What We Know About Teachers and School Choice featuring Paul E. Peterson

>> Michael Boskin: Hello, everyone. I'm Michael Boskin, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Professor of Economics at Stanford University. I lead the Hoover Institution's Tennenbaum Program For Fact-Based Policy, an important initiative bringing facts relevant to understanding the context and the evaluation of various public policies so that our citizenry can be more and better informed.

I'm speaking today with Paul Peterson. Paul is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Henry Lee Shattuck professor of Government at Harvard University. Along with Nora Gordon of Georgetown University, he authored a tour de force, a remarkable broad survey of what we know about schools. And in that survey, they covered a wide variety of topics.

If you haven't had the chance to look at it already and listen, there was an earlier podcast in which we focused on the broad context of the K12 education system and on student achievement and the sources of success and obstacles to further success. And I encourage you to take a look at that.

I think you learned quite a bit. So this is, in a sense, part two. We're gonna delve into two additional of the eight topics covered in this essay. Those are teachers and evaluating teacher effectiveness and school choice and other policy reforms that might help us improve student achievement.

So, Paul, let's start with the most fundamental question. What's the most important resource schools bring to the educational experience for our students?

>> Paul Peterson: Well, thank you, Michael, for arranging this great Tennenbaum program, which I think is a real contribution that Hoover is making to the larger community. With respect to who counts when it comes to education.

I don't think we should ever forget about the student herself or himself, because students really are critical to their own learning experience. If somebody really wants to learn, it's very difficult to keep them from learning. You can think of Abraham Lincoln as the classic example of a person who spent maybe less than one year in a schoolhouse, but he learned an enormous amount by reading Shakespeare and the Bible and from the tutelage of his dear stepmother did pretty well.

>> Michael Boskin: Absolutely.

>> Paul Peterson: But having said that, when you look at what schools can contribute, you must say they can contribute by bringing great teachers into the classroom, because great teachers make more of a difference than anything else.

>> Michael Boskin: Well, that's telling. And it's important that we then turn to our next subject, which is what do we know about teacher effectiveness?

How we can evaluate it, how we can improve it, how we can compensate in some way better teachers or better teacher performance that will aid in our kids learning.

>> Paul Peterson: There's two things about teachers that I think are really important, and one is that you can't Tell who's going to be a good teacher until you put them in the classroom.

>> Michael Boskin: Interesting.

>> Paul Peterson: People think they can. They think that if you get the right credentials, you'll be a good teacher, that if you are taught how to be a good teacher, you'll become a good teacher. But we have not found the educational training program that really produces outstanding teachers.

It may be that the best way to become a good teacher is to just practice teach, which is what was done originally. Originally, if you go back into the 19th century, you didn't go to school to become a teacher. You just started where one of the bright kids graduated from high school and you began teaching maybe by yourself in a little red schoolhouse somewhere.

And then you learn by teaching. It's like a lot of other crafts. Teaching is a craft, it's not a science. It's not something where you can say, here are the three things, things you need to do and you'll be a great teacher. So I think that's one of the things we've learned, is that you can't really train a good teacher.

You can only find a good teacher. And that is a risk that every education reform has to deal with.

>> Michael Boskin: Now, if we've established that students themselves, and then of course, next teachers are the most important thing to childhood learning in our K12 system, and that student achievement is a huge predictor of future success in life, this is really important.

But coming back to the overall importance of teaching in our K through 12 system, why don't we also figure out about how many teachers are we talking about?

>> Paul Peterson: Well, you know, the number of teachers has steadily increased over time, as has the number of students, but it's actually increased at a more rapid rate.

So we now have 4 million teachers out there.

>> Michael Boskin: Wow.

>> Paul Peterson: And that's a lot of teachers. In terms of the number of pupils per teacher, that's fallen by almost 50%. In the 1960, we had about 28 pupils for every teacher. And the last information we got on that, it was more like 15 pupils for every teacher.

So there's almost twice as many teachers given the number of pupils today as in the past. Now, do kids learn twice as much? Well, there's been a lot of improvement in student learning, especially in mathematics over the years, but. And so maybe class size is actually, by reducing class size, we may have a lot more learning, though studies on this are Some show yes, some show no. There's no final consensus on this. But yeah, everybody does like a small class, you know that, Michael.

>> Michael Boskin: Absolutely.

>> Paul Peterson: And so we are going to have small classes and maybe maybe smaller classes going forward well as you mentioned it's likely the student enrollment will decline because of demographics low fertility rates we'll have probably less students in school for a while and that will be one contributor and I guess the big issue is how as we're dealing with a gradual adjustment dealing with that demography we develop a system or improve the system to attract and retain the best teachers rather than those who are just average or below you know that's really what we want to do what we want to do is to devise a system that allows us to keep the really good teachers so that they don't drift off into other occupations which they may be tempted to do because if they're a good teacher they may be very good at other things as well and this is especially important today because women have so many more opportunities than in the past and you have to remember that 80% of the teaching force today is female That's.

What it was about 50 years ago, 80% was female and still is today. Despite the fact that women have many more opportunities, it is still the case that our educational system seems to want to have women in the classroom. Maybe men just don't want to do that. That may not be what, you know, makes them feel like what they're doing is worthwhile, but it's a reality out there.

80% of our teaching force is female, and women have a lot more opportunities. So we need to make sure we keep the best women in education if we're going to maintain the learning system that we've created in the past.

>> Michael Boskin: Well, let's come back to that with another fact that your study revealed was that teacher effectiveness seems to improve quite a bit over the first few years and then flatten out.

It plateaus, but pay scales keep rewarding for years in service rather than for performance. Is there something we can do to better align pay that would help lead to being able to retain these really good teachers?

>> Paul Peterson: Yes. Right now we have a salary schedule which is called step and lane, and the-.

Step and lane? Step and lane is the slogan that they have. And basically the step part of it is that every year you get a little bit of a salary increase. And the lane is if you have a master's degree, you'll get a little bit more than if you only have a bachelor's degree.

And if you have a few more education courses that'll get you close to a PhD, you'll get even more than if you get just a master's degree. But what we find is that the master's degree adds nothing to a person's effectiveness as a teacher. If we look at the same person before and after they get a master's degree, we see no improvement.

If we take two people who are similar in other respects and say, well, one has a master's degree and the other does not, is the one with a master's degree better? We see absolutely no difference. So this is not just one study. This is. Many studies have all found the same.

So this, if there's any consensus, it is that you don't become a better teacher by taking more college courses or more courses in schools of education, yet we pay you 15% more if you get a master's degree. You get even more of a salary bump if you take some additional courses.

So this seems to be really quite inconsistent with what you would want to do if you were trying to have the most effectively designed educational system.

>> Michael Boskin: Well, there's also been, while we've had A reduction in the number of students per teacher. And we're likely facing a gradual reduction in the number of students enrolled, at least for a while because of the recent demographic history of low fertility rates.

There also seems particularly severe. There seem to be particularly severe shortages in math, science and special education. Is that really accurate and how do current pay structures deal with that? And are there other obstacles to getting good teachers into these subjects?

>> Paul Peterson: You know, the shortage issue comes up again and again in education.

Every few years there's a new crisis that says, okay, there's a huge shortage in education. And it's true that there is a shortage in some subjects. In other subjects we have more people who would like to be a teacher than there are spaces available. So there's just a lot of variation depending on two things.

One, how difficult is is it to teach a particular kind of child? So if you think of special education, some of. And I have a child myself who is an autistic child. So I just, I know how difficult it is to educate somebody with autism. And so you need to have somebody who's extremely committed, extremely talented if that person is going to be able to deal with two or three autistic children in a classroom.

And the other thing that we find is that there are some subjects that it's very difficult to recruit people as teachers because they are so well compensated in other occupations or other professions that require those same skills. So we should be paying math teachers a lot more, we should be paying science teachers a lot more, we should be paying special education teachers a lot more.

But the step in lane salary schedule says every teacher shall be paid exactly the same except for their education level and how many years of teaching they have been in the classroom.

>> Michael Boskin: What about certification requirements? We've often heard that Harvard or Stanford math professors couldn't teach elementary school math courses because they don't have a teaching credential.

Is that still a problem or is that always overblown or what's going on there? A lot of people, for example, because the aging of the population and a lot of people retiring with a lot of good years left. A lot of people, I know several personal friends who want to go back and teach and give back to something in that way.

So how can we harness those people?

>> Paul Peterson: Well, we do have an alternative certification program that is moving in that direction. But basically you're right. We have set up artificial barriers to teaching. And the artificial barrier that's the most important is you must get a degree in education.

Now I believe that you should probably have a college degree. If you're going to be a teacher, I think somebody does not have a college degree, then maybe there could be some really exceptional people who could be very effective teachers without a college degree. But a college degree is probably a sensible rule to have that you must have one if you're going to be responsible for the education of children in a classroom.

But then to add onto that, and you must take 30 courses, which is one full year's worth of college coursework. And how to become a teacher, which really often is a bunch of topics that really have very little to do with classroom setting, has more to do with adolescent psychology or the history of education or the politics of education or the sociology of education.

These are all things that professors like to teach, but they don't have a lot to do with what. What a teacher really needs to know in the classroom. What a teacher really needs to know when they walk into a classroom as a beginning teacher is how do you manage this classroom?

How do you motivate students? How do you make sure that the disruptive elements that are out there are contained so that the rest of the students can learn? All of that is not being taught in our colleges. And so you learn that on the job. And that's why a beginning teacher is not nearly as good as a teacher who's taught for one year.

We see the biggest change in the first year and the second year of teaching in terms of student performance, and it keeps on improving after that. So third and fourth and fifth year teaching, you see steady improvements, after which you see not so much.

>> Michael Boskin: Well, one other issue in shortages that's come up recently and gets us into perhaps a fraught topic of political correctness in schools.

And things of that sort is that at least one state, New Jersey, has now eliminated English and math proficiency requirements for school teachers. And many people view this as dumbing down and likely to be, while it may produce more teachers. And by the way, this isn't the only area where quality requirements are being relaxed because of shortages.

The army has relaxed some of its restrictions, et cetera, to try to get to its recruiting goals. So there's a question about whether this is really, you know, maybe at some point they certainly have to have some, some level of English and math proficiency to be in a classroom to teach third grade arithmetic, for example.

Where do we go with this, with this tendency to relax requirements? I think President George W. Bush called it the soft bigotry of low expectations, was talking about people not believing that students coming from disadvantaged backgrounds could really achieve. And we know that in many cases they can.

But I'm wondering what do we know about these sorts of moves and are they sensible that this balancing of attracting teachers when there's a shortage versus perhaps, at least in the traditional measurements, attracting people who are less qualified, maybe some of them will grow into being a good teacher?

>> Paul Peterson: Well, I have two thoughts on this, and they're not necessarily pointing in the same direction. On the one hand, how well a student does on a test in math or reading is a better predictor of teacher performance than almost anything else that we have out there. So it's much better than knowing whether or not they've taken 30 hours of certified courses.

But on the other hand, it's not a very good predictor. So whether or not you pass this test isn't going to necessarily tell you a lot about whether or not this person will be a good teacher. What I would tend to prefer is I'd like to see at the end of the first year of teaching a principal or the supervisor take a very serious look at whether or not this, this person looks like this is somebody who will be an effective teacher going forward.

And that I think we don't do. I think private schools do this for sure because they do not want to lose enrollments because they've got some ineffective teachers. But public schools tend to let teachers stay in and continue on the job without giving close scrutiny at the very beginning.

>> Michael Boskin: Well, let's turn to the flip side of that, which is that your studies, review of the data revealed that first year teachers tend to be disproportionately concentrated in schools with a high proportion of low income students, also minority students, because of that correlation, as well, one of the rules in education is that you get more power when you're more senior.

>> Paul Peterson: And I know that's true of professors and universities too.

>> Michael Boskin: Absolutely.

>> Michael Boskin: You also have to go to a lot more committee meetings.

>> Paul Peterson: Well, I don't know about the committee meetings, but certainly teachers have a lot more choices the more senior they are. And senior means simply how long you've been there.

And how long you've been there does make a difference. That's an important fact, especially over the first five years. But it shouldn't continue to be a fact for 10 years or 20 years years, because you don't see much change over that yet. The more senior teachers get the first choice of the new jobs that become available.

So let's say you have a fairly large school district that has a lot of schools that are serving a disadvantaged population. And then you have some schools in the district that are just the creme de la creme. It's a really great position because the students there come from backgrounds where the students already are well prepared to learn and the behavioral issues that you are facing are greatly reduced.

And so the senior teachers will say, well, there's an opening there, I would like to move to that school. And so you get a lot of movement out of the most difficult teaching positions into the much more attractive positions within a school district. And so the irony of it is that the first year teacher in many school districts is asked to teach the most challenging kids, which is precisely the opposite of what you would like to see.

>> Michael Boskin: Well, there was a decision by a judge in Los Angeles a few years ago in response to a lawsuit saying that under the state's equal protection clause, California's equal protection clause, the, that this was disadvantaging students in those schools who. The suit was brought on behalf of and ruled that the state had to change that.

It was appealed and unfortunately perhaps, it was rejected by the Supreme Court of California. And so the teachers' placement and tenure system remained as it was. The teachers union won the lawsuit. Are there other attempts to do that sort of a thing? And are there? Obviously there are constituencies that don't like that sort of thing.

They're happy to have better, better teachers move into their schools and help their students, people from better off areas with more resources that have been granted, that are provided to their students before they go to school and during their education. So what can, what can be done about this?

Does this remain only some future legal challenge, the only way to deal with this? Are there some policy changes that could be brought about?

>> Paul Peterson: Yeah, that lawsuit attracted a lot of attention among policy analysts. Because it was proposing to do away with the seniority rule that a lot of people work in education policy say yes, that's exactly what we need to do if we're gonna have a more egalitarian educational system.

But teachers themselves didn't like that idea. They liked the idea that as they become more senior, they're going to have an opportunity to move to more attractive positions and organizations that represent teachers reflect the views of their constituents. And so the teacher unions were very much on the other side in the courtroom and they prevailed when it went to the Supreme Court, as you mentioned.

And they've the issue has not had any success anywhere across the country. So I think court tend to look at this as this is where this is where the reality is out there. And as a reform effort, reform strategy, I would say this has pretty much been a failure.

>> Michael Boskin: When we look at some other things that have been done to try to help students in traditionally low performing schools where they're disproportionately students from disadvantaged backgrounds and so on, there have been attempts to add resources. You mentioned earlier that was part of the contributory factors to the gains by minorities from 1970 to 2010 was that the states tended to provide more of the resources and distribute it more equally and help equalize some the disparities across school districts.

In California, of course, you mentioned the lawsuits. The Serrano decision was fundamental in that regard. More recently, Governor Brown, for example, had a proposal that was put into effect that. That provided more funding to such schools relative to the baseline they would have expected to receive. Are there other states who are doing that?

Do we have any evidence of whether that which had perhaps a historical precedent for being prospectively a good way to improve achievement in those schools? Is there any data on or studies about what's been done in that area, whether it's been effective or not?

>> Paul Peterson: Yes. There's two ways to think about this.

One is to compare it to desegregation. When you look at the desegregation that occurred in the south during the 1960s and 70s, that seems to have had a pretty dramatic effect on African American student performance. It may be part of the explanation for why you got a closing of the gap.

It was not only the effect on the experience in the school, although black students got access to much better facilities, much better teachers as a result of this, but also the feeling that, there's an opportunity for me as a student, I can achieve something in life. We saw the biggest effects on adolescents, people who were teenagers when these decisions were being handed down and the opportunities were opening up following Brown versus Board of Education.

And it's not, you know, Brown has a delayed effect. Brown comes in on board in 1954, but really the desegregation doesn't take place until after the Civil Rights act of 1965. And then in the subsequent 10 year decade you see the or 20 year decade, you see the biggest positive changes in the performance of African American students.

 

So I think that's a really important development in our society. And the more specific studies that have looked at that confirm it, that actually desegregation pays off. Now in terms of funding here you have a disagreement among the scholars. And you know, in the paper that we've done, we try to look at what does the consensus say.

And on this topic there's two kinds of research. One kinds of research that looks at what's the immediate impact of getting this state aid that suddenly comes to a school district. And that kind of study will tend to show, yes, we see some benefits for the students that suddenly have a lot more resources available to them.

But at the same time we never find that it then leads to a system wide improvement. We don't see that the state as a whole gains and nobody's been able to find that. So you always sort of have this question, how could you have these positive effects in individual circumstances when you study them, but they don't turn out to have system wide effects.

We don't see it happening in general. So I think what we have to say with the money side of it is that money can make a difference. It has made a difference in specific places. But the way in which resources tend to get used in general, we tend not to see a lot of improvement just because there's more money out there.

>> Michael Boskin: So the answer is we're not really sure about whether there are lasting effects and how we can improve things.

>> Paul Peterson: We have to recognize we don't know as much as we would like to know.

>> Michael Boskin: Well, there's the old saw that the beginning of wisdom is knowing what you don't know, and that's the only way you're going to figure out how to learn something.

So absolutely. Let's turn to our final subject today before we conclude, which is, let's call it with an umbrella of school choice, of greater flexibility of reforms, trying to reduce the inflexibilities and perhaps the sclerotic nature, the hidebound nature of rules and regulations and traditions in K through 12 education.

Let's begin with is choice available now and how is it available and to whom?

>> Paul Peterson: Such a good question, because we tend to say, well, what do you think of school choice? And the answer to that is, well, we already have school choice and we have it everywhere because everybody can decide which place they live.

And where you live is going to decide what school your child is going to attend. Well, not for Everybody, but for 90% of the population it's going to have a huge effect simply because your child doesn't want to go to the other side of town to go to school, they're going to go to their local school.

And states and school districts have set itup so that you automatically go to the school that's more or less closest to you. And so therefore we tend to call this residential choice. So if you choose your residence, you choose your school. Now, the people have a lot of money, have a lot of choices among residents.

They can move into a community where property values are very high and homes are pretty attractive and schools are pretty good. But then some people don't have those resources and they have many fewer options. So the question is, should we move away from the choice system that we currently have, the residential choice system, to some alternative choice system?

>> Michael Boskin: So what sorts of alternatives are there to the current system?

>> Paul Peterson: Well, of course, the most obvious one are the private schools. So about 8% of the population is choosing to send their child to a private school. Private schools are expensive and they're becoming increasingly so. But if the government helps to pay for the cost of going to a private school, that would open up the opportunity to use that alternative to many more people, especially people of low income.

So school vouchers or tax credits to families who use the private sector are being offered to many people. However, that's a very controversial idea. And so far, only about 1%, maybe less than 1% of students are making use of government assistance to go to a private school with a voucher.

>> Michael Boskin: Now, one recent development are so called ESAs. What are they? How do they work? Who's using them? What's their potential?

>> Paul Peterson: ESAS is the latest kind of voucher program. It's called an Education Savings Account, and sort of a misleading term, but basically the idea is sort of like a voucher, except that it is available to anybody and everybody.

And so the big difference between that and your traditional early voucher program that came online in the 1990s and 2000 is that the original programs were set up to be available only for poor families, whereas the Education Savings Accounts are available to everybody. And you can use these accounts for any purpose.

So you can homeschool your child, and then you can get piano lessons for your child, or you can get math classes for your child, or you can bring in tutors to help with your child's education. So the homeschooling community has become very enthusiastic about Education Savings Account, but the money can also be used as tuition for a private school.

So the most important thing about Education Savings Accounts has been political. It's unified the different branches of the choice Community, because charter schools can benefit from this. Because parents can supplement their education at a charter school, private schools can benefit, and the homeschooling movement can benefit from it.

 

>> Michael Boskin: Well, you raised charter schools, and they were originally proposed as a way to generate some choice. And importantly, as I recall, the promise was that by getting some more flexibility, they got a little bit reduced funding, but they got more flexibility, they could do a better job.

And the learnings from that, the best practices for what they did could be transferred to the traditional public schools and help improve them. Where do we stand on what we know about how successful charter schools are and doing better than traditional public schools, if at all, and what's changed and what types of organizations are doing better in that regard?

>> Paul Peterson: Yeah, the idea of charter schools was invented back in 1990 in Minnesota by a couple of people involved with education policy. And they said, you know, what we really need are schools run by teachers without the bureaucrats telling them what to do. And this was popular with Al Shanker.

>> Michael Boskin: Professors would like that, too.

>> Paul Peterson: Al Shanker thought, he was the head of the teachers union in New York City, a very influential figure, very philosophical in his thinking. He said, this is the solution. Let's have schools run by teachers. And then people said, you know, in these schools, they will try out new ideas, and their ideas will work in some places and not in others.

And whatever happens, the good ideas will get translated into the public school system.

>> Michael Boskin: So just interrupt for one second. There was this old idea from Mr. Justice Brandeis saw the states as laboratories of democracy, more or less on the same lines. They try different things, and they'd learn from each other about what worked.

So this is sort of the same example. In this case, it's charter schools as laboratories.

>> Paul Peterson: Exactly. Precisely. This was the whole idea behind it, was these are going to be laboratories of education, these opportunities to find out what works and then apply it more generally. Well, you know, it doesn't work out that way in the real world because everybody likes to keep on doing what they are currently doing.

People don't like to change their behavior. And the people who are working in the public school system really had no incentives to take on the ideas that are being tried out in the charter schools, because they could keep on operating pretty much the way they always have been.

And so the charter schools then began to say, well, we need more and more of them, and if we're going to really change the educational system, we have to have lots of charter schools. And maybe the competition between charter schools and district schools will lead to improvement. So if we have a lot of competition now, this was Milton Friedman's idea about voucher programs was that really what we want is a lot of competition among educational systems out there.

We want to have many schools, many schools competing with one another, and the best schools will win over the long run. Makes sense. It works in lots of different parts of the economy. But in education, it's such a politicized industry that you can prevent the competition from expanding too, too much.

And so what we have today is 7% of students are going to charter schools. Well, that's non trivial. That's a substantial number of students. But it isn't nearly the kind of level of competition that you would tend to want if you wanted to have a highly competitive marketplace for families to choose among all the different options that are available out there.

>> Michael Boskin: Well, that's one component of what people look at is how much they develop new ideas or better ideas or better methods or pedagogy, and then how it transfers into public schools. But I guess there are two others. One, what about their performance and how well they do?

And the second, obviously is the concern they drain resources from public schools because they divert some students there and to some extent the money follows them.

>> Paul Peterson: Well, the idea began in 1990 and around 2,000 people began to measure how well they were doing. And the first results were pretty pessimistic.

They didn't look as good as your traditional public school. On average, if you compare two schools that were near one another and you looked at the same kids, types of kids in the two different schools, you didn't see much difference. And if anything, the charter schools weren't, weren't doing as well if you look at how things are in 2019.

So, you know, after two decades, you see that the charter schools are now somewhat better. And it's not like it's a massive change, It's a moderate change. They're somewhat better. It's like they have learned a lot over these years because they are set up in a different way.

They're run by nonprofit organizations and they can be shut down every five years. That's one of the rules of chartering, is that you get a charter for five years. At the end of five years, somebody's going to take a look at you. And the authorizers, people who are in charge of deciding whether or not you should continue, have done a pretty good job, not a perfect job of weeding out the weakest ones.

And the weakest ones tend to get weeded out for other reasons as well. People don't want to use those schools because they're not really doing the job. And since they're a school of choice, it's not like you're automatically put into that school as it is with the neighborhood school, district school.

So district schools did not improve at the same rate as the charter schools over the first 20 years of the, of the 21st century. So the charter school story is sort of somewhat positive without being overwhelmingly so. The kind of charter schools that are working the best are called the no excuses ones that are serving minority students in large cities.

We find this in New York and New Jersey, Newark and Boston and Washington, D.C., generally in big cities and areas where you have a lot of talented young people who like to think they would like to take on the challenges of the world. And so those schools are doing really quite amazingly good in difficult circumstances.

So that's the good news. If you look at the broad picture nationwide, then it's more, okay, this is better than what we had, but it's not transformative.

>> Michael Boskin: There's also been this movement to organizations. I think they're called charter management organizations, CMOs. Kind of an analogy with what goes on in healthcare, where they have groups of schools and they seem to have some of the better performing charter schools.

Is there some view about why they're doing better? Is it scale, is it figuring out best practices internally and transferring them among the schools or spreading that along their schools, or what?

>> Paul Peterson: Yeah, there are probably two factors. One is if you're a good school already, you will, you can grow and you can set up another one and then another one and then another one.

So good schools can multiply. And so part of the CMO network is good schools multiplying. And the other side of it is they're sharing facilities, they're sharing information among themselves. And so you definitely do see higher levels of performance of students attending these networks. Whether it's because the networks learn as they go along or whether they were good right from the beginning because.

They were the ones that grew is still something we can't unpack.

>> Michael Boskin: So we'll figure that out. But I guess we need competition among them as well as.

>> Paul Peterson: Well, you know, the funny thing about charter schools is they're no more willing to have competition than anybody else because once they get established, they're not so much in favor of having more charter schools around.

They want enough to be politically significant, but they don't necessarily wanna have a lot of competition. So yeah, finding the right solution can be elusive.

>> Michael Boskin: Well, what other types of reforms do you think can feed into this process of at least learning best practices, gradually spreading them, et cetera?

So are there other types of reforms you've been considering? We mentioned pay earlier, you discussed the step and lane system, which probably misaligns incentives for effectiveness. Are there other types of things in addition to the voucher type things, etc. That are being tried or might be worth taking a look at?

>> Paul Peterson: Well, let me give you a story that is optimistic, which sort of says we need all of this. And it sort of is about Washington, DC, which, if you go back to the year 2000, was the lowest performing big city school system about which we had accurate information.

And it set up a lot of charter schools inside Washington D.C. so that about half the kids in Washington D.C. today go to a charter school. So that's real competition between the district. And then they had a superintendent come in there by the name of Michelle Rhee who said, I want the district schools to be better than the charter schools.

And the way I'm gonna do that is I'm going to pay the teachers a lot of money if they're good teachers. And I'm gonna ask the teachers to leave if they're ineffective. Now, this was a huge political issue. I mean, fighting with the union over this cost her her job.

She ends up getting fired. The mayor loses his job. The mayor backed her all the way, but he lost his job over it. But the system has remained in place. It's still there. And so we have a school district in the United States where teachers are being paid twice as much as they are on average in other places if they are high level.

And also, you got extra pay if you taught in a school with a high concentration of disadvantaged students. And you also got more pay if you were teaching in a subject area where there was a shortage. So they designed the pay schedule to meet all of the criticisms of the step and lane pay schedule.

But it was done in a context where they also eliminated a lot half the administrative staff. So they greatly reduced the number of administrators in the system, pouring many more resources down to the school level. So if we look at Washington, DC, today, it is the fastest improving school district in the country.

So it's been a dramatic change in student performance and it's not due to any one thing, it's due to a variety of things. So I think that's really what we have to look for if we're going to have a major change.

>> Michael Boskin: So for all the suggestions and the proponents of which think it's the silver bullet, it turns out that we need kind of a whole ammo clip of various things to work and complement each other, some of which will do a lot of good, others won't, but many of which have some opportunity to do great.

>> Paul Peterson: Well, DC Also had the advantage of a lot of resources. So the US Government was paying for a lot of the bills. So if you put in the money and you put it in the right way and make good use of it and you have competition, that's meaningful, all of that together can produce a better educational system.

>> Michael Boskin: So it's not just more resources, but it's how it's spent, how wisely it's spent and the incentives that are created to align with what's effective and can produce better outcomes. Well, so we've covered school choice. There are people who want greater return to local control, more spending.

Again, you're I guess saying that it can be helpful if it's used wisely for the right things, but it can be misspent and misallocated. Curriculum reform, early childhood education, all these are things people believe will be the magic bullet to deal with these. But your conclusion seems to be that we need to do a variety of things that complement each other and you need some very, very tough minded, hardworking principals, superintendents and local government officials backing them to really change some of these high bound systems, even though they might get politically thrown out the door.

Doing the right thing by the kids may take a while to show up and you may get credit for it later, but you may lose your job in the meantime. Absolutely, well, let's hope there are more of those people in more places, for sure, Paul. Let me just conclude by returning, we briefly mentioned the Trump administration's view of returning more responsibility back to the states more generally.

You may have some thoughts on that. I know it's something you've thought about a lot. And also with respect to education, we mentioned their view of considering getting rid of the Department of Education or at least dramatically reforming it. So do you have any sense of what's on the horizon?

Which of these things might be productive? In tax policy regulations, you mentioned block granting to the states for some purposes, et cetera.

>> Paul Peterson: You know, the federal role has never been the dominant role in American education. It's been basically, schools are run by local districts. They hire the teachers, they select the textbooks, they assign teachers to tasks.

Everything is done at the local level. Now, the state has regulations which says you have to do it according to these and those rules. The federal government tends to say, when we give you some money, you have to spend it in the ways that we tell you. But otherwise, they don't really fundamentally affect the way the system operates.

So you should never expect the Trump administration to either change this system in a terrible direction or in a positive direction. The ideas that are floating out there in the political discourse today greatly exaggerate the impact that the Trump administration is going to have. Now, having said that, you can say, okay, on the margins, this is what they're likely to be doing, and this is where they might have some effect.

It's possible that in this new legislation, the proposed to Congress that they're going to try to pass, and I guess one big bill is the idea right now, that will have to be financial legislation, and they may include in there a provision that provides a tax credit or a tax deduction to families who send their children to a private school.

And that would be a pretty big change because that's currently happening in about 30% or 40% of the state. States, but many states don't have anything like that. So depending on the size of that program, that could have some nationwide effects.

>> Michael Boskin: And of course, the, the federal tax rates are much higher than the state tax rates for most people.

>> Paul Peterson: Yes, it could make a difference. It's going to cost the government a lot of money, though. And so this is going to be a constraint on this program. It can't be too big without it becoming a problem from the point of view of being fiscally responsible. I don't know how fiscally responsible the Republicans want to be in the next few months, but that's going to be a topic.

And the other thing they could do is they could combine a lot of existing programs. Eliminating programs can be difficult, but combining them into a block grant to the states, I expect that that will happen and I don't think it'll make too much difference. As a practical matter, though, it might reduce a bunch of administrative cost.

Right now we have a lot of little programs with lots of people shuffling a lot of paper around that that's definitely a topic for the efficiency commission that's been appointed that that would be beneficial. I don't think it's going to change the quality of our educational system in any fundamental way.

Now there are a lot of regulations that are being handed down in Washington that affect the schools that are highly controversial over gender policy and race policy and disciplinary policy. Some of these could be very positive. I think one of the things that the Trump administration is likely to consider is the bullying that's taking place in our schools in the wake of the pandemic.

And to the extent that federal rules with respect to discipline have made it more difficult for teachers and administrators to maintain control of the school building, that could have a positive effect, but that would be a very long term indirect something that's not going to happen immediately. And just how consequential it could be remains to be seen.

>> Michael Boskin: One final topic we didn't really get a chance to talk about thus far is that there are some people who believe, and there's certainly some school districts that have done this, that we're not doing enough for our most gifted students, that some school districts have eliminated gifted programs or have tried to level, including eliminating special programs for accelerated students and so on.

I'm wondering what evidence we have of what effect that might have. Are there any studies that too small a population, the data too incomplete, do we know anything about that?

>> Paul Peterson: There's more studies of that topic underway and just being released than ever before. This is a topic gaining in interest among scholars and some of the early studies are showing that it really does benefit gifted students to be given opportunities to learn with their peers, people equally talented, and to have special educational programs designed for people who have that level of talent.

And certainly we know that the United States trails other nations in the world by a dramatic margin in the performance of students at the very top end of the achievement distribution.

>> Michael Boskin: So it's not just the average, but it's the top end.

>> Paul Peterson: Yeah, we talked about the average before.

But if you look at the very talented, highest performing students in various countries across the world, the United States is way behind the Asian countries and the northern European countries. So there certainly is a need to take a look at the people who are most important for the economic health of the country over the long run, the bright minds that can do so much, as we've seen in Silicon Valley, to generate wealth for us all.

That is an area which finally research is focusing on. And let's hope that policy follows because the story has been the opposite for the last 20 years.

>> Michael Boskin: Well, Paul Peterson, thank you so much for enlightening us on all these vital subjects and for all of our listeners.

Please tune in not just to this but also to the first broadcast if you haven't had a chance to listen to that as well. And we hope to see you back here before too long. Paul, to go into some of these other subjects and some of the other areas that you're thinking about and writing about.

If you want to learn more about the Tennenbaum Program For Fact Based Policy, please go to hoover.org where you'll find the Tennenbaum program's own page. If there are any questions we haven't covered today about education that you would like to learn more about, please send them in and we will do what we can to try to cover them in future shows.

And always, as always, look for the link to more information notes in the about the show and about the research, about this paper and about other areas. You can learn more about references to things we covered today. And thanks for joining us. Take care.