Achievement Gaps, Absent Leaders, and Inadequate Policies

>> Audience 1: Hey, good morning. My name is Mahdi al Husseini. Do you mind if we return to the slide that showed the states? And I think it's on a, not a per student basis necessarily, but the percentage decrement.

>> Eric Hanuskek: Yep, takes a little bit of while to get through all this.

>> Audience 1: And no worries, and my question go back a little bit further, I think the first one. Yeah, so this is a pretty confounding graph. It's not at all what I expected. So I don't wanna use the state of nothing against the state of Alabama. I lived there for a while, but not exactly what I expected in terms of the bottom or the best side of the income loss.

So I'm just curious, in your perspective, what are some of the characteristics that you think resulted in some states suffering more than others? Cuz a very myopic look would say, hey, the value of one year of education in Alabama really makes no difference.

>> Eric Hanuskek: So the first answer is that the obvious things don't explain at least the aggregate difference.

It's not whether people wore masks or didn't. It's not whether the schools opened earlier than others on average. It appears to be much more related to what local districts did and how they performed. And in particular, what appears to have been very costly, and still is costly is starting and stopping sort of disrupting class.

So you start in person classes and then you have two weeks. You discover somebody is a carrier of COVID and you close down the school for another two weeks and then you start again. It appears that that systematically is one of the things that matters, but it depends a lot on local districts of how well they responded and so forth.

So we know, for example, that on average, charter schools managed to turn around what they were doing very quickly, and the public schools next to the charter schools didn't in most states. There's a nice study that was done here at Hoover of surveying schools in New York state, and the charter schools within a week were back into operation.

I mean, not in person class, but having a remote program. They had lunch, meals for kids and so forth. And the public schools were much slower. So it was the nimbleness in some sense of the individual schools, as best we can tell. But it's hard to systematically look at this somebody, there's a microphone.

If you're endowed with a microphone, you get to stand up and talk. You can wave at the people in the back who are helping.

>> Audience 2: Thank you so much for speaking with us today. My name is Cameron and I'm from Ohio. In regards to your stance that we must increase teacher quality, what are your thoughts about Florida's policy to allow unlicensed people with college degrees to teach K-12 even without teaching backgrounds?

 

>> Eric Hanuskek: I think it's good if they're good teachers. So what it turns out is that we know that there are really large differences in the effectiveness of teachers. You all know, and why do I say that to you guys? You obviously know that. But it turns out that when you do the research, it's not very systematic in terms of any background characteristics, and it's not systematic in terms of whether they're certified or not.

Some people are just better at it than others, and it's hard to predict, actually, before somebody's in the classroom who's gonna do well in the classroom, you have to actually observe. So there are two different ways of thinking about policies of teachers. One is increase the standards that you have to meet to be a teacher, increase the requirements for going to school and the certification requirements, and bring in a better stock of teachers.

The other way is lower the standards for who becomes a teacher and make it harder to stay in teaching. The first way is increase the standards, but make it easy then to stay in teaching, make sure that nobody leaves. The other is make it easier to get into teaching, but harder to stay, continue in teaching.

I'm obviously part of the second group, which is a minority opinion among policy makers should say.

>> Audience 3: Hi, my name is Leila. I'm from Arizona. And I was curious about your comment on the 10% of students that did better during the pandemic than after. So I guess my first question is how you measured that.

And then secondly, are there similar characteristics among that group or lessons we can glean to. I think before the pandemic, we weren't super happy with our education system either. So are there lessons we can actually improve upon from that?

>> Eric Hanuskek: Sure, I mean, the first answer is if you array just scores as we've done, the people at the top end are more advantaged than the people at the lower down, measured by income, parental education, intact families, and so forth.

And that's what you see, is that at the top end are people that are, on average, better off. But there's nothing very systematic that we know about that group because they haven't been studied in terms of did their parents provide them lots of extra support materials? Did they organize local pods to teach things and hire outside teachers.

We don't know that, we can make our guesses, and you're absolutely right. Before the pandemic we wanted to do something about our schools to improve them. And you probably realized when I gave my solution at the end, to use the more effective teachers more intensively and the less effective teachers less intensively.

That's something that maybe we could lever out of the pandemic, but it's something to improve the schools in general. That's what we wanna do before the pandemic. And in some sense, look, the pandemic is a sunk cost in some sense. That's not gonna change. The question is, can we make our schools better and make up for that which would also have the advantage of making schools better in the future?

Who's got it?

>> Audience 4: Hello, thank you for coming to speak with us today, professor. I recently read an article by your colleague here at Stanford, Professor Linda Darling Hammond. And she traced California's learning losses during the pandemic and said that they were smaller comparatively than other states, especially in reading.

And she traced that better performance comparatively to the 30% increase in funding allocated to schools under Governor Newsom. I was wondering what you thought about that.

>> Eric Hanuskek: I guess we have to be polite to our colleagues. She and I get along fine. We don't agree entirely on the some policy issues.

California is now a reasonably high spending state, and it does in fact come below the state average, below the national average in terms of performance of students. Even adjusting for the fact that it has generally what you might call more difficult to educate population, more disadvantaged population. California did better, sort of above the national average in reading and below in math, as I remember the numbers.

And I don't think it has anything to do with paying more for the schools or teachers. What the California did, we're gonna get off track here if I go too far. But they changed from a very bizarre funding system to one that was more uniform across the districts based upon the student populations.

But it didn't eliminate all the other regulations and restrictions on the schools in California, which are monumental. And I don't think that we got very good results from changing that funding pattern because local schools didn't have many options of what to do, even though they got more money.

The teachers were happier because their salaries went up.

>> Audience 5: Good morning. Sorry, I've stood up a few times. My name is Bailey McNutt. I'm from Annapolis, Maryland. So this was a sobering way to start my morning, for sure, seeing Maryland at the bottom of that graph and rather depressing.

One of the things that I spent my time during COVID doing was volunteering with something that initially was a homework club and then became more of a substitute for school for disadvantaged students in my community. And now it is still continuing to this day to continue to be kind of a tutoring beyond school, whatever you'll call it.

So I'm wondering what you think the role of communities, and particularly community-based organizations, might be in this extra tutoring or beyond school learning.

>> Eric Hanuskek: So I think community organizations have been extraordinarily important, particularly over the pandemic. They've been called out to do more things, and to the extent that they've kept going, I think that's been good.

I've been talking about what goes on in the schools, but it's clear that the schools are a minor part of the day for most people, that the families and the communities are an important part. In fact, historically in educational research, the story is family background matters a lot.

It's just that in general, we don't know how to change family background and things like these community organizations are ways that we can start changing the effective family background for kids. If they're disadvantaged kids that don't see their parents or don't have intact families and so forth, you can substitute by community organizations.

We've never figured out how to organize that very well, and that's the problem. It's not a sort of scalable solution in the sense that we can find ways to mobilize the entire country to take care of that, or mobilize the entire state of Maryland to take care of it.

We might be able to do it at Annapolis.

>> Audience 6: Thank you, Doctor Hanischek. I'm from Cleveland, Ohio. I'm in teach for America there and I teach middle school. One problem I had recently was that I chose not to join the Cleveland Teachers Union for a variety of reasons.

The Cleveland teachers Union failed to go back to hybrid when the rest of the state did. What can be done with, you mentioned how unions were striking for water coolers. What can be done with these unions that wield enormous power but don't really prioritize the education of the students?

 

>> Eric Hanuskek: Well, first, let me compliment you on being Cleveland. I grew up in the suburbs of Cleveland, so I know that well. Second, I had actually hoped that the teachers unions would, with the pandemic, see that they had a mission to do and that they could, in fact, get behind policies to try to improve the learning of kids.

But in fact, very early on, a number of very public teachers unions. By the end of March 2020, somebody, a few of you are here from Massachusetts. The Massachusetts teachers unions immediately said we have to use the pandemic to get the things we want. And that was the position of them.

Teachers unions exist around the world, but teachers unions in some countries realize that they have to make a better product, that that's part of their job. And the teachers unions in the US are more, we're just about pay and benefits, period. Thank you. This is a serious problem.

And that's one of the reasons why things like charter schools have expanded. Because in general, charter schools are not unionized. And after some period of time, we see that on average, charter schools are doing better than their comparable traditional schools. Not everyone, not all charter schools are better and not all public schools are that way.

But I think that it, the unions are not a positive impact on schools today. And this is a matter of public policy, of trying to get them to do something different. One final thing, if you actually survey the population, the approval rating of teachers unions is somewhat below the US Postal Service.

And they always, teachers unions try to say we're teachers as opposed to we're unions. And that's the distinction to make. We have some very good teachers teach for America and others, and they're not the unions and so on. Who has the microphone? That's what counts.

>> Audience 7: Hi, my name is Danielle, and I am a Florida student and resident.

So I am well aware of the changes in the curriculum and perhaps the potential loss of income in that. My question is, do you predict that the loss of income over a lifetime will be more significant for younger or older students?

>> Eric Hanuskek: Probably for younger students during the pandemic because they missed out on basics.

If you can't subtract fractions, you have trouble with algebra one, right? If you miss the basic things, if you miss the basic reading, you're going to have trouble throughout. And so for the most part, older students had what they were gonna get out of the basics and the losses were less.

You could sit off and read a book as opposed to trying to figure out things that were new to you that you hadn't seen before.

>> Audience 8: So it seems that the modern school choice movement, one of the big thing they push for is ESAs. I don't wanna hear a thought like what kind of ESA you think is the most optimal for states, whether or not it's like Arizona's, where it's literally parents get a credit card or tax credit based or other kinds.

 

>> Eric Hanuskek: ESAs are education savings accounts. They differ dramatically across the country in terms of their structure and so forth, but they're basically providing funds to families to make a broader set of choices in schools. Sometimes you go to the regular traditional public schools and can use that for extra materials or whatever.

Other times they support a fair amount of attending private schools, purely private schools. I don't think we know yet how does what's the best structure for these schools? In some states, they're highly means tested, and in some states they're pretty open across the income spectrum and we don't know the full ramifications.

It's been a huge movement recently of states to expand Arizona, West Virginia and some others to expand the use of these funds. It's obviously gonna put pressure on traditional public schools too. If you take some of the total budget today, when you have total funding for schools today, doesn't put any money into private schools, which are 10% of the population.

And then there's homeschooling, which is another 3%, so those people aren't getting anything today. Take the same pot of money with ESAs and start putting it into that 13%. The amount of money for the traditional public schools, even if nobody moves from traditional to private schools, puts pressure on budgets for the schools.

We don't know the impact of that.