What We Know About Our Schools and Achievement 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 also lead the Hoover Institution's important Tennenbaum Program For Fact Based Policy, an initiative that tries to bring to bear expert opinions on the facts and interpretation of those facts that are fundamental to a citizenry understanding the foundations of public policy.

We may disagree about how to interpret the facts or about how we weight different aspects of the outcomes, but we all should be grounded in the facts. I'm delighted today to be speaking with Paul Peterson, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Henry Lee Shattuck, professor of Government at Harvard University.

Welcome, Paul.

>> Paul Peterson: Well, thank you, Michael.

>> Michael Boskin: Along with Nora Gordon of Georgetown University, he is a co author of what We Know About Our Schools, Literally a Tour de Force, a Terrific Survey of K12 Education and Education policy, and a standout essay in the Tennenbaum Program. Let's start with some context, Paul.

What do we actually mean when we say K12 education? What does that encompass?

>> Paul Peterson: Well, K12 education is the education we provide for children between the ages of 5 and 17, approximately. It's basically what we've been offering in the United states since the 19th century. We were the first country in the world to put into place that educational system, especially through secondary schools.

>> Michael Boskin: That's terrific. Let's begin with some review of some basic factual data about our K12 system in the United States, or at least the most recent year data are available, which is probably a few years ago. Well, then maybe turn to the important issue of achievement, the role of teachers.

And then we'll conclude today with something about school choice and how we can evaluate various issues surrounding that important topic.

>> Paul Peterson: I'm happy to discuss all of these topics.

>> Michael Boskin: Great. So about how many children are enrolled in K12 education of all types today?

>> Paul Peterson: Well, you know, our enrollment has been growing decade by decade, so we have 50 million today.

It's one decade. During the 30s we didn't grow, but we're now facing a point where we may not be growing in the future. So we're a bit at an inflection point there. But yes, it's a 50 million person industry.

>> Michael Boskin: Well, it's very large, very important, obviously. How has the demographic composition changed over time, who's going to school, what their background is, et cetera?

>> Paul Peterson: The important change is that we no longer have a predominantly white population attending our schools. The children today are about a little over 50% white, but there's been a substantial growth in the Latino population. The black population stays about 15%. The Asian population has grown from about 3% to close to 10%.

And so we now have an extremely diverse ethnically population in our schools.

>> Michael Boskin: And what would be roughly the breakdown between traditional public schools, private schools, charter schools and homeschooling?

>> Paul Peterson: Yeah, that's a great question. Close to 80% of our students are attending your traditional public school. Could call it the district school because it's run by school districts.

But we also have 7% of our students attending charter schools, which are often thought of as public schools, but they do have a private dimension to them because there are. It's a nonprofit organization that actually runs a school, though it gets most of its money from the government.

And then there are strictly private schools. Many of them are very religious. Very high percentage are Catholic schools, even today. And then finally, we have 7% of our students are being homeschooled. Something that's happened, a dramatic change there since the pandemic.

>> Michael Boskin: We have to go back a very long time, the frontier days where homeschooling was a predominant feature, I suppose.

>> Paul Peterson: Well, actually there was a lot of thought during the colonial period that that was the only way that children should be educated. And so we've evolved from homeschooling to providing education in the setting outside the home for 93%, but not for 7% of the population.

>> Michael Boskin: If we take a look at this vast industry sector, important activity about how much is spent on all public source.

From all public sources, local, state, federal, on K through 12 education.

>> Paul Peterson: Well, there's not universal consensus on exactly how much is spent, but if you talk about how much the government spends. A trillion dollars is about what is being spent by the US government every year, it's about 3.5% of our gross domestic product.

>> Michael Boskin: Well, that's slightly more than we spend on defense, for example. So it's very important. Let's talk about that. Let's reduce it to the classroom and the pupil. About how much is spent per pupil.

>> Paul Peterson: Well, amazingly, $20,000 a year is being spent in the post Covid period.

We don't have exact data for 2025, but the best data we have is that it's at $20,000 per student across the United States. So there's a lot of variation in that. There's some places that are spending as much as $30,000. New York State is doing that. And there's some places like Utah which are spending maybe half of 20,000, maybe closer to 10,000.

>> Michael Boskin: Well, that's a significant variation. Of course, some of that must be the differences in the cost of living in these different places as well, but no doubt.

>> Paul Peterson: I mean, personnel costs vary a lot, but it's not just that. It's also how many kinds of services people think should be provided and how many people it takes to provide those services.

>> Michael Boskin: So we spend a lot per pupil and therefore quite a bit per classroom, and we'll get into achievement and other things of that sort and teachers in a few minutes. But that suggests that doing a better job with how that money is being spent could pay big dividends.

Is that right?

>> Paul Peterson: You know, it's very difficult to see a close connection with how much is being spent and how much kids learn. There are a lot of states that have increased their expenditures a lot and you see very little improvement in student performance. And you find other states that have improved student.

Florida is the best example example where you've seen huge improvement in student performance in Florida with only modest increases in expenditure. So it's really quite hard to really say that you're going to get more learning for additional thousand dollars of expenditure.

>> Michael Boskin: Yeah. I think also there's the issue of how that money is allocated and how it is spent as well as how much is spent, I suppose.

>> Paul Peterson: Well, there's a lot of services that really have little to do with learning or maybe indirect, a very indirect effect, such we feed students at school. That's part of the cost of schooling. We provide sports, athletic events during the school day and after the school day. And probably physical exercise is important for education and learning, but it's It's a very indirect thing.

So there's a lot of indirect effects on education that are classified as part of school expenditure.

>> Michael Boskin: I think if it's anything like higher education, there also must have been a lot of a lot being spent on increases in the numbers of administrators in school districts.

>> Paul Peterson: Well, the system has become increasingly complex. 

You know, it used to be that education was something the local school district did and only the local school district did. As late as 1920, it was 80% of the cost of school expenditure was paid out of the local school district pocket. That's fallen down to 45% today.

And the state has picked up a huge share of the costs and, and the federal government role has played and all. Once you get different levels of government contributing together for an activity, there's a lot of coordination that needs to be done, a lot of reporting that needs to be done, and then you get a lot of administrative staff that get created.

So, yes, we have a massive increase in the size of our administrative structure.

>> Michael Boskin: What would be a rough division of the spending of this trillion dollars, $20,000 per pupil on average. A rough division between the federal government, the state government, and local governments.

>> Paul Peterson: Well, roughly speaking, nationwide, the costs are split between the state and the locality.

45% of each. The school district and the state are contributing 45% each, and then the federal government's picking up 10%. During the pandemic, the federal expenditure level went up a lot, but it's very likely to go back to close to that 10% level as we move into the post pandemic period and the more conservative administration in Washington.

>> Michael Boskin: When we look at what the incoming administration is proposing, they have some pretty substantial changes they'd like to achieve. They've hinted at maybe abolishing the Department of Education, shifting responsibilities back to the states. Do you have any suggestions about how some of that funding could be reallocated to do more good?

>> Paul Peterson: Well, you know, abolishing the Department of Education is sort of the least likely thing to happen. There's plenty of opposition to it. There's a lot of things that the government is doing that would be difficult to do without a Department of Education. You could do it by reassigning a lot of things to other agencies.

So, for example, you have a huge program in higher education of student loans and student grants that could be done through the US treasury, but it would be quite a shift in responsibilities. So I expect the department to continue. I do think we're going to see a consolidation of programs.

We have a lot of tiny little Programs that got enacted hither and yon over the course of time that really don't make a lot of sense and require a lot of administrative apparatus. And I think you could simplify that a lot by giving a block grant to the states and let the states spend the money.

That's been done in the past, I think we're gonna see that in the future. There'll always be little groups that wanna hang onto their special little programs. So there'll be battles over that and exactly how it's going to happen that's going to get settled by Congress and Congress.

You never know exactly what it's going to do until it's done it.

>> Michael Boskin: Now, one of the big changes over time has seemed to been a shift from more local control and local funding to the states and an increase in the federal role. Roughly what does that coincide with?

What's the time frame has happened over the life?

>> Paul Peterson: Well, a lot of it has been. Two things have driven it. One has been the consolidation of our school districts. We used to have 120,000 school districts in the United States, now we have 14,000, which is- All little red schoolhouses.

Yes, all those little red schoolhouses had their own district. And a lot of them were told, you need to consolidate. And if you do consolidate, we the state will give you some more money. So the state gave incentives to local school districts to consolidate, and they did at a very rapid pace.

And that happened basically between 1930 and 19, say 1955, 1960. That was the era of consolidation. Following that, we got the era of equity and adequacy. We got lawsuits. And so the lawsuits have been a major driver of increasing the state role in education. Because they would argue in the courtroom that actually the districts have different amounts of money.

Some districts are pretty wealthy and others are not at all. And so there was inequity among school districts and there wasn't enough being spent on education. So the lawsuits were filed in virtually every state in the United States. So between roughly speaking, 1970 and 2000, you saw a huge change in the role of the state because of all of the lawsuits that were being filed and the various decisions that were handed down.

The result has been greater equity and expenditure among school districts. We haven't seen much change in other respects, but change. A lot more administrative control goes along with that.

>> Michael Boskin: Well, that gets us to the next big and important topic, achievement. First of all, what do we think we're measuring and how are we measuring it when we talk about student achievement?

>> Paul Peterson: Well, we have tests that measure student achievement. And standardized tests administered by either the state or by the federal government provide us with the best information that we have. They're very controversial in certain quarters because people say, I don't want my child's performance to be assessed by how well they can answer a question on a that can be quantified, and you fill out little bubbles on a sheet.

So that gets very heavily criticized. But we know that those tests do provide us with information that's both reliable and valid. We know that you'll get the same results repeatedly over time. If nothing else has changed from a particular individual or a group of individuals, we know that these things predict pretty well what's going to happen later in life, Whether or not you're going to finish college, whether or not you're going to be successful in life as an adult.

All of these things can be predicted by the test that you take in 8th grade or at the age of 15. And so therefore, they do give us an indicator of what's really happening out there in the real world. As imperfect as they might be for any one individual, for groups of individuals, they provide useful information.

Okay, so having said that, these tests are the most important. There's different kinds of tests. Some are administered by the federal government called the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The great thing about that test is it's the same all across the country. So we can really compare what's happening in different parts of the country.

But each state has its own tests, and those states devise their tests to meet their particular desires of the residents of their states. And so those states get to be used for accountability purposes.

>> Michael Boskin: Now, there's been this fairly widespread view that achievement has been declining, students are falling behind.

Your data suggests otherwise, at least for a long period. I'm wondering, do you have some idea of why that fact has fallen on some deaf ears, doesn't seem to have penetrated. Maybe this has been especially exacerbated because of COVID and the learning loss and the closure of schools and some dismay at what's actually being taught now relative to what's being taught.

When the parents were in school

>> Paul Peterson: you know, we looked at this with some care and we have been able to show that the amount of learning and mathematics among children at the age of nine or in fourth grade has improved enormously since 1970 by four years of learning.

In fact, that's a dramatic change in reading. It's much less only one year gain in reading. And so raises the question how, what could account for this huge increase in learning over a 50 year period of time? Now, having said that, starting around 2010, these gains did not continue.

And we've now seen a dramatic decline with COVID and the fact that kids didn't go to school for a year or even more. And there seems to have been a difficulty getting back to the same steady improvement over time in the post Covid period. So things have really dramatically changed very recently.

But if you look over the last 60, 70 years, you can say, gee, we had a really good period where there was a lot of learning growth, especially among young kids in elementary school, less so in middle school, and not much at all in high school. But we've seen a lot of improvement at one level of our educational system, which now seems to be we're not seeing that any longer.

>> Michael Boskin: Well, that raises two questions, Paul. First of all, how likely are we to recover some of that loss? Are we just a permanent step down and we'll get back to a new trajectory?

>> Paul Peterson: Everybody wants to be optimistic about this. Everybody wants to think we're gonna get back to where we were.

And this is driving a lot of the demand for greatly increasing expenditures in education to help make up for the loss. There's been a demand to have more tutoring of individual students because we find that tutoring is probably the best way to go. But setting up a nationwide tutoring program is really, really difficult because a lot of kids don't want to go to school at night to be tutored, or in the late afternoon or before school.

It's very difficult for an educational system to reorganize itself to provide that additional service. Summertime people don't like to send their kids to school in the summertime. So the participation in tutoring Programs, which is the best program for catch up? Only 5% of the students are participating in tutoring programs so far.

And I doubt that that's gonna change going forward. So I'm more pessimistic about how we're going to be able to recover from the dramatic loss that occurred.

>> Michael Boskin: Well, that suggests we've got a lot of work to do in other dimensions to make sure these kids lead productive lives in the future.

Let's turn back to what you said previously and are there some plausible explanations for how we did so much better for several decades?

>> Paul Peterson: Well, that's sort of interesting. And there's three ideas out there and it's hard to choose which idea is the correct one. And- Well,

>> Michael Boskin: maybe it's a combination of.

>> Paul Peterson: It could be the three all working together. You know, parents are better educated today than ever before. They have gone to school for more years. They have learned more themselves. They have more resources, they have more money. We are a much wealthier nation than we used to be.

And some of that money is being used by families in the home to educate their children. So you might say a lot of this improvement is just in the quality of the family life. On the other side of that question, we've had a huge increase in single parent families which has had a negative effect on learning.

So within the family we see these tensions. But we have fewer kids today than we used to have. A smaller family is a better family for education. We find if you only have one or two children in the family, the children learn more in school than if they-

>> Michael Boskin: Parental time is spread over a few number of children so it's more time per child.

>> Paul Peterson: We got one to one ratio there, and that's different than if you don't have that kind of ratio. So that's one of the factors. The second factor is maybe the schools are focusing especially on the needs of the disadvantaged more today.

There's more money, it's more equally distributed across the population. There's a lot of specialized programs focusing on the needs of the disadvantaged and that could be a factor. But the third factor, which I think is undervalued is the fact that early in life, when a child is still in the womb or in the very first year of life, that's when a brain is developing and children, babies are being born under much better circumstances today than ever before.

They're getting better nutrition. Mothers are getting better nutrition when they're pregnant. There's fewer contagious diseases. You don't have measles you don't have mumps, you don't have chickenpox. You don't have all those things that, that I had as a child that are damaging to physical. When you look at the size of a child today, I just saw somebody walking with their parents across the street and the son was another foot taller than the father.

And the same is true of the brain. The brain has developed more in recent years than in the past. Now, that's not gonna happen forever. But we have seen a change in the capacity to learn. And you see this worldwide. This is not just in the United States, it's a worldwide change.

So I think that's part of what we're seeing. That's actually a very promising development that really is moving us in a direction we want to be.

>> Michael Boskin: Well, that's really important. Obviously raises the broader question of what parents or what's going on in the home as well. So schools bring something.

We'll get back to that in a second. But they're not the only thing that's important to a child's development and to their learning. Obviously,

>> Paul Peterson: you know, the home is probably the most important thing in a child's life. If you're raised in a home that's you've got a committed set of parents and you've got a child that's got all kinds of opportunities provided for them, I mean, you know that that's the very best educational environment a person can have.

And many of us have know that from our own personal experiences. And we can see it by all the data that we look at just as well.

>> Michael Boskin: Well, among the concerns people have up to the policymaker level is not just our performance relative to our history or to the recent past or contemporaneously where we all care about our kids and all kids, obviously, but also our performance relatives, children on test scores and achievement in other countries because that's their future leadership and labor force.

And it's our future leadership and labor force. And there's a concern that we're not. We're not competing well enough on the education dimension with a variety of other countries with whom we currently compete economically, some of which we may wind up competing with more than economically, unfortunately. How do we stack up in that regard?

And are these international comparisons valid? Are they jerry rigged in some way? Or is there really a story that America is not doing as well as it could be by international comparisons?

>> Paul Peterson: Yeah, we first began doing international tests in math and science and later on in reading back in 1970.

And those tests gave us a shock. The United States was not doing nearly as well as many European countries. So people said, well, we don't really like that test, so why don't we have the government's take on a test and they'll design a better test for 15 year olds.

And that's called the Pisa test. So that was launched in 2000, but it ended up showing the same thing that the United States on the PISA tests and math especially is way down the list as compared to other countries. You know, we're well below the average country in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which is the industrialized world average.

And reading, we don't look quite so bad. But definitely in science and math, we look way down the list and it's never changed. Every time they administer it, every three years, there is the United States ranked number 20 or 25 or somewhere well down the list.

>> Michael Boskin: Who ranks ahead of us and should we be concerned about that?

>> Paul Peterson: Well, there's just about everybody. The Germans are a large country like the United States, and they have a diverse population like the United States. So I think the Germans provide us with a genuinely fair comparison. And we see that they're, you know, ranking 10 steps higher than we are.

Their students are learning about a year's worth more of learning than those in the United States that's in Europe. Now if you go to Asia, it's even more dramatic. I mean, the Japanese way outperform us, the Koreans way outperform us. The tiger countries of Asia, these small countries that have made such remarkable progress.

The Korean story is truly amazing. If you look at Korea in 1950, they were among the lowest, least educated, lowest achieving populations in the world. Of course, that's understandable. They'd been under Japanese domination, they'd been under Chinese domination for a very long period of time. But once they were freed from that after the Korean War came to an end, there's been a spectacular increase, so that Koreans now rank near the very top of the world.

So that tells us that it's actually possible to have dramatic change over a relatively short period of time. But how to do it, Whether or not you can replicate the Korean experience in the United States, that's a huge question.

>> Michael Boskin: Now there was one standout country from the COVID problem, the COVID era, Sweden.

It kept its schools open and they were basically the major exception to the fact that achievements stalled or fell during the COVID period. Have they done better since then? Was it a one off and they've regressed, or do we have any data since then, or have they managed to keep that?

And where do the Swedes stand internationally?

>> Paul Peterson: Well, data comes in slowly and we've just learned this about the Swedes this past month. The new data, the latest data that we have from the TIMSS study, which is the first study I was talking about, they have now administered a test that's a post COVID test.

And you compare 2019 to 2023 and you see that Sweden gained dramatically over that four year period despite Covid. So despite Covid, you see major gains in Swedish performance. And then in the United States you see just as large a change, but in the opposite direction. This is in mathematics.

You see a large improvement in Sweden and equally large drop. So Sweden has now passed the United States in math performance when it used to be lagging. And the United, the difference amounts to about two years worth of learning. So it's a pretty dramatic difference.

>> Michael Boskin: So the difference in policy with respect to school closures seemed to have been a very, very big difference.

>> Paul Peterson: You can say that's good news because it shows that kids are learning things in school. And you can say it's bad news because if you close your schools, you're going to pay for it. It is one of the biggest prices that we paid for our policies during the pandemic.

>> Michael Boskin: Now, returning to generic issues in achievement and its performance over time, your study concludes that gains were large and as you mentioned briefly earlier in elementary school compared to high school. So what are the factors, the explanations for the fact that it stalls or levels out at that?

What are the likely candidates for an explanation?

>> Paul Peterson: Yes, it's another one of those issues where you can come up with different explanations, different possibilities. But I think the basic point might be that the elementary school has improved steadily over time and the high school has not. One of these is the fact that we are paying elementary school teachers today the same amount of money that we're paying high school teachers.

We used to pay high school teachers more because they had specialized skills teaching particular subject matter. Whether it was science or math or or English language, which required an understanding of Shakespeare and how to interpret it. So there were lots of demands on the high school teacher that justified giving them additional compensation.

We have put all teachers on the same pay scale, and by putting all teachers on the same pay scale, we have actually paid elementary school teachers a lot more, which is probably really good for elementary schools, but we're not doing the same for our high school teachers. So it could be that that's part of what's going on here.

Another possible factor is the peer group culture. It could be that adolescent culture has changed quite dramatically over the last 50 years, so that the learning opportunities that once existed in the conversations of high school students among themselves may no longer be present to the same extent.

>> Michael Boskin: Well, one of the controversies, at least to my less informed understanding of the issue, is that schools are now, perhaps particularly high schools are now responding to a variety of pressures to deal with a variety of social and politicized issues and trying to deal with those things and have maybe taken the eye off the ball a little bit on the core fundamentals of math and reading and science and so on.

Are schools trying to do too much? Do we know much about that? Do we have any comparisons of schools that are more focused on the basics as we traditionally did, or is that something that's just an open question and we don't really know the answer to?

>> Paul Peterson: Well, I do think that the a big concern today is the social media and the use of cell phones in schools.

And I think we are very rapidly as a country. Deciding we've got to stop letting the cell phone dominate our schoolhouse. And I think we're going to see even the next year, a lot of bans on the use of this inside the schoolhouse, because when people are constantly being distracted from what they're focused on or should be focused on, learning is not going to happen.

I would say that's a major issue at the present time.

>> Michael Boskin: You mentioned the very large gains, particularly in math, also somewhat in reading from 1970 to 2010, that was also a period in which the gap between minorities, blacks, and Hispanics, and white students changed considerably, closed by roughly half.

I think you said in your study, what plausible explanations are there for that and also for it stalling out since then?

>> Paul Peterson: You know, I think we have really underappreciated how much we have done for students who come to the United States from a minority background or whether they are being brought into the mainstream of American society from the years of slavery and segregation that existed in the South.

And so it's really quite fascinating to see that African American and Hispanic American students improved by a much more rapid pace both in elementary school and in middle school across the United States, especially in the south, for African Americans, but generally speaking across the United States. And of course, Asian students in the United States, which used to be well behind white students, have now advanced so that they're easily the highest performing ethnic group in the United States.

The downside to that is why didn't we see the same improvements among white students? Now, this also applies to social groups. If you look at income differentials and so forth, you see the biggest gains occurring among students who come from backgrounds where parents have less education and less income.

So that really says we've had an egalitarian society that's compressed social differences in our society over the last 50 years. I have to qualify that because that did not extend to the COVID era and the post Covid era. We've really slid back during that era where we have those gains from the past, they haven't disappeared altogether, but we have to work hard to preserve them as we move forward.

>> Michael Boskin: Well, Paul, with this background, with this understanding, are there any policy interventions you could think of that might actually improve things?

>> Paul Peterson: Well, I think we have to realize that education is a slow process and things that are going to be effective are going to take a long time to take place.

I do think that we can do a lot for our high schools. There's a lot more that needs to be done in secondary education. Too many of the reforms of the past were said, well, let's get the kids set right in both before they come to school and in kindergarten and in elementary school.

And that was all fine. That's good, that's important. But we sort of have said, okay, once we fix that we can just sort of let the system run. And now we have to think more. When students are reaching adolescence, they are demanding a lot of different things, and we're asking them to all go through the same school and be subjected to the same requirements and same expectations.

So I think we have to have a much more open, dynamic, responsive secondary system. I'm not gonna go into the details as to how you could do that, it's a big topic all by itself. But I think that's where we need to concentrate reforms for the future.

>> Michael Boskin: Is there some way we can test or measure that whether that's doing any good or hold students and their and their teachers and the schools accountable?

>> Paul Peterson: Well, you know, this accountability movement has suffered badly in the public's eyes as the testing that's been taking place is open to a lot of criticism these days. So it's very hard to use the kind of testing that was thought to be the right thing to do when no Child Left behind was passed back in 2002.

So moving forward, I'm thinking you need to ask kids to take courses, and then you need to have a test, an external test administered at the end of the course. And you need a lot of variety out there. You need to have courses that are going to be in carpentry and electricity and point to career paths that are quite different from traditional ones.

But you also want to have your tests, like the Advanced placement tests, that have done pretty well at measuring how well students are prepared for college in math, science, chemistry, so forth.

>> Michael Boskin: There's one criticism that has been levied against our education system is we've tried to, as you sort of indicated, funneled too many people into one track pre-college, and we have reduced our emphasis on trade skills.

When I was a student a long time ago, we had to take two shop classes. I took print shop and wood shop, and we also had to have a half semester of agriculture. This was growing up in Los Angeles. Agriculture still is, but at the time was hugely important in California.

And so I grew radishes for 10, for 10 weeks. But those were interesting. Not that I pursued them, but they also gave me an appreciation of the skill of the people who do specialize in that. And we all know now that that's there's a huge shortage of skilled tradespeople getting six figure salaries and there's a many firms and sectors have had a desperate need for skilled trade people.

So hopefully, our schools can do a better job of offering those kinds of flexibilities that you're talking about.

>> Paul Peterson: I think it's time for us to recognize there's many different paths for young people. I don't think we should say that college is not a very valuable path for many students and probably even more students in the future than in the past because the basic returns to higher education keep on increasing over time.

If you finish a four year college degree program, you're going to be earning more relative to a high school student today than ever before. So children should be told that and students should be encouraged to go on to college if they have the interest in the wherewithal. But we should also recognize there's a lot of other occupations out there that make useful contributions to our society and we should be developing our secondary educational system in such a way that meets their needs as well.

>> Michael Boskin: Absolutely, your study had a variety of other conclusions and I wanna just focus for a moment on those. What role can technology remote learning play? I mean, that was allegedly a substitute for the in person classroom attendance during COVID for a long time in many states. In California among the longest.

What do we know about the effectiveness. Of that, and the opportunity to either incorporate it. Not as a substitute, maybe as a compliment, maybe doing more in-school technology, pace at your own learning in different subjects, etc. Do you know anything about that?

>> Paul Peterson: Well, there's a lot of work being done in that space.

There's probably more work being done on how to provide information online and how to use computers within the classroom than any other area of education today. I think we did learn during the COVID era that online learning is no substitute for the classroom. We found that kids really paid no attention to what was going on.

Now, that could be because the technology wasn't there to really draw students into the experience. So maybe we are going to improve the technology so that students will be motivated to learn by sitting and looking at a screen. I'm a little skeptical, however. I think that interactions between people in real context is important to learning for young people.

Now, maybe as an adult you can have a more specialized online experience and learn a lot that way, but people like to be with other people when they're in the learning process. So I don't think we should count on technology to solve our problems too much. Now, if you can bring technology into the classroom and if you can have teachers in the classroom who really know how to use that technology, I think there's a lot of explosive opportunities.

But we don't train our teachers to make use of the existing technology. This could be just a transition period, it could be moving forward. But then we need to have a very flexible system that will reward people for their effectiveness in the classroom because they can make effective use of technology.

>> Michael Boskin: Paul, this has been really engaging, really informative. I want to ask everybody out there to join me in thanking Paul for this remarkable Tour about our K12 system, the basic facts and context in which it operates, and student achievement and its importance. We're going to turn in in the next episode to talk about two other important subjects.

Teachers, their role, their importance, their effectiveness, what can be done to improve it, and school choice and related issues and alternative reforms that might help us improve the quality of K12 education. Thanks again, Paul.

>> Paul Peterson: Thank you.

>> Michael Boskin: Michael Boskin here signing off for the Tennenbaum Program on Fact-Based Policy at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.