ADAMS: Thank you for sticking with us. Delighted to have Rick Hess with us today. He’s just written a book called The Great School Rethink and we’ve been talking about that.
Let's just continue this conversation. In chapter five, you talk about choice, and you come at that from several different angles, and you talk about how we need to reconsider what that means. So talk to us, give us a little bit of your thoughts there.
HESS: Sure. Look, one of the things that's odd about the way we've debated school choice over the last 30 years is that schools are nothing but a bundle of choices.
What discipline program a school is going to use is a matter of choice. How much homework they're going to assign, how kids are assigned to classrooms, how much choice middle schoolers or high schoolers get for their courses. All of these things are choices, and they're made sometimes by district officials and sometimes by principals and sometimes by teachers and sometimes by children and families.
If the choices that are being made by that school aren't a good fit for a kid or a family, it seems only logical that we're going to make sure that they have the choice to go find a [unintelligible 01:28]. Yet somehow we have made some of these choices feel very normal. We're okay with kids choosing to take honors or standard track. We're okay with kids choosing to take art instead of music. But for various reasons, when kids want to move from School A to School B, we've made this into a huge, kind of brutal political debate.
And that's odd on a couple of levels. One, it's odd that people are so opposed to this because it seems like it's just part of the fabric. In fact, we have public school choice programs. Huge numbers of families buy their home. They're choosing their school when they buy it. We've had charter schools for 30 [years], so it seems odd for anybody to really get up in arms about this anyway.
But then the second thing is it's odd how big a deal those of us who support school choice have made the act of just moving schools. For instance, Bernie Sanders, when he talks about socialized health care, right? Bernie Sanders says, it's not just “you have the right to go to hospital B instead of hospital A,” it's that “we're going to pay for all your health care, but you still get to pick your doctor and your specialist.”
That ought to be how we talk about school choice, because here's the funny thing about the way we've talked about school choice for so long. We've made school choice a niche issue because 75-80% of parents give their kids school an A or a B. Most parents of means have already taken school quality into account when they bought a home. The only families that have really benefited from school choice, the way we’ve talked about it, are relatively marginalized families who are trapped in lousy schools, often in places like Washington, DC and Milwaukee and New York.
It is absolutely the right thing to do that we give these parents the tools to get their kids into the school that's right for them. But by making a choice only about bailing kids out of awful and unsafe schools, we've also made it easy for lots of working class and middle class families to say, “That's a fringe issue.”
What the pandemic changed was it suddenly made because of the reality of school closure—and because of what parents saw through those zooms—it suddenly made the importance of choice much more salient. Not just the choice to move to another school, though, but the choice to take part in a learning pod, the choice to seek a micro school, the choice to opt out of this confused, long- term subs math class and into a high quality online option.
And so what's happened is, I think, as we've seen kind of the last couple of years, the explosion of school choice legislation. What that should be understood as is it's because people are understanding choice to mean something different than it meant before 2020.
It's about empowering all families to find something right for their kids and not just empowering families trapped in a lousy school to get out. It's a both-and thing. If we take that understanding—as kind of the logic of a rethink—then the point of choice is to empower families and educators to create and find a school environment meant to work for everybody.
ADAMS: Let me just throw in here real quick. I think that's such an important area because it's a hot topic right now. Everybody's talking about it, everybody cares about it, but it means different things to different people.
I think this is an opportunity, as we are rethinking this issue. Certainly it's an opportunity for leaders, leaders in our school system, leaders in our school boards, leaders in our state legislatures to be thinking about these issues and, basically, listen to what the needs are. Then let's create systems that truly give a plethora of opportunities.
As you were talking about Bernie Sanders…look, what we want is what's best for the patient and in this case, what's best for the students. The funding is flowing anyway. Let the funding follow whatever is best for the student. That's the whole logic, but if our leadership can really grab that and understand that, then at the end of the day, that takes away that “us versus them” concept. It becomes, look, we are all working together for the best interests of our students.
What does shift us into a rethink is “systems versus students.” The typical thought has always been directed toward “we fund systems.” But we don't need to fund systems. If we fund students, the students will fund the systems. Right? It's free market.
It's a system that works. We use it in every other element of our society. I mean, people have a choice where they go out to eat. People have a choice where they buy a home. People have a choice in their insurance coverage, a choice in everything except this whole education thing. Partly because it's been such a monopoly for 100 years, and it's been that system that's kind of been ingrained there.
We're having to really rethink. It's not the system, it's the student. Really put a new focus on that. And if leadership will focus on that, and parents focus on that, we can all get very easily on the same page. That's the foundation for a solution.
HESS: I think that's so well said. And, you know, I mean, it's right. When Bernie Sanders is more creative about problem solving than the market types in school choice, it tells you something.
Look, and there's a couple of things that get lost here. One is that this should be about empowering teachers too. Right now, if you're a teacher and you live in a community, you just have a very limited set of options if you want to teach. If there's private schools around you can apply for jobs there. But if you're going to apply in the school district, you work in their schools and they all have the same pedagogy.
Part of the beauty of creating options is it creates options where educators can find an environment where they can do their best work, just like families can find one for kids.
And, you know, and a second point, which just flows from what you're saying about the systems and funding students rather than systems is this is why the education savings account stuff is so interesting. For listeners who haven't followed this closely, school choice says you have the right to move your kid from this school to that school with a voucher or a charter school. Education savings accounts say—in theory, if the law is written a certain way—you have more freedom to mix and match.
You might want to keep your kid in the school where they are because it's a nice school, but you hate the civics program. And you think the math, their teaching is just mediocre, goofy. And with an education savings account, you can opt out of, say, the civics and math component and opt into this other stuff. Or opt in to do alternatives online, or [something] offered by a local tutor.
Or if you want a learning pod because your kid needs some additional support, you can opt out of some other school activity and put the dollars into that. The nice logic here is, we're starting to move away from “you have to pick this school or that school” and starting to ask what kind of learning environment is going to be right for this student and that family.
ADAMS: Well, that really leads right into chapter six of partnership, a renewed partnership with the parents. I mean, it's not rocket science, but that's the foundational concept, is it not? Talk to us more about that.
HESS: Yeah. You know, it's funny. Everybody pays lip service to how important families parents are, but the reality is, I think we've got a very passive aggressive relationship at this point between lots of school systems and the local parents.
What's happened is…when I started doing this stuff I used to supervise student teachers back in the 1990s in Boston. At that point in time, it was no trick at all to go into a Boston high school, and you'd be talking to a teacher who's training a teacher, and they'd say, “Well, those kids…you can't teach them.”
They weren't ashamed; it was just an observation. It was about class or ethnicity or whatever it was. And one of the great bipartisan triumphs of the last quarter century is working together, we've changed the culture of teaching. It's now expected that the job of teachers is to teach every kid they serve. It's hard to do that. We don't succeed. But teachers will whisper that stuff in the parking lot. They won't say that out loud very often, and that's a great thing.
But in order to make sure that we weren't scapegoating kids and families, I think we didn't understand fully how this would play out. What's now happened is you've got principals and teachers and advocates who are so terrified of being accused of scapegoating families that they refuse to treat families as responsible players.
Everything's the school's fault, everything's a teacher's fault. And this has both kind of let parents off the hook. Kids are on the phone all night and show up, not ready to learn…“It's a school's fault.” Kids misbehaving. Parent shows up for the disciplinary hearing. “What are you doing?” We've lost the vocabulary and the ability to say, “It's a partnership.”
School has to do its part, but parents have to send kids to school respectful, well behaved, ready to learn. Then, the other piece of this that’s fallen out is once you start to treat somebody like that—once you're enabling them rather than partnering with them—you tend to cut them out. Then parents feel like they are being cut out of the loop on these conversations about how schools are handling gender issues or how they're teaching about race.
That's why I think so many parents felt blindsided during the pandemic. They just felt like they had never really been brought into the loop on these sensitive conversations. It's kind of the worst of both worlds. Parents have been infantilized in a way that means they’re not expected to do their job, and they're infantilized in a way that they feel like stuff is being done to their kids behind their back.
I think we need to reimagine a relationship where schools are actually treating parents like partners. “Here's what you can expect of us. Here's, darn it, what we're going to expect of you. Part of what you can expect from us is transparency, being straight with you, reaching out, keeping you apprised. Part of what we expect from you is that you're going to stand over your kid's shoulder when they do homework. You're going to read to them, you're going to make sure that you limit their screen time.”
We're just very far from that set of relationships, and we need to reimagine or rethink how we get back to that kind of healthier dynamic.
ADAMS: Boy, you said that so well, and wow, that is so true, because talking about partnerships…partnerships only thrive when all the partners are responsible. If there's no responsibility and accountability and transparency in those relationships—whether it's a business partnership or any other kind of partnership—it doesn't last long, it doesn't work.
I think this really brings it back to where every one of us who wants to be a stakeholder in this process, it means: “All right, I want a voice at the table, but it also means I've got to show up. I've got to listen. I've got to sometimes speak up, and I've got to do my part in this partnership if it's going to work.”
HESS: I think that's beautifully said. We live in an outrage age. You've got stuff like the National School Board Association asking the FBI to investigate parents, who are concerned about what's happening, as domestic terrorists. That's crazy.
It's easy for those of us who believe parents are at the center of this to feel defensive and get our backs up. And that's a healthy response, but I think we need to understand that if parents are letting their kids go to school late, when we know that teens are spending seven and a half hours a day on phones two and a half hours on social media, two and a half hours gaming, when tweens are spending five or six hours a day on phones, we need schools to reach out to parents and say, “This is bad for kids. Here's how we have to partner together to get kids off of screens and into networks with their friends and into activities.
We have to be able to make the distinction between schools disrespecting parents and trying to cut them out of sensitive conversations about values and understand that that's very different from schools working with parents to make sure that they are preparing kids to succeed in school.
ADAMS: Yep. Wow. Covering some great stuff here.
Your last chapter is “A New Public School Tradition.” I think all of these things we've talked about kind of lay the foundation for that. But do you want to sum up again? We want folks to get your book because we're leaving out tons and tons of details here, and we're doing that on purpose, right? We don't have time for it, for starters.
Great resource. Talk to us a little bit about what your capstone is.
HESS: Yeah, I think there's two big points in the conclusion. One is when I talk the way that you and I are talking now, there's a certain segment—including my friends who lead the teacher unions, particularly—that say, “This is all part of a big attack on public education.” And I think what we need to keep in mind is that public education exists to fulfill a mission in a free country.
ADAMS: Yeah.
HESS: It exists to educate our children, to prepare citizens, to serve communities. Public education is not some series of buildings to which we kowtow.
The things we are talking about reimagining—how we use teachers, how we hire and pay teachers, how time gets used, what we do with technology, how we expand our vision of choice—None of this should be seen as an attack on public education.
NASA, the Environmental Protection Agency; these are places that use private vendors. They use contracts to serve a public mission. Schools do this right now: they buy pencils and buses and chromebooks and every other thing from private companies, and they use them to serve a public mission. All we're talking about is the ability to think: “What is the right way to make sure we're serving that public will and those public needs?” And the idea that we ought to rule anything out as an attack on public schooling is just odd. That’s the first point.
The second point that I try to talk about at some length in that conclusion is: we do get stuck. Those of us who tend to think this way have a bad habit of picking fights in ways that make it hard to convince parents and educators that this is actually something that they should believe in.
If you look, for instance, at No Child Left Behind or Race To the Top, a lot of this stuff was done by very self impressed Washington hands and foundation executives who had MBAs from fancy schools. They could not wait to wag their fingers and tell people how if they really knew what was going on, they would be for this.
All of us have had that experience. When somebody is yelling at us that we don't understand what's good for us, and you just start to go, “Yeah, you know what? Just—no.” I think that has long been the dynamic of school reform. I think the way that you do rethinking—and I talk about this in the book—is starting with these specifics: what are teachers doing? What's happening to the time?
And do it as community and school conversations. Because it's really about what are the challenges that we see as real people? What are we frustrated by? What are ways that we solve this? If we start from there—and I think it's a lot easier to do post pandemic than it was before the pandemic—then what happens is you're actually pulling in solutions rather than having solutions pushed from on high.
I think that kind of advocacy, that kind of engagement, that kind of problem solving has a chance to really drive us much more productively than a lot of well meaning reformers have, say, over the last 20 or 30 years.
ADAMS: Frederick Hess, it's been awesome to have you with us today. Thank you so much for sharing your time, your expertise. Really appreciate you being here.
HESS: Hey, it's been a pleasure. Thanks for having me.
ADAMS: Tell us real quick, how can people learn more? How can they go to your website? What do you want to share so people can learn more?
HESS: Sure. Easiest is probably just find me, Frederick Hess, at AEI. The book is up there. They can go to the Harvard Education Press website, any of your Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, it’ll be there. With any luck, it’ll be in a bookstore near you. Though, nowadays, don’t bet on it!
If they want to follow me on stuff more generally, they can follow me on Twitter @rickhess99.
ADAMS: Rick Hess 99. And the title of the book—this book that we’ve been talking about—is The Great School Rethink. I encourage folks to get that book, read it, give it some thought, and let’s see what we can do to bring the changes we’re all looking for.
Thank you again, Rick, for joining us. And to all of you who have spent this time listening and learning with us, we appreciate it. Together, we can get this job done. It’s critical, our children, our country, depend on us getting this right.
Thank you for joining us today on The State of Education.