ADAMS: Welcome to The State of Education. So glad you’ve joined us today. We’re excited to share our guest with you today; we have Frederick Hess in the studio with us. He goes by Rick so we’re going to refer to him as Rick.
Rick, thank you for joining us. We’re excited to share with you today.
HESS: Great to be here. Thanks for having me.
ADAMS: Awesome.
Rick recently wrote a book and he sent me a copy—right here, for those of you who are watching—and the title is The Great School Rethink. Well, that’s a catchy title, and it’s one that many of us think is the right thing to do.
So we’re going to talk about that today. First of all, Rick, tell us just a little bit more about yourself, kind of your backstory so our audience knows who we're talking to, who they’re listening to. Your story and then what helped you kind of, I’m going to write this book.
HESS: Sure. I’m director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. Been in that role about two decades now. Teach occasionally at colleges and universities. I’ve obviously stepped back to that, given the climate, but over the years I’ve taught at University of Virginia, Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, Rice, Georgetown, Hopkins.
I started out in this stuff last century as a high school social studies teacher. I had substitute taught in college for pizza money. Enjoyed it. Folks said, “If you like substitute teaching, you’ll love actually teaching.” Got a teacher credential in the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Went down to East Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Taught high school. Taught for a couple years.
I was frustrated at the remarkable sight of seeing a lot of nice people, who, as best I could tell, all meant well, working in an environment which was absolutely self-defeating. Every time you volunteered for something, you ended up with more work on your plate and more frustration on your shoulders.
The environment was one where good intention seemed never to play out as intended and this got me puzzling how the heck we could set up schools that work this way. Went back, did a PhD thinking about this. That led to my first book, Spinning Wheels, looking at why urban school reform doesn’t seem to deliver. Came out in the late-nineties with Brookings, and got a lot of attention.
I was a professor for a while and got hired away to this AEI role. One of the things I get to do now—because I don’t have to do any of the hard work—is I have a lot of opportunity to study things, to talk to folks who are doing it, to observe. This book, The Great School Rethink, captures a lot of my thinking on the backend of the pandemic, which was so destructive to so many families and so disruptive for so many schools and educators.
ADAMS: That was for sure. It was disruptive but, you know, it’s interesting, because your first chapter in your book is called “The Great School Disruption.” And for some time, I’ve been talking to folks and saying what we really need in this country is a strategic disruption of our educational system.
Now, we don’t want to blow it up. We need a strategic disruption that just gets it enough off center—because it’s so synchronized, it’s such a system, if I may call it—that it’s hard to break up that system in order to create positive change.
Strategic disruption, kind of like Twitter, you know, and some other things like that. So you start out your first chapter stating that between 1920 and 2020 there was very little change in our educational system. Basically, we were stuck. I agree with that. Talk to us a little more about that.
HESS: Yeah, sure. You know, it’s funny—we talk a lot about disruption in education. The pandemic was surely disruptive. In no way was it strategic.
ADAMS: True, true.
HESS: Look, the way to think about schooling is: more than anything, I think parents and communities look to schools for their custodial function. The reality is, if schools are picking up kids at the right time each day, taking the kids to campus, the kids are safe, they seem to have friends, and they get off the bus safe…reality is, most parents are going to say, “You’re doing your job well enough. We’re not going to poke around too much.”
One of the things that’s meant is that people who are trying to promote various school improvement—kind of “school reform” in the vernacular—are usually trying to roll a boulder uphill. You think about all the 21st century reforms: No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, Common Core. These were all efforts by elites in Washington or on the West Coast to push schools to do reform.
What you saw was, in lots of these cases, the parents, the communities, the teachers said, “Yeah, this isn’t for us.” What’s changed I think, what happened during the pandemic, was a couple of things. One, suddenly parents couldn’t count on their school. For the first time in generations, the schools were saying, “Yeah, you can’t even take your kid to the bus stop. You’re on your own.”
In fact, instead of telling our teachers to reach out every day and ask what you need, we’re going to cut the contract day in half. We’re going to tell the teachers to work three hours and we’re going to put up an hour of mediocre Zoom instruction and some resources and we’ll call that a-synchronous. All of this fundamentally shattered the confidence that lots of families had that they could count on schools. That’s one.
Second, when parents were looking over the kid’s shoulder at that iPad or laptop, they saw lots of stuff that left them concerned. They saw that kids were doing a lot less work than they thought, they saw stuff that felt ideological or political that they hadn’t realized was going on.
Then the third thing was that teachers themselves felt enormously frustrated. They felt like the schools didn’t have their back, nobody was telling them what they were supposed to do. What we had was a disruption, in a sense. Not a Silicone Valley, “Hey, we’re going to dream up something cool and new,” but the things that we had been used to, generation upon generation, suddenly weren’t there and weren’t working. And as we've come out the other side, I think you see a lot of evidence that parents and teachers are actually saying, “We want you to give us something different,” instead of them having this stuff pushed onto them from on high.
ADAMS: Yeah, absolutely.
You use a phrase about being a rethinker in your book. Chapter one, I believe, is where I saw that. How do people “be a rethinker”? What are you talking about? What do you mean by that?
HESS: Yeah, it's funny. Like I said, we talk a lot about reform. So you think about the logic of, say, No Child Left Behind or Race to the Top, these “big R” reforms. The idea was our schools weren't built to do what we want them to do today.
The common school movement was launched in the 1830s and 1840s with a very straightforward mission: make all of these Catholic immigrant children less Catholic by having them read the King James Bible. We need to build out schools so we could expose them. In the early 1900s, the goal was to get kids out of factories and out of mines and lock them up so that they would be safe and that we could drive up minimum wages for adults.
None of this was about teaching kids skills for an information economy. None of this was about teaching kids to be citizens in the world that we inhabit today. This mission we're asking schools to do today, to educate every kid in an incredibly diverse nation for college or career or service, and to be active citizens is the right mission, But nobody in the history of the planet has ever done it.
There seems to be an assumption that if we just come up with the right teacher pay system or the right testing system, that somehow that'll be enough to kick schools over it. I think rethinking starts from a different premise. It says, look, nobody's intentionally not serving kids. There are people who are self interested and there are teacher unions that are more interested, I think, in the well being of their members than in the kids or communities. But that kind of makes them human. It doesn't make them evil, to my mind. It means they're a problem, but they're not a problem because they're malicious.
What we need, I think, is a more fundamental rethinking. Why do kids go to school for the hours they do? What are kids doing all day? What does it mean to be a teacher anyway? What are we trying to do with technology? What's the right way to engage parents? And what does it mean to talk about choices and options?
Why is it normal for parents to be able to move into a community where they will live by a school they choose, but odd for them to choose to move schools once they're enrolled? Why is it normal for kids to choose among electives, but somehow problematic for kids to choose into non school options?
So for me, the logic here is that we have this moment when there's a sense that what we're doing is not working for lots of families, for lots of communities, for lots of teachers. And rather than it be a chance for some great reset dreamed up by the US Secretary of Education—like he's talked about—or a chance to reheat the same reforms that have disappointed, it's an opportunity for folks in those communities, in those schools, to say, “Can we rethink the rules of the road?”
ADAMS: It's really an opportunity for us to rethink what is it that we really want? What do we need when it comes to education? Because we've had these systems and we've gotten certain results, but too often the result—there have been some positive results, right? But in the big scheme of things, we're seeing a major sink, a major decline across the board.
We see a general disapproval, just a general…parents aren't happy. Teachers are leaving the trade in droves. There are so many things that are happening here, and I think all of these things are an opportunity to rethink. What is it we really want? What is it we need?
What do we need for our kids to know so that they can be successful ten and twenty and thirty years from now? And what do we have to do right now that can move us in that direction? Who are the key stakeholders and who gets to sit at the table? I think, as I look at your book, I think that's kind of a big factor there, is it not?
HESS: Huge factor. Let me give you two real concrete examples, just because folks might be, “Well, I'm having trouble kind of nailing down exactly what we're talking about.” Let me give you one kind of “structural” and one kind of “in the classroom.”
When you talk about school choice, people like us—who have a lot of time on our hands—tend to debate this as “you're either for empowering parents or you're for defending community schools.” But it turns out real parents don't talk about it that way. 75% of parents give their kids public school an A or a B, and 75% of parents support things like tuition tax credits and vouchers and education savings accounts. For parents, it's not an either or.
They say, “We like schools. That's where we meet our neighbors and where we go on Friday night. And we believe, especially after what happened during the pandemic, that we all deserve the option to take our kids to an environment that serves them.”
Second example. A reformer, I think, dives into this debate and says, “I'm for empowering parents, and I want to end zip code education, and I want to blow up systems.” What happens is you sound like one of these wild eyed radicals. For the same reason, parents and normal voters kind of have a problem with folks who talk about defunding the police, they have a problem with people who talk about blowing up schools. They like police, they like schools. But they also believe in choices.
A very different kind of example of rethinking is you'll hear a lot right now that kids need more time to make up for the learning loss of the pandemic. And it's true. New Mexico, for instance, just extended its school year by a couple of weeks at an extraordinary cost: hundreds of millions or billions of dollars a year, kids locked up in these buildings for an extra couple of weeks.
And that's fine if we're actually going to use the time well. But here is where things get a little funny. You ask people, “How much time do American kids spend in school?” They'll say, “Well, not as much as their peers around the world.” And that's just wrong. Turns out that American kids, grades K to nine, spend 100 hours more a year in school than other other industrialized nations’ kids. So, Japan, Germany.
The question becomes: what are our kids doing in school all day? In Japan, for instance, the teachers rotate and the kids stay in a classroom so they don't lose learning time in transition. We have about 1,100 hours that kids spend in school a year. Columbia University study in 2015 just started to break this down. Nothing fancy.
They identified the school district they looked at: 450 hours. About 15 or 16 of those 36 weeks kids were spending in school, no learning was happening during that time. That was break periods, that was recess for testing. Look, if you're telling me you don't want kids sitting at a desk minute to minute being bored to death, I'm 100% on board. I'm all for kids having fun, getting out, running around.
But having kids spend hundreds of hours during announcements, walking between classrooms, waiting for teachers to read directions, trying to get control of kids…This isn't good for anybody. So the question becomes, rather than add more time, longer days, longer years, ask the question: what's happening all day in school? And how do we make sure more of it's making a difference for real kids?
ADAMS: Yeah, well, you kind of dig into that in chapter two of your book where you talk about what do we do with our time? Thank you for bringing that up and you've made some points there.
Readers, if they want to get your book, we'll give them that opportunity. You can tell more about that as we kind of get to the end here.
But, yeah, the use of time is really a critical area. The other thing that is important here, really, is the whole approach to teaching. Rethinking teaching, which you cover in chapter three. Jump into that a little bit.
HESS: Yeah, you hear all the time that schools are having trouble filling teaching jobs right now. You get the impression that it's hard to fill [teaching positions], and it is, because we keep creating new jobs, which makes it harder and hard to hire talent.
So, for instance, since 2019, we've lost a million kids from public schools. but we've added 32,000 teacher jobs. This is a long term trend. Going back to the early 70s, for instance, we used to have a teacher for about every 27 students. Today we have a teacher for every 16 students. That means we've had to add about a million and a half teaching positions, which means it's a lot harder to train and maintain quality, which means you get a lot more long term substitutes, which means you're paying a lot more people.
Just to give folks a sense of what might be possible, the National Education Association, the nation's largest teacher union, reports that median teacher pay today is about $66,000 a year. With benefits, average teacher’s on the books for ninety-odd thousand.
If, instead of adding all those teaching jobs—even if we added a lot of administrators too, but set that aside. If we had just spent all those dollars, we spent hiring more teachers and instead had spent them to pay the teachers, the million and a half teachers we have better—since the 1970s— average teacher pay in the U.S. today would be about $140,000 a teacher. Average teacher pay would be about $140,000 a teacher.
What we have chosen to do is add quantity rather than invest in quality. Here's one way to think about what it's done. If you go into a typical elementary school and you say to a principal, “What are you most concerned about?” Nine times out of ten, they'll tell you English language arts, reading, literacy.
So you say, “Take me to one of your great second or third grade reading teachers.” And you'll watch them teach and they're doing reading for 90 minutes and then they're doing math for 90 minutes and then they're going to watch kids eat lunch for 45 and then they're loading buses and unloading buses.
And you say to the principal, “Is this the best way to use talent?” And they go, “That's what we do.” And then you say, “Well, take me to your worst reading teacher,” and they're doing the exact same thing. Time after time, principals aren't troubled by this.
And I say, look: if we went to the local hospital and we watched the best pediatric surgeon in the state operating on a kid and that kid was halfway through a surgery on one of your students and then she started peeling off her gloves. And you said, “Doc, what are you doing? The surgery is only—” and she said, “It's my turn to go take Jell -O around to the patients, but don't worry, we're going to have a lousy pediatric surgeon finish up,” you'd say, “This is a crazy way to think about utilizing their skills.”
Part of this is we've just built these assumptions. We're going to hire three and a half million teachers. We're going to pay them all okay. We're going to give them all the same job. We're going to give them a little bit of mediocre training and hope things work out. And what gets lost along the way is the opportunity to say, “Well, wait a minute. How are we thinking about who teachers are, what they do, how they get paid?”
It's not about spending more money or less money. It's about spending dollars and hiring adults in ways that are going to transform kids' lives rather than just get us from September to May.
ADAMS: Yeah, that's an interesting concept. Well, I tell you what, chapter four, you talk about technology use. That's such a big deal and so important in our world today because our world is driven by technology, so much of it.
At the same time, you know, there are dangers with technology and over stimulation of technology. Finding the balance there. We're not going to dive into that right now for this interview. I want people to get your book and pick where you’re going with all that…but that’s an important topic.