Hoover’s Dr. James Lynn Woodworth on CREDO, NCES, & Data-Driven Policy

The Learning Curve Dr. James Lynn Woodworth

[00:00:00] Albert Cheng: Well, hello everybody, and happy Wednesday or whatever day you’re tuning into this show. I am your co-host, Dr. Albert Cheng for this week’s episode of The Learning Curve Podcast. And the other co-host of course, is Alisha Thomas Searcy. What’s up Alisha?

[00:00:17] Alisha Searcy: What’s going on? Dr. Cheng? All is well. How are you?

[00:00:21] Albert Cheng: Doing well, doing well. Yeah. Happy. Uh, April? Yes. You know, maybe we should have done some kind of like April Fools episode, but I, I guess I. Well, that moment has passed.

[00:00:31] Alisha Searcy: Yes. You know what, I don’t know about you, but I don’t love April Fool’s jokes. I love having fun. I love laughing, but there’s something about the jokes that people play that I don’t know, maybe I’m just, I have a lot going on.

[00:00:45] I’m just not a huge fan, are you?

[00:00:47] Albert Cheng: Well, I haven’t played many jokes on people and people have not played jokes on me, so I guess I still feel kind of indifferent, but maybe, I don’t know, under different circumstances, maybe it’d be different.

[00:00:59] Alisha Searcy: Well, my husband got me this week by calling as soon as he left the house and saying, oh my God, you won’t believe what happened. And he said he that a deer hit his car. Oh boy. Of course I was getting all upset and then he’s like, April fool, so. Oh yeah. Yeah. Why do people do that? Good one.

[00:01:16] Albert Cheng: Well, I hope your husband doesn’t tune into this episode, but anyway, I hope all the other jokes that people have played are harmless. You know, we’re harmless and that all’s good.

[00:01:27] Alisha Searcy: Yes. And that Bambi is okay.

[00:01:30] Albert Cheng: That’s right. That’s right. I. Well, aside from April Fool’s jokes, we’ve got some news to cover. I wanna cover one that’s it’s related to the issues we’ve been talking about regarding the downsizing of potential closure of the Department of Education.

[00:01:42] Alisha Searcy: Yes.

[00:01:43] Albert Cheng: And this one hits closer to home for me because as we’re gonna find out. Um, our guest, Lynn Woodworth actually was a former commissioner at the National Center for Education Statistics as part of the US Department of Education. And that group is responsible for massive data collection efforts. Um, you know, the federal government has been collecting data about our nation’s schools and teachers, public and private.

[00:02:09] Lots of data about our schools and, and, you know, these data collection efforts are one of the things that I guess the breaks have been put on it. And this article is from the Hecker report and it’s actually a report that the title is Losing Homeschool data. You know, I hope I don’t sound like someone that’s griping about this.

[00:02:26] I do some homeschooling research myself and has have relied on the National Household Education Survey, which is one of these federal data sets to study homeschooling. And you know, I actually had. Some of my latest research had been about some trends in the homeschooling population, and we’ve actually used that data to really do a lot of myth busting about homeschooling.

[00:02:47] You know, I think there’s a lot of misconceptions about homeschooling, but you know, thanks to the data that the U-S-D-O-E has, I. Collected over the past 20 years, you know, we’ve been able to really get a kind of evidence-based look at what the population of homeschoolers looks like and, and document the change.

[00:03:04] And you know, I was looking forward to the post covid wave of this data to. Talk about, Hey, how has homeschooling changed? Well, this article kind of gives the skinny about how this data set has been. I mean, I guess the breaks I’ve been put on it. And so unfortunately we don’t know the status of it. Um, won’t be able to look into that to learn about homeschooling and how that’s changed in light of all the changes that we’ve seen through the pandemic.

[00:03:29] So anyway, I wanna point readers to this story. It’s got some commentary about what’s going on and, but you know, just to share a little bit about some of the other kind of practical. Consequences of what’s been happening.

[00:03:42] Alisha Searcy: Yeah, and I’m glad you brought that up. I remember, I guess around Covid, maybe slightly post covid learning that among African Americans in the country homeschooling increased by 9%, which is

[00:03:56] Pretty significant. And as a person who believes in public school choice primarily, but I do also support. Homeschooling. I thought that was very interesting. Very telling about what parents are doing with their kids and, and how they’re choosing different delivery systems. And so it is disappointing to know that we won’t have access to that data and to understand again, what parents are doing, you know, what’s working, what’s not, et cetera.

[00:04:23] Albert Cheng: So. Hmm. I know so we’ll, we’ll have to figure out another way, I guess. Yes, in the meantime, but we’ll see.

[00:04:29] Alisha Searcy: For sure. Well, interestingly, I think my story is relevant to what we’re talking about. It’s a story from Real Clear Investigations entitled School House Limbo. How Low Will Educators Go to Better Grades?

[00:04:47] That’s a catchy title. Loved it. Definitely got my attention. And it’s funny, there’s a little picture of a little girl playing, um, what’s the game? Limbo. Right? Limbo. Thank you. It’s really limbo. Yes. Yeah. Literally limbo. And so this is a really good story for a lot of reasons. So first of all, as you know, and our listeners probably know I kind of fan girl when it comes to superstars in education reform.

[00:05:12] Hmm. Okay. So this article is pointing out. The tremendous work that Carrie Wright has done Yeah. In Mississippi, is now doing in Maryland, where she said to be an old school champion of rigorous standards and pushing back against efforts in other states to boost test scores by essentially lowering their expectations of students.

[00:05:35] If you wanna get me fired up. Let me talk about how states are lowering the standards. You know, I live in Georgia. It’s a, it’s been a big issue. I’ve written about this locally, and I think it was, this is 25, so that must have been in 2023. They changed the cut scores so much, lowered them. That 20,000 kids who were not proficient in reading in Georgia were all of a sudden proficient in reading.

[00:06:02] Yeah, I remember that. Yeah. Yes. And so to see this is happening all over the country. And so we’re talking Oklahoma, Wisconsin, New York. Illinois states that are lowering the standards, lowering the cut scores, and in some cases not even informing parents. That these cut scores have changed. And so they may look at scores and see growth and believe that students are performing when in fact the standards are just lower.

[00:06:31] And so what I appreciate about this article is it talks about how Carrie Wright is not doing that. She’s doing the opposite. And she believes that if you make the standards more rigorous, then students right, will meet the expectations. And so I just appreciate this conversation. I think there’s a lot of concern, and we’ve talked about this, I have certainly brought it up over the last few weeks as we see a lot of changes from the US Department of Education, whether it’s, you know, changing which data we want to collect.

[00:07:02] Mm-hmm. Which you talked about, or whether it’s loosening the standards and the expectations. There are a lot of states now that are. Have already, and there will be more that will apply for more waivers so that they’ll have less accountability. They don’t necessarily want the compliance when it comes to special education.

[00:07:22] They just want block grants so they can kind of have the flexibility to do what they want. And so we just need to be paying attention to this and I appreciate. That this superintendent, Carrie Wright has said, no, I’m gonna have high expectations for all of our kids. Mm-hmm. And I’m gonna do the hard work.

[00:07:39] And I think the last point that I’ll make about this article, the author raises a really good point that, you know, this top down approach is very hard, but it takes real leadership and vision. I think Carrie Wright has that. She’s proven that in her work in Mississippi with the quote unquote, Mississippi Miracle, which we know was not a miracle.

[00:07:56] It was a lot of hard work and resources put in the right place. But there is something to be said about getting the buy-in, mm-hmm. Of principals, of superintendents, of teachers, of making sure that you have the resources. And so again, because she has a track record, I believe that she’ll be able to do it.

[00:08:13] And so I would say to our listeners that Maryland is the state to watch. Because it’s got the leadership. I think the political will is there. If it’s not it, it needs to be there. And we’ve gotta have high expectations for our kids. Mm-hmm. And so I’m looking forward to seeing what she does in the next few months to years to make sure kids know what they need and that they’re actually proficient in reading and math.

[00:08:34] Albert Cheng: Yeah.

[00:08:35] Well thanks for sharing that and flagging that. Yeah. You know, just to hold that line and, and expect more from our kids and yes. For their good. So let’s keep an eye out on Maryland and hopefully you’ll get to fan girl Dr. Kerry Wright some more. Yes. So anyway, that’s it for news on this episode. But coming up after the break, we’re gonna have Dr. James Lynn Woodworth to chat with us about what he’s been up to. So stick around.

[00:09:13] Dr. James Lynn Woodworth is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He recently completed a term appointment as the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics and CES. In his role as Commissioner Dr. Woodworth also served as a member of the Inter-Agency Council on Statistical Policy and its subcommittee on the American Community Survey on the steering committee of the Federal Geographic Data Committee and as a senior statistical official for the US Department of Education.

[00:09:44] Before joining NCES, Woodworth worked as a lead quantitative research analyst at the Center for Research on Educational Outcomes or Credo at Stanford University. Prior to his work at Credo, he served as a distinguished doctoral fellow. In the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, and I might add parenthetically, the best education policy shop in the United States where he earned a doctorate in education policy.

[00:10:11] And Dr. Woodworth is also a veteran, having spent six years as a crypto logic linguist in the US Marine Corps. Dr. Woodworth, welcome to the show. Thank you. I’m glad to be here. Let’s start with a little bit about your own background. I mean, you’ve had a quite a varied work background, including teaching in public schools, being a researcher, you served in the military, and most recently the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics.

[00:10:37] Talk about how your differing career experiences have really became focused on quantitative analysis of K 12 education. You know, how did all that kind of unfold?

[00:10:48] Dr. James Lynn Woodworth: So I had always wanted to be a teacher. Even in high school, I knew I wanted to be a teacher, especially a band director. I loved band, I loved music.

[00:10:56] I loved the things that it allowed me to do, and so that was my plan. That was always the plan. After I finished my degree, I did wanna serve in the military, so I enlisted the Marines for six years so I could do what I felt was my duty and serve. But again, it was always the plan that as soon as that was done.

[00:11:16] Into the classroom, and that’s exactly what happened. I went right into the classroom. I love being in the classroom. I love being a teacher. I love working with students. I wanted to be able to do more to help kids. And so I was going to become a building principal, and so I went to school at night and during the weekends and such and got my master’s degree and was all set to.

[00:11:36] Go down that path and as I was finishing up my degree and I was taking some classes that included research work, kinda realized I was actually really good at it. It was one of those things that I was shocked, as shocked as anybody that you know, I actually really enjoyed working with the data. I was actually pretty good analyst and so I started.

[00:11:59] Thinking, maybe I could do more. Maybe I could have a bigger, a bigger reach if I went into the research world. And so that’s kinda what happened. I was fortunate to work on a few projects while I was at the University of Arkansas in grad school, and that led to me getting some connections to have an interview with Credo, the Center for Research and Education Outcomes at Stanford.

[00:12:22] They were looking for a person I wasn’t. Actually quite ready to go on the job market yet, ’cause I needed to finish my dissertation, but they were willing to hire me and let me work on my dissertation at night, you know, all my time. Yep. So I took the job and, you know, it went, things went well and I, I think I did a lot of good work there with credo.

[00:12:42] Then one day I got a phone call that I was again not expecting to ask if I would be interested in becoming the commissioner at the National Center for Education Statistics. At first, I was a little shocked, and then as I talked to him about it and I kind of expressed my, I. Concerns about places that could be problematic or conflicts.

[00:13:03] Mm-hmm. And basically everyone agreed though that it would be in the best interest of the country for me to take that position. And so I did, and I served as commissioner at NCS about three and a half years and until the end of my term, in 2021. And it was a. I, I mean, I think it was a good experience. I think I did some good, and that’s always been my goal, is to do some good.

[00:13:23] And then after I finished at NCES, credo came knocking at my door again and wanted to know if I’d be interested in coming in and working on the third national charter school study. Mm-hmm. And so I did. And then that translated to me being back with the Hoover Institution full time.

[00:13:40] Albert Cheng: Well, thanks for sharing that and grateful for all the work you’ve done.

[00:13:43] I know I’ve certainly benefited a lot and you’ve added lots of value to many others. Let’s get into data and research a little bit here. Going back to, you know, a nation at risk in 1983, I. Right. There’s been growing knowledge about, you know, test scores and all the data we’ve been collecting since then about the relationship between K 12, academic attainment, global competitiveness.

[00:14:04] Right. And lots of other things that, you know, good education, I guess, is correlated with. Let’s talk about the data landscape and tests like NAEP Pisa, Tims. How have these tests expanded our knowledge and understanding of our education system, education performance, both in the US and around the world.

[00:14:24] Dr. James Lynn Woodworth: It’s been really interesting to look at these scores change over time, especially like the PISA and TIMSS, and what we really see is. That, you know, a lot of countries have moved up in the rankings a lot more since, since these tests began, and they’ve also added a lot of countries. That’s another thing that often gets missed, is that these have grown from like 30 countries to 60, 70 countries in some cases, and so there are a lot more countries participating and that’s useful to allow us to kinda see, you know, where the US ranks, how we perform compared to other countries.

[00:14:59] Of course, you always have to make sure you dig in. You know, and make sure you have the facts. So, you know, for example, on the Pesa test, people get Chinese scores and go, oh wow, look at their scores. Well, yeah, but China only tests four of their provinces. Mm-hmm. They test the four richest provinces. Uh, and so, you know, you have to be a little careful there.

[00:15:17] You have to be, you know, make sure again, you know what you’re actually looking at. But you know, I will say too, though, even those international assessments are useful for comparisons with how we do. With other countries, really the more important assessments as far as US Education policy and changes and improvements have been the state tests tests that were first required by No Child Left Behind.

[00:15:38] Later, they continued the requirement in every Shooting Succeeds Act. Those assessments have been really critical. The state tested, looking at the performance in America and really seeing who the systems are working for and who they’re not. Because this is something a lot of people don’t always understand.

[00:15:58] These assessments actually have a little direct impact on individual students. I mean, there are a few cases where like the end of course, algebra test, you had to pass it.

[00:16:07] Albert Cheng: Mm-hmm.

[00:16:07] Dr. James Lynn Woodworth: In order to get credit for Algebra. Florida had a system where your students had to be proficient on third grade reading, or they were required to repeat the grade because they decided, you know, you’re not ready to move on, which actually turned out to be a good policy.

[00:16:20] If you look into the data. But these assessments aren’t generally used to measure students. They’re actually meant to measure the system. They’re meant to measure how well the systems are serving students, and that was one of the big things that came outta No Child Left Behind. And the requirement for assessments was we actually had really good insight into which students were being helped by the system and which students weren’t being helped by the system.

[00:16:46] And that’s critical. You know, before this, the way people determined if a state or a school was a good school system was, oh, well they send, you know, a quarter of their kids onto college. Yeah, yeah. 5% of their kids go to the Ivy League. They’re a really good school district. Well, that’s great for that quarter of kids, but what about the other three fourths?

[00:17:06] You know, what’s happening with them? And a lot of times those kids were overlooked, but with the assessment requirements where every kid had to take the test for grades three or eight, you had to test in high school. It allowed us to really get a look at how all the students are performing, and especially where did the lower performing students fall.

[00:17:27] Are they little behind or are they way behind? And so that’s really been critical to improving education in America, is getting the look under the hood and actually looking at the different performance levels, because that’s really where the improvement happens. Look, the top kids are always gonna be the top kids they’re gonna go through without any problems.

[00:17:47] It’s the kids that struggle that will either. Get help and get improvement and become useful, productive members of society, or we’ll continue to struggle and always, you know, be shortchanged ’cause they didn’t get the education they needed.

[00:18:01] Albert Cheng: Mm-hmm. Let’s keep talking about the various ways we can peek under the hood, so to speak.

[00:18:07] And you’re just talking about the individual state’s assessments. Let’s talk about NAEPe a little bit ’cause that’s just another way we can try to peek under the hood. And you know, we’ve mentioned on the show, and I think a lot of listeners know familiar, certainly with the decline that happened in the decade before the Covid pandemic.

[00:18:24] And of course now the bigger drops that we’ve seen more recently. Talk about NAEPe along this issue of understanding what’s going on. What does Nate tell us about how the system’s working? You know, closing achievement gaps, what can we learn and what have we learned?

[00:18:39] Dr. James Lynn Woodworth: Yeah, you know, NAEP has been a really useful tool because again, those state tests are really critical and important for understanding what’s happening inside the state.

[00:18:48] But because they’re different tests and they have different standards, they’re not comparable from state to state. So you can’t look at state A and state B and say, well, this one’s doing better than that one. ’cause look at the state test scores. It may be, you know, one state may have an easier test than the other, and so it’s important to have a single assessment that gives you an idea.

[00:19:08] Of how to balance the states, and that’s what NAEP is for. NAEP, originally the idea, it started back in the late sixties. The first, the actual first NA test was given in like 69. Mm-hmm. The idea was we wanna see, it’s the national assessment of education progress. We wanted to see how the country is doing over time.

[00:19:26] Later in really, you know, long the time after the nation at risk came out and such people started actually wanting to see, well. We’re interested in how the country’s doing, but how are the individual states doing as well? And that’s where NAEP really came into its own. And that’s where Nate became a really useful tool because it lets you see, well, how does Mississippi compare to Alabama?

[00:19:48] How does Massachusetts compare to New York? It lets you see how these, you know, not just neighboring states, but you know, any state in the country. How does their educational results compare to these other states and the rest of the country as a whole? The key there is it allows states to see, wow. This state is doing something that’s really working.

[00:20:07] Let’s not just copy what they’re doing ’cause it, ’cause you know, their population may be different from ours or something like that. So we can’t just copy what they’re doing, but let’s go look at what they’re doing and see if there are lessons we can learn from them. And so that’s in my mind, the real power of NAEP.

[00:20:22] And you know, I think. There are a lot of good examples of that and there are a lot of places where it’s important to look at those scores. Now, one interesting thing with NAEP is too, you we’re talking about looking into the hood. So one of the interesting things with NAEP that we’ve found lately is that the NAEP scores haven’t.

[00:20:41] Changed a lot. They’ve been kind of consistent. They’ve actually, I mean, they’ve dropped some over time and of course when the pandemic hit, you know, the bottom fell out. But even before the pandemic, one of the things we could see by looking under the hood and the NAEP scores is oftentimes the average score on a, the national score.

[00:21:00] Or a state score wouldn’t change. But when you looked at the groups underneath, what we saw was that there was some change. It was just canceling each other out. Mm-hmm. So for example, the higher performing students, those at the 75th and 90th percentile, their scores were actually improving. The students at the 10th and 25th percentile, their scores were dropping.

[00:21:20] So we were seeing this pull apart where the top students are improving, the bottom students are falling further behind, but they were improving and falling behind at about the same rate. Mm-hmm. So it actually canceled out when you looked at everyone across the board as a average. So again, that’s where these, these assessments are really useful in getting the, because the average could hide a lot, but when you break out by different.

[00:21:44] Groups, either by income or race, ethnicity or by performance. Then you start to see the differences that are occurring again, that really are what’s driving education outcomes for the country.

[00:21:56] Albert Cheng: Well, let’s shift gears a little bit and talk a little bit specifically more about your work at Credo and actually how many, um, charter reports now have you been on?

[00:22:07] Uh.

[00:22:08] Dr. James Lynn Woodworth: Keep track. There have been three national reports. I now, I didn’t, I wasn’t at Credo when the first report came out. Yeah. But I did work on the second and third national report. There’s the online study report. There was the Urban Study report and there have been a large number of individual state reports.

[00:22:23] That’s right. Yeah. Honestly, I couldn’t, I I’ve lost track too. I couldn’t.

[00:22:29] Albert Cheng: Well, let’s talk about what we’ve learned from this work and look, I mean, charter school enrollment has, has nearly doubled to 3.4 million students in recent years. So what are the main takeaways based on your work of on charter school performance and what are some maybe larger lessons that the Credo data has taught policymakers about?

[00:22:47] You know, the cities, states, or particular networks that are most successful at delivering great academic results, are there places where we’re closing the achievement gaps?

[00:22:57] Dr. James Lynn Woodworth: You know, one of the big findings that we found with the National Charter School studies is that the largest impacts of charter schools have been for underserved students, students who live in urban areas, poor students, minority students.

[00:23:10] Those are the students who have had the biggest benefits from being able to attend charter schools. You know, we see some states with some really strong results, um, in the charge Third national charter school study, for example. Rhode Island was a big standout in both reading and math, almost 90 additional days of learning for the kids who attend to charters.

[00:23:29] I mean, that’s half a school year. Yep. Yep. I mean, that’s huge. New York and Massachusetts also have some strong results. I mean, there are definitely places in states that can be looked at again because they’re getting good results. Of course. One of the caveats that we always make sure we put in place, so is that people need to understand charters are not a panacea.

[00:23:48] They don’t always provide better outcomes. It’s not, you can’t just slap the name charter runs up and say, there, it’s better. It doesn’t work that way. There are charter systems that have better outcomes than others. There are places where we see even, you know, some states that had negative charter outcomes, although not many in the national Charter school study.

[00:24:08] Three. One of the big things again that we do is we break out data by groups so you can see who it’s working for and who it’s not working for. Again, that under the hood.

[00:24:18] Mm-hmm.

[00:24:18] Dr. James Lynn Woodworth: And just like NAEP allows you to compare results for different states. One of the things that we did was we did studies. On the CMOs, the different charter management organizations, these networks and charters, we report out by network name.

[00:24:33] You know how they’re doing. So same concept. You could look and see which charter networks are doing or having good results and are doing well, and you can look and see which ones aren’t. And so you can say, Hey, we’re having problems. We need to help our kids. We need to make changes. Let’s go look at these charter networks that are being successful, not just once.

[00:24:53] They didn’t just pull off one good school. They have a whole chain of good schools. Our hope has always been the hope of, I mean, not just with Credo putting this information out, but honestly the hope of the whole charter movement. If you go back and look at their information, because Credo is not part of the charter movement, I wanna clarify that.

[00:25:10] We, Eva, we, you know, we evaluate it. Well, you know, there are people who. You just go, well, it’s credo. The results are gonna show good. They’re good. Well, that, that’s not true. ’cause in the first national study the results were actually negative and they weren’t good. But that, I think, helped prompt charter schools to take a look at what they were doing.

[00:25:27] Yeah. And, and say, we need to improve what we’re working on. So one of the goals of the charter movement in the early days, it was stated that they wanted to be a laboratory to be able to try things out that then the other traditional schools could learn from. And that’s one of the things that with Credo that we always encourage was, look, here’s how you use these test scores.

[00:25:48] You look and see who’s doing better than you, and you go talk to them. You go find out what it is they’re doing that you’re not, or that they’re not doing, that you are, you look to them for, for lessons. Now again, you can’t just copy what they’re doing ’cause it may not work for your kids, but you can get ideas.

[00:26:04] Mm-hmm. And you can try to figure out how can I adapt what they’re doing to help my kids get a better outcome? And especially in these states where, you know, some of these charter. Systems and these networks, again, you know, they might, they run a lot of schools and they’re having really good results.

[00:26:21] Mm-hmm. So if I was still a public school teacher, I can’t imagine why I wouldn’t want to go talk to those folks. Yeah. You know, when I was a classroom teacher, I would absolutely go talk to people who, who were getting better results than I was and see what I could. Learn from them. See what I could take and apply to my own classroom.

[00:26:38] You know? And that’s really how this should be working. Schools should look around them, see who’s getting better results than they are, and go talk to those people.

[00:26:47] Hmm.

[00:26:47] Dr. James Lynn Woodworth: Because that’s how you improve things. Again, there’s no silver bullet, there’s no instant fix. Just doesn’t exist. But there are people who are having more success than others.

[00:26:58] So again, let’s rely on those folks and talk to them and learn from them.

[00:27:03] Alisha Searcy: Yes. I love that. I wanna go back for a moment talking about more traditional schools. So in recent years, we’ve seen massive federal K 12 education investments, including things like race to the top, several rounds of covid relief and SR funding.

[00:27:20] Can you talk about what the performance data tells us about the strengths and weaknesses of federal K 12 spending, accountability and policy making. As well as whether the over 800 billion annually that America spend is translating to overall academic improvements.

[00:27:40] Dr. James Lynn Woodworth: This could be a tough question, especially when you get into the covid money and the Esser funding.

[00:27:44] So that was a lot of money. I mean, even by, even by federal government standards, that was a lot of money. And the problem is we can’t really know how effective that pandemic spending was because we don’t have a counterfactual. We don’t have a comparison to say, well, this is what would’ve happened if the money hadn’t been there.

[00:28:02] Mm-hmm. If that money hadn’t been there, would the scores have dropped even more? You know, because we saw, you know, the substantial, you know, arguably catastrophic drop in scores after covid. Wouldn’t it been even worse without the spending? Or did the spending really not have that much effect? We don’t have a really good way to know that because again, we don’t have anything to compare it to.

[00:28:24] And then some people argue, well, you can look at other countries that didn’t do this well. Yes, but other countries can be very different from us. There are a lot of reasons. Again, you have to look at the population, you have to look at the situations, the circumstances. So it’s really tough to get on that one Now, on spending in general.

[00:28:40] I mean, there has been a massive increase in spending over the decades in education in America. There’s all kinds of documentation that show that we have. I think it’s very arguable that we’ve seen diminishing returns on spending increases, and there are a couple of reasons that could be. It could be that we’ve reached the point where how we are spending money is the issue.

[00:29:02] Right. Because we’ve taken, you know, we’ve knocked out all the easy things to do with money. You, you, you get extra money. If you think of a, if you always think of it this way, if you have a classroom that’s, you know, an interior classroom with no windows and no lights, kids, it’s gonna be really hard for kids to learn much.

[00:29:20] You can spend $20. Running a wire and hanging a bare bulb in that classroom, and that $20 is gonna have a massive effect on how much learning can take place because all of a sudden the kids can actually see. That doesn’t mean that taking. $20,000 in putting in the lighting system that’s going to adjust and make it feel like they’re outside and adjust for their moods.

[00:29:43] And you know, things like that is going to have a thousand times the impact of that initial light bulb. So again, it really does depend on how you’re using the money. And I do think that that’s something that we need a lot of research on. In order to do that, guess what we need? Test scores. You know, we need to be able to say this change was made in this school.

[00:30:04] How did that affect their. Their performance, the changes weren’t made in these schools. What does their performance look like? Yeah. So, you know, we need data to figure these things out. But again, you know, I keep saying this money’s not a panacea, right? There is no panacea unfortunately there. I think there are people out there who just think if you keep throwing money at it, it’s gonna get better.

[00:30:23] And that’s not necessarily the truth. Now, money has helped. We have seen improvements for some groups. I mean, we’ve seen scores again, come up for groups in places where. There were real shortfalls. I think it’s very arguable that, again, if you have a building that is substandard, if you have a building where the heat doesn’t work, if you have a building where you have a hundred degree temperatures in the summertime and there’s no air conditioning, and the kids are distracted from that, that money can solve those problems.

[00:30:52] But. Just more money and more money and more money doesn’t work. Like I said, it’s not the perfect solution and again, it really depends on how that money is spent, and that’s a place where we’ve had a lot of shortfalls. You know, there’s still not a good data set. I. On school level spending. Most states, they report spending at the district level, and they don’t, in a lot of places, don’t even track the money down to the school level, much less to the classroom level.

[00:31:20] Right.

[00:31:20] Dr. James Lynn Woodworth: So without that data, it’s hard to know what some of these changes are actually accomplishing.

[00:31:26] Alisha Searcy: Yeah, that’s a great point. I, I wanna stay on this topic of funding. And you brought up a great point about it’s not about how much, it’s really about how you’re spending it. And to that point, many major urban school districts, including dc, New York, Boston, are spending.

[00:31:44] Upwards of 24 to $30,000 per pupil, which we would love to have that in Georgia, but that’s a different story while the upwards of 20 to 25% of their students never graduate, and those who do score below basic proficiency in reading and math. So can you talk about. What the data are telling us about larger urban school districts in America, where the achievement gaps are, the widest and the cities where the student performance is the most difficult to improve what’s happening?

[00:32:16] I.

[00:32:17] Dr. James Lynn Woodworth: You know, this kind of proves the argument that money’s not the perfect solution because yeah, you are right. There are some of these places that are spending a lot of money. Of course. Now you have to also consider too, though, you can’t just look at how many dollars are being spent and say, well see, look at the difference.

[00:32:30] Because I live in rural Arkansas, there’s a big difference between cost of living in New York City and where I live, right? And so of course things are gonna cost more in New York and DC and Boston and places like that.

[00:32:42] Mm-hmm.

[00:32:43] Dr. James Lynn Woodworth: But you know, again, it really depends on. Not just how much money, but how the money’s being used.

[00:32:49] There are a lot of situations where. It does seem a little crazy that people just keep doing the same thing over and over again and expect something different to happen. Right. You know, I think someone, there’s some, I, I don’t remember who it was attributed to, but they said it’s the definition of insanity.

[00:33:05] Yes. And, and I know you asked me about major urban districts, but let’s talk a minute about a rural area. Where they changed what they were doing and they got great results. You know, Mississippi had a great state chief in there, Carrie Wright, and she, you know, came in there and said, look, we’re gonna look at what’s working and what isn’t.

[00:33:22] We’re gonna address these shortcomings we have. And they started making changes and Mississippi’s. Performance like a Nate, you know, went through the roof. They started really turning around. It was called the Mississippi Miracle, but that was because you had a person who came in and again, they didn’t just say, well, let’s throw more money at this, or let’s, you know, we need to do these things that everyone’s that we’ve been trying, we just need to do ’em better.

[00:33:46] They actually came in and said, we need to do something different. I think that is the case because like you said, there are a lot of these places where, again, they’re spending tremendous amounts of money and it works for some kids, but there are a lot of kids it doesn’t work for. And again, you know, we see that there are achievement gaps there.

[00:34:05] We see their achievement gaps between rich and poor. We see their, and anytime you have gaps between rich and poor, you’re also gonna have gaps between the different racial groups because. Poverty and race and ethnicity are highly correlated. You know, there’s a strong relationship there, and so that’s going to come into play.

[00:34:23] You know, there’s a lot of evidence that there are huge economic differences based on household type. This is actually something that I have a, a work that I’m doing called The Tectonics Project, and on our website we have data on household incomes and for example, in many places, a single mother household.

[00:34:42] With children has an income that’s about a quarter. Of the income of married couples with children. Wow. And obviously, not only do you have this single mother, she, you know, the family’s earning less. They’re probably not getting to pick where they wanna live, so they can’t pick to live in an area with good schools.

[00:35:00] And it’s a single mother. She may not have as much time to work with the students on their work. So poverty’s really a big driver. A lot of these achievement gaps, uh, they often get attributed to, again, things that are associated with poverty, but it’s really poverty, that’s the big driver. And cities, of course, have more poverty as far as a.

[00:35:20] Well, it’s not fair to say they have more poverty ’cause a lot of rural areas that have a lot of poverty. Maybe it’s better to say there’s more variation in income levels in urban settings. You have more wealthy people in closer proximity to people in poverty. So I think that’s where we get a lot of those splits.

[00:35:36] So again, let’s look at changing what we’re doing in education and come up with ways to help improve things for those students in poverty. You know, back in the eighties there were all kinds of studies that showed that boys did better in math and science than girls did. And it really actually, I guess it started in the seventies.

[00:35:56] And so instead of just saying, oh, well, I. They said, well, let’s look for ways we can improve math and science education for girls. And they did that. And you know what? It worked. Mm-hmm. The gaps are still there, but they closed dramatically. They got much smaller. In fact, it’s interesting because, you know, educators did all these things to help improve outcomes for girls in math and science, and close that gap.

[00:36:20] Interestingly, girls did better in reading than boys did, and they did nothing to address that gap. And guess what? It still exists.

[00:36:28] Yeah.

[00:36:28] Dr. James Lynn Woodworth: So, and again, so I think that’s the key here is if you wanna close these achievement gaps, it’s not just money. I mean, obviously you have to have enough funds to be able to do what you need to do, but once you get to that enough level, it’s about using those funds appropriately.

[00:36:43] And that means designing plans to actually help. Close the gaps actually help make a change. You know, the Obama administration had proposed my Brother’s keeper, and unfortunately it hit a lot of headwinds because people said, well, this is only about helping boys. What about helping girls? And ironically, the the steps that my brother’s keeper were.

[00:37:04] Was wanting to take were the exact steps that they used to help improve outcomes for girls in reading to math were the things they were talking about doing in My Brother’s Keeper. But the reason my brother’s keeper focused on minority, specifically Hispanic and especially black boys, is ’cause that’s the group that falls.

[00:37:24] Furthest behind. Mm-hmm. In fact, in every subject, when you look at NAEP scores and state test scores in every test, boys do better in math and science. And girls do better in reading for every subgroup, except for black students or black students. Black girls do better than black boys in reading, and black girls also do better than black boys in math and science.

[00:37:45] Mm-hmm. So if you address achievement gaps, if you want. You know, address these students who are not getting a good education, who are graduating, but not actually getting the skills. I would suggest people start, and I know this is anathema right now, ’cause you know, there people are gonna claim it’s DEI, but you know, you should start with a group that’s having the most struggle.

[00:38:04] And so there are, you know, like I said, there are ways to help improve things, but not if you don’t change what you’re doing.

[00:38:11] Alisha Searcy: Yes. Well said. Thank you for that really helpful explanation. I think it’s practical and makes a whole lot of sense. I appreciate that. I wanna talk about what’s happening nationally, but specifically about your role.

[00:38:25] I. As a former commissioner, so the National Center for Education Statistics has been in the news quite a bit. And of course, as its former commissioner, I would love for you to talk about NC S’S basic functions, its role in the federal educational landscape, and the fundamental importance of collecting data.

[00:38:45] And you talked about this a little bit earlier. Can you talk also about how those data collected and disseminated to state and local policy makers, how it’s disseminated, and what state cities or jurisdictions do the best job of using data to drive improvements in student achievement? I. That was a lot.

[00:39:05] I know.

[00:39:06] Dr. James Lynn Woodworth: Yeah. So the National Center for Education Statistics was established in 1867. A lot of people don’t realize that. It’s one of the oldest statistical agencies in the country, and again, it’s about a hundred years older than the Department of Education was, and it was established because. People in the state who were trying to organize the education and come up with education policies in their states realized this would be a lot easier if we could actually know what other people are doing and again, see what works for them and what doesn’t.

[00:39:38] And so it was, the states were a lot of the factor in driving the establishment of NCES. When NCS was first established, there was a quote from one of the early commissioners who said. This was around the fifth or sixth year of NCSS existence who said for the organization there was no comprehensive list of schools in the country at any level.

[00:40:03] So there was no, not even any way of knowing what schools existence. So someone could show up in your community and have a diploma for dentistry or for medicine from the university of whatever. And of course no one in that area had any way to know if that was even a real school or not, could have been a totally fake, you know, diploma.

[00:40:22] And there was no way for anyone to know, because there was, wasn’t even a list of all the different universities or schools in the country. So that’s the most fundamental thing at the most fundamental level that NCS functions at, for example, was what we call the common core of data, which to be clear, was named long before common core curriculum ever came along.

[00:40:41] Had nothing to do with the common core of data. Was the data collection that, you know, lists enrollment in public schools, it lists how many kids are enrolled, what the kids look like, their characteristics, it down to the grade level. You know, that’s a really important data set because if you’re doing any kind of research and you want to say, my results represent the nation, you have to be able to balance the profile of the people in your results to match the profile of the people in the country.

[00:41:09] I. And to do that, you need to know what that profile is, it’s called, and we use a system called Waiting to make that happen. So you know, that’s one of the most fundamental basic necessities of any research for anybody. NCS is the ones who were providing that. They also had a similar study that was called the Private School Study that collected the same information for private schools.

[00:41:31] NCS collects information on all aspects of education. pre-K preschool data. There’s not a lot of that out there. They collect information on K 12. They collect information on post-secondary studies, post-secondary institutions. How much does it cost to attend this university? How many people major in this occupation at that university?

[00:41:52] You know, what are the outcomes for people who go through different education systems? What are the adult levels of education? This is a lot of information that. People need to make decisions about their own education. Yeah. If you wanna decide where you wanna go to college, it’s very useful to know how big is the program of study for the area you’re wanting to major in at that university?

[00:42:14] How much does it cost? Am I gonna be able to afford this? For public schools, you know, I’m getting ready to move. I can choose between this community or that community. Well, which one has the best test scores? Which ones have the best outcomes? Again, I can look at that data and I can make that decision for myself, but someone has to provide me with that data, and that was the role of NCES.

[00:42:37] That’s what NCS was established to do. Report on the condition of education in the various states and territories of the United States. And so, you know, it’s a really critical mission. I know a lot of state and local policy makers, you know, look at the data because they would tell me, I’d see people at conferences or at meetings, and they would say, oh, you know, we use this data set all the time.

[00:43:00] We use that data set. This is so useful. Sometimes they would say, could you add x? Could you. Put this into a data set, and a lot of times we would look at it and if we found there was a need, we would do that because again, we were flexible to the popula. You know, the role of NCES, just like the other federal statistical agencies, is to provide data.

[00:43:21] You’re supposed to provide data to the administration, which is the executive branch. You’re supposed to provide data for Congress to use in writing laws. You’re supposed to provide data that’s reliable, that the judiciary can look at and use when they’re making decisions, legal decisions, you’re supposed to buy data for the public to use, and those are the key missions.

[00:43:42] And if a agency like NCS is meeting those missions, then they’re successful. One of the things I tried really hard to do at NCS was to speed up the process. Bureaucracies are slow. We all know that, we’ve all painfully felt that. So one of the whole reasons I took the position at NCS was I thought, you know what?

[00:44:00] I think I can help streamline some of this stuff and, and move things along faster because I was a huge user of NCS data and I planned to be after I left NCS. So I knew if I could improve the speed that the data comes out with, that, that would be a good thing for the population, for the country and for me personally, just to be blunt.

[00:44:18] And so I did, I really focused on that. And so I do think that there are critical things that could still be improved at NCS, but I also think it’s a critical agency to maintain.

[00:44:29] Mm-hmm.

[00:44:31] Alisha Searcy: Very well said. Absolutely important to maintain. Here’s my final question. This has been so helpful and very informative.

[00:44:39] I think we could agree that the current landscape in K 12 education is as divided and complicated as we’ve seen in decades. And not to be depressing, but we’ve seen disappointing make trends. Pandemic driven learning loss and contentious public debates about the federal role. And so as a researcher and expert on education data, could you share some of the projects that you and Hoover are working on that will give us some hope?

[00:45:07] And what data should state and local policy makers be looking at more carefully to drive improvements in student achievement?

[00:45:15] Dr. James Lynn Woodworth: One of the big projects, like I said, mentioned earlier that I’m working on is a project called, we call it Tectonics, and we call it tectonics. As we’re looking at the things that we think are ground shifting that are gonna cause earthquakes in the education system.

[00:45:29] And a lot of these are, you know, again, it’s looking at data points, looking at things that are in our country that are shifting. You know, we have massive. Characteristics shifts in the students in our country. We have massive population shifts across our country. There are states that are losing people that are, or people are, you know, leaving the state in droves.

[00:45:50] We have other states where people are streaming into the state and it’s causing incredible levels of growth. Both those have their. Positives and negatives there. There are opportunities and challenges in both those situations, but it’s really important though for people to kinda understand where their community fits within that dataset.

[00:46:08] And so that’s one of the things that we’re working on there with Tectonics. And we’ve got a, a lot of topics that we are covering and we talk about population shift, demographic changes. I mean, the fact is. America is changing in how it looks. The characteristic of our student body is changing and it’s gonna continue to change.

[00:46:24] And that’s not a bad thing, it’s just a fact. Changes in differences is really where people should be looking. Again, you know, I know I’ve said this a couple of times, but it’s, it does, it matters. If someone else is having different outcomes than you’re having, look and see what they’re doing differently from you.

[00:46:42] It could be something they’re doing that you’re not. It could be something that they’re not doing that you are, but look and see if you can figure out the cause for those differences. Again, look under the hood, look to see do they have different, you know, are their spending levels different? If their spending levels are different, well, is are they higher or lower?

[00:46:59] If their spending levels aren’t different, are they using that, spending some other way? Look at their classroom structure, look at the curriculum that they use, especially from one state to the other. Having different curriculums could really make a big difference in, in the outcomes for kids. And that’s one of the things, some of the type of stuff we’re looking.

[00:47:17] At the Tectonics Project, we break down the data. We give both a national overview, but then we also give a hyper-local view. ’cause we have a lot of these data points that are broken out by school district. So you can see what your district looks like compared to your neighbors. You can see what your district looks like compared to another district that has similar characteristics to you, but maybe has different outcomes.

[00:47:39] And so that’s, you know, again, a key activity that we’re, we’re working on is trying to get data available to the public. By the way, I will say a lot of the data that we use in the Tectonics project comes from federal data systems and comes from federal sources. So again, those federal data systems are really important.

[00:47:57] Another big project at Hoover is called the Education Futures Council. I. This is a group that is looking at what education is and what education could possibly become. And again, they’re not per, it’s not prescriptive. They’re not saying, here’s the solution because again, there is no one solution, but they’re saying, I.

[00:48:16] Here are the things you should look at to figure out a solution, and they give some guidance to help educators, to help policy makers have an idea of where could things go and what do we need to look at in order to give some directionality to this instead of just, you know, you don’t want people randomly trying things in the dark.

[00:48:34] You want them to really be thoughtful about the changes they make and what those outcomes could be. So that Education Futures Council has some really good advice. It’s relied on a number of experts from across the country and around the world, and they just recently released a report called Ours to Solve Once and for All, and this highlights, you know, the path to revitalizing public education in the country.

[00:49:00] Albert Cheng: Thank you. That’s great, Lynn. Thanks for your time and for being with us on this episode.

[00:49:05] Alisha Searcy: Yes. Yeah. Thank you.

[00:49:19] Albert Cheng: That was a lot of fun to sit down with dr. Woodworth, and I hope you enjoyed that, Alisha.

[00:49:23] Alisha Searcy: I did. Such important insights. It’s such a critical time, so, you know, very timely interview, very important.

[00:49:30] Albert Cheng: Well, that’s gonna take us to the end of our show, and let me leave you with first the Tweet of the Week Parents for Reading Justice.

[00:49:37] And actually they tweeted a piece by our friend Robert Pio from his new Substack, fairly new. You just started it and I’d encourage listeners, if you haven’t checked it out, go check it out. The title of the article is Cracking the Code Behind Dismal a. Grade reading scores. And there he talks about some of the reading, research, this idea of a decoding threshold.

[00:49:58] So if you don’t know what that is, go check it out. Punchline, there is, we may need to focus more on multi-syllabic decoding as a critical skill for reading. So check it out. But until then, Alisha, thank you again for co-hosting. Always a pleasure, always. And I hope the rest of you that you’ll join us. For next week’s episode, we’re gonna have Dr.

[00:50:18] Jeffrey Myers. He’s a widely acclaimed author of 54 books, including the one that we’re gonna talk about, f Scott Fitzgerald, A biography as this month FYI. Marks the hundredth anniversary of the publication of the classic, the Great. Gaby, so get your, uh, kind of roaring twenties, you know, vibes on, and join us next week.

[00:50:42] So see you right? Take us back to high school. It’s gonna be great. There you go. Hey, it’s Albert Cheng here, and I just wanna thank you for listening to the Learning Curve podcast. If you’d like to support the podcast further, we’d invite you to donate to the Pioneer institute at pioneerinstitute.org/donations.