Back to School

The Law & Liberty Podcast

As students head back to classrooms, host James Patterson welcomes education experts Frederick Hess and Michael McShane to the podcast. We are still finding the “new normal” after Covid lockdown shook our education system—and public confidence in schools. Too often, our schools are guided by ideas developed by policymakers, intellectuals, and administrators who are separated from the needs of the classroom. Ranging from cell phones in class to school choice, from gender theory to administrative bloat, the conversation points in hopeful directions, drawn in part from their recent book, Getting Education Right.

Related Links:
Frederick Hess and Michael McShane, Getting Education Right
“Taking on the College Cartel,” Frederick Hess and Michael McShane (Law & Liberty)
“Opening Doors for School Choice,” Frederick Hess (Law & Liberty)
“A Unified Theory of Education,” Frederick Hess and Michael McShane (National Affairs)
Rick Hess Straight Up (Education Week)
Old School with Rick Hess (Education Next)

Liberty Fund is a private, non-partisan, educational foundation. The views expressed in its podcasts are the individual’s own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Liberty Fund.

Transcript

James Patterson:

Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m your host, James Patterson. Law & Liberty is an online magazine featuring serious commentary on law, policy, books, and culture, and formed by a commitment to a society of free and responsible people living under the rule of law. Law & Liberty and this podcast are published by Liberty Fund.

Hello and welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. Today is August 28, 2024. I’m James Patterson, and with me are my guests, Mr. Frederick M. Hess and Dr. Michael Q. McShane. We’ll be talking about K-12 and higher education in the United States, especially their most recent book, Getting Education Right: A Conservative Vision for Improving Early Childhood, K-12, and College, published earlier this year on Teachers College Press.

Mr. Hess is a senior fellow and the Director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, where he works on K-12 and higher-education issues. He’s the author of Education Week‘s iconic blog, Rick Hess Straight Up, and Education Next‘s popular Old School with Rick Hess. Dr. Hess is also an executive editor of Education Next, a Forbes senior contributor, and a contributing editor to National Review. He is the founder and chairman of AEI’s Conservative Education Reform Network.

And Dr. McShane earned his PhD in education policy from the University of Arkansas and MEd from the University of Notre Dame and his BA in English from St. Louis University. He is an adjunct fellow in education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, and Director of National Research at EdChoice, where he studies and writes about K-12 education policy, including private and religious schools and the politics of education. He was previously a high school teacher.

Gentlemen, thank you for coming on the Law & Liberty podcast.

Rick Hess:

Hey, thanks for having us.

Michael McShane:

Thanks for having us.

James Patterson:

Yes, this is very exciting. Lots of people are sending their kids back to school, probably fewer because some of them may be teaching at home. There’s been a lot of changes to the landscape of education. So before we get into the book, I wanted to ask you, what is the current state of American K-12 education now that we are firmly, and hopefully forever, past the COVID lockdowns?

Rick Hess:

Mike, do you want to take that?

Michael McShane:

Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think we’re in this really interesting moment, as you intimated there. There have been some serious changes in enrollment patterns. We’re seeing more folks that are homeschooling. We’re seeing an increase in states passing private-school choice programs that are allowing more and more students to attend private schools with government subsidies in order to do that. And there are just some of these broader trends.

A lot of the work that we do at EdChoice, or a fair amount of work that we do, is in public opinion polling. And one of the things that I found most interesting recently was that there’s … When you talk about public opinion, the general polling question that you ask of, right track or wrong track, do you think that the American education system is going on the right track, or is it headed in the wrong direction?

Historically, two things have been true. We’ve been asking this question for years, and it is that the closer you get to people, the more they like their schools. So people tend to say, “Schools at the national level are a mess, but the ones in my state, they’re probably a little bit better, and the ones that are closest to me, my local district, is even better than that.” And the second thing that you would see is that parents were much more positive about their local schools than the general population was.

What we’re seeing for the first time in the last year or so is parent opinions of schooling just falling off the cliff. Parents are much less likely now, whether they’re talking about the national, state or local level, much less likely to say that they think that local schools are on track. And this is meeting up with similar polling that we have from teachers, that again, we’re seeing increasingly negative opinions from teachers if you ask them things like, “Would you recommend teaching to someone else?” or just talking about if they have confidence in their local schools.

So, I think we are in this really interesting moment where there is a lot of dissatisfaction in the American K-12 education system. There are certainly opportunities that are emerging for new players to come onto the field, but it remains to be seen how successful those are going to be. We’re in the very early days of some of these new education savings-accounts programs or others. They could go one way. They could go another. So it’s a really interesting time, and we’ll probably look back on this particular period as a turning point, this post-pandemic era, of where education goes from there.

James Patterson:

Yes. So there have been a lot of federal and state efforts to improve education. You go through them in the book. The most recent one that many people maybe our age, a little older, will remember is No Child Left Behind. Their format has been really to treat teaching as input and test scores as an output, and you discuss some of the limitations, some of the things that were learned in handling education this way. What were the successes and what were maybe the failures that caused us to reevaluate how maybe we can think about education?

Rick Hess:

Yeah. I mean, one of the realities of education is that we’ve been trying to reform it pretty much since day one. So if you go back to the founding of this country, Jefferson, Benjamin Rush, and others talked a lot about the kinds of schools that could promote a free people. Jefferson famously had his architect of the Virginia educational system, both at K-12 and then at the University of Virginia.

So we’ve been doing this forever, and one of the realities is the higher up you go, the further you get away from education, from schools, from classrooms, the less ability you have to control what actually happens in them, because schools are incredibly complicated human places. The difference between a good classroom and a bad classroom usually comes down to a hundred tiny little interactions in the course of an hour. Whether a teacher knows who to ask a question to, how they ask that question, whether they know how to make a kid feel comfortable, put a hand on their shoulder, none of this can you touch from a state capital, much less from Washington DC.

So when you start trying to reform or improve schools from on high, whether it was the push that followed Nation at Risk in 1983 or No Child Left Behind in 2001, what you do is you try to control the levers that you can move from on high. Well, what is that? That is the number of courses that kids take. That is the amount of money that gets spent. That’s how you measure what’s going on in schools. That’s how do you manage the paper requirements for who’s allowed to teach or how schools spend money or buy textbooks.

And so what’s happened, time after time, most famously in No Child Left Behind, is that you’ve got well-intended policymakers trying to figure out how do you yank around these levers for schools, and then you’ve got parents and educators who are incredibly frustrated by the way that these blunt instruments play out in practice. And partly what’s going on today is that we’re living in the aftermath of … Between the 1990s push to raise standards and the 2001 No Child Left Behind, and the Obama Administration’s Race to the Top in 2009 with the Common Core, we’re living in the shadow of the frustration that was bred by all those ambitious efforts.

James Patterson:

Yeah. The thing about those curricula is that they did tend to be a little bit … How to put it? Oppositional, maybe, towards teachers. There was an attempt to tether performance of students to the outcomes of state testing. Was this a success? It doesn’t seem to have been, but you know more about this than me.

Michael McShane:

It’s funny. I think of what Rick just said, talking about all of those little interactions that take place within a classroom. I mean, I think that’s what we’ve learned. There was a big effort by the Gates Foundation. Others have tried to figure out, can we get the formula for what makes a great teacher, in theory so that then we could replicate that formula? And the thing is, it’s really hard to find because different teachers have different strengths and weaknesses. Different teachers run their classrooms in different ways.

And while we have identified some methods … There’s been this whole science of reading movement that’s taken place. It’s been really interesting, and I think quite helpful, in identifying better and worse ways to actually teach kids how to read and the mechanics of it. So that’s true, and I imagine with lots of careful experimentation, we might find the exact better ways to teach fractions or solve simultaneous equations or things like that, those discrete little tasks. This bigger picture of what makes a great teacher, how do we have more great teachers, how do we get more into the profession, how do we keep them once they’re there, it turns out that, as your question implies, there isn’t really a mechanistic way to do that. It would be great if there was. It would make life a lot easier, but I just don’t think that that’s the case.

James Patterson:

That can be a bit disappointing to people who want to figure this out as an equation, that it’s more complicated than that. So, the book Getting Education Right, I think it’d be a little simplistic to call it a school-choice book because there’s a lot more to the book than that, but there’s definitely an emphasis on exploring new opportunities, new ways of doing education policy, that allows for greater variety. In a way, it’s responding to the problems you just described, namely, that there’s not a one-size-fits-all curriculum or pedagogy. So what does school choice really mean? What does it look like in policy terms?

Michael McShane:

Well, it can take a lot of different forms, and I think that that’s actually a mistake that a lot of people in the school-choice world make, that they take whatever thing is in vogue at that moment and say, “Okay, that’s what school choice is now.” So as I mentioned at the beginning, people are really fired up about these education savings-accounts programs that basically place a student’s K-12 funding into a flexible-use spending account that they can spend amongst different providers, so they could pay private-school tuition, but they could also pay for tutoring or special-education services or others.

But that’s just one form of school choice. Historically, there’s been choice within the traditional public schooling system. Basically, anything that severs the connection between where students live and where they go to school. So it could be within their district where they attend a magnet school or some sort of special program, or they’re allowed to enroll in a school that’s across town but in the same district. Within the traditional public system but outside of the district, there’s inter-district choice that allows people to cross district boundaries. Some people call this open enrollment. States like Arizona, I think, have done this to great effect, and to a lesser extent, in places like Ohio and Wisconsin have given that a try at various times.

And then there are charter schools, which are public schools but exist outside of the traditional management system. They tend to be independently operated and schools of choice that students can attend. So we have within the traditional public system, straddling the public and private system, and then all of these new private school-choice programs. Some people might be familiar with school vouchers or tuition tax-credit scholarships that have been around for some time now. This new generation of education savings accounts, but also now places like Oklahoma that are giving tax credits for private-school spending or even homeschooling expenditures and others.

So, there are lots of different ways of mechanically providing school choice, but ultimately, school choice is about a couple of things, right? It is about empowering parents to pick the best school for their kids. It’s about empowering educators to try and create new educational models outside of the strictures that have existed in our existing system, whether that’s-

Michael McShane:

The strictures that have existed in our existing system, whether that’s collective bargaining agreements or other just rules and routines and norms, have developed over the course of, as Rick said, since before our nation’s founding, or even before I. And it’s about trying to create a more diverse pluralistic system, where different people can have different ideas of what makes the best type of school, and allow those folks to live out in that pluralistic way that our nation … Some of the highest norms and values of our nation has.

So it could be any number of those things—it could be within the traditional public schooling system, it could be outside the traditional public schooling system, but if you’re trying to empower parents to make choices on behalf of their kids, you’re trying to empower educators to have the space to create great schooling environments, that’s when you’re over the target.

Rick Hess:

James, and if I can just piggyback on that, one of the points you made, you said, “Well, it’s not a book about school choice, that’s part of it, but it’s really not about that.”

James Patterson:

Right.

Rick Hess:

And I think that’s what makes what Mike was just saying so interesting. A lot of what you’ve seen on the right when it comes to school choice is a tendency to talk about efforts to empower parents, to empower educators, as an end in themselves—that’s how it gets talked about. And that’s actually been a huge problem because it means we don’t have a very coherent vision of what are we trying to do, other than expand choice. It’s choice for choice’s sake. And to the extent that we say anything else, it tends to be bound up in diatribes about how awful schools are, because of test scores or because of X.

What Mike and I tried to set out to do in this book is address those two challenges very directly. One, we tried to say, look, empowering parents, breaking up the bureaucracy, and giving educators and families the ability to find the right solution for them is hugely important. But it’s only one piece of a much larger vision that speaks to the values that we want schools to impart, the opportunities that we need to think about in terms of the professional work of educators, how they’re paid, what it means for communities to take the needs of families and kids more seriously.

And then, the second thing we tried to do was offer an argument that’s less about schools are awful, or public schools are awful, and that’s much more grounded in, as conservatives, what are the things that we value when it comes to education? What are we for, not what are we against? And so, I think it’s not in any way to set aside the importance of empowering families, but I think if we start from first principles and make sure we’re explaining the choice is part of the solution, it’s not the whole ball game, it turns out both to be better for efforts to tackle education, and an easier way to explain to most parents, most voters, what we’re trying to do and why it’s important.

James Patterson:

Yeah, that’s great. And it really is, as a book, to be read very carefully by potential policymakers, or even concerned parents, because of the … It’s not a one-size-fits-all. Of course, that’s the problem with so much curricular and pedagogical recommendations, wised up to the fact that we’re not going to have it that way, and so school choice doesn’t want to make the same claim. In the early part of the book, there’s a discussion of childhood education for pre-K, and you talk about the two elephants in the room, and so a way of getting at that is, does it work, does it make a difference? And is this also efforts to subsidize it just a way of subsidizing childcare?

Michael McShane:

Oh, man. Yes, yeah, yeah.

James Patterson:

That was slow across the plate, right down the-

Michael McShane:

No, no, it’s great, because, look, there’s been so much … And especially if you have gone to grad school in education, or public policy, or whatever, in the last couple of decades, this research on pre-K has been just thrust into the forefront. And part of it is James Heckman, who won the Nobel Prize, has a lot of intellectual heft behind this work that was done. And frankly, some of these initial studies of pre-K were some of the first and best examples of randomized controlled trials where so much research at that time wasn’t able to really isolate causal effects.

And so, there were these couple of small programs, the Abecedarian Program, the Perry Preschool Program, that were actually … They did a randomized study, where half the kids got the intervention and half the kids didn’t, and they followed up after these kids, many years later, to actually trace them into adulthood, and the headline that you get is that these kids did much better. Later in life, they can track any number of things to make more money, I think they were less likely to go to jail—there’s all sorts of stuff that they found off of this.

But there are some interpretive problems with that, one of which is people are unclear as to what the actual intervention was because oftentimes these studies are used to talk about a new pre-K program that a state or a city is trying, where kids are going to go to school for, whatever, four hours or five hours or six hours a day. These programs had all sorts of other stuff going on. Some had parental home visits, and they had counseling, and they were incredibly expensive, even at the time, adjusted for inflation, they’re even way more expensive than that. So what exactly was doing this is not 100 percent clear, and so what you would do now, having learned from it, is also not exactly clear. And they were also just small. I think now there’s a joke that probably more studies have been done with the data from these things than there were kids in the original study, because you’ve had these things that are available at times.

So I don’t … Because the other thing is they take away these big things, where it’s like $6 or $7 or $8 in benefit for every $1 that was spent, and it’s like pre-K is a perpetual money machine, which, of course, raises the question, well then, wait, if we spend an infinite amount of money on pre-K, will we get eight times that in response? No, there has to be something that’s working here. So we throw some cold water on that in the book and say, look, the research on pre-K, some of it’s out there, some of other stuff that’s been out there is definitely a lot less rosy, and some of the stuff on daycare and others is a lot less rosy, and in some cases, actually trends negative, they’re negative experiences for kids to be in.

But we recognize that pre-K does a lot of stuff for people. So part of it is about, for some kids, it’s about academic readiness. We recognize that there are gaps that exist, from the earliest times that we test kids, we can see that there are gaps between different groups of kids, so trying to intervene earlier with academic preparation so they’re ready for kindergarten, or ready for first grade, makes a lot of sense, and so that’s helpful. There are other parts of it, where socialization, having kids have time outside of their house, even if it’s not full-time or whatever, but for a couple of days a week, seems to make sense, so kids can learn important things, like waiting their turn and sharing, which I think is quite important. And as you mentioned in your question, part of this too is childcare so that parents can work.

So we don’t want to come out in the book and say pre-K is bad, just because we don’t think these studies are as great as everybody else says, that we’re saying no place should try and ever subsidize preschool, people shouldn’t put their kids into preschool. We are just trying to temper the expectations and be honest about first asking the question, which is, well, what do we want to accomplish with pre-K? And if you are, as you mentioned, a policymaker that’s reading this book, what are you trying to accomplish here? And then, we can talk about the degree to which we think it will be able to accomplish it, and if that’s worth the expenditure that goes along with it.

But pre-K can be important for families, it can be necessary for people who are working, it can be helpful for some kids in some situations, but it is not the cure-all that we see in lots and lots of policy conversations out there today.

James Patterson:

Moving into K-12, there’s a lot of viral videos about behavior issues, there’s one in particular of a teacher getting assaulted by a student for taking away, I believe, a Nintendo Switch or something. The trouble with these videos is that they do a lot to influence people about how they think schools are going, perhaps maybe more than they should. Is there a real problem with discipline in schools, or is this a phenomenon of viral videos biasing us against those institutions?

Rick Hess:

Both.

James Patterson:

Oh, no.

Rick Hess:

Shockingly.

James Patterson:

It’s the worst option.

Rick Hess:

Yeah. What’s important to keep in mind is there’s three to four million public school classrooms in this country, and from … We can go far back as we want, you could always find a couple of lunatics doing awful things in schools and classrooms. We’ve had a problem with sexual assault by educators since time immemorial, we’ve had teachers pushing personal agendas or inappropriate activity. So sure, absolutely, that’s a real thing. But 30 or 40 years ago, if there was some awful teacher behaving inappropriately in West Texas, you were never going to hear about it in Indiana or Virginia. Today, you’re going to see it, and that, quite naturally and appropriately, makes you ask, well, how common is it? Is this happening in my kid’s school? But that’s the distortion, because what you’re seeing is the one or five or 10 out of three and a half million, that doesn’t necessarily … It’s good to be aware that there’s bad conduct, but it can also give us a really distorted sense of how common it is.

That said, the surveys tell us that there really is a problem right now, that kids feel unsafe, teachers don’t feel safe. Lax disciplinary policies are part of this, the failures to keep kids engaged in their lives together through the pandemic and after, that I think Mike and I would mostly put on the shoulders of school systems, but where a lot of parents also got overwhelmed, that’s a real challenge. The fact that so many local activities and healthy outlets got disrupted, or even vanished, during the pandemic, and that haven’t come back yet, that’s a problem.

So it’s all of the above. It’s easy to get an overly exaggerated sense of how bad things are if you spend much time scrolling Facebook or TikTok, but there are real challenges. And part of what Mike and I talk about in the book is the way in which the dominant cultural zeitgeist of education, in which we have become reluctant to set expectations, we’ve become hesitant to talk about rigor, we’ve seen educators feel like nobody’s going to have their back if they discipline students. These things have all, unfortunately, fueled an educational culture where too often, it seems like anything goes.

Michael McShane:

And I would say, just to put a data point onto what Rick said, as I mentioned, we at EdChoice do public opinion polling, we also poll teachers, and we did a poll of teachers in the spring, and we asked them about interruptions in their class and how often was their class interrupted. When we asked them about how often their class was interrupted by student discipline issues, 73 percent of teachers said that it was either extremely frequently, very frequently, or somewhat frequently that their class was interrupted by discipline issues. And so, it was about 13 percent said extremely frequently. So that’s more than obviously one in 10 teachers telling us that student discipline is an extremely frequent problem in their class.

Another 25 percent were in that very frequently. So if you put those two groups together, we’re talking about more than a third of American teachers telling us either extremely or very frequently that this is a problem in their class. When you throw in the somewhat, it takes it all the way up to three-quarters.

So I think there’s definitely, to just buttress what Rick said, there’s definitely evidence that in some places it is an incredibly acute problem and in other places, it’s a sort of low-lying problem that maybe isn’t happening all the time and in your face, but is happening there in the background and disrupting students’ learning.

James Patterson:

So just a brief aside, my mom was a public school special education teacher who worked on people with behavioral disabilities, and my wife used to be a public school teacher, and both of them confirmed that the phone is the worst thing to be brought into a classroom. It’s the worst device because of how disruptive it is since it creates both a kind of fixation of attention since it’s always trying to keep your attention, and also it makes it easier for people to start coordinating bad behavior on campus.

But the thing that … I actually didn’t have this down as a question. I realized that this is a mistake because you talk about it in the K-12 section of the book, which is what happened to things like tracking or honors schools. These used to be very important features of schools in order to make sure that kids are able to learn at the proper rates. But these became very unpopular for political reasons as much as pedagogical ones, right?

Rick Hess:

Mike, do you want to start with that? Then I’ll piggyback talking about phones a bit too.

Michael McShane:

I was going to say that when we get back to phones, I have a very fun phone data point that I’ll share with you. When you’re talking about tracking, when you’re talking about honors, this is something that we talk about in the book that I think that there is this broader, I don’t know if we want to go so far as calling it a war on rigor, but definitely like skepticism of rigor. What we basically had was a big obsession starting around the time of No Child Left Behind. But even at some points earlier than that, with this idea of achievement gaps, anybody who’s been around education in the last couple of decades has heard this phrase, achievement gaps, gaps, gaps, gaps.

The number one thing that our education system has to do is it has to close the gaps between the lowest performing students and the highest performing students, or if there are any gaps between racial and ethnic groups or economic groups or whatever. Gap closing, gap closing, gap closing. Well, if we just look at this mathematically, let’s strip out all of the other bits of this and we just think about the mathematical gap that exists between two different populations of people. There are a couple different ways in which you could choose to do that.

One way, conceivably the best way of possibly closing gaps is to say the students that are at the highest continue to go up, but the students that are at the lowest level, we’re able to increase their performance at a rate even faster than those that are at the top and they’re able to catch up. Everyone is better off and the gaps close, everybody’s happy. Unfortunately, that doesn’t really seem to be what’s played out in a lot of different places. In many cases, the idea has been to either sort of purposefully or just via neglect, not really care about those higher performing students.

And say, “You know what? They’re fine.” You hear this sort of rhetoric all the time. Students who perform well on exams or others, “Oh, they’re going to be fine. Oh, they’re going to be fine. We don’t need to worry about them.” And all of this emphasis was put on the students who need to be brought up to grade level or in others. And so I think if your goal is to close gaps, and that’s the thing that you’re sort of monomaniacally focused on, things like honors programs are a problem for you, things like selective admission magnet schools are a problem to you.

Because they’re taking some of your highest performing students and pouring as much gasoline on that fire as you can, which could, in turn, sort of exacerbate gaps between different groups of people. So I think part of it is this conceptual flaw that has been in the education policy community for some time and that it’s had these various pernicious effects over the years.

Rick Hess:

That’s right. And so you could say the kindling was there, and then when you got … Michael Brown was shot in 2014 in the launch of Black Lives Matter, and then George Floyd was killed in 2020, and you got the aggressive insistence that any difference by race in the US was a product of institutionalized racism. Anything like a gifted program, a magnet program immediately became suspect. And so what Mike’s talking about just got turbocharged. But let’s pause on that for a sec because I think this whole tech phone issue, that you touched on James, is huge.

And actually it gets to this, one of the reasons that we can’t discipline effectively is because both due to Obama administration, Dear Colleague Letters and Biden administration enforcement, but also because of the culture that’s taken hold in schools. Folks are scared of discipline because they don’t want to discipline a Black or Latino student, and therefore there’s just a real hesitance to discipline anybody. And that’s kind of a backdrop. So in that environment of extreme permissiveness, you’ve now got technology writ large.

And it’s funny because if you think about the tech stuff 20 years ago, those who are old enough remember the enthusiasm for the internet. It was going to democratize access to knowledge. It was going to foster civil engagement and an educated populace by allowing everybody to share and connect. It would make us all love our neighbor. And none of it played out that way of course. Well, 10 years ago in schools, the whole question was how could you get a device in front of every student? Educators and tech people were excited about giving a phone to every kid.

They were like, “Well, maybe we can’t get everybody a laptop, but if we can get a tablet or a phone, it’s just as good.” So there are states like Louisiana today or Utah where you’ve got the state has more than one device for every kid in high school. More than one device for every kid in high school. That was the game. And so you’re now in an environment where it turns out these devices manufacture distraction, where they’re designed to create addiction, where the average teen has over 230 messages a day coming in, so close to half of those during the school day.

Kids constantly either want to check their devices, they want to see what’s being said about them, they want to make sure they’re not out of the loop. And schools are reluctant to take them away unless there’s a law because you’ve got a lot of angry kids and you’ve got a lot of angry parents who say, “I can’t reach my kid when I need to tell them that I’m picking them up early or I forgot to pack lunch.” So what you’ve got is a hugely distracted environment where teachers are staring at a lot of kids who are already not very interested in paying attention begin with, and none of this is what tech’s supposed to do.

Now, the answer is not to try to strip technology out of schools altogether. A, because we’ll never manage. B, because technology has been with us since the pencil and the chalkboard. But because technology can be useful if it’s used carefully and properly. The real problem with this stuff is because so much of it’s driven not by a vision of what good education entails, but by a vision of what vendors are promising and of what teachers can practically manage to do in a given day, is that technology has generally wound up dehumanizing classrooms. It has generally wound up distracting kids and becoming another force that separates kids from their teachers.

What we really want is to use technology the way you use it in a promising environment, which is that technology lets us do less of the dumb stuff. Lets kids get real-time feedback on their math quiz. Lets the teacher simplify the process of planning a lesson so that there’s more time for the real human part of schooling. But that’s generally not what’s going on. And what Mike and I would argue in this book is it’s not going on, not because it’s impossible, but because a dominant culture of schools is shaped by people who aren’t really clear on what their purpose is or how the technology can help with it.

Michael McShane:

And I’ll give you the one fun data point that backs up exactly what Rick was saying there. From our polling, we’ve polled teachers, parents, and actually teenagers as well on the question of cell phones in school and cell phones in the classroom. So when we asked teachers, do you think students should have cell phones in school? 56 percent of them said that students should have cell phones in school. When you ask parents, it’s 71 percent. And when you ask teenagers, it’s 91 percent. And then when you look in the classroom, 17 percent of teachers say that students should have a cell phone in classroom.

Thrity-eight percent of parents say that students should have a cell phone in the classroom, but 65 percent of teens did. I mean, this is clearly a case where you can’t let the inmates run the asylum. Obviously, teenagers want to have their cell phones in school, they want to have their cell phones in the classroom, but vast majorities of adults, whether parents or teachers realize that that’s a terrible idea in the classroom and substantial numbers of teachers, they probably need to pull some more parents along with that as far as the cell phones in schools bit. But seeing that difference made me laugh.

James Patterson:

This morning I had my cell phone on the rostrum while teaching, and I had a … It’s on silent, so my phone has a notification that buzzes. And all the students in the front all slowly checked their phones and it was agonizing because I’ve just got to turn the phone off because any little sign of connection to the outside world will distract these kids. And they all start to focus. And of course there were notifications, so they were all very distracted anyway. I mean, we don’t have that much time left, and I have a lot of other questions. Maybe a lightning round as an order. I’ve never done one of those on a podcast, but I love it.

Michael McShane:

Let it rip.

James Patterson:

Let it rip. We’ll do a lightning round. One is gender theory. Has the tide gone out on this or is it here to stay, Rick?

Rick Hess:

This stuff has been brewing in schools of education for 30 years, but most of the public has just never paid any attention. It seemed like the kind of thing that only extremists were talking about. So everybody was caught unaware when this stuff burst on the stage. What you’re now seeing is pushback from both the right and from a lot of people in the sensible middle. I think what we’ll do over the next five or seven years is we’ll see it settle down. It won’t go away, but hopefully, we can settle down into something that’s more sensible, healthier for kids, and more workable for families.

James Patterson:

All right. Education has a bloat problem. I’ve got, albeit somewhat old, data here from an EdChoice colleague, Ben Scaffidi. Seven-hundred and nine percent increase in administrative staffing from 1950 to 2015. What on earth is going on?

Michael McShane:

Yes, school has a bloat problem. I think this is a K-12. It’s in higher education as well. These are people who are not spending time in the classroom, but they’re doing it. And I think when we think of the cost of that, we need to think of it in two ways because one of them is obviously this is money that could be spent. We could be, as we outline in the book, you could pay teachers more. You could do all sorts of different things with the money that you’re spending on these kind of mid-tier people in school districts and in schools that probably don’t need to be there. But the second part of it, and it’s actually tied into the last question that you asked, is all of these people then have to justify their own existence. And a lot of these initiatives that you see happening, if you know teachers and if you know other professors and others that are at universities, all of these crazy things that we hear about very rarely is it like some kindergarten teachers.

Like, you know what We need? Like a seven-part PD on whatever. These are these other folks who then have to justify their existence. They have to create these new initiatives. They’re not actually connected to the classroom, so they don’t know what kids actually need. And so there’s this other kind of longer tail of problems that this administrative bloat creates that is hard to put a dollar sign on. But when we talk about people being frustrated or ridiculous things in the classroom or in teacher PD or in administrative policies and higher education, I think a lot of those folks are responsible for it.

James Patterson:

The craziest part is that in the same study, teacher salaries had gone down. Right? This leads me to the final lightning strike of the lightning round, which is 8 percent of school teachers quit every year. Why?

Rick Hess:

One, because it’s hard work. Two, because that’s pretty typical, if you look in any profession. You get rates of turnover that aren’t outrageously different from that. But part of the question is, well, what can we do about it? Especially what can we do to keep the educators that we want to keep people who work hard, who do good by kids? And how do we keep them not just in education, but in classrooms instead of going to become trainers or assistant principals or bureaucrats and central? And part of the answer, I think is making the work more rewarding.

That means paying them better. It means making it professional year-round work by giving them more responsibility for things like curriculum and onboarding their colleagues. And of course, we should compensate them appropriately. It means setting clear expectations and letting them know that they’re not going to have to carry the weight for colleagues who are mailing it in. And it’s funny that at different times, we’ve gotten pieces of this, but because we tend to look for silver bullets, let’s throw some more money at the system at large and just hope. Or let’s try to fire our way to quality. We don’t spend nearly enough time talking about the work involved and how we actually make it more rewarding and more possible for mere mortals to do it well.

James Patterson:

So I deserve a medal for my restraint and for not asking only higher ed questions as a professor. I also have kids in K-12, so it’s not entirely a nobility that did this. So we’ve maybe got time for two more questions. The first that I wanted to get at was there was a lot of enthusiasm a decade ago for massively open online courses or MOOCs, which is a really unfortunate acronym, has COVID demolished that hope? I taught online, and I’ll tell you, the students are not loving it.

Michael McShane:

Look, it’s a classic thing about technology. Rick wrote about this with Bror Saxberg a decade ago. Technology is just a tool. And so you have to think about “what problem are we trying to solve?” What sort of learning community are you trying to create? If you’re trying to just broadcast lectures out to people, technology could be an opportunity to do something like that where the people are generally self-directed, they’re interested in what they want to know. I mean, Lord knows I did when I was in graduate school and was behind in mathematics. I used MITs, mathematics courses, and others because I was highly motivated. Fear is a powerful motivator. So, I was reaching out to those. But just because you have a hammer, not everything is a nail. There are lots of things that we want in education where want to have discussions where we want to build an actual community.

You want to have seminars. And I don’t think those things necessarily translate great to the online environment. So the problem, I think, with a lot of these is we thought, as happens in education, that suddenly, oh, now everything will be like this. As opposed to saying, well, what can we use technology for? What do we still need to use other methods for? And there’s no one answer for every situation. What is the problem that we’re trying to solve? Who are the people we’re trying to meet? What are we trying to create? And sometimes being able to broadcast, there are YouTube lectures that have tens of millions of views on them. So, obviously, that was striking a chord somewhere. But as you mentioned, Zoom School for so many people, and I’ve tried to teach classes and stuff over Zoom, if you’re trying to have discussions, if you’re trying to leave the seminar, way, way harder and probably not the best environment for it. So could be good for some stuff, but challenge for other things.

James Patterson:

Just as a final question, maybe try to merge these together because I think they’re related. The way that you address the issue of higher education is as a cartel. And the cartel that is one of certification because avenues for certifying people as qualified employees have been cut off for civil rights reasons. But in the process of doing that, what you’ve had is the creation of federal funding and state funding for a lot of that requires them to assess whether the schools are any good, something called accreditation. And the result has been that a lot of universities have essentially all turned into one of three varieties. You have a small number of rich, prestigious schools, and then you have small liberal arts colleges, and then you have giant state schools. There’s been a kind of standardization, a limitation on what we were talking about earlier as choice. So what’s happening here, and what might change to make higher education better?

Rick Hess:

Yeah. And then the other … I mean, that’s within kind of the four-year varietal obviously.

James Patterson:

Yes, that’s true.

Rick Hess:

Then the lion’s share of folks in higher ed, five out of six, are those other kinds like community colleges and regional publics. Look, I mean, yeah, you put your finger on it. What’s happened is that higher ed, largely as a result of how the courts allowed the Civil Rights Act to be interpreted in the late ’60s and early ’70s, higher ed wound up becoming entitled to give you a license to get a good job. So we created a culture where if you went to college and you got a diploma, you were going to earn a lot more. The standard figure is a million dollars over your working life, more than you would’ve. Not that your major necessarily taught you anything useful, not that we actually believe people who finished four-year colleges have demonstrated any great grit or insight or acquired any great skills.

There’s a great book called Academically Adrift by Richard Arum, which documented a lot of this a decade ago. But because it was an easy sorting way to separate the kinds of people who knew how to show up for work, who knew how to put together a PowerPoint or write a paper from all the other types who didn’t. And once they were given this enormous gangster authority to decide who’s allowed to go get a good job and who’s not, colleges have been able to monetize the living heck out of it. You need to get in and get a diploma, which means colleges get to decide. The elite ones get to come up with all kinds of bizarre ways to decide who should get to come based not on merit but all kinds of descriptive characteristics. Other institutions get to pay faculty $70,000 or $80,000 a year or more for teaching nine hours a week in the fall and nine hours a week in the spring. And then sprinkling a bunch of adjuncts around them, and all of this then created an incredibly noncompetitive environment.

So, there are a lot of things that we need to do to address behaviors, raise expectations, and open up accreditation. But the biggest thing we can do is we can remove the ability for employers to treat a college diploma as some kind of defensible hiring criteria, which means what we basically want to do is apply to diplomas the same exact equal employment opportunity tests we apply to every other criterion. Which is what we’re talking about actually related to the job, like in the case of nursing, say. And does it actually document relevant skills and knowledge? If it does, then degrees ought to be treated as appropriate hiring criteria. If not, then employers should not be able to favor people who borrowed a lot of money from taxpayers to go get a piece of paper. And that, more than anything else, would force colleges to start getting serious: A, about how much they cost, and B, about the value they actually convey.

James Patterson:

As a professor at a college, I do not endorse that answer. You borrow, and you come here. Mr. Hess, Dr. McShane, this has been absolutely fantastic. I wish I could spend another hour just talking about this. But unfortunately, we’ll have to settle that at another time. Thank you so much for coming on the Law & Liberty Podcast.

Michael McShane:

Hey, thanks for having us.

Rick Hess:

Thanks for having us.

James Patterson:

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Law & Liberty Podcast. Be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and visit us online at www.lawliberty.org.