The Great School Rethink

Senior fellow and director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) Rick Hess recently joined me on the Future of Education to talk about his new book, The Great School Rethink. It's a terrific book that reaches a similar set of conclusions as my own recent book, From Reopen to Reinvent. Rick argues that change in education won't come from on high, but instead from education and entrepreneurs on the ground. He then talks about what those changes could look like—and how they'll look different in different communities. In this conversation, we delved into some of Rick's pet peeves—which viewers may be surprised to learn are also some of my pet peeves. Phrases like innovation and disruption and best practices. We also talk about rethinking the job of teachers, what a charter teacher might look like, and the use of time in schools and mastery-based learning. As always, subscribers can listen to the conversation, watch it below, or read the transcript.

Michael Horn:   Welcome, welcome, welcome to the show where we are dedicated to building a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live a life of purpose. And today's guest is a longtime friend of mine. He's the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, and the author of a great new book called The Great School Rethink. He's none other than Rick Hess. Rick, it is good to see you. Thanks for being here.

Rick Hess:         Hey, good to be with you, pal.

Horn:                Yeah, no, I appreciate it. And I'm going to try not to fawn too much over the book because I know you hate that sort of stuff in these conversations, but I enjoyed every word in it, so I'll just say that upfront. I loved how you started it off in particular, I used to tell my team when I had a team at the Christensen Institute that our job in policy circles is not to so much tell people exactly what to put in place or do this policy, it's often, frankly, to tell them not to do these well-meaning things. Like don't do this sort of thou shall use technology in this way sort of policies that you know people love to put in place. You have a lot of humility around that in the book, I would say. But also your message is that the best ideas are going to come from educators and entrepreneurs on the ground. I'd actually love to hear how you came to that conclusion, the evidence you sort of have and hold for it and why maybe we don't see enough of that, if that's the case.

Hess:                Yeah. These are great questions, man. And it's very kind of you to say the nice stuff about the book, but anybody who's going to read it is going to be like, "Wait a minute, didn't Horn actually make a lot of these points in Reopen to Reinvent?" And I think part of it is you're out there doing a lot of this work, so it means a lot that you say that.

                        Look, for people who are thinking about this book, part of it, yeah, it's a continuation of stuff that I've been thinking about since I was teaching high school in the last century. Folks who've read my stuff will probably know this story. I was teaching high school, I got frustrated. I was like, how can so many well-meaning people drive each other so nuts? And for me I went back to do my PhD to try to understand how come school reform seems like it's a frustrating enterprise.

                        One of the key insights to this point that why I'm a skeptic about grand fixes and great resets and all this kind of stuff is that I did this book back in the... My dissertation at Harvard in the '90s wound up being called Spinning Wheels. I studied 50 odd urban school districts. And at the time, the conventional wisdom was that we needed to shake them up, they needed to be brought to life. And the big counterintuitive finding was that I found that the average district appeared to have launched more than a dozen major reforming initiatives in the prior three years. That's one every three months.

                        And the big takeaway from the book was like, look, guys, when you teach people that nothing is actually going to stick very long, they don't take it very seriously. And what teachers do is they close their doors and they tell each other this too shall pass, and none of this reform becomes anything more than raindrops pounding off a tin roof. And several years ago in Letters to a Young Ed Reformer, I said, look, this actually explains, I think a lot of our frustrations, whether it's these big R reforms, no Child Left Behind, and school improvement grants and Common Core are all premised on the notion that if we write some laws and give some marching orders from state capitals or Washington, that will translate into changes in schools and cultures.

                        I think 25 years of empirical observation has taught me that it just doesn't. And in fact, what happens is it creates more rules, more routines, more fear, and it actually leaves us more stuck than where we began. So kind of the great school rethink, I said, look, we've just been through this brutal kind of disruption in the way Americans think about schools and how teachers experience schools and how families relate to schools, and it's created a moment of punctuated equilibrium. And rather than use this as a money moment for somebody's grand scheme to try to jam it in place, it's actually a great opportunity for us to ask the kinds of questions that in the hurley burley, we usually don't get around to asking.

Horn:                Love it, love it. And you know, you have this quote then that really resonated with me and seems so common sensical frankly, which I'm going to quote it at length, so apologies. But you say, “How do I want schools to change? I want kids to play more games, master more rigorous math, read more fiction, engage in more debates, play more music, and learn more history. I want schools to be both more rigorous and more joyous. I want more assurance that seven year olds are mastering the building blocks of literacy and more freedom for 17 year olds to be out in the world learning a trip. I want schools to find ways to do vastly better with struggling students and with high achievers. I want teachers to have more control over their profession and more freedom to focus on the things that matter for kids.”

                        And like me, you don't particularly care where that occurs if it's a private school, a homeschool, a charter school, district school, just want this to happen for kids. I guess I'm curious, your reflections, you've written the book, you do see a fair amount of the innovations, you get to interview a lot of people doing interesting stuff. They come through the AEI forums as well. Do you feel like this is happening that we're starting to build these communities, and where is that occurring, if so?

Hess:                Yeah, I mean, one of the funny things is people say, "Well, Rick, how can you be both for rigor and joy?" And I'm like, where did we lose the thread of the plot? Every parent wants more rigor and more joy. Pedro Noguera and I kept talking about this when we were doing this in search of common ground book a couple years ago, how fundamentally stupid our debates have gotten that we pick sides on things that no normal human being picks sides on. In making this happen, yeah, I mean I think that's the weird thing. I mean, I think you and I both kind of observe this a lot when we get to talk to people out there and are out in the mix, is that lots of cool stuff is happening, lots of cool insights about how do we start to leverage staff, the opportunity culture stuff that Brian Hassell does or the ASU stuff that Brent and Carol at ASU are doing.

                        There's an enormous amount of interesting stuff around technology and how to leverage it where we think about choices and new models, whether it's micro schools or learning pods or there's any number of interesting things. The problem, it goes back to what we talked about a moment ago, is I feel like so much of this just runs into the brick wall of that's not how we do it. Districts wind up trying to threaten and bully parents who are looking for a learning pod. Instead of saying, hey, we talk all that stuff about equity, why don't we help people who need help build learning pods? That seems like it advances equity. Instead, they wind up denouncing learning pods as some kind of nefarious scheme.

                        When we think about funding mechanisms, course choice, in order to be able to do it, you've got to be able to use your federal funds in ways that are consistent with what ESSA allowed. But we also know that there's time and reporting requirements. And so for me, so much of my career in education last quarter century has been watching people keep trying to build a new scaffolding that they just lay over the ruins they've inherited... not ruins. Over a system that wasn't designed to do what they wanted to do. And instead of saying, well, all right, we need to create some green field here, they say, well, if we just put one more story on top, if we just weld on one more plate, we'll finally get there.

                        And I think they've made it harder and harder for the kinds of communities of practice that you're talking about, the problem solvers out there. it becomes much harder for them to grow and extend and create than it needs to be. And so for me, the great rethink is largely how do we get people in positions of authority, district leaders, school leaders, school board members, state education chiefs, asking questions about how do we facilitate this work rather than imagine that it's their job to come up with one new grand solution?

Horn:                And to do that, you have some really cool exercises throughout the book. And one of them actually asks educators to define what a school is. I'll just confess, I read that, I was like, actually that's really hard. I struggled with it as I read it. So I'd actually love to turn it back to you. What's your own answer for what is a school?

Hess:                It's a great question. For me, I mean, I think to cut to the chase, I don't know that there's a clear answer. When I think about Aristotle doing his thing, that was a school. When I think about these self-impressed, fancy New England prep schools, their schools, when I think about these scrappy, non-traditional kind of CET shops in their schools, I mean, I think a school is a place where we get together learners and educators in order to try to master skills, Dick Elmore's old kind of triangle, the student and the teacher in the presence of content. But for me, the more important thing is these exercises are so much fun. You and I get to do a lot of work shopping and teaching kind of stuff. And what what's fun about them is you realize how little opportunity really smart educators and leaders are given to just think creatively.

                        They get drilled. Here's what you're supposed to say. You're supposed to talk about teacher quality and effective schools, and you're supposed to memorize the slogans. You are supposed to learn the five pillars of this reform strategy and the opportunity to just say, well, how much time actually gets lost to disruption? Or what do teachers actually do in 390 contract minutes during the day? And I learned this years ago. I remember I was doing this book The Same Thing Over and Over. And one of the fascinating things, it's a history how schools got to where they are. And one of the funny things that struck me that I hadn't expected, but when you go out and you talk to people about this stuff, if they understand where things came from, somehow it makes talking about changing it less personal. So this is particularly the case, say, with I always found it with step and lane pay.

                        When you explain that step and lane pay was actually an attempt to bring some degree of rationality and fairness to pay because we were paying men twice what we paid women and white teachers twice what we paid black teachers, and the step and lane pay was created to address that, but it's now a solution to a different set of problems, you could just get a different conversation going than you could before you got into the history. And so for me, so many of these exercises are trying to create that space to reflect in a way that lets people have conversations and think about stuff that we often don't.

Horn:                Well, they're incredibly effective. I'm going to be honest. I'm going to steal a couple of them. I'll credit you on the road, but they're really effective. And on that note, you talk about educators don't have the space to do this stuff, but they also sort of revert to these truisms or the things that they're supposed to say. And you have some great pet peeves in the book. I suspect some folks who tune in will be surprised that I share your pet peeves actually. And so I'm going to toss a few of them out, and you can do your lightning round around why you dislike the phrase or the emphasis. And the first one is you have innovation as an end.

Hess:                Yeah. It's funny, you and I have had this conversation, and you're a great innovator. But anybody who's ever walked into an Apple store and said, "Sell me your most innovative iPhone," looks like an idiot, because innovation is a process. You get a better Apple phone with more memory or it takes better pictures because folks working somewhere have solved problems. And a good overall description for that problem solving is innovation. But when you hear educators talk about innovation zones or innovative programs, and that becomes the goal, I'm like, y'all just lost a thread of the plot.

Horn:                Yeah, I love it. I always say to folks in the innovation community also, they're like, we just got to try stuff and we have to have space and it'll fail and blah, blah. I'm like, fair, but the idea is to get good outcomes. Apple, it's not an innovation if it doesn't help people make progress in their lives. And so progress in their lives is what you ought to care about, not how you got there. You have another one that I suspect given that I'm the disruption guy for better or worse, but you say disruption or transformation is bad. I totally agree with you. So tell us why though.

Hess:                Yeah, well it's funny too because one of the things that I've always loved about your work is when you talk about disruption. You and Clay talked about it in a very precise way. By disruption we mean replacing one way of doing things. You get these other people, it particularly comes up in the school choice conversation. You get these over caffeinated kind of social media types who love to talk about blowing up the school districts. And I'm like, look, guys, lots of people like school choice. Seventy percent of people want the right to pick the school their kid goes to. Over half of families say, especially after COVID, they'd like to have a school model where there kids are at home one day a week. They want options. They want programs, they want choices. That doesn't mean they don't like their local schools. Their local schools are where they go on Friday night to watch football. It's where they get to know the other families in their community. So it is possible both to like robust school choice, education, savings, accounts, vouchers, as well as charter schools and other options and also to like your schools.

                        And if we talk about it that way, that school choice is about giving families options, about empowering them, I think it's both true to what we're trying to do and really sensible and well liked. But what happens is you get the same kinds of kids who if they were on the other side, would be saying, let's defund the police, running around chanting these crazy slogans that the goal is to disrupt America. And all of these parents are like, dude, I got plenty of disruption in my life. What I'm actually looking for is somebody to help me educate my kid in a safe, caring environment. And I just feel like disruption picks up absolutely none of that.

Horn:                Yeah. I love it. The next one you had was best practices.

Hess:                Partly it's what the heck is a best practice? Look, if we're talking, I'm going to my dentist and the dentist is like, "Hey, I'm an innovator. I don't believe in giving you anesthesia first." I'm like, no, no, no. Go best practice. Don't innovate. Give me the anesthesia first and then drill. That's the best practice I can get behind. The problem is in education, a lot of times best practice is somebody did a pilot somewhere with lots of foundation money in an opt-in school where all the teachers were excited about it, where they had an MOU, memorandum of understanding, that gave them flexibility to do it well, or they did it in some charter that was built around doing this thoughtfully and well. I think a lot of the blended stuff fits this. And then you look at it, and it works fantastic in that site, and they go, "Ah, ha, it's the best practice." And you're like, "No, dude, dude, dude. It's not a best practice."

                        It's something that works well under very particular circumstances. You want to replicate none of the circumstances. You just want to do a dog and pony show where you fly in for a day, look at it, come back and do a half-hearted version of it, and then two years later you're going to ring your hands and say it was an implementation problem, what could we know?

Horn:                It's so funny on that, and I'm glad you brought up the blended example because so many people when we came out of that taxonomy of different types of blended models, you remember people would say, well, which one's the best? I was like, I don't know. It depends. It depends on so many things that we're not even capturing. Circumstance matters in this sort of average, this is the best practice thinking is the death of progress, I think.

Hess:                Part of this is a problem with the ED research that they're like, well, we find that on average you find some kind of effect if you do this, but it's like saying, on average we find a minuscule effect if you give kids carrots sometimes. Well, how many carrots? How often? And most of our ED research doesn't have any of the particulars that educators can then use to say, "Well, I know exactly what I'm supposed to do."

Horn:                Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And it's interesting that best practice problem pervades frankly all of social sciences and business as well. Jim Collins stuff. Everyone should not have a charismatic leader. Well, Steve Jobs did pretty fine. So it can't just be that. So conditions matter, I think. You didn't have this one, but I want to name it because it's one of my pet peeves, and I suspect it might be one of yours, but I'm curious, which is personalized learning.

Hess:                Oh, I can't believe I didn't hit that one. Thank you, man. Well, the hell's that even mean?

Horn:                One, yeah.

Hess:                It's like, look, I mean... Right? And, again, it's all these things. People are like, well, what we mean is that there's a problem that kids are sitting in classrooms organized by grade level, and it doesn't actually in any way reflect where they're at. It doesn't reflect what they're curious about, what they need to master, what they've already mastered. Okay, totally on board with that. But what do we do about it? And they're like, oh, we need personal... I'm like, well, fine. It's a game.

Horn:                Moms and apple pie.

Hess:                Part of it, it's weird. It's almost like education has learned to talk about improvement by watching The Office. If you think about Steve Carell just doing one of those things where he was just throwing out words he clearly didn't understand, and it's like we've trained superintendents and school leaders and they go to these foundation led conferences where it's almost as if you say the right half dozen words in the right sequence, schools will magically improve. And so we wind up with effective quality based, equitable, personalized learning environments. And it's like, well, there you go. And what gets lost along the way is how all of it is the actual doing, and none of it's the talking.

Horn:                Love it, love it. And I also push a lot of times back on folks, and I'm like, personalization's a verb, right? It's how we help get to the outcomes. And I suspect there's some times where having the whole class doing the same thing, that's a great idea, but let's be open to what's the outcome, how are we trying to get there? And just be open to it. So three more concepts I want to hit from your book out of the lightning round, if you will. You talk about the impossible job of teachers, and you referenced this earlier, the ASU worker, the Public Impact, Brian Hassell work, and like me, you spend some time on asking folks to rethink what that staffing model is, maybe getting rid of one to many, whatever it might be. I'm curious because when I talk about this right now on the stump, people are like, okay, outside of ASU and Public Impact, how do I do this?

                        And I'm curious, how do you suggest helping more school communities sort of think through this foundational question of what are the adults in our buildings doing?

Hess:                It's almost like your personalization point that you just made so effectively. Starting with ASU or opportunity cultures, starting at the wrong place. It's like, hey, here's something on the shelf called improved staffing, so let's plug it in. And that's the exact wrong way to go about it. The right way is to say, "Look, most important thing schools are doing is spending money on adults." That's a bulk of what they do. What are they getting for this? I do this exercise when I work with teachers, get out chart paper, and I'm like, let's list all the things you did in the last week. Teachers will routinely put five dozen things up.

                        And so then I say, all right, circle the five that are most useful for kids and star the five that you spent the most time on. And there's usually a limited overlap. And they've never actually done this. Even in districts that claim they're data driven, nobody's ever actually sat down and systematically thought about what are teachers doing all day in their work? And nobody's actually trying to say, how do we optimize for the stuff that matters for kids? Much less start talking about how do we match teachers with complimentary technology? So where to start, I would start with what the heck are teachers doing? Understanding that, talking about what matters, how much time is being used in ways that are inefficient or ineffectual, and then work forward from there.

                        Because one of the things that any of the ASU or opportunity culture stuff is doing is it's saying, look, let's layer teacher roles. You don't need them to help you think about this. If you go to an architecture firm, prizewinning architects don't spend a lot of time filling out paperwork for clients. That's handled by somebody else, but that's partly because they have figured out what work is high leverage and what maps on the skills. If you've got a phenomenally effective K3 literacy instructor, I don't know that you want to compartmentalize. I think departmentalized schools work in some cases, not others. That's fine. Whichever you want to do is fine by me, but you sure as hell shouldn't have them spending a lot of time loading kids onto the buses, getting off buses and having them watch kids eat Jello at lunch. That's not a great use of highly skilled labor.

Horn:                Makes a lot of sense. Let me move to this next one, which is, you have a fascinating chapter about the use of time in schools, and you made a lot of really important observations, one of which, why aren't there more studies around the day in the life of a kid and just the minutes literally of what they're doing and how much time is wasted in the name of efficiency is the way I'll put it because I don't want people to think I want kids slaving away all the time, but it's wasted in the name of actually those sorts of things in many cases. But I'm curious, you also talk about the Carnegie Unit and obviously that's a big push for me, mastery based learning, and I genuinely don't know how you think about this. Is mastery based learning one of those things that requires conditions do you think from government or rethink of the assessment paradigm for it to thrive? Or is it one of those things that should be more community by community driven and not universal in your view?

Hess:                I think to move off the Carnegie Unit, I think you need a baseline level of comfort among the policy, the folks who are funding schools in the state, that they have some assurance, whether kids are learning what you want to learn. Completing course units is a clunky and terrible way to measure these things, but at least it's some way to measure them, and it gives people some way to cover their ass. The problem of going to mastery learning is you no longer have any way as a policymaker to cover your ass. And so I think just as a pragmatic question, yeah, you need some degree of buy-in. You need at least an opt-in agreement at the state level that districts are allowed to use these set of mastery kind of badges or what have you as a stand-in because that gives school boards or local school leaders the room to operate. You can't do the whole thing from scratch.

                        So I think that's right. Again, this is a place where part of what's necessary for, and I think you've made the case for mastery learning as opposed to Carnegie compelling. I don't know how anybody could sit there and be like, oh, yeah, I don't get it. But there's this question of how do you practically do it instead where you're worried about which kids are going to fall off the radar. But the other thing, it's just such a crucial point that people routinely talk about, oh, we've got to extend the school year. We've got to extend the school day. I'm always amazed how many people don't understand that if you look at the OECD data, American kids spend about a hundred hours more in school each year than their peers around the globe.

                        That's compared to kids in Finland, in Japan and Germany. I mean, we got kids locked up a lot, and lots of it were just boring the living crap out of them. So like you said, being more thoughtful and purposeful about times, not about strapping kids to a desk instead of we're locking kids up for over a thousand hours a year, how do we make sure that we can in good faith, tell the kids that this actually is about them and not about bureaucratic routine?

Horn:                Okay, last question. I have so many thoughts on this. So we could go down the OECD rabbit hole, but I'm going to avoid that one for another day. But the last question is, you have this great idea, which was new to me toward the end of the book about a charter teacher rather than a charter school. So share more about what this looks like, and is anywhere actually doing it? I'm not even sure.

Hess:                Yeah. This was Julie Squire's idea. Julie was my program manager like 15 years ago.

Horn:                Back in the day.

Hess:                She's way back in the day. She's at Bellwether now doing that interesting Assembly work they're doing. This was her idea. If folks want to find the writeup, it's in the Conservative Ed Reform Network, Sketching the New Agenda Series. Julie and I had chatted about it. It's been introduced in Louisiana. It has not been adopted anywhere. The idea is real simple. It's a version of a thing that a bunch of us I think have written out over the last 10-15 years, which is if you are a teacher who in whatever fashion demonstrates your medal, national board certification or student achievement or any other mechanism, what's the equivalent of being able to hang out your own shingle as a psychiatrist?

                        And the charter teacher idea is that Julie says, well, states should create a mechanism where teachers can apply and win charter status. They then are negotiating essentially as standalone operators with their school or district. They negotiate a rate for the salary split. So say it's 50/50 or what have you, 50% goes to the district for overhead. Teacher pays their own expenses, any teacher aides, their own benefits. And the teacher can then choose how many students to take. They have to take, say, at least the district minimum, whatever that is per class. But if they say, look, I can handle 35 kids and I want to hire an aide or two, bless them. More kids in a strong teacher's classroom creates less drag, makes it easier on her grade level or departmental compatriots in that school or system. And it creates ways for teachers to grow in their role without having to step out of the classroom and enter administration.

Horn:                Love it. And it strikes me, it's also one of these ways, Clay and my work is a lot about autonomy, how you create autonomy in the organizational or business model so you can do these rethinking exercises. And it strikes me that this is a great way within schools to get that freedom away from the conventional model and allow some educators to do the rethinking like the exercises in your book.

Hess:                Absolutely. I mean, this is one of the things that has, again, gotten lost with all of the sloganeering in the choice conversation, that this really ought to be about creating options and empowering families and educators, letting folks create learning environments that make sense for them, whether they are the learner or the teacher. And I think what Julie's come up with here is just a terrific version of one piece of it.

Horn:                Love it. Love it. Rick, thanks for joining us on the Future of Education. For all of you tuning in, check out his new book, The Great School Rethink. It's just out, I believe, by the time this conversation airs. And just really appreciate you being the voice that you are out there.

Hess:                Oh, man. No, appreciate it. And thanks so much for having me on.