Unlock the secrets behind boosting school attendance and graduation rates with Ohio's own Bill Seitz and Dani Isaacsohn. Our latest podcast episode delivers a compelling conversation on House Bill 348 and the bold, bipartisan strategy to use cash incentives as a catalyst for educational success. We're not just talking about the principles of the bill; we're diving into the stories and data that have shaped its creation, with personal insights from two legal minds passionately invested in the future of education. As we unpack the potential of these incentives, you'll understand why targeting key student groups could be a game-changer for economic growth and the health of our democracy.
Join us as we navigate the layers beneath chronic absenteeism and the pandemic's impact, revealing how financial rewards could be the bridge to a culture that cherishes education. But it doesn't stop there. We investigate the power of mentorship and the ripple effect of engaging students through individualized goals, shining a light on success stories that bridge party lines. This episode is a treasure trove for anyone keen on coming together to forge an educational system that not only addresses immediate issues but also paves the way for long-term fiscal well-being. Don't miss out on this crucial discussion that transcends partisan politics, focusing squarely on the core of educational challenges.
Engage the conversation on Substack at The Common Bridge!
Unlock the secrets behind boosting school attendance and graduation rates with Ohio's own Bill Seitz and Dani Isaacsohn. Our latest podcast episode delivers a compelling conversation on House Bill 348 and the bold, bipartisan strategy to use cash incentives as a catalyst for educational success. We're not just talking about the principles of the bill; we're diving into the stories and data that have shaped its creation, with personal insights from two legal minds passionately invested in the future of education. As we unpack the potential of these incentives, you'll understand why targeting key student groups could be a game-changer for economic growth and the health of our democracy.
Join us as we navigate the layers beneath chronic absenteeism and the pandemic's impact, revealing how financial rewards could be the bridge to a culture that cherishes education. But it doesn't stop there. We investigate the power of mentorship and the ripple effect of engaging students through individualized goals, shining a light on success stories that bridge party lines. This episode is a treasure trove for anyone keen on coming together to forge an educational system that not only addresses immediate issues but also paves the way for long-term fiscal well-being. Don't miss out on this crucial discussion that transcends partisan politics, focusing squarely on the core of educational challenges.
Engage the conversation on Substack at The Common Bridge!
Welcome to this episode of season 5 of the Common Bridge, where policy and current events are discussed in a fiercely nonpartisan manner. The host, richard Helpe, is a philanthropist, entrepreneur and political analyst who has reached over four million listeners, viewers and readers around the world. With our surging growth in audience and subscriptions, the Common Bridge continues to expand its reach. The show is available on the Substack website and the Substack app Simply search for the Common Bridge. You can also find us on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. The Common Bridge draws guests and audiences from across the political spectrum, and we invite you to become a free or paid subscriber on your favorite medium.
Speaker 2:Hello, welcome to the Common Bridge. As you know, the Common Bridge is a fiercely nonpartisan, policy-oriented discussion about issues of the day, opportunities of the moment and how we can get to a better place by talking to each other. It's a great example now from the state of Ohio. We have a representative from the Republican Party, representative from the Democratic Party joining us today, representative Bill Sight and representative Dunny Isaacson. Gentlemen, welcome to the Common Bridge, we're happy to have you.
Speaker 3:Glad to be with you. Thanks for inviting us.
Speaker 2:Excited to be here. Education, public education, is important to all of us. It's what sets the basis for the quality of life, whether somebody can have a good future. It also is the foundation of our freedom and our economy. People that think they're going to collect Social Security need to understand that's coming from the economy of the future. The economy of the future is going to depend on knowledge. We've got to have great schools. There's been lots of discussion about schools, school performance, how the students are doing, and we got them to school. You, too, have taken on, in a bipartisan way, one of the key elements of school performance and that is absenteeism. You've introduced House Bill 348 in the Ohio legislature. We're going to go through that. But, if you don't mind, the audience of the Common Bridge, our readers, our listeners, our viewers, like to know a little bit about our guests. So, gentlemen, if you don't mind, a quick thumbnail. Representative Isaacson, if you don't mind, tell us a little bit about yourself.
Speaker 4:Sure Well, rich. Thank you again for inviting us and for covering this issue. I grew up in Cincinnati. By background I am a lawyer, as is representative sites, so we bring sort of that Makes it easier to have conversations between the two of us. Let's put it that way To the point my background is in community organizing, political campaigns and grassroots work. I started and ran a small business that does grassroots community engagement work on public policy issues for the seven years leading up to when I decided to run for the state house, and I represent a district that is just in the city of Cincinnati, so represent sort of the urban core of the city.
Speaker 2:Great and representative Sides. Tell us about yourself.
Speaker 3:Well sure, bill Sides and I've been a lifelong resident of the Cincinnati area. I represent a suburban area outside the city of Cincinnati. The first elected position that I ever had, some 34 years ago, was as a member of the Cincinnati Public School Board of Education. That was a four year stint on that before I became a township trustee, and for the last almost 24 years I've been a member of the Ohio House of Representatives or the Ohio Senate. So I have a passion for education and that's why I agreed to provide bipartisan support to Donnie on this pilot project. And I want to emphasize that, because our critics of which there are many are saying well, why in the world would you ever pay somebody to do what they're legally required to do anyway? And how much is this going to cost? And this is a giant waste of money. We say, well, why don't you hear us out? And it's only a pilot project. We're trying to see if this program could work to improve our shockingly bad, chronic truancy problem here in Ohio.
Speaker 2:Tell us about HB 348. What is it, why is it and what are the objectives? What would a great outcome look like?
Speaker 3:Fire away, Donnie.
Speaker 4:So, as Rob Scythe mentioned, this is a very modest pilot program to test whether something that has worked elsewhere and has a robust amount of evidence behind it to increase attendance and graduation can work here in Ohio.
Speaker 4:So the way it will work is the pilot is divided into two approaches. The first approach is attempting to tackle chronic absenteeism in the highest need population, so primarily in lower income urban and rural school districts that fall in the sort of bottom quintile of attendance rates, and we're specifically focused on whether cash incentives can boost attendance among kindergartners by giving the cash incentives to their parents, or among ninth graders as they start high school by giving the cash incentives sort of jointly to the student and their guardian. So that's half the pilot program. Then the other half is to test whether cash incentives can boost graduation rates in the lowest performing high schools across the state, where they have some of the worst graduation rates, and seeing if not only can it boost graduation but can it actually boost educational achievement and grades by giving additional bonuses for higher achievements within GPAs. But again, this is a one and a half million dollar pilot over two years in a state with a $10 billion education budget. So we just want to see if what has worked elsewhere will work here in Ohio.
Speaker 2:Well, I've got some experience with a high school in the city of Wayne, michigan, where we've had a mentoring and incentive program, and perhaps we've got a chance to talk about that a little bit. How would you go about selecting the school districts and how would you go about selecting the students that would be eligible in terms of this legislation?
Speaker 3:Well, this will involve the grand total of eight school buildings in Ohio, four on the attendance side and four on the graduation incentive side.
Speaker 3:Districts that meet the qualifications of bad attendance rates or poor graduation rates would apply to our State Department of Education to participate in the pilot. We're requiring an even division of rural districts and urban districts that meet those qualifications. And then the Ohio Department of Education would devise a proper way of having a control group and an incentivized group so that we would be able to see if performance actually improved among the incentivized group compared to their peers in the control group. And that's probably why we tentatively said two school buildings for each of the districts that can get in on the incentive program for attendance and graduation. One of those buildings might be the control group, the other might be the incentivized group, or you could split it with equal numbers between the incentivized group and the control group in each building. We're leaving that up to the Ohio Department of Education. Is that pretty well how we're doing it, dunning. I think that is about right right, yep, that's.
Speaker 3:So we are looking for evidence that this has worked elsewhere, and Representative Isakson has done a lot of good research suggesting that in Brazil and in Mexico this has been successful. But then, thanks to Brian, we found out about your program, rich, which apparently has been up and running in our neighborhood to the north for apparently 13 years, and you personally have shelled out many millions of dollars, and I imagine you wouldn't do it unless you thought it was paying dividends. So I think we're both interested in getting a little bit more knowledge about your experience up there in Michigan.
Speaker 2:Champions of Wayne. Over the 13 years I've contributed about I don't know just $2 million plus or minus, and we've been able to obtain great community support. And Champions of Wayne is a little different design. It is a mentoring and incentive program and, a nutshell, the way it works is that each of these students in the program get an individual goal. Oftentimes that's an improvement of grade point average, sometimes it is things like attendance or disciplinary, like don't get suspended this semester. They get a mentor and then, if they are successful at their goal, we have a banquet for them. They get their picture next to a group trophy, kind of like a Stanley Cup type thing, and we give them a check. We just raised it to $250.
Speaker 2:And the really interesting thing is the less about the money than more about the connection. And oftentimes you'll hear the students talking saying I got into this because of the money, but then I realized Mr Smith really cared about me and then I realized I could achieve, and so it has turned around the culture from an environment of academic apathy or antagonism to one of academic enthusiasm. It has really proven beneficial. So, as I read your bill HB 348, and thankfully you guys were concise on the language. One of the questions I have is if you'll say it works and someone says you know, I wasn't going to go to school or I wasn't going to get my kid ready for school and I have this cash incentive the students in school. Now what happens?
Speaker 3:Well, on the attendance side, we are giving the participating schools three different options for how the cash incentive gets paid out. The first one is a $25 stipend that would be paid on a biweekly basis. The next one is $150 that would be paid on a quarterly basis. And then the third one is, I believe, $500, payable on an annual basis, and we gave that flexibility to test different kinds of incentives.
Speaker 3:Does it make a difference whether they're getting the money more or less as immediate gratification, versus some delayed payment that would be a bigger amount? It'd be interesting to know those things. That may have a difference in the success rate or it may not. We just don't know. So that's how it's going to work on the attendance side. On the graduation side, the stipend it starts at $250 if they just graduate, but it can go up as high as $750 if they graduate with a GPA over 3.5. And then I think we have an interim of $500 for grade points over 3.0. So that's how it's set up and again, if there are details that need to be worked out, we're leaving that up to our state, the Department of Education and Workforce.
Speaker 4:And Rich, I'm glad you brought up that in your program, which is fascinating, and I'm excited to learn more that it led to the hook was the money, but it led to a culture change once they were participating more, and a lot of the constructive criticism that Representative Sykes and I have received is, you know, this is not going to solve the problem in the long term. In the long term, we need students to actually, and their families to understand the value of public education and getting their kids to school, to which our answer is, of course, that's the case. This is not the long term solve to our public education issues. We had a cultural moment because of the pandemic where the cultural around school attendance has shifted all over the world. England is struggling with this. Every state in the US is struggling with this. We had a chronic absenteeism problem before. Now we have a crisis 11% for kindergartners in Ohio pre-pandemic, 29% now 15% for ninth graders, 32% now. In our urban and rural districts that we're focused on, it's closer to 40% or 50% chronic absenteeism.
Speaker 4:This policy, if it works, will be a jolt to get kids back in the door, but the solution long term has to be that they want to be there, that they're excited about school, that the teachers have the time and attention to give them, that the teachers are qualified enough to do it, that we have a curriculum that's engaging enough that parents and guardians understand the value of why they're sending their kids to school. This will not address any of that, but, similar to what you're talking about with your program, it's to get them in the door because you can't teach them to read if they're not there. And so, yes, we need to invest in the long term things, but first we need to jolt the culture back to a culture of attending and graduating from school.
Speaker 2:Well, you're on the right track in that the school district that I'm most familiar with, the Wayne Westland, wayne Moray High School, wayne, michigan they suffered greatly during COVID because the resources weren't there, like some of the more affluent districts. It's oh, you're going to go online, you go to your room, you take your computer, you hook up to your Wi-Fi and you attend class and your parents ask you how you did. Many of our students had no space at home, they didn't have a computer, they didn't have Wi-Fi. The district deployed school buses with hotspots to provide some connection, but their parents were often at work or they were smaller children that they were responsible for, and so I will tell you that the focus across that district now and at the high school is about attendance and they basically have an all hands on deck with every adult being responsible.
Speaker 2:The data is showing that the chronic absenteeism begins in about the sixth grade and it's manifest greatly by the ninth grade and if you go back over the course of that, missing two days a month, that's 30 hours of math missed a year, 60 hours of reading and writing, and by the time you get to graduation you've missed a year of school. And that's just two misses in a month. Now I noticed that one of the standards that you've talked about and I'm not sure that the television station got it right. But they said, well, we wanna get 90% attendance and I said, okay, that means you can miss one day every two weeks. And then it said chronic absenteeism was 10%. And I'm like, well, wait a minute, 90 and 10 is our math that far off? What's the target attendance and where does the incentive kick in for the attendance?
Speaker 3:It's a definitional issue. Really, I don't think the TV station did get it right. Currently, in Ohio, we define chronic absenteeism as missing 10% or more of the instructional hours. Okay, okay.
Speaker 3:So, we were just going with the accepted definition. Obviously, we would like to focus more on the folks that are missing 20%, 30%, 40%, and that's why we picked what we picked by way of qualifications. As Donnie said, most of these districts that we're talking about, be they poor rural areas or poor urban areas, are currently experiencing absenteeism rates on the order of 40% or 50%. So we chose the definition that's the common definition because nobody would have believed the sites Isaacs in definition, because it would have been made out of whole cloth. But by focusing on the districts that are the worst of the worst, if you will, on this metric, we think we will be targeting the cash incentives towards the people that are most need of getting that learning loss improved. That's kind of the way we approached it.
Speaker 2:The reason I asked the question about what happens once the students in school is that our experience was when this program began is that attendance was one element. But we had one young man but a perfect attendance record and a 0.2 GPA Because he had passed two electives nice young man. And through the champions program he graduated with his class and that I'm going to penn state. And I asked every bank would I say I can't wait to see which of you is going to be the Benefactor this program, because none of my peers would have picked me a long time ago. And he said, mr help, I'm going to be that guy.
Speaker 2:So what we discovered along the way is that they want to attend and they want to learn, but they don't know how, because they maybe have never dealt with an educationally successful adult and the money and sent of gave them the ability and the reason to interact with the adult. By the way, it's mostly faculty but precovid it was every adult in the building, the custodial staff, the kitchen staff. We recently had the awards banquet for champions and one of the kitchen workers had mentored two of the people, the young students that made their goal. And we've had mentors that Call the student every morning and said are you out of bed? Are your feet on the floor? You need to be moving now to get to school on time. So a lot of it is. Nobody showed them how to study, no one showed them how to attend, and that's really where the value came in. So I applaud you for putting that incentive out there. Have you thought about that bridge to teaching those life skills that you I'm gonna guess you both probably benefited from in your youth?
Speaker 3:Well, I'll just. I'll just point out that going way back to the period of nineteen ninety to nineteen ninety three, when I was on a society public school board, we had a major campaign through something called the Cincinnati youth collaborative To enlist mentors for the kids that most needed them. That program, I believe, still continues today. Mentorship is critically important for all the reasons that you give. It's difficult To sustain these programs because somebody will agree to be a mentor and they'll do it for a few years and then other other things happen and they Don't. You want to do it anymore, they cannot do it anymore. But yes, mentorship is critically important. Good parenting skills are critically important.
Speaker 3:Here in Cincinnati we're blessed to have a charity called the jakers which is one hundred percent devoted. It's called the be jakers parenting center, one hundred percent devoted to Teaching parenting skills. So it really takes a whole family of approaches and we didn't ever say that this little pilot program was going to be the panacea. We were simply saying it was one approach that had not yet been tried in Ohio where, as we have been trying mentorship programs and parenting skill programs and we tried the old fashioned way with truancy officers, for example. So maybe this one more arrow in the quiver, so to speak, might move the needle, or it might not. We just do not know.
Speaker 4:In the absence of trying, and we we tried to be really data driven in that, which is that the data Is pretty compelling. It's extremely compelling that cash incentives can boost attendance and graduation rates. It's very clear across dozens of countries, cities all over the US, multiple studies. It is less clear, it's a little gray or when it gets into trying to improve specific academic outcomes, right test scores, achievement, and so for the first introduction of this type of conditional cash transfer policy, we wanted to keep it simple, straightforward, easy to understand and really Hue closely to what the data tells us is likely to work. But there's no doubt that to get a student, especially in these Really tough environments and a lot of the schools we're talking about, to succeed, it takes way more than getting them in the door there. I you know. I'll tell you something. You know representative sites. I don't know if you know this. I didn't know that you started the CYC mentorship program.
Speaker 4:I am a CYC mentor of the lot for the last five years and, as a result, for different factors, I've spent a number, a lot of time in our juvenile justice center, juvenile detention center, and a Lot of principles have told me, as is a heartbreaking sort of anecdote, that there's students, the students who end up in the juvenile detention center actually see larger reading gains From their time there than from their time in school. Right, so I am not. We do not think that this is the answer to our educational challenges. This is the answer to an acute problem that has arisen in our culture as a result of the remote learning during the pandemic, but beyond that, we have a lot more work to do to address all the educational issues that existed pre-pandemic, and so this is not the answer to all of those. This is our attempt to use some a data-driven approach to address this acute new problem, which is the level of chronic absenteeism that we're seeing post pandemic representative Isaacson, when you were doing your research, what programs stood out to you?
Speaker 2:Is there a specific one? You said if we could mirror this one.
Speaker 4:This is what we want to do so there is a lot in the sort of Academy and in the research in what is known as conditional cash transfers, specifically around Schools. The two longest running programs are Bolsa Familia in Brazil and Progresa in Mexico. Those are have decades of data. Northern Europe has a lot of data, particularly on giving families upfront payments for for younger students. And then there are studies out of the University of Chicago and out of Harvard Harvard's in particular from an economist, professor Frye, who looked at 250 different urban districts across the US attempting versions of this. So those were the main sort of studies that we looked at to see what was Likely to be effective and maybe we can get some links that we can put as when we go to publish on this.
Speaker 2:One of the things that we've had success with that, the champions of Wayne, is that Every goal is individualized, because if you take a young person who has problems just getting to school or is that a 1.0 grade point average after it's been explained them what a great point is why it's important and so forth, and then saying, look, you get extra at 3.5. They can't even see 3.5. It'd be like you know, giving me an incentive to run a nine second hundred yard dash, okay, you can give me all the incentive you want, it's not gonna happen. But it's that giving that an achievable goal but a stretch with the mentorship, with the incentive to get them in, has been the formula that we found. I Applaud you both for reaching across the aisle and trying to do something for kids in need. God bless you both for doing that. As we kind of come to the end of our time today, what message would you like the readers, the listeners and the viewers of the common bridge to hear? Where can people lean in and be supportive?
Speaker 3:Well, but I'll let me. Let me take a crack at that, because most of the critics of this very recently introduced bill tend to be Conservatives and Republicans. And it's like why in the world would we pay people to do what they're legally required to do? We should. We should get the courts involved and make the parents send their kid to school, because that's the law. We've heard that a lot, but what we are fighting back with is what Donny said.
Speaker 3:The data suggests that this can work, and just last week we picked up an important ally. One of the biggest, most conservative education think tanks in the country is called the Fordham Institute, and Many people around in education know all about Fordham. They're big in the school choice movement, for example. They've been around for some time and they actually issued a report by Aaron Churchill, one of their premier Executives, saying that this program might work, and so we actually got an endorsement from a Well-respected conservative think tank saying that you know, this has possibilities and and so that's going to be part of what we would like people to know and we'd like people to give us a chance.
Speaker 3:Let's bring the supporters before the committee and and let them hear with their own ears Examples such as yours, rich, where these kinds of programs have worked in the United States. It's not just Brazil and Mexico and Guatemala, et cetera. It's right here in the good old USA. They need to know that, and it's easy to dismiss it by saying we never did this when I was a little boy. Yeah, okay, but it was a different world then too.
Speaker 2:Some people are gonna get their kids ready for school because they know it's the right thing to do or someone showed them how to do that, or they were inspired by the law and sometimes, if if they have to have the carrot, like I don't really care that much, as long as we get the student into school and in a place where they can interact with the faculty, because nobody's going into education to make a big fortune, it's a calling with good teachers and they want those students to learn and Any tools or programs that can bring them a willing student is all the better. And I've seen it over and over again. I've got hundreds of examples. I just give you one.
Speaker 2:Imagine an English teacher, small-framed woman. Imagine the largest person in the high school, big kid, funny, big following, and Literally every day is flipping her off and walking out of class. She goes to him and says I'm going to be your champion, we're gonna work together, almost like throwing a switch. Now it's hey, she's talking, he's telling the other kids sit down, shut up, and it's changed the education experience for everyone with that simple tool of the incentives and those individual goals. If you guys can get someplace with those incentives, if that child if someone's asking them why are you showing up for school? And they say, well, I'm getting $50. It's a good reason. Now you got your reason. Go, representative Isaacson. Any wrap up comments for the listeners, readers, viewers of the Common Bridge Police.
Speaker 4:Well, first of all, thank you again for having us. I just I want to say that it has meant a lot to me. I'm very grateful that Representative Sites not only has been the joint sponsor on this bill, because he is not only a long-serving Republican but a leader among conservatives in Ohio for a long time. But this is not a partisan issue. Getting kids in school is not a partisan issue, and I I'm in my first term, but it's already clear to me that there are so many things on the major issues we face access to healthcare, improving our education system, doing something about transportation, criminal justice that the creative data-driven approaches do not fit within a partisan lane, and so we just need elected officials who are willing to look at a problem, look at the data, take some risks, be open-minded and an attempt to do things a little differently. Because actually and this is a fiscally conservative approach and this is something I want I hope that there's a shift in policy thinking in general.
Speaker 4:If we move towards prevention right and upfront investments in training, in safety, but especially in health right and nutrition and exercise and diet, and in schools, in actually making sure that we're getting kids in the classroom and educating them well, we will save money down the road right. Every business knows that. The military knows that right. You invest in training people so that you don't have to deal with their mistakes 10 years later, and so we should have that culture and policymaking. And you can love or hate this bill, because you did it differently, or your kids didn't get it, or you don't see that issue in your school. Whatever, this is the issue we should be debating, and too often in legislatures not just in Ohio, everywhere we're debating these fringe sort of cultural issues when we should be talking about the core problems that our education system faces, and so I'm actually really grateful that this is not only a bar partisan bill but has a new approach to policymaking that is not obviously partisan and directs attention on the issue that it should be directed on.
Speaker 2:It seemed to me the logical argument to somebody saying, well, we never had to get paid to do this back in the day. It's like, yeah, back in the day education wasn't partisan. We all agreed we're supposed to be trying to educate children in a good way. So, look, you get one more kid in a classroom. You got one more chance for success. To your point, representative Isaacson, about they'll hear about health and they'll hear about opportunities that might be available to them.
Speaker 2:Look, I will confess that I was not a diligent student, often had better things to do, but by getting there enough, some adults taught me how to program computers 50 years ago and guess what? It turned out to be a really good thing for me. And the students that are in school today are going to be working in industries that haven't even been invented yet, much less the jobs. They need to be in school to get that foundation. They need to understand science and mathematics. They need exposure to literature and the arts and health and fundamental economics. And they're not going to get it if we can't get them into school. And hey, if it costs a few hundred bucks to get them seems to me like the point you're both making. It's worth a shot. So Godspeed, gentlemen. I hope that you're successful, and if anyone would like to talk to me about our experience of Champions Wayne, love to do that. If you'd like to come up and see for yourself, we'd love to have you in the great city of Wayne, michigan.
Speaker 4:Thank you so much, rich, great words of wisdom.
Speaker 2:We've been talking today with Representative Bill Sight, a Republican, and Representative Donnie Isakson, a Democrat from the Ohio Legislature, with their somewhat controversial House Bill 348 to provide some incentives for parents and for students to attend school. We'll be checking back to see how they're doing and in the meantime, this is your host, rich. Helpe signing off on the Common Bridge.
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