Kids. The problem is, when little r reforms become big r, we lose a sense how these really play out in real schools and real kids. These ideas are right. What happens when you take them too far away from the judgments that shape kids education and turn to National Policies they play out in ways we dont hope and dont anticipate. Host how long have you been thinking about writing with education . Guest i started out substitution for pizza money back in late 1980s. I been around School Reform for 30 years. This product is this book is a product of that. Host we got special lines in this segment. As we talk to rick hess. Teachers its 2027488000. President trump has talked about making a big School Choice reform push in his presidency. Is that a big r reform effort . Guest the funny thing about School Reform its still passion of people. Passion is a good thing. Theres Airline Customer service, i wish everybody had more passion. When youre passionate about changing schools, lose psych of the fact the Great Schools are a product of thousands little decisions made by educators about how do you help kids. How do you inspire them and encourage them. These are things that shape good education. School choice is a useful tool. It helps you create School Community where everybody is on the same page. Teachers and students want to be there. You start taking it to washington and scholarship programs, i worry that you undermine the ability of schools to be effective and creating the kind of communities where kids learn. Host whats the status now for viewers of the president s push for School Choice. Guest its not going anywhere. In order to get it out the senate through regular legislation you would need 60 votes. Theres 62 republicans in senate, all 62 are not excited about this. They will not get a democrat. If you do reconciliation, you can do a tax code with a scholarship through the tax side. It looks like thats not going to be included even if tax reform does go forward. Right now its a talking point rather than a real legislative proposal. Host what happens with School Choice if that lingers for a year or two . Guest School Choice is going gang busters in the states. Half the states have Voucher Programs. 40 states have Charter School laws. One of the things is, when you have to build this from the ground up, as frustrating as it is, what you see is you have to build Bipartisan Coalition in the state. You actually have to speak to the real concerns of families and educators. School choice is stronger. Than it would be if if actually got the boost from washington. Host some argue School Choice increases segregation. Leaves students who need it most behind in the schools. What do you say to those arguments . Guest the evidence suggest those are not worn out. The student who tend to want School Choice are the kids whos families cant buy their way into good suburban schools. The reality is, the people who are satisfied with their schools, 75 of american households, dont like their kids schools are not the people for School Choice. Its the folks frustrated. Increases segregation. It defense how you set the School Choice system up. In milwaukee, what you see or in louisiana, what you see children opting out of single race schools, particularly nearly all black schools in order to go to private School Options that are much more predominantly white. Host rick hess is author of letters to a young education reformer. With us to talk about education reform in this country. We want to hear from you, lines for teachers 2027488000, administrators 2027488001. All others2027488002. For administrators. Shelby is in florida east. Good morning. Caller good morning. I am really delighted with this topic this morning. So pleased blessing of cspan for the nation. Sir, as florida has been the epicenter for this movement of voucherrizing and privatizing education and it startrd here with jeb bush when he was governor. School districts calling in on administrative line where he created this Voucher Program it was called opportunity scholarship that was giving corporations the ability to bypass paying their sales tax to the state revenue and then would be able to use that as a credit to then give the voucher. Our local constitution here in florida as my understanding most constitutions in the country will prohibit if challenged the transfer of our public dollars. Could you please confirm for us that the bulk of our funding for our local School Districts coming from the property tax base. Would you confirm to that . Host before you go, what kind of administrator are you . Are you a principal of the school . Caller no. Im a part of the District Office that would have to create the elimination of the public dollars and the transfer. Now here in florida, we have a bill that signed by Governor Scott that did not go through any kind of review. All the School Administrators and local districts that will take out 200 million of local school funds that we in the local School Funding have to pay for private entities construction costs. Building leases and then the private entity gets to keep the public asset that they paid for. Host i appreciate that. I want to have rick hess jump in and go through that history that youre talking about. Guest theres a couple of things going on here. Jeb bush during his two terms as governor, was very much the most active republican governor for School Choice. Aiding schools on accountability. Another thing he did was promoted School Choice. Various ways. What the caller is referring to is what the trump folks talked about, the scholarship programs. Where corporations and individuals are allowed to contribute to scholarship funds that will be used to allow low income kids to use those funds to go to private schools. In return, they get 100 tax credit against their state taxes. Depending on the state youre in the degree to which school are financed by property taxes or other taxes shifts, but generally across the country about 90 of School Spending is combination of state and local and about 10 is federal. What they just did in florida is governor rick scott just signed ambitious new reform bill with moving pieces in Charter Schools. Which the caller is talking about. There are a lot of moving pieces here. Well see how that plays out. Host on that line for teachers. We go to james in rochester, michigan. Youre on with rick hess. Caller good morning. I appreciate the topic. I have a point and a question. My point is, i like to get the guest take on this. I think reform whether big or little r, whatever you want to coin it, is selfperpetuating. If education became perfect tomorrow, Reform Movement would need a boogeyman. Without a problem or scapegoat the Reform Movement will be in the water. There has to be something out there for the Reform Movement to focus on in order to keep itself perpetuated. Question i have for the guest is the issue of accountability for Charter Schools. Here in michigan the detroit free press, one of the two big dailies did a second piece in three years, outlining how for profit, for profit Charter Schools, severely under performed those Charter Schools that are sponsored by nonprofit entities and their Traditional Public School peers. 2014, they did a similar study which showed that Charter Schools on hold, did not perform significantly better. In some cases worse but not significantly worse than Traditional Public School peers. In michigan, we seem to have an accountability where were shutting down low performing schools, public and charter both. But yet we still cant get past that point where were closing down under performing schools. It becomes a point where all choices is not necessarily good choice. Thats all you have are bad choices and what choice do you have to have . Thank you. Guest its a terrific question. Theres two pieces here. One, the caller alluded to this reform. The Reform Movement. Theres a real point here. We have professionalized School Reform in the last decades in ways in a mixrd blessing. Especially with major foundations providing support and advocacy groups in the business of really calling for better schools and trying to make that happen in the states. We see the good part of that. The danger of that the more people spend their time talking about reform writing op eds the easier it is for those of us in that line of work to forget how this stuff plays out in the real world of schools and classrooms. We can wind up with teacher evaluation systems, School Accountability systems which are well intended. Which makes sense but wind up have to disruptive impacts. Thats part what we get into school accountabilities. No child left behind back in 2001 suggested look, we want to make sure that kids are doing at least adequately on reading and math. We want to have transparency by requiring all state and condition for their federal aid to test kids reading and math to three to eight. This all makes sense at a certain level. The problem with it especially as you build this stuff into definition of School Accountability, schools focus more and more on reading and math more and more prepping kids for prepping kids for reading and math tests. When we talk about Charter School accountability, one of the reasons people go to Charter Schools, they are frustrated with what they see narrow focus in School Districts. The caller is right. When you look at performance across these metrics, you will see differences. I would probably disagree with some characterizations of charter performance. For instance stanford came out last week with a study of charter management organizations, which found on balance on reading and math scores theyre significantly outperforming traditional School Districts across the nation. Thats actually not even the point. The trick is how do we think about School Accountability where were talking about making sure schools are doing a responsible job in terms of reading and math scores without allowingallowing that to exclude or redesign all the other things that parent and communities are passionate about. When we talk about good schools and bad schools we lose that perspective. Host rick administrator in maryland, good morning. Caller good morning. I was really calling to ask the speaker his thoughts on the push now for use of open Educational Resources as a part of district curriculums. I begun to Research OpenEducational Resources extensively. They found and appear to be good on the surface. It does incorporate technology which we know is a mainstay and it has become a mainstay in Public Education. But this society as a whole. Again, just out of curiosity what is his take on their use in Public Education . Guest i i would have said, i dont care schools for profit or not profit i care its doing good things for kids. In terms of measured outcomes and open Education Resources. I think its the same question. There are open Education Resources which are shoddy and poorly constructed and are not going to serve the kids well. There are others that are fabulous. The definition of them being open means they are readily available to educators and School Systems without having to buy them. The trick is when you make things freely available that you have to the question is where are you going to get the resources to update them to improve them moving forward. Either it has to come from public funding or public funding or from foundation support. Youre not making any revenue off it. Part of the challenges in order to ensure these are not good open resources in 2017, which is all you need to worry about as an administrator or teacher make sure these are still high quality open resources in 2027. There is this question how do we ensure folks making these will continue to get the resources to improve them and deliver them . Host what is campbells law . Guest campbells what we were talking about. It says its a social scientist offered this up back in the mid1970s. When you measure something, you focus on the things that you measure. Its particularly true in public policy. For instance if a company says, we are going to judge our fast food franchises by how fast customers get served. Ill bet you dollars to donuts customers will be served faster they will be served faster at the expense of other things like the quality of the food and customer satisfaction. In schooling, you talk about campbells law. We have made reading and math scores the realm over the last 15 or 17 years. One of the costs of that is those things which dont show up in reading and math scores is systematically shortchanged. Host what do you think is the right measurement for students and teachers . Guest reading and math scores take up about 30 to 35 what i think needs to happen for kids in the k12 education. Other things are tests of science or history or language acquisition or arts. Other things are developmental. We different have good simple metrics for were cultivating the kind of citizens we want to live among. Partly, is that taking the schools seriously means were going to take seriously that some of the ways we judge School Quality are subjective. School choice, which allows parents to choose, is one way to get at that. Another is what they call at the british model where you actually have highly trained folks to go out and spend realtime talking to students and families and educators and getting a feel for schools. Look theres lots of thoughtful ways that reasonable people might decide then to gauge schools. All schools arent serving the same kids. The trick is that reformers in their passion have unfortunately taken us away from this broader and pretty important conversation about how do we judge quality into a default where its about reading and math scores. Host the book is letters to a young education reformer. Rick hess is with the American Enterprise institute with us for about the next 15 minutes. David is in bethesda, maryland, good morning. Caller i wanted to touch on the other aspect of School Choice, which is vocational schools. I had traditional education up to tenth grade in high school which i transferred to a Half Day Program at this School Called thomas edison. They had computer programs, nursing programs and Building Trades programs where the first six weeks you get into one of each the trades for about a week to figure out whether you want to do masonry or carpentry. I decided to drop my main english and math courses and take business courses and Music Lessons which was the stuff that appeals to me. I planned not to education graduate pointed inned in not all of them have. Some of them are just like four year college down people throats when people cant sit still in class. They need to be building things, they need to be working and getting that energy out their system where they cant do it sitting down doing written stuff. Guest you hear a lot of governors talk about career and technical education. We have so poisoned the education around k12 and accountability, its nice to talk about Something Like technical education, early childhood. That feels a less divisive. One, for decades, Vocational Education was a huge part of american Public Education. One of the problems as it became a big r reform in its hay day it become a mechanism for tracking schools. When you look at Vocational Education, it was disportion gnatly low income kids and black and latino kids. Reformers said, this is enormous problem. Because of the way we intend to do things and the enthusiasm we see in School Reform its never doored to say, lets back up and rethink how this plays out instead we need sweeping fixes. One of the things we did we largely gutted Vocational Education. Partly because there were folks who loved working with their hands who can make 60 or 90,000 a year working in hvac repair or pluming. The reality is that schools kaine should be in can and should be in the business to can what they want to do. How do we cultivate all of those. Part of the problem is, the folks those of us who wind up working washington or s