U-MI's Sarah Cohodes on Charter Public Schools & Paths to College Success

The Learning Curve Sarah Cohodes

[00:00:00] Alisha Searcy: Welcome to the Learning Curve podcast. I’m your co-host, Alisha Thomas Searcy, and joined by our other co-host, Dr. Albert Cheng. Albert, how are you?

[00:00:30] Albert Cheng: Hey, you doing all right? How about yourself?

[00:00:32] Alisha Searcy: I am doing well, thank you.

[00:00:34] Albert Cheng: Good.

[00:00:34] Alisha Searcy: Looking forward to our conversation today. We’ve been talking a lot about charter schools and choice, and so these conversations have been very interesting. I’m looking forward to the one today as well. With that said, though, we’ve gotta jump into our stories of the week. Would love for you to go first. What’s your reading out there?

[00:00:51] Albert Cheng: Sure Alisha. Yeah, I mean, it is a school choice related story. This is an article in the Hill entitled Texas, Florida Faced Pushback Over Efforts to Exclude Islamic Schools From School Voucher Programs.

[00:01:05] So, you know, Alisha. I know this is a controversial topic, but we’re gonna go there ’cause you know, we’d like to have important discussions and have space for it. So, you know, I think in within the school choice movement, two schools of thought on what do we do or essentially, are there limits to religious liberty?

[00:01:22] This shows up quite a bit on the question of Islamic schools and, you know, concerns about Islamic extremism. And so, you know, you get actually one group within School Choice saying that we probably should exclude these schools from participating in, in private school choice programs. Well, you know, I gotta get out there and say, that’s not my view.

[00:01:41] You know, I’m, I’m kind of a, almost a religious liberty maximal list. If our First Amendment kind of guarantees free exercise, I really find it tough to make a case to pick and choose and kind of exclude some religious schools from others. So, no, I mean, I get there are probably some – there’s probably some situation out there where, you know, some exclusion has to apply, but with that First Amendment guarantee and just a commitment to kinda lowercase liberal ideals of, you know, freedom of, you know, the kind of individual freedoms that we take for granted in our society.

[00:02:16] You gotta have a high bar to excluding some schools and no, I’m of the opinion that this one doesn’t really pass muster and I’ll just point out some work by, you know, a friend of pioneers through Charlie Glenn, who, who’s actually done some work studying Islamic schools and finds no evidence of the kind of extremism that we’re worried about.

[00:02:33] I mean mm-hmm. I think these schools, they were actually, it’s fascinating, you know, his observation of these schools trying to help Muslim students both learn about their own culture, but also to think about how to integrate into, to broader American society. So anyway, I know this is, we’re not gonna hash through all this right now, but just wanna flag the article ’cause it is an important conversation I think to be having.

[00:02:54] Alisha Searcy: It is, and I’ve spent a little bit of time thinking about this and for me there’s a little bit of a nuance.

[00:03:00] I am not a fan of public schools getting into religion. I’m a Christian. I, you know, have my set of beliefs, but I believe if I want my children to learn religion in schools, then I need to put them in a private school. If I’m thinking about vouchers though, which you know, I’m not a huge fan of in general, but if I am having a conversation about religious schools, like receiving public funds and you are limiting which religions students would have access to, I actually have a problem with that.

[00:03:36] So maybe I’m, for some people that would be a confusing stance to have, knowing about a number of religions and I’m grateful. I have a background in sociology, so I love studying people and, and patterns and all of that. I’ve spent a little time in the Middle East over the last year, and I’ve come to learn a lot about the Muslim Islamic faith in particular.

[00:03:57] And I’ll tell you, Albert, there are a lot of things that we could learn. From different religions for that matter. And so I think to your point to say we can have this religion but not this one. And someone believes that there could be, you know, some extremism and so therefore they should be limited. If you believe in religious liberty, if you believe in the first amendment, then how can you limit people’s access if you, again, if you believe that private schools ought to be able to.

[00:04:28] Provide this kind of education. I think there’s a lot of value to it. And so I, I think it’s, it’s a very interesting conversation. As you said, we, we don’t have time to go deep into it, but it’s very interesting to see the opposition to it. Again, just depending on which faith we’re talking about, I don’t think that’s fair or right.

[00:04:44] Albert Cheng: Yeah. Yeah. And you know, I’m open to being wrong, but I think I’m with you here where it’s hard for me to square the circle here and it excludes some, but not others.

[00:04:53] Alisha Searcy: Yeah, to be continued on that one. I, I feel like this makes for a very interesting conversation later on. I wanna point out a story that I saw in Education Week by Robert Sokolowski.

[00:05:06] I hope I’m saying that correctly. It’s entitled, Six Years Ago, Schools Closed for COVID Have We Learned the Right Lessons? And he talks about four priorities to guide true recovery from the pandemic. And so the premise here is there was a lot more that we needed to focus on in terms of like, everybody talks about learning loss from the pandemic.

[00:05:27] But one of the lines he has in the piece is that you cannot learn if you’ve not begun to heal. And he is talking about the trauma and the disruption that the pandemic created essentially. And issues like chronic absenteeism, disengagement, teacher shortages, he believes are not just isolated academic failures, but they really have to do with the collective trauma that happened during that time.

[00:05:55] And so some of the lessons that he talks about, number one, inequality is not a side issue, it is the system. Number two, that fragmented leadership has real consequences. Number three, crises do not slow the world down. They speed it up and I mean, hello, we are right now. And then number four, the digital age is not neutral.

[00:06:18] I think this is a really compelling piece, again, to add to this conversation ’cause we always talk about learning loss. We always talk about literacy rates and all those things are obviously very important. I’m deeply passionate about that. But there’s also this other piece, right? It’s the mental health, it’s the impact that the pandemic had on students had, on teachers had on the system that we don’t talk about enough.

[00:06:42] And I wonder if we’ve studied it enough. Because perhaps as we talk about the decline as we’re seeing in NAEP scores, we know that of course COVID had something to do with it, right? Because of the quality of teaching and learning that was happening. But we’re not talking enough about this emotional piece, like why aren’t kids showing up to school?

[00:07:01] Why are there more teacher shortages? It’s not just because the learning loss piece. Maybe there are some social emotional pieces that we’re not considering, so very interesting piece.

[00:07:11] Albert Cheng: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I appreciate you bringing that up. And it reminds me of some of the work, some of our students here at the University of Arkansas are doing to try to understand what’s going on with absenteeism and just teacher morale and that kind of thing.

[00:07:23] And I guess it’s not just here at the University of Arkansas. Certainly I know other scholars are trying to, to figure this out as well. So, you know, maybe we need a, some, uh, show where we have some of these scholars kinda share some of their insights onto these issues.

[00:07:37] Alisha Searcy: That’s a great idea. I would love to hear from some of your students and colleagues who are doing this work. That’d be a pretty nice connection there, so let’s make it happen.

[00:07:46] Albert Cheng: Okay.

[00:07:47] Alisha Searcy: We’ll talk to the higher ups and see what we can do. Well, make sure you stick around when we come back. We have Sarah Cohodes, who is an associate professor of public policy at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan.

[00:08:14] Sarah Cohodes is an associate professor of public policy at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. She’s a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a co-editor at the Journal of Public Economics. Her past positions include Visiting Scholar at the Opportunity and Inclusive Growth Institute at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, co-editor at the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management and Associate Professor of Economics and Education and Program Director of Economics and Education at Teachers College. She holds a PhD in public policy from Harvard University. Sarah, welcome to the show. Thanks for being with us today.

[00:08:53] Sarah Cohodes: For sure.

[00:08:54] Alisha Searcy: Let’s jump in. You’re among the most accomplished researchers on K-12 education with a particular academic expertise on public charter schools. Would you share with us a quick overview of your background, your formative academic experiences, and how you became interested in researching education reform and charter schools?

[00:09:14] Sarah Cohodes: I am from outside of Chicago, and I was a nerd growing up and a nerd going to college and found a special niche in this intersection between economics and education. A lot of that has to do with an undergraduate mentor. I had Tom D, who you might all be familiar with his work, who really encouraged me in this area and helped me to find my first job doing research at a think tank in dc and then eventually I decided, despite leaving college saying I would never go back to school, eventually I decided that if I wanted to be in charge of.

[00:09:50] Projects that I got to work on, I needed to go back to school to get a PhD. So I have a PhD in public policy from Harvard University where I built on the relationships and data access that I, during my six years of a research career, both at the Urban Institute and then at this Center for Education, policy Research at Harvard University.

[00:10:12] And that is my general background. How did I become interested in charter schools? Well, when I started in this world, which was the mid two thousands, the thing that everybody was talking about was teachers and teacher value added. And you know, of course everybody has had that experience of having a great teacher who has changed their life.

[00:10:33] Student experiences, many teachers in their lives, sometimes in middle and high school, many teachers in a day, and changing or using professional development or changing teacher salaries or doing something like that. Like that, because there are so many teachers and so many students. In order to change education via teachers, you would have to have huge interventions.

[00:10:55] Also given the magnitude of the effects you get from going from a, you know, middle of the road value added teacher to a high value added teacher. So I was really interested in, okay, well what, what could do it all? What could create a atmosphere that helps students and that’s gonna help them no matter who their teacher is, or is going to recruit and train teachers to deliver the education that works for everybody in that building.

[00:11:24] Some of my work when I was working as a researcher was on charter schools, and I was the research assistant who was, you know, plugging away on the data. When we first found the big test score effects from Boston Charters, the effects were so big that my boss at the time, Tom Cain, like sent me back to check my work and make sure I did it right.

[00:11:45] And it was fine. My work was fine. Yeah, it was that the schools had really big effects and so that was, was really exciting to me to think about in a world where so many interventions are. Changing things at the margin, what would an intervention look like that could make a real difference in students’ lives?

[00:12:06] And the reason I’ve stuck with it is that, and because I think that charter schools are a great place to sort of learn about the technology of learning in general, and that what we learn about in charter schools can be applied more broadly to K-12 education beyond just charter schools.

[00:12:28] Alisha Searcy: That’s super helpful. Great background. The fundamental policy bargain of charter schools has always been greater school autonomy in exchange for greater accountability. And charter critics often claim that on average charter performance is only slightly better than the traditional public schools. What does the research say about the need for rigorous charter authorizations and academic data as a means for holding charters accountable for student performance?

[00:12:56] Sarah Cohodes: Yeah, so this is really interesting. Charter research has really proliferated that tells us the impacts of individual schools or individual charter networks or types of schools. And I think there is less research on the context and conditions that make it possible to have a successful charter school or a successful school in general.

[00:13:21] And I think that really has to do with the fact that one of the features of charter schools is they admit students by lottery, and so it’s very appealing to researchers to estimate the effects of charter schools because you can compare students who won the lottery to those who didn’t win the lottery in a study sort of akin to a, a randomized controlled drug trial.

[00:13:40] We don’t have randomized controlled trials on what type of authorizer you have or what the state context is. All of that research is necessarily going to be less oriented towards a causal orientation, less oriented towards, you know, being super confident that what we find is a, a causal effect.

[00:14:00] Nevertheless, there is some great research out there. Doug Harris has some sort of on the state conditions that contribute to success of charter schools or the sort of tipping point on, on number of charters schools, but also the case that there are some things you don’t need research on to have a good answer to.

[00:14:21] If the entire system that you have predicated on is an exchange between autonomy and accountability, you need both sides of that bargain. So I do think there is some suggestive evidence that says, states that have meaningful review of the charters meaningful consequences if charter schools don’t meet the terms of their charter as aren’t successful.

[00:14:44] I think there is some research out there that shows, you know, that those schools there are slightly more successful. It’s not a huge difference. But I also think like this is the premise of the policy accountability in exchange for autonomy. And so I think that that is the bargain and charter organizations need to be willing to fill those terms. And then authorizers also need to fill the terms of that as well.

[00:15:08] Alisha Searcy: Exactly. This is a little bit off the subject, but it just reminds me of there was a time in educational reform where even when it within traditional public schools, we were having conversations about schools having more autonomy to meet the needs, the students that they serve in particular.

[00:15:24] And it feels like we’re far away from that now. But anyway in 2021, you co-authored research Charter Schools Effectiveness Mechanisms and Competitive Influence, which examined charter schools impact on student achievement and their influence on nearby traditional public schools. And though charter schools perform on average the same as district schools, they find that charters in urban areas improve student test scores, especially for low income and minority students. And that was a quote, would you discuss this research and the details of its major findings?

[00:16:00] Sarah Cohodes: Sure. This is some work that I did with my former PhD student, Katherine Oltra, and we sort of just took a look at almost 20 years of research, or maybe even 25 years of research on charter schools, collecting evidence both on what it is that charter schools do in terms of impacting student outcomes.

[00:16:20] How they do that, that’s the mechanism side. And then how does it affect students nearby? We try in general to rely on that lottery based evidence that I talked about earlier, because we’re really confident when you have lottery based evidence of a charter school effect, that it is due to the charter school itself, not because it recruits a certain kind of student to come to that school or attracts a certain population, but the limitation of the charter school.

[00:16:50] Lotteries is that not all schools are oversubscribed, and even if they have been oversubscribed, not everybody held onto the records in a way that you can do this type of research. So in addition to those lottery based studies, which my colleagues and I have worked on for. A long time and other folks in this research world have, there is also a lot of great research out there that uses other methods to try and get at the effectiveness of charter schools using statistical mashing techniques or trying to identify charter school effects based on people who switch between traditional public schools and charter schools.

[00:17:24] And it happens to be the case. It didn’t have to be this way, but in general, all of that research together, the lottery based research, the observational research that uses regression methods tends to tell the same story. And that story seems to be that charter schools as a whole perform about the same as traditional public schools in this country.

[00:17:46] But there is this tale, a tale of very successful schools, many of which have been studied in Boston and New York and Denver, et cetera, which show these big effects on student test scores. And you know, the promise of the charter school movement is going back to the previous question is if charters don’t hold up the end of their bargain on student performance, if that’s part of the terms of their charter, then they can be closed.

[00:18:15] And you know, there’s potential for charter. Schools to have a smaller tale of lower performing schools and a larger tale of higher performing schools. I don’t know if we certainly have seen that smaller tale of lower performing schools. There’s a lot of schools out there, but I think we have seen this upper tail of very successful schools, and those tend to be the schools that are located in urban areas that are serving high need students.

[00:18:42] Many of them employ what was once called a no excuses philosophy. So, a focus on discipline and comportment, frequent feedback to teachers, data-driven instruction, a longer school day and year. High academic expectations for everybody. And those are the schools that we have seen have sort of the biggest success on test scores and where we do have longer term outcomes.

[00:19:09] We also tend to see things like big effects on college going, and we’re starting to get more research on college persistence and college graduation. I should point out that. Since that work a few years ago, I have a recent paper with my coauthor, Astro Pineda, that looks at the impact of charter schools on college in Massachusetts and finds that both the urban schools that we saw having big effects on test scores had.

[00:19:38] Positive impacts on college going and college graduation. But so did the non-urban schools, the ones that had no, or even in some cases, negative effects on test scores. Those also benefited longer run outcomes like college going and college graduation. So, I also, I don’t want to imply that test scores are the only thing that we should be looking at.

[00:20:00] I also don’t wanna imply that you know, what we found in once. Is going to be what we find elsewhere as well. So, I think it is to be determined to some extent the effects of charter schools on these other outcomes as well.

[00:20:14] Alisha Searcy: Very interesting. So, over the last decade alone, charter school enrollment in the US has nearly doubled to 3.4 million students attending roughly 7,700 schools and campuses.

[00:20:27] You mentioned a couple of cities a few minutes ago. Can you talk about some of the cities or charter networks that your research indicates that provides the best academic leadership for charter schools as well as the role that high academic quality charters play in charter expansions and performance?

[00:20:45] Sarah Cohodes: There are charter networks out there that I personally admire. I don’t, I don’t want to call out any of them in particular because my research has been closely focused on a subs sample of schools in Massachusetts, many of which have different kinds of success. But I will say that we do have research from Boston, which looked at a state mechanism that selected schools for expansion.

[00:21:10] So charters got to apply for expansion and used criteria, including academic criteria to decide which schools. Be allowed to expand and replicate. And then we found that they were able to replicate those successes so they were able to expand those campuses and be successful. So I think that it is a great model to think about.

[00:21:34] Like, why are we reinventing the wheel every time? Why don’t we focus on models that we know work and expand those models? And that doesn’t have to be something that is limited to the charter sector. That could be across sectors. Though of course, somebody could say, well, the whole reason we got to those models in the first place was by experimenting, and you need new models in order to do that.

[00:21:56] So I think that is something that is happening, but it is also the case. You know, the past few years have been hard years for education in the United States facing the pandemic, chronic absenteeism since then, and I think the story is still being written on how schools recover from that and how charter schools recover from that.

[00:22:18] And so I think we need to see that as well. I also think the research that we did with my colleagues, Elizabeth Trin and Chris Walters on replication showed that it is possible to replicate it. But it was at a fairly small scale. And so it’s hard to know how much of this is premised on like a really strong original founding leadership team.

[00:22:43] And now as the charter movement gets older, you know, those people are moving on to new careers or retiring even or things like that. And so I’ll be really interested to see if. The schools that were successful are able to sustain that success in the long run as there is turnover in the leadership team.

[00:23:06] Albert Cheng: So Sarah, I’m gonna jump in here and maybe pick up where you’re leaving off here about replicating. The next few questions are gonna maybe ask you to go out on a limb a little bit ’cause we’re gonna try to peek inside the black box in terms of why do some models work. So here’s my first question. You just mentioned the important role of leadership, and you know there’s a need to train high quality principals and teachers, recruiting them, preparing them.

[00:23:29] What do we know about the role of teacher quality? Principal quality needed to make big achievement gains in charter schools.

[00:23:36] Sarah Cohodes: Something that is so fascinating about charter schools is they have managed to get these big results, and I should say a subset of charter schools that do have those big results despite having a fairly high level of turnover among the teaching staff.

[00:23:53] So at every school, there are veterans that have been there for a long time. Many of these schools also are bringing in new teachers every year and training teachers. So that means they have to do something around selecting teachers and training teachers and working together. And something in that paper with Elizabeth and Chris that we found is it’s very hard to look at the effects of teachers and charter schools as separate from the charter school effect, for example.

[00:24:20] You know, how much of it is the school effect, how much of it is the teacher effect? But one thing that we found in charter schools was that there was less variation in teacher effects. So, the spread of teacher effects within a school was smaller in a charter school than in traditional public schools, which means that the charter schools are doing something.

[00:24:40] To make sure everybody has a similar experience and everybody gets on the same page, and that the teaching teams work together and are effective. And so, to me that says something, you know, different districts and schools have different ways of doing this, but many schools have the tradition of teachers just closing the door and doing their own thing, and that is awesome if you have an awesome teacher.

[00:25:06] But that is not awesome if you have a not awesome teacher. And what charter schools have done is they have made that experience more universal. So, they have a high quality curriculum. They work as a unit to develop that curriculum, but then they also have all the teachers delivering that same curriculum and working together to have shared assess.

[00:25:29] And shared lessons and things like that. And I think that consistency and teamwork makes it so that it’s less driven by an individual and more driven by the organization as a whole and the rich curriculum that has been put together. Of course, that’s not the only research out there on teachers in charter schools, and there’s other interesting evidence out there.

[00:25:54] But I think that consistency and getting everybody on the same page is a really valuable and important thing that many charter schools do. And then I also want to point out that. It doesn’t have to be something that is unique to a charter school. There is nothing stopping traditional public schools from doing grade level planning, from having a consistent curriculum from working together to make sure everybody in the school has the same policies around student behavior and discipline. So to me, that is potentially a, a lesson to be learned from the charter sector.

[00:26:31] Albert Cheng: Well, let’s talk about Massachusetts charter schools in particular for a little bit. I mean, you, your early work where you found such huge effects that, you know, people were, uh, blinking to see if that was what was there a mistake.

[00:26:41] Right? And then you also mentioned your recent work about the, uh, charter schools in urban and non-urban areas in Massachusetts. Could you take that research and maybe speak to maybe a broader question of what has made Massachusetts charter school landscape so conducive to producing these outcomes?

[00:26:59] Sarah Cohodes: This is gonna ask me to go into territory. I’m less comfortable as a researcher ’cause we don’t have strict causal evidence on this. Yep. This is just my speculation. Having worked in this area and surveyed the evidence. A couple of things are very interesting about Massachusetts. Massachusetts has a sole charter school authorizer.

[00:27:18] That’s the state. And Massachusetts has a cap on charter schools. It’s based on the amount of funding per school district that goes to charters. Some lower performing school districts can have a, a higher percentage of funding going to charter schools, but it’s, there still is a cap. The chartering process is known to be a rigorous one.

[00:27:40] The state has closed schools that either haven’t met financial or academic performance benchmarks. So the, the accountability threat is real. And then as a whole, Massachusetts is highly invested in education. It is a resource rich state, and there are always people who can say, we can, we should invest even more in kids.

[00:28:01] And if we’re picking something to invest in, I, I love investing in kids, but Massachusetts is certainly a place that has devoted substantial resources to education. And it also benefits from having a population of young people who come to Massachusetts to go to college and then want to stay and get a job.

[00:28:20] And many of those individuals, you know, do go on to teach in those in charter schools. So, I don’t think we can pin down and say it is any one of those things. But all of those things seem to have come together to create an atmosphere where schools have been successful and successful in the urban areas on test scores and college in the non-urban areas, more focused on college.

[00:28:44] But I think that to sort of think about, you know, what is the special sauce? We’d also wanna compare to other states and, and see what they do there. And that’s where Doug Harris has done some research. He has some research I think that shows like the largest effects on the system as a whole from charter schools come when they reach like a certain threshold, but there’s diminishing marginal returns after a certain point. You don’t get more benefit from having charters in the system.

[00:29:13] Albert Cheng: Well, good. Yeah. I mean, you know, hopefully in the years to come we’ll have more, uh, evidence to speak to some of that. Speaking of Massachusetts, Steve Wilson, who we’ve had on the show before, I mean a former charter leader there, I guess you might call him that.

[00:29:26] Yeah. Right. Last year Steven wrote the book, the Lost Decade. Really it’s become a tour de force critique of how K 12 education reform has strayed from, you know, in his mind, what the successful recipe of using high quality academic content. Deliver equality of opportunity and big effects. So what, you know from the literature, I guess one, is he right?

[00:29:46] Is he wrong? But um, I think more importantly, what should policymakers and district and charter school leaders be thinking about to maybe remedy some of these declines that we’ve been seeing of late in academic performance?

[00:29:59] Sarah Cohodes: That’s a big question. You know, first of all, I think it is definitely the case that if you look in like test scores that they publish in the Boston Globe or whatever, it is the case that since the pandemic that the charter schools haven’t been sort of the same dominating force in terms of impacts on test scores, but we don’t yet have causal evidence that shows a change in impact.

[00:30:21] So, you know, one part of me just wants to say we need to wait and see if it’s out there, but I think. You know, inside or outside of charter schools? I think it is the case that we have seen both since the pandemic and prior to the pandemic declines and things like test scores on the NAEP. So certainly a rise in chronic absenteeism.

[00:30:42] I think something that charter schools have shown us. And this is so incredibly not a controversial point, is if you wanna educate students and help them learn, they need to be present. And maybe the more time they spend on task doing things that help them learn the more they learn. So, charter schools do that by how they organize the school day and their long school year and staying on task via sort of behavior management when they are learning.

[00:31:15] But you can also think of like when you aren’t present in school, it is hard to receive the benefits of school. So, to me, things to do that address. Chronic absenteeism are a huge and important thing that we can do. I understand politically why the response to the pandemic was not, let’s have more school, let’s have summer school, let’s have longer school days.

[00:31:41] To me, that seemed like a duh response. We had less time for children in school, educators and kids and families were doing the best they could. An obvious way to use sort of the subsidy money that many school districts received was to get the butts in the seat for longer, and many places, of course, had afterschool programs or summer programs or things like that.

[00:32:05] But as a whole, those programs were optional and, and so the very students that have had chronic absenteeism. Since the pandemic may also be the students who are not showing up for programs like that. So, if I had to do one thing, that would be what I would focus on. I do think there is a huge place for high quality academic curriculum.

[00:32:27] Something that Massachusetts does is it doesn’t say you have to use this curriculum or that curriculum, but it says these are a few high-quality curriculum that are out there. This is for reading. You know, pick from among them. I would love to see more states do something like that. And, you know, just my personal peccadillo from having a, a child at school, you know, I would love to see children spending less time on computers and in front of screens.

[00:32:55] But that comes back to the same concept of why do charter schools work? Why is chronic absenteeism bad? Why is being on a screen bad? Well, we know that. Education happens through the instructional triangle. Going back to my ed school days, the, the relationship between the student, the teacher, and the content.

[00:33:17] And so obviously you need to be physically present for that, but you also need to be intentionally present for that. And so, I worry that spending a lot of time on screens makes it hard to be intentionally present for that, uh, relationship between the, the student, the content, and the teacher. And that may be that taking the teacher out of that as is a computer to student interaction is not the way to go.

[00:33:45] Albert Cheng: Yeah, well I’m with you on that hypothesis and hopefully we can maybe try to prove some evidence to speak to that. So, well, last question, I mean, you’ve been studying K 12 policy for quite a bit, so what would you like to see governors, state legislators, local officials, parents do to use education research to improve student outcomes?

[00:34:08] Sarah Cohodes: I mean, how about using education research to improve student outcomes? I mean like, like that is like the first order thing that you can do. There is a lot of great evidence out there. Obviously, if all you needed was great evidence, we would have different outcomes. So, there’s something about the implementation and the policy process and politics.

[00:34:29] That is making it hard to translate from evidence to policy. And obviously it’s super easy for me to sit here and say, you know, we need to address chronic absenteeism. That is like a long, hard slog knocking on doors doing pizza parties, you know, changing social norms. And so obviously like it is very easy to say, we have the evidence, let’s just use it, but it’s a lot harder to actually implement that and to do that. I do think there are some areas of low hanging fruits. High quality curriculum is one of those areas and making sure that all kids have access to high quality curriculum. So that I think would be exciting. I think there are some things that we know don’t work, so like let’s not do them.

[00:35:14] Let’s not have a four day school week that is not good. All the evidence we have on virtual education says that it has poor outcomes for children. I’m not sure why we’re expanding virtual outcomes. Sure. There are definitely gonna be circumstances where there’s a child in the hospital or a child who’s a child actor or something where that is the right model.

[00:35:36] But for the vast majority of students that is not the right model. So I would say like, let’s do the things where we have great evidence and that aren’t hard to implement. Let’s not do the things that we know out there, harm students, and then, you know, let’s, let’s work hard on all the stuff in the middle where we have good evidence, but the challenge really is around implementation and politics and getting it done.

[00:36:01] Albert Cheng: All right, Sarah, thanks for hopping on the show with us.

[00:36:04] Sarah Cohodes: I was glad to chat with you.

[00:36:06] Alisha Searcy: Take care.

[00:36:19] Well, Albert, that was great. As I said, you know, we’ve been talking a lot about charters and Sarah’s research is really, really interesting and I learned a lot today. It was great to have her.

[00:36:28] Albert Cheng: Yeah, no, she, uh, definitely is an expert and is familiar with that literature in and out, so really appreciate her time.

[00:36:34] Alisha Searcy: Yeah. Good stuff. Well, as always, we’ve got to talk about our tweet of the week. And this week’s tweet says “On March 25th, 2026, the nation marks the 61st anniversary of the conclusion of the historic 1965 Selma to Montgomery Voting Rights March led by Dr. Martin Luther King JR. Thousand reach the Alabama Capitol on March 25th, 1965, following a five day, 54 mile journey, which directly spurred the passing of the Voting Rights Act.”

[00:37:07] Obviously a very important moment in history. We also have to remember Bloody Sunday, which preceded that all, which helped us to achieve voting rights in this country. So, a great tweet. Now, make sure you join us next week we’re going to have Aaron Lansky, who’s the founder of the Yiddish Book Center and author of Outwitting History, the Amazing Adventures of a Man who Rescued a million Yiddish books. So, with that said, Albert, always great to hang out with you.

[00:37:33] Albert Cheng: That’s right, yeah. We’ll see you next time.

[00:37:35] Alisha Searcy: See you next time.