a little bit of if I only knew then what I know now. Right. And what I've learned over my maturity maturing over the course of now 28 years in the profession. And that's what kind of strikes me from the report in terms of thinking through what does a fully flipped system look like today in trying to get people equipped in terms of developing them professionally, if it's a classroom teacher or a leader, you know, shifting some of that authority down to the classroom level that currently we may buffer them from, to some extent, some of the pieces, the things they don't want.

 

Right. And how do you get there? And so I think it is a complete shift in leadership development coupled with the rate of change. We've talked about that some particularly as it relates to artificial intelligence. But also add too that the wealth of information and knowledge that's at your fingertips, right?

 

So as an educator with all this autonomy, I'm in a position of having to pick and choose what I'm going to integrate, what I'm going to apply, how I'm going to approach things. I appreciate the inclusion of knowledge bases and instructional stockpiles where I can go and I can get a lot of this information.

 

We have that now through what Works Clearinghouse. We have it through other aims, other entities, teachers sharing information one with another. But you have to think about the leadership piece and the professional development piece as well, knowing that it is continuous, as we've heard from other sectors, it's always sharpening the profession, sharpening your skill set, and always learning and always growing.

 

And so then what are those right things that we wanna try to integrate? And I think that's where the value of a state education agency or an LEA comes into place and kind of steering that vision or casting that vision in part that then results in some of those guardrails.

 

>> Philip Howard: Right, I think the value of coaches, we're talking the football player here, the value of coaches is unbelievable. I mean, getting people who can observe. What you're doing say, maybe you should try this or somebody else did that. We have a daughter who's a teacher who now is a teacher of teachers.

 

She actually just has a book coming out with scholastic on the words that teachers use and this sort of choice of words and stuff. There's so much, teaching is so complex and it's so hard. And it takes such a high emotional iq, you know, to be a good teacher.

 

And a principal is hard in different ways. And so having coaches having the ability to do that, which by the way, the unions don't, you know, they're another reason to. We're going to get to this.

>> Jim Peyser: I think we're going to get to it right now. I see you go from the next three times and I haven't walked through.

 

>> Philip Howard: Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's all your fault. So anyway, but I think the role of coaches is really undervalued. And if you look at the resources that the schools use for this and that and what the budgets were used for, my God. If you had more room for coaches and helpers and good charter schools, if there are particular problems, they have people, you know, a third teacher will come in and help manage the thing.

 

It's just it's such a complex profession that you're honoring the autonomy of the people by more nuanced evaluations of what they're doing and improving them.

>> Jim Peyser: And related to the role of the principal and some lessons I think from the charter school experience, is that if you want the principal to be the instructional leader, you have to free that person from a lot of other responsibilities.

 

And so the organizational structure, even within schools, you know, needs to be differentiated in order to make it possible for people to do their best work and to do what they're good at. But, yeah, go ahead.

>> Jeremy Tucker: Can I mention something? To kind of steal from the hospitality sector, as you're stating that, the role of the principal, instructional manager versus kind of the day to day management.

 

There's a book entitled Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara, if you've read that. And it speaks specifically about kind of the corporate aspect of a restaurant, right? Or the kitchen side of the restaurant as compared to the other side of the wall. And that being the service space, the front of the restaurant, and the value in knowing both spaces and the interplay between the two.

 

I think that's what I wonder about. If I get to this space in which autonomy is provided, do I solely focus on one side as compared to having a holistic leader that truly understands both the management Front and the instructional side from that standpoint, I think you can have both.

 

You don't have to pick one or the other. But that, that becomes part of the challenge in resetting what leadership looks like and what those supports look like, whether it's coaches or mentors, whatever that might, might serve as far as students in the classroom.

>> Jim Peyser: So collective bargaining.

 

So first, Liberty Public Schools does not subject to collective bargaining. So he has no reason to complain about anything apparently, it's all his fault personally if anything goes wrong. But you know, this idea of leadership, teams of educators and staff playing untraditional roles, working together as a team in a collaborative way is not necessarily well aligned to typical contracts, collective or otherwise, where people are trying to stay very narrowly in their lane and work in those, you know, specific way at a specific time, time and place.

 

And, you know, that's what they do. So in some places where there's no collective bargaining, this may be easier to overcome. Although I think the culture of schools and staffing is similar in a lot of places, even if there's no collective bargaining agreement. But how do we overcome that one?

 

How do we. I mean, empowerment zones has been mentioned a couple of times and those typically happen with some agreement from a union to waive certain requirements. So in theory it's possible, but it's still on a small scale. How do we approach this?

>> Philip Howard: Well, particularly in the big states and the big cities, the big, the blue states, California, Illinois, New York, we're really dominated by public unions, politically and otherwise.

 

So I identify two villains in the paper I wrote for this conference. One is overbearing red tape from the top that crowds out the educators ability to actually use their judgment in daily choices. And the other are the union controls. And the union controls are really about control.

 

They're all about restrictions. If it were about fairness, it would fail the test because teachers are polled about whether accountability is fair, and the answer is no, it's not, people aren't accountable. So it's corrosive of the culture for the reasons I mentioned. It's not that you have so many bad teachers.

 

I think what you have are bad cultures because people know performance doesn't matter. So you have people who feel their job is simply to do what's required as opposed to do what's inspired. And school should be about doing what's inspired. So unions are typically not part of the discussion because they're treated as a state of nature.

 

In fact, public employee unions, teachers unions, got authority beginning only in the late 60s as an accident of the rights revolution without anyone thinking it through. And the result wasn't to eliminate labor strife, but to create labor strife, because now they had a sword to wield against. And they started striking to get more and more, and they got more and more so that schools in many districts are virtually unmanageable.

 

Chicago has 45 schools where not one student is proficient in reading or math. And no one in Chicago has the authority to change how those schools operate. There was this 18 year study in Illinois that found that out of 95,000 teachers, give or take an average of two per year, were dismissed for performance.

 

So here you have miserably performing school districts with near zero accountability because they treat jobs as a kind of property right. It's not an obligation to do, a job's not a property, right? A job's a job, I don't know if you've gotten fired before, I have, surprisingly. I mean, who can imagine?

 

So who,

>> Philip Howard: The teachers union now has about four and a half million members in this country. Overall public employees, about 7 million. They collect over $5 billion a year in dues, almost all of which is spent for direct or indirect political activity. They don't provide meaningful services with that.

 

It's really about getting people elected or getting people unelected. So Republicans don't want to take them on because they'll put all the money, you know, from, from the nation into one race to get somebody unelected who's a Republican. So I don't think it has a political solution. I don't think we can fix school cultures until we can.

 

Make them manageable again. I'm all for fairness and fair assessments, and they're not gonna give up their power. They're just not, why would they give up their power? They're not even thinking about giving up their power. So I wrote a book two years ago called Not Rethinking the Constitutionality of Public Employee Unions, in which I go through the history and all the evidence, including evidence, powerful evidence, by people at the Hoover Institution, Terry Moe, and more recently, Michael Hartney, on the effects of public unions on schools and the incredibly corrosive effect on the management schools.

 

And I argue in the book that democracy can't work if the people we elect who have the constitutional responsibility to run a school system don't have the authority to do that, and that therefore the public union controls should be unconstitutional. And the book's gotten a lot of attention, like covers of magazines and stuff.

 

And we're in the middle of organizing a constitutional challenge, challenges to the unions. And I'm just finishing up a deck for the Department of Justice now for it to bring challenges to the public union controls. And I think it's the only way to win this. I don't think we can do it politically.

 

>> Jim Peyser: So this is a case where lawyers can actually be helpful instead of screw things up a little bit more. Is that what you're saying?

>> Philip Howard: Well, that remains to be seen. But as Tino Cuellar was saying before Lawrence, fantastic creation, fantastic human being, there are some places where we just get to the end of a kind of a cul-de-sac and a roadblock, and we can't get past it, and it has to get fixed.

 

And so it doesn't matter. I don't care if you think what I'm saying is right or not. It doesn't matter that you don't think it can happen or whatever. Schools can't get fixed unless you do this. I don't care what you think is feasible or anybody. I don't care what a court thinks it's feasible.

 

We're not going to fix it. Schools have to be manageable to have pride. And so there are lots of other things that need to happen with schools, but we have to do that. And I think the case is compelling. My career was as an appellate lawyer, as it happens, with a bunch of very business cases, prominent cases in the U.S. supreme Court and others.

 

And every big case I won was won in spite of the leading experts saying, well, that's not the law, you can't do that because there's this other hearing or ruling that said this. To which I responded said, yes, but this makes no sense. Business can't go forward, you know, on these terms.

 

This creates the wrong incentives. Well, that's true with the unions. Whatever we intended when we gave unions collective bargaining power. And I have a really interesting chapter on what the proponents thought they were doing. If they were alive today, they would say that the unions were unconstitutional.

>> Jim Peyser: Well, first I have to ask you what the name of the book is going to be.

 

So, people, what's the name of the book? What's the title?

>> Philip Howard: It's very, very valuable. I don't know if I can reveal the name.

>> Jim Peyser: Well, I want to make sure people are signing up for pre-orders on Amazon.

>> Philip Howard: The book is called Not Accountable.

>> Jim Peyser: Okay, Jeremy, I won't put you on the spot to respond to that since that.

 

>> Jeremy Tucker: No, I do have some thoughts.

>> Jim Peyser: All right, all right, well, remember, we're being recorded.

>> Jeremy Tucker: Understood.

>> Jim Peyser: You know you signed a waiver in the back.

>> Jeremy Tucker: Yes, I did.

>> Jim Peyser: Okay.

>> Jeremy Tucker: For all the viewers home, right? A few thoughts in terms of our context.

 

We're a meet and confer state and our district, and we have a structure that addresses and deals with a lot of the same quality of work life issues that actually was birthed out of some conflict in our previous years with the previous leader and some mismanagement and so forth.

 

And I would say that that structure is invaluable for us. And I think the piece that correlates here is just the importance of trust. And we've talked about that in a working engagement, working trust, engaging teachers, treating them as professionals, extending that autonomy. That really is kind of the culture of what we call our Team Liberty.

 

There are districts to our east and to our west that have formalized collective bargaining agreements. And at times they do butt heads. But at times there's also dynamic leaders that come in and bring them together through those bargaining agreements. And really at the center of that is the trust that occurs and the trust they're able to build in the relationship building.

 

So it's kind of a unique piece to see it in some districts and not see it in others. But the thing that I would elevate is that I don't ever want to lose that trust and that relationship that we have with both of our teachers unions as we've designed this system and this team in terms of our local approach.

 

>> Jim Peyser: And I will say that in the Empowerment Zone example, which I mentioned earlier, there's one in Massachusetts and Springfield. And I think it's one of these things where when the opportunity is presented for the teachers to feel like they're engaged and have some ownership and responsibility, it actually does create a stronger relationship and dials down some of the tension that would otherwise exist.

 

And they haven't opted out of it yet, which is a reflection of its success. So it's possible, however.

>> Philip Howard: Yeah, just the starting premise, all schools are different. And Tino was saying this, different communities are different and have different cultures. Culture trumps everything. So you can have a place where there are not many of them, but where there are unions with lots of powers, where the union leaders, for whatever reason, don't exercise them.

 

They don't treat how you spend your time as an entitlement. You know, they don't treat sick days as an entitlement for every Friday, you know, that sort of thing. But that is not the status quo in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and certainly not Chicago, and other schools.

 

But to the point of trust, I mean, teachers in most places should get paid more. They should have more, I think, more responsibility as well as, you know, adequate autonomy. They should have, you know, the ability to do a lot more than they can and work longer hours.

 

And teachers work longer hours than they're supposed to, good ones anyway, than they're supposed to. So they need to be honored and their views ought to be trusted. That's not way the teachers union contracts in most jurisdictions are treated. They're treated as a rigidity and an entitlement and an impediment to any effective management and to any accountability.

 

>> Jim Peyser: So let me ask one more question, and then if folks could start to think and then get up to either microphone on either side of the center aisle here, and this question is, I think, different from the others, but I'm curious as to your perspectives on it.

 

So the focus of this conversation up until this point really has been, for lack of a better word, traditional public schools or district school districts as systems and school systems. But we've also talked about charter schools as being a good model for what an autonomous and accountable public school might look like.

 

And charter management organizations as systems of autonomous, accountable public schools. So I guess the question is, what role do you think charter schools? And I could broaden this to public and private school choice, for that matter. But maybe just to limit it a little bit, what would. What role do you think charter schools play in this overall effort to flip the system?

 

Is it complimentary? Is it competitive? Does it help? Does it hurt? Can we do both at the same time? Or do we have to choose? Jeremy, why don't you go first?

>> Jeremy Tucker: So in Missouri, it's an interesting context. They're mostly relegated to St. Louis and Kansas City. Right.

 

You don't see it outstate. We call it outstate. I think it's complimentary in part, so long as you have this loop as it relates to how they were originally intended to function. That being that you have these hubs of innovation that then are able to give back to public settings and public school districts.

 

Right. In terms of this feedback loop of practice that then can be incorporated into what I do in my traditional public school setting, I think that was, at least in our context, what it was intended to do. That seldom happens, which then gets us into this notion of networks that we've talked a little bit about, and the value of networks and bringing districts together to learn one from another, both traditional as well as charters.

 

We are starting to see more of that, which, interestingly, to bring in philanthropy has been facilitated from convenings through the Ewing Marion Kaufman foundation, both primarily in the Kansas City side, but they've also done some work throughout both Kansas as well as through Missouri and our state education departments.

 

I say all that to say is that there's an opportunity to learn and grow one from another. And so I don't know that they're, well, typically viewed as competing, I do see them as being able to be complementary. And quite frankly, by even saying that I know they're my peers, that would disagree with me.

 

But we've worked enough with various charters within our region toward the same aim of ensuring that kids have exceptional learning experiences.

>> Jim Peyser: I guess I'm saying something maybe a little bit different because most of those networks or those collaborations are around practice of one kind or another, as opposed to models of what, you know, the structure and the systems might look like if you truly were trying to empower district schools to be, you know, charter, like in terms of autonomy and accountability.

 

>> Jeremy Tucker: And we have some of that in play with the inception of our choice school, you know, a decade ago, that's had pretty good run along with our micro schools. We Even approach our alternative school a little bit differently. There are some provisions that allow us to do that as a district in terms of chartering our own school models, but you don't see that widespread.

 

You see that in those, you know, districts that maybe either have the capacity or have met certain expectations that then gets you into that earned autonomy that we've talked about a little bit earlier.

>> Philip Howard: Phil, I think the scale of cost and benefits to charter schools is so radically tipped in favor of benefits that it's almost, I mean, in terms of providing models for how to better manage schools, providing really quality education to students who are not like all students because they have parents who wanted them to go to a charter school.

 

So they have the advantage of parents who were involved. That's the kind of the one difference, as I understand it, with most charter schools. My God, with the good charter school network. I spent a lot of time in charter schools in New Jersey and New York and other places.

 

They're really. There's so much to learn from the ones that are good and they need to be accountable. And they're not all good. And, you know, 25% of the charter schools started in New Orleans after Katrina had to get closed down because they weren't any good. So it doesn't.

 

Just having a charter school doesn't mean it's going to be good. But, boy, you have the opportunity to be good. And it's just. I think it's been a fantastic movement, including by inspiring discussions like this one.

>> Jim Peyser: Yep. Okay, let's open it up. Start here.

>> Speaker 4: Jim, good to see you again.

 

>> Jim Peyser: Good to see you.

>> Speaker 4: Recovering college president, as Phil now knows. Jeremy, you've almost anticipated and already answered the question, but maybe there's more you might say about the. It seems to me you are have in the process of creating a more, let's call it, open district in which you deliver educational services.

 

But you, you may serve actually as a convener of other organizations whose work is relev to your own. Is there more you'd like to say about the kind of partnership. I forget how you termed it earlier in your remarks, partnerships or relationships you've developed in support of the work you do or who become extensions of your own work.

 

>> Jeremy Tucker: Yeah. No. We talked in part about being positioned for purpose as far as some of the things that we're learning and able to do that then we think are of value to all kids. I think it starts foundationally there. And so then our board allows me and our leaders to be able to engage at that level just beyond our walls.

 

So then that brings into this conversation, who are our partners? What does our network look like? And the conversation has evolved into our envisioning of a learning ecosystem, right, where you have partnerships from higher ed, from the business community, from philanthropy, you know, partnering with homeschool families or charter schools, whatever the case may be.

 

And that there's, there's that common element of students, of kids, and service to our community and to our families. Right. And so then from there it's, it's an interesting dynamic in Kansas City, where we started with a group of a couple of superintendents having a conversation with the Kauffman Foundation.

 

What might it look like if we had incorporated this real world learning experience for some pilot districts and their high school kids? And the notion stemmed from, yeah, that sounds great, but why would we stop there? Why wouldn't we take this to the region? And so it mushroomed almost overnight, by the way, during COVID into a six county effort in two states, Kansas and Missouri, that incorporates about 30 high schools and 100,000 high school students aiming toward a goal by 2030 of maintain or obtaining a market value asset, 100% of our high school students doing that, that brought us to the table in terms of that convening to be able to have those conversations.

 

A side piece to that was that it also brought higher education, it brought the business community, because we know we can't do that without those partnerships and that, that's integral in order to get to that full 100%. Beyond that, we start looking for other opportunities. Okay, if we're working over here in real world learning, how might competency based learning move forward?

 

How can we influence assessment and accreditation and policy practices within both state houses across both states. And so it's, it's really that notion of better together as compared to, you know, keeping to ourselves in isolation in a silo afternoon,

>> George Pendleton.: again, George Pendleton. If I were to ask everyone in this room to finish the statement, if it ain't broke, they would say, don't fix it.

 

I would say, if it's broke, they would say fix it. But I find very few hands that would admit. If it's broke, if it ain't broke, break it and start all over again. So I want an opinion from these fine gentlemen on what I would offer up as a cocktail for what you talk about combating unions, but flipping this system.

 

First cocktail is Newt Gingrich wrote a column in 2008 that was titled, Let's End Adolescence. We're familiar with the term early childhood education, but are we in a society where we need to be focusing on early adulthood? In every school we emphasize reading, writing and arithmetic. I'm very intrigued by this Liberty School Network to realize, do you have any way of assessing whether the kids or the teachers are processing what are known as the other six Rs?

 

Risk, Rivalry, Research, relationships, results, rewards. I suspect the kids may process that faster than their teachers. Lastly, because it's like a three part cocktail, what would be your opinion of amending the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to prohibit discrimination in employment based on credentials? I'm done.

>> Jim Peyser: Who wants to start?

 

Let's start with a legal question.

>> Philip Howard: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not gonna. I didn't catch the end of it. You amended to do what?

>> George Pendleton.: Amended Civil Rights Act of 1964 to prohibit discrimination in employment based on credentials.

>> Philip Howard: So if I'm based on.

>> George Pendleton.: Yeah, okay, yeah, I need to get a degree then.

 

>> Philip Howard: Right.

>> George Pendleton.: And I can apply.

>> Philip Howard: Right, I've written books about why rights? Why can't absolute rights end up being gamed by people to get things that no one else thinks they deserve? So I'm not in favor of kind of broad based rights, but I do think, at least in many jurisdictions, schools are broke.

 

And I do think it requires a new vision. I don't think it requires tinkering. And I think that's the import of the report here by Hoover, it's time to rethink it. I'd like to talk about how you articulate what the new vision is and to try to fit it into the current zeitgeist.

 

But I think the idea of local control, the idea of responsibility and accountability, the idea of common standards, I mean, there are a few things that I think will appeal to people. And the idea of getting rid of bureaucracy, I mean, at one level what's happened in the last 50 years is you have school bureaucrats competing with the unions for who has more control.

 

And the victims of that, it's like puppeteers are all the educators at the bottom who are subject to all these legal strings and stuff. So it's just it's clearly time for a reboot. And the reboot should incorporate all the learning and all the stuff and best practices and inspire humans to do this profoundly human important thing, which is educate our youth.

 

>> Jeremy Tucker: As it relates to that early phrase you opened up with, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. I think what we see is that we know that there are better ways of doing things and it would be much easier, quite frankly, to sit back, enjoy our context, our community, suburbia, so to speak, and not do anything differently because it is a high performing district.

 

But we recognize that there are better ways of learning and better ways of teaching. And so I think that's what we've taken on, which in and of itself creates challenges against those people that are, you know, satisfied with the status quo. And so then what do we do in order to move that and change minds toward a better way, a different way, a different approach that is equally challenging.

 

Right. And so that's the task that we've taken on. And our board of education is there, our community is there. In terms of looking at how to do things differently, in terms of the six Rs that you measure, you mentioned in terms of teacher performance or outcomes of students, you know, how do we assess and measure those pieces as well?

 

I think those are some elements that are incorporated into profiles of a graduate. In part, they may not be listed just that way or the profile of an educator. I think there's more and more momentum occurring nationally, several states that have taken that on in terms of their entire state and what that might look like.

 

The caution is to measure those or assess those and then rank and sort, as we've always done, right? And that I think there is value for truly talking about student agency and learner agency. It's the onus on the student to not only grow in those skills and mindsets, but the ability to coach them along the way and how they're able to demonstrate those.

 

So the measures may look both qualitative or quantitative, but then culminate in a portfolio or an extended transcript or a learner record. All those pieces we've chatted about that then makes that much more meaningful because they've engaged in those skills and mindsets within with an employer or with a coach with an area that they're interested in pursuing.

 

>> Jim Peyser: Yes.

>> Michael Kirst: Yes. My name is Michael Kirst. I'm professor emeritus at Stanford, and I've served 15 years on the California State Board of Education, mostly as president of the board. And I would like maybe the moderator to respond to this as well, since you've had a lot of state experience.

 

So we've thought a long time about how to take away some of the red tape, the state regulations, the state code. California has a very, very large state code, and it is really overwhelming in some ways. So, one of the first things you think of, well, why don't we repeal a lot of the state code?

 

And you start figuring out, my gosh, you would, you'd have to go through these laws, try and go back through the legislature, try and repeal the stuff. So the discussion you mentioned, and it triggered my question of waivers. Waivers, and typically, can be done by state boards of education.

 

It was always in our plan to have a lot of waivers, and the locals didn't ask for them. And so I think there's a point of stimulating more requests. But my question is, do you think there's a way and it would make sense to go through and try and make many of these state laws waiverable?

 

If the local districts come to the board and say, we want a waiver from this restriction that that could be analyzed across the code, and you would be able to get a sort of a massive increase in waiver requests. We approved almost all the waiver requests that came to us.

 

And so I think that's a more. The waiver is not a policy instrument. We've used enough, and I like the panel's reaction to that.

>> Jim Peyser: Yeah, I'll respond first. I think that's a great point, in part because the authority, a lot of the authorities already exist, and that's true at the federal government as well as a lot of state governments on this point.

 

The report talks about earned autonomy as being one of the features of this new system, new operating system, which is really effectively, a kind of a waiver from a variety of other. Restrictions or mandates that might apply in general. I think it's from a pragmatic point of view, if nothing else.

 

I think you're totally right. The idea of going back through the code and repealing sections is not only a particularly attractive thing to a politician to do, but it's also deeply time consuming and may not lead to the result you want, but either exercising the powers that exist or creating some new waiver authorities, you know, given certain conditions.

 

The one thing I will say, and Jeremy, you may take a different view of this, but when in Massachusetts we've asked this question, what do you want to waiver from? They say, we wanna waiver from the testing and accountability provisions, which the balance here is that you get the waivers in exchange for accountability.

 

And so, you know, while maybe you can peel the onion and find some other things that they would like us to waive, that seems to be the one thing they want to get out of, is the accountability for outcomes.

>> Philip Howard: Yeah, I think it's a really good point.

 

I'm talking with a bunch of people about changing federal procurement guidelines for the Department of Defense, changing civil service rules, others. And what we're talking about is not repealing, but creating a second channel which subject to approval. So like a waiver thing where you can do things in a much more streamlined way.

 

And then if that's successful over time, the rules become vestigial and it's just a question of cleaning them up when you go to the legislature, it's not a question of repealing the law. So I think that's exactly the right way of doing it. But you do have to market it to people.

 

You do have to go out to whoever the constituency is, it's schools, and say, we are now allowing broad waiver party powers, easy to get in this respect. They might be really good in these areas, eliminating the burden of filling out forms and whatever, and kind of marketing it.

 

But I think it's a great idea

>> Jeremy Tucker: and just to speak to what Jim shared in our context in Missouri, as we've approached, you know, two years now of districts pursuing innovation zones, it's not necessarily like usurping those requirements around assessments. It's more about doing it differently. And so in our specific asks, we've had about six or seven different waiver statutory provisions that we've asked explicitly be waived, but yet we've come up with an alternative to the requirement.

 

Does that make sense? And so that has been receptive, received well by our state board of Education. The other Thing that I would say that really sparked this work for us in our district, in our state these last couple of years was the initiation or the catalyst being the State Board of Education.

 

The State Board of Education called for a competency based learning task force and work group. And that really kind of gave us that additional momentum to begin coalescing and bringing districts and business partners together to then bring recommendations to the state board that then fast forward culminated in creation of a formalized network in these zones.

 

>> Jim Peyser: Okay, we're in.

>> Miriam Friedman: Thank you for this great discussion. My name is Miriam Friedman, I've worked in special education as an attorney for 100 years. So this is a great title. Flipping the System. I don't know how we flip the system without touching and changing special ed.

 

While the general population of students in public schools has declined in the last few years, special ed keeps growing. We're up to 7.5 million kids. Many of them are there simply because they didn't learn how to read. Just by comparison, the number of children in charter schools I think is three point some million.

 

So less than half. How do you flip the system without stopping the bureaucratic nightmare coming from the federal government and the state on top of the locals who are trying to educate our children? Thank you. Special ed.

>> Philip Howard: Well, as Miriam knows, cuz I've relied upon her work in part on this, I've written some about special ed.

 

Special is an example of a quote, right, that gives no authority to balance the needs of the other students. So you have these situations where the field trip to go on a hike is canceled because the one child is disabled, can't go on the field trip if it violates their rights.

 

You have a situation where many situations where the budget is completely skewed towards a few students who cannot reasonably actually profit from all the money that's being spent on their education, but it's taken away from the fixed budget of the school. The federal government imposes these entitlements, but doesn't really fund them.

 

But it's hard to take things away, as you know there's a whole constituency with special ed. There's incredible bureaucracy, special ed teachers spend almost half their time filling out forms with IEPs and such. I've written about how other countries do special ed. Denmark, for example, they have balancing mechanisms and they have rights to appeal to make sure the children are being treated fairly.

 

But it's against the standard of the greater good. So we're going to take care of special needs children, but not whatever the cost on everyone else. It's a Very. I don't know how you fix it politically because of the obvious dynamics of that. But I think in a system, as you point out, when you're flipping the system, you have to have a realistic view of balancing budgets and allocating budgets.

 

And ultimately, I think the solution is to create an authority structure that people can appeal to that looks at whether kids are being treated special needs kids are being treated fairly, consistent with the goals of the law, but still leaves room to balance. And the problem with the current system is it doesn't leave room to balance.

 

And it just doesn't. For all the reasons you've written, you can't ultimately get the resources and the time and the get rid of the red tape and stuff without also making sense of the special ed system.

>> Jeremy Tucker: And I don't know that I have an answer. Certainly a couple thoughts that come to mind would be regardless of the size of your system, you're still obligated to the requirements, right?

 

We know that. And so then as we've talked a little bit about audits and we've talked about streamlining, I wonder if there's space for that, where that in turn leads to a faster turnaround in terms of services and supports. Maybe, maybe not. But I wonder if there's the ability to streamline processes so that we can get to the need sooner and faster.

 

I think that's kind of the ideal to work toward.

>> Philip Howard: And delegalize processes. Again, these are value judgments. You have this whole system of special ed that's designed for people to sue people. Can you prove that the savvy is crazy? These are judgments in the public good. I mean, they're not.

 

You can have somebody else overrule it, but they shouldn't be legal trials with lawyers all over the place.

>> Jim Peyser: So we're getting close to the end. Let me ask you one more question, which is, I don't want to say it's out of left field, but a little bit different and sort of gets to maybe the zeitgeist we're in and the recommendations that are being made relative to kind of what the trends might be at the moment.

 

So I think it's fair to say that obviously the report is talking about devolving more authority down to the frontline educators and educational leaders. But nationally and in many states, there's a growing tendency towards trying to centralize decision making around things like curriculum, for example. And we've talked about science of reading.

 

So there are right to read laws that are being passed at state levels. There are laws that are being proposed around civics education. There's all kinds of questions around gender identity and a variety of other things, and a whole bunch of issues related to parents rights and sort of establishing new or stronger rights for parents to intervene, if you will, in the education of their child.

 

How do all of? I guess I'm trying to get to. The question I'm trying to ask is, are we, in a moment that's ripe for this kind of discussion and this kind of proposal, or are we going to have to do something to really change the underlying political dynamic to get people to agree to this direction of reform?

 

>> Philip Howard: I just want to say one thing from my standpoint is not being an education expert. Lines of authority and checks and balances have to be coherent. You can't have lowest common denominator. You can't have the power of a parent or whatever to pull the rug out from under the organization and the value judgments of the school.

 

You can judge the school and replace the leaders, but you can't actually create a system that pleases everyone. So what's disturbing about a lot of the stuff that's going on, we want to dictate what books are in there. And all this kind of stuff is. It's completely muddying the water on any coherence to the structure.

 

And it ultimately will be counterproductive. So parental engagement doesn't mean parental authority. It's just a different, you know, it's a different point. And so one has to be. While you're seeking through the authority, the mag. The gravitational force of authority to bring people in and to argue it's the authority that has the responsibility of making the decision.

 

Not, you know,

>> Jim Peyser: I totally get it. Of course the parents have a legal responsibility to send their kid to the school unless they have viable options, which is why we have.

>> Philip Howard: Well, fine. Well, they're stuck and we've got. We're in a democracy and they ought to be accountable.

 

But, you know, you're not. It doesn't always work out the way you want to work out.

>> Jeremy Tucker: I think of community dynamics, in part, whether your community is dominated, factional, pluralistic, inert. There's some research studies around that and how as a governing entity, you respond to those community dynamics that then can inform some of those educational decisions, whether it's curricular choices, instructional approaches insert the autonomy of the teacher and the choice and decision making that they have.

 

So as compared to the support of a system in steering and guiding best practice, the last couple of years we've seen a rise of open educational resources and content curation. As compared to just kind of a turnkey textbook approach. And there's value in both. But being able to steer and direct in terms of that knowledge base that we spoke about earlier, conversely, taking those decisions out of the local level and then legislating them over here, that might provide restrictions, which then is counterintuitive to that local community dynamic and what they value or will permit, which gets into politics.

 

Right. In terms of the library volumes that sit on one library shelf in this district as compared to the other, a lot of times that varies depending upon the political dynamic of that local community. I say all that to, say, engaging families, but yet at the same time being able to protect teachers through their autonomous decision making or leaders who are trying to navigate the political arena within their communities and boards of education so as not to face this constant swinging of that political pendulum that then impacts instructional decision making.

 

>> Jim Peyser: Yeah, it's tough though, right? I mean, the environment's pretty, pretty tough at the moment. And maybe, you know, maybe this is a passing moment in time and things will go back to whatever normal might have been before. But I do think these. One of the challenges of moving forward with some of the ideas in the council report is this moment we're in where there seems to be a politicization at the highest levels of some decisions that have historically, or would, you know, under the.

 

Under the council's recommendations would be left to the local and the school level. Tough. Any concluding remarks from either of you?

>> Philip Howard: I think change is important and having a vision for change that can actually galvanize attention is really, you know, bringing some coherence to this narrative. And this debate is vital at this time.

 

It's vital for the future of our country in a. In a really scary, perilous world. And so I applaud this gathering and the report and its message, which is, let's come up with a new vision for how to make things work.

>> Jeremy Tucker: I think perhaps some common ground is this notion of local communities and asking another question as a follow up.

 

If the first one is what does it mean to be learner centered, perhaps another question is, what does it mean to thrive or flourish? That word's gotten a lot of attention of late. That then brings us into dialogue and a conversation because whether it's in our neighborhood, in our school setting, in our church, in the political arena, I think we can all agree that we want our families, we want our children.

 

We ourselves, personally and professionally, we want to thrive. But what do we do about that? How do we get to that point and have those conversations? And it's multiple conversations and engagements that hopefully, as we bring in research and ideas and visions of the future, you can start to put those pieces together, which again, I think varies from context to context to context.

 

>> Jim Peyser: And on that note, let's join me in thanking Jeremy Tucker and Phil Howard. Thank you.

>> Holly Boffy: And I just want to start with our panelists with the question of what excites you about the call for the new professionalism. Who would like to start?

>> Jenn Vranek: Why did everyone look at me? I can jump in. And actually I'm going to do it by talking about some of the depressing state of the current state of the profession.

 

And because it is what gives me optimism. I mean, they say never let a good crisis go to waste. And we spend a lot of time today talking about how we have a crisis of achievement and yet we don't know exactly what to do next and how to take advantage.

 

And I think this panel today can offer some ideas because the teachers themselves are incredibly dissatisfied with the current state of their jobs and the systems they work in. And Evan will tell you, you're going to hear from four excellent teachers on this panel and they can share their own anecdotes, their own data.

 

But let me just give you a couple of, I think pretty jarring data points. So it turns out that half of American adult workers are extremely or very satisfied with their jobs. Only a third of teachers are. A third of working adults experience frequent job related stress. It's 60% of teachers and only 22% of teachers say they experience difficulty coping with that, compared to only 7% of other working adults who are similar in terms of education and type of job.

 

Almost a quarter of teachers say they intend to leave. That's actually over a third for Black teachers and 28% of Latino teachers and 20% of white teachers. This is one of Evan's data points. But only 16% of teachers right now say they would recommend the profession to others.

 

We have teachers who are largely dissatisfied. Their well being is suffering. We know that not all teachers are as successful as all of their counterparts. And we know that not enough young people are choosing teaching. So let's use that crisis. And like, what makes me optimistic is there's actually some innovations and some things you're going to hear about here today that are about building real professionalism that we can put in place.

 

And I got excited. In the fall, we had a round of conversations reaching out to school district leaders, reaching out to teacher groups to say, would you want to partner in some of these innovative areas? And every single answer was yes. You're solving a need that we feel right now.

 

You're helping us get to more coherence, and we want to be part of that, and please sign us up. And I don't usually get a full round of yeses when we do that kind of outreach, and so we'll hear more about that. But there's a real impetus for change that we should feel optimistic about, instead of only feeling downtrodden by the some of the challenges we face.

 

>> Partrick Kelly: So I get optimistic when I read this part of the report because it's one of those moments where I read an educational report and it aligns with lived experience. Too often as a classroom teacher I read a report and it feels misaligned or out of touch with the reality of what's happening in the classroom, especially post Covid.

 

But when I read this section of the report, I'm optimistic because I know this works not from data but from my own experience. So I'm in year 20 as an advanced placement US government teacher outside Columbia, South Carolina. Still teach every morning. I taught yesterday morning before hopping the plane to get here.

 

But my work experience for the last 10, almost 15 years now has been very similar to what the report's recommending. And so I know it works from my own experience. In my fifth year in the profession, I was selected by my principal for a lead teacher position in my school and my high school is broken into four houses in if you're a Harry Potter person, think of Hogwarts and down the line that's exactly how we run it.

 

So I taught for half of the day and the other half of the day I was some hybrid version of a dean of academics and a teacher evaluation coach. And that was life giving to me. It was energizing to me. But I know from my experience it made me a more effective teacher because I was seeing what my colleagues were doing around the building across curriculum areas and I stole good ideas that was brought up earlier.

 

Good teaching is just stealing. And I know it made me a more effective colleague and I hope it made my colleagues more effective because coaching came up earlier. Well, the person running the evaluation for my colleagues was not an administrator who hadn't been in the classroom in 15 years.

 

It was the guy who taught 35 seconds ago. For the last five years I still teach in the morning, but now I'm the Director of Governmental affairs for South Carolina's largest teacher association. So I teach US Government in the morning, and then I hop on the interstate and I make it to the State House before they ever get around to doing business for the day, and I'm interacting with the government.

 

It makes me a more effective teacher. The stories that I bring into the classroom are far richer than they would be, but that is only possible to me because I have a district level administration. And a school level administration that was willing to be visionary enough to think about a new professionalism instead of looking at my crazy request to be part time teacher, part time lobbyist and go, no, that's not the way we do things.

 

We got full FTEs and this is how you're going to do it. So I get optimistic when I see a report that aligns with what my personal experience shows me works.

>> Evan Stone: And just to build on that, the experience that Patrick described, what makes me optimistic is it's not just Patrick that wants that type of a role.

 

Broadly, that's what teachers are asking for. We heard, I think earlier on a panel that the sort of one teacher, one classroom model is broken, that it's giving us the statistics that Jen just talked about how disengaged, unhappy, unsatisfied teachers are with the conditions of their profession because they want what Patrick just described.

 

They want roles that allow them to have a lot more time for collaboration. Over 65% of teachers are saying more collaboration is one of the most important things to keep them in the profession. They want roles that allow them to have differentiated compensation or to specialize in what they're focused on.

 

I think the challenge is how we get from here to there. And we're going to talk a lot about that today. But what makes me optimistic is there is real demand, authentic grassroots demand for teachers for the types of changes that are described in this report that we just need to harness as we roll out these new initiatives.

 

>> Mike Miles: So I can't speak for the profession as a whole. My experience is with large urbans. I'm the Superintendent of Houston ISD. We have 11,000 teachers. Before that I was a CEO of a charter network. And before that, Dallas Independent School District where we had about 10,000 teachers and then another district before that.

 

And I'm an optimist by heart, but I gotta say I'm happy we're having this discussion because we have not been honest over the last 10, 20, 30 years about the profession. And that is we have a lot of problems and we're not always that professional. Patrick is a unicorn in some ways.

 

I mean, he's by far superior than most teachers that I would expect. And we have a lot of great teachers doing great work, but we also have a lot of teachers not doing great work. And we have not differentiated, we have not called, we have not removed teachers who are ineffective, and that's just the brutal facts.

 

There's been a lot in the last five years, for example, of teachers, and I'll just speak again for urban districts. I don't know that much about rural districts, but there's been a lot of call for more mental health days. And we need to be honest and say, look, in Houston, teachers, you get a week off at three spring break, you get a week off at Thanksgiving, two weeks off at Christmas, 10 PTO days, another five if you've been in the profession a while.

 

You get eight professional development days, six national holidays, two recess days, and 40 days in the summer. And we need to say, as a profession, if you need more mental health days than that, this is not the profession for you. And nobody wants to say that. And so I'm optimistic that we'll have that conversation, that some people will be brutally honest.

 

>> Holly Boffy: Thank you. So the next question is, how will we know when we've achieved the new professionalism, and we'll just work the other way. So we'll start with you, Mike. How will we know we've gotten there? What is success to you?

>> Mike Miles: In the end of the day, we would be a great profession, and we've reached where we need to be if we get the outcomes that our students need.

 

Yes, we have to define those. Not just reading, writing, math proficiency. People talk today about critical thinking, or year. I call them year 2035 competencies. When we are there, when the students are taken care of and they're getting the outcomes that we need, then we probably have the profession.

 

We can hardly say we're a great profession when over the last 20 years, we've not closed the achievement gap hardly at all, and we're getting the outcomes that we're getting. We can hardly say we're a great profession when 97% of all teacher evals are proficient or higher, when the outcomes are as bad as they are.

 

So for me, it's outcomes and actually taking care of the kids the way they should be taken care of.

>> Holly Boffy: Thank you, Evan.

>> Evan Stone: I totally agree with what Mike said, and I don't wanna just repeat it, so I'll try to come up with something different.

>> Holly Boffy: Yes, we do.

 

No repeating on this panel.

>> Evan Stone: So I'm a relatively new parent, and in 1999, the government surveyed parents across the country, and one of the questions on it was, would you be happy if your kid became a teacher? And over 80% of parents across the country said that they would be happy or very happy if their child became a teacher.

 

We asked that same question nationally last year, and it was down to 51% of parents across the country. Still a pretty high number. But I think we would be back in a place where the teaching profession had prestige and respect and was effective. If we had parents across the country saying, absolutely, I would be excited if my child became a teacher.

 

>> Holly Boffy: What year was that? The first one.

>> Evan Stone: 99.

>> Holly Boffy: In 99, 80% of people would have been happy for their child to choose the teaching profession. And in 2024, it's down to 51%. Okay, I really appreciate you saying that because for me, it would be when everybody in this room would encourage their children to consider the teaching profession.

 

So we'll go ahead. Patrick.

>> Partrick Kelly: So Mike did take the best answer because I love in the report that it's outputs focused. If we have a new professionalism, but we don't see a change in student achievement. We just redecorated. For the point of redecorating. My teenage daughter loves doing that.

 

As her father, I do not. And so I serve on assessment governing board. If I don't see change in NAEP data with a new professionalism, I don't really think that we hit the mark. But since we're not doing the same answers, two things. Number one in the report, one data point that really grabbed my attention was they cite a survey that shows teachers to be the most trusted profession.

 

I know there's surveys out there consistently. Teachers are toward the top, Congress is toward the bottom. Everything falls in between. But what strikes me as a advocate for teachers when I see that data point is the misalignment between what is said in terms of how teachers are viewed and how teachers view their respect in the community.

 

So every year I survey our membership in South Carolina about a whole comprehensive range of issues to build our policy positions. And one of the most striking data points is always asking teachers if they feel respected by certain groups. Well, they feel overwhelmingly respected by their colleagues. They feel respected by their students.

 

That's always above 85%. They feel respected by the parents and the families of the students they serve. But when you get to administrators and then when you get to policymakers, less than 15% of teachers are saying, I feel respected by those individuals. So to see a report that says teaching is the number one respected profession in America is misaligned from the lived experience of teachers.

 

And so I think success and a new professionalism would bring those two into positive alignment with each other. And then the last criteria would be the same criteria I take to my approach as a teacher and my approach to the advocate. As an advocate, which is really simple.

 

I want every child in this country to have the same teacher in front of them that I want my two daughters to have in front of them. I'm dangerous as an educator and a parent because my girls now go to the same school where I teach. I know which classrooms I want them in.

 

It shouldn't be that way. I should just be able to say, every teacher is a great opportunity. And so a new professionalism should create an environment where it's not about wondering did you get the right teacher? You're in the right spot just by being in the school.

>> Jenn Vranek: I guess ditto isn't going to work.

 

So maybe what I'll add to this, all of these incredibly thoughtful trust, respect, prestige outcomes is that could take us a while. And so if I think in the shorter term, I'd like to see a lot more at scale redesigned teacher jobs. I'd just really like to be able to say, point to get asked a question, give me 10 bright spots and be able to say I got 20 for you.

 

I got them in rural, I've got them in urban, I've got them in every state. It's a right to work state. It's a union state where teachers don't all they aren't treated like interchangeable widgets, where they have the opportunity to lead other teachers, where someone who's great at teaching phonemic awareness is doing that for all the first graders and the person who's really good at math is teaching all the first graders math.

 

And they work collaboratively and that's the norm, not the innovation. So if we could try to in the shorter run, maybe five to ten years from now, see that at scale, I think we would be really on the path toward these longer term object goals. Thank you all.

 

>> Holly Boffy: Patrick, this one's for you. What are your thoughts on the tension between teachers as professionals versus teachers as labor?

>> Partrick Kelly: I think it's a natural tension because at, at the end of the day, yes, you need labor in a school building, you have to fill positions because you have to meet the needs of students or what laws or regulations may require.

 

But I think ultimately if we look at teaching as labor only and not as a profession, I think that we are shortchanging not just the professionals, but more importantly, we're shortchanging the students that they serve. So one of the trends that I wrote about recently that I've wrestled with over the last few years, the term's been used today, but not in the classroom context, which is the term with fidelity.

 

I've struggled with that as a teacher because when I started teaching 20 years ago with fidelity was not a thing. But now increasingly it is a thing that the key to educational success is, is to find the right curriculum pack and to implement it in the classroom with fidelity.

 

To me, that's treating teaching as labor. And certainly that's better than nothing. That's better than popping kids on a software program for five hours a day and just letting it work them through. But I think that it robs the students of the professionalism and skill and the humanity that the teacher brings to the classroom.

 

Yes, we need high quality instructional materials. No, we don't need people on teachers pay teachers, but to simply say that if you're on the pacing guide on day five, and that's the goal, I think we rob the fact that teaching is far less robotic than it is artistic.

 

And that's certainly been my experience, both as an educator and as a parent. So I think that the natural bent is to look at teaching like labor, especially when we look at things like teacher shortages rates. That's a huge report every year in South Carolina that I wait for with bated breath is what's the vacancy rate this year in South Carolina?

 

It comes out right around Thanksgiving, which is terrible timing, but that's how we do it in our state. But it goes deeper than that because ultimately it's about the individual impact on the student in the classroom. And I think that professionals using their skill and using their artistic license are what move students to where they need to be and where we want them to be more so than just putting widgets into a machine.

 

>> Holly Boffy: Would anyone else like to expand on that?

>> Mike Miles: I think there's a balance somewhere. If we were the profession I think we should be, then Patrick, I would agree 100% with you. There is an art to teaching for sure. There's an art to adjusting your instruction in the moment.

 

There's an art to taking a question from a kid and it may be kind of an off topic question. But then turning that question for the whole class to respond to, that's tied back to the objective, so it's back on point. That's an art that not anybody can do that.

 

At the same time, my experience at least in these large urbans, again, I can't speak to any other type of schools except maybe some charter schools. My experience is that a lot of teachers are inexperienced, they don't have certifications or they're hired and they're not effective or they're really progressing at the beginning, which makes sense.

 

They're new teachers. Those teachers need some real guidance, they need some real structure and they need to teach and use some basic things with fidelity. I'll just give one example. Engagement strategies. Engagement strategy is something we do all the time in the profession. But I will guarantee you that in a group of 20 teachers in ex urban school, they have 20 different ideas of what engagement means.

 

If somebody or some group doesn't define it. And all people looking at me right now, are you engaged? If this was a classroom of kids, could you say that even if everybody had their hand raised, is that engagement, this notion of, well, let's cold call. And that's engagement.

 

So I'm a good teacher because I cold call on kids. Is that engagement? Is that a good practice? Now you get into the real art and stuff that we do. And many, many teachers cannot engage kids at the start. And they can't use what we call multiple response strategies unless they are trained.

 

And they need to do that with fidelity.

>> Evan Stone: Yeah, I think one thing I would maybe to pull these two things together, like art requires a huge level of skill that's developed over time. And I think we don't do a good job of developing teacher skill over time to set them up to be artists.

 

And I agree, great teaching is a combination of deep competency and a core set of skills. As well as the flexibility and autonomy to be able to make decisions, to engage your classroom and your community in the way it needs to be. I think about this in New York City, where we do a lot of work, we've been helping with the rollout of new literacy curriculum in New York City and prior to what's called NYC Reeds,.

 

Which is three high quality curricular materials in all elementary schools that are chosen at a local district level and then all teachers implement it. Prior to that, every principal chose their own curriculum and their own professional learning. And there was not. That did not free teachers up to be flexible and autonomous and artistic.

 

It actually just created overwhelm. So if you were a teacher and you changed schools, you were totally learning something new. If you were a student, then we have a huge transient population of kids in New York. You went to a new school, you were totally confused as to what was going on.

 

And so I do think that we need to break down this perception that standardization eliminates flexibility and sort of teacher empowerment. Because I actually think from some level of standardization you can free up teachers once they reach a level of competence with those core sets of materials to be more creative and more autonomous.

 

So I think it is a combination of these two things that we need to focus on. And that to me, is a profession. When we look at most of the things that we consider a profession, whether it's the medical field or the legal field, there's a core set of knowledge and competencies and skills.

 

And then those that are really great can maybe go beyond that and tweak that and make it their own.

>> Holly Boffy: Well, and the report talks about progression over time, right? So you're not expected to be the same teacher at year 20 than you were at year one. And if you are, that's not a professional, right?

 

So the beauty of professionalism, and I think that it even merits a conversation of how do you define professionalism? Rick gave us a definition earlier today from the standpoint of someone who's willing to be held accountable. For me, it's a growth over time is a critical component of it and being committed to that growth over time.

 

>> Jenn Vranek: Holly, one of the things that struck me from the Measuring Effective Teaching study from about 15 years ago, Tom Kane and others.

>> Holly Boffy: Was it 15 or like.

>> Jenn Vranek: It's been a long time? 2011, somewhere around there was that there's a lot of evidence that shows that people really work on their crafts year 03 and then 5 to 10, but after about year 10, there's not a lot of differentiation.

 

And I do wonder if in the truly transformed profession we're talking about where you've really honed that craft of being a proficient teacher in your classroom, now you're taking on the next challenge. You're the lead teacher. You're the coaching other people. You're learning a new subject area. You're doing something different.

 

I wonder if we would start to see those numbers change as well as our results, because I can't imagine actually being in the job for 30 years but not getting a lot better for 20. And so to me, that's also part of this professionalism is continuing growth and challenges, even when we've reached a level of quality.

 

>> Holly Boffy: So how do we build?

>> Jenn Vranek: I think it was inspired.

>> Holly Boffy: Yeah ,I think it's worth thinking about how we build that in intentionally. And I think one of the great parts about the report for me is it looks at the classroom as the unit of change.

 

So having served on the state board in Louisiana for 12 years, I became convinced it was the district that was the unit of change. This report pushes it all the way to the classroom and for someone who loved my season in the classroom, I. I won't argue against that.

 

I think there's beauty in the unit of change being in that classroom level. But if we are flipping that system, if that hierarchy is getting flipped and that focus is all on the classroom, what are the things we can build in? So there is that growth over time, and I think that's some opportunity that we'll see with this new professionalism.

 

>> Mike Miles: Can I jump in there, please? Because I don't want to ignore what Rick said earlier about accountability. If you want a true profession, You have to have accountability. And then we have to define what that looks like cuz that word gets thrown out and then there's very little accountability.

 

And it intersects this unit of change business. If it's a classroom, who's accountable? Right now we have a profession that is hardly accountable for poor instruction or poor performance. Very little. In Houston, we've changed that. In Dallas, I changed that. There's great accountability. And I can tell you what that looks like.

 

But it's not about Houston, it's about our profession. What does it look like to hold somebody accountable? And I tell you, if you can go on year after year and not get outcomes, that's not accountability. And so if it's gonna be at a classroom level that you need to change, okay, what does accountability look like?

 

Does that mean they will hold themselves accountable? Will principals hold them accountable for not getting outcomes? Does that teacher get, year after year a step increase in stipends even though performance goes down?

>> Holly Boffy: Go for it, guys.

>> Partrick Kelly: Ditto on that. But the one other thing that struck me in the report is the report takes the time to define professionalism and accountability for results is part of that.

 

And I agree with Mike. We need more accountability for results within our profession. That's part, part of how professions work. But the report also talks about professions have high entry points, you have high standards for entry. And I think that we fall short in that area in the teaching profession too often.

 

And I think it's caused by the tension back to profession versus labor is we've got to have a teacher in the classroom. And so I get it. If you're short teachers or your short educators in the building, you've got to fill the vacancy. But I think that by lowering the standard, you make the profession less appealing to the very workforce you're trying to attract.

 

It's almost like a field of dreams, if you build it, they will come kind of scenario. I think that if the standards for the profession are raised, then in turn you attract greater talent into the profession. And I think that that's another part of the report, beyond the accountability piece that resonates as well.

 

>> Mike Miles: Yeah, let me add to that cuz I think this notion of vacancies and shortages is wrapped up into the profession also both in Dallas and in Houston. I've been in Houston a year and a half and we've started these massive reforms, whole scale systemic reform. We can talk about some other day.

 

And this, at the start of this school year, we had only 48 teacher vacancies out of, you know, 10,640 teachers, whereas everybody around.

>> Jenn Vranek: Has that ever happened before?

>> Mike Miles: Hundreds. No. And, and, and those vacancies were specialty ones. And, and we have 1879 SPED teachers. And 12 of them were vacant because of special certification requirements anyway.

 

And the reason why we have so few vacancies is not just because we raised salaries and we had the highest salaries, but because we've said this is challenging. We have an employee value proposition that's publicized, and it says if you join HISD, you'll be visited often, you'll be on paper performance eventually, and.

 

And these are the supports we're going to give you. But it's challenging. And every elite organization out there, every elite one, has always done better with hiring because they are elite, but they make sure there's a bar and they know it's a challenge and it will attract people who want to step up to the challenge.

 

So the original thing we need to do, I think, is make it a choice to join a district that is challenged and will be challenging, but will support you in your growth.

>> Holly Boffy: So connected to all of this, our current system in my home state of Louisiana has school accountability and district accountability.

 

And what happens is each time you do school accountability, you're getting an average across the school. When you do district accountability, you're getting an average across the district. That's where you're getting information that's farther away from the kids. That's where, you know, you can't really tell where things are great and where things are poor.

 

If you're looking at averages, I think some power behind going to that classroom level and talking about accountability at that classroom level takes away that we're not averaging out a district. We're gonna look classroom by classroom of how things are happening in this particular school. I think it would be powerful.

 

And Patrick, I would be willing to bet on establishing those expectations, providing that support and then knowing that if people opt in who are not at the level that you expect them to be, knowing that they're not going to stay there for 30 years. Right? I'd rather take a bet on you in like, for one year or two years and, and try it out, which it sounds like what you're doing.

 

Mike.

>> Mike Miles: Yeah, go ahead, Patrick.

>> Partrick Kelly: No, no, no.

>> Holly Boffy: No, I mean, I Like, what you're doing is that you're telling, well, you have high expectations, you meet those expectations, you stay, you don't meet those expectations. Money There are other things you can do that's.

>> Mike Miles: That's exactly.

 

I mean it's spelled out fairly clearly. But also so it's all connected. I mean it's whole skill system. So the spot, what we call spot observations, observations of classroom, what is expected of the teachers clearly outline. But then the evaluation system is individualized. So the unit of change is not the teacher.

 

In our case the unit of change is district. But the assessment is individualized.

>> Evan Stone: And just I mean maybe full circle for me because when I started teaching it was 2011 and I was a measures of effective teaching teacher in my first year. I had the camera in my room, I got the like video observations all the time.

 

It was awesome. It was the best feedback I ever got. But then when we rolled out teacher evaluation systems across the country as part of Race to the Top, they didn't stick in most places we heard they did stick in D.C. And now you're bringing this back in Houston and Dallas.

 

>> Mike Miles: And in Dallas.

>> Evan Stone: Yeah. And that's in Tennessee. There are other places that have meaningful evaluation systems in place. But I think I just want to name two things that you're doing and that DC did. And that is both the support and the reward. That a lot of places we rolled out accountability without the support and the reward.

 

And I don't say this to make excuses for it, but I saw it firsthand that we had tons of teachers that felt like, okay, now I'm gonna be held accountable. And I agree not that many actually were held accountable, but there was the threat and the fear of accountability coming and yet there was no benefit, there was no additional compensation, there was no differentiated compensation.

 

Leadership roles in districts were not defined by your ability to be effective in that. And so I just say that this does need to be the full package that with accountability needs to come. The support needs to feel like if I am struggling there will be opportunities to grow and improve and that feels real and tangible and there will be a reward if I am high performing so that you build a sort of self interest and buy in into the system as well.

 

>> Mike Miles: We have a phrase that says accountability without support just breeds fear. But accountability which supports creates a high performance culture. One other thing, Eric Hanischick and Steve Rifkin and several other professionals were involved in a research study of Dallas's pay for performance system. You can find it in the National Bureau of Economic Research study from March of 2022, I believe, or 2023.

 

So recent publication and shows unequivocally that the pay for performance system in Dallas that I implemented has had long term benefits on achievement. And by the way on staff retention as evidenced by your only 48 vacancies. Well, yeah, this is Houston, the 48 vacancies. But over time we'll show the same thing in Houston.

 

>> Partrick Kelly: And I think what's really important about what you're describing, Mike, is that I heard you say teachers sign up for this and amongst those are these routine classroom observations. I love that as a teacher because A I want people in my classroom giving me feedback. I don't know how to get better if nobody tells me what I'm not doing right.

 

I can self evaluate all day. But there's something to be said for a third party independent evaluator. But the report talks about accountability, reframing and I think part of what causes the rub within the profession when we start talking about holding teachers accountable is over the last 25 years.

 

Since no child left behind, accountability has become synonymous with one time high stakes test. Accountability is more than that. The report talks about the need for a broadly defined set of measures that you're using like classroom observations. And I think the profession can rally to that. Not to drag in the 45th sports analogy today since you know, that's what happens when you have a former NFL quarterback on stage, but listening to him, I think resonates with that.

 

Because when accountability for the teaching profession is boiled down to a singular number on a singular test, which is not what Mike's talking about in Houston. Then it would be similar to me to holding a coach accountable in a sporting event solely based on the final score of the game.

 

Yes, the final score matters. As Andrew Luck said today, like you want to win, but if you're not looking at half of his starting lineup was injured or like there's more to it than just that one number. And so when you create that broader set of accountability, I think it becomes more appropriate and fair to the professional.

 

But it makes a more attractive profession as well because you know that you're looking at a holistic body of evidence and not just a singular point in time.

>> Jenn Vranek: Evan, you shared a data point with me a couple of months ago when you polled teachers and it might have been Massachusetts.

 

And it was the tension of the they want summative data, but not can you, can you share? Assessment keeps coming up today. I've been really fascinated that when we've gotten into kind of policy ideas, it's been science and reading and assessment accountability. And I think there's a political gridlock on assessment change and a huge desire for assessment to be maintained and for them to be changed.

 

And I thought your teacher data underscored that tension and I hear it here now.

>> Evan Stone: I'm going to get the numbers wrong.

>> Jenn Vranek: But just make them up. Give them the General Good.

>> Partrick Kelly: Great, 80% stats are made up.

>> Evan Stone: No, but what we know is true from our polling of teachers across the country is that the vast majority of teachers do think that they should be held accountable for student learning over time.

 

That they want to know their student learning over time. When you ask them that question, then they get really worried when you say, do you want to be measured based on your end of the year state standardized test? So it is a framing and messaging because they don't view the state standardized test for whatever reason as a measure of student learning over time.

 

I think if there were embedded measures throughout a curriculum, they might have more faith in that. If they actually saw the connection between their end of year assessment and the year prior's assessment, they might have more faith in that. But I think we have a lot of work to do to build confidence in the assessments that we use.

 

And this played out in Massachusetts where when we polled our teachers, they thought there should be end of course requirements. They thought there should be a clear graduation standard, and yet they did not support the MCAS test. The majority of teachers did not support the MCAS test, which was those things.

 

And we had a really hard time trying to think about how do we talk to teachers about this issue to help them understand the that this is the thing that they say they want. And part of that has been the political fights around assessments. Part of that has been their unions messaging around these issues.

 

Not to minimize that, but we have a lot of work to do to help teachers build confidence in the measures of student learning that we are using, that it's actually reflective of what they're learning over time.

>> Mike Miles: Let me defend teachers at this point. The measures of effective teaching MET study done around 2010, 2011 pointed out, Jen, what you're saying, Evan, that there's got to be multiple measures and achievement is only 30 to 40%.

 

It should be 30 or 40%. And then there should be other components of the evaluation. But to go back to why this is a systemic problem is that we have a lot of principals who go into classrooms only once every six months or once every few months, or they're not instructional either themselves.

 

They can't tell the teacher how to improve. And so it does feel like, wow, you're coming in, you've seen me twice in a year maybe, and then you're trying to hold me accountable for good instruction or whatever it is or you want. Because the rest is subjective. I got a principal who doesn't know what they're doing, they're not instructional, so what do they do?

 

They say, well, let's put most of it on an end of year evaluation. That's not fair, that's not the way it's supposed to be. That's not research based. That's not how D.C. does it It's not how Dallas does it, it's not how Houston does it.

>> Jenn Vranek: It's not how any of us are evaluated.,.

 

>> Mike Miles: Yeah, exactly. So I can see why there's that hesitancy from a lot of teachers to say, look, my evaluation shouldn't count for much because I've got a leader who doesn't really know what I do.

>> Partrick Kelly: My last formal observation before I moved to the professional certificate in South Carolina was from an administrator who stared out the window at the pond outside my classroom.

 

Beautiful view from my classroom and kind of like being on Stanford's campus. But in the post evaluation conference, the feedback was, I have no idea what you were doing, but the kids seem to engage. So you're good?

>> Mike Miles: Yeah.

>> Partrick Kelly: Like that as a professional, that actually like part of me was like, okay, cool, I'm on professional certificate now.

 

But as a professional, I was like, really? This is what I'm getting, I worked hard to prep for this observation and I got, I don't know what she did, but look good.

>> Jenn Vranek: And that's what DC did, for example, that was different. Just to name it, they put this cadre of expert teacher coaches in place who were AP government or physics or seventh grade at pre algebra.

 

Like who knew the content and the pedagogy for that subject area. And they came in and did the consistent, frequent multiple observations, the really actionable feedback, not just at the end of the year. Here's one big post observation conference. And teachers grew in their practice. It didn't actually cost that much either.

 

They were able to spend a lot of the money on compensation and rewards, but by having this highly selected cadre of teacher leaders who do know the subject matter, who can provide. Teachers got better, the system has gotten better. Kids are learning more and I'd love to see that be what we're talking about.

 

Now, if we can't necessarily upskill principals to do all of these things. But what if we have lead teachers like Patrick or Holly who. That's half their day.

>> Mike Miles: I want to challenge that notion.

>> Jenn Vranek: Okay, about principles.

>> Mike Miles: Yes, because the best coaches are principals. Here's what's happening in the profession right now.

 

This is what mixes things up. You have lots of vendors and contractors and consultants and companies out there, and no offense, right? But when it comes to instruction, the best way to do it systemically is to have your principals be strong instructional leaders that your district and their executive directors.

 

We have 274 principals, 645 assistant principals. That's the scale that we're dealing with. And so the challenge is getting 674 principals all on the same page, all to be instructional leaders. That's another session, another day. But that's the best way. Instead of, we hire a company like Houston had when I got there and I changed all this.

 

This group was teaching principals about instructional practices. A different group was teaching this set of schools about engagement and teacher practices. Another group of consultants teaching this group of teachers. And it's like, okay, so is it all aligned? Do the teachers have to do what the consultant says?

 

Is anybody accountable for it? Is the principal holding? The principal's not even showing up. The training of the teachers, they don't know what. I've been a consultant. I still consult a little bit, and it would drive me crazy. I'm training principals. The executive director's not there, the superintendent's not, nobody's there.

 

I could be telling them I could be making up shit, which is an official term of art for us, but that's a problem. So one of the things we had that drove people crazy, some people crazy, is we had a phrase and we stuck to it. No vendors on the field.

 

Now we need consultants to do all kinds of stuff, just like a football team. But on the field, it's only the coaches that tell a player how to throw a tackle, how to run a route, how to line up, how to run this play. It's only coaches that we have, not anybody else.

 

And so you can imagine it drove a lot of the people angry because we're a $2 billion organization and there were a lot of vested interests in their practice.

>> Jenn Vranek: I don't know if we're saying something different or not, because I would never say the principal shouldn't be an instructional leader.

 

They have to set the tone and the vision. But in the football analogy, there's a lot of coaches out on that field. The special teams coordinator-

>> Mike Miles: They're all on the team, though.

>> Jenn Vranek: They're all working on the team. And that's what I am excited about with the idea of, like, not trying to invest everything in the one visionary, excellent principal.

 

Who's going to be in the role for four years and then move up to principal supervisor and then assistant superintendent. I'd love to see it be more like, you're the special teams coordinator. You're excellent at punting. What's the equivalent of that? Maybe inclusion for special ed kids. Like, we do have different strengths and gifts.

 

That principal needs to lead that building. But I think we need to take advantage of the teacher assets in a building and just organize time differently. I don't think a fourth grade teacher should be teaching English language arts, mathematics, science, social studies, five sessions a day with one planning period by themselves in a classroom-

 

>> Mike Miles: Or departmentalized.

>> Jenn Vranek: With five different curriculums that look very different. And really, no, I mean, maybe a grade level meeting once a month. So I think we need that, that leadership and we also need to instill the capacity and find it within our pretty proficient teachers who are there in the building.

 

And they're just being asked to only reach their 25 kids and not have a greater impact.

>> Holly Boffy: Thank you for all of that. I'm gonna revise the next question because you guys have answered that in a great way and I just wanna get to the specifics. So the original question was thoughts on teacher responsibility for services versus results.

 

The report is clear that the North Star is the results for students. I think that what we should talk about is how do we get to those results? And I know, I've heard a little bit already, but I'd like to hear what do the results look like in Houston?

 

What are you guys shooting for? What are your goals? What kind of measurements matter to you? Are there a whole bunch of measures? Are you honing in on a few key areas?

>> Mike Miles: So, again, Houston's a little bit different because it's a state takeover districts. So a year and a half ago that the Commission of Education of Texas took over the district for failure to improve and they removed the elected board and then put in a board of managers.

 

And I was appointed the superintendent. So it's a little bit different than my Dallas experience and Harrison, Colorado Springs experience, etc. But the question still is pertinent. But I tell you that because there's two sets of goals. One is a set of goals to get out of exit, to get out of intervention.

 

That is to have zero schools with D or F rating, you know, before we can get out of intervention. How many do we had at the start of my tenure a year and a half ago, 121.

>> Jenn Vranek: Out of how many total?

>> Mike Miles: 274. So that's kinda big challenge.

 

The second goal was to conform with state and federal law on special education and to improve SPED achievement. The third goal is a board goal and that's improve board governance. So those two have to be there. And to get out of state intervention, to get out of DNF status, you have to meet certain.

 

You have to improve reading, writing, math, college and career readiness, graduation rate, things like that. But there's another goal I put in place or another set of goals and that is year 35 competencies. Because I wasn't just going to go in and just do read and write, math, science and just think that's okay, get out of intervention status when I know that the world is changing, the workplace is changing, we need some different competencies.

 

It has to do with whole scale systemic reform. I just gave you a short 22nd version and that is we also want to improve our kids skill in the art of thinking, which is information literacy, problem solving, critical thinking. We actually have exams beginning, middle and end of year around that.

 

And we have now 130 schools doing that. And that will expand. We expanded programs of study to make sure that our career tech ed programs are upgraded. We started AI electives in the high school, all geared towards year 2035 competence. I can go on more, but that's generally it.

 

>> Holly Boffy: So you guys have identified the results you need to be successful for the students in Houston. And in a way those goals are articulated by the state, but you've added on to those goals to make sure that it's not just about coming out of an unsatisfactory status, but about truly serving the community where.

 

You are, thank you. So unions came up in the earlier conversation. My situation is different in a right to work state. You know, I, I can't relate to all the things that was said already about unions, but there is this notion of solidarity that has been prevalent in the teaching profession.

 

And so Patrick, Mike, whoever likes to talk about it is, I'd like for you to talk to us about that notion of solidarity versus a notion of reward for distinguished performance and what that has looked like in your experience, what you hear from educators about it. How do we make it possible?

 

Solidarity is a big part of the teaching profession because it is a collective exercise.

>> Partrick Kelly: I think by nature educators flock to other people with a like minded focus on student achievement and student growth and the well-being of children. And I've heard the tension loudly today. South Carolina is a right to work state like Louisiana.

 

So I, I don't have the experience that has been referenced at other points today. But I think part of the tension that I see in South Carolina because our state superintendent is being innovative and forward thinking in terms of strategic compensation and trying to deliver some of the packages and incentives around compensation that Mike has mentioned in Houston.

 

Is striking a balance between a profession wanting to have those opportunities for growth and those opportunities to be rewarded for a job well done. Like I think there's an inherent human desire to be rewarded for good work. Like I just think that I'm not a sociologist or a psychologist, but I just think that's true in watching my students work, go through their work and so that desire is there.

 

But I think that we also have to acknowledge that for too long the teaching profession at large has been marginalized in terms of compensation related to other like professions. It's just a simple reality. And so for example, in South Carolina, as recently as five years ago, a first year teacher made $31,000.

 

You can want higher pay and opportunities for achievement and strategic compensation and incentives. But you can also in a stand of solidarity, say nobody doing this job should be doing it for $31,000 a year in the year 2019. And so I think what's moving the needle certainly in South Carolina is while our superintendent has pushed for these strategic models, she and the governor have also clearly articulated a goal by 2026 of getting minimum starting teacher pay in statewide to $50,000.

 

To what I would consider to be certainly in our state, with our standard of living or cost of living in South Carolina, that's a working salary for somebody coming straight out of school in a way that $31,000. If you've ever been to Charleston, you're not living in Charleston at $31,000 a year.

 

And so striking the balance between making sure that the profession at large is a profession where all educators have the ability to earn a living wage that can support a family and support growth in the profession. If that's that precondition is in place, then I think you see stronger support across the profession for the implementation of incentive based pay structures.

 

Because at the end of the day, I can't do my job well if there aren't a army of teachers in my building also doing their job well. I've got to teach apus government if the English teacher isn't doing their job well. I only have so many minutes in the day and my students don't want to see me for more minutes than they already have to.

 

So I need a strong teaching workforce around me. And I think that's where the solidarity element comes into it.

>> Mike Miles: So. No, no, go ahead, I'll go after.

>> Evan Stone: So at Educators for Excellence, we work in all of the big districts that we're talked about earlier. Los Angeles, Chicago, New York City, Boston, Minneapolis, all with very strong labor unions.

 

And a lot of our work is about getting teachers to be in part, more involved in those unions because by and large, very few teachers vote in union elections. On average, across the country, it's about 16% of active teachers vote in their union elections. So union leadership is often not very representative of where the aggregate teacher position is.

 

And at the same time, teachers really want their union. When you poll teachers across the country, whether they are in a union, whether they are in an association, or whether they're in a charter school environment, over 80% of teachers say they want and think that teachers should have access to unions.

 

So they want unions. And then at the same time, you ask them, do you agree with your union's current negotiating priorities? And then it's only about 35% of teachers that tell you, I agree with my union's priorities. And I think a big driving factor of this is that we have tribalism in all of our politics.

 

And I think there is solidarity on the people that are working side by side with you every day. And if you're seeing some of them get attacked, it does feel like an attack on you. And so I think in the reform movement, we've made some big mistakes in the way we talk about teachers that has fed into that tribalism.

 

But otherwise, I totally agree with what Patrick said that I think by and large, teachers show us that yes, they want to increase compensation for all teachers, but that does not mean they are opposed to differentiated compensation tied to performance, tied to roles tied to impact with kids.

 

I think they are very open to that depending on how it's messaged. And as long as there's a set standard there to start from, I don't think you need a union for solidarity and teamwork.

>> Mike Miles: In fact, I think just the opposite, I think the union has been the number one barrier to success in the education profession for the last 20, 30 years.

 

And I'm a person who agrees with the right to assemble, the right for unions to exist and try to get better working conditions. But the way they've gone about it is their interests are tied to different outcomes or different priorities for the school system. You talk about putting student centered foot work, that is not their first priority.

 

The adult is their first priority. And they are openly say that. So that is in direct conflict with student centered or you know, putting kids first. So what we're doing, and here's what I did analysis, we're, I mean yes, we're right to work state, so we don't have a master agreement, but the association still have plenty of power over elected boards, is we're supporting teachers despite the union.

 

So we raised teacher salaries $8,000 in one year in Texas now having the highest salaries of anybody in the area by far. And that was without union participation. We've improved their professional development and their practice, the curriculum, the lesson planning, their work life balance, all without the union.

 

And we are already finding more and more solidarity and teamwork in the schools as a result of the things that we're doing and what the principals are doing to support the teachers. So I say let's flip the switch on that. We don't need the union, we need to support teachers.

 

We need to give them a livable wage, help them with work life balance. We don't need the union to do that.

>> Holly Boffy: Say more about work life balance.

>> Mike Miles: Yeah, so one of the things we as a profession, we want teachers to be able to go home 15 minutes after the last bell and not have to work.

 

On any lesson plans or anything that they're done. They work hard during the day, they have high quality instruction. They are coached like football players on the field. But when practice ends, they're done. That's what we're hoping for. And so what we've done in Houston so far is at least in 130 schools out of the 274.

 

And it's now creeping into all the other schools. We provide the PowerPoint, the lesson plans, the demonstrations of learning, the bell work, demonstrations of learning are mini quizzes. The answer key, the differentiated assignments, every day differentiated assignments for kids who are further behind. And the teachers love that because they're not getting on teachers pay teachers.

 

They're not having to find resources after work. They leave at 4:15. They are done. There's only one requirement to meet, and that's Thursday afternoon from 4:15 to 5:15 for one hour across those 130 schools. And the other schools also have to meet for an hour. Other than that, they don't have any other meetings scheduled after school.

 

They can go home, they can have time with their family. We're going to try to keep doing that and expanding that. By the way, this notion of autonomy. We found that the other schools, 140 other schools in the system, 93% of all of our schools are using the curriculum we provide and the lesson plans, even though they don't have to go figure.

 

The real practice and professional comes in, in internalizing that and then delivering that. There's no curriculum that teaches, there are no pieces of paper that teach. There's no piece of paper or curriculum that adjusts in the moment. That takes a question and turns it into a question for the whole group.

 

That's the art of teaching, that's the profession, that's the professionalism. Let us do all the other stuff. Teachers are not experts at curriculum alignment. Most of them, they like that we give them the stuff. And by the way, the stuff is grade level material until you get to the differentiated material.

 

But the lesson plans, the PowerPoints are grade level instruction. We can have a long debate about will teachers teach grade level instruction. We know in our profession they don't on the whole, especially in underserved communities, maybe in other places. So that's what I mean by work life balance.

 

>> Holly Boffy: I appreciate that. I was happy to hear you bring it up when we talked earlier and I definitely wanted to make sure that we addressed it here today because I don't believe that we talk enough about that. Is that historically even if you envision a teacher, they're walking in with all these extra bags and walking out with all these extra bags.

 

And so I think you talked about the mental health days earlier. I imagine you'll need fewer mental health days if you truly are unplugging and meeting your responsibilities with families and whatever hobbies you have outside of being a teacher. So I really, as someone who started in the classroom, I really appreciate you bringing that, bringing that up.

 

So we're gonna turn to the audience in just a minute. So I want to let you know we are going to allow the audience to ask questions. I'm going to skip through a couple of questions that we have. So if there's anything I'm skipping that you guys really wanted to make a point on, let me know.

 

But Jenn, this has come up a little bit in this notion of innovation in teaching. And so I've heard you sprinkle that into the conversation already. But just want to create some time for you to talk about innovation in teaching because it sounds like that's what it's going to take to turn around some of the statistics you shared with us at the beginning.

 

>> Jenn Vranek: Yeah, I mean, so my organization worked with a number of foundations and a number of teaching advocacy organizations and something called the Coalition to Reimagine the Teaching Profession. And there were these two sort of simultaneous side-by-side efforts. And we looked all around the country for examples of innovations that are having impact.

 

We tried to find statewide examples. We were able to find some district wide examples where it's not just a couple classrooms or case by case examples. But really where there's an intentional plan sometimes negotiated with the union and embedded in contracts and really came up with a framework that talks about six different characteristics of strategic, strategic staffing.

 

We've talked about several of them. Distributed leadership where, you know, Evan's not asked to do the things Evan's not really good at and he focuses on the things he's great at in a group with other people. We've talked about this idea of leading other teams of teachers and teaming with intentional teams.

 

Some of the other characteristics are things like technology that optimizes the use of teacher time. Not necessarily go sit in front of software. But there's a really very new piloting nonprofit called Course Mojo where they're tapped into about half a dozen of the best high quality instructional materials out there and they're training the AI technology to help teachers differentiate with the grade level standards.

 

So it's actually integral to the lessons, but it's like 15 minutes at the beginning. It's not the full classroom, it's not a station rotation, but it's really deeply connected into the work. And it doesn't say that teachers have to be able to reach students who are really far below grade level, at grade level and advanced on their own in one classroom.

 

And doing all that simultaneously. It's getting some help for teachers to do that. Another thing we haven't really talked about is all the other people in the building, like the paraprofessionals or the instructional assistants, how do we use them really effectively? You've talked about student engagement strategies. You go into a lot of classrooms and it's the paras who are sitting and talking with students who might need some extra help.

 

How do you actually build those into teams and compensate people differently and then again, compensation to recognize all these different responsibilities. To do that you have to have equity, focus, stable leadership. You have to have trusting relationships. We talk a lot about unions. At the end of the day, a lot of this comes down to do you spend the time to build relationships with people and to try to see meet each other somewhere where each other are.

 

And you need to do that in order to see these innovations. But a couple places, Edgecombe county in North Carolina, they've been doing public impacts, opportunity culture for a number of years, but that got scaled up a bit with some state level support. And so they have an achievement leader role who is responsible for multiple classrooms.

 

Actually they're held accountable not just for the 25 kids on average in their classroom, but for the whole grade level. And to do that, the other teachers kind of work with and for that teacher. And then they have paraprofessionals who are called reach associates who help make it happen.

 

And that's all done together, not and by design. And it's embedded and compensated, it's the expectation. It doesn't just happen because smart people sat down and said they could do it. And they've been able to do that in a rural eastern North Carolina school system that doesn't get a lot of fresh blood.

 

They hire locally and they have to be creative. So there's a couple schools here in California that are in year one of doing some other things around team teaching. Like I mentioned earlier, that real life example, one teacher is teaching writing, another is teaching phonemic awareness, another is teaching math, and another is helping with special education.

 

And they're doing that. For all the fourth graders. And they figured out how to make the school day work, and they figured out how to make the contract work for it, and it's year one. They all feel more satisfied with their job. They're reporting that they're seeing faster kids, are learning faster, they're getting on to where they should be earlier in the year than is expected, and parents and the students seem happier.

 

And it's not tracked. It's just, it's just well-designed that takes a lot of effort to get there. So, we've got to have some support to make these innovations happen. But I think there's just a lot of latent demand, as people have been saying. And what we need are some places that are willing to build on the 15 years or so of this and try to take it to scale.

 

We need some states, we need some states that are willing to go kind of go big on this.

>> Holly Boffy: Are you guys doing any kind of publication of the work?

>> Jenn Vranek: A bunch of people are, so we've got a framework on our website that people can go to, and download that has examples, has some of these examples.

 

And then in this next phase of the work, some of these funders have, are funding about a dozen planning grants to try to scale this to new places, and then a few implementation grants to go scale the. Sorry, the piloting, and testing of it to more places, and then a smaller number of implementation grants to really go big.

 

But there's a storytelling and publication element of that. I think it'll be let out of Teach Plus. So, I don't know if you have any more details on that.

>> Evan Stone: Yeah, and on the coalition to reimagining the teaching website, there are case studies and examples of some of this already.

 

But I think your point is right, that the challenge, the question is, how do you take this to scale? Because in most of the places that it is happening, there is a lot of outside support, there's a truly visionary set of leaders, and we want to think about how do you actually institutionalize this so that it is built into the system.

 

So that it can last, so that it is sustained, and there are mechanisms for this to continue to improve over time.

>> Holly Boffy: Thank you, I look forward to checking it out, learning more. Is there anything else that we had talked about that you want to be sure to share before we turn it over to questions from the audience.

 

>> Evan Stone: Just to build on this, one other thing that we are working a lot on is this question of, like, how do you embed this in CBAs? Where they exist, and so we are doing a lot of work at E3 to start to analyze contracts in major districts across the country, and identify here are barriers to being able to really shift roles in the teaching profession to change pay, to change how you can use time.

 

And a big one that I think is going to be one of the hardest to address are class size mandates across the country. These are baked into many state laws. They're also baked into many contracts. And if you actually want to shift how we're using teachers and time, it means you're going to have larger classes and smaller classes and working groups and other things.

 

And so one of the most, you know, the first thing that most legislators put money into is class size reduction because lots of parents. It sounds good, it feels good. And so I think one huge political hurdle we're going to have if we actually want to rethink the structure of the profession is how we deal with class size mandates in a way that doesn't feel like we're just saying every teacher is now going to have 50 kids.

 

But that we're actually going towards ratios to make sure there's still the appropriate number of teachers. But we aren't limiting school's ability to be flexible, to be, to make different decisions based on class size.

>> Holly Boffy: Well, I think you did a beautiful job of circling us back to the report and the fact that we need to move away from all of these inputs and mandates, and we need to return.

 

We need to give authority to people closest to students and focus on the results there. So we'll go ahead and turn it over to question. If you could share your name and your role, we would appreciate it.

>> Bob Banning: My name is Bob Banning, Chair of House Education Committee in Indiana.

 

I've really enjoyed the panel, I think you've done a good job of explaining a lot of the report. One thing, that wasn't mentioned in the report that I personally think we might have overlooked is differentiated pay. And I wonder, I really appreciate what Mike is doing in your school district.

 

I'd love to have maybe you come to Indiana at some point in time because it sounds pretty amazing as to how you're turning around districts, but can you speak to differentiated pay? I think in a professional system, I just can't imagine with the demands we have, for instance, in the private sector for STEM fields, to think that I'm paying a STEM teacher the same thing I'm paying a PE even though I see the value of both.

 

It's just market is going to drive forces, are going to drive that in a way that's going to make it more difficult for us to get those people. So, I'd like to response from that.

>> Mike Miles: I'll start, yes, we have in Houston we have what's known as a hospital model, pay structure for 130 schools.

 

And starting next year we'll have the pay for performance model. The pay for performance model is differentiated based on performance. So, the higher your achievement, instruction and other components, you get paid more. The hospital model is, I think Houston's the only one in the nation using it as far as a large urban, and it's differentiated pay based on the position.

 

So for example, a sixth grade language arts teacher starts at $86,000. In Houston today, even with zero years of experience, we only count the first and second year. When you get to the third year, you get a different pay and then fifth year, but it's all high. So zero years experience, $86,000.

 

However, the social studies teachers only make 72 or 74,000 and the elective teacher makes 68 or 70,000. I don't have it in front of me, but so it is differentiated based on the value of the position that we have, and we have to be honest about it. And we say, because we have a lot of kids who are behind 92% for in reduced lunch, we started way behind the state average.

 

And you know, so we have a lot of challenges, kids can't read. So, if you're a 6th grade language arts teacher and your student body, you know, only 20% of your kids can read, then you better be a surgeon. And we should pay for that even with zero years, if you get hired.

 

But if you are teaching third grade, PE, sorry. You know, we have to be honest, that's not as valuable, at least in a district like Houston as a language arts teacher, we're still going to give you a decent pay, $70,000 or 72,000, which is more than the starting salaries in the area.

 

But it is definitely not, you know, 86,000.

>> Holly Boffy: So, is that district wide? Because I know that you've talked about the differentiation between your lower performing schools. So it is the hospital model.

>> Mike Miles: The hospital model is in 130 schools.

>> Holly Boffy: Is 130, okay, so the schools where you're really trying to emphasize growth.

 

>> Mike Miles: Yes.

>> Holly Boffy: Okay, did you do the hospital model in Dallas?

>> Mike Miles: No, we did not, we came up with it in my charter network called Third Future Schools.

>> Evan Stone: And I'll just say the combination of those two things. There's also broad support from educators for both differentiation based on role responsibility and based on student population.

 

And actually, that's the thing that there's the highest level of support from teachers for is differentiation. If you are serving the highest need populations of kids, because every teacher teacher understands that every classroom is not the same and that the job is actually substantially harder in some classrooms.

 

>> Holly Boffy: Also offer that in Louisiana the funding formula allows for it. I don't know if districts are actually using it or not. So we have a statewide incentive incentive fund and the districts can do it, but I'm not sure that any are actually doing it.

>> Evan Stone: There's really interesting stuff like Detroit pays all of their special educators now $15,000 a year more and they are using IDA funds as part of the mechanism to cover those costs.

 

Because they had so many vacancies and they went from having hundreds of vacancies and their special educators down to having seven at the start of this year. That's one other example.

>> Bob Banning: I do have a, I appreciate that. I have a follow up question that you did speak to in class size and I agree totally with what Evan was saying about having larger classes.

 

You can pay teachers, especially highly effective teachers, more money just by the fact they have class sizes. State law is part of the problem, but the unions are a good part of the problem too where the unions constantly negotiate for smaller class sizes. Can you speak to how we can negotiate with the unions to get that changed?

 

I could easily change the class size at a state level. I think other thing is you have to change consumers minds because parents think smaller equals better. But the reality is a great educator can actually work miracles with larger classes and still have a greater impact than a bad teacher in a small classroom.

 

>> Partrick Kelly: So I'll offer two things to that. One I think it's if you're talking about how to navigate the politics of that, you have to look at kind of the hospital model. You have to look at different. Not all teaching situations are the same. I can teach 50 advanced placement seniors.

 

All day long that bring them that's fine. If you put 50 second graders into a little bitty classroom with one adult safety to the side. Learning is going to be really hard in that environment. So to Evan's point earlier about ratios, some of the most successful models is getting away from class size.

 

In South Carolina, the Meeting Street School model in Charleston has been really really successful and they put two adults in every classroom so you have that backing. The other thing you have to look at is it's less from the educator perspective about the number of kids in front of you and it's more about the workload associated with it.

 

So I'm telling you and I'm going to borrow, I'm going to channel Rick Hannah Shek for a second. I can teach 400 advanced placement students a day. I can manage that. I cannot grade their writing. There is a breaking point. There's only so many hours in a day it takes me.

 

I've read for the College Board. I am a wildly efficient scorer of free response questions. I still am going to need two minutes a question. And if you give me 500 students, there's not enough hours in the day because when I get home I'm going to have a list from my wife and daughters that have nothing to do with scoring those essays.

 

So Rick often advocates for give your highest performing teachers more students to instruct, but give them support with tasks like grading, similar to the graduate assistant model at a university. So I think that's the other part that has to be navigated. It's not just about the arbitrary number, it's about the workload associated with that number and how can you offset it in a meaningful and appropriate way.

 

>> Speaker 1: And a lot of the international studies will show it's not less adults. Since you have your highly effective teacher in front, you have guides on the sides basically supporting. So I get what you're saying.

>> Holly Boffy: And that was what I think the point Evan had brought up about the ratios.

 

And so it's moving the conversation. Shifting that conversation from the class sizes to the conversations about ratios could be a way for you to enter that conversation. The other thing is you've told us you can make the change at the legislative level, right?

>> Evan Stone: I also think there's places where they've set up a process for schools to take to actually be able to solve this on their own.

 

So there are contracts, CBAs and right to and unionized.

>> Holly Boffy: What is a CBA.

>> Evan Stone: Sorry, collective bargaining agreement.

>> Holly Boffy: All right.

>> Evan Stone: A union.

>> Holly Boffy: I was getting close to that in my head.

>> Evan Stone: But anyway, a union contract. And there are places where they've actually let, they have a ratio, district wide ratio for the schools.

 

And then they let the schools actually determine in the building through a committee how do we want to allocate those ratios. And in low performing schools, often they just do it flat. We're all going to have 27 kids or something. But in the higher performing schools you'll actually see that they've adjusted that and that they've moved those things around.

 

And when you can tie compensation to those decisions so that you're doing exactly what Patrick just described. Giving your best teachers either more students or giving them time to mentor and coach others and then giving them compensation, that goes along with it. So I just think it can't.

 

It is needs to be whole scale systemic reform. Because if you just do the ratios but you don't have the compensation and the teacher leader roles, then I think it does break down. And I think that our reforms need to be both the accountability and the reward and the support altogether for them to actually have sticking power in third future schools.

 

>> Mike Miles: We purposely at the charter network, not only do we have the high salaries, but we purposely have numerous teachers teaching two classrooms of kids at one time, 50 kids. We pay them more, about $10,000 more. We put a teacher assistant in there. We call them learning coaches.

 

And we do that part partly to save money because this teacher, this high paid teacher we're saving on that by just giving them 10,000 and we put a teacher assistant in there. So because there are many teachers who can teach 50 kids at one time with a teacher assistant.

 

And so that is a purposeful strategy in third future schools. We're going to bring it to Houston after another year.

>> Holly Boffy: At the appropriate.

>> Mike Miles: Yeah, at the appropriate time.

>> Evan Stone: Make it through a few other fights.

>> Mike Miles: Yeah.

>> Holly Boffy: So this is something that I had a dinner table conversation about is.

 

And I think it goes back to that first or second question of how do we know when we're successful? And part of it for me is when we're promoting within the classroom, right? Is that in order to get a promotion as an educator, it's not me becoming an assistant principal or a principal, but that my promotion is in the classroom somehow.

 

And I think that's where the opportunity lies. It goes back to some of the practices that Jen's talking about. And then Evan is telling us that he sees in the polling data and it's the reality of what Patrick gets to live every day, right. So I serve as a principal.

 

It's an amazing season in my life, but I love to begin a teacher and I wish someone would have figured this out a long time ago.

>> Jenn Vranek: So you can make more money, that I can do different things. You can continue growing, right? But you're still putting that first love at the heart of the job.

 

>> Holly Boffy: I don't have to leave the classroom to get that promotion. Yes, absolutely. And think about the results we can achieve with our students when we make that possible. So I don't see any other questions. You guys have been amazing. You were inspired me to get on the plane to come here because I wanted to have this conversation with you all.

 

I want to thank the Hoover Institute and the Futures Council for all that you guys have put forward because as someone who has started in the classroom. I read into this so much beauty and so much possibility, right? So I want to be able to encourage my children to become educators and I want all of our students served well.

 

And I think, Patrick, that point you made about the solidarity and we need great teachers working alongside us because it makes our job easier. I think that's an interesting way to think about that notion of solidarity and just the opportunities available. So I'm going to go ahead and turn it back over to Mackie.

 

Yes.

>> Margaret Raymond: So I want to appreciate, along with my New Year's resolution, leading with gratitude the hearty folks who have stayed to the very end. Give yourselves a hand. This has been a long, long day. I hope your brain is exploding as much as mine has. I want to thank this panel and all of the other presenters today.

 

We have had a phenomenally rich set of ideas and discussions today that have been far greater than I could have hoped hoped for. And it is their bringing of their own life experiences and their own thinking to add on to the earlier work that we presented that has made this such a successful day.

 

However, everyone here is going to leave with a little bit of homework. If you wouldn't mind using your cell phone to capture the QR code, we would love to hear from you, if you will share your ideas with us. For those of you that were enthused by the program today, we're happy to connect and find ways to engage further.

 

For the rest of you, it's absolutely okay that you don't like these ideas. It's absolutely okay that they hit you in ways that just bring the boil. But if that's the case, you have extra homework because then it's your job to come up with better ideas. I think everyone here ought to be on notice that we collectively have to acknowledge that the status quo cannot continue.

 

And we can't just slide back to that because this work is hard. So I am going to say we have so much potential and possibility and enthusiasm for doing something else. And if the recommendations of the Education Futures Council are not the right something else, let's work together to make it the right something else.

 

Come up with something different that's better, and I guarantee people will move to that. But let's make the commitment that we have to move forward to a new idea and then find ways to make that happen. I'm convinced the public is with us on this. I'm convinced that legislators are with us for the most part, too.

 

And so I don't consider this out of reach. I want to remind you we have already built a brand new education system. It's called charter schools and we did it successfully and it's in 46 states. We have a model of legislation that can guide us in in how we would do another model so it's not out of reach.

 

We have lots of ideas of we have lots of information about success that we could harness together. We have lots of ideas about how to celebrate and elevate teachers and administrators to help them bring their best work forward. And if we worked all of the pieces into a single idea, I'm pretty sure that that would have phenomenal legs.

 

So I will leave you with the charge of bringing your imagination home with you and trying to cultivate it. And as you leave today, please remember the bookstore continues to be open at the end of the reception area and the imagination trolley full of cafe books is still in the lobby.

 

You are welcome to take any of them that you like. I have extra book bags if you want multiples and the shuttles will run home back to the hotels starting around 5:30 until 6:30. So please go get your refreshments, you have earned them. And thank you all for staying all day long.

 

This was a great day.