Johns Hopkins' Dr. David Steiner on Academic Quality, School Choice, & Accountability

The Learning Curve David Steiner

Alisha Searcy: [00:00:00] Welcome back to the Learning Curve podcast. I’m your co-host, Alisha Thomas Searcy, and have a guest co-host in with us today, Helen Baxendale. Welcome back.

Helen Baxendale: Thank you, Alisha. It’s always nice to be with you.

Alisha Searcy: Always. I enjoy hearing that accent and having great conversations with you about education, so glad to have you.

So of course, we have to jump in and talk about some articles. What are you reading out there today?

Helen Baxendale: Well, thanks, Alisha. The article that caught my eye this week was titled The Quiet Erosion of the Five Day School Week, and it’s by Anna Egalite, and she’s a education scholar at North Carolina State. And she’s written an interesting piece about the phenomenon of school districts not moving [00:01:00] formally to a four-day school week, which many have, but actually the instance of districts populating their instructional term with, you know, seemingly random teacher only days or non-student days such that, you know, it averages out to almost being a four-day week, even though it’s not, you know, formalized as every Monday or every Friday being student free as it is in some districts.

And so this is, I think, something that’s kind of gone under the radar of a lot of education policy people. Certainly it has not escaped the notice, I’m sure, of the parents who are in those school districts who, as the article notes, have to scramble to find alternate care arrangements when their kids aren’t in school.

So it’s a good piece of research she’s done here from, I think, what is her local school district of Wake County Public Schools perhaps. But it’s certainly a phenomenon that is more generalized across the country and one that’s worth monitoring, as we all know that instructional [00:02:00] time corresponds with generally better student outcomes.

So one to watch, I think.

Alisha Searcy: It is. And I thought that the four-day school week was more of a COVID thing or more- Mm-hmm … with teacher shortages. I didn’t realize that it was actually still happening. And I think I also assumed that if you’re having four days, then that means that the school day is longer, so they’re still making up those hours.

Is that not the case?

Helen Baxendale: I think there are still requirements to hit a certain number of hours, but they might sort of slightly lengthen the school year to allow for these student-free days. So I think mandated total hours are still being met, but over a longer period and with less predictability than parents would, I imagine, prefer.

So it’s not optimal, I think, for the convenience of parents and probably also the learning of students when every month or so they’re only in school for four days a week.

Alisha Searcy: Right. Very interesting. Well, thank you [00:03:00] for bringing that forward. I need to read that article. Like I said, it wasn’t on my radar before.

I was like, “Oh, that’s a thing of the past.” So apparently it’s not, so I’ve got some reading to do on that. Thank you.

Helen Baxendale: Yeah, the long tail of COVID strikes again.

Alisha Searcy: Yes, it does, in more ways than one. So the article that came to my attention was from a local news station in Baltimore. The title is School Choice, Academic Standards, His Contract: Next Baltimore School CEO Talks Issues.

So a new superintendent or CEO has been hired for Baltimore City Schools after the previous superintendent served for 10 years. And very interesting article to me. What really caught my attention, Helen, is in the article the reporter points out that in Maryland, the amount of students enrolled in charter schools since 2010 has more than doubled, and the amount of homeschoolers in Maryland has also doubled in the past decade.

And so the superintendent or CEO was being asked, “In your view, why are more families choosing to [00:04:00] leave the traditional public education setting?” His response is, I quote, “I can’t speak directly to know what the intent of parents are, but what I can say as a parent is that parents, they’re really saying they want choice.”

I don’t think I’ve ever heard a school CEO or superintendent openly, publicly, unapologetically acknowledge that parents want choice. He goes on to say that school choice is the idea that parents can choose where to send their children to school instead of being forced into a school based on where they live, and it’s an idea that he supports.

He says parents should have a choice. Choice is actually good, and what he wants to do is to be able to strengthen their public schools and charter schools so it can be, and can continue to be, a place of choice for parents in the future. Whoa. How about that? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Very refreshing. Very refreshing, right?

Same word.

Helen Baxendale: Mm-hmm.

Alisha Searcy: And so that’s exciting to me because in the work that I do, I look for [00:05:00] educators, education leaders, policymakers who get it, that we shouldn’t focus on the type of school, right? Let parents choose that, but let’s focus on having high-quality public schools so that there are actually choices.

So I don’t know- Mm-hmm … what else this guy has in store, but I’m excited. And not- Yeah … this is all about charter schools and public school choice, but I think it speaks to the mindset that if you want all of your public schools to be great so that parents actually have choices, that means that you really are gonna focus on where the high needs are, you’re gonna focus on innovation, so I love that.

The last thing that I’ll mention in this article, it talks about some of the challenges that he’s inheriting. A school system with some of the state’s lowest attendance, lowest graduation rates, has a challenge with English proficiency, and average SAT scores. So he certainly has some work ahead of him, and I will pay lots of attention because I [00:06:00] wanna see what he does.

But also, as I look at his track record, he’s got some ties from Atlanta and Georgia, where I live. He also went to Morehouse. I went to Spelman. So I’m gonna reach out to this guy and see how we can- Mm-hmm … be supportive, and I think we all, all of us who care about public schools and schools doing well, need to make sure that he has everything he needs to be successful.

You know?

Helen Baxendale: Indeed, indeed, and he, he should have help at the state level. I believe Maryland has recently recruited the very successful longtime state superintendent from Mississippi.

Alisha Searcy: Yeah.

Helen Baxendale: So all things could be moving in the right direction in, in Maryland and Baltimore, and we wish him well.

Alisha Searcy: Yes, we do.

Absolutely. Well, thank you for that. We’ve got a great show ahead of us today. We have on with us Dr. David Steiner, who is the executive director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy, and professor of education at Johns Hopkins. So make sure you stick around. We will be right back[00:07:00]

Dr. David Steiner is Executive Director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy and Professor of Education at Johns Hopkins University. In 2020, he finished serving as a member of the Maryland State Board of Education and the Maryland Commission for Innovation and Excellence in Education.

He currently serves on the board of the Relay Graduate School of Education. Most recently, he was appointed to the Practitioner Council at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. In 2009, Dr. Steiner was appointed Commissioner of Education for New York State, in 2005 as the Clara and Larry Silverstein Dean at the Hunter College School of Education, and in 2003, the Director of Education at the National [00:08:00] Endowment for the Arts.

Dr. Steiner consults regularly with the federal government, state education leaders, educational reform organizations, and universities. He has addressed audiences on both sides of the Atlantic and authored book chapters and more than 50 articles. His most recent book, A Nation at Thought: Restoring Wisdom in America’s Schools, was published in 2023.

He holds a BA and MA degrees from Balliol College, Oxford University, and a PhD in political science from Harvard University. Welcome to the show, Dr. Steiner

Dr. David Steiner: Delighted to be with you.

Alisha Searcy: So let’s jump in. Across your career, you’ve been a strong proponent of K-12 education focused on classic liberal arts with standards and curricula grounded in high-quality academic content.

Can you share with us the importance of democratic education transmitting Western principles to teachers and students?

Dr. David Steiner: Yes. First of all, democratic education isn’t [00:09:00] necessarily a liberal arts education, although they may overlap. Democratic education is, in a way, a response to Aristotle’s observation in his politics that every regime, be it tyrannical, oligarchic, or democratic, has to educate its population differently in order to maintain itself.

Liberal arts education is not explicitly political. It is, in the classic sense of the word, the education of the arts and of the mind. The primary purpose of liberal arts education is to transmit what in our best judgment is, to quote Matthew Arnold in 1869, “The best which has been thought and said.” Now, obviously, people disagree about that.

It changes across cultures and generations, but as a society, as a teacher, that is what we’re aspiring to when we speak about liberal arts education. It’s [00:10:00] cultivating judgment, aesthetic appreciation, ethical sensibility, cognitive development. It’s all about the furnishing of the mind. So in terms of education today, there’s obviously a push towards the utilitarian, that is, trying to prepare children to be useful members of society, to be productive economically.

But equally important is that they not be a complete bore to themselves when they’re alone and when they’re grown up. There has to be within themselves, within their thinking and their thoughts and their memories, something that is worth keeping the company of, namely the furnishings of their mind, and that is what the purpose of education is, in my judgment, above all others.

Helen Baxendale: Dr. Sterne, you had me at the invocation of Matthew Arnold, one of my heroes, so thank you for that. Our listeners might have detected a, a lovely transatlantic accent. And so I’m wondering if you [00:11:00] could share with us a little bit about some of your formative and higher educational experiences in England, and bring a comparative lens perhaps to the two systems that I assume you know best, being the English and, and the American.

And what are some of the respective strengths and weaknesses that you’ve observed perhaps across the English-speaking world if you want to roam beyond the UK and the United States?

Dr. David Steiner: Well, first of all, the England of 2026 is certainly not the England of my childhood. In the 1970s, when I was growing up, the focus was still very much on depth rather than breadth.

After taking the so-called O levels at 15 or 16 years of age in multiple subjects, English students who stayed in school, and not all of them did, chose three subjects for in-depth study, and then if they advanced to university, usually majored, as we would say in the American context, in just one subject.

In my own case, the result is that my mathematical knowledge is multiple [00:12:00] years behind my knowledge of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 2, Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, and the canon law of Henry VIII’s divorce. Those may not strike the listeners as absolutely seminally important topics, but studying anything in depth is a unique educational experience, and the British system really prioritized it.

The American system, as of course your listeners know, insists on English and math all the way through, and science and history, and a number of other subjects often. So the advantage of the British system is that in-depth learning, that sense of being really masterful in a small number of areas. The advantage of the American system, if it’s well taught, is a continuing education across disciplines that ensures, at least in theory, that you have real vocabulary, not only [00:13:00] in one topic, but you are literate in mathematics, in science, in history, and in literature.

The universities mirror that. So in the United States, really the freshman and sophomore year are equivalent in many ways to the British first year of university because already you’re specializing in that first year in England, whereas in America, you’re still sort of finding your feet, finding what interests you, and it’s really only in the junior and senior years that you specialize

Alisha Searcy: Dr.

Steiner, I have a question about your article that you wrote in The 74. Very interesting article entitled, “A Fast Food Menu of Schools Doesn’t Mean Kids Will Get a Nourishing Education.” Can you talk to us about this piece?

Dr. David Steiner: All else being equal, I am a strong supporter of choice for one very simple reason: justice.

More affluent American families have multiple choices. They can go to very expensive districts [00:14:00] where the tax rates are very high, property tax rates are high, and choose very good public schools. They can choose expensive private schools. Those are advantages not known to less affluent parents unless they have vouchers, tax credits, and so forth, and even then, the options may be limited.

But increasing choice just like that doesn’t guarantee a much wider array of options that are of quality, and the parallel I use is that if you have choice in restaurants, but your income is extremely limited, you may be choosing between Burger King, Wendy’s, and McDonald’s, but most of us would say that that’s a rather limited kind of choice.

So that’s the first point. The second point I make is that choice of quality schools, if we are going to support vouchers and other forms of public money to give parents more options, depends on supply. You have [00:15:00] to increase the supply of good private schools or good schools that are at least the recipient of public money.

And I detail, I won’t bore your listeners today, but I detail in the piece a number of strategies, political and economic, that might increase that supply The third point I make is that even if you have a sense of a choice of a good school, or at least not a bad school, that doesn’t tell you very much in the United States, because as we know from a lot of data, the range of quality of teachers in any given school in the United States is one of the broadest in the world.

Meaning that almost inevitably, even in a single school, you will encounter a teacher who’s in the bottom 25% of the teaching effectiveness range and the top 25%, and those two will [00:16:00] be very, very far apart in their effectiveness. It matters tremendously which teacher you get, and there’s a lot of, again, a lot of data on this, but very roughly, moving from a mediocre teacher to a strong teacher can be the equivalent of half a year’s more of learning per year.

Now, if you magnify that across the years, you can see it’s life-changing. So I also argue that parents need to be much more aggressive consumers of finding out who’s teaching their child, if they can, and asking teachers to share more about their own style, their own curriculum, the textbooks they’re using online so that parents can make more informed judgments.

That may strike some people as a pipe dream, but we certainly know more about the calories and the fat in the food we eat at [00:17:00] McDonald’s than we know in most cases about the quality of the teacher teaching our child, and that seems to be, in my view, a rather strange phenomenon given the impact on a whole life that that teacher or those teachers will represent.

I also argue, finally, that when the public gives money to a parent to choose the school, including private schools, that that parent sends their child to, there should be public accountability, and that means tests every year, and I would argue preferably the same state test as is taken by public school children, so that there can be meaningful comparisons between the schools that are regular public schools and the schools that are funded by public dollars

Helen Baxendale: Dr.

Steiner, thank you. You just detonated a common sense bomb, I think, and I’m [00:18:00] momentarily sort of collecting myself to work out which of the many threads I wanna pull on in what you just said. But let’s stick with your article in the 74, which I’d implore our listeners to go and read. But there were two things I wanted to prompt you on a little further.

I think our listeners would actually love to hear your brief summation of strategies to improve the supply side of schools, particularly as we now have over 25 states that have expanded the sort of private school choice mechanisms with vouchers and ESAs and so on. And the other question I had, and this is particularly sort of pertinent for me at the moment as someone who’s about to have children entering school for the first time, is what are some quick heuristics that a parent can rely on to approximate teacher quality?

Dr. David Steiner: Sure. So on the first one, and it does get a little technical, but we need low-interest loan programs or credit enhancements or both for proven operators, that is charter networks and high-performing faith-based or community-based [00:19:00] schools, because otherwise the upfront costs are often prohibitive. We need to expand public bonding authority so that we can finance private school facilities serving students with vouchers or educational savings accounts.

We need discounted leases for proven, again, proven non-district operators who want to rent property so they can create schools. And we really need a predictable, clear, and publicly accessible set of rules governing where schools can be built and how applications are evaluated. It’s a really gnarly thicket in most cases that you have to negotiate if you’re actually trying to start a school.

I think people who’ve never tried it are just often overwhelmed by the red tape. So expansion grants for schools with proven track record, greater support [00:20:00] for schools that serve high-need students groups, stabilization funds for new schools. We really need a lot more support to make it attractive for proven providers, again, not for just mom-and-pop schools, but for proven providers to expand the offerings of schools.

Now, in terms of what you can do, in the case of public schools, of course, the first thing you do is you try to negotiate the state’s website and look up the math and ELA results of the school that you are considering. Again, that’s easier in some cases than others. Texas has a pretty impressive and fairly transparent place to go.

Other states, you kinda need a PhD in working through the web to meaningful information because it’s often coded, and it’s often difficult to [00:21:00] understand. But that is absolutely the first place to go, and in some of the big cities like New York, there are independent guides published to the schools which are fairly often updated and are useful.

The second thing, and I know that for parents who are carrying two jobs or who have lots of young children, it’s tough, but going to actually visit a school, walking down the corridors, even if you can get permission popping your head into the classroom, is really valuable. I had the privilege when I was commissioner of New York State to visit lots of schools, and one of the things that struck me was it really didn’t take long, even physically entering a school environment, to get a sense of whether the school was a place where learning was happening.

Was there chaos during the in-between periods between classes? Was the school [00:22:00] clean? Were there examples of student work everywhere? What was the general ambiance? So that actually is important because a school culture, as again we know from research, has an enormous impact. So the more you can actually familiarize yourself with the school, the better.

And then, you know, meeting with the principal, again, if the principal, he or she is willing, and asking questions about what the curriculum is. Are they using a so-called HQIM, high-quality instruction materials, or do teachers get a lot of latitude to kinda make it up as they go along? Which sounds like it’s a good idea because teachers know their students well, but we actually know that teachers, about 80% of the time, dumb down materials they pull from the Internet and mix it up in ways that only, you know, a magician could applaud, and then give your child a kind of curated [00:23:00] list like a DJ, which is unique and can’t be penetrated from any responsible perspective.

So the more homework you do, the more you’ll know, but it’s pretty imperfect.

Alisha Searcy: I love the way you respond to these questions, Dr. Steiner. I wanna ask about another piece about your article in the ’74, and you talked about this a little bit earlier when you talk about the quality of teachers. According to the data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or the OECD, you say that the spread of teacher effectiveness in this country is wide That’s what you write in the ’74 piece.

“More strikingly, variation in teacher quality is far more pronounced within America’s public schools than between them.” End quote. So can you discuss more about the general quality of teacher preparation programs in America, and what it means for the teacher supply both in public and private school choice programs?

Dr. David Steiner: Yes. I’ve been a, a [00:24:00] long time critic of schools of education, and perhaps have come by that honestly since I ran one for eight years, one of the largest in New York City, and introduced videotaping of student teachers, tried to strengthen the clinical preparation, and really tried to put an emphasis on the effectiveness of our graduates in the classroom rather than how many volumes of John Dewey they had or hadn’t read, or Paolo Freire or Howard Gardner.

I mention those three ’cause they’re among the three most-read authors in American schools of education. The problem is that our teacher preparation is approximately where our medical schools were in 1895. Yes, 1895 is fair. By 1910, after the famous Flexner Report, there began to be real emphasis in medical training on clinical rotations, on [00:25:00] residencies, and that changed everything.

Hospitals began to save patients rather than kill them. In our field, in education, we’re stuck right where medicine was before all those reforms. You know, we do two and a half years of textbook learning, or one and a half years of textbook learning, and then one semester, often, of clinical practice, and that clinical practice in schools is supervised by two adults, most often an adjunct professor who hasn’t been in school for many years, and a harried mentor teacher from the school.

Those two adults have no particular training in preparing teachers. Their own observations of the poor student teacher are not normed, so often the young person is getting completely contradictory advice. They’re not using videos, so they’re just trying to scratch something on their pad, and then often [00:26:00] multiple days later, the meeting is one in which both parties are trying to recall what did or did not happen in the classroom.

It’s truly awful, to use a technical term. It’s really not a way to prepare professionals. And then, of course, we have a profession in which you basically have to choose between being a teacher for the rest of your career or going into the principal administrative route. Highly efficient and effective systems, particularly for example in the Far East, offer far more professional pathways.

You can become a mentor teacher as a professional. You can become a curriculum expert as a professional. You can become a data specialist. You don’t have to just do one of those two routes. And then our pay scales are really bizarre. It’s not so much the entry pay, though that is often risibly low in some parts of the United States.

It’s [00:27:00] what we call this compression of the salary scale. That is, you can be a teacher for decades, and when you finish, what you’re earning is really not equivalent to what is being earned by others in professions who have stayed for the same amount of time. Part of the reason is that we pay an enormous amount of our educational dollars for the retirees.

Once you retire at 55, you’re often well taken care of. But we’ve got this lopsided. We need to make the professional years much more attractive. And that’s just part of it. I could go on about our barriers to entry into the profession, which are much too low and not effective. But we can’t have high barriers if we can’t attract a good talent pool.

So it’s a vicious cycle. The profession isn’t attractive, so we attract less able candidates with wonderful, wonderful exceptions of course. But in general, less able candidates. Then we treat [00:28:00] them ineffectively, and then we complain, you know, when our results haven’t budged in 50 years

Helen Baxendale: Dr. Steiner, how do you think all, all of those invidious factors are liable to intersect with the growth of private school choice now?

It sort of strikes me that we have at the same time as, you know, all of these issues with the, you know, teacher preparation and so on are going largely unaddressed. Burgeoning of choice in a lot of states, particularly, you know, Florida and Arizona. And also, you know, perhaps a positive development of maybe mainstreaming of ideas like the science of reading and an introduction of sort of evidence-based practice, at least as, as it concerns that.

How do you see all of these things intersecting? And in particular, are there things we can learn from international models that have pluralistic systems like the United States does, but perhaps have better accountability and quality mechanisms?

Dr. David Steiner: Yeah, I’ll start with your second point. My colleague, Ashley Berner, here at The Institute at Johns [00:29:00] Hopkins, has written extensively about pluralism and about countries such as Holland, which funds thirty-six different kinds of schools, public funding, including Montessori and Jewish and Christian schools.

And of course, the reason that those schools get strong outcomes is that they do have to share in a core curriculum that is tested by a state exam. So no matter what kind of school you’re at and what kind of culture that school has, which can respond to parental wishes, the academic core is held accountable.

And that, that is crucial. If you just compare, for example, Arizona and Florida, both of which have done, you mentioned Arizona have done a lot to enhance choice. It’s a world apart, right? Florida has done quite extensive accountability. You must report scholarship student scores to parents. You have to submit those [00:30:00] scores to independent research organizations.

You have to account for year to year learning gains where you have at least thirty scholarship-based students. I still would prefer if they restricted the list of tests that could be used. It’s an alphabet soup. And frankly, what does a parent know about comparing the CTP with the aimswebPlus with the Adam?

These are all allowed tests in Florida. They are normed, and they’re better than nothing, but it’s still a problem But it’s a lot sounder than Arizona, which very frankly, with its empowerment scholarship accounts and its private school tax credit scholarships, has exactly zero accountability. There’s no testing required whatsoever.

So this has not changed, frankly, since Arizona, you could say, led the nation in its push for charter schools, but then again did the same [00:31:00] thing. This is years ago. There was very little accountability, and some of them were so dreadful they had to be closed, with all the kerfuffle that that causes for children who then have to be moved.

So I think that the lesson is that accountability matters. Now, in terms of teacher quality, very hard to say. The data suggests quite strongly that when you control for demographics, Catholic schools do better than public schools. Now, that’s not terribly surprising. Catholic schools have a unified cultural vision.

Their teachers are, as it were, motivated by a shared commitment to certain fundamental educational values, and the learning environment is sustained by many hundreds of years of dedication that traces itself back to St. Thomas Aquinas, if not earlier. On the other hand, [00:32:00] you have plenty of private schools where, as far as we can tell, the results are weaker than public schools.

So there’s no guarantee that just because you send your kid to a private school with a public scholarship, that the result’s gonna be magically better. I think the answer here is, again, what do you know about how the school is attracting its teachers and what you know about them? It’s one thing to have a private school that costs $90,000 a year and is filled with PhDs who might as well be teaching at a good liberal arts college, and it’s another that, you know, has none of the above, is trying to skimp along with a few thousand dollars and attract teachers on minimal pay.

Again, often lower pay than in public schools because these are non-unionized schools, and they can pay whatever they [00:33:00] choose as long as they can put a warm body into the classroom. So it’s a real problem to say universally it’s gonna be better or worse or about the same. The only answer is to think school by school by school and teacher by teacher by teacher.

Alisha Searcy: Makes sense. Dr. Steiner, in recent decades, American K-12 students have struggled with basic reading- Yes … as reflected by NAEP scores, right? Those are largely unchanged for many years. Can you talk to us about how we teach reading in the United States, the strengths and weaknesses of our approach, and then maybe talk about some of the complexities between the science of reading movement and the growth of private school choice programs.

Dr. David Steiner: Yeah. So we’ve made modest progress in early childhood reading. In other words, when you talk about the science of reading, what you really mean is that [00:34:00] we now, more than we did for some decades, we focus on phonics, phonemic awareness, vocabulary, fluency, comprehension. These are the basic strands of the so-called famous Reading Rope.

This is the science of reading. It turns out that asking children to guess what a word means by its context was not a particularly intelligent way to teach reading. That was called whole language or balanced literacy. And we’re slowly but surely, and I say slowly because there’s still almost half of the schools of education who refuse to teach the science of reading rigorously, but we are slowly but truly abandoning it, and most states now have legislation on the books that mandates the science of reading for young children.

On the other hand, what we don’t teach, despite the fact that it was written into the original work that the reading panel did, this is now decades old, we [00:35:00] don’t teach building of knowledge from the beginning. So it’s one thing to sound out nonsense sentences or sentences about me, myself, and I or me and, and the family I love.

It’s another to learn to read interesting, informative, evidence-based material that is gonna build your knowledge base in geography, history, science, literature. And years later, you may have been taught good science of reading, but if you don’t have a knowledge base, then you’re gonna start flunking the state tests because when it says to you, “Please find the main idea in this text you’ve never seen before,” if you don’t know what the text is about You can stare at that text for 100 years and not know what the main idea is.

If you know what the text is about, the main idea is a piece of cake, [00:36:00] frankly. It’s a false skill. It’s a false flag. So our refusal to really teach content, and of course E.D. Hirsch is the person I’m relying on here, and he’s really a teacher to us all. But if you don’t teach that basic foundational knowledge, then it’s lost.

And the real kicker here is that children of upper middle class, wealthy families, they get that background knowledge. They get it by the summers they spend, you know, going to museums, going abroad, but more fundamentally just in the conversations they have at home from more educated parents. Where we desperately need knowledge building is in our underprivileged communities where school is the source or not the source that’s gonna give us that background.

And there’s no difference here between private and public schools. If a Catholic [00:37:00] school is using a good curriculum from the beginning and building background knowledge just like a good public school can do, then the children will be good readers. If they don’t Then they won’t.

Alisha Searcy: Great point.

Helen Baxendale: Very lucid.

Thank you, Dr. Steiner. Let’s change gears a little, and I’d like to invite you to reflect a little bit on Jonathan Haidt’s work. I imagine you’ve probably read his more recent book, The A- Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, and I would like to invite you to relate what you made of that book to what you’re seeing in terms of school quality, school choice, and how worried should we be about smartphones and social media and AI, in your view?

Dr. David Steiner: Well, it’s complicated. There’s been some pushback on his work from researchers who feel it’s perhaps not quite as rigorous in terms of its sources as one [00:38:00] would like for somebody leading a kind of national movement. But I think the general view is that when a child is on social media four, five, six hours a day when they come home from school, this is not doing them any favors at all.

I think we can, you know, common sense suggests this, and there is strong research that attention spans have diminished, and that’s a killer, right? I mean, it means that the tests that we have, like the SAT, gives you shorter and shorter passages because the evidence is children just can’t sustain the attention needed to read longer passages, and the same is happening with the reading of whole books, which is in trouble, as we give children what we think they can do, which is shorter and shorter excerpts.

So certainly, the scrolling through social media, looking at each scroll for 20 seconds and then moving on, and doing it for [00:39:00] hours and hours, is isolating and killing of attention spans. So to that extent, I think he’s completely right. I think the killing of cell phones in schools obviously is a byproduct of this, and Los Angeles became one, but by no means the only major school district to do this.

The early outcomes are not as exciting as we might have hoped, and I think the reason for that is that the majority of a child’s life is not lived in an academic environment. In other words, I mean, Checha Finn, a researcher in education, once calculated that only 9% of a child’s life from kindergarten to 12th grade is actually occupied in an academic setting in a school classroom.

So you can’t really expect, you know, if you muck around with just 10% of a child’s life, that if the other 90% is still [00:40:00] media-dominated, that you’re gonna get an enormous outcome. Do I support putting cell phones into bags at the beginning of the day of the school? Sure, absolutely. Nothing is distracting, and it energizes the children to focus on what’s actually in front of them, if what’s in front of them is worth focusing on, which goes back to our earlier point about content knowledge.

But again, I think that the deeper problem is social and cultural. Exhausted parents plopping their children in front of the screen because it’s the easiest outcome. Everyone else has a cell phone, so my child wants the cell phone, right, for peer pressure reasons. It’s very tough to be a parent today and try to control that insatiable appetite for social media, and that, frankly, is a bigger problem than the cell phone use in schools or the partial cell phone use in schools.

So again, that’s one point. The second point [00:41:00] is let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Robert Pondiscio has recently written sensibly about this. Just because there’s a lot of bad technology, and there is- Doesn’t mean there’s no good technology. So we spend about $30, $35 billion a year, it’s hard to get an exact estimate, on K12 education technology.

Probably 98% of that is wasted money. That’s because most of this software has zero serious research behind it. But the 2% or 3% can be very strong. CourseMojo, which is a piece of software that supports high-quality instructional materials in ELA, in English language arts, has shown quite strong results. So, too, have certain programs in math.

It all depends on the program, and just to say, “Throw it out,” is as mindless as anything goes when it comes to technology. We [00:42:00] need judgment, and we need to make judgments based on research, not just on the fact that we’re gonna be with it by putting a screen in front of a child and calling it personalized learning.

So it’s a little bit more complicated. We’ve done a very bad job in my world, we researchers, at really evaluating some of the, the more popular pieces of software. My own institute is currently involved in three such evaluations, but they take time, and part of the problem is technology keeps changing, so by the time you think you’ve evaluated something, the software manufacturer says, “Well, that’s no use anymore ’cause we have Model 2.0 or 3.0 or what have you.”

So it’s a really tough problem.

Alisha Searcy: Over the last 50 years, achievement gaps in American education have also largely remained unchanged, and we’ve talked about that with reading scores in particular, despite enormous national, state, and local reform efforts, [00:43:00] including expansive federal legislation, over $800 billion in annual spending, and an ever-growing private school choice programs.

Can you talk to us about these achievement gaps and why so few K-12 education reforms really seem to close these persistent socioeconomic divides?

Dr. David Steiner: Yes. I, I mean, we’d need a whole multiple series of podcasts to do that question justice. Those of us in the field have spent our professional lives trying to address it.

But beyond the problem, specific problem I addressed earlier of teacher quality, we have one of the most fragmented educational systems known to the Western world. Most countries have a, a rather simple structure. They have a curriculum, either at the national level or at the provincial level, what we would call states.

That curriculum has content. It is known. It is [00:44:00] stable. There are some changes gradually, but the core of it is stable. They train, these countries train teachers to teach that curriculum. Then, after the children have studied that curriculum, they are tested on that curriculum. It is so commonsensical that it’s almost impossible for me to underestimate the damage that has happened in America because we don’t follow that model.

We instead have three vast industries. We have a multi-billion dollar teacher preparation industry, a multi-billion dollar curriculum publishing industry, and a multi-billion dollar testing industry And each one of them is in a beautifully sealed silo and has almost nothing to do with the other. So for example, we can’t prepare teachers to teach the curriculum because there isn’t one.

Texas may become the first state to get close to having a state [00:45:00] curriculum. May. But elsewhere, no. There are scores of curriculum floating around, and that’s even assuming that teachers actually use them, which they often don’t. Then we have the testing system, which because there’s no fixed curriculum, can’t actually test what you’ve learned.

It has to test generic skills, like find the main idea. And on those skills, again, affluent kids do very well and poor kids do very badly ’cause they don’t have the background knowledge. So we have built fragmentation into our system, and then we spend billions, as you point out, trying to rearrange the deck chairs on this Titanic.

It’s completely unsurprising that we actually don’t do very well. In fact, what is surprising is that we do as well as we do, which in math and science is pretty dismal internationally. We do better in reading, [00:46:00] partly because of the work we’ve done recently, but partly because the way PISA, which is the international test, tests reading is much closer to social media.

It’s short passages. It’s often passages that are of current interest. It is not long passages, certainly not novels or texts of any length, and so American kids do better, certainly much better than they do in math and science. But I think that only really inspired state leadership, there was some in Louisiana under John White, some in Tennessee.

There was good leadership now in Maryland who did the work in Mississippi, now called the Mississippi Miracle in the science of reading. Carey Wright was the commissioner there and now here. But it’s isolated. It’s like oases of heroic action to try to stitch together this chaos that we have [00:47:00] created by empowering these separate professions.

Helen Baxendale: Dr. Saye, that might be, um, the most lucid outline of the political economy of American education dysfunction I’ve ever heard. As depressing as it is. I wondered if you could leave us on a positive note. Let’s say one of these state governors calls you up, as I, I imagine this has happened. What are the first three things you advise them to do?

Dr. David Steiner: So the first is pre-K. By the time children get to second, still more third grade, the learning gaps are obvious, and they never close. In fact, in recent years, they’ve widened. So we need desperately quality control of a universal pre-K, especially, you know, if we have to narrow it, especially for underprivileged children.

It’s too late. Even kindergarten is late. And third grade, which is when we start [00:48:00] testing, is much too late. We never catch up. And in mathematics, which is sequential, it’s a disaster. The skills build on each other. So that’s the first thing. The second thing is to do what Texas is doing, which is to narrow the curriculum choices so that we can actually prepare teachers to teach the curricula that are being offered.

Louisiana did this. Tennessee’s done this. It is absolutely hopeless to try to prepare teachers to teach generic ELA. They have to be prepared to teach a curriculum, not nothing in particular. So narrow the curriculum. That is really important. And then third, and we’ve touched on this earlier, but the accountability system has to be real.

We are rapidly engaged in a kind of race to the bottom when it comes to standards, right? My own state where I was commissioned, New York, has made the [00:49:00] Regents Exam, which was once the pride and joy of the state and in some ways the envy of the nation, optional. Other states faced with low rates of passing or proficiency, instead of buckling down and worrying about teacher preparation and the quality of curriculum and professional learning, what have they done?

They’ve lowered the standards. That really is the soft bigotry of low expectations enshrined in state policy. Don’t do it. Bite the bullet, tell yourself the truth, and give yourself realistic targets.

Alisha Searcy: Well, Dr. Steiner, this has been a great interview. We’ve learned a lot, just as we expected we would, and you’re so refreshing in your responses and helping us to really hear the reality of things and what we need to do.

So thank you for all that you do, all of your contributions, and frankly, continuing to push us as we think about where we need to go to improve K-12 education.

Dr. David Steiner: Well, you’re very, very [00:50:00] kind. I appreciate it. And if any of your audience want to be in touch, it’s all lowercase d.steiner@ghu.edu. I’d be happy to be responsive to any questions.

Alisha Searcy: Well, I’ll be one of those people

Wow, Helen, that was exactly what I thought it would be. Dr. Steiner has a wealth of knowledge and experience, and it was so, I think, enlightening to hear the history that he’s gone through, you know, the work that he’s done, the contributions that he’s made, and just kind of hope for the future for education policy.

Helen Baxendale: Yes, absolutely. Uh, Dr. Steiner is a giant in my eyes in education research. I followed his work for a long time. I loved his most recent book, but it’s the first time I’d actually met him today, so real thrill for me to be able to sit in on today’s interview, and a pleasure to [00:51:00] share it with you, Alisha.

Alisha Searcy: Absolutely, as always. Well, before we head out, we’ve got to do our tweet of the week. This week it comes from Chalkbeat. Parceling out key education department functions should be viewed as a pilot program, not an end run around Congress, and five other takeaways from our interview with agency leaders.

Very interesting article where the author is talking to the leaders of the US Ed at the federal level and asking some really, I think, important and hard questions about the moves that they’re making to move special education, to move the Office of Civil Rights and Office of Disabilities outside of the Department of Education.

So very important article. Make sure you check that out. Helen, as always, so great to hang out with you. Love chatting with you about all things education, and so thanks for joining us again.

Helen Baxendale: Always glad to be here, Alisha. I look forward to the next time.

Alisha Searcy: Yes, and everybody, be on the lookout for next week’s [00:52:00] show.

We’ll have Jane Levy, who is the New York Times best-selling author of Sandy Koufax: A Leftie’s Legacy. Make sure you check it out. We’ll see you next week. Take care, everybody.