[00:01] Announcer:
Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.
[00:13] SPEAKER_00:
I am honored to welcome to the program today Rick Hess. Frederick M. 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. The author of Education Week's popular blog, Rick Hess Straight Up, Dr. Hess is also an executive editor of Education Next, and his scholarly and popular writing has appeared in Harvard Education Review and American Politics Quarterly, Teachers College Record, The Atlantic, The New York Times, Washington Post, and many other outlets. Dr. Hess has taught at Harvard, Johns Hopkins, the University of Pennsylvania, Rice, the University of Virginia, and as a high school social studies teacher.
[00:51]
He holds a master's and a PhD in government and a master's in teaching and curriculum from Harvard University. And he's the author of more than a dozen books on teaching and education reform. And we're here today to talk about his new book, The Great School Rethink.
[01:06] Announcer:
And now, our feature presentation.
[01:09] SPEAKER_01:
Rick, welcome to Principal Center Radio. Hey, thanks for having me and for that long, generous introduction. Appreciate it.
[01:17] SPEAKER_00:
Well, thank you so much for joining me to talk about the book. And I think this is a particular time in history and in the history of education in the United States in particular, when it's worth doing some of that rethinking. Why now and why rethinking on the scale and scope that you talk about in the book, which I was surprised to find is fairly reasonable and modest. You're not saying burn everything down, start from scratch. These are fairly modest and doable rethinking. Why now and why to that extent?
[01:47] SPEAKER_01:
Yeah, I think so. I'm glad to hear that. That was certainly the intent. A couple of reasons. One reason why now is for the first time in my professional career, going back to when I taught high school last century, it feels like there's actually an appetite for rethinking. For most of the last few decades, while we've been in the throes of quote unquote school reform, most of it has felt like it's been pushed down.
[02:11]
From nations, from governors, from Washington, D.C., from places like think tanks like mine. During the pandemic, when parents and schools, when the relationship was fundamentally altered over the course of a year, a year and a half, and I think you saw parents who had long kind of taken the relationship with schools for granted. Suddenly asking new questions, seeking new opportunities. And when you saw educators and school leaders confronted by the sense that a lot of what we're doing just isn't working the way it needs to, you actually saw a demand for rethinking.
[02:46]
So I think I've written a number of books, many books over the years, most of them working for the premise of here's what we really ought to do. And I think maybe for the first time in memory, this was a time where I was writing, well, if we want to do this, here's how we can do it. Which is why this book is heavy on exercise, it's heavy on opportunities for folks to do what works in their schools and communities. And I think that's at the core of it. To the extent that there is an appetite to figure out how do we make these schools and systems work much better for kids and families and for educators, that the fact that we've been shaken out of routines creates a moment to do that. And this book is really intended to help folks seize that moment.
[03:32] SPEAKER_00:
Absolutely. And one of the big shakings that I've spent a lot of time thinking about in recent months is around staffing, that we have different people and different numbers of people coming into the profession. We have a great deal of difficulty keeping people in the profession. In the book, you go into a bit of the history of why education is staffed the way it is, that there were some particular moves made by key reformers at different points in history that got us the workforce that we had in the 20th century, the workforce we have today. Take us into just a little bit of that history and tell us a little bit about your thoughts about how we might think about the workforce differently today.
[04:09] SPEAKER_01:
You know, it's funny when you talk to school or system leaders, we're all so used to the staffing model and that's due to state regulations and collective bargaining agreements and job descriptions and everything else that it's hard to get outside it. This is where history can be useful. It's good to remember that schools weren't always schooling wasn't always a feminine profession. At the dawn of the Republic, it was a mostly male profession because it was thought to be inappropriate for women to teach outside the home. We feminized teaching in the 1830s, 1840s, when the common school movement, Horace Mann, folks might remember, bought a pool of cheap labor to staff out their new common schools. And so they paid women half what they paid the men, and they weren't going to go anywhere.
[04:52]
And so we built this labor force from... the mid-19th century, the mid-20th, which was fueled by cheap women labor because women college grads, other than teaching or nursing, really had no doors open to them. It's not that it was a perfectly functional model of schooling. Today, it's not a functional model.
[05:11]
All of those college-educated women who once became teachers are now going into all kinds of other lines of work. yet you've got district HR departments that continue to try to recruit in 2023, like it's 1923. Once upon a time, Average college grad was going to hold three, four, five jobs before they retired. Today, average college grad is going to hold five jobs by the age of 30. And yet school districts are still on campus trying to recruit somebody who's going to be a teacher for the next 20 or 30 years. It's not that that model of teaching wasn't a perfectly good one.
[05:46]
It's that it doesn't fit the reality of today's labor force. So what would it look like to do it differently? Well, what I suggest in the book is let's just think about how other knowledge professions tackle this work. Architecture, law, engineering, medicine. There you've got people who've got really hard to replace specific skills. Think of early literacy instruction.
[06:09]
Think of folks who can teach math or science at a high level. Then you've got lots of folks who do important work that complements that, but that's easier to replace and doesn't require as much expertise. So if you think, for instance, about you go in the hospital, you've got a cardiovascular surgeon, you've got RNs, you've got emergency medical techs. They're working together with different levels of training to serve a common end. So one of the things I talk about in the book is what would it look like to start thinking about What it would look like to reshape schooling, especially in short-staffed environments around some of those realities. There's a couple of models out there like Arizona State's new teacher workforce or public impacts opportunity culture.
[06:52]
And what would it allow us to do in terms of teacher pay and in terms of teacher retention?
[06:57] SPEAKER_00:
I was excited to see you mention opportunity culture. I've had them on the podcast to talk about that a little bit. They're doing a kind of rethinking that almost nobody is, where we get outside the paradigm of every teacher having exactly the same job, every teacher having exactly one teacher per classroom and a fixed number of students. And especially when we see big differences in expertise, experience. I have somebody who has 30 years of experience and two master's degrees. They technically have the exact same job as somebody who was just hired yesterday, basically off the street.
[07:29]
And once upon a time, we didn't do a lot of that kind of hiring. But today, it's extremely common for people to come into the classroom with no teacher training, maybe experience in another field, but having not gone through a teacher certification program. And the fact that those jobs are identical, the teachers next door to one another can have extremely different experience and skills, I think suggests the kind of rethinking that you're talking about. Talk to us a little bit about the use of time when it comes to teachers, because you point out that both the headcount of schools has gone way up. We have tripled the number of employees that we used to. And on paper, that should mean that our teacher to student ratios are much better than they have been in the past.
[08:09]
But in reality, class sizes haven't really changed that much. what's going on with staffing and how do we think about the use of time? We have all these extra people. What's going on there?
[08:17] SPEAKER_01:
I mean, you know, what's funny is say since 2000, since No Child Left Behind, we've added student enrollment has grown by 5%. Teacher positions have grown by 10%. District non-teaching staff are up by almost 40%. And central district staff are up by 89%. So we've added teachers twice as fast as we added kids, but we've added non-teachers much, much faster than that. And what that has done is partly because the more folks we have in these roles, the more restrictions we wind up on duties and the more we wind up multiply staffing some segments.
[08:55]
So if you look, for instance, in special needs classrooms, you will sometimes find several FTEs working, not necessarily because it's deemed effective, but because it's how you ensure compliance with IDEA and with an understanding of what federal regs require. Now, the frustrating thing is when you talk to the folks at the state education agency or in Washington, they will tell you, no, we're not requiring that. But these routines have taken hold. So what's happened is that we wound up hiring a lot of staff and teachers are saying, wait a minute, we have a national student to teacher ratio. We have about three point six million teachers and about fifty four million public school children. That means nationally we have a student teacher ratio of about 17 to one.
[09:40]
The number of public school teachers who tell you they teach in classrooms where they're assigned 17 students is that the math doesn't add up. You know, part of the problem here, you mentioned a moment ago, you've got that teacher teaching next to somebody in a classroom with no training, who's hired off the street on an emergency credential. This is partly because we've made a choice. For instance, if we, over the last 50 years, going back to say sometime in the 1970s, had instead of adding teachers as fast as we had, if we had added teachers, forget administrative staff, just added instructional staff, at the same rate we'd added students, So we had maintained a steady teacher to student ratio. Average teacher pay today across the US, average teacher pay would be $140,000 a year. So we've made a conscious choice or unconscious choice to emphasize quantity instead of quality.
[10:31]
And I'd say we actually, same challenge relates to school time, which you just mentioned. People often hear that American kids need to spend more time in school. What's often lost is that American kids from grade say K to nine, spend 100 hours more in school each year than kids and other advanced industrial economies. People say, how can that be? Well, what about Germany, Japan? It's true that, say, Germany and Japan have a longer school year.
[10:58]
They have 220 school days, but they have a much shorter school day, about five, five and a half hours. American kids spend more time in school. Yet, When you actually look at where that time goes, it turns out the huge chunks of that time actually are lost. They're lost to interruptions. Matt Craft of Brown University has calculated that Providence, Rhode Island, typical teachers interrupted 2,000 times a year, costing around 15 instructional days of time. An analysis of the PISA data by Columbia University in 2015.
[11:30]
I looked at a school district in Holyoke, Massachusetts. Typical school year had 1,080 hours marked out for instruction. Close to 500 hours of that were lost to various non-instructional obligations. So when we talk about school time and what we do with teacher time, a huge piece of this is what are we doing to ensure that students and educators are spending their time from the things that we think matter? And part of rethinking is recognizing we can probably do enormously better on that score.
[12:03] SPEAKER_00:
I wonder if we could talk a little bit about time and the school schedule and kind of where the school schedule comes from. There's this, I guess, myth that the summer vacation comes from the harvest and farming needs. And there are certainly lots of experiments underway with school schedules and breaks and things like that. Talk to us a little bit about the historical background and a little bit about what you see parents wanting. And I'm particularly interested in your thoughts on kind of getting more input on what parents want and how often we don't really pay much attention to that when we're making education policy decisions.
[12:39] SPEAKER_01:
Our calendar conversations tend to be enormously divorced from actually saying, hey, what would actually help you make sure your kids are well cared for. You know, it's funny. You're exactly right. We often say, oh, it's an agrarian calendar. If our school calendar were an agrarian calendar, it'd be the craziest thing ever because planting season is typically in the spring and harvest season is in the fall. So the idea that you would get kids summer off just wouldn't have made a lick of sense.
[13:06]
What it really is, our school calendar came from Part of American kind of school reform in the 19th century tended to be New England and New York. This was where you had a lot of immigration. This is where you had a higher premium on education and schooling. And in places like New York and Boston and New Haven, these were disgusting places in the summer. There was no air conditioning. They were hugely hot.
[13:33]
diseases and fevers would run rampant. There was no sewage. Remember, there was no plumbing back then in the 1800s. So raw sewage was running in the streets. So during the summer, when you're getting 90 degree days and you were getting pyphos, and the idea was how the heck can we get kids out of here? So there was a notion that the goal was to get kids away from the city in the summertime, which had obvious implications for schooling.
[13:58]
So think about it today. That may or may not make sense. We talk about how extended school years or year-round schooling may work well for some families, and that's absolutely right. If your kid is sitting on doorsteps all summer or on their cell phone getting exposed to crazy stuff and getting bullied or running with kids that you can't monitor because you're at work, Summer vacation is actually a scary time, not a good time. And for those families, schools that actually run year-round or have a shorter summer vacation can be hugely appealing. On the other hand, there are also other families for whom summer vacation is a wonderful time.
[14:39]
They have the resources or flexibility or what have you that they can give their kid exposure to things that they value. And when we often talk about this in a policy sense, it's we need to start school earlier, we need to add 10 days to the school year, what have you. A rethinking approach says, well, let's engage our community. Let's find out what options our parents need. Maybe it makes sense to run different schools or different learning environments with different calendars. And let's try to make sure that we're offering what works for these families and for these kids.
[15:11]
It's weird that is not the way we often approach these things. But I think as folks see emerging designs like micro schools and so much else, there's an increasing willingness to kind of reflect on the problems of one size fits all.
[15:26] SPEAKER_00:
Absolutely. And for years now, we've seen that especially rural districts are going to four-day school weeks. And many people say that works well for them. I am pretty happy personally as a parent with the traditional five-day summer vacation and all the typical kinds of schedules. But You point out that in a lot of areas, it may make more sense to have more things going on in the summer, to have just different opportunities that are a better fit for the community. Talk to us a little bit more about what parents want.
[15:58]
You have an exercise in the book and just... By the way, you know, for anybody like myself who's in the habit of kind of skipping the exercises that are often at the end of chapters in books, the exercises are really crucial in this book. Like a lot of the content of the book is in the exercises, which are fantastic. Talk to us a little bit about the exercise on what parents want and some of the research on what parents want.
[16:19] SPEAKER_01:
I know it's a great question. You know, we've talked a lot in over the last 20 some years about test scores and, you know, one of the great frustrations of reformers during the No Child Left Behind years was was that the logic was we're going to test regularly in grades three to eight in reading and math, and parents are going to see these scores, and they're going to know that their schools are troubled. And it turned out that the worse the schools did, the more the parents said, well, I'm not sure we trust those scores. Parents said, you know, what I see of that teacher, what I experienced at that school dwarfs how much weight I'm giving to the test. And You know, policymakers or advocates can think that's incorrect, but parents think it makes a lot of sense. Turns out that that's actually not surprising.
[17:06]
What we've done is when we survey parents about what are you looking for in a school, the answers tend to be what maybe not what advocates would like to see, but what normal people would expect to see. Parents care a lot about who teaches at that school. about the culture of that school, about the reception they get when they visit campus, about location. They don't want their kid to spend a lot of time, for the most part, getting transported back and forth to school. The things that we talk about a lot is education intelligentsia, test scores, diversity programs. These things matter a lot less to parents than, say, safety and school discipline and location and whether the teachers seem to care about their kids.
[17:54]
Now, part of the trick, if you're a school leader or a superintendent, is you might say, well, how the heck do I control those? I have instruments that can help raise test scores, better curricular instruction materials. I can adopt new programs. Well, that's fine. But it's worth talking to parents about the things they care about, about when they think about school safety, what do they mean? And are your policies and your reforms speaking to their concerns?
[18:25]
If they feel like they have to travel too far to get to the school you want them to go to, are there ways to address that? Can you think differently about transportation and about where you're placing your options? Again, it's kind of like with the school calendars. So much of this is that we have gotten in the habit of running public education as a big, almost corporate system. where the logic is driven by what works for us, what allows us to deliver the product we're used to delivering. And part of the opportunity for a rethinking is to think about it more as a co-created enterprise, where it's how do we do the things in partnership with parents and educators that they're looking for, rather than the things that we're used to doing.
[19:10] SPEAKER_00:
The graph you have on page 84 is really eye-opening, and this is from some research by Drew Katt, John Kristof, and Colin Ritter. And I think there are nine different components that are ranked for both private school and public schools in terms of what parents are looking for. And in both of them, test scores are at the absolute bottom, and not even by a small margin, but just substantial difference. Test scores are just dead last by a large margin. And safety and geographic location, along with academic reputation, are right at the top. And it's interesting that academic reputation and test scores are so far apart in those rankings by parents.
[19:46]
Talk to us a little bit more about academic reputation and safety. What are some ways that we can think in more perhaps parent-friendly terms, consider more what parents are looking for around academic reputation and safety?
[19:59] SPEAKER_01:
Yeah, I think one thing here is the divide between what kind of education world and parent world. In parent world, safety is pretty straightforward. If I send my kid there, will my kid not get bullied? Are there not going to be fights on campus? Do I not have to worry about this? Parents tend to like it when their kids are polite.
[20:18]
And they get good vibes from schools where politeness is a norm. For school professionals, these things tend to be much more complicated. There's a lot of energy at education conferences around restorative justice and the problems with disparate disciplinary policies and the rest. And I think while I understand and respect the concerns, and while school leaders absolutely need to make sure that school discipline is fair-minded and and implemented carefully, I think one of the things you get from parents is they are much more concerned about a reputation for things being chaotic than a lot of folks in professional education are at this moment. And I think the parents are right on that. At a minimum, it's worth talking to your parents.
[21:01]
On academic reputation, I think what we see is that parents value a lot of things, which again, don't get as much love right now in professional education world. I think parents like advanced course offerings, They like things like debate teams and fine arts, the kinds of stuff that kids get passionate about. They like the sense that teachers have high expectations and ask and expect students to do good work. Right now in education world, there's a push for grading equity, which involves laxing deadlines, which involves giving kids time. You know, no truly bad grades. There's a push, for instance, in the California math standards or the math framework to do away with advanced mathematics instruction.
[21:48]
So I think educators from the professional community are getting this notion to do less of the stuff that parents regard as excellent. Again, I think the parents are probably right on the merits, but whether or not you agree, school leaders and system leaders do well to engage their parents and see whether or not what they think of as well-meaning initiatives are being received very differently by their community.
[22:15] SPEAKER_00:
I wonder if we could close with a little bit of a discussion around how you envision central office and system leaders using your book. And as I mentioned earlier, there are terrific exercises, multiple exercises throughout every chapter that could be used among a senior leadership team, as well as in a graduate course. But thinking especially about the discrepancy between what career educators tend to focus on, we focus on test scores, we focus on often just a very different set of concerns than parents have at the forefront. Talk to us a little bit about how central office leaders could kind of reconnect with what parents care about and also with what teachers care about that may be on the back burner in some districts.
[22:53] SPEAKER_01:
Yeah, that's such a great question. Three things. One, I think with the parents piece is my friend Pedro Naguera and I did a book a couple of years ago called In Search of Common Ground. And one of the things we talked about is how we talk a lot about courageous conversations in education, but you don't see many of them. People tend to pat themselves on the back for preaching to the choir. Really engaging the community is not just engaging the people who show up, but it's seeking out and making time for folks who view differently.
[23:21]
So I would argue that means folks in Central should reach out to community leaders they might not spend enough time with, church leaders, or folks who are active in political causes, and find time to sit down and let them organize a focus group or a listening group of 15 or 25 parents and have a conversation with them, parents who might not otherwise be part of the Education Award. Doesn't mean you have to agree with them. But just giving them a hearing can be validating and make them feel included. And it can also give you a sense of where you may be maybe making assumptions that need to be challenged. Second thing is one of the things that district leaders, I think, often are surprised by is how little they know about a teacher's day-to-day. So I mentioned Matt Kraft's study in Providence a couple of moments ago.
[24:09]
He and grad students spent an extensive chunk of time in these Providence classrooms. And then they also interviewed principals. And principals wildly underestimated how much time teachers were losing to interruptions. Especially in Central, I think you're even further removed from the day-to-day. And when I've done some of these exercises with mixed groups of teacher leaders and Central staff, The central, when you ask teachers what they spend their time on and how valuable it is, they get wildly different answers than do the folks in central. So there's just this huge disconnect.
[24:39]
And I think doing some of these exercises with folks on campus or with selected teacher leaders and having those conversations can really be eye-opening. And then the third thing I'd say is I think part of the challenge for district leadership is you're supposed to have the answers. That's part of the logic of what drives reform. We're hiring you to come fix our schools or make good schools even better. So come in with a game plan and run it. And the problem is that's not actually how schools tend to get better.
[25:08]
And it can be hard to acknowledge that. But even if you need to put a public message face over it, I think these leaders do a much better job if they are asking themselves throughout, well, wait a minute, where is our time going? What are we doing with technology? Are there other ways that we might effectively partner with parents? Even if that's not part of your three-point plan, a superintendent that you were hired for by the school board, still making sure that even as you're doing that with one hand, that you're asking these critical questions and opening doors with the other. It's challenging, but I think if you're not doing it, you're setting yourselves up for so many of the same frustrations.
[25:50]
that have played themselves out time and again.
[25:53] SPEAKER_00:
One last thing I wanted to ask about, Rick, was the idea of innovation. And especially senior leaders, central office leaders are often hired to do something shiny and new. And you talk about how technology adoptions have often been disappointing and failed to live up to the hype. Help us think about what innovation is, what that really means, and whether perhaps we're overselling the potential for innovation to really bring about better results.
[26:17] SPEAKER_01:
You know, if there's one thing I hope central and school leaders who are listening might take from that, innovation is a bad word. Don't let anybody use innovation in your school or your office. We have innovation zones, innovation labs, innovation projects. They're bad. Here's what I mean. It's a little strong.
[26:33]
But look, if you or any of your people walk into an Apple store and say, hey, I want to buy your most innovative iPhone. The person who's helping you is going to roll their eyes and think you're a lunatic for good reason. Innovation is not a thing. If you walk into that store and say, hey, I want to buy the phone of the best camera that you have, they can do that. If you say, I want you to sell me the phone with the most chip capacity because I run a lot of powerful apps. Okay, they can do that.
[27:05]
And it's true that those camera advances or chip advances were a product of of a bunch of invention and designing that we can loosely label innovation. But innovation is not a thing. Innovation is a loose, lazy label that we throw about that other stuff that went on. What you're really asking for is give me a phone with a better this. If you're going to a car dealer, you're not saying sell me an innovative car. You're selling me a car that has longer battery life, that can hold a charge for 400 miles.
[27:38]
Sell me a car that's safer for my kids. That's how we should talk about school improvement. It's not whether it's new or not. It's not whether it's exciting or some funder is thrilled about it. It's given the challenges that you're looking at, is this going to help you serve your kids and your families better and if you're doing that and somebody in the back of the room is whispering innovation okay but what i worry about is that talk about innovation tends to get in the way of what's the problem and is this a better way to solve it whether it's newfangled or old-fashioned
[28:15] SPEAKER_00:
So the book is The Great School Rethink, a wonderful read from Harvard Education Press. Rick Hess, thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio. It's been a pleasure.
[28:26] SPEAKER_01:
Hey, Justin. Thanks for having me. Good to be with you.
[28:28] Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.
