In his latest book, The Great School Rethink, American Enterprise Institute scholar Frederick Hess argues that “schools are organized today in ways that waste time, overburden educators, misuse technology, and alienate parents.” Rick joins the Students Over Systems podcast to provide a short education history lesson and explain why it is time to rethink, rather than innovatively transform, education. Rick maps out the questions “rethinkers” should ask about instructional time, technology, teacher recruitment, and educational choice.
TRANSCRIPT
Ginny Gentles:
Today on Students Over Systems, we’re celebrating the opportunity for a Great School Rethink. American Enterprise Institute Education Scholar, Rick Hess, joins us to discuss his latest book.
Welcome to Students Over Systems, a podcast that celebrates education freedom. I’m your host, Ginny Gentles. At Students Over Systems, we talk with the creators, advocates, and beneficiaries of education freedom. And on today’s episode, we’re joined by Frederick Hess. Rick is the senior fellow and director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. He’s the founder of the Conservative Education Reform Network, and the Grumpy Uncle of School Reform. He’s the author of many books and Education Week’s popular blog “Rick Hess Straight Up”. He’s also the Executive editor of Education Next, a Forbes senior contributor, and a great guy. Rick, thank you so much for joining us.
Frederick Hess:
Hey, Ginny, thanks for having me. Great to be with you.
Ginny Gentles:
So Rick, you’ve written so many books, why was it time for another one? This book is called “Great School Rethink,” and it’s coming out this spring. And what was the need for another book on education?
Frederick Hess:
Absolutely. Yeah, for folks who are interested afterwards, it’s available everywhere, at least on Amazon and barnesandnoble.com and such, starting in early June. Look, two simple things. One, a lot of the ideas that we all talk about in the community of folks who want to reform schooling, who want to expand school choice, a lot of these ideas have been in circulation for 20 plus years, and part of the frustration is trying to get them into the system. And what made this moment particularly special, I think, or not special but significant, was the pandemic, just shook up American education like a giant Etch-a-sketch. It fractured the trust between parents and schools. It rewired community routines. It caused educators to take a hard look at what they were doing and how their school systems were operating. And I think the result is that it created a real opportunity for us to think differently about how schooling works and what schools are doing with our kids.
Ginny Gentles:
One point that you made that was, I found really important was, that schools are such habitual parts of our lives that we forget to ask why they’re organized the way they are. And something that I particularly enjoyed about the book was the history lessons that you sprinkled throughout about why we have this education system structured the way that it is. So, could you talk a little bit about Horace Mann and common schools, and why we have the school calendar and district structures that are in place now?
Frederick Hess:
Sure. One thing that we often lose in our fights over schooling today is schools look the way they do because it served a purpose at some point. It just might not be the purpose that we need for kids and families and communities today. So, back in the 1830s-1840s, folks who’ve ever studied any education history, or remember there was this famous guy named Horace Mann, who was executive secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, came to that position in 1837. And they had a big problem. Their big problem 200 years ago was that lots of folks were immigrating to the US from Ireland, Southern Europe, Eastern Europe, and these folks were Catholic.
And for the young Republic, there was a lot of concern that these Catholic parents were not going to value the republic that their first fealty was to Rome. So, they started launching a Common School Movement. And the point of the Common School Movement was to build lots of schools so Catholic kids would come in and become literate so that they would read in school the King James Bible, so they would be less Catholic than their parents so that they would be good American citizens.
That explains a whole bunch of things about why schools look like they do today. This was the emphasis on getting schooling to be universal everywhere. It took another century to make it happen. They had to rework the teacher labor force because at that point, most teachers were men, but there weren’t enough men and they were too expensive to actually staff these common schools. So, they had to feminize the teaching profession, which led to the creation of teacher colleges so that men could teach women how to interact around kids in schools. And the result of this was a real emphasis on schools as a tool of social homogenization. Fast forward a century later, you have this heavily female teaching force under the dictates of male superintendents, male principals. And there was a sense that teachers were poorly paid, weren’t being paid fairly, so you had to push for things like teacher tenure and teacher pay scales, which were a reasonable response to the way schools were staffed in 1905 or 1915.
Ginny Gentles:
Well, particularly when women could be fired for getting married or getting pregnant or not meeting height and weight requirements, you mentioned.
Frederick Hess:
And when women were paid one half for one third what their male counterparts were paid, just cut. So, it’s funny, a lot of times when you’re talking to somebody who’s a teacher and they know a little bit of this history, and you start talking about the problems with tenure or pay scales, their minds go back to this. Those of us who were thinking about how these things work today are having a very different conversation. And one of the advantages of knowing the history is understanding why it looks like it does and how we got here. And sometimes, it creates an opportunity to say, All right. We get why we did this a century ago, but it’s actually no longer serving the purpose that it was designed to serve.
Ginny Gentles:
All right. Well, let’s talk about what education was like maybe 50-60 years ago, when women had few options in the workforce. You mentioned that women were graduating… 50% of the college graduates were going on to be teachers or work in education.
Frederick Hess:
Yeah. From that time that Horace Mann and his compadres turned teaching from male work to female work, to well after World War II, 1950s-1960s, most college educated women became teachers. Other doors were closed to them. You could be a teacher or a nurse. And so, teaching was staffed. Folks who were old enough might remember that generation of teachers who were retiring in the 1980s-1990s. Incredibly talented women who today would be in all kinds of highly educated, sophisticated professions, and they became teachers. And in that world, you could count on teachers teaching for 30 years, and you could count on them not leaving you to go do anything else. And so, we built hiring systems and pay systems on the notion that 22 year old college educated women were going to become teachers, and they were going to do it for the next 30 years.
If you’re in any organization today and you’re trying to recruit talented 22 year olds who are finishing college this spring, and you say to them, Hey, I got a deal for you. You can do the same job into the 2050s, and you’ll be able to get incremental 4-5% pay, whether you’re terrible at your job or you’re good at your job. It is a really lousy way to try to recruit talented, dynamic young people today. It’s not that it’s a bad model, it’s just not how America works anymore. And what’s happened is we are still wedded to a way of staffing schools that made a lot of sense for a very long time, but just has nothing to do with how you hire and train and keep dynamic professionals in 21st century America.
Ginny Gentles:
Okay. So, we talked about the impetus behind the creation of the schools, and then the workforce, and the shift to the female workforce. Let’s talk about the changes in the students. A statistic that I found rather shocking was the percentage of students that were graduating from high school in the early 1900s. Could you talk about how that’s changed over time?
Frederick Hess:
Yeah, yeah. And it makes a lot of sense. If you think back a century, say to 1900, four out of five Americans worked on farms or in factories. In that world, education was more of a luxury than anything else. So in 1900, about 6% of Americans graduated high school, about one out of 16. Today, only about one out of five jobs is on a farmer in a factory. Most Americans need at least a college diploma if they’re going to have a job that’ll let them support a family, that’ll give them some degree of independence and autonomy. And it’s no surprise that today we expect everyone should be finishing high school, and then going on to whatever makes sense for them.
Ginny Gentles:
All right. So, you caution that we shouldn’t change things until we understand why they look the way they do. So, I recommend that everybody brush up on their education history, and we understand what things looked like when we first created these common schools and how little they differ now. But you do say that innovation, to you, is a dirty word. So, we obviously shouldn’t be doing schools the same way that we did when Horace Mann created this common school process. Why shouldn’t we be innovating?
Frederick Hess:
And you know what? I think a lot of things that we’ve been doing for a long time, we’ve done for a long time, because they make sense. The idea that kids should actually know the content of American history, not very innovative, but it makes a lot of sense. The idea that we ought to make sure kids can read and do math before we promote them to grade four or to middle school may not be a new idea, but it makes a lot of sense. So, part of the problem with innovation is it almost teaches us that we’re supposed to focus on what’s shiny and new rather than focus on the things that are good for kids and good for families.
Ginny Gentles:
All right. So, we do have some problems to be solved. And we do want to solve some practical problems. Can you lay out some of the problems that you address in the book? An example would be too much school time wasted. What are some other examples of some of the problems you tackle?
Frederick Hess:
Yeah. And that’s what we started with. What’s different about now, in some sense, not a lot. Ginny, you and I have talked about the frustration of parents who can’t find the right program or school for their kid. Kids have been bored in school since time in Memorial. We see today that so many kids seem socially disconnected or fragile, partly because they spend so much time online and have so many fewer relationships in the real world. What should we be doing? We should be trying to make sure that schools give kids the education they need. That means they need to know content. It means they need to develop their skills. It means they need mentors and healthy relationships. How do we do this? Well, a couple of the places where we’re blowing the opportunity is one, we waste a lot of time. People don’t realize this.
You’ll often hear that we need to spend more time in school, but American kids spend more time in school than their international peers around the world, about a 100 hours more per year from K to nine. Now, there’s also a lot of evidence that lots of this time, 100s of hours every year are wasted in ridiculous ways.
Second thing we need to do is make sure that good and effective teachers are spending their time teaching, and not spending their time doing ridiculous things. The third is we got to make it easier for parents to customize. School choice is part of that. But one of the challenges when we talk about school choice is a lot of parents may like their school, but that doesn’t mean they like what’s happening in their school. They might not like the math program. They might not like the fact that foreign language is taught by a long-term sub. They might not like the values that are being imparted in American history or civics. Many of us have pointed out repeatedly that school choice really, as your slogan, “Students Over Systems”, really needs to be more about educational choice. Really needs to be more about equipping families to make sure they’re getting their kids what they need, whether that’s moving the kid to a new building or whether that’s making sure the education is serving the kid in other ways.
Ginny Gentles:
Well, you know that I’m going to want to delve into more of your ideas on school choice or education freedom. But before we do that, I just want to talk a little bit more about the time in school and the school calendar. There’s a myth out there that the school calendar was set to accommodate an agrarian schedule. That myth doesn’t actually make any sense and you address that in the book. Can you speak to that?
Frederick Hess:
Yeah. And now look, this is stuff other people have taught me. I’m a suburban guy, so I didn’t grow up in farm country. But anybody who’s in farm country will tell you, they say, Look, the idea that a school calendar which goes off for the summer and starts in the fall and runs through the spring, that this is agrarian is about the dumbest thing you ever heard of. They say, you know what? We have planting season, and we have sowing season. And planting season tends to be in the spring, and sowing season in the fall. So, the idea that farmers are worried about getting kids out for the summer just doesn’t make a lick of sense. What really happened back in the middle-late 1800s was, folks got to remember that we haven’t always had air conditioning, we haven’t always had modern plumbing, so in cities like Boston and New York and Baltimore, summer was a nightmare.
Temperatures were getting into the 80s and 90s. There was no AC. You had open human waste running in the gutters. There were lots of diseases. So, the idea behind summer vacation was that in order to keep kids and communities safe, it made a lot of sense to try to make sure, A: kids weren’t together in closed rooms that were a million degrees, and B: that whenever possible, you got folks out of the city into the countryside.
Well, in our world today, things actually look a little different. We now have AC. A lot of single parents in particular are scrambling to find how to take care of their kids during the summer. It’s not easy to get your kid out of Baltimore or Boston into some leafy kind of country community, even if you want to. So look, summer vacation works fabulous for some families. I wouldn’t want any change because I love the time we get with our kids and the opportunities they get. For lots of families though, summer vacation as it was constructed 150 years ago, doesn’t make a lick of sense. They’re worried about how do you keep your kids off devices, they’re worried about what their kids are doing all day. And they actually want schools to offer those kinds of structured, engaging, humanized activities. The problem is we tend to talk about a longer school year. Or as one size fits all, and what we ought to really be talking about, is how do we figure out the school programming that gives different families what they need for their kid?
Ginny Gentles:
All right. So, let’s talk about technology. Let’s change the subject a little bit. You say, “We ping from techmania to frustrated disappointment, and back again.” And those of us who had kids in public school prior to the pandemic, during the pandemic, and then even after the pandemic, have seen there’s an obsession with the device. Everybody has an iPad. Well, great. What are they doing with that iPad? And there’s an obsession with the apps. Your kid is on, I’m not even… A DreamBox. Make sure they’re doing DreamBox. Well, what are they learning? And are they mastering basic skills on DreamBox? Let’s talk about… Why is there obsession with technology? And what kind of problems is it causing for teachers and students?
Frederick Hess:
Yeah, yeah. If you ever want to laugh, go back and read sometime about the stuff that got written over time about the introduction of the pencil, or the radio. There were books written about radio as being the schoolhouse of the air. And the US Office of Education, a century ago, created the Office of Radio. And teachers no longer had to teach because kids would just listen to the radio. And then they realized there are all kinds of problems with this. The radio wasn’t necessarily teaching the lessons the schools were supposed to be. So look, the idea that technology doesn’t deliver is not a new insight. This is something that we learned over and over, over the last 150 years or more. The real question is if you think about the run up to the pandemic and all of the excitement for the flipped classroom and the idea that, wow, this is going to be awesome.
And then we got the pandemic and kids were online and learning online and we were like, Wow, this is terrible. What’s going on? I think the simplest way to think about it is that technology is good when it lets schools do more of the human stuff. Now, that’s a little counterintuitive. So, we say it again. Technology is good when it lets schools do more of the human stuff. The idea of the flipped classroom done right is really best understood by terms of this really powerful, awesome technology that we’ve learned about over time, was introduced about five centuries ago, called the book. What the book did was instead of having a teacher have to stand in front of a bunch of students and tell them everything, you could give students the book and they could read it and go home. And then they could come in and ask questions.
What the book allowed teachers to do was spend more time mentoring kids, explaining ideas, answering questions, and less time just telling them stuff. So, when we talk about all of these new Chromebook, and iPhone based apps that kids are spending time on. If kids are spending a lot of time staring at screens, whether it’s AI assisted or not, if they’re not interacting with real human beings, if they are jumping through a bunch of hoops in order to show process mastery, that’s a problem. If on the other hand, we’re using these things so the kids are getting introduced to cool multimedia demonstrations of how the solar system works, and are then coming back to a classroom where the teacher’s having them do hands-on projects where they’re building planets, where they’re actually asking questions, where they’re getting orally quizzed on what they’ve mastered and not mastered, then that technology can be a supercharged kind of opportunity for them to master the content, and then digest it with the teacher and their classmates.
So, what parents just always need to remember is it’s not, Is your school district buying a lot of tech? It’s, what are the teachers in those classrooms doing with kids? And is the tech making that more dynamic and engaging and rigorous, or not?
Ginny Gentles:
Right. And have the teachers been trained to use the tech, right? It can’t just be that the district has this huge contract with a technology company. And maybe the tech support will help with the glitches, which are, you mentioned, quite disruptive to teachers and to student learning time. They also need to make sure that teachers know how to effectively use tech to improve learning, which, you mentioned, the studies are showing that that’s not really happening. All right. So, some parents think, I don’t want a public school that’s all about the tech, that’s all about the apps, that is not engaged in making sure that my child learns. I actually want pencils and textbooks and old-fashioned learning. And that’s where a parent like me is very happy in a little private school that has a more traditional approach. So, let’s talk about school choice, which empowers parents to make those choices and find a school that’s meeting their needs.
You have a couple interesting quotes when you start talking about school choice, both of which involve the word “weird”. And one point in the book, you said that it’s like a weird morality play. The notion that one is either for empowering parents or for supporting public education is a misleading one, and that real parents don’t think this way. And then your other “weird” quote was, “It’s downright weird that educational choice has focused so narrowly on students changing schools.” All right. So Rick, what is choice to you and how do we get out of this weird morality play?
Frederick Hess:
Sure. The simplest thing to keep in mind is even after the pandemic, even after four out of five parents say, “American education on a whole is on the wrong path,” even after our parents will give you a litany of horror stories about watching their kids at the kitchen table in these little muted Zoom boxes for three hours during the pandemic, even after all that, 75% of parents give their kids pub school an A or B. And 75% of parents support school choice pretty much across the board, whether you’re talking about charters or vouchers or education savings accounts. And people who do what we do tend to be very confused by this. They say, “How can parents like their kids’ public schools and like school choice?” And I’m always like, That’s just weird. For parents, there’s no tension here. They like their kids’ school because many times they’ve moved to their community because of that.
It’s where they’ve met their neighbors. It’s where you go and see the kids in a play. It’s where you go watch football on Friday night. But especially now, especially after the disruptions and the broken trust in the last few years, they also say, “We ought to have the right to make sure we’re getting for our kid what they need.” So, for me, I think the way I think about school choice is it’s not about blowing up school districts. It’s not about abstract conversations about zip code education or failing government schools. It’s real simple. It’s, can we say that we respect and appreciate why families would like their community institutions, whether those are schools or churches or soccer leagues or anything else? But also that we believe families ought to have the ability to make the decision serve their kid. And then I think the weird thing about the narrow focus on school choice is if you think about education, education is basically nothing but a giant sticky ball of choices.
You’re making choices about at what age could your kids start kindergarten. Districts are making choices about zoning, about discipline policies. Schools and teachers are making choices about how much homework to assign, how to grade kids, what to… Schools are nothing but choices. And for some kids, the choices that are made, especially in terms of policy and pedagogy, might be a bad fit. And in some cases, that might mean that families who don’t like their school and don’t have the resources or ability to go to another school, need programs that allow them to do that. And that’s great.
But it also means that we ought to be all about giving parents more opportunities to make all kinds of choices that support their kid, giving them access to career and technical education programs, giving them access to learning pods. One of the weird things was, during the pandemic, instead of school districts saying, “Hey, we know some families are having trouble putting learning pods together, especially low-income families or families that don’t have all the resources. We are going to lean into that, and we’re going to help connect them and help them find a teacher.”
Instead, you saw folks like NPR in Washington Post railing against the millions of parents who put together learning pods as somehow bad people who were perpetuating that inequality. I’m like, look, the business of education should be about empowering families, empowering parents to make sure kids all of whom are profoundly different are getting the teaching and learning and support they need, and a choice movement, I think ought to embrace that rather than try to turn that into an abstraction.
Ginny Gentles:
All right. So, one question about something that I wonder if the choice movement is maybe not addressing enough, and maybe the parental rights movement is not addressing enough, and that is you mentioned that the job of parents and guardians is to send children to school who are responsible, respectful and ready to learn. Are we leaning too heavy on the parents are right, students should be prioritized and not leaning heavy enough on like, Hey, parents have a responsibility, and students need to shape up?
Frederick Hess:
Yeah, I think so. And it’s a weird ironic consequence of one of the great victories of modern school reform. I used to supervise student teachers in Boston in the 1990s for Harvard. And one of the strange things about back then when I taught or then when I supervised student teachers is it was not hard to find teachers who would say, I can’t teach that kid. I can’t teach those kids. It wasn’t just about race. People will sometimes suggest it’s just about race. It was about class, it was about attitude. But it was considered something that teachers would say out loud. One of the great successes of the last 25 years, No Child Left Behind and the rest, was we made it a moral premise. The job of educators is to educate all their kids. Teachers will still say stuff like this occasionally, but they’ll whisper it in the parking lot.
They won’t say it out loud because they understand it’s not okay to say, “I can’t teach that kid.” The consequence of this though is that we’ve created a culture where we’ve got way too many folks in and around education who were scared to say the other side of it. Who were scared to say, “Look, we can’t blame kids and parents, but this is a partnership.” If you take your kid to a doctor, to a pediatrician. And the pediatrician says, “Rick, Blake’s a little heavy. He’s eating too many Doritos.” And the first thing I do when I get home with Blake is I tear open a bag of Doritos and say, “Go to it, pal.” We don’t say that’s a bad pediatrician.
We say the pediatrician can only do so much… That the pediatrician can tell me what to do, can offer support. But as a parent, I got to be the one who’s saying, It’s time to do homework. We’re going to read together. It’s time to turn off the lights. It’s time to wake up and get your butt to school. And we cannot be in the business of turning a blind eye to that and somehow imagining that we can let parents who aren’t doing their part off the hook, and then just yell at schools without educators feeling scapegoated or like they’re being put in a position where they can do what they’re being asked to do.
Ginny Gentles:
Yeah, absolutely. Well, we definitely prioritize… Students Over Systems, here, we definitely want to empower parents… We want to make sure that everybody is taking full responsibility for their role. Rick, thank you so much for talking with us today. And thank you for walking us through elements of The Great School Rethink. For listeners who are interested in finding out how to free ourselves from Horace Mann’s clammy grip, can you remind us where people can find this book?
Frederick Hess:
Sure. You can find it at amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, Harvard Education Press, and hopefully, some of the local bookstores near you, but that’s always a crapshoot nowadays.
Ginny Gentles:
All right. Well, thank you, Rick. I enjoyed our conversation.
Frederick Hess:
Hey, great to be with you. Thanks.
Ginny Gentles:
We hope listeners found today’s conversation informative and encouraging. If you enjoyed this episode of Students Over Systems, please consider leaving a review on your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to share this episode with your friends. To learn more about the work of the IWF Education Freedom Center, please visit iwf.org/efc. Thank you for listening to Students Over Systems. Until next time, keep celebrating education freedom and brighter futures.
