Catholic schools are closing their doors all across America, leaving future generations with nowhere to turn for the high-quality academics and values-based education so many families are seeking. The number of students attending Catholic schools in the US fell from about 5.2 million in 1965 to around two million in 2008.
Pioneer Institute believes these schools are worth preserving. For over a decade, we have raised our voice in support of these excellent academic options, and tools such as tax credit scholarships that would enable more families to attend.
Pioneer has held public forums, published research on the benefits of Catholic education, on successful models such as Cristo Rey, and on policy changes that would stop the Massachusetts education department from depriving religious school students of special needs services and school nurses. The Institute has also convened key stakeholders, appeared in local and national press, filed amicus briefs, produced a feature a documentary film, and much more.
Hubwonk host Joe Selvaggi talks with Kyle Pomerleau, senior fellow on federal tax policy at American Enterprise Institute about the Build Back Better Act now in Congress, to understand how those new taxes will affect individuals, business, and the economy.
Guest:
Kyle Pomerleau is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he studies federal tax policy. Before joining AEI, Mr. Pomerleau was chief economist and vice president of economic analysis at the Tax Foundation, where he led the macroeconomic and tax modeling team and wrote on various tax policy topics, including corporate taxation, international tax policy, carbon taxation, and tax reform. The author of many studies, Mr. Pomerleau has been published in trade publications and policy journals including Tax Notes and the National Tax Journal. He is frequently quoted in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. He has also testified before Congress and state legislators. Mr. Pomerleau has an MPP in economic and social policy from Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy and a BA in history and political science from the University of Southern Maine.
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Please excuse typos.
Joe Selvaggi:
This is Hubwonk, I’m Joe Selvaggi.
Joe Selvaggi:
Welcome to Hubwonk, a podcast of Pioneer Institute, a think tank in Boston. On October 28th, the White House and Democratic leadership in Congress announced a framework deal on the Build Back Better Act. The act includes federal spending of upwards of three and a half trillion dollars on broad social, environmental, and economic programs to pay for this massive spending proposal. The echo makes a substantial changes to the nation’s tax laws. There’ll being somewhat constrained by president Biden’s campaign promise to never raise taxes on those earning more than $400,000 a year. And razor thin democratic majority is in Congress. The new tax provisions seek to target large corporations and the ultra high income earners taxing the rich and large corporations may offer a more politically palatable message, but taxpayers deserve to know how its typical $4 trillion annual budget will now afford three and a half trillion of additional spending. I guess today’s senior policy fellow at the American enterprise Institute and tax economist. Kyle Pomerleau. Kyle’s work at AEI focuses on the effects of current tax policy on the economy and works to understand the likely effects the future policy proposals. Kyle will share with us his analysis on what changes are likely to emerge from the build back better act, who is likely to pay more. And what are the possible effects on the economy in the future? When I return, I’ll be joined by AEI senior fellow Kyle Pomerleau.
Joe Selvaggi:
Okay. We’re back. This is hubwonk. I’m Joe Selvaggi and I’m now pleased to be joined by American enterprise Institute, senior fellow and tax economist. Kyle Pomerleau. Welcome to hub Juan Kyle, thanks for having me. Well, it’s great to have you. I really wanted to have you as a guest here on, on how long, because I want you to help. I want you to help our listeners understand what’s going who’s going to pay for this what we’re calling the build back better act. It’s an ambitious piece of legislation. We’re told that there’ll be new taxes, but only on those making more than $400,000 a year, that was president Biden’s promise. And of course we’re, we’re really going to particularly be targeting those a 700 or so billionaires who are fortunate among us help us separate fact from fiction. Let’s start with the ax features that are the most likely to generate the most revenue. In my let’s say amateur reading of, of what I can tell it seems to be that, that the minimum tax on all corporations book profits are, are likely to see the most short-term revenue explain for our listeners. What does that mean? And how does collecting taxes on book revenue, different, different from how we have historically taxed corporations?
Kyle Pomerleau:
The book proposal, the book tax was proposed as part of the build back better is kind of a replacement for the corporate tax rate increase. Previously. They had proposed to raise the corporate income tax to 26 and a half percent. However, a couple senators were uncomfortable with raising rates corporate or individuals. So those were taken off the table entirely. So what was added very recently as recently as last week was this minimum tack on tax on book income. This was originally proposed by President Biden all the way back when he was running for president in November of 2019. And the way that this tax would work is that companies would have to calculate their taxes in two different ways each year, first, the ordinary corporate tax. And then second, this book tax and under this book tax companies would take the income that they report to their shareholders on their financial statement, make some adjustments to make sure there’s no double taxation also make adjustments for losses.
Kyle Pomerleau:
If companies had lost money in previous years, then multiply that by 15%, then subtract out a few credits credit for foreign taxes, paid research and development, credit green energy credits, and knowing those two tax liabilities, the company has to pay the greater of the two. So if the corporate tax is greater than the book tax, they pay the ordinary tax and go on their way. But if the company’s book tax is greater than the ordinary tax, they have to pay the diff that difference in that book tax liability is then tacked on top of the ordinary tax liability. As in the purpose of this is to target the very largest multinational corporations in the United States that from year to year, at least on their financial statements are projecting to pay low effective tax rate.
Joe Selvaggi:
And this addresses, I think, a popular, I won’t call it a rhetorical myth, but this popular chorus among some in and public political leadership that there are lots of billion dollar corporations paying zero tax. This is essentially to address what’s perceived to be a large companies getting away with no taxes in a given year. Is that roughly where this is coming from? Yeah. This
Kyle Pomerleau:
Is more perception than fact definitely. The underlying driver of this is what tax people call book tax differences, but book income is calculated in a certain way to provide information to shareholders. How will the company’s doing what investments the company’s making what, it’s, what it will look like potentially a few years from now, that’s what book income is supposed to. If the information book income is supposed to provide it, taxable income is meant to fairly levy taxes on corporations and the way that these are calculator entirely different. So you can have in many years book income that shows pop positive profits, but in some years, taxable income, that’s very, very low. It causes this Mitt mismatch where you can have a low, effective tax rates on your book income. Now the mismatching go the other way too, in that some years book income can be very, very low, but taxable income can be very, very high. And it shows the opposite that these companies are paying very high, effective tax rates, some 80 or 90% of their profits. And those numbers don’t make very much sense either. So I usually caution people from looking at those effective tax rates on booking com because they don’t really tell us very much about what the effect of tax burden on a company is. You really have to look over a number of years. You really have to study what provisions the companies are using or taking advantage of in the, in the federal tax code.
Joe Selvaggi:
Again, I want to address a myth about this, no tax billionaire corporation. I think the myth is that they get away with paying no tax by having very clever tax attorneys and accountants. Instead from what I know taxes corporations make profits and have two choices. They can distribute those to their shareholders, or they can reinvest it in the firm if they do, the shareholders are happy to see that money essentially make the company they own bigger that would be a case of a large growth corporation. And if a company is more stable it may prefer to distribute those profits so effectively. It’s not that the company isn’t paying taxes on money distributed, but rather money retained and further invested in growth. Is that right?
Kyle Pomerleau:
Yeah. Another, another piece of this too, is that I think part of this conversation that bugs economists is that at the end of the day, corporations really don’t pay tax, right? Corporations are legal entities, they’re just collections of individual workers and shareholders that get together to produce a good or a service that other people then purchase. Ultimately, any money up corporation is liable to pay in taxes. That goes to the FA it goes to the federal government is going to be taken out of individuals pockets, whether those are the shareholders. So those are the owners of the, the corporation or the workers of those th those corporations. You can’t really escape that, that it’s going to be people that bear the burden of these taxes, not legal entities.
Joe Selvaggi:
Yes, of course. And of course and again, to preserve margins corporations also can raise prices to to pay for taxes. So again corporations don’t pay taxes consumers, workers, and shareholders do that’s important. What would be a case of a firm that is going to likely be swept up or effected by a tax like this? I mentioned growth, but if you have names in mind that our listeners would know, yeah,
Kyle Pomerleau:
I don’t want to speak to any specifics because I don’t really know the details of many of these companies, but then the proposal is meant to target companies like Amazon apple. These are very large corporations that are growing. And the reason why these companies may have low effective tax rates, Amazon for example, is that if you’re a company that makes a lot of investment, you’re growing, you’re going to be taking lots of deductions for those investments. And under the corporate income tax current law, a lot of the deductions you can take are very large upfront deductions for those new investments. This was passed in 2017, it’s called 100% bonus depreciation, lets companies deduct the full cost of many investments upfront. And if you that compared to book income, for example, you’re not allowed to make deductions that large. So there creates a mismatch. So when there’s a company, a large company like Amazon that’s growing quickly or making investments that can drive down effective tax rates quite a bit. So I think those are the, those are the companies that these were, these, this provision is meant to go after
Joe Selvaggi:
After these myths. And I wanted to help see if we can throw one more way and say, okay, if, if it’s the shareholders of these growth companies, these billion dollar growth companies that will be affected, is it billionaires who own billion dollar companies, or are there ordinary people who might be affected by this, this tax
Kyle Pomerleau:
By and large high-income households own more stock than low income household? So if you look across the entire distribution of the population and you look at all the equity that people may own, a lot of it is concentrated in the high-income households. So it is true to say that when you do raise the corporate income tax rate, you are disproportionately impacting high-income households that said taxing very large companies is not the same as targeting very high income households because although most of the equities are owned by high income or high net worth households. That’s not, that’s not a law. There are people across the income scale and wealth distribution that own equities. So attacks on corporation can also impact to retiree that earned that lives off $30,000 of dividends from corporate stock. So it, it re it, it really depends. An entity level tax is not, is not going to be as well targeted as just raising tax rates on high-income households.
Joe Selvaggi:
Now, a tax expert, like you make a living on explaining to a layman like me, the complexity of taxes, but I, I haven’t met too many tax experts who wouldn’t prefer a more simple tax policy just does this tax provision one that looks at book rather than a traditional profits. Does this simplify the tax code or does it move us what I would say in the wrong direction towards a far more complex, a system of calculation? Yeah.
Kyle Pomerleau:
It’ll depend on who you talk to, but I think regardless of whether it’s an economist or a lawyer or an accountant, I don’t know if there are very many people that like this idea of a book tax or your book minimum tax increases complexity, because one, you’re now calculating two taxes instead of one two, it increases the number of credits that companies will have to track. Three and this is a little bit more outside of complexity, but it is a downside book. Income is not determined by Congress. Book income is determined by rules put forth by FASBI w which is a nonprofit organization that dictates accounting accounting standards. So when you raise some of your revenue from taxing book income, you’re in essence outsourcing some of the revenue collections from Congress into a non-elected nonprofit, nonprofit body. So that’s not necessarily increased in complexity, but it is a concern that part of the tax code is no longer controlled by, by Congress. So I, I think that overall, this is that taxing book income is a step away from a simpler tax code. And we all want to make sure that we are limiting the amount of deductions and credits that companies can take that are distortive, that are reducing the amount of taxes they should pay, but I would always prefer to just go directly at them, scale them back repeal them outright as a way to increase the tax burden on corporations, not to enact a parallel tax that runs alongside the ordinary corporate tax.
Joe Selvaggi:
So a more simple plan that affects everyone equally rather than a complex plan that is, is difficult to follow and, and, and has businesses making decisions based on tax implications rather than business implications.
Kyle Pomerleau:
Yeah. And then that’s another really good point too, that we know that corporations adjust their taxable income in FA in the face of taxation. Individuals will try to take as many deductions or companies will try to take as many deductions and credits as they can. Companies also use some accounting maneuvers to shift profits from the United States to overseas to reduce their tax liability. That taxing book income is going to translate that behavior right over to book income. So there’s also a concern that taxing book income is going to reduce the quality of financial statements that we’re not going to really get a good, perfect sense of how well these companies are, are doing because to some extent, the profits that they’re reporting to their shareholders are somewhat dictated by the fact that they’re taxed on them have heard of it.
Joe Selvaggi:
Again, political leaders assert that our taxes are corporations are undertaxed. I guess what they mean by that is relative to the rest of the world. How do the U S tax rates compare with let’s say our largest
Kyle Pomerleau:
Competitors, this is a complex issue of actually you can’t really look at just one statistic and some of the statistics are outright misleading. Now, if you look at statutory tax rates, just how much companies pay on each additional dollar of profits. The United States is about average, maybe a little bit above average. You look at the federal rate of 21% plus state and local rates. That’s about 25.8%. The OACD average is around 25%. So we’re right around average that now, if you look at effective tax rates, however, the story changes a little bit. We actually place a slightly higher tax burden on investment in the United States than other countries do. So if you look at how much say, if a company wants to invest in a new machine, how much is that machine going to have to pay in taxes over the life of that asset?
Kyle Pomerleau:
That that tax is a little bit higher in the United States than the average of the OECD. Then the third piece is sometimes the administration, for example, likes to compare corporate tax collections as a percent of GDP in the United States to corporate tax collections as a percent of GDP in other countries. And that statistic generally shows where at the bottom of the list where you, we, we are collecting the least amount of revenue as a percent of GDP, my caution against using that statistic because the size of each corporate sector in each country is different in the United States. For example, we have a huge sector of non-corporate businesses are what are called pass through businesses. These are S corporations, partnerships, LLCs. These are businesses that pay taxes through the individual income tax. And we in the vast majority of businesses in the United States are passed through businesses.
Kyle Pomerleau:
Only about 5% of businesses are corporations. In contrast, other countries, their corporate sectors are huge. They have much higher individual income tax and much lower corporate tax rates. So most of their activity is in the corporate form over in other countries. So you can’t really directly compare collections as a percent of GDP without making adjustments for the size of the pass-through sector. And I, in a recent piece, I did that. And once you do that, you find that the United States a little bit above average in terms of its burden on corporations. So make a long answer short here, it’s, it’s complicated, but we’re, we’re probably above right around average or a little bit above average under current.
Joe Selvaggi:
And the, and the situation you described really is a function of the fact that most wise business owners don’t want to be taxed twice. And so therefore they’ll create the corporate entity that gets taxed once, once you, the corporation makes the profits and then distributes the profits, and then the, the, the owner gets taxed twice. When you say as the income. So that’s the reason we have such a small corporate sector.
Kyle Pomerleau:
Yeah. Yes. Com companies when, when individuals are looking at which business legal form of organization to take, they’re going to look at the all-in tax burden, whether it’s passed through business or a corporation. And I think you’re right. All things considered the tax burden on corporations slightly higher than it is under a pat passed through form, especially after the tax cuts and jobs act. And I think that that tilts the scale towards that. And that is one of the reasons why our, yeah, our corporate sector is, is smaller at the end of the day.
Joe Selvaggi:
So I want to shift our focus to another provision. I think this is fairly recent and almost mind-blowing to imagine this, this I’ve heard it called the Zillow taxes notion that we would tax unrealized gains in addition to realized gains and you know, for our listeners, I think everyone knows what a realized gain is. You sell something, you make a profit and your profits realized unrealized as an asset. That’s appreciated notionally, but not actually now you’ve not sold it. So it’s only worth what someone will pay for it in the future. How is it? Or, you know, w w what are the, the details of this, this, this tax, and how will it be implemented?
Kyle Pomerleau:
I don’t even, so this was actually a last week, big debate over this mark to market proposal. And I think, well, we’ll see it’s all already rumblings that this is going to be dropped. I think a lot of some lawmakers are uncomfortable with it, but though the way that the proposal was going to work is that for taxpayers with $1 billion in net worth, or $100 million in earnings on average over three years would be pushed into this mark to market regime. And that instead of being taxed on capital gains, when you sell your asset, these taxpayers would be taxed on capital gains each year as the asset appreciates in value. So you’d be switching from the realization to the mark to market system. And so th th in the reason that they wanted to go about this, or why they wanted to go about this is that they feel that for very, very high income and high net worth households, the value of deferral, the ability to defer your capital gains is very large.
Kyle Pomerleau:
And a lot of tax payers may be able to borrow money to finance their consumption instead of realizing their capital gains and totally avoid taxation on this income. So that’s the argument for why they wanted to go to go about this. We didn’t really get a good sense of how much this tax would raise. I think some people suggested it would be somewhere between 200 to $300 billion over a decade. That number seems to make sense to me, it would only be affecting about 700 people in the United States. So even, even though in theory, it could impact the, the appreciation of someone’s house. It would only be impacting the appreciation of say, Jeff Bezos, his house, or Elon Musk’s house.
Joe Selvaggi:
But again, I don’t wanna get too deep into this because as you say, it’s, it’s, it may not happen after all. But isn’t this just carrying, bringing forward in revenue that you will ultimately collect when that, that asset is sold in the future. I mean it’s not as if it falls off the register forever, ultimately everything gets sold or disappears. How, how, how do you account for the fact that you’re essentially drawing future taxes forward to
Kyle Pomerleau:
It’s in Texas? Yeah, that’s a really good question. So there are two, two pieces to this. So one of them has to do with the treatment of capital gains when the owner of those assets passes away. So under current law, if you hold onto an asset and it appreciates over your lifetime, you pass away and then pass that asset onto your heir, that assets basis is stepped up to market value at the point of your death. So what that means is that all of the appreciation through your life is not subject to tax. So it gets a big exemption. And this is one of the concerns I think Democrats are trying to address is that fair, very, very wealthy strategy you’d want to use is to just not sell your assets, because you don’t want to realize your capital gains. And then eventually you pass those assets onto your air and all of that tax that could have been collected.
Kyle Pomerleau:
If you sold the asset would go away, it would be exempt from taxation. The second piece is that to the federal government, there’s an aspect of time value of money, but you are right that if an asset appreciates over time and I sell in the future, I’m still getting taxed, but to the federal government, they’d rather have that revenue each and every year, rather than delaying it several years. And to them, the value is not all that different because interest rates on debt are not that high and the government can borrow at below 2% effectively, but there is a slight difference in timing in that the government, from the government’s perspective, they’d rather collect the revenue now than later from the taxpayer’s perspective, they rather pay the tax later than pay it. Now,
Joe Selvaggi:
Fair enough, fair enough. But that, that asset is not sitting up in the ground it’s, it’s appreciating and giving people jobs and creating new opportunities.
Kyle Pomerleau:
Yeah, that’s an, that’s another piece too, is that a lot of these assets are are, are capital assets, their claims on ownership to productive corporations that produce goods and services, and that if you are own a share and Exxon mobile, for example, the dividends you get are net of any corporate tax that’s being paid. Or if you own a, a stock, an apple stock, and it’s appreciating its appreciation is partially based on the corporate taxes that apple has to pay. So there is still tax being paid every single year. It’s just the entity level tax not the additional individual income tax.
Joe Selvaggi:
So the appreciation is as you say, after tax appreciation. So that’s an important, important detail part. I want to, I don’t want to dwell on that feature. Are there any traditional income taxes you said much is off, off the off the board. We at the outset some members in Congress didn’t want additional raising of taxes on corporate store income. What’s still in there.
Kyle Pomerleau:
So there, there are a few pieces that are more traditional individual income tax increases or kind of conventional income tax increases. So there is a they’ve build back better proposal has a new Sur tax on adjusted, gross income for households. So under this provision taxpayers with $10 million in adjusted gross income would face a 5% Sur tax on income over that threshold, an 8% Sur tax on income over $25 million. So very, very high income households would face this additional tax on all of their sources of income wages, business, income, capital gains, dividends, interests. They would all face this additional tax. This tax, I think in a way, is a replacement to the mark to market proposal. This, this surtax is supposed to raise about 200 to $250 billion in target, roughly the same, the same household tussles that have very, very high income that might be earning some of their income from capital gains independence.
Joe Selvaggi:
And we hear Massachusetts had been contemplating a change in our constitution that would allow for, we have a mandate of a flat tax, but we’re considering changing our tax code to allow for a certain tax on income on very high earners. We’ve established that it’s, it’s rare that someone makes this kind of money often and more often than not a $10 million income is, is going to be reflected by someone who’s, who’s built a business retained a lot of the earnings and has a liquidity event that puts them over, let’s say the $10 million threshold, but just once is there is this money purely over the 10 million or would it, you know, go back to dollar one? And who, who do you think is likely to pay these kinds of taxes? Yeah.
Kyle Pomerleau:
Oh, this is a, a, a marginal tax rate. So it’s over the threshold. Yeah. I think it would be an entirely different animal if they were thinking of, of, of taxing infer marginal dollars below that. So th this type of this type of tax it’s broad, so it’s going to hit wage-earners. So those that earn very, very high wages for one reason or another. This could, this could hit business owners. Those that earn those past the earned profits from those pass through businesses, we were talking about this Sur tax would apply to them. It would also hit some returns to corporations as well, because it’s going to apply to capital gains and dividends those those forms of income or the returns to those investments. So it’s a, it’s a broad tax. It’s gonna hit all that income now to the extent that, that those higher taxes are going to discourage productive activities, whether it’s working, saving, and investment, that could have additional effects on the economy than just the direct effects on those that are paying the tax. If you’re a business owner and you’re facing a higher tax rate that may increase your cost of capital or your cost of investing in new and new projects, and that could have an impact on the productivity of your firm, that could have an impact on the amount you can pay your workers and the amount that you can hire. Of course,
Joe Selvaggi:
Now let’s take this step back. Let’s change our focus. We estimate, although that’s even that is not certain this bill or this act will be will cost roughly three and a half trillion dollars. That’s a lot of zeros. Have you been able to estimate given all the provisions of the revenue that we’ve described here, how much money will this bring in?
Kyle Pomerleau:
Yeah. Good, good question. So, right. So right now, there’s still a lot in flux on the spending side, they’re still negotiating the 3.5 is that top line number that Biden really wanted recent news as stated that it could be as low as 1.5 or 1.7, 5 trillion, 1.7, $5 trillion over that period. So anywhere in between now on the revenue side, again, unclear because we don’t know exactly what provisions are going to be in there, but if we add up all the provisions that are currently in build back better, this is probably a tax increase between one and a half to 1.7, $5 trillion over a decade. And, you know, to give a sense, that’s the same size as the the, the tax cuts and jobs act that was passed in late of 2017 in terms of its its scale early, some dollar value. Now, the taxpayers and impacts are totally different. This 1.75 trillion is coming primarily or almost exclusively from very high income households. The TCGA was a broader tax cut. So it’s not a perfect comparison, but just to give you a sense of scale, we’re talking about roughly the same dollar figure there. So
Joe Selvaggi:
With the earlier act reduced taxes, this replaces and if we use the low end range of the estimate of the, the spending here, it will roughly will not be free as some assert, but will pay for itself. If, if the revenue estimates and the spending of Smith’s on the low end add up, it will pay for itself.
Kyle Pomerleau:
It will be, it will be financed in so far as taxes will cover spending. I don’t know many people that call that as being costless, because taxpayers will be having will, will need to pay for that. And any spending that isn’t directly financed by increased taxes is going to increase the federal debt, which means that there is a future liability that taxpayers will need to cover.
Joe Selvaggi:
Indeed. the government I’d like to point this out, it seems trivial, but the government doesn’t have its own money. It only has our money so that if this tax revenue does not meet the expenditures, it’s either, you know, we, we call for additional taxes now or additional taxes in the future. That’s the only choices we have.
Kyle Pomerleau:
It’s important politically. We don’t know how comfortable any given lawmaker is with borrowing. We know that some may be comfortable, but, you know, if, if they come up short, that may mean that spending has to come down a little bit in order for them to get the votes that they need to pass them.
Joe Selvaggi:
Now, we’re, we’re in the last couple of years now with the pandemic the federal government spent quite a bit of money, roughly $6 trillion, extra trying to sort of ensure that the economy doesn’t suffer any more damage than it already had. That’s an addition to it. You know, what historically has been about a $4 trillion federal budget. We owe a lot of money at this point. You’re a tax expert. If we were trying to be responsible about paying for what we spend if you’re king for a day, I like to ask our experts these kinds of questions. What types of taxes do you think would both raise revenue? But also not distort economies. And in other words, it’s not discouraged investment growth jobs, all the things we like at AEI and, and that pioneer, what would you recommend?
Kyle Pomerleau:
Th this is a really broad question. Of course my, my, my initial reaction here is that it’s not, it, it’s not going to just be from tax revenue. I think eventually lawmakers are going to have to do something to balance things. And it’s probably going to be a combination of reduced spending and increased taxes. Now, if I had a seat at the table, or I could just decide I think that if I were to raise additional revenue, it would be probably be from one broadening the income tax base. So there’s currently a lot of income that isn’t taxed under the individual income tax. For example, one of the biggest sources of that is compensation. I, or you may receive from your employer in the form of health insurance premiums paying for those health insurance premiums. That’s a form of income that is being, that people are earning that is kind of like wages should be taxed like wages. But that’s just one example, another tax or a couple of the taxes that I would consider are additional sources of revenue. I think the United States should consider a value added tax to be a federal level roughly a sales tax. These are very broad based taxes they’re used through most of the world. And they are relative to other taxes, very little distortion on the economy. And a tax of 5% could raise quite a lot of revenue for the federal government to close some of this gap.
Joe Selvaggi:
Hm. So value added tax. I’ve, I’ve heard that proposed. In fact, I’ll, I’ll share a little secret. A very progressive economist I met at the Kennedy school, talked about the power of value out of taxes, enormous revenue potential, but right now Democrats see it as a progressive tax. So they don’t like it. Republicans see it as a enormous revenue opportunity for tax. But when he said, if Democrats realized it was an enormous opportunity for taxes and Republicans realized it was regressive, they might actually meet in the center of that and agree on it. What do you imagine the probability of a value-added tax ever come seeing the light of day?
Kyle Pomerleau:
Yeah, I, I w today very low chance, but I think at some point something has to give I at that in the future, the federal government is going to face some tough choices. Some of those choices in the absence of revenue may include cutting social security benefits, or Medicare benefits. And I think politically, you know, if you’re going to choose, are we going to raise a broad base tax modestly or place a significant, potentially significant burden on current recipients of retirement benefits? I think that they, they would probably lean more on the value added tax and drastically cutting benefits. I know that’s probably a sad thing for proponents of limited government to hear. But there are only so many things that or there’s only so many things that are possible politically.
Joe Selvaggi:
And I think that, you know, smaller reforms are more likely than very large ones. And you know, in the future, I think an additional source of revenue like of that could be part of a smaller, more modest for form to balance the bucket, getting closer to balancing the budget on relief. Neither of us is intending to run for office. Anytime soon, I proposed raising taxes on healthcare plans. I presume also on maybe the mortgage deduction that’s yeah, that, that would be another one that I, you could at least start by capping the value and only impacting high-income households. I’m actually somewhat surprised that lawmakers this time around, didn’t try to limit itemized deductions for very high income household. In fact, lawmakers are thinking about expanding itemized deductions for high-income households, by eliminating the state and local tax deduction, cap of $10,000 that was passed as part of the tax cuts and jobs act.
Joe Selvaggi:
Right. That’s amazing to me that Democrats proposed something like that, which would be sort of a naked giveaway to, you know, higher earners in high tax states. If you’re getting a tax subsidy to pay state taxes, it seems impossible, but that’s how it is. Okay, well, we’re almost out of time. I appreciate this very deep conversation. I hope our our listeners stuck with us. There’s a lot to learn about this this new act and you’ve been very, very informative, a great guest, and I really appreciate your time will thank you very much for having me.
Joe Selvaggi:
This has been another episode of Hubwonk, a podcast of Pioneer Institute, a think tank in Boston. If you enjoyed today’s show, there are several ways to support us and pioneer Institute. It would be easier for you and better for us. If you subscribe to Hubwonk on your iTunes podcast, if you’d like to make it easier for others to find hub one, it would help. If you offer us a five star rating or a favorable review, naturally, we’re always grateful. If you want to share Hubwonk with friends, if you find ideas for me, or suggestions or comments about future episode topics, you’re welcome to reach out to me via email at hubwonk@pioneerinstitute.org. Please join me next week for a new episode.
Related Posts:
This week on JobMakers, host Denzil Mohammed talks with Gary Christenson, Mayor of Malden, the second most diverse city in Massachusetts, with almost 43 percent of its residents born outside of the United States. It’s also home to The Immigrant Learning Center, the co-producer of this podcast. It’s always been a gateway city for immigrants and refugees: from Jews fleeing for safety after World War II, to Eastern Europeans and Vietnamese seeking democracy and freedom, to immigrants from China, Morocco, Brazil and Haiti seeking the American Dream. For Mayor Christenson, it is this diversity that gives Malden its strength, and assures him of a strong, proud future. He looks to the revitalization of downtown with its disproportionate number of immigrant-owned businesses, and talks with us about managing the relationships between long-time residents and new immigrants, the reaction of the city to hate crimes after the Boston Marathon bombing, how much immigrants have given back to their new home, and his stance on sanctuary cities, in this week’s JobMakers.
Guest:
Gary Christenson has been Mayor of Malden, Massachusetts since 2012. His political career began as a budget analyst, revenue director and special assistant reporting to Tom Finneran on the Massachusetts House Ways and Means committee from 1994-1997. He also served as budget director at the Middlesex County Sheriff’s Office. Christenson was appointed to the Malden School Committee, and served as a city councillor of Ward 1 in Malden for seven years. He became Chairman of the Finance Committee and then City Council President, before being elected mayor. Christenson is a triple alumnus of Suffolk University. He has received a Bachelor’s degree in political science science and business management in 1990 and a Masters Degree in public administration in 1992. In 2003, Gary received his Juris Doctorate from the Suffolk University Law School.
Read a Transcript of This Episode:
Please excuse typos.
Denzil Mohammed:
I am Denzil Mohammed, and this is JobMakers.
Malden, Massachusetts, the second most diverse city in the Commonwealth. After Chelsea with almost 43% of us residents born outside of the United States. It’s also home to the immigrant learning center, the co-producer of this podcast. So a good location for free English language program. Maldens always been a gateway city for immigrants and refugees from Jews fleeing for safety after world war two to Eastern Europeans and Vietnamese seeking democracy and freedom to immigrants from China, Morocco, Brazil, and Haiti seeking the American dream today from me or Gary Christianson. It is this diversity that gives Malden its strength and assures him of a strong, proud future. He looks to the revitalization of downtown as its disproportionate number of immigrant owned businesses, the dizzying array of cuisines on offer and the very entrepreneurial spirit. That’s the fuses its immigrant populations. He talks with us about managing the relationships between the term residents and new immigrants, the reaction of the city to hate crimes after the Boston marathon bombing, how much immigrants have given back to their new home and his stance on century cities in this week’s job makers, Mayor Gary Christianson, welcome to the job makers podcast.
Mayor Gary Christenson
Thank you so much for having me, always an honor.
Denzil Mohammed:
So what is it like running the second most diverse city in the Commonwealth?
Mayor Gary Christenson
It probably is the greatest aspect of serving as mayor, because I have learned things that I know that I never otherwise would, if not the living in one of the most diverse cities in the state of Massachusetts. For example, I met with a community group a couple of years ago, and when they told me the name of the country, I didn’t even know it existed. I actually had to go to a map to look it up. It was Eritrea. And,uagain, if not for them being here and being part of this diverse city that we live in, I might have never known that. And so to me, that’s one of the greatest benefits of, of living here in Malden.
Denzil Mohammed:
And you’re a lifelong Malden resident. How have you seen immigration shaped this city? And in what ways? I mean, I, as far as I can tell Malden has always been a gateway city for different refugee and immigrant groups, right?
Mayor Gary Christenson
Yeah. I guess how has it shaped our city from religion to culture, to my favorite, which is a food it’s had a profound impact on who we are and where we are going. And I can’t tell you the number of people who end up coming here now mention the diversity as one of the attractions on why they come to our city.
Denzil Mohammed
So you think that this diversity is a strength of ours.
Mayor Gary Christenson:
We touted every chance we get. And you know, we just don’t, we try not to just talk the talk. We’re now trying to take what has been happening to our city and have it permeate throughout everything we do in Malden. So for example we now have our first diversity equity and inclusion officer, just a couple of offices down from me. Her name is Bybiose Larochelle, and she now is working very hard to have the government reflect what Malden has become, which is again, one of the most diverse cities in our state. So she sits on every hiring committee she’s involved with helping to promote the vaccine to underserved populations in our city. And we want to make sure that Malden is not just known as the most diverse, but actually practices and preaches on making sure that our community is, is welcoming and safe for us all.
Denzil Mohammed:
So we know from our own research and you would know as the person who runs this city, that immigrants are inherently entrepreneurial. Just the idea of packing a suitcase and leaving their family and friends and their culture and their food behind is itself. An entrepreneurial act. How has that entrepreneurial spirit immigrants in Malden shaped the local economy?
Mayor Gary Christenson:
Just the other day, we cut the ribbon to the new Maplewood meat market over on in Maplewood square. And the owners, they one was from Peru and the other one was from Mexico, I believe. And they are not only the owners, but they’re serving the goods that are native to their original countries. And again, that would not be the case, if not for them wanting to set up their business here in our city. So we went down that not only congratulate them on this risk, because that’s what it is when you’re opening a new business, but thank them as well for sharing what they have experienced and learned growing up with our, our community. So that’s just one example of many that we work with on a daily basis here in Malden.
Denzil Mohammed:
I remember talking to Shane Smith on this podcast who runs Hugh O’Neill’s Irish pub. And, you know, he mentioned when he, when he first opened that downtown mall and wasn’t the vibrant hub that it is now with pubs and restaurants and cafes and stores particularly looking at the downtown area, how have immigrants played a role in revitalizing downtown Malden over the years?
Mayor Gary Christenson:
Well, I would encourage your listeners to, to come see it, to experience it firsthand, but they have, single-handedly brought our city back and there were times when people weren’t sure about whether that would ever be possible again, but they have done it. Just go up one side and down the other, and you’ll see just this afternoon, I’m going to go over to the gallery at 57 pleasant street, which consists of a number of immigrant artists who are going to be celebrating the second anniversary of that store opening. And again, that would not have happened without their willingness to get involved and help us bring back Malden square from where it once was.
Denzil Mohammed:
And I just can’t help. But think of the sheer diversity, you talk about someone from Peru and Mexico Eritrea, I mean, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Vietnam Haiti, just so many, so much rich diversity here. And we take it for granted that just in America, that we have all this great diversity of food. For instance, you know, America’s favorite fast food chain is Taco Bell. We have immigrants to thank for the fact that we can have, we can choose on a Friday night Thai food or Scottish food or Irish food or Chinese food.
Mayor Gary Christenson:
Well, I can tell you the difference here. A number of our students who graduate Malden high school and go off into the big world, always come back and tell us that one of the advantages of attending school in our city is that when they get out, they’ve experienced it all whereas students that they are meeting for the first time, it takes them several years to adjust and adapt to experiencing new cultures, new religions, new foods, but not students that come from our cities. So, you know, to me, that’s one of the great things about Malden.
Denzil Mohammed:
You’ve mentioned students, and I want to get back to that in a second, but what has Malden done over the years? How has your relationship with immigrant business owners in particular evolved? Like what have you, what have you done right? That other cities have not done right? When it comes to really fostering that entrepreneurial spirit?
Mayor Gary Christenson:
Yes. You know, again, as I mentioned, our diversity equity inclusion officer now Bybiose Larochelle has been working with the different community groups throughout Malden to take us to that next level, because we’ve known now for some time that we are diverse and we appreciate it and enjoy it, but now it’s time to take it to where it should go, which is to again, be in a place that everybody can participate in. So I would say that is where we’re going next, which is, you know, having people working in the government that reflect our community having documents, translated meetings, translated so people could participate in eventually run for political office.
Denzil Mohammed:
So you mentioned students a little bit, a little while ago. Part of your progress in Malden has been the creation of 1500 jobs from Malden’s teams, exposing them to the job interview process, giving them work experience, arming them with career readiness. Given that 50%, 57% of Malden high school students don’t count English as their first language. How do you see reaching such a diverse group of students? How have they been able to engage with these opportunities?
Mayor Gary Christenson:
We go to them, we reach out to them, we roll out the red carpet for them. We make it a point to find those students who otherwise would not get involved and take that step. We try to find people that we’ve never met and we have no connection with, because again, it’s opportunities like the summer youth employment program that good help determine who that next teacher is, who that next police officer is. That next entrepreneur is
Denzil Mohammed:
One of the most beautiful things to see in Malden is when the bell rings and the high school students come streaming out, all the elementary schools students. And they’re from every different color, every different Stripe, every different background, but they’re all friends, they all get along. They may wear a hijab or, you know, something else, but they all get along. And it’s almost like this lesson in immigrant integration and inclusion and belonging. Has it been challenging over the years? Just you talk about all this community outreach and meeting people where they’re at and has it been like a learning experience for you?
Mayor Gary Christenson:
It certainly hasn’t been a challenge. It’s been something that I have been proud and honored to be a part of, because again, I, listen, my family said growing up the whole point of why we’re here is to learn, share, and grow. That’s the whole point of it to make it better for the next group of residents behind us, for them then to be living in a place that’s greater than we found it. And so I’ve been able to do that by, you know, living here in Malden. Again, I’ve seen, I’ve heard, I’ve learned things. It actually has helped me to rarely need a vacation because I feel like here in Malden, I’m on vacation all the time. I’m not sure
Denzil Mohammed:
You want to say that before your next campaign.
Denzil Mohammed:
But what, what, what do you think re it’s it’s, it’s almost ironic and tragic that you say the lesson was to make it easier for the people who come after you, because so often the groups that are, that are, have settled here, disliked the groups that come after them, we’ve seen that it’s a cycle in US history. You know, who does America belong to? And I think, I would venture to suggest it belongs to anyone who believes in the American dream, you know, who had that freedom and opportunity. What do you think sets Malden apart when it comes to embracing its newest foreign-born residence and ensuring that they thrive?
Mayor Gary Christenson:
I would say it’s just a willingness to work with everyone to make our community the best it can be. I mean, we try here to take every call, every email, no matter what your stature is in life, you know, so, you know, there was a time when it was, we knew, you know, what they do, but we’ve tried hard over the years to let that not be the case here. So we, I believe we truly have a, an open door policy. I’ll give you an example. We had someone reach out to us from Morocco the other day. I don’t even know how she got my text number, but she got my cell number. She texted me, I couldn’t remember who she was or where I met her, but within 24 hours sitting in the mayor’s office trying to help address, you know, her ratio, which is serious, but we think we might have some solutions for her, but the point I’m trying to make is that again, that was something we could have said, you know, schedule it a month out, you know, find out who she is, all that stuff.
Mayor Gary Christenson:
But we try not to do that here. We had her here in 24 hours.
Denzil Mohammed:
So it hasn’t been entirely rosy experience here in Malden. I think there have been some tensions with longtime residents and newer residents,and things can get very heated when it comes to, you know, national or local tragedies. We did have an incident soon after the Boston marathon bombing where a Syrian woman was punched by a resident of Malden,in front of her toddler, you know, taking her child to daycare. But the city’s response was pretty remarkable, right?
Mayor Gary Christenson:
Yes, that’s in the eye of the beholder, but our instant reaction was to swarm her, you know, to be with her, to let her know that that is not something we’re known for or tolerate. And the thing I’ll remember most about that is the number of people who came to her defense and to reassure her that that was, that was an anomaly. And I think as a result, we were able to survive that together. You know, we are a community for all. I mean, just look at the latest census track that just came out. When you look at the map of Malden, it’s pretty evenly distributed across the five square miles. So as opposed to another city who might have a, you know, a segment or a population in this corner, and then the rest of the city is another population, here in Malden, you wouldn’t know where you are at any given time in any part of the city.
Denzil Mohammed:
Over the years, how has Malden sort of managed these tensions or this relationship of the longer term residents versus the newer ones?
Mayor Gary Christenson:
I would say it’s creating an atmosphere, again, where people are welcomed and respected, no matter what generation they’re from. So we observe, we celebrate different holidays, we observe and celebrate different religious traditions. We eat different foods. And I think that’s how we’ve tried to do it here in the government. So I guess in other words, lead by example. So if you notice on our social media, my social media channels, always trying to promote, you know, a different culture or a different religion, a different food. And I think when people see the leaders of the city doing that, I think over time, people tend to accept it. You know, when they see their elected officials and managers, department heads, police chiefs, fire chiefs, I think that’s how we’ve been able to do it. Because again, we want to demonstrate that no matter where you are or where you’re from, you’re just as part of Malden as anybody else.
Denzil Mohammed:
One thing that you did over the last federal administration, you know, there were a lot of movements across the country to where cities were insisting that they be more welcoming and that they take a sort of stand when it came to protecting their immigrant populations. And as we know, about 20% of the immigrant population in Massachusetts has no legal status. They’re undocumented. Malden was one of the cities that did not proclaim that it was a sanctuary city. And the reason was that coming from you and your administration was that it’s already a welcoming and protective place. Can you expand on that a little bit as why you took that decision? Not to make Malden a sanctuary city?
Mayor Gary Christenson:
No. I mean, that was the flavor of the day to become a sanctuary city, but in actuality, what did it really mean besides the potential for pro protracted legal battles and the potential loss of aid? You know, at that time, we didn’t know whether that would mean that some of the grants that we were relying on to help people who were in need of it the most would be at risk. So that was why at the time we didn’t feel the need to sign on to becoming a sanctuary city, which I think over time then changed to something else, et cetera. I just know, I think for us, and I think, I believe the other branches of government, they felt the same way that, you know, we were long past having to label ourselves as something other than what we have always been, which is a place, you know, that everybody can live, work, worship
Denzil Mohammed:
We’ve, you and I have seen immigrants contribute to the city as business owners, as workers through cultural events, building it up and enriching it every day. There is a huge narrative out there about immigrants as takers, refugees as takers. What is your view on that? How have you seen immigrants give back and have they given back over time more than you’ve given them or the government has given them?
Mayor Gary Christenson:
I haven’t seen takers. I’ve seen people, my experience here that like you outlined Denzil at the beginning, that just want a chance, an opportunity to live out their dreams. And so I’ve seen that as we’ve gone around to the different businesses, as I’ve talked with students in the different schools that we have here. And even in the houses of worship, when I go through there that, you know, people are just looking for an opportunity to achieve their lifelong dream.
Denzil Mohammed:
That’s a very powerful way to end this. Mayor Christenson, thank you so much for joining us and JobMakers. This was really a fascinating discussion and I hope other municipalities listened to this and be guided accordingly as to how, as you say, you can help people fulfill their dreams and you can see how much they can give back.
Mayor Gary Christenson:
That’s it. That’s what it’s all about. Hey, and thank you Denzil, to the Immigrant Learning Center. I am certain we would not be having this conversation if not, for all the work that you have done over the years. So thank you.
Denzil Mohammed:
Jobmakers is a weekly podcast about immigrant entrepreneurship and contribution produced by pioneer Institute, a think tank in Boston and the Immigrant Learning Center, a not-for-profit that gives immigrants a voice. Thank you for joining us for today’s fascinating story on the benefits of welcoming immigrants and refugees to the U S if you have feedback or know someone, you should talk to email Denzel that’s, D E N Z I L @ jobmakerspodcast.org. I’m Denzil Mohammed. Join us next Thursday at noon for another episode of jobmakers.
Recent Episodes:
This week on “The Learning Curve,” co-hosts Gerard Robinson and Cara Candal talk with Dr. Bror Saxberg, MD, Vice President of Learning Science at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Dr. Saxberg describes his groundbreaking work in the area of learning science and understanding how “working memory” and “long-term memory” can help improve academic excellence and equity. He reviews what we now know from cognitive science and brain research that, if taken to scale, would likely help drive better student outcomes, and surveys some of the schools that apply this research most effectively to instructional reforms. Finally, Dr. Saxberg offers thoughts on the uses and limits of technology in American education reform, and whether school districts and schools are spending their resources on technology effectively enough to improve student achievement.
Stories of the Week: In Philadelphia, as the city prepares for a transit system strike that could disrupt in-person learning for 60,000 students and 20,000 school system employees, district leaders are looking to online education as a temporary solution. Wisconsin is seeing a rise in efforts to recall school board members, with 11 attempts in 2021, as a result of academic decline, COVID response, and some contentious curriculum content.
Guest:
Dr. Bror Saxberg, MD, is Vice President of Learning Science at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. In his role, Saxberg is responsible for CZI’s thinking about how to apply learning science results at scale to real-world learning environments. Bror works closely with the Summit Public Schools team to guide learning science research and applications in Summit Schools and the Summit Learning Program. Saxberg most recently served as Chief Learning Officer at Kaplan, Inc. Saxberg received an Honors BA in Mathematics and a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Washington, and an MA in mathematics from Oxford University, a PhD in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT, and an MD from Harvard Medical School.
Next episode: The next episode will air on Wednesday, November 3rd with guest, Pastor Robert Soto, a Lipan Apache tribal religious leader and an award-winning feather dancer, who has successfully upheld his Native American cultural heritage and religious liberties in federal courts.
Tweet of the Week
More than 5,000 #Maine children began #homeschool in 2021 (+75% from 2020)
More than 50 districts at least doubled their counts
The average district lost ~80% more students to homeschooling
data as of 3/31/21 ??@mdoenews https://t.co/bkOdTtcDyZ #mepolitics #School2021
— Nick Murray (@NickMurr) July 23, 2021
News Links:
Philadelphia School District braces for a possible SEPTA strike by considering online learning https://www.inquirer.com/news/septa-strike-philadelphia-school-district-plans-20211019.html
In Wisconsin, recall efforts add to pressure on school boards in the wake of COVID-19 https://www.wpr.org/wisconsin-recall-efforts-add-pressure-school-boards-wake-covid-19
Read a Transcript of This Episode:
Pleaae excuse typos.
[00:00:00] Cara Candal: Well, Gerard Robinson, we are back with another edition of the learning curve. And last week I was all excited because I had become this Fairweather baseball fan, and now are pretty excited because boy, the red Sox did not, despite those beautiful grand slam data, pull it out in the end. So now I am back to just not watching baseball.
[00:00:23] How about you?
[00:00:24] Gerard Robinson (GR): I did not watch it. I heard a lot of my friends, , were pretty excited about the outcome. I have friends in Houston, so they’re loving it up. And so it, Jamie, but the folks in Boston are not happy campers, but you know, to thought two months ago, they, be this far. It’s a win.
[00:00:40] Cara: Let’s be clear. So, Bostonians usually just base Staters in general, usually. Very sorry guys, but I’m just gonna say the truth, like a very grumpy bunch of people. When I first moved here from the Midwest, I would like wave at people in my morning jog and they would look at me like, Going to hurt them.
[00:00:55] So, I mean, we’re, that’s sort of how we are anyway. So we’re used to it, we need something to [00:01:00] be a little bit angry about it’s dark and cold and all in all of the things, Gerard, but okay. Listeners and we have to tell you that you’re going to notice Gerard sounds a little bit different today because of.
[00:01:09] he’s out and about. He’s a busy guy. So he’s coming to us, from somewhere on the road. Gerard, I’m hoping that your travels are going really well. we’re going to get to a pretty cool guest today. , Bruce expert, MD of the Chan Zuckerberg initiative. We’re gonna talk about brain science and education and learning and all of these great things.
[00:01:29] But Gerard, I want to get to my story of the week because my story of the. Feels like, it’s about just the theme of the decade and the theme of our summer in that is it really comes down , to infrastructure, how dependent some of us are on crumbling infrastructure and how dependent, some school kids actually are , on things like, school buses, which we’ve talked about a little bit, but also just public transportation to get them to school.
[00:01:55] So, the news this week in Philadelphia news, you know, Philadelphia. [00:02:00] And in fact, all of the public school students and teachers in the school district are preparing for a possible strike. It’s called SEPTA in Philadelphia, and this is the city buses, the subways, the trolleys, all of the modes of transportation that people use to get around the city.
[00:02:15] they’re threatening a strike now, Gerard, nearly 60,000 students in the city of Philadelphia use public transportation to get to school. So this is a really, really big deal. And I got to say, public transportation is such a big, thing that we’re talking about this country. I know here in Boston, am lately more afraid of, , getting an, a train derailment on the MBTA in Boston than I am of catching COVID on the mat, because that’s about the state of art infrastructure.
[00:02:43] But in Philadelphia, you’ve just got folks who are going on are threatening to strike, because of the things that people strike about, you know, overwork and lack of pay. And we all know that. Systems are stressed right now with a lack of people to work. But what does that mean for the kids? And what does that mean [00:03:00] for the school districts?
[00:03:01] In some sense, juror, the straight gives me a little bit of hope because this school district is in fact talking about pivoting to online learning. So taking some of the lessons that we’ve learned from the pandemic that in fact, Kids can learn online and we have systems and structures in place.
[00:03:17] we’ve talked about on this show, what happens if there’s a hurricane, can we pivot to online learning? Yes, we can. A big snowstorm. Yes, we can. Well, this can include transportation strikes. So if indeed this does happen and we don’t know that it will because the union hasn’t voted on it yet and they need to let’s hope that the Philadelphia public school.
[00:03:36] Can pivot to online learning and do all that they can to keep students learning after so much loss learning. there’s of course we have to mention. Poses a problem for parents who are going to go to work and are going to be at work, probably despite the strike and will now have childcare needs. So let’s fingers crossed.
[00:03:52] Hope it doesn’t come to that. But I was heartened to see that there is a potential solution at play. Should this strike [00:04:00] happen? So that’s my story of the week Gerard infrastructure week infrastructure month or summer, as we should say, I’m sure in the future, we’ll be talking about the infrastructure package that everybody’s eagerly awaiting, but what’s on your.
[00:04:12] Gerard: We’ve talked about Philadelphia a couple of times on our show, the first time it had to do with the lack of bandwidth for some students. And so the school system put together a set of buses and had hotspots, but they also made sure that students received computers now were possibly seen students impacted Nothing that has to do with the school system per se, but strikes. So hopefully they worked that out and yes, I’m glad that, , the online learning is an option because without it you’d have a lot of families, as you mentioned, who are going to find themselves in trouble, so that’s going to be pretty tough.
[00:04:48] My story is a little different. It comes from. Uh, state I used to live in, and this one is in about a strike, but it’s about a possible, we call a school board members. [00:05:00] So Wisconsin is not a state with a very few school systems. In fact, it’s a state with 421. Well, during the 20 20, 20, 21 school year, you’ve actually had 11 districts in the state say that they’re going to recall people and only one.
[00:05:19] In fact, it’s actually qualified through the petition process to get enough signatures, to put it on the ballot. And that’s the MEK wan, uh, Thiensville school district, you know, right outside of Milwaukee. And the reason they’re doing it is twofold. Number one, parents say that the way the school system responded to the fandom, it wasn’t great.
[00:05:39] Others say is because of critical race theory, maybe something in the middle. What’s unique about this. And this is according to, one of our, scholars at the university of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, Michael, for. I used to work with many years ago when I was in Milwaukee, he said that going back to 2010, [00:06:00] when the teachers and others were making a real big push to, we call, the sitting governor at the time that from that point, moving forward, people have begun to use the recall as either a threat or a lever to pull.
[00:06:14] And so, although of the 11 only one qualified. And 10 of the other districts, guess what some of the school board members actually resigned and some people stepped in to take their place or to run for the seat. So it’s an interesting time in Wisconsin, because as you know, we have some challenges here in Northern Virginia, in terms of school, board, parent relations, but in Wisconsin, I guess what some people say, let’s just recall , whether it’s really critical race theory, whether it’s really the pandemic.
[00:06:43] I think it may be more of that than former, but this is a really interesting time. And as my court said, this, isn’t how we often practice democracy, but it’s something that people are beginning to do right now. What are your thoughts?
[00:06:57] Cara: Oh, , well, , as a school board [00:07:00] member myself, like for current former, I’ve been a couple of school boards.
[00:07:04] non-public school district boards that will say always charter and private school boards. it is a terrible time to be a school board member. And on the one hand it’s, I observed. that parents seem to be much more active for a variety of reasons at school board meetings, which is a positive, because I got to tell you I’ve unfortunately sat through and viewed online, you know, school board meetings where like I was the only parent present or there was barely anybody there.
[00:07:31] but, the way. So many citizens are engaging with school boards right now. whether it’s around critical race theory, concerns about critical race theory or something else seems to be uncivil. we’ve been reading a lot in the news about, and I’m not saying. Or uncivil there is probably a majority who are going and trying to be productive speak their piece.
[00:07:52] But, the ones that make the news are those , who are not behaving very civilly. it’s a scary time and I think it’s indicative, you know, school parts have [00:08:00] become this just battleground as of late. we always want more parent involvement in our schools.
[00:08:05] We always want more parent input, especially in our public schools where. Well, let’s just face it. Parents have less control, right? , , , there are a lot of structures and bureaucracies in place that dictate, what curriculum going gonna look like and what outcomes are gonna look like, et cetera.
[00:08:19] And so it can understand on the one hand, white parents, , want to exercise their voice, but don’t know to exercise it in this way to use a recall. And as, as you’ve noted, not how democracy, usually works. it’s really interesting. And I wonder Gerard half the time, if, when folks are voting for school board, They actually even study what these candidates claim to do. We’ve got school, board elections going on in community. And I see signs that say, you know, I support excellence in education, for example. And my first question in my mind is always, what does that mean to you? So I wish that citizens, I hope that on the one hand.
[00:08:54] Engages parents and citizens more in their local schools and what schools are doing. But man, do I wish we could [00:09:00] have, much more civil conversation and behave in much more democratic ways around what it means to participate in the process that is, governing our public school district.
[00:09:09] So, TBD, I don’t think this is the last time we’re going to be talking about school boards on the learning curve. well, okay, Gerard, , this is cool. I think this is a guest that you have talked about at least to me having on the show for some time. And we are going to be talking with Dr.
[00:09:26] Brewer, sax, Berg MD. I don’t know. Maybe it’s just the first medical doctor we’ve talked to on the show. It could very well be. and he is the vice president of learning science at the Chan Zuckerberg. Initiative. So lots of great questions, great conversation coming up after this with Dr. Sachs Berg. you and I will back after this little musical.[00:10:00]
[00:10:26] Learning curve listeners. We are back with Breuer, sax, Berg. He is the vice president of learning science at the Chan-Zuckerberg initiative in his role sacks. For CZI is thinking about how to apply learning science results at scale to real-world learning environments for our works closely with the summit public schools team to guide learning science research and applications in summit schools and the summit learning program, sax Berg most recently served as chief learning officer at Kaplan, Inc.
[00:10:54] And he received an honors BA in mathematics and a BS in electrical engineering from the university of Washington [00:11:00] and an ma in mathematics from Oxford universe. As well as a PhD in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT and an MD from Harvard medical school, a very accomplished human being.
[00:11:11] Dr. Saxberg, thanks so much for being with us on the learning curve.
[00:11:15] Bror: Thanks so much for asking me. Yeah,
[00:11:18] Cara: we’re excited. Okay. So this is, I can’t tell you how many books I have on my shelf about brain science and education as an ed policy person said, but it’s such a quickly changing and evolving field and what we understand about how the brain works and how, kids and even adults learn.
[00:11:35] it’s just fascinating stuff. So we’re going to hear a little bit about the work that you’ve done. CZI, especially within learning science and understanding how working memory and long-term memory can help improve academic excellence and equity, not something that I think most people think about that learning science and memory science can help us understand how we sort of close gaps.[00:12:00]
[00:12:00] So can you talk a little bit about what we know from cognitive science that if we scaled it would really help K to 12 education reform. drive towards evidence-based student
[00:12:11] Bror: achievement. I’d be happy to I’ll start where in a sense, we all want to end with learning and learners, which is.
[00:12:20] What is expertise? How do human expert minds actually have their expertise, if you will encode it or embedded. And what cognitive psychologists have found is that when you look at somebody who is an expert, who is really good at what they do, who’s spent more than 10 years at work , in a field and, and has become just very good at what they do.
[00:12:42] What you find is that something like 70 or 80%. Of the decision-making that they do comes from what is called long-term memory. In other words, it is like instinctual, tacit. It’s become so native to [00:13:00] them that they see patterns and they don’t even realize that there’s another alternative to it. So if you look at it like a chess master, when they look at a book.
[00:13:09] They will instantly see your queen is a threat. Now I’m a complete Duffer as in like literally not good chess. Like what is this horse do? can’t keep track of what is going on, even with one piece, but a chess master can instantly grasp that weight. There’s that queen is under risk and can keep going from there.
[00:13:29] And this is true. All kinds of different experts have things that are so. Deeply practice that they become part of long-term memory. So the difference between working memory and long-term memory is that working memory is the part of our minds. That is the verbal part is kind of where our verbal self lives.
[00:13:48] So if you’re listening to me and I started talking in a high squeaky voice, you’re thinking, this is a very strange man there, he got on the podcast and you’d be right. But that internal monologue of yours, that saying, who is this guy is [00:14:00] happening in your workplace. The working memory is also the part that handles new, complicated things.
[00:14:05] Things you have no familiarity with. It’s where a lot of creative stuff happens. It is actually quite slow and you can’t have very many things at once going on in your working memory that you quickly get confused and stuff just falls out the side. however, As you practice and get better at things.
[00:14:24] And when you’re doing something new, the practice is part of the working memory. It’s doing new things, working memory draws on what’s already in long-term memory and then combines it with new things. And then you practice, you get feedback, you gradually add new things to long-term memory. So I’ll give you, , an example from, when I was teaching my daughter to drive, a number of years ago.
[00:14:46] So the first time we get out of. Right. And she’s kind of ambidextrous. So it’s kind of like the brakes on the left, the brakes on the left. It’s like, there’s tears and chaos and that’s just me. Right? And so she’s not able to [00:15:00] think of anything except how does the steering wheel work?
[00:15:03] There’s no room at all in there right now, you know, fast forward, six months, nine months later. And she is like many of the rest of us She was able to drive to school. You could sit next to her. She drove to the mall or something, and she would have a conversation about her day and what was going on and what she’s doing.
[00:15:21] While driving perfectly well. And so driving is one of those things where it becomes part of our long-term memory. And many of your listeners may have had the following experience, which is telling when you think about it, You start out at place a and then you get to thinking about your life and what’s going on at work and all this, and you look up and you’ve gone to place B instead, I usually end up at a Starbucks, you know, frequently under caffeinated, right?
[00:15:47] Cara: Yeah.
[00:15:48] Bror: There you go. And you laugh. I can’t believe I did that again. And you drive off, you don’t think about it. Well, let’s pause for a second. Who drove that car? took a ton and a half of [00:16:00] metal, 20, 30 miles an hour, 50 miles an hour for many minutes at a time, if you were thinking about vacation or problems at work or other things, right.
[00:16:11] And this is in fact, the characteristic of all expert minds that. Things decisions that may be over an extended period of time. Even like driving where working memory doesn’t even have to pay attention, that there are decision processes already in long-term memory that make all kinds of complicated decisions driving this complicated.
[00:16:31] Right. And it’s totally learned we didn’t evolve to drive. We had to learn. So in a sense, one of the questions that is often a bit unanswered or not clearly answered is when we’re talking about our students is huh, which are the things that we need students to have in long-term memory. And which are the things that are always going to be a wrestled between working memory and long-term memory.
[00:16:55] So for example, writing without spelling mistakes, It’s [00:17:00] something you can actually pretty much embed in long-term memory over time. I mean, some of us harder, and sometimes there are still some mistakes that we step in, but you can end up in a place where when you’re typing or when you’re writing, you’re not thinking about every single word and what is the spelling and all that it just sort of is happening, straight through.
[00:17:17] But if you’re trying to write a persuasive note to your boss, you will never be able to do that and plan your family vacation at the same. Because working memory is going to be occupied with, how do I talk to my boss? What is the key point I’m trying to make? Is that too angry, a tone, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:17:36] And so often exercise of expertise is this collaboration between working memory as the flexible problem solving part of our mind and in the long-term memory, which has a whole range. Pasadena and skills and noticings and patterns and things that then you can get drawn into working memory and executed potentially very quickly by long-term memory.
[00:17:58] when. so that’s kind of [00:18:00] that relationship. So when we’re thinking about learning, whether it’s in math or history, or in English language arts, or in sciences, we should, if we were our best selves and Quicken designers ask, what do we need kids to have in longterm memory? And then design the learning environment to have enough practice and feedback to get it there because you need a lot of it.
[00:18:18] You can’t just do one and done to get it into long-term memory. And what are those things that are not needed to be in long-term memory, but can rather be either looked up or frankly are complex problem solving things that you just need to try a few times and exercise, but each time it will be something new , for working.
[00:18:34] Now actually, , if you let me, I’d like to pull back from what I’ve just described as the cognitive architecture of, expertise and learning and talk about wider architecture of learning and even expertise. And that’s when you start talking about the whole learner experience, it.
[00:18:53] It’s not enough to only design for kids cognition. So if you’re designing for kids condition, [00:19:00] you’d like to know what does this child already have in long-term memory? How can I draw on that and have them wrestle with new things and working memory, but not too many because working memory is narrow. It can’t take too much stuff.
[00:19:11] Right. So that’s designing for. You also need to think about several other things. One thing is motivation. Why should a child start persist and put in mental effort? And in fact, that’s motivation. There’s a lot of cognitive scientists think about it. You’ll notice that the term liking doesn’t appear in that list because if you study.
[00:19:34] Persist and putting mental effort, you will change your mind if it’s a well-designed living environment. Just like if you go to the gym and you do a well-designed physical exercise routine, you don’t have to like that. But if you start persistent putting physical effort, Muscles will change. So the same thing is true with well-designed, learning environments.
[00:19:53] Well, so a very good, scientists, which are Clark, did a scan of many different traditions of research into [00:20:00] motivation, behavioral psychology, behavioral economics, cognitive psychology, social psychology, and he came out with simple. Four-part framework that you can use as for design purposes or even to use with people, you know, in your family, which is there seem to be four main things that go wrong with motivation, starting persistent and putting in that effort.
[00:20:20] One thing that goes wrong is you don’t see the point. You don’t see the value of what you’re doing or how you’re trying to do it or learn it. And so that’s like a dancer in an algebra. Why am I here? I want to think about Swan lake. Why would I care about this stuff there? You need to find a way to connect what the new thing is, what that challenge is with things that they are interested in.
[00:20:41] So maybe it’s problems about a dance foundation. How do you fund it? How do you let money grow over time? And that turns into algebra and off you go. Second thing that goes wrong, quite different is you just don’t think you can do. So I’m another dancer in the same algebra class. might not even think algebra is important, [00:21:00] but I can’t do math.
[00:21:01] I’m no good at math. Well, they’re talking about how important it is. Just makes you more miserable, right? What you need is something different. You need, stories of other people, just like you, who thought they couldn’t do it? Who did master? You need ways to help the person back up. Just things they can master or have mastered that are similar and then show them how to walk forward and so forth.
[00:21:22] So that’s the second way it goes wrong. The third way motivation fails is if you blame something in your environment and just say, well, I can’t do it because so classic would be, my teacher hates me, so that’s why I can’t do this. Or, I don’t have any space in which to do this work, or I don’t have bandwidth to do this work.
[00:21:41] And the favorite among professionals as well as students and others is I don’t have time. I don’t have time to do this, so I don’t start. I don’t persist. I don’t put in mental effort because the thing that’s in my way is out of my control. Well, that’s where the right answer. Is to sit down and demonstrate none of these things [00:22:00] may be in your control.
[00:22:01] Let’s look at your schedule. Let’s find a space for you. Let’s figure out where can you be, where there is bandwidth let’s change teachers or alter the media you’re using to learn from. that problem solving with the student helps model. Now you can control this. So that’s the thing. The last thing that goes wrong is frankly the hardest to get right or to fix.
[00:22:22] And that is negative emotional states. If you’re angry, if you’re scared, if you’re upset or it’s really hard to start persistent, put a mental effort into some kind of challenging learning environment. And that is as complicated results, it sounds like it could be just a good conversation. Might be helpful all the way out to professional services at some stage.
[00:22:42] And especially, after the pandemic and lots of stress in home. All kinds of people, including our teachers may find themselves in these negative emotional states, which will then get in the way of them trying to do things in new ways. The final thing I’ll say, sorry to stretch away back out is to say.
[00:22:59] There [00:23:00] are other factors as well that get in the way things like your physical and mental wellbeing, that’s related to the negative emotional states. But it’s more than that. It turns out there’s research from 20 years ago, that if you are under hydrated, your math problem solving performance goes down by like 20% or something like that.
[00:23:17] And you don’t even realize that’s the problem. That’s the interesting thing about how our minds work is our minds are not terribly good at diagnosing what’s in our way for learning. So. if you are sleep deprived, that also affects your ability to think and to learn and solve problems.
[00:23:33] And, things around social and emotional skills, do you know how to work with the other kids or other people, if you have never done that before, that becomes a burden in working memory, because you’re not sure what to say and how to say it. You’re not sure who should be doing what.
[00:23:48] And so now suddenly your working memory is flood. Issues and questions about the other people and how I relate to them compared to another student who may be very familiar with these kids or people in their learning [00:24:00] group and who may have done this a lot, and so know exactly how to slot in. And so they have long-term memory skills attached to social and emotional, , connections, and then identity issues, whether it’s racial identity or even identity issues around the academics.
[00:24:14] I’m just not a math person. I’m just not a writing person. Those are the things that will am getting your way as well. And so you really have to think about a whole multi-dimensional set of pieces and each of them actually has input into what’s going on and how to help that comes from cognitive and development science.
[00:24:31] GR: Bror, I have a question for you cause you’ve actually piqued my interest as this work relates to policy. So for the last 30 years, we struggled with more stupid achievement in math and science based upon what you know about learning science, what lessons came up, policymakers, schools of ed and educators learn to try to close performance gap.
[00:24:51] Bror: this is a rich and complicated question. And as often happens when you’re trying to do evidence-based design work, you [00:25:00] first look to see, are we asking the correct question because awesome. The problems begin by trying to answer the wrong question or an irrelevant question. , so one of the questions is.
[00:25:12] what is our goal for our students is our problem that the test scores of students are too low. Or is it that they can’t do any math or they can’t write, or they can’t read and interpret what they’re reading. So, depending on how you’re thinking about what the problem is, you could be guided and this sometimes happens to very instrumental solutions.
[00:25:33] I’m just trying to listen. Math scores by hook or by crook or, you know, reading scores by hook or by crook. And you don’t pay attention to some of those issues of motivation or identity that I mentioned that in fact, you may pick up techniques that lift a score, but that actually ruined the kids’ enjoyment of mathematics or writing or literature forever.
[00:25:54] And that is not a win. So the first step is just trying to define your goals. The [00:26:00] second thing that’s important is what I talked about earlier, which is many educators get this. And they use language like meet kids where they are. And this links to that cognitive science notion of you want to draw on what is already in long-term memory.
[00:26:15] And depending on the kid’s own personal context, their culture, their home, their community, you may have kids with very different things in their longterm. And so you really want your teachers and your materials to be able to adjust and match, especially for hard things to where the kids are as they come in.
[00:26:35] And this relates not just to their skill levels, where they are, but it also leads to what is familiar to them. There’s some really fascinating research where if you give American kids baseball problems and then cricket problems that use the same mathematics, the kids do much worse than the cricket problem.
[00:26:55] Because the context is totally alien and confusing. What the heck is a wicked? Why [00:27:00] do we care? Where does it live? the result is working. Memory gets taken up with the mysterious stuff in there, and therefore it gets in the way of them actually solving the problem. So thinking through context of students, what is familiar to them and then building from there forward would be, you know, is really an essential part of this.
[00:27:19] , and then I think these notions. making sure that our teachers, we understand have a growth mindset, this notion that, no matter where the kids are as they come in, you cannot predict where they will be in five years or 10 years, because practice and feedback environments, if they’re well-designed, we’ll move them from wherever they are.
[00:27:40] To new places that are exciting for them, exciting for their community, and lead them forward. And so having teachers who are curious about kids’ backgrounds, who are curious about, what have they seen before, what are they able to do and draw on that Zen really signals to the kids as well.
[00:27:57] Okay. this is somebody who’s really caring and thinking about [00:28:00] this with me that I really want to, participate in perform. and then finding that sense of belonging. It turns out there’s great research about schools and this is going to be as true for, you know, math or science or English or any of that.
[00:28:11] That if kids have even one adult in a school that they have a close relationship with, it changes very much how they relate to school, how they engage, and a sense of I belong in this place. And that turns out to be critical. You’ve got to get the cart and the horse the right way around here. there’s actually great example out of hurricane Harvey.
[00:28:31] the Nottingham school district, and many other Houston schools were just hammered by Harvey right at the start of the school year. But the Nottingham school district after the four week reconstruction, they spent two more weeks with students coming to the school, focused solely on making everyone feel like they belong in this place, listening to each other’s stories and challenges, the teachers as well, describing what they had gone through in Harvey.
[00:28:56] And then. They did again at school year. So if you think about it, they lost six [00:29:00] weeks out of their school year, which would, you know, it was a panic inducing idea for any school superintendent or principal. In fact, and I actually looked it up. they got better state test score results that year than they had the year before.
[00:29:15] And the reason arguably is they took care of belonging. And are you in the right place, right from the get-go. And then they were able to invest the attention, the working memory, , and the motivation generated in part by that sense of belonging throughout the rest of the year. And they did really.
[00:29:32] Cara: am taking so much away, from what you’re saying, not only personally, I’m going to go with, I might’ve been under hydrated and sleep deprived through most of my high school.
[00:29:41] I did very poorly in math and I’m going to make sure my children are very well-hydrated every day, it also, as somebody who’s spent a lot of time with teacher training, it’s very interesting to me that I think some of the concepts you have named that come out. Science, as you’re saying growth mindset, thinking about context, which I [00:30:00] would frame as somebody who also used to work in large scale assessment, we would talk about that in terms of bias, right?
[00:30:05] Is, are these test questions by, well, what that really means is like, if students don’t have context, often think of it as a cultural thing, but I hadn’t thought of it as your brain sort of going haywire and , your working memory, not being able to focus on the right things. This is all fascinating.
[00:30:19] Idea though that I think , so much in education reform, we maybe use these terms, not realizing that they are in fact rooted in empirical evidence. but then if you’re out with you’re also talking about is creating the right learning environments for students on all of these different levels.
[00:30:38] And one thing that comes to mind is our increased. Reliance mean, especially in the past year and a half forced reminds really on technology, sometimes educational technology and sometimes other technologies. Can you talk a little bit about as we advance our knowledge of how the brain works with regard to education, what role, if any, does technology play either [00:31:00] like liquid or the risks and benefits and in how should we be leveraging it for advanced effort to help students.
[00:31:06] Bror: I’d be glad to talk about that. It’s actually a really interesting question. , we’ve gotten to a state now in our society where we no longer ask or pencils good for learning or not.
[00:31:17] And the reason we don’t ask that is because we know that’s not actually a great question. What are you doing with the pen? And actually the same thing is true for all kinds of technologies books, you can argue, even a teacher is in a sense, the form of technology, you know, the ultimate of artificial intelligence is of course human intelligence, right?
[00:31:37] So the HII in the room, right. And Richard Clark was an extremely good cognitive scientist. I mentioned before, even an article in, I think it was the late seventies, early eighties where what he stated was the. Technology does nothing for learning what technology of any kind does, but especially, you know, computers and things like that.
[00:31:58] What technology does is it [00:32:00] takes any learning approach and can make it more affordable, more, reliable, more available, more data, right. But it will take a terrible learning approach and do that too. I mean, imagine for a second, , all of you are listening, your worst ever high school teacher or college professor.
[00:32:19] I mean your worst one right now, thanks to, the old days that person could only damage the hopes and dreams of in college. Maybe a few thousand students a year. But because of the glories of technology and the web, that same teacher can destroy the hopes and dreams of millions of students around the globe, 24 7.
[00:32:43] Right. And it’s like, no. So the technology is not the problem. So the way to think about this is first ass. Do you know what the learning environment is for your students now? Because sometimes people think they know, and then when you go into a class or observe closely or even use videotape, you [00:33:00] discover it’s not happening the way we thought it was.
[00:33:02] So what is happening now then say, what does evidence suggest we should do better across those multiple dimensions? I laid out not just the academic, but the non-academic summit. And then you ask the question. Aha. If those are the better ways of doing this, how can technology make those better ways of doing it more affordable, more reliable, more available, and more data rich.
[00:33:25] And that’s how you can start to use technology to really help. Students and teachers, because think about what I said earlier, that we want to make it be context sensitive. You want students let’s say, who are learning to write, you want them yes. To have ambitious goals for their narrative structure and then persuasive abilities and their figurative language.
[00:33:44] But you would also like them to start with topics they’ve already mastered. So, , they know what they want to say, and they understand all the underpinnings. They just have to wrestle with the hard work of structuring for an audience and all of this. Right. Well, to have. A different writing prompt for many different subgroups in a, in a [00:34:00] classroom.
[00:34:00] My goodness that, you know, that’s really hard for the teachers to engage in and to grade and mark and all this. But technology may be able to help by providing access to many others who could mark or grade those essays, or potentially eventually even using some, , natural language processing to give them.
[00:34:18] But again, the important thing is you started by saying, we’re going to make the context be as familiar to the student as possible so that their working memory is focused on how do I make a persuasive argument? Not on what the heck is a sailing record. And why would I care? so that’s how I think about technology.
[00:34:38] I think technology has a lot of great opportunities to help things like simulations, for example, to allow students to work inside increasingly realistic environments, practice and feedback with increasingly noisy situations. Before they actually have to get out in the real world and do it. They can actually practice it for themselves.
[00:34:59] These are [00:35:00] powerful things to try. As long as you do the architecture in a way that, , is aligned with how a human commission works and also benefits the motivation of a learner to actually.
[00:35:12] Cara: So , in the really short time that we left, I have what I realize is an unfair question that I’d like to ask you.
[00:35:19] I feel like I’ve learned so much in this like 27 minutes that we’ve had together. my working memory will not retain at all. so what grade I have to go back and listen, but if you, had you know, I’m really interested about implications. For teachers and implications for education reformers.
[00:35:37] And you’ve given us a lot of wonderful information about what we need to know about how the brain works in order to inform how we educate. But if you, I guess I’m asking you to prioritize in a sense, if you had, your 32nd elevator pitch , with the world’s most average. What would you say to that teacher?
[00:35:56] about like, if there was one thing you could do within [00:36:00] your practice or change about your practice tomorrow, is there something you would prioritize? What would you tell that person
[00:36:06] Bror: there’s a couple of things. One is I would want to encourage them to put a sense of belonging first. To not be afraid of investing time at the beginning of the school year, beginning of your experience with the students, making each student feel like I hear you, I want to know your story.
[00:36:24] Tell me your story. And the teacher should tell his or her story too, so that there is a sense of being seen as a human. That then can get moving into the interactions and the plans and the lessons going forward. That’s one thing I would say the second thing I would say is definitely shift the more production by students and less talking by the team.
[00:36:47] So teachers in our country particularly are used to explain things to students. Let me show you et cetera. And you really have to get comfortable with allowing students minds, to wrestle with things and [00:37:00] to wait them out. As opposed to quickly stepping in to give an answer or a guide. Learning is hard.
[00:37:06] Working memory is slow. And so it needs to process and try again. And so you need to give the students a chance to think, to write, to make mistakes, give feedback, or have students give each other feedback and you have to train them how to do that and then have them do it again so that they have to incorporate the feedback and what they do.
[00:37:26] And it’s, it’s amazing how different a learning experience it is for a mine when they’re. Production mode most of the time, instead of just listening, just listening it’s we know this it’s so easy to tune out and say it out, but when you’re producing, you’re really exercising what you know, and it also shows what don’t, you know, in a way that you can then come back to, to say, no, I need to know more about this.
[00:37:50] Cause I didn’t get that right. And off you go from there. So those are a couple of things I’d probably put at the top of that.
[00:37:56] Cara: I love it. And I have to say that the elevator’s probably already arrived at his [00:38:00] floor, but if I were that teacher, I would get off the elevator with you so that I could listen to exactly
[00:38:05] Bror: what you
[00:38:07] Cara: just said.
[00:38:08] Fascinating. And I know our listeners probably going to want more. , but Dr. Burse expert, thank you so much for taking this time with us today. And hopefully maybe we’ll have to have you back again for a part two, because we have many questions that we just didn’t have time to get to thank you.
[00:38:25] Thank you for your time and for your excellent work.
[00:38:27] Bror: I’m more than happy to help. Thank you very much for asking me.[00:39:00]
[00:39:04] Cara: Wow listeners after that, just fascinating. my mind sort of blown interview. We are going to close it out with a mind blowing statistic. Actually, our tweet of the week, this week is from Nick Murray. Nick Murray more than 5,000 main children began to homeschool in 2021. This is up 75% from 20 20, 70 5% from 2020 more than 50 districts, at least doubled their counts.
[00:39:30] The average district loss, , about 80% more students to homeschooling as of March 31st, 2021. This is. Pretty amazing stuff. It is in probably if we had our friend Karen McDonald on, she might call it a homeschool revolution. And as we have talked about. On the learning curve before, parents from all walks of life, homeschooling their kids, and we are going to see more and more of it.
[00:39:56] I think we need to see more and more policy reforms and [00:40:00] mechanisms to let parents do that. Using the public health. that should be there. So as they choose the best form of education for their kids and listeners, we will be back as we are next week, no matter where in the world we are coming to you from next week’s episode, next week’s guest.
[00:40:19] We’re going to be speaking with pastor Robert Soto. He is a Lipan Apache tribal religious leader, and an award-winning feather dance. Awesome. I am very excited to hear about that. And he has successfully upheld his native American cultural heritage and religious liberties in the federal courts.
[00:40:38] Excited to hear all about that until next week, stay safe. Good luck to the Astros in the world series. I think I know we’ve got at least few of you who are going to be watching very closely and looking forward to being back with you all again soon.
Recent Episodes:
In Massachusetts, the Know-Nothing amendments prevent more than 100,000 urban families with children in chronically underperforming school districts from receiving scholarship vouchers that would allow them access to additional educational alternatives. These legal barriers, also known as Blaine amendments, restrict government funding from flowing to religiously affiliated organizations in nearly 40 states and are a violation of the first and fourteenth amendments.
The U.S. Supreme Court will hear a case this year, Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, that could end these amendments. In 2018, Pioneer produced a 30-minute documentary on the impact of the Blaine amendments on families in Massachusetts, Georgia, and Michigan.
“She’s a good girl. She helps me a lot. She has big, big dreams. I don’t have the money, but she has big dreams. I hope she’s going to get everything, but she works so hard. She works so hard in school.”
“Our family is needing to make some really big sacrifices because we believe this is important, and so, we’re basically going to do whatever it takes… Sometimes we look at each other and go ‘I don’t know if I can do it again another month…’”
“A lot of the families have to sacrifice and work multiple jobs… And just scraping together enough money to just make tuition, just the basics.”
“It is discriminatory, that parents who want to choose an alternative to public school for their children, would not in any way receive any compensation for that, whether it be tax credit, whether it be a voucher…”
In the 1840s, nativist movement leaders formed official political parties and local chapters of the national Native American Party (later the American Party), although they continued to be commonly known as the Know-Nothing Party. Politicians sought to insert provisions into state constitutions against Catholics who refused to renounce the pope. The Know-Nothing movement brought bigotry and hatred to a new level of violence and organization.
The party’s legacy endured in the post-Civil War era, with laws and constitutional amendments it supported, still today severely limiting parents’ educational choices. A federal constitutional amendment was proposed by Speaker of the House James Blaine prohibiting money raised by taxation in any State to be under the control of any religious sect; nor shall any money so raised or lands so devoted be divided between religious sects or denominations. These were then named the Blaine Amendments of 1875.
in recent decades, often in response to challenges to school choice programs, the U.S. Supreme Court has demonstrated great interest in examining the issues of educational alternatives and attempts limit parental options. Massachusetts plays a key role in this debate. The Bay State was a key center of the Know-Nothing movement and has the oldest version of Anti-Aid Amendments in the nation, as well as a second such amendment approved in 1917. Two-fifths of Massachusetts residents are Catholic, and its Catholic schools outperform the state’s public schools, which are the best in the nation.
Help families like the Costons in Michigan to end the bigoted Blaine amendments in their state that are blocking tuition scholarships and other types of financial support that would make it possible for families to send their children to high-quality schools that are best suited for their children.
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Hubwonk host Joe Selvaggi talks with Kyle Pomerleau, senior fellow on federal tax policy at American Enterprise Institute about the Build Back Better Act now in Congress, to understand how those new taxes will affect individuals, business, and the economy.
Guest:
Kyle Pomerleau is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he studies federal tax policy. Before joining AEI, Mr. Pomerleau was chief economist and vice president of economic analysis at the Tax Foundation, where he led the macroeconomic and tax modeling team and wrote on various tax policy topics, including corporate taxation, international tax policy, carbon taxation, and tax reform. The author of many studies, Mr. Pomerleau has been published in trade publications and policy journals including Tax Notes and the National Tax Journal. He is frequently quoted in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. He has also testified before Congress and state legislators. Mr. Pomerleau has an MPP in economic and social policy from Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy and a BA in history and political science from the University of Southern Maine.
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Read a Transcript of This Episode:
Please excuse typos.
Joe Selvaggi:
This is Hubwonk, I’m Joe Selvaggi.
Joe Selvaggi:
Welcome to Hubwonk, a podcast of Pioneer Institute, a think tank in Boston. On October 28th, the White House and Democratic leadership in Congress announced a framework deal on the Build Back Better Act. The act includes federal spending of upwards of three and a half trillion dollars on broad social, environmental, and economic programs to pay for this massive spending proposal. The echo makes a substantial changes to the nation’s tax laws. There’ll being somewhat constrained by president Biden’s campaign promise to never raise taxes on those earning more than $400,000 a year. And razor thin democratic majority is in Congress. The new tax provisions seek to target large corporations and the ultra high income earners taxing the rich and large corporations may offer a more politically palatable message, but taxpayers deserve to know how its typical $4 trillion annual budget will now afford three and a half trillion of additional spending. I guess today’s senior policy fellow at the American enterprise Institute and tax economist. Kyle Pomerleau. Kyle’s work at AEI focuses on the effects of current tax policy on the economy and works to understand the likely effects the future policy proposals. Kyle will share with us his analysis on what changes are likely to emerge from the build back better act, who is likely to pay more. And what are the possible effects on the economy in the future? When I return, I’ll be joined by AEI senior fellow Kyle Pomerleau.
Joe Selvaggi:
Okay. We’re back. This is hubwonk. I’m Joe Selvaggi and I’m now pleased to be joined by American enterprise Institute, senior fellow and tax economist. Kyle Pomerleau. Welcome to hub Juan Kyle, thanks for having me. Well, it’s great to have you. I really wanted to have you as a guest here on, on how long, because I want you to help. I want you to help our listeners understand what’s going who’s going to pay for this what we’re calling the build back better act. It’s an ambitious piece of legislation. We’re told that there’ll be new taxes, but only on those making more than $400,000 a year, that was president Biden’s promise. And of course we’re, we’re really going to particularly be targeting those a 700 or so billionaires who are fortunate among us help us separate fact from fiction. Let’s start with the ax features that are the most likely to generate the most revenue. In my let’s say amateur reading of, of what I can tell it seems to be that, that the minimum tax on all corporations book profits are, are likely to see the most short-term revenue explain for our listeners. What does that mean? And how does collecting taxes on book revenue, different, different from how we have historically taxed corporations?
Kyle Pomerleau:
The book proposal, the book tax was proposed as part of the build back better is kind of a replacement for the corporate tax rate increase. Previously. They had proposed to raise the corporate income tax to 26 and a half percent. However, a couple senators were uncomfortable with raising rates corporate or individuals. So those were taken off the table entirely. So what was added very recently as recently as last week was this minimum tack on tax on book income. This was originally proposed by President Biden all the way back when he was running for president in November of 2019. And the way that this tax would work is that companies would have to calculate their taxes in two different ways each year, first, the ordinary corporate tax. And then second, this book tax and under this book tax companies would take the income that they report to their shareholders on their financial statement, make some adjustments to make sure there’s no double taxation also make adjustments for losses.
Kyle Pomerleau:
If companies had lost money in previous years, then multiply that by 15%, then subtract out a few credits credit for foreign taxes, paid research and development, credit green energy credits, and knowing those two tax liabilities, the company has to pay the greater of the two. So if the corporate tax is greater than the book tax, they pay the ordinary tax and go on their way. But if the company’s book tax is greater than the ordinary tax, they have to pay the diff that difference in that book tax liability is then tacked on top of the ordinary tax liability. As in the purpose of this is to target the very largest multinational corporations in the United States that from year to year, at least on their financial statements are projecting to pay low effective tax rate.
Joe Selvaggi:
And this addresses, I think, a popular, I won’t call it a rhetorical myth, but this popular chorus among some in and public political leadership that there are lots of billion dollar corporations paying zero tax. This is essentially to address what’s perceived to be a large companies getting away with no taxes in a given year. Is that roughly where this is coming from? Yeah. This
Kyle Pomerleau:
Is more perception than fact definitely. The underlying driver of this is what tax people call book tax differences, but book income is calculated in a certain way to provide information to shareholders. How will the company’s doing what investments the company’s making what, it’s, what it will look like potentially a few years from now, that’s what book income is supposed to. If the information book income is supposed to provide it, taxable income is meant to fairly levy taxes on corporations and the way that these are calculator entirely different. So you can have in many years book income that shows pop positive profits, but in some years, taxable income, that’s very, very low. It causes this Mitt mismatch where you can have a low, effective tax rates on your book income. Now the mismatching go the other way too, in that some years book income can be very, very low, but taxable income can be very, very high. And it shows the opposite that these companies are paying very high, effective tax rates, some 80 or 90% of their profits. And those numbers don’t make very much sense either. So I usually caution people from looking at those effective tax rates on booking com because they don’t really tell us very much about what the effect of tax burden on a company is. You really have to look over a number of years. You really have to study what provisions the companies are using or taking advantage of in the, in the federal tax code.
Joe Selvaggi:
Again, I want to address a myth about this, no tax billionaire corporation. I think the myth is that they get away with paying no tax by having very clever tax attorneys and accountants. Instead from what I know taxes corporations make profits and have two choices. They can distribute those to their shareholders, or they can reinvest it in the firm if they do, the shareholders are happy to see that money essentially make the company they own bigger that would be a case of a large growth corporation. And if a company is more stable it may prefer to distribute those profits so effectively. It’s not that the company isn’t paying taxes on money distributed, but rather money retained and further invested in growth. Is that right?
Kyle Pomerleau:
Yeah. Another, another piece of this too, is that I think part of this conversation that bugs economists is that at the end of the day, corporations really don’t pay tax, right? Corporations are legal entities, they’re just collections of individual workers and shareholders that get together to produce a good or a service that other people then purchase. Ultimately, any money up corporation is liable to pay in taxes. That goes to the FA it goes to the federal government is going to be taken out of individuals pockets, whether those are the shareholders. So those are the owners of the, the corporation or the workers of those th those corporations. You can’t really escape that, that it’s going to be people that bear the burden of these taxes, not legal entities.
Joe Selvaggi:
Yes, of course. And of course and again, to preserve margins corporations also can raise prices to to pay for taxes. So again corporations don’t pay taxes consumers, workers, and shareholders do that’s important. What would be a case of a firm that is going to likely be swept up or effected by a tax like this? I mentioned growth, but if you have names in mind that our listeners would know, yeah,
Kyle Pomerleau:
I don’t want to speak to any specifics because I don’t really know the details of many of these companies, but then the proposal is meant to target companies like Amazon apple. These are very large corporations that are growing. And the reason why these companies may have low effective tax rates, Amazon for example, is that if you’re a company that makes a lot of investment, you’re growing, you’re going to be taking lots of deductions for those investments. And under the corporate income tax current law, a lot of the deductions you can take are very large upfront deductions for those new investments. This was passed in 2017, it’s called 100% bonus depreciation, lets companies deduct the full cost of many investments upfront. And if you that compared to book income, for example, you’re not allowed to make deductions that large. So there creates a mismatch. So when there’s a company, a large company like Amazon that’s growing quickly or making investments that can drive down effective tax rates quite a bit. So I think those are the, those are the companies that these were, these, this provision is meant to go after
Joe Selvaggi:
After these myths. And I wanted to help see if we can throw one more way and say, okay, if, if it’s the shareholders of these growth companies, these billion dollar growth companies that will be affected, is it billionaires who own billion dollar companies, or are there ordinary people who might be affected by this, this tax
Kyle Pomerleau:
By and large high-income households own more stock than low income household? So if you look across the entire distribution of the population and you look at all the equity that people may own, a lot of it is concentrated in the high-income households. So it is true to say that when you do raise the corporate income tax rate, you are disproportionately impacting high-income households that said taxing very large companies is not the same as targeting very high income households because although most of the equities are owned by high income or high net worth households. That’s not, that’s not a law. There are people across the income scale and wealth distribution that own equities. So attacks on corporation can also impact to retiree that earned that lives off $30,000 of dividends from corporate stock. So it, it re it, it really depends. An entity level tax is not, is not going to be as well targeted as just raising tax rates on high-income households.
Joe Selvaggi:
Now, a tax expert, like you make a living on explaining to a layman like me, the complexity of taxes, but I, I haven’t met too many tax experts who wouldn’t prefer a more simple tax policy just does this tax provision one that looks at book rather than a traditional profits. Does this simplify the tax code or does it move us what I would say in the wrong direction towards a far more complex, a system of calculation? Yeah.
Kyle Pomerleau:
It’ll depend on who you talk to, but I think regardless of whether it’s an economist or a lawyer or an accountant, I don’t know if there are very many people that like this idea of a book tax or your book minimum tax increases complexity, because one, you’re now calculating two taxes instead of one two, it increases the number of credits that companies will have to track. Three and this is a little bit more outside of complexity, but it is a downside book. Income is not determined by Congress. Book income is determined by rules put forth by FASBI w which is a nonprofit organization that dictates accounting accounting standards. So when you raise some of your revenue from taxing book income, you’re in essence outsourcing some of the revenue collections from Congress into a non-elected nonprofit, nonprofit body. So that’s not necessarily increased in complexity, but it is a concern that part of the tax code is no longer controlled by, by Congress. So I, I think that overall, this is that taxing book income is a step away from a simpler tax code. And we all want to make sure that we are limiting the amount of deductions and credits that companies can take that are distortive, that are reducing the amount of taxes they should pay, but I would always prefer to just go directly at them, scale them back repeal them outright as a way to increase the tax burden on corporations, not to enact a parallel tax that runs alongside the ordinary corporate tax.
Joe Selvaggi:
So a more simple plan that affects everyone equally rather than a complex plan that is, is difficult to follow and, and, and has businesses making decisions based on tax implications rather than business implications.
Kyle Pomerleau:
Yeah. And then that’s another really good point too, that we know that corporations adjust their taxable income in FA in the face of taxation. Individuals will try to take as many deductions or companies will try to take as many deductions and credits as they can. Companies also use some accounting maneuvers to shift profits from the United States to overseas to reduce their tax liability. That taxing book income is going to translate that behavior right over to book income. So there’s also a concern that taxing book income is going to reduce the quality of financial statements that we’re not going to really get a good, perfect sense of how well these companies are, are doing because to some extent, the profits that they’re reporting to their shareholders are somewhat dictated by the fact that they’re taxed on them have heard of it.
Joe Selvaggi:
Again, political leaders assert that our taxes are corporations are undertaxed. I guess what they mean by that is relative to the rest of the world. How do the U S tax rates compare with let’s say our largest
Kyle Pomerleau:
Competitors, this is a complex issue of actually you can’t really look at just one statistic and some of the statistics are outright misleading. Now, if you look at statutory tax rates, just how much companies pay on each additional dollar of profits. The United States is about average, maybe a little bit above average. You look at the federal rate of 21% plus state and local rates. That’s about 25.8%. The OACD average is around 25%. So we’re right around average that now, if you look at effective tax rates, however, the story changes a little bit. We actually place a slightly higher tax burden on investment in the United States than other countries do. So if you look at how much say, if a company wants to invest in a new machine, how much is that machine going to have to pay in taxes over the life of that asset?
Kyle Pomerleau:
That that tax is a little bit higher in the United States than the average of the OECD. Then the third piece is sometimes the administration, for example, likes to compare corporate tax collections as a percent of GDP in the United States to corporate tax collections as a percent of GDP in other countries. And that statistic generally shows where at the bottom of the list where you, we, we are collecting the least amount of revenue as a percent of GDP, my caution against using that statistic because the size of each corporate sector in each country is different in the United States. For example, we have a huge sector of non-corporate businesses are what are called pass through businesses. These are S corporations, partnerships, LLCs. These are businesses that pay taxes through the individual income tax. And we in the vast majority of businesses in the United States are passed through businesses.
Kyle Pomerleau:
Only about 5% of businesses are corporations. In contrast, other countries, their corporate sectors are huge. They have much higher individual income tax and much lower corporate tax rates. So most of their activity is in the corporate form over in other countries. So you can’t really directly compare collections as a percent of GDP without making adjustments for the size of the pass-through sector. And I, in a recent piece, I did that. And once you do that, you find that the United States a little bit above average in terms of its burden on corporations. So make a long answer short here, it’s, it’s complicated, but we’re, we’re probably above right around average or a little bit above average under current.
Joe Selvaggi:
And the, and the situation you described really is a function of the fact that most wise business owners don’t want to be taxed twice. And so therefore they’ll create the corporate entity that gets taxed once, once you, the corporation makes the profits and then distributes the profits, and then the, the, the owner gets taxed twice. When you say as the income. So that’s the reason we have such a small corporate sector.
Kyle Pomerleau:
Yeah. Yes. Com companies when, when individuals are looking at which business legal form of organization to take, they’re going to look at the all-in tax burden, whether it’s passed through business or a corporation. And I think you’re right. All things considered the tax burden on corporations slightly higher than it is under a pat passed through form, especially after the tax cuts and jobs act. And I think that that tilts the scale towards that. And that is one of the reasons why our, yeah, our corporate sector is, is smaller at the end of the day.
Joe Selvaggi:
So I want to shift our focus to another provision. I think this is fairly recent and almost mind-blowing to imagine this, this I’ve heard it called the Zillow taxes notion that we would tax unrealized gains in addition to realized gains and you know, for our listeners, I think everyone knows what a realized gain is. You sell something, you make a profit and your profits realized unrealized as an asset. That’s appreciated notionally, but not actually now you’ve not sold it. So it’s only worth what someone will pay for it in the future. How is it? Or, you know, w w what are the, the details of this, this, this tax, and how will it be implemented?
Kyle Pomerleau:
I don’t even, so this was actually a last week, big debate over this mark to market proposal. And I think, well, we’ll see it’s all already rumblings that this is going to be dropped. I think a lot of some lawmakers are uncomfortable with it, but though the way that the proposal was going to work is that for taxpayers with $1 billion in net worth, or $100 million in earnings on average over three years would be pushed into this mark to market regime. And that instead of being taxed on capital gains, when you sell your asset, these taxpayers would be taxed on capital gains each year as the asset appreciates in value. So you’d be switching from the realization to the mark to market system. And so th th in the reason that they wanted to go about this, or why they wanted to go about this is that they feel that for very, very high income and high net worth households, the value of deferral, the ability to defer your capital gains is very large.
Kyle Pomerleau:
And a lot of tax payers may be able to borrow money to finance their consumption instead of realizing their capital gains and totally avoid taxation on this income. So that’s the argument for why they wanted to go to go about this. We didn’t really get a good sense of how much this tax would raise. I think some people suggested it would be somewhere between 200 to $300 billion over a decade. That number seems to make sense to me, it would only be affecting about 700 people in the United States. So even, even though in theory, it could impact the, the appreciation of someone’s house. It would only be impacting the appreciation of say, Jeff Bezos, his house, or Elon Musk’s house.
Joe Selvaggi:
But again, I don’t wanna get too deep into this because as you say, it’s, it’s, it may not happen after all. But isn’t this just carrying, bringing forward in revenue that you will ultimately collect when that, that asset is sold in the future. I mean it’s not as if it falls off the register forever, ultimately everything gets sold or disappears. How, how, how do you account for the fact that you’re essentially drawing future taxes forward to
Kyle Pomerleau:
It’s in Texas? Yeah, that’s a really good question. So there are two, two pieces to this. So one of them has to do with the treatment of capital gains when the owner of those assets passes away. So under current law, if you hold onto an asset and it appreciates over your lifetime, you pass away and then pass that asset onto your heir, that assets basis is stepped up to market value at the point of your death. So what that means is that all of the appreciation through your life is not subject to tax. So it gets a big exemption. And this is one of the concerns I think Democrats are trying to address is that fair, very, very wealthy strategy you’d want to use is to just not sell your assets, because you don’t want to realize your capital gains. And then eventually you pass those assets onto your air and all of that tax that could have been collected.
Kyle Pomerleau:
If you sold the asset would go away, it would be exempt from taxation. The second piece is that to the federal government, there’s an aspect of time value of money, but you are right that if an asset appreciates over time and I sell in the future, I’m still getting taxed, but to the federal government, they’d rather have that revenue each and every year, rather than delaying it several years. And to them, the value is not all that different because interest rates on debt are not that high and the government can borrow at below 2% effectively, but there is a slight difference in timing in that the government, from the government’s perspective, they’d rather collect the revenue now than later from the taxpayer’s perspective, they rather pay the tax later than pay it. Now,
Joe Selvaggi:
Fair enough, fair enough. But that, that asset is not sitting up in the ground it’s, it’s appreciating and giving people jobs and creating new opportunities.
Kyle Pomerleau:
Yeah, that’s an, that’s another piece too, is that a lot of these assets are are, are capital assets, their claims on ownership to productive corporations that produce goods and services, and that if you are own a share and Exxon mobile, for example, the dividends you get are net of any corporate tax that’s being paid. Or if you own a, a stock, an apple stock, and it’s appreciating its appreciation is partially based on the corporate taxes that apple has to pay. So there is still tax being paid every single year. It’s just the entity level tax not the additional individual income tax.
Joe Selvaggi:
So the appreciation is as you say, after tax appreciation. So that’s an important, important detail part. I want to, I don’t want to dwell on that feature. Are there any traditional income taxes you said much is off, off the off the board. We at the outset some members in Congress didn’t want additional raising of taxes on corporate store income. What’s still in there.
Kyle Pomerleau:
So there, there are a few pieces that are more traditional individual income tax increases or kind of conventional income tax increases. So there is a they’ve build back better proposal has a new Sur tax on adjusted, gross income for households. So under this provision taxpayers with $10 million in adjusted gross income would face a 5% Sur tax on income over that threshold, an 8% Sur tax on income over $25 million. So very, very high income households would face this additional tax on all of their sources of income wages, business, income, capital gains, dividends, interests. They would all face this additional tax. This tax, I think in a way, is a replacement to the mark to market proposal. This, this surtax is supposed to raise about 200 to $250 billion in target, roughly the same, the same household tussles that have very, very high income that might be earning some of their income from capital gains independence.
Joe Selvaggi:
And we hear Massachusetts had been contemplating a change in our constitution that would allow for, we have a mandate of a flat tax, but we’re considering changing our tax code to allow for a certain tax on income on very high earners. We’ve established that it’s, it’s rare that someone makes this kind of money often and more often than not a $10 million income is, is going to be reflected by someone who’s, who’s built a business retained a lot of the earnings and has a liquidity event that puts them over, let’s say the $10 million threshold, but just once is there is this money purely over the 10 million or would it, you know, go back to dollar one? And who, who do you think is likely to pay these kinds of taxes? Yeah.
Kyle Pomerleau:
Oh, this is a, a, a marginal tax rate. So it’s over the threshold. Yeah. I think it would be an entirely different animal if they were thinking of, of, of taxing infer marginal dollars below that. So th this type of this type of tax it’s broad, so it’s going to hit wage-earners. So those that earn very, very high wages for one reason or another. This could, this could hit business owners. Those that earn those past the earned profits from those pass through businesses, we were talking about this Sur tax would apply to them. It would also hit some returns to corporations as well, because it’s going to apply to capital gains and dividends those those forms of income or the returns to those investments. So it’s a, it’s a broad tax. It’s gonna hit all that income now to the extent that, that those higher taxes are going to discourage productive activities, whether it’s working, saving, and investment, that could have additional effects on the economy than just the direct effects on those that are paying the tax. If you’re a business owner and you’re facing a higher tax rate that may increase your cost of capital or your cost of investing in new and new projects, and that could have an impact on the productivity of your firm, that could have an impact on the amount you can pay your workers and the amount that you can hire. Of course,
Joe Selvaggi:
Now let’s take this step back. Let’s change our focus. We estimate, although that’s even that is not certain this bill or this act will be will cost roughly three and a half trillion dollars. That’s a lot of zeros. Have you been able to estimate given all the provisions of the revenue that we’ve described here, how much money will this bring in?
Kyle Pomerleau:
Yeah. Good, good question. So, right. So right now, there’s still a lot in flux on the spending side, they’re still negotiating the 3.5 is that top line number that Biden really wanted recent news as stated that it could be as low as 1.5 or 1.7, 5 trillion, 1.7, $5 trillion over that period. So anywhere in between now on the revenue side, again, unclear because we don’t know exactly what provisions are going to be in there, but if we add up all the provisions that are currently in build back better, this is probably a tax increase between one and a half to 1.7, $5 trillion over a decade. And, you know, to give a sense, that’s the same size as the the, the tax cuts and jobs act that was passed in late of 2017 in terms of its its scale early, some dollar value. Now, the taxpayers and impacts are totally different. This 1.75 trillion is coming primarily or almost exclusively from very high income households. The TCGA was a broader tax cut. So it’s not a perfect comparison, but just to give you a sense of scale, we’re talking about roughly the same dollar figure there. So
Joe Selvaggi:
With the earlier act reduced taxes, this replaces and if we use the low end range of the estimate of the, the spending here, it will roughly will not be free as some assert, but will pay for itself. If, if the revenue estimates and the spending of Smith’s on the low end add up, it will pay for itself.
Kyle Pomerleau:
It will be, it will be financed in so far as taxes will cover spending. I don’t know many people that call that as being costless, because taxpayers will be having will, will need to pay for that. And any spending that isn’t directly financed by increased taxes is going to increase the federal debt, which means that there is a future liability that taxpayers will need to cover.
Joe Selvaggi:
Indeed. the government I’d like to point this out, it seems trivial, but the government doesn’t have its own money. It only has our money so that if this tax revenue does not meet the expenditures, it’s either, you know, we, we call for additional taxes now or additional taxes in the future. That’s the only choices we have.
Kyle Pomerleau:
It’s important politically. We don’t know how comfortable any given lawmaker is with borrowing. We know that some may be comfortable, but, you know, if, if they come up short, that may mean that spending has to come down a little bit in order for them to get the votes that they need to pass them.
Joe Selvaggi:
Now, we’re, we’re in the last couple of years now with the pandemic the federal government spent quite a bit of money, roughly $6 trillion, extra trying to sort of ensure that the economy doesn’t suffer any more damage than it already had. That’s an addition to it. You know, what historically has been about a $4 trillion federal budget. We owe a lot of money at this point. You’re a tax expert. If we were trying to be responsible about paying for what we spend if you’re king for a day, I like to ask our experts these kinds of questions. What types of taxes do you think would both raise revenue? But also not distort economies. And in other words, it’s not discouraged investment growth jobs, all the things we like at AEI and, and that pioneer, what would you recommend?
Kyle Pomerleau:
Th this is a really broad question. Of course my, my, my initial reaction here is that it’s not, it, it’s not going to just be from tax revenue. I think eventually lawmakers are going to have to do something to balance things. And it’s probably going to be a combination of reduced spending and increased taxes. Now, if I had a seat at the table, or I could just decide I think that if I were to raise additional revenue, it would be probably be from one broadening the income tax base. So there’s currently a lot of income that isn’t taxed under the individual income tax. For example, one of the biggest sources of that is compensation. I, or you may receive from your employer in the form of health insurance premiums paying for those health insurance premiums. That’s a form of income that is being, that people are earning that is kind of like wages should be taxed like wages. But that’s just one example, another tax or a couple of the taxes that I would consider are additional sources of revenue. I think the United States should consider a value added tax to be a federal level roughly a sales tax. These are very broad based taxes they’re used through most of the world. And they are relative to other taxes, very little distortion on the economy. And a tax of 5% could raise quite a lot of revenue for the federal government to close some of this gap.
Joe Selvaggi:
Hm. So value added tax. I’ve, I’ve heard that proposed. In fact, I’ll, I’ll share a little secret. A very progressive economist I met at the Kennedy school, talked about the power of value out of taxes, enormous revenue potential, but right now Democrats see it as a progressive tax. So they don’t like it. Republicans see it as a enormous revenue opportunity for tax. But when he said, if Democrats realized it was an enormous opportunity for taxes and Republicans realized it was regressive, they might actually meet in the center of that and agree on it. What do you imagine the probability of a value-added tax ever come seeing the light of day?
Kyle Pomerleau:
Yeah, I, I w today very low chance, but I think at some point something has to give I at that in the future, the federal government is going to face some tough choices. Some of those choices in the absence of revenue may include cutting social security benefits, or Medicare benefits. And I think politically, you know, if you’re going to choose, are we going to raise a broad base tax modestly or place a significant, potentially significant burden on current recipients of retirement benefits? I think that they, they would probably lean more on the value added tax and drastically cutting benefits. I know that’s probably a sad thing for proponents of limited government to hear. But there are only so many things that or there’s only so many things that are possible politically.
Joe Selvaggi:
And I think that, you know, smaller reforms are more likely than very large ones. And you know, in the future, I think an additional source of revenue like of that could be part of a smaller, more modest for form to balance the bucket, getting closer to balancing the budget on relief. Neither of us is intending to run for office. Anytime soon, I proposed raising taxes on healthcare plans. I presume also on maybe the mortgage deduction that’s yeah, that, that would be another one that I, you could at least start by capping the value and only impacting high-income households. I’m actually somewhat surprised that lawmakers this time around, didn’t try to limit itemized deductions for very high income household. In fact, lawmakers are thinking about expanding itemized deductions for high-income households, by eliminating the state and local tax deduction, cap of $10,000 that was passed as part of the tax cuts and jobs act.
Joe Selvaggi:
Right. That’s amazing to me that Democrats proposed something like that, which would be sort of a naked giveaway to, you know, higher earners in high tax states. If you’re getting a tax subsidy to pay state taxes, it seems impossible, but that’s how it is. Okay, well, we’re almost out of time. I appreciate this very deep conversation. I hope our our listeners stuck with us. There’s a lot to learn about this this new act and you’ve been very, very informative, a great guest, and I really appreciate your time will thank you very much for having me.
Joe Selvaggi:
This has been another episode of Hubwonk, a podcast of Pioneer Institute, a think tank in Boston. If you enjoyed today’s show, there are several ways to support us and pioneer Institute. It would be easier for you and better for us. If you subscribe to Hubwonk on your iTunes podcast, if you’d like to make it easier for others to find hub one, it would help. If you offer us a five star rating or a favorable review, naturally, we’re always grateful. If you want to share Hubwonk with friends, if you find ideas for me, or suggestions or comments about future episode topics, you’re welcome to reach out to me via email at hubwonk@pioneerinstitute.org. Please join me next week for a new episode.
Related Posts:
This week on JobMakers, host Denzil Mohammed talks with Gary Christenson, Mayor of Malden, the second most diverse city in Massachusetts, with almost 43 percent of its residents born outside of the United States. It’s also home to The Immigrant Learning Center, the co-producer of this podcast. It’s always been a gateway city for immigrants and refugees: from Jews fleeing for safety after World War II, to Eastern Europeans and Vietnamese seeking democracy and freedom, to immigrants from China, Morocco, Brazil and Haiti seeking the American Dream. For Mayor Christenson, it is this diversity that gives Malden its strength, and assures him of a strong, proud future. He looks to the revitalization of downtown with its disproportionate number of immigrant-owned businesses, and talks with us about managing the relationships between long-time residents and new immigrants, the reaction of the city to hate crimes after the Boston Marathon bombing, how much immigrants have given back to their new home, and his stance on sanctuary cities, in this week’s JobMakers.
Guest:
Gary Christenson has been Mayor of Malden, Massachusetts since 2012. His political career began as a budget analyst, revenue director and special assistant reporting to Tom Finneran on the Massachusetts House Ways and Means committee from 1994-1997. He also served as budget director at the Middlesex County Sheriff’s Office. Christenson was appointed to the Malden School Committee, and served as a city councillor of Ward 1 in Malden for seven years. He became Chairman of the Finance Committee and then City Council President, before being elected mayor. Christenson is a triple alumnus of Suffolk University. He has received a Bachelor’s degree in political science science and business management in 1990 and a Masters Degree in public administration in 1992. In 2003, Gary received his Juris Doctorate from the Suffolk University Law School.
Read a Transcript of This Episode:
Please excuse typos.
Denzil Mohammed:
I am Denzil Mohammed, and this is JobMakers.
Malden, Massachusetts, the second most diverse city in the Commonwealth. After Chelsea with almost 43% of us residents born outside of the United States. It’s also home to the immigrant learning center, the co-producer of this podcast. So a good location for free English language program. Maldens always been a gateway city for immigrants and refugees from Jews fleeing for safety after world war two to Eastern Europeans and Vietnamese seeking democracy and freedom to immigrants from China, Morocco, Brazil, and Haiti seeking the American dream today from me or Gary Christianson. It is this diversity that gives Malden its strength and assures him of a strong, proud future. He looks to the revitalization of downtown as its disproportionate number of immigrant owned businesses, the dizzying array of cuisines on offer and the very entrepreneurial spirit. That’s the fuses its immigrant populations. He talks with us about managing the relationships between the term residents and new immigrants, the reaction of the city to hate crimes after the Boston marathon bombing, how much immigrants have given back to their new home and his stance on century cities in this week’s job makers, Mayor Gary Christianson, welcome to the job makers podcast.
Mayor Gary Christenson
Thank you so much for having me, always an honor.
Denzil Mohammed:
So what is it like running the second most diverse city in the Commonwealth?
Mayor Gary Christenson
It probably is the greatest aspect of serving as mayor, because I have learned things that I know that I never otherwise would, if not the living in one of the most diverse cities in the state of Massachusetts. For example, I met with a community group a couple of years ago, and when they told me the name of the country, I didn’t even know it existed. I actually had to go to a map to look it up. It was Eritrea. And,uagain, if not for them being here and being part of this diverse city that we live in, I might have never known that. And so to me, that’s one of the greatest benefits of, of living here in Malden.
Denzil Mohammed:
And you’re a lifelong Malden resident. How have you seen immigration shaped this city? And in what ways? I mean, I, as far as I can tell Malden has always been a gateway city for different refugee and immigrant groups, right?
Mayor Gary Christenson
Yeah. I guess how has it shaped our city from religion to culture, to my favorite, which is a food it’s had a profound impact on who we are and where we are going. And I can’t tell you the number of people who end up coming here now mention the diversity as one of the attractions on why they come to our city.
Denzil Mohammed
So you think that this diversity is a strength of ours.
Mayor Gary Christenson:
We touted every chance we get. And you know, we just don’t, we try not to just talk the talk. We’re now trying to take what has been happening to our city and have it permeate throughout everything we do in Malden. So for example we now have our first diversity equity and inclusion officer, just a couple of offices down from me. Her name is Bybiose Larochelle, and she now is working very hard to have the government reflect what Malden has become, which is again, one of the most diverse cities in our state. So she sits on every hiring committee she’s involved with helping to promote the vaccine to underserved populations in our city. And we want to make sure that Malden is not just known as the most diverse, but actually practices and preaches on making sure that our community is, is welcoming and safe for us all.
Denzil Mohammed:
So we know from our own research and you would know as the person who runs this city, that immigrants are inherently entrepreneurial. Just the idea of packing a suitcase and leaving their family and friends and their culture and their food behind is itself. An entrepreneurial act. How has that entrepreneurial spirit immigrants in Malden shaped the local economy?
Mayor Gary Christenson:
Just the other day, we cut the ribbon to the new Maplewood meat market over on in Maplewood square. And the owners, they one was from Peru and the other one was from Mexico, I believe. And they are not only the owners, but they’re serving the goods that are native to their original countries. And again, that would not be the case, if not for them wanting to set up their business here in our city. So we went down that not only congratulate them on this risk, because that’s what it is when you’re opening a new business, but thank them as well for sharing what they have experienced and learned growing up with our, our community. So that’s just one example of many that we work with on a daily basis here in Malden.
Denzil Mohammed:
I remember talking to Shane Smith on this podcast who runs Hugh O’Neill’s Irish pub. And, you know, he mentioned when he, when he first opened that downtown mall and wasn’t the vibrant hub that it is now with pubs and restaurants and cafes and stores particularly looking at the downtown area, how have immigrants played a role in revitalizing downtown Malden over the years?
Mayor Gary Christenson:
Well, I would encourage your listeners to, to come see it, to experience it firsthand, but they have, single-handedly brought our city back and there were times when people weren’t sure about whether that would ever be possible again, but they have done it. Just go up one side and down the other, and you’ll see just this afternoon, I’m going to go over to the gallery at 57 pleasant street, which consists of a number of immigrant artists who are going to be celebrating the second anniversary of that store opening. And again, that would not have happened without their willingness to get involved and help us bring back Malden square from where it once was.
Denzil Mohammed:
And I just can’t help. But think of the sheer diversity, you talk about someone from Peru and Mexico Eritrea, I mean, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Vietnam Haiti, just so many, so much rich diversity here. And we take it for granted that just in America, that we have all this great diversity of food. For instance, you know, America’s favorite fast food chain is Taco Bell. We have immigrants to thank for the fact that we can have, we can choose on a Friday night Thai food or Scottish food or Irish food or Chinese food.
Mayor Gary Christenson:
Well, I can tell you the difference here. A number of our students who graduate Malden high school and go off into the big world, always come back and tell us that one of the advantages of attending school in our city is that when they get out, they’ve experienced it all whereas students that they are meeting for the first time, it takes them several years to adjust and adapt to experiencing new cultures, new religions, new foods, but not students that come from our cities. So, you know, to me, that’s one of the great things about Malden.
Denzil Mohammed:
You’ve mentioned students, and I want to get back to that in a second, but what has Malden done over the years? How has your relationship with immigrant business owners in particular evolved? Like what have you, what have you done right? That other cities have not done right? When it comes to really fostering that entrepreneurial spirit?
Mayor Gary Christenson:
Yes. You know, again, as I mentioned, our diversity equity inclusion officer now Bybiose Larochelle has been working with the different community groups throughout Malden to take us to that next level, because we’ve known now for some time that we are diverse and we appreciate it and enjoy it, but now it’s time to take it to where it should go, which is to again, be in a place that everybody can participate in. So I would say that is where we’re going next, which is, you know, having people working in the government that reflect our community having documents, translated meetings, translated so people could participate in eventually run for political office.
Denzil Mohammed:
So you mentioned students a little bit, a little while ago. Part of your progress in Malden has been the creation of 1500 jobs from Malden’s teams, exposing them to the job interview process, giving them work experience, arming them with career readiness. Given that 50%, 57% of Malden high school students don’t count English as their first language. How do you see reaching such a diverse group of students? How have they been able to engage with these opportunities?
Mayor Gary Christenson:
We go to them, we reach out to them, we roll out the red carpet for them. We make it a point to find those students who otherwise would not get involved and take that step. We try to find people that we’ve never met and we have no connection with, because again, it’s opportunities like the summer youth employment program that good help determine who that next teacher is, who that next police officer is. That next entrepreneur is
Denzil Mohammed:
One of the most beautiful things to see in Malden is when the bell rings and the high school students come streaming out, all the elementary schools students. And they’re from every different color, every different Stripe, every different background, but they’re all friends, they all get along. They may wear a hijab or, you know, something else, but they all get along. And it’s almost like this lesson in immigrant integration and inclusion and belonging. Has it been challenging over the years? Just you talk about all this community outreach and meeting people where they’re at and has it been like a learning experience for you?
Mayor Gary Christenson:
It certainly hasn’t been a challenge. It’s been something that I have been proud and honored to be a part of, because again, I, listen, my family said growing up the whole point of why we’re here is to learn, share, and grow. That’s the whole point of it to make it better for the next group of residents behind us, for them then to be living in a place that’s greater than we found it. And so I’ve been able to do that by, you know, living here in Malden. Again, I’ve seen, I’ve heard, I’ve learned things. It actually has helped me to rarely need a vacation because I feel like here in Malden, I’m on vacation all the time. I’m not sure
Denzil Mohammed:
You want to say that before your next campaign.
Denzil Mohammed:
But what, what, what do you think re it’s it’s, it’s almost ironic and tragic that you say the lesson was to make it easier for the people who come after you, because so often the groups that are, that are, have settled here, disliked the groups that come after them, we’ve seen that it’s a cycle in US history. You know, who does America belong to? And I think, I would venture to suggest it belongs to anyone who believes in the American dream, you know, who had that freedom and opportunity. What do you think sets Malden apart when it comes to embracing its newest foreign-born residence and ensuring that they thrive?
Mayor Gary Christenson:
I would say it’s just a willingness to work with everyone to make our community the best it can be. I mean, we try here to take every call, every email, no matter what your stature is in life, you know, so, you know, there was a time when it was, we knew, you know, what they do, but we’ve tried hard over the years to let that not be the case here. So we, I believe we truly have a, an open door policy. I’ll give you an example. We had someone reach out to us from Morocco the other day. I don’t even know how she got my text number, but she got my cell number. She texted me, I couldn’t remember who she was or where I met her, but within 24 hours sitting in the mayor’s office trying to help address, you know, her ratio, which is serious, but we think we might have some solutions for her, but the point I’m trying to make is that again, that was something we could have said, you know, schedule it a month out, you know, find out who she is, all that stuff.
Mayor Gary Christenson:
But we try not to do that here. We had her here in 24 hours.
Denzil Mohammed:
So it hasn’t been entirely rosy experience here in Malden. I think there have been some tensions with longtime residents and newer residents,and things can get very heated when it comes to, you know, national or local tragedies. We did have an incident soon after the Boston marathon bombing where a Syrian woman was punched by a resident of Malden,in front of her toddler, you know, taking her child to daycare. But the city’s response was pretty remarkable, right?
Mayor Gary Christenson:
Yes, that’s in the eye of the beholder, but our instant reaction was to swarm her, you know, to be with her, to let her know that that is not something we’re known for or tolerate. And the thing I’ll remember most about that is the number of people who came to her defense and to reassure her that that was, that was an anomaly. And I think as a result, we were able to survive that together. You know, we are a community for all. I mean, just look at the latest census track that just came out. When you look at the map of Malden, it’s pretty evenly distributed across the five square miles. So as opposed to another city who might have a, you know, a segment or a population in this corner, and then the rest of the city is another population, here in Malden, you wouldn’t know where you are at any given time in any part of the city.
Denzil Mohammed:
Over the years, how has Malden sort of managed these tensions or this relationship of the longer term residents versus the newer ones?
Mayor Gary Christenson:
I would say it’s creating an atmosphere, again, where people are welcomed and respected, no matter what generation they’re from. So we observe, we celebrate different holidays, we observe and celebrate different religious traditions. We eat different foods. And I think that’s how we’ve tried to do it here in the government. So I guess in other words, lead by example. So if you notice on our social media, my social media channels, always trying to promote, you know, a different culture or a different religion, a different food. And I think when people see the leaders of the city doing that, I think over time, people tend to accept it. You know, when they see their elected officials and managers, department heads, police chiefs, fire chiefs, I think that’s how we’ve been able to do it. Because again, we want to demonstrate that no matter where you are or where you’re from, you’re just as part of Malden as anybody else.
Denzil Mohammed:
One thing that you did over the last federal administration, you know, there were a lot of movements across the country to where cities were insisting that they be more welcoming and that they take a sort of stand when it came to protecting their immigrant populations. And as we know, about 20% of the immigrant population in Massachusetts has no legal status. They’re undocumented. Malden was one of the cities that did not proclaim that it was a sanctuary city. And the reason was that coming from you and your administration was that it’s already a welcoming and protective place. Can you expand on that a little bit as why you took that decision? Not to make Malden a sanctuary city?
Mayor Gary Christenson:
No. I mean, that was the flavor of the day to become a sanctuary city, but in actuality, what did it really mean besides the potential for pro protracted legal battles and the potential loss of aid? You know, at that time, we didn’t know whether that would mean that some of the grants that we were relying on to help people who were in need of it the most would be at risk. So that was why at the time we didn’t feel the need to sign on to becoming a sanctuary city, which I think over time then changed to something else, et cetera. I just know, I think for us, and I think, I believe the other branches of government, they felt the same way that, you know, we were long past having to label ourselves as something other than what we have always been, which is a place, you know, that everybody can live, work, worship
Denzil Mohammed:
We’ve, you and I have seen immigrants contribute to the city as business owners, as workers through cultural events, building it up and enriching it every day. There is a huge narrative out there about immigrants as takers, refugees as takers. What is your view on that? How have you seen immigrants give back and have they given back over time more than you’ve given them or the government has given them?
Mayor Gary Christenson:
I haven’t seen takers. I’ve seen people, my experience here that like you outlined Denzil at the beginning, that just want a chance, an opportunity to live out their dreams. And so I’ve seen that as we’ve gone around to the different businesses, as I’ve talked with students in the different schools that we have here. And even in the houses of worship, when I go through there that, you know, people are just looking for an opportunity to achieve their lifelong dream.
Denzil Mohammed:
That’s a very powerful way to end this. Mayor Christenson, thank you so much for joining us and JobMakers. This was really a fascinating discussion and I hope other municipalities listened to this and be guided accordingly as to how, as you say, you can help people fulfill their dreams and you can see how much they can give back.
Mayor Gary Christenson:
That’s it. That’s what it’s all about. Hey, and thank you Denzil, to the Immigrant Learning Center. I am certain we would not be having this conversation if not, for all the work that you have done over the years. So thank you.
Denzil Mohammed:
Jobmakers is a weekly podcast about immigrant entrepreneurship and contribution produced by pioneer Institute, a think tank in Boston and the Immigrant Learning Center, a not-for-profit that gives immigrants a voice. Thank you for joining us for today’s fascinating story on the benefits of welcoming immigrants and refugees to the U S if you have feedback or know someone, you should talk to email Denzel that’s, D E N Z I L @ jobmakerspodcast.org. I’m Denzil Mohammed. Join us next Thursday at noon for another episode of jobmakers.
Recent Episodes:
This week on “The Learning Curve,” co-hosts Gerard Robinson and Cara Candal talk with Dr. Bror Saxberg, MD, Vice President of Learning Science at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Dr. Saxberg describes his groundbreaking work in the area of learning science and understanding how “working memory” and “long-term memory” can help improve academic excellence and equity. He reviews what we now know from cognitive science and brain research that, if taken to scale, would likely help drive better student outcomes, and surveys some of the schools that apply this research most effectively to instructional reforms. Finally, Dr. Saxberg offers thoughts on the uses and limits of technology in American education reform, and whether school districts and schools are spending their resources on technology effectively enough to improve student achievement.
Stories of the Week: In Philadelphia, as the city prepares for a transit system strike that could disrupt in-person learning for 60,000 students and 20,000 school system employees, district leaders are looking to online education as a temporary solution. Wisconsin is seeing a rise in efforts to recall school board members, with 11 attempts in 2021, as a result of academic decline, COVID response, and some contentious curriculum content.
Guest:
Dr. Bror Saxberg, MD, is Vice President of Learning Science at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. In his role, Saxberg is responsible for CZI’s thinking about how to apply learning science results at scale to real-world learning environments. Bror works closely with the Summit Public Schools team to guide learning science research and applications in Summit Schools and the Summit Learning Program. Saxberg most recently served as Chief Learning Officer at Kaplan, Inc. Saxberg received an Honors BA in Mathematics and a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Washington, and an MA in mathematics from Oxford University, a PhD in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT, and an MD from Harvard Medical School.
Next episode: The next episode will air on Wednesday, November 3rd with guest, Pastor Robert Soto, a Lipan Apache tribal religious leader and an award-winning feather dancer, who has successfully upheld his Native American cultural heritage and religious liberties in federal courts.
Tweet of the Week
More than 5,000 #Maine children began #homeschool in 2021 (+75% from 2020)
More than 50 districts at least doubled their counts
The average district lost ~80% more students to homeschooling
data as of 3/31/21 ??@mdoenews https://t.co/bkOdTtcDyZ #mepolitics #School2021
— Nick Murray (@NickMurr) July 23, 2021
News Links:
Philadelphia School District braces for a possible SEPTA strike by considering online learning https://www.inquirer.com/news/septa-strike-philadelphia-school-district-plans-20211019.html
In Wisconsin, recall efforts add to pressure on school boards in the wake of COVID-19 https://www.wpr.org/wisconsin-recall-efforts-add-pressure-school-boards-wake-covid-19
Read a Transcript of This Episode:
Pleaae excuse typos.
[00:00:00] Cara Candal: Well, Gerard Robinson, we are back with another edition of the learning curve. And last week I was all excited because I had become this Fairweather baseball fan, and now are pretty excited because boy, the red Sox did not, despite those beautiful grand slam data, pull it out in the end. So now I am back to just not watching baseball.
[00:00:23] How about you?
[00:00:24] Gerard Robinson (GR): I did not watch it. I heard a lot of my friends, , were pretty excited about the outcome. I have friends in Houston, so they’re loving it up. And so it, Jamie, but the folks in Boston are not happy campers, but you know, to thought two months ago, they, be this far. It’s a win.
[00:00:40] Cara: Let’s be clear. So, Bostonians usually just base Staters in general, usually. Very sorry guys, but I’m just gonna say the truth, like a very grumpy bunch of people. When I first moved here from the Midwest, I would like wave at people in my morning jog and they would look at me like, Going to hurt them.
[00:00:55] So, I mean, we’re, that’s sort of how we are anyway. So we’re used to it, we need something to [00:01:00] be a little bit angry about it’s dark and cold and all in all of the things, Gerard, but okay. Listeners and we have to tell you that you’re going to notice Gerard sounds a little bit different today because of.
[00:01:09] he’s out and about. He’s a busy guy. So he’s coming to us, from somewhere on the road. Gerard, I’m hoping that your travels are going really well. we’re going to get to a pretty cool guest today. , Bruce expert, MD of the Chan Zuckerberg initiative. We’re gonna talk about brain science and education and learning and all of these great things.
[00:01:29] But Gerard, I want to get to my story of the week because my story of the. Feels like, it’s about just the theme of the decade and the theme of our summer in that is it really comes down , to infrastructure, how dependent some of us are on crumbling infrastructure and how dependent, some school kids actually are , on things like, school buses, which we’ve talked about a little bit, but also just public transportation to get them to school.
[00:01:55] So, the news this week in Philadelphia news, you know, Philadelphia. [00:02:00] And in fact, all of the public school students and teachers in the school district are preparing for a possible strike. It’s called SEPTA in Philadelphia, and this is the city buses, the subways, the trolleys, all of the modes of transportation that people use to get around the city.
[00:02:15] they’re threatening a strike now, Gerard, nearly 60,000 students in the city of Philadelphia use public transportation to get to school. So this is a really, really big deal. And I got to say, public transportation is such a big, thing that we’re talking about this country. I know here in Boston, am lately more afraid of, , getting an, a train derailment on the MBTA in Boston than I am of catching COVID on the mat, because that’s about the state of art infrastructure.
[00:02:43] But in Philadelphia, you’ve just got folks who are going on are threatening to strike, because of the things that people strike about, you know, overwork and lack of pay. And we all know that. Systems are stressed right now with a lack of people to work. But what does that mean for the kids? And what does that mean [00:03:00] for the school districts?
[00:03:01] In some sense, juror, the straight gives me a little bit of hope because this school district is in fact talking about pivoting to online learning. So taking some of the lessons that we’ve learned from the pandemic that in fact, Kids can learn online and we have systems and structures in place.
[00:03:17] we’ve talked about on this show, what happens if there’s a hurricane, can we pivot to online learning? Yes, we can. A big snowstorm. Yes, we can. Well, this can include transportation strikes. So if indeed this does happen and we don’t know that it will because the union hasn’t voted on it yet and they need to let’s hope that the Philadelphia public school.
[00:03:36] Can pivot to online learning and do all that they can to keep students learning after so much loss learning. there’s of course we have to mention. Poses a problem for parents who are going to go to work and are going to be at work, probably despite the strike and will now have childcare needs. So let’s fingers crossed.
[00:03:52] Hope it doesn’t come to that. But I was heartened to see that there is a potential solution at play. Should this strike [00:04:00] happen? So that’s my story of the week Gerard infrastructure week infrastructure month or summer, as we should say, I’m sure in the future, we’ll be talking about the infrastructure package that everybody’s eagerly awaiting, but what’s on your.
[00:04:12] Gerard: We’ve talked about Philadelphia a couple of times on our show, the first time it had to do with the lack of bandwidth for some students. And so the school system put together a set of buses and had hotspots, but they also made sure that students received computers now were possibly seen students impacted Nothing that has to do with the school system per se, but strikes. So hopefully they worked that out and yes, I’m glad that, , the online learning is an option because without it you’d have a lot of families, as you mentioned, who are going to find themselves in trouble, so that’s going to be pretty tough.
[00:04:48] My story is a little different. It comes from. Uh, state I used to live in, and this one is in about a strike, but it’s about a possible, we call a school board members. [00:05:00] So Wisconsin is not a state with a very few school systems. In fact, it’s a state with 421. Well, during the 20 20, 20, 21 school year, you’ve actually had 11 districts in the state say that they’re going to recall people and only one.
[00:05:19] In fact, it’s actually qualified through the petition process to get enough signatures, to put it on the ballot. And that’s the MEK wan, uh, Thiensville school district, you know, right outside of Milwaukee. And the reason they’re doing it is twofold. Number one, parents say that the way the school system responded to the fandom, it wasn’t great.
[00:05:39] Others say is because of critical race theory, maybe something in the middle. What’s unique about this. And this is according to, one of our, scholars at the university of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, Michael, for. I used to work with many years ago when I was in Milwaukee, he said that going back to 2010, [00:06:00] when the teachers and others were making a real big push to, we call, the sitting governor at the time that from that point, moving forward, people have begun to use the recall as either a threat or a lever to pull.
[00:06:14] And so, although of the 11 only one qualified. And 10 of the other districts, guess what some of the school board members actually resigned and some people stepped in to take their place or to run for the seat. So it’s an interesting time in Wisconsin, because as you know, we have some challenges here in Northern Virginia, in terms of school, board, parent relations, but in Wisconsin, I guess what some people say, let’s just recall , whether it’s really critical race theory, whether it’s really the pandemic.
[00:06:43] I think it may be more of that than former, but this is a really interesting time. And as my court said, this, isn’t how we often practice democracy, but it’s something that people are beginning to do right now. What are your thoughts?
[00:06:57] Cara: Oh, , well, , as a school board [00:07:00] member myself, like for current former, I’ve been a couple of school boards.
[00:07:04] non-public school district boards that will say always charter and private school boards. it is a terrible time to be a school board member. And on the one hand it’s, I observed. that parents seem to be much more active for a variety of reasons at school board meetings, which is a positive, because I got to tell you I’ve unfortunately sat through and viewed online, you know, school board meetings where like I was the only parent present or there was barely anybody there.
[00:07:31] but, the way. So many citizens are engaging with school boards right now. whether it’s around critical race theory, concerns about critical race theory or something else seems to be uncivil. we’ve been reading a lot in the news about, and I’m not saying. Or uncivil there is probably a majority who are going and trying to be productive speak their piece.
[00:07:52] But, the ones that make the news are those , who are not behaving very civilly. it’s a scary time and I think it’s indicative, you know, school parts have [00:08:00] become this just battleground as of late. we always want more parent involvement in our schools.
[00:08:05] We always want more parent input, especially in our public schools where. Well, let’s just face it. Parents have less control, right? , , , there are a lot of structures and bureaucracies in place that dictate, what curriculum going gonna look like and what outcomes are gonna look like, et cetera.
[00:08:19] And so it can understand on the one hand, white parents, , want to exercise their voice, but don’t know to exercise it in this way to use a recall. And as, as you’ve noted, not how democracy, usually works. it’s really interesting. And I wonder Gerard half the time, if, when folks are voting for school board, They actually even study what these candidates claim to do. We’ve got school, board elections going on in community. And I see signs that say, you know, I support excellence in education, for example. And my first question in my mind is always, what does that mean to you? So I wish that citizens, I hope that on the one hand.
[00:08:54] Engages parents and citizens more in their local schools and what schools are doing. But man, do I wish we could [00:09:00] have, much more civil conversation and behave in much more democratic ways around what it means to participate in the process that is, governing our public school district.
[00:09:09] So, TBD, I don’t think this is the last time we’re going to be talking about school boards on the learning curve. well, okay, Gerard, , this is cool. I think this is a guest that you have talked about at least to me having on the show for some time. And we are going to be talking with Dr.
[00:09:26] Brewer, sax, Berg MD. I don’t know. Maybe it’s just the first medical doctor we’ve talked to on the show. It could very well be. and he is the vice president of learning science at the Chan Zuckerberg. Initiative. So lots of great questions, great conversation coming up after this with Dr. Sachs Berg. you and I will back after this little musical.[00:10:00]
[00:10:26] Learning curve listeners. We are back with Breuer, sax, Berg. He is the vice president of learning science at the Chan-Zuckerberg initiative in his role sacks. For CZI is thinking about how to apply learning science results at scale to real-world learning environments for our works closely with the summit public schools team to guide learning science research and applications in summit schools and the summit learning program, sax Berg most recently served as chief learning officer at Kaplan, Inc.
[00:10:54] And he received an honors BA in mathematics and a BS in electrical engineering from the university of Washington [00:11:00] and an ma in mathematics from Oxford universe. As well as a PhD in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT and an MD from Harvard medical school, a very accomplished human being.
[00:11:11] Dr. Saxberg, thanks so much for being with us on the learning curve.
[00:11:15] Bror: Thanks so much for asking me. Yeah,
[00:11:18] Cara: we’re excited. Okay. So this is, I can’t tell you how many books I have on my shelf about brain science and education as an ed policy person said, but it’s such a quickly changing and evolving field and what we understand about how the brain works and how, kids and even adults learn.
[00:11:35] it’s just fascinating stuff. So we’re going to hear a little bit about the work that you’ve done. CZI, especially within learning science and understanding how working memory and long-term memory can help improve academic excellence and equity, not something that I think most people think about that learning science and memory science can help us understand how we sort of close gaps.[00:12:00]
[00:12:00] So can you talk a little bit about what we know from cognitive science that if we scaled it would really help K to 12 education reform. drive towards evidence-based student
[00:12:11] Bror: achievement. I’d be happy to I’ll start where in a sense, we all want to end with learning and learners, which is.
[00:12:20] What is expertise? How do human expert minds actually have their expertise, if you will encode it or embedded. And what cognitive psychologists have found is that when you look at somebody who is an expert, who is really good at what they do, who’s spent more than 10 years at work , in a field and, and has become just very good at what they do.
[00:12:42] What you find is that something like 70 or 80%. Of the decision-making that they do comes from what is called long-term memory. In other words, it is like instinctual, tacit. It’s become so native to [00:13:00] them that they see patterns and they don’t even realize that there’s another alternative to it. So if you look at it like a chess master, when they look at a book.
[00:13:09] They will instantly see your queen is a threat. Now I’m a complete Duffer as in like literally not good chess. Like what is this horse do? can’t keep track of what is going on, even with one piece, but a chess master can instantly grasp that weight. There’s that queen is under risk and can keep going from there.
[00:13:29] And this is true. All kinds of different experts have things that are so. Deeply practice that they become part of long-term memory. So the difference between working memory and long-term memory is that working memory is the part of our minds. That is the verbal part is kind of where our verbal self lives.
[00:13:48] So if you’re listening to me and I started talking in a high squeaky voice, you’re thinking, this is a very strange man there, he got on the podcast and you’d be right. But that internal monologue of yours, that saying, who is this guy is [00:14:00] happening in your workplace. The working memory is also the part that handles new, complicated things.
[00:14:05] Things you have no familiarity with. It’s where a lot of creative stuff happens. It is actually quite slow and you can’t have very many things at once going on in your working memory that you quickly get confused and stuff just falls out the side. however, As you practice and get better at things.
[00:14:24] And when you’re doing something new, the practice is part of the working memory. It’s doing new things, working memory draws on what’s already in long-term memory and then combines it with new things. And then you practice, you get feedback, you gradually add new things to long-term memory. So I’ll give you, , an example from, when I was teaching my daughter to drive, a number of years ago.
[00:14:46] So the first time we get out of. Right. And she’s kind of ambidextrous. So it’s kind of like the brakes on the left, the brakes on the left. It’s like, there’s tears and chaos and that’s just me. Right? And so she’s not able to [00:15:00] think of anything except how does the steering wheel work?
[00:15:03] There’s no room at all in there right now, you know, fast forward, six months, nine months later. And she is like many of the rest of us She was able to drive to school. You could sit next to her. She drove to the mall or something, and she would have a conversation about her day and what was going on and what she’s doing.
[00:15:21] While driving perfectly well. And so driving is one of those things where it becomes part of our long-term memory. And many of your listeners may have had the following experience, which is telling when you think about it, You start out at place a and then you get to thinking about your life and what’s going on at work and all this, and you look up and you’ve gone to place B instead, I usually end up at a Starbucks, you know, frequently under caffeinated, right?
[00:15:47] Cara: Yeah.
[00:15:48] Bror: There you go. And you laugh. I can’t believe I did that again. And you drive off, you don’t think about it. Well, let’s pause for a second. Who drove that car? took a ton and a half of [00:16:00] metal, 20, 30 miles an hour, 50 miles an hour for many minutes at a time, if you were thinking about vacation or problems at work or other things, right.
[00:16:11] And this is in fact, the characteristic of all expert minds that. Things decisions that may be over an extended period of time. Even like driving where working memory doesn’t even have to pay attention, that there are decision processes already in long-term memory that make all kinds of complicated decisions driving this complicated.
[00:16:31] Right. And it’s totally learned we didn’t evolve to drive. We had to learn. So in a sense, one of the questions that is often a bit unanswered or not clearly answered is when we’re talking about our students is huh, which are the things that we need students to have in long-term memory. And which are the things that are always going to be a wrestled between working memory and long-term memory.
[00:16:55] So for example, writing without spelling mistakes, It’s [00:17:00] something you can actually pretty much embed in long-term memory over time. I mean, some of us harder, and sometimes there are still some mistakes that we step in, but you can end up in a place where when you’re typing or when you’re writing, you’re not thinking about every single word and what is the spelling and all that it just sort of is happening, straight through.
[00:17:17] But if you’re trying to write a persuasive note to your boss, you will never be able to do that and plan your family vacation at the same. Because working memory is going to be occupied with, how do I talk to my boss? What is the key point I’m trying to make? Is that too angry, a tone, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:17:36] And so often exercise of expertise is this collaboration between working memory as the flexible problem solving part of our mind and in the long-term memory, which has a whole range. Pasadena and skills and noticings and patterns and things that then you can get drawn into working memory and executed potentially very quickly by long-term memory.
[00:17:58] when. so that’s kind of [00:18:00] that relationship. So when we’re thinking about learning, whether it’s in math or history, or in English language arts, or in sciences, we should, if we were our best selves and Quicken designers ask, what do we need kids to have in longterm memory? And then design the learning environment to have enough practice and feedback to get it there because you need a lot of it.
[00:18:18] You can’t just do one and done to get it into long-term memory. And what are those things that are not needed to be in long-term memory, but can rather be either looked up or frankly are complex problem solving things that you just need to try a few times and exercise, but each time it will be something new , for working.
[00:18:34] Now actually, , if you let me, I’d like to pull back from what I’ve just described as the cognitive architecture of, expertise and learning and talk about wider architecture of learning and even expertise. And that’s when you start talking about the whole learner experience, it.
[00:18:53] It’s not enough to only design for kids cognition. So if you’re designing for kids condition, [00:19:00] you’d like to know what does this child already have in long-term memory? How can I draw on that and have them wrestle with new things and working memory, but not too many because working memory is narrow. It can’t take too much stuff.
[00:19:11] Right. So that’s designing for. You also need to think about several other things. One thing is motivation. Why should a child start persist and put in mental effort? And in fact, that’s motivation. There’s a lot of cognitive scientists think about it. You’ll notice that the term liking doesn’t appear in that list because if you study.
[00:19:34] Persist and putting mental effort, you will change your mind if it’s a well-designed living environment. Just like if you go to the gym and you do a well-designed physical exercise routine, you don’t have to like that. But if you start persistent putting physical effort, Muscles will change. So the same thing is true with well-designed, learning environments.
[00:19:53] Well, so a very good, scientists, which are Clark, did a scan of many different traditions of research into [00:20:00] motivation, behavioral psychology, behavioral economics, cognitive psychology, social psychology, and he came out with simple. Four-part framework that you can use as for design purposes or even to use with people, you know, in your family, which is there seem to be four main things that go wrong with motivation, starting persistent and putting in that effort.
[00:20:20] One thing that goes wrong is you don’t see the point. You don’t see the value of what you’re doing or how you’re trying to do it or learn it. And so that’s like a dancer in an algebra. Why am I here? I want to think about Swan lake. Why would I care about this stuff there? You need to find a way to connect what the new thing is, what that challenge is with things that they are interested in.
[00:20:41] So maybe it’s problems about a dance foundation. How do you fund it? How do you let money grow over time? And that turns into algebra and off you go. Second thing that goes wrong, quite different is you just don’t think you can do. So I’m another dancer in the same algebra class. might not even think algebra is important, [00:21:00] but I can’t do math.
[00:21:01] I’m no good at math. Well, they’re talking about how important it is. Just makes you more miserable, right? What you need is something different. You need, stories of other people, just like you, who thought they couldn’t do it? Who did master? You need ways to help the person back up. Just things they can master or have mastered that are similar and then show them how to walk forward and so forth.
[00:21:22] So that’s the second way it goes wrong. The third way motivation fails is if you blame something in your environment and just say, well, I can’t do it because so classic would be, my teacher hates me, so that’s why I can’t do this. Or, I don’t have any space in which to do this work, or I don’t have bandwidth to do this work.
[00:21:41] And the favorite among professionals as well as students and others is I don’t have time. I don’t have time to do this, so I don’t start. I don’t persist. I don’t put in mental effort because the thing that’s in my way is out of my control. Well, that’s where the right answer. Is to sit down and demonstrate none of these things [00:22:00] may be in your control.
[00:22:01] Let’s look at your schedule. Let’s find a space for you. Let’s figure out where can you be, where there is bandwidth let’s change teachers or alter the media you’re using to learn from. that problem solving with the student helps model. Now you can control this. So that’s the thing. The last thing that goes wrong is frankly the hardest to get right or to fix.
[00:22:22] And that is negative emotional states. If you’re angry, if you’re scared, if you’re upset or it’s really hard to start persistent, put a mental effort into some kind of challenging learning environment. And that is as complicated results, it sounds like it could be just a good conversation. Might be helpful all the way out to professional services at some stage.
[00:22:42] And especially, after the pandemic and lots of stress in home. All kinds of people, including our teachers may find themselves in these negative emotional states, which will then get in the way of them trying to do things in new ways. The final thing I’ll say, sorry to stretch away back out is to say.
[00:22:59] There [00:23:00] are other factors as well that get in the way things like your physical and mental wellbeing, that’s related to the negative emotional states. But it’s more than that. It turns out there’s research from 20 years ago, that if you are under hydrated, your math problem solving performance goes down by like 20% or something like that.
[00:23:17] And you don’t even realize that’s the problem. That’s the interesting thing about how our minds work is our minds are not terribly good at diagnosing what’s in our way for learning. So. if you are sleep deprived, that also affects your ability to think and to learn and solve problems.
[00:23:33] And, things around social and emotional skills, do you know how to work with the other kids or other people, if you have never done that before, that becomes a burden in working memory, because you’re not sure what to say and how to say it. You’re not sure who should be doing what.
[00:23:48] And so now suddenly your working memory is flood. Issues and questions about the other people and how I relate to them compared to another student who may be very familiar with these kids or people in their learning [00:24:00] group and who may have done this a lot, and so know exactly how to slot in. And so they have long-term memory skills attached to social and emotional, , connections, and then identity issues, whether it’s racial identity or even identity issues around the academics.
[00:24:14] I’m just not a math person. I’m just not a writing person. Those are the things that will am getting your way as well. And so you really have to think about a whole multi-dimensional set of pieces and each of them actually has input into what’s going on and how to help that comes from cognitive and development science.
[00:24:31] GR: Bror, I have a question for you cause you’ve actually piqued my interest as this work relates to policy. So for the last 30 years, we struggled with more stupid achievement in math and science based upon what you know about learning science, what lessons came up, policymakers, schools of ed and educators learn to try to close performance gap.
[00:24:51] Bror: this is a rich and complicated question. And as often happens when you’re trying to do evidence-based design work, you [00:25:00] first look to see, are we asking the correct question because awesome. The problems begin by trying to answer the wrong question or an irrelevant question. , so one of the questions is.
[00:25:12] what is our goal for our students is our problem that the test scores of students are too low. Or is it that they can’t do any math or they can’t write, or they can’t read and interpret what they’re reading. So, depending on how you’re thinking about what the problem is, you could be guided and this sometimes happens to very instrumental solutions.
[00:25:33] I’m just trying to listen. Math scores by hook or by crook or, you know, reading scores by hook or by crook. And you don’t pay attention to some of those issues of motivation or identity that I mentioned that in fact, you may pick up techniques that lift a score, but that actually ruined the kids’ enjoyment of mathematics or writing or literature forever.
[00:25:54] And that is not a win. So the first step is just trying to define your goals. The [00:26:00] second thing that’s important is what I talked about earlier, which is many educators get this. And they use language like meet kids where they are. And this links to that cognitive science notion of you want to draw on what is already in long-term memory.
[00:26:15] And depending on the kid’s own personal context, their culture, their home, their community, you may have kids with very different things in their longterm. And so you really want your teachers and your materials to be able to adjust and match, especially for hard things to where the kids are as they come in.
[00:26:35] And this relates not just to their skill levels, where they are, but it also leads to what is familiar to them. There’s some really fascinating research where if you give American kids baseball problems and then cricket problems that use the same mathematics, the kids do much worse than the cricket problem.
[00:26:55] Because the context is totally alien and confusing. What the heck is a wicked? Why [00:27:00] do we care? Where does it live? the result is working. Memory gets taken up with the mysterious stuff in there, and therefore it gets in the way of them actually solving the problem. So thinking through context of students, what is familiar to them and then building from there forward would be, you know, is really an essential part of this.
[00:27:19] , and then I think these notions. making sure that our teachers, we understand have a growth mindset, this notion that, no matter where the kids are as they come in, you cannot predict where they will be in five years or 10 years, because practice and feedback environments, if they’re well-designed, we’ll move them from wherever they are.
[00:27:40] To new places that are exciting for them, exciting for their community, and lead them forward. And so having teachers who are curious about kids’ backgrounds, who are curious about, what have they seen before, what are they able to do and draw on that Zen really signals to the kids as well.
[00:27:57] Okay. this is somebody who’s really caring and thinking about [00:28:00] this with me that I really want to, participate in perform. and then finding that sense of belonging. It turns out there’s great research about schools and this is going to be as true for, you know, math or science or English or any of that.
[00:28:11] That if kids have even one adult in a school that they have a close relationship with, it changes very much how they relate to school, how they engage, and a sense of I belong in this place. And that turns out to be critical. You’ve got to get the cart and the horse the right way around here. there’s actually great example out of hurricane Harvey.
[00:28:31] the Nottingham school district, and many other Houston schools were just hammered by Harvey right at the start of the school year. But the Nottingham school district after the four week reconstruction, they spent two more weeks with students coming to the school, focused solely on making everyone feel like they belong in this place, listening to each other’s stories and challenges, the teachers as well, describing what they had gone through in Harvey.
[00:28:56] And then. They did again at school year. So if you think about it, they lost six [00:29:00] weeks out of their school year, which would, you know, it was a panic inducing idea for any school superintendent or principal. In fact, and I actually looked it up. they got better state test score results that year than they had the year before.
[00:29:15] And the reason arguably is they took care of belonging. And are you in the right place, right from the get-go. And then they were able to invest the attention, the working memory, , and the motivation generated in part by that sense of belonging throughout the rest of the year. And they did really.
[00:29:32] Cara: am taking so much away, from what you’re saying, not only personally, I’m going to go with, I might’ve been under hydrated and sleep deprived through most of my high school.
[00:29:41] I did very poorly in math and I’m going to make sure my children are very well-hydrated every day, it also, as somebody who’s spent a lot of time with teacher training, it’s very interesting to me that I think some of the concepts you have named that come out. Science, as you’re saying growth mindset, thinking about context, which I [00:30:00] would frame as somebody who also used to work in large scale assessment, we would talk about that in terms of bias, right?
[00:30:05] Is, are these test questions by, well, what that really means is like, if students don’t have context, often think of it as a cultural thing, but I hadn’t thought of it as your brain sort of going haywire and , your working memory, not being able to focus on the right things. This is all fascinating.
[00:30:19] Idea though that I think , so much in education reform, we maybe use these terms, not realizing that they are in fact rooted in empirical evidence. but then if you’re out with you’re also talking about is creating the right learning environments for students on all of these different levels.
[00:30:38] And one thing that comes to mind is our increased. Reliance mean, especially in the past year and a half forced reminds really on technology, sometimes educational technology and sometimes other technologies. Can you talk a little bit about as we advance our knowledge of how the brain works with regard to education, what role, if any, does technology play either [00:31:00] like liquid or the risks and benefits and in how should we be leveraging it for advanced effort to help students.
[00:31:06] Bror: I’d be glad to talk about that. It’s actually a really interesting question. , we’ve gotten to a state now in our society where we no longer ask or pencils good for learning or not.
[00:31:17] And the reason we don’t ask that is because we know that’s not actually a great question. What are you doing with the pen? And actually the same thing is true for all kinds of technologies books, you can argue, even a teacher is in a sense, the form of technology, you know, the ultimate of artificial intelligence is of course human intelligence, right?
[00:31:37] So the HII in the room, right. And Richard Clark was an extremely good cognitive scientist. I mentioned before, even an article in, I think it was the late seventies, early eighties where what he stated was the. Technology does nothing for learning what technology of any kind does, but especially, you know, computers and things like that.
[00:31:58] What technology does is it [00:32:00] takes any learning approach and can make it more affordable, more, reliable, more available, more data, right. But it will take a terrible learning approach and do that too. I mean, imagine for a second, , all of you are listening, your worst ever high school teacher or college professor.
[00:32:19] I mean your worst one right now, thanks to, the old days that person could only damage the hopes and dreams of in college. Maybe a few thousand students a year. But because of the glories of technology and the web, that same teacher can destroy the hopes and dreams of millions of students around the globe, 24 7.
[00:32:43] Right. And it’s like, no. So the technology is not the problem. So the way to think about this is first ass. Do you know what the learning environment is for your students now? Because sometimes people think they know, and then when you go into a class or observe closely or even use videotape, you [00:33:00] discover it’s not happening the way we thought it was.
[00:33:02] So what is happening now then say, what does evidence suggest we should do better across those multiple dimensions? I laid out not just the academic, but the non-academic summit. And then you ask the question. Aha. If those are the better ways of doing this, how can technology make those better ways of doing it more affordable, more reliable, more available, and more data rich.
[00:33:25] And that’s how you can start to use technology to really help. Students and teachers, because think about what I said earlier, that we want to make it be context sensitive. You want students let’s say, who are learning to write, you want them yes. To have ambitious goals for their narrative structure and then persuasive abilities and their figurative language.
[00:33:44] But you would also like them to start with topics they’ve already mastered. So, , they know what they want to say, and they understand all the underpinnings. They just have to wrestle with the hard work of structuring for an audience and all of this. Right. Well, to have. A different writing prompt for many different subgroups in a, in a [00:34:00] classroom.
[00:34:00] My goodness that, you know, that’s really hard for the teachers to engage in and to grade and mark and all this. But technology may be able to help by providing access to many others who could mark or grade those essays, or potentially eventually even using some, , natural language processing to give them.
[00:34:18] But again, the important thing is you started by saying, we’re going to make the context be as familiar to the student as possible so that their working memory is focused on how do I make a persuasive argument? Not on what the heck is a sailing record. And why would I care? so that’s how I think about technology.
[00:34:38] I think technology has a lot of great opportunities to help things like simulations, for example, to allow students to work inside increasingly realistic environments, practice and feedback with increasingly noisy situations. Before they actually have to get out in the real world and do it. They can actually practice it for themselves.
[00:34:59] These are [00:35:00] powerful things to try. As long as you do the architecture in a way that, , is aligned with how a human commission works and also benefits the motivation of a learner to actually.
[00:35:12] Cara: So , in the really short time that we left, I have what I realize is an unfair question that I’d like to ask you.
[00:35:19] I feel like I’ve learned so much in this like 27 minutes that we’ve had together. my working memory will not retain at all. so what grade I have to go back and listen, but if you, had you know, I’m really interested about implications. For teachers and implications for education reformers.
[00:35:37] And you’ve given us a lot of wonderful information about what we need to know about how the brain works in order to inform how we educate. But if you, I guess I’m asking you to prioritize in a sense, if you had, your 32nd elevator pitch , with the world’s most average. What would you say to that teacher?
[00:35:56] about like, if there was one thing you could do within [00:36:00] your practice or change about your practice tomorrow, is there something you would prioritize? What would you tell that person
[00:36:06] Bror: there’s a couple of things. One is I would want to encourage them to put a sense of belonging first. To not be afraid of investing time at the beginning of the school year, beginning of your experience with the students, making each student feel like I hear you, I want to know your story.
[00:36:24] Tell me your story. And the teacher should tell his or her story too, so that there is a sense of being seen as a human. That then can get moving into the interactions and the plans and the lessons going forward. That’s one thing I would say the second thing I would say is definitely shift the more production by students and less talking by the team.
[00:36:47] So teachers in our country particularly are used to explain things to students. Let me show you et cetera. And you really have to get comfortable with allowing students minds, to wrestle with things and [00:37:00] to wait them out. As opposed to quickly stepping in to give an answer or a guide. Learning is hard.
[00:37:06] Working memory is slow. And so it needs to process and try again. And so you need to give the students a chance to think, to write, to make mistakes, give feedback, or have students give each other feedback and you have to train them how to do that and then have them do it again so that they have to incorporate the feedback and what they do.
[00:37:26] And it’s, it’s amazing how different a learning experience it is for a mine when they’re. Production mode most of the time, instead of just listening, just listening it’s we know this it’s so easy to tune out and say it out, but when you’re producing, you’re really exercising what you know, and it also shows what don’t, you know, in a way that you can then come back to, to say, no, I need to know more about this.
[00:37:50] Cause I didn’t get that right. And off you go from there. So those are a couple of things I’d probably put at the top of that.
[00:37:56] Cara: I love it. And I have to say that the elevator’s probably already arrived at his [00:38:00] floor, but if I were that teacher, I would get off the elevator with you so that I could listen to exactly
[00:38:05] Bror: what you
[00:38:07] Cara: just said.
[00:38:08] Fascinating. And I know our listeners probably going to want more. , but Dr. Burse expert, thank you so much for taking this time with us today. And hopefully maybe we’ll have to have you back again for a part two, because we have many questions that we just didn’t have time to get to thank you.
[00:38:25] Thank you for your time and for your excellent work.
[00:38:27] Bror: I’m more than happy to help. Thank you very much for asking me.[00:39:00]
[00:39:04] Cara: Wow listeners after that, just fascinating. my mind sort of blown interview. We are going to close it out with a mind blowing statistic. Actually, our tweet of the week, this week is from Nick Murray. Nick Murray more than 5,000 main children began to homeschool in 2021. This is up 75% from 20 20, 70 5% from 2020 more than 50 districts, at least doubled their counts.
[00:39:30] The average district loss, , about 80% more students to homeschooling as of March 31st, 2021. This is. Pretty amazing stuff. It is in probably if we had our friend Karen McDonald on, she might call it a homeschool revolution. And as we have talked about. On the learning curve before, parents from all walks of life, homeschooling their kids, and we are going to see more and more of it.
[00:39:56] I think we need to see more and more policy reforms and [00:40:00] mechanisms to let parents do that. Using the public health. that should be there. So as they choose the best form of education for their kids and listeners, we will be back as we are next week, no matter where in the world we are coming to you from next week’s episode, next week’s guest.
[00:40:19] We’re going to be speaking with pastor Robert Soto. He is a Lipan Apache tribal religious leader, and an award-winning feather dance. Awesome. I am very excited to hear about that. And he has successfully upheld his native American cultural heritage and religious liberties in the federal courts.
[00:40:38] Excited to hear all about that until next week, stay safe. Good luck to the Astros in the world series. I think I know we’ve got at least few of you who are going to be watching very closely and looking forward to being back with you all again soon.
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Building Budgets Bigger: Unpacking Who Pays the Trillion Dollar Plus Tax Bill
/in Better Government, Featured, Podcast Hubwonk /by Editorial StaffHubwonk host Joe Selvaggi talks with Kyle Pomerleau, senior fellow on federal tax policy at American Enterprise Institute about the Build Back Better Act now in Congress, to understand how those new taxes will affect individuals, business, and the economy.
Guest:
Kyle Pomerleau is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he studies federal tax policy. Before joining AEI, Mr. Pomerleau was chief economist and vice president of economic analysis at the Tax Foundation, where he led the macroeconomic and tax modeling team and wrote on various tax policy topics, including corporate taxation, international tax policy, carbon taxation, and tax reform. The author of many studies, Mr. Pomerleau has been published in trade publications and policy journals including Tax Notes and the National Tax Journal. He is frequently quoted in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. He has also testified before Congress and state legislators. Mr. Pomerleau has an MPP in economic and social policy from Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy and a BA in history and political science from the University of Southern Maine.
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Please excuse typos.
Joe Selvaggi:
This is Hubwonk, I’m Joe Selvaggi.
Joe Selvaggi:
Welcome to Hubwonk, a podcast of Pioneer Institute, a think tank in Boston. On October 28th, the White House and Democratic leadership in Congress announced a framework deal on the Build Back Better Act. The act includes federal spending of upwards of three and a half trillion dollars on broad social, environmental, and economic programs to pay for this massive spending proposal. The echo makes a substantial changes to the nation’s tax laws. There’ll being somewhat constrained by president Biden’s campaign promise to never raise taxes on those earning more than $400,000 a year. And razor thin democratic majority is in Congress. The new tax provisions seek to target large corporations and the ultra high income earners taxing the rich and large corporations may offer a more politically palatable message, but taxpayers deserve to know how its typical $4 trillion annual budget will now afford three and a half trillion of additional spending. I guess today’s senior policy fellow at the American enterprise Institute and tax economist. Kyle Pomerleau. Kyle’s work at AEI focuses on the effects of current tax policy on the economy and works to understand the likely effects the future policy proposals. Kyle will share with us his analysis on what changes are likely to emerge from the build back better act, who is likely to pay more. And what are the possible effects on the economy in the future? When I return, I’ll be joined by AEI senior fellow Kyle Pomerleau.
Joe Selvaggi:
Okay. We’re back. This is hubwonk. I’m Joe Selvaggi and I’m now pleased to be joined by American enterprise Institute, senior fellow and tax economist. Kyle Pomerleau. Welcome to hub Juan Kyle, thanks for having me. Well, it’s great to have you. I really wanted to have you as a guest here on, on how long, because I want you to help. I want you to help our listeners understand what’s going who’s going to pay for this what we’re calling the build back better act. It’s an ambitious piece of legislation. We’re told that there’ll be new taxes, but only on those making more than $400,000 a year, that was president Biden’s promise. And of course we’re, we’re really going to particularly be targeting those a 700 or so billionaires who are fortunate among us help us separate fact from fiction. Let’s start with the ax features that are the most likely to generate the most revenue. In my let’s say amateur reading of, of what I can tell it seems to be that, that the minimum tax on all corporations book profits are, are likely to see the most short-term revenue explain for our listeners. What does that mean? And how does collecting taxes on book revenue, different, different from how we have historically taxed corporations?
Kyle Pomerleau:
The book proposal, the book tax was proposed as part of the build back better is kind of a replacement for the corporate tax rate increase. Previously. They had proposed to raise the corporate income tax to 26 and a half percent. However, a couple senators were uncomfortable with raising rates corporate or individuals. So those were taken off the table entirely. So what was added very recently as recently as last week was this minimum tack on tax on book income. This was originally proposed by President Biden all the way back when he was running for president in November of 2019. And the way that this tax would work is that companies would have to calculate their taxes in two different ways each year, first, the ordinary corporate tax. And then second, this book tax and under this book tax companies would take the income that they report to their shareholders on their financial statement, make some adjustments to make sure there’s no double taxation also make adjustments for losses.
Kyle Pomerleau:
If companies had lost money in previous years, then multiply that by 15%, then subtract out a few credits credit for foreign taxes, paid research and development, credit green energy credits, and knowing those two tax liabilities, the company has to pay the greater of the two. So if the corporate tax is greater than the book tax, they pay the ordinary tax and go on their way. But if the company’s book tax is greater than the ordinary tax, they have to pay the diff that difference in that book tax liability is then tacked on top of the ordinary tax liability. As in the purpose of this is to target the very largest multinational corporations in the United States that from year to year, at least on their financial statements are projecting to pay low effective tax rate.
Joe Selvaggi:
And this addresses, I think, a popular, I won’t call it a rhetorical myth, but this popular chorus among some in and public political leadership that there are lots of billion dollar corporations paying zero tax. This is essentially to address what’s perceived to be a large companies getting away with no taxes in a given year. Is that roughly where this is coming from? Yeah. This
Kyle Pomerleau:
Is more perception than fact definitely. The underlying driver of this is what tax people call book tax differences, but book income is calculated in a certain way to provide information to shareholders. How will the company’s doing what investments the company’s making what, it’s, what it will look like potentially a few years from now, that’s what book income is supposed to. If the information book income is supposed to provide it, taxable income is meant to fairly levy taxes on corporations and the way that these are calculator entirely different. So you can have in many years book income that shows pop positive profits, but in some years, taxable income, that’s very, very low. It causes this Mitt mismatch where you can have a low, effective tax rates on your book income. Now the mismatching go the other way too, in that some years book income can be very, very low, but taxable income can be very, very high. And it shows the opposite that these companies are paying very high, effective tax rates, some 80 or 90% of their profits. And those numbers don’t make very much sense either. So I usually caution people from looking at those effective tax rates on booking com because they don’t really tell us very much about what the effect of tax burden on a company is. You really have to look over a number of years. You really have to study what provisions the companies are using or taking advantage of in the, in the federal tax code.
Joe Selvaggi:
Again, I want to address a myth about this, no tax billionaire corporation. I think the myth is that they get away with paying no tax by having very clever tax attorneys and accountants. Instead from what I know taxes corporations make profits and have two choices. They can distribute those to their shareholders, or they can reinvest it in the firm if they do, the shareholders are happy to see that money essentially make the company they own bigger that would be a case of a large growth corporation. And if a company is more stable it may prefer to distribute those profits so effectively. It’s not that the company isn’t paying taxes on money distributed, but rather money retained and further invested in growth. Is that right?
Kyle Pomerleau:
Yeah. Another, another piece of this too, is that I think part of this conversation that bugs economists is that at the end of the day, corporations really don’t pay tax, right? Corporations are legal entities, they’re just collections of individual workers and shareholders that get together to produce a good or a service that other people then purchase. Ultimately, any money up corporation is liable to pay in taxes. That goes to the FA it goes to the federal government is going to be taken out of individuals pockets, whether those are the shareholders. So those are the owners of the, the corporation or the workers of those th those corporations. You can’t really escape that, that it’s going to be people that bear the burden of these taxes, not legal entities.
Joe Selvaggi:
Yes, of course. And of course and again, to preserve margins corporations also can raise prices to to pay for taxes. So again corporations don’t pay taxes consumers, workers, and shareholders do that’s important. What would be a case of a firm that is going to likely be swept up or effected by a tax like this? I mentioned growth, but if you have names in mind that our listeners would know, yeah,
Kyle Pomerleau:
I don’t want to speak to any specifics because I don’t really know the details of many of these companies, but then the proposal is meant to target companies like Amazon apple. These are very large corporations that are growing. And the reason why these companies may have low effective tax rates, Amazon for example, is that if you’re a company that makes a lot of investment, you’re growing, you’re going to be taking lots of deductions for those investments. And under the corporate income tax current law, a lot of the deductions you can take are very large upfront deductions for those new investments. This was passed in 2017, it’s called 100% bonus depreciation, lets companies deduct the full cost of many investments upfront. And if you that compared to book income, for example, you’re not allowed to make deductions that large. So there creates a mismatch. So when there’s a company, a large company like Amazon that’s growing quickly or making investments that can drive down effective tax rates quite a bit. So I think those are the, those are the companies that these were, these, this provision is meant to go after
Joe Selvaggi:
After these myths. And I wanted to help see if we can throw one more way and say, okay, if, if it’s the shareholders of these growth companies, these billion dollar growth companies that will be affected, is it billionaires who own billion dollar companies, or are there ordinary people who might be affected by this, this tax
Kyle Pomerleau:
By and large high-income households own more stock than low income household? So if you look across the entire distribution of the population and you look at all the equity that people may own, a lot of it is concentrated in the high-income households. So it is true to say that when you do raise the corporate income tax rate, you are disproportionately impacting high-income households that said taxing very large companies is not the same as targeting very high income households because although most of the equities are owned by high income or high net worth households. That’s not, that’s not a law. There are people across the income scale and wealth distribution that own equities. So attacks on corporation can also impact to retiree that earned that lives off $30,000 of dividends from corporate stock. So it, it re it, it really depends. An entity level tax is not, is not going to be as well targeted as just raising tax rates on high-income households.
Joe Selvaggi:
Now, a tax expert, like you make a living on explaining to a layman like me, the complexity of taxes, but I, I haven’t met too many tax experts who wouldn’t prefer a more simple tax policy just does this tax provision one that looks at book rather than a traditional profits. Does this simplify the tax code or does it move us what I would say in the wrong direction towards a far more complex, a system of calculation? Yeah.
Kyle Pomerleau:
It’ll depend on who you talk to, but I think regardless of whether it’s an economist or a lawyer or an accountant, I don’t know if there are very many people that like this idea of a book tax or your book minimum tax increases complexity, because one, you’re now calculating two taxes instead of one two, it increases the number of credits that companies will have to track. Three and this is a little bit more outside of complexity, but it is a downside book. Income is not determined by Congress. Book income is determined by rules put forth by FASBI w which is a nonprofit organization that dictates accounting accounting standards. So when you raise some of your revenue from taxing book income, you’re in essence outsourcing some of the revenue collections from Congress into a non-elected nonprofit, nonprofit body. So that’s not necessarily increased in complexity, but it is a concern that part of the tax code is no longer controlled by, by Congress. So I, I think that overall, this is that taxing book income is a step away from a simpler tax code. And we all want to make sure that we are limiting the amount of deductions and credits that companies can take that are distortive, that are reducing the amount of taxes they should pay, but I would always prefer to just go directly at them, scale them back repeal them outright as a way to increase the tax burden on corporations, not to enact a parallel tax that runs alongside the ordinary corporate tax.
Joe Selvaggi:
So a more simple plan that affects everyone equally rather than a complex plan that is, is difficult to follow and, and, and has businesses making decisions based on tax implications rather than business implications.
Kyle Pomerleau:
Yeah. And then that’s another really good point too, that we know that corporations adjust their taxable income in FA in the face of taxation. Individuals will try to take as many deductions or companies will try to take as many deductions and credits as they can. Companies also use some accounting maneuvers to shift profits from the United States to overseas to reduce their tax liability. That taxing book income is going to translate that behavior right over to book income. So there’s also a concern that taxing book income is going to reduce the quality of financial statements that we’re not going to really get a good, perfect sense of how well these companies are, are doing because to some extent, the profits that they’re reporting to their shareholders are somewhat dictated by the fact that they’re taxed on them have heard of it.
Joe Selvaggi:
Again, political leaders assert that our taxes are corporations are undertaxed. I guess what they mean by that is relative to the rest of the world. How do the U S tax rates compare with let’s say our largest
Kyle Pomerleau:
Competitors, this is a complex issue of actually you can’t really look at just one statistic and some of the statistics are outright misleading. Now, if you look at statutory tax rates, just how much companies pay on each additional dollar of profits. The United States is about average, maybe a little bit above average. You look at the federal rate of 21% plus state and local rates. That’s about 25.8%. The OACD average is around 25%. So we’re right around average that now, if you look at effective tax rates, however, the story changes a little bit. We actually place a slightly higher tax burden on investment in the United States than other countries do. So if you look at how much say, if a company wants to invest in a new machine, how much is that machine going to have to pay in taxes over the life of that asset?
Kyle Pomerleau:
That that tax is a little bit higher in the United States than the average of the OECD. Then the third piece is sometimes the administration, for example, likes to compare corporate tax collections as a percent of GDP in the United States to corporate tax collections as a percent of GDP in other countries. And that statistic generally shows where at the bottom of the list where you, we, we are collecting the least amount of revenue as a percent of GDP, my caution against using that statistic because the size of each corporate sector in each country is different in the United States. For example, we have a huge sector of non-corporate businesses are what are called pass through businesses. These are S corporations, partnerships, LLCs. These are businesses that pay taxes through the individual income tax. And we in the vast majority of businesses in the United States are passed through businesses.
Kyle Pomerleau:
Only about 5% of businesses are corporations. In contrast, other countries, their corporate sectors are huge. They have much higher individual income tax and much lower corporate tax rates. So most of their activity is in the corporate form over in other countries. So you can’t really directly compare collections as a percent of GDP without making adjustments for the size of the pass-through sector. And I, in a recent piece, I did that. And once you do that, you find that the United States a little bit above average in terms of its burden on corporations. So make a long answer short here, it’s, it’s complicated, but we’re, we’re probably above right around average or a little bit above average under current.
Joe Selvaggi:
And the, and the situation you described really is a function of the fact that most wise business owners don’t want to be taxed twice. And so therefore they’ll create the corporate entity that gets taxed once, once you, the corporation makes the profits and then distributes the profits, and then the, the, the owner gets taxed twice. When you say as the income. So that’s the reason we have such a small corporate sector.
Kyle Pomerleau:
Yeah. Yes. Com companies when, when individuals are looking at which business legal form of organization to take, they’re going to look at the all-in tax burden, whether it’s passed through business or a corporation. And I think you’re right. All things considered the tax burden on corporations slightly higher than it is under a pat passed through form, especially after the tax cuts and jobs act. And I think that that tilts the scale towards that. And that is one of the reasons why our, yeah, our corporate sector is, is smaller at the end of the day.
Joe Selvaggi:
So I want to shift our focus to another provision. I think this is fairly recent and almost mind-blowing to imagine this, this I’ve heard it called the Zillow taxes notion that we would tax unrealized gains in addition to realized gains and you know, for our listeners, I think everyone knows what a realized gain is. You sell something, you make a profit and your profits realized unrealized as an asset. That’s appreciated notionally, but not actually now you’ve not sold it. So it’s only worth what someone will pay for it in the future. How is it? Or, you know, w w what are the, the details of this, this, this tax, and how will it be implemented?
Kyle Pomerleau:
I don’t even, so this was actually a last week, big debate over this mark to market proposal. And I think, well, we’ll see it’s all already rumblings that this is going to be dropped. I think a lot of some lawmakers are uncomfortable with it, but though the way that the proposal was going to work is that for taxpayers with $1 billion in net worth, or $100 million in earnings on average over three years would be pushed into this mark to market regime. And that instead of being taxed on capital gains, when you sell your asset, these taxpayers would be taxed on capital gains each year as the asset appreciates in value. So you’d be switching from the realization to the mark to market system. And so th th in the reason that they wanted to go about this, or why they wanted to go about this is that they feel that for very, very high income and high net worth households, the value of deferral, the ability to defer your capital gains is very large.
Kyle Pomerleau:
And a lot of tax payers may be able to borrow money to finance their consumption instead of realizing their capital gains and totally avoid taxation on this income. So that’s the argument for why they wanted to go to go about this. We didn’t really get a good sense of how much this tax would raise. I think some people suggested it would be somewhere between 200 to $300 billion over a decade. That number seems to make sense to me, it would only be affecting about 700 people in the United States. So even, even though in theory, it could impact the, the appreciation of someone’s house. It would only be impacting the appreciation of say, Jeff Bezos, his house, or Elon Musk’s house.
Joe Selvaggi:
But again, I don’t wanna get too deep into this because as you say, it’s, it’s, it may not happen after all. But isn’t this just carrying, bringing forward in revenue that you will ultimately collect when that, that asset is sold in the future. I mean it’s not as if it falls off the register forever, ultimately everything gets sold or disappears. How, how, how do you account for the fact that you’re essentially drawing future taxes forward to
Kyle Pomerleau:
It’s in Texas? Yeah, that’s a really good question. So there are two, two pieces to this. So one of them has to do with the treatment of capital gains when the owner of those assets passes away. So under current law, if you hold onto an asset and it appreciates over your lifetime, you pass away and then pass that asset onto your heir, that assets basis is stepped up to market value at the point of your death. So what that means is that all of the appreciation through your life is not subject to tax. So it gets a big exemption. And this is one of the concerns I think Democrats are trying to address is that fair, very, very wealthy strategy you’d want to use is to just not sell your assets, because you don’t want to realize your capital gains. And then eventually you pass those assets onto your air and all of that tax that could have been collected.
Kyle Pomerleau:
If you sold the asset would go away, it would be exempt from taxation. The second piece is that to the federal government, there’s an aspect of time value of money, but you are right that if an asset appreciates over time and I sell in the future, I’m still getting taxed, but to the federal government, they’d rather have that revenue each and every year, rather than delaying it several years. And to them, the value is not all that different because interest rates on debt are not that high and the government can borrow at below 2% effectively, but there is a slight difference in timing in that the government, from the government’s perspective, they’d rather collect the revenue now than later from the taxpayer’s perspective, they rather pay the tax later than pay it. Now,
Joe Selvaggi:
Fair enough, fair enough. But that, that asset is not sitting up in the ground it’s, it’s appreciating and giving people jobs and creating new opportunities.
Kyle Pomerleau:
Yeah, that’s an, that’s another piece too, is that a lot of these assets are are, are capital assets, their claims on ownership to productive corporations that produce goods and services, and that if you are own a share and Exxon mobile, for example, the dividends you get are net of any corporate tax that’s being paid. Or if you own a, a stock, an apple stock, and it’s appreciating its appreciation is partially based on the corporate taxes that apple has to pay. So there is still tax being paid every single year. It’s just the entity level tax not the additional individual income tax.
Joe Selvaggi:
So the appreciation is as you say, after tax appreciation. So that’s an important, important detail part. I want to, I don’t want to dwell on that feature. Are there any traditional income taxes you said much is off, off the off the board. We at the outset some members in Congress didn’t want additional raising of taxes on corporate store income. What’s still in there.
Kyle Pomerleau:
So there, there are a few pieces that are more traditional individual income tax increases or kind of conventional income tax increases. So there is a they’ve build back better proposal has a new Sur tax on adjusted, gross income for households. So under this provision taxpayers with $10 million in adjusted gross income would face a 5% Sur tax on income over that threshold, an 8% Sur tax on income over $25 million. So very, very high income households would face this additional tax on all of their sources of income wages, business, income, capital gains, dividends, interests. They would all face this additional tax. This tax, I think in a way, is a replacement to the mark to market proposal. This, this surtax is supposed to raise about 200 to $250 billion in target, roughly the same, the same household tussles that have very, very high income that might be earning some of their income from capital gains independence.
Joe Selvaggi:
And we hear Massachusetts had been contemplating a change in our constitution that would allow for, we have a mandate of a flat tax, but we’re considering changing our tax code to allow for a certain tax on income on very high earners. We’ve established that it’s, it’s rare that someone makes this kind of money often and more often than not a $10 million income is, is going to be reflected by someone who’s, who’s built a business retained a lot of the earnings and has a liquidity event that puts them over, let’s say the $10 million threshold, but just once is there is this money purely over the 10 million or would it, you know, go back to dollar one? And who, who do you think is likely to pay these kinds of taxes? Yeah.
Kyle Pomerleau:
Oh, this is a, a, a marginal tax rate. So it’s over the threshold. Yeah. I think it would be an entirely different animal if they were thinking of, of, of taxing infer marginal dollars below that. So th this type of this type of tax it’s broad, so it’s going to hit wage-earners. So those that earn very, very high wages for one reason or another. This could, this could hit business owners. Those that earn those past the earned profits from those pass through businesses, we were talking about this Sur tax would apply to them. It would also hit some returns to corporations as well, because it’s going to apply to capital gains and dividends those those forms of income or the returns to those investments. So it’s a, it’s a broad tax. It’s gonna hit all that income now to the extent that, that those higher taxes are going to discourage productive activities, whether it’s working, saving, and investment, that could have additional effects on the economy than just the direct effects on those that are paying the tax. If you’re a business owner and you’re facing a higher tax rate that may increase your cost of capital or your cost of investing in new and new projects, and that could have an impact on the productivity of your firm, that could have an impact on the amount you can pay your workers and the amount that you can hire. Of course,
Joe Selvaggi:
Now let’s take this step back. Let’s change our focus. We estimate, although that’s even that is not certain this bill or this act will be will cost roughly three and a half trillion dollars. That’s a lot of zeros. Have you been able to estimate given all the provisions of the revenue that we’ve described here, how much money will this bring in?
Kyle Pomerleau:
Yeah. Good, good question. So, right. So right now, there’s still a lot in flux on the spending side, they’re still negotiating the 3.5 is that top line number that Biden really wanted recent news as stated that it could be as low as 1.5 or 1.7, 5 trillion, 1.7, $5 trillion over that period. So anywhere in between now on the revenue side, again, unclear because we don’t know exactly what provisions are going to be in there, but if we add up all the provisions that are currently in build back better, this is probably a tax increase between one and a half to 1.7, $5 trillion over a decade. And, you know, to give a sense, that’s the same size as the the, the tax cuts and jobs act that was passed in late of 2017 in terms of its its scale early, some dollar value. Now, the taxpayers and impacts are totally different. This 1.75 trillion is coming primarily or almost exclusively from very high income households. The TCGA was a broader tax cut. So it’s not a perfect comparison, but just to give you a sense of scale, we’re talking about roughly the same dollar figure there. So
Joe Selvaggi:
With the earlier act reduced taxes, this replaces and if we use the low end range of the estimate of the, the spending here, it will roughly will not be free as some assert, but will pay for itself. If, if the revenue estimates and the spending of Smith’s on the low end add up, it will pay for itself.
Kyle Pomerleau:
It will be, it will be financed in so far as taxes will cover spending. I don’t know many people that call that as being costless, because taxpayers will be having will, will need to pay for that. And any spending that isn’t directly financed by increased taxes is going to increase the federal debt, which means that there is a future liability that taxpayers will need to cover.
Joe Selvaggi:
Indeed. the government I’d like to point this out, it seems trivial, but the government doesn’t have its own money. It only has our money so that if this tax revenue does not meet the expenditures, it’s either, you know, we, we call for additional taxes now or additional taxes in the future. That’s the only choices we have.
Kyle Pomerleau:
It’s important politically. We don’t know how comfortable any given lawmaker is with borrowing. We know that some may be comfortable, but, you know, if, if they come up short, that may mean that spending has to come down a little bit in order for them to get the votes that they need to pass them.
Joe Selvaggi:
Now, we’re, we’re in the last couple of years now with the pandemic the federal government spent quite a bit of money, roughly $6 trillion, extra trying to sort of ensure that the economy doesn’t suffer any more damage than it already had. That’s an addition to it. You know, what historically has been about a $4 trillion federal budget. We owe a lot of money at this point. You’re a tax expert. If we were trying to be responsible about paying for what we spend if you’re king for a day, I like to ask our experts these kinds of questions. What types of taxes do you think would both raise revenue? But also not distort economies. And in other words, it’s not discouraged investment growth jobs, all the things we like at AEI and, and that pioneer, what would you recommend?
Kyle Pomerleau:
Th this is a really broad question. Of course my, my, my initial reaction here is that it’s not, it, it’s not going to just be from tax revenue. I think eventually lawmakers are going to have to do something to balance things. And it’s probably going to be a combination of reduced spending and increased taxes. Now, if I had a seat at the table, or I could just decide I think that if I were to raise additional revenue, it would be probably be from one broadening the income tax base. So there’s currently a lot of income that isn’t taxed under the individual income tax. For example, one of the biggest sources of that is compensation. I, or you may receive from your employer in the form of health insurance premiums paying for those health insurance premiums. That’s a form of income that is being, that people are earning that is kind of like wages should be taxed like wages. But that’s just one example, another tax or a couple of the taxes that I would consider are additional sources of revenue. I think the United States should consider a value added tax to be a federal level roughly a sales tax. These are very broad based taxes they’re used through most of the world. And they are relative to other taxes, very little distortion on the economy. And a tax of 5% could raise quite a lot of revenue for the federal government to close some of this gap.
Joe Selvaggi:
Hm. So value added tax. I’ve, I’ve heard that proposed. In fact, I’ll, I’ll share a little secret. A very progressive economist I met at the Kennedy school, talked about the power of value out of taxes, enormous revenue potential, but right now Democrats see it as a progressive tax. So they don’t like it. Republicans see it as a enormous revenue opportunity for tax. But when he said, if Democrats realized it was an enormous opportunity for taxes and Republicans realized it was regressive, they might actually meet in the center of that and agree on it. What do you imagine the probability of a value-added tax ever come seeing the light of day?
Kyle Pomerleau:
Yeah, I, I w today very low chance, but I think at some point something has to give I at that in the future, the federal government is going to face some tough choices. Some of those choices in the absence of revenue may include cutting social security benefits, or Medicare benefits. And I think politically, you know, if you’re going to choose, are we going to raise a broad base tax modestly or place a significant, potentially significant burden on current recipients of retirement benefits? I think that they, they would probably lean more on the value added tax and drastically cutting benefits. I know that’s probably a sad thing for proponents of limited government to hear. But there are only so many things that or there’s only so many things that are possible politically.
Joe Selvaggi:
And I think that, you know, smaller reforms are more likely than very large ones. And you know, in the future, I think an additional source of revenue like of that could be part of a smaller, more modest for form to balance the bucket, getting closer to balancing the budget on relief. Neither of us is intending to run for office. Anytime soon, I proposed raising taxes on healthcare plans. I presume also on maybe the mortgage deduction that’s yeah, that, that would be another one that I, you could at least start by capping the value and only impacting high-income households. I’m actually somewhat surprised that lawmakers this time around, didn’t try to limit itemized deductions for very high income household. In fact, lawmakers are thinking about expanding itemized deductions for high-income households, by eliminating the state and local tax deduction, cap of $10,000 that was passed as part of the tax cuts and jobs act.
Joe Selvaggi:
Right. That’s amazing to me that Democrats proposed something like that, which would be sort of a naked giveaway to, you know, higher earners in high tax states. If you’re getting a tax subsidy to pay state taxes, it seems impossible, but that’s how it is. Okay, well, we’re almost out of time. I appreciate this very deep conversation. I hope our our listeners stuck with us. There’s a lot to learn about this this new act and you’ve been very, very informative, a great guest, and I really appreciate your time will thank you very much for having me.
Joe Selvaggi:
This has been another episode of Hubwonk, a podcast of Pioneer Institute, a think tank in Boston. If you enjoyed today’s show, there are several ways to support us and pioneer Institute. It would be easier for you and better for us. If you subscribe to Hubwonk on your iTunes podcast, if you’d like to make it easier for others to find hub one, it would help. If you offer us a five star rating or a favorable review, naturally, we’re always grateful. If you want to share Hubwonk with friends, if you find ideas for me, or suggestions or comments about future episode topics, you’re welcome to reach out to me via email at hubwonk@pioneerinstitute.org. Please join me next week for a new episode.
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Mayor Christenson on How Immigrants Enrich His City
/in Better Government, Economic Opportunity, Featured, JobMakers /by Editorial StaffThis week on JobMakers, host Denzil Mohammed talks with Gary Christenson, Mayor of Malden, the second most diverse city in Massachusetts, with almost 43 percent of its residents born outside of the United States. It’s also home to The Immigrant Learning Center, the co-producer of this podcast. It’s always been a gateway city for immigrants and refugees: from Jews fleeing for safety after World War II, to Eastern Europeans and Vietnamese seeking democracy and freedom, to immigrants from China, Morocco, Brazil and Haiti seeking the American Dream. For Mayor Christenson, it is this diversity that gives Malden its strength, and assures him of a strong, proud future. He looks to the revitalization of downtown with its disproportionate number of immigrant-owned businesses, and talks with us about managing the relationships between long-time residents and new immigrants, the reaction of the city to hate crimes after the Boston Marathon bombing, how much immigrants have given back to their new home, and his stance on sanctuary cities, in this week’s JobMakers.
Guest:
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Read a Transcript of This Episode:
Please excuse typos.
Denzil Mohammed:
I am Denzil Mohammed, and this is JobMakers.
Malden, Massachusetts, the second most diverse city in the Commonwealth. After Chelsea with almost 43% of us residents born outside of the United States. It’s also home to the immigrant learning center, the co-producer of this podcast. So a good location for free English language program. Maldens always been a gateway city for immigrants and refugees from Jews fleeing for safety after world war two to Eastern Europeans and Vietnamese seeking democracy and freedom to immigrants from China, Morocco, Brazil, and Haiti seeking the American dream today from me or Gary Christianson. It is this diversity that gives Malden its strength and assures him of a strong, proud future. He looks to the revitalization of downtown as its disproportionate number of immigrant owned businesses, the dizzying array of cuisines on offer and the very entrepreneurial spirit. That’s the fuses its immigrant populations. He talks with us about managing the relationships between the term residents and new immigrants, the reaction of the city to hate crimes after the Boston marathon bombing, how much immigrants have given back to their new home and his stance on century cities in this week’s job makers, Mayor Gary Christianson, welcome to the job makers podcast.
Mayor Gary Christenson
Thank you so much for having me, always an honor.
Denzil Mohammed:
So what is it like running the second most diverse city in the Commonwealth?
Mayor Gary Christenson
It probably is the greatest aspect of serving as mayor, because I have learned things that I know that I never otherwise would, if not the living in one of the most diverse cities in the state of Massachusetts. For example, I met with a community group a couple of years ago, and when they told me the name of the country, I didn’t even know it existed. I actually had to go to a map to look it up. It was Eritrea. And,uagain, if not for them being here and being part of this diverse city that we live in, I might have never known that. And so to me, that’s one of the greatest benefits of, of living here in Malden.
Denzil Mohammed:
And you’re a lifelong Malden resident. How have you seen immigration shaped this city? And in what ways? I mean, I, as far as I can tell Malden has always been a gateway city for different refugee and immigrant groups, right?
Mayor Gary Christenson
Yeah. I guess how has it shaped our city from religion to culture, to my favorite, which is a food it’s had a profound impact on who we are and where we are going. And I can’t tell you the number of people who end up coming here now mention the diversity as one of the attractions on why they come to our city.
Denzil Mohammed
So you think that this diversity is a strength of ours.
Mayor Gary Christenson:
We touted every chance we get. And you know, we just don’t, we try not to just talk the talk. We’re now trying to take what has been happening to our city and have it permeate throughout everything we do in Malden. So for example we now have our first diversity equity and inclusion officer, just a couple of offices down from me. Her name is Bybiose Larochelle, and she now is working very hard to have the government reflect what Malden has become, which is again, one of the most diverse cities in our state. So she sits on every hiring committee she’s involved with helping to promote the vaccine to underserved populations in our city. And we want to make sure that Malden is not just known as the most diverse, but actually practices and preaches on making sure that our community is, is welcoming and safe for us all.
Denzil Mohammed:
So we know from our own research and you would know as the person who runs this city, that immigrants are inherently entrepreneurial. Just the idea of packing a suitcase and leaving their family and friends and their culture and their food behind is itself. An entrepreneurial act. How has that entrepreneurial spirit immigrants in Malden shaped the local economy?
Mayor Gary Christenson:
Just the other day, we cut the ribbon to the new Maplewood meat market over on in Maplewood square. And the owners, they one was from Peru and the other one was from Mexico, I believe. And they are not only the owners, but they’re serving the goods that are native to their original countries. And again, that would not be the case, if not for them wanting to set up their business here in our city. So we went down that not only congratulate them on this risk, because that’s what it is when you’re opening a new business, but thank them as well for sharing what they have experienced and learned growing up with our, our community. So that’s just one example of many that we work with on a daily basis here in Malden.
Denzil Mohammed:
I remember talking to Shane Smith on this podcast who runs Hugh O’Neill’s Irish pub. And, you know, he mentioned when he, when he first opened that downtown mall and wasn’t the vibrant hub that it is now with pubs and restaurants and cafes and stores particularly looking at the downtown area, how have immigrants played a role in revitalizing downtown Malden over the years?
Mayor Gary Christenson:
Well, I would encourage your listeners to, to come see it, to experience it firsthand, but they have, single-handedly brought our city back and there were times when people weren’t sure about whether that would ever be possible again, but they have done it. Just go up one side and down the other, and you’ll see just this afternoon, I’m going to go over to the gallery at 57 pleasant street, which consists of a number of immigrant artists who are going to be celebrating the second anniversary of that store opening. And again, that would not have happened without their willingness to get involved and help us bring back Malden square from where it once was.
Denzil Mohammed:
And I just can’t help. But think of the sheer diversity, you talk about someone from Peru and Mexico Eritrea, I mean, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Vietnam Haiti, just so many, so much rich diversity here. And we take it for granted that just in America, that we have all this great diversity of food. For instance, you know, America’s favorite fast food chain is Taco Bell. We have immigrants to thank for the fact that we can have, we can choose on a Friday night Thai food or Scottish food or Irish food or Chinese food.
Mayor Gary Christenson:
Well, I can tell you the difference here. A number of our students who graduate Malden high school and go off into the big world, always come back and tell us that one of the advantages of attending school in our city is that when they get out, they’ve experienced it all whereas students that they are meeting for the first time, it takes them several years to adjust and adapt to experiencing new cultures, new religions, new foods, but not students that come from our cities. So, you know, to me, that’s one of the great things about Malden.
Denzil Mohammed:
You’ve mentioned students, and I want to get back to that in a second, but what has Malden done over the years? How has your relationship with immigrant business owners in particular evolved? Like what have you, what have you done right? That other cities have not done right? When it comes to really fostering that entrepreneurial spirit?
Mayor Gary Christenson:
Yes. You know, again, as I mentioned, our diversity equity inclusion officer now Bybiose Larochelle has been working with the different community groups throughout Malden to take us to that next level, because we’ve known now for some time that we are diverse and we appreciate it and enjoy it, but now it’s time to take it to where it should go, which is to again, be in a place that everybody can participate in. So I would say that is where we’re going next, which is, you know, having people working in the government that reflect our community having documents, translated meetings, translated so people could participate in eventually run for political office.
Denzil Mohammed:
So you mentioned students a little bit, a little while ago. Part of your progress in Malden has been the creation of 1500 jobs from Malden’s teams, exposing them to the job interview process, giving them work experience, arming them with career readiness. Given that 50%, 57% of Malden high school students don’t count English as their first language. How do you see reaching such a diverse group of students? How have they been able to engage with these opportunities?
Mayor Gary Christenson:
We go to them, we reach out to them, we roll out the red carpet for them. We make it a point to find those students who otherwise would not get involved and take that step. We try to find people that we’ve never met and we have no connection with, because again, it’s opportunities like the summer youth employment program that good help determine who that next teacher is, who that next police officer is. That next entrepreneur is
Denzil Mohammed:
One of the most beautiful things to see in Malden is when the bell rings and the high school students come streaming out, all the elementary schools students. And they’re from every different color, every different Stripe, every different background, but they’re all friends, they all get along. They may wear a hijab or, you know, something else, but they all get along. And it’s almost like this lesson in immigrant integration and inclusion and belonging. Has it been challenging over the years? Just you talk about all this community outreach and meeting people where they’re at and has it been like a learning experience for you?
Mayor Gary Christenson:
It certainly hasn’t been a challenge. It’s been something that I have been proud and honored to be a part of, because again, I, listen, my family said growing up the whole point of why we’re here is to learn, share, and grow. That’s the whole point of it to make it better for the next group of residents behind us, for them then to be living in a place that’s greater than we found it. And so I’ve been able to do that by, you know, living here in Malden. Again, I’ve seen, I’ve heard, I’ve learned things. It actually has helped me to rarely need a vacation because I feel like here in Malden, I’m on vacation all the time. I’m not sure
Denzil Mohammed:
You want to say that before your next campaign.
Denzil Mohammed:
But what, what, what do you think re it’s it’s, it’s almost ironic and tragic that you say the lesson was to make it easier for the people who come after you, because so often the groups that are, that are, have settled here, disliked the groups that come after them, we’ve seen that it’s a cycle in US history. You know, who does America belong to? And I think, I would venture to suggest it belongs to anyone who believes in the American dream, you know, who had that freedom and opportunity. What do you think sets Malden apart when it comes to embracing its newest foreign-born residence and ensuring that they thrive?
Mayor Gary Christenson:
I would say it’s just a willingness to work with everyone to make our community the best it can be. I mean, we try here to take every call, every email, no matter what your stature is in life, you know, so, you know, there was a time when it was, we knew, you know, what they do, but we’ve tried hard over the years to let that not be the case here. So we, I believe we truly have a, an open door policy. I’ll give you an example. We had someone reach out to us from Morocco the other day. I don’t even know how she got my text number, but she got my cell number. She texted me, I couldn’t remember who she was or where I met her, but within 24 hours sitting in the mayor’s office trying to help address, you know, her ratio, which is serious, but we think we might have some solutions for her, but the point I’m trying to make is that again, that was something we could have said, you know, schedule it a month out, you know, find out who she is, all that stuff.
Mayor Gary Christenson:
But we try not to do that here. We had her here in 24 hours.
Denzil Mohammed:
So it hasn’t been entirely rosy experience here in Malden. I think there have been some tensions with longtime residents and newer residents,and things can get very heated when it comes to, you know, national or local tragedies. We did have an incident soon after the Boston marathon bombing where a Syrian woman was punched by a resident of Malden,in front of her toddler, you know, taking her child to daycare. But the city’s response was pretty remarkable, right?
Mayor Gary Christenson:
Yes, that’s in the eye of the beholder, but our instant reaction was to swarm her, you know, to be with her, to let her know that that is not something we’re known for or tolerate. And the thing I’ll remember most about that is the number of people who came to her defense and to reassure her that that was, that was an anomaly. And I think as a result, we were able to survive that together. You know, we are a community for all. I mean, just look at the latest census track that just came out. When you look at the map of Malden, it’s pretty evenly distributed across the five square miles. So as opposed to another city who might have a, you know, a segment or a population in this corner, and then the rest of the city is another population, here in Malden, you wouldn’t know where you are at any given time in any part of the city.
Denzil Mohammed:
Over the years, how has Malden sort of managed these tensions or this relationship of the longer term residents versus the newer ones?
Mayor Gary Christenson:
I would say it’s creating an atmosphere, again, where people are welcomed and respected, no matter what generation they’re from. So we observe, we celebrate different holidays, we observe and celebrate different religious traditions. We eat different foods. And I think that’s how we’ve tried to do it here in the government. So I guess in other words, lead by example. So if you notice on our social media, my social media channels, always trying to promote, you know, a different culture or a different religion, a different food. And I think when people see the leaders of the city doing that, I think over time, people tend to accept it. You know, when they see their elected officials and managers, department heads, police chiefs, fire chiefs, I think that’s how we’ve been able to do it. Because again, we want to demonstrate that no matter where you are or where you’re from, you’re just as part of Malden as anybody else.
Denzil Mohammed:
One thing that you did over the last federal administration, you know, there were a lot of movements across the country to where cities were insisting that they be more welcoming and that they take a sort of stand when it came to protecting their immigrant populations. And as we know, about 20% of the immigrant population in Massachusetts has no legal status. They’re undocumented. Malden was one of the cities that did not proclaim that it was a sanctuary city. And the reason was that coming from you and your administration was that it’s already a welcoming and protective place. Can you expand on that a little bit as why you took that decision? Not to make Malden a sanctuary city?
Mayor Gary Christenson:
No. I mean, that was the flavor of the day to become a sanctuary city, but in actuality, what did it really mean besides the potential for pro protracted legal battles and the potential loss of aid? You know, at that time, we didn’t know whether that would mean that some of the grants that we were relying on to help people who were in need of it the most would be at risk. So that was why at the time we didn’t feel the need to sign on to becoming a sanctuary city, which I think over time then changed to something else, et cetera. I just know, I think for us, and I think, I believe the other branches of government, they felt the same way that, you know, we were long past having to label ourselves as something other than what we have always been, which is a place, you know, that everybody can live, work, worship
Denzil Mohammed:
We’ve, you and I have seen immigrants contribute to the city as business owners, as workers through cultural events, building it up and enriching it every day. There is a huge narrative out there about immigrants as takers, refugees as takers. What is your view on that? How have you seen immigrants give back and have they given back over time more than you’ve given them or the government has given them?
Mayor Gary Christenson:
I haven’t seen takers. I’ve seen people, my experience here that like you outlined Denzil at the beginning, that just want a chance, an opportunity to live out their dreams. And so I’ve seen that as we’ve gone around to the different businesses, as I’ve talked with students in the different schools that we have here. And even in the houses of worship, when I go through there that, you know, people are just looking for an opportunity to achieve their lifelong dream.
Denzil Mohammed:
That’s a very powerful way to end this. Mayor Christenson, thank you so much for joining us and JobMakers. This was really a fascinating discussion and I hope other municipalities listened to this and be guided accordingly as to how, as you say, you can help people fulfill their dreams and you can see how much they can give back.
Mayor Gary Christenson:
That’s it. That’s what it’s all about. Hey, and thank you Denzil, to the Immigrant Learning Center. I am certain we would not be having this conversation if not, for all the work that you have done over the years. So thank you.
Denzil Mohammed:
Jobmakers is a weekly podcast about immigrant entrepreneurship and contribution produced by pioneer Institute, a think tank in Boston and the Immigrant Learning Center, a not-for-profit that gives immigrants a voice. Thank you for joining us for today’s fascinating story on the benefits of welcoming immigrants and refugees to the U S if you have feedback or know someone, you should talk to email Denzel that’s, D E N Z I L @ jobmakerspodcast.org. I’m Denzil Mohammed. Join us next Thursday at noon for another episode of jobmakers.
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Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s Dr. Bror Saxberg on Learning Science & School Reform
/in Academic Standards, Blog: Education, Featured, Podcast /by Editorial StaffThis week on “The Learning Curve,” co-hosts Gerard Robinson and Cara Candal talk with Dr. Bror Saxberg, MD, Vice President of Learning Science at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Dr. Saxberg describes his groundbreaking work in the area of learning science and understanding how “working memory” and “long-term memory” can help improve academic excellence and equity. He reviews what we now know from cognitive science and brain research that, if taken to scale, would likely help drive better student outcomes, and surveys some of the schools that apply this research most effectively to instructional reforms. Finally, Dr. Saxberg offers thoughts on the uses and limits of technology in American education reform, and whether school districts and schools are spending their resources on technology effectively enough to improve student achievement.
Stories of the Week: In Philadelphia, as the city prepares for a transit system strike that could disrupt in-person learning for 60,000 students and 20,000 school system employees, district leaders are looking to online education as a temporary solution. Wisconsin is seeing a rise in efforts to recall school board members, with 11 attempts in 2021, as a result of academic decline, COVID response, and some contentious curriculum content.
Guest:
Next episode: The next episode will air on Wednesday, November 3rd with guest, Pastor Robert Soto, a Lipan Apache tribal religious leader and an award-winning feather dancer, who has successfully upheld his Native American cultural heritage and religious liberties in federal courts.
Tweet of the Week
News Links:
Philadelphia School District braces for a possible SEPTA strike by considering online learning https://www.inquirer.com/news/septa-strike-philadelphia-school-district-plans-20211019.html
In Wisconsin, recall efforts add to pressure on school boards in the wake of COVID-19 https://www.wpr.org/wisconsin-recall-efforts-add-pressure-school-boards-wake-covid-19
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Read a Transcript of This Episode:
Pleaae excuse typos.
[00:00:00] Cara Candal: Well, Gerard Robinson, we are back with another edition of the learning curve. And last week I was all excited because I had become this Fairweather baseball fan, and now are pretty excited because boy, the red Sox did not, despite those beautiful grand slam data, pull it out in the end. So now I am back to just not watching baseball.
[00:00:23] How about you?
[00:00:24] Gerard Robinson (GR): I did not watch it. I heard a lot of my friends, , were pretty excited about the outcome. I have friends in Houston, so they’re loving it up. And so it, Jamie, but the folks in Boston are not happy campers, but you know, to thought two months ago, they, be this far. It’s a win.
[00:00:40] Cara: Let’s be clear. So, Bostonians usually just base Staters in general, usually. Very sorry guys, but I’m just gonna say the truth, like a very grumpy bunch of people. When I first moved here from the Midwest, I would like wave at people in my morning jog and they would look at me like, Going to hurt them.
[00:00:55] So, I mean, we’re, that’s sort of how we are anyway. So we’re used to it, we need something to [00:01:00] be a little bit angry about it’s dark and cold and all in all of the things, Gerard, but okay. Listeners and we have to tell you that you’re going to notice Gerard sounds a little bit different today because of.
[00:01:09] he’s out and about. He’s a busy guy. So he’s coming to us, from somewhere on the road. Gerard, I’m hoping that your travels are going really well. we’re going to get to a pretty cool guest today. , Bruce expert, MD of the Chan Zuckerberg initiative. We’re gonna talk about brain science and education and learning and all of these great things.
[00:01:29] But Gerard, I want to get to my story of the week because my story of the. Feels like, it’s about just the theme of the decade and the theme of our summer in that is it really comes down , to infrastructure, how dependent some of us are on crumbling infrastructure and how dependent, some school kids actually are , on things like, school buses, which we’ve talked about a little bit, but also just public transportation to get them to school.
[00:01:55] So, the news this week in Philadelphia news, you know, Philadelphia. [00:02:00] And in fact, all of the public school students and teachers in the school district are preparing for a possible strike. It’s called SEPTA in Philadelphia, and this is the city buses, the subways, the trolleys, all of the modes of transportation that people use to get around the city.
[00:02:15] they’re threatening a strike now, Gerard, nearly 60,000 students in the city of Philadelphia use public transportation to get to school. So this is a really, really big deal. And I got to say, public transportation is such a big, thing that we’re talking about this country. I know here in Boston, am lately more afraid of, , getting an, a train derailment on the MBTA in Boston than I am of catching COVID on the mat, because that’s about the state of art infrastructure.
[00:02:43] But in Philadelphia, you’ve just got folks who are going on are threatening to strike, because of the things that people strike about, you know, overwork and lack of pay. And we all know that. Systems are stressed right now with a lack of people to work. But what does that mean for the kids? And what does that mean [00:03:00] for the school districts?
[00:03:01] In some sense, juror, the straight gives me a little bit of hope because this school district is in fact talking about pivoting to online learning. So taking some of the lessons that we’ve learned from the pandemic that in fact, Kids can learn online and we have systems and structures in place.
[00:03:17] we’ve talked about on this show, what happens if there’s a hurricane, can we pivot to online learning? Yes, we can. A big snowstorm. Yes, we can. Well, this can include transportation strikes. So if indeed this does happen and we don’t know that it will because the union hasn’t voted on it yet and they need to let’s hope that the Philadelphia public school.
[00:03:36] Can pivot to online learning and do all that they can to keep students learning after so much loss learning. there’s of course we have to mention. Poses a problem for parents who are going to go to work and are going to be at work, probably despite the strike and will now have childcare needs. So let’s fingers crossed.
[00:03:52] Hope it doesn’t come to that. But I was heartened to see that there is a potential solution at play. Should this strike [00:04:00] happen? So that’s my story of the week Gerard infrastructure week infrastructure month or summer, as we should say, I’m sure in the future, we’ll be talking about the infrastructure package that everybody’s eagerly awaiting, but what’s on your.
[00:04:12] Gerard: We’ve talked about Philadelphia a couple of times on our show, the first time it had to do with the lack of bandwidth for some students. And so the school system put together a set of buses and had hotspots, but they also made sure that students received computers now were possibly seen students impacted Nothing that has to do with the school system per se, but strikes. So hopefully they worked that out and yes, I’m glad that, , the online learning is an option because without it you’d have a lot of families, as you mentioned, who are going to find themselves in trouble, so that’s going to be pretty tough.
[00:04:48] My story is a little different. It comes from. Uh, state I used to live in, and this one is in about a strike, but it’s about a possible, we call a school board members. [00:05:00] So Wisconsin is not a state with a very few school systems. In fact, it’s a state with 421. Well, during the 20 20, 20, 21 school year, you’ve actually had 11 districts in the state say that they’re going to recall people and only one.
[00:05:19] In fact, it’s actually qualified through the petition process to get enough signatures, to put it on the ballot. And that’s the MEK wan, uh, Thiensville school district, you know, right outside of Milwaukee. And the reason they’re doing it is twofold. Number one, parents say that the way the school system responded to the fandom, it wasn’t great.
[00:05:39] Others say is because of critical race theory, maybe something in the middle. What’s unique about this. And this is according to, one of our, scholars at the university of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, Michael, for. I used to work with many years ago when I was in Milwaukee, he said that going back to 2010, [00:06:00] when the teachers and others were making a real big push to, we call, the sitting governor at the time that from that point, moving forward, people have begun to use the recall as either a threat or a lever to pull.
[00:06:14] And so, although of the 11 only one qualified. And 10 of the other districts, guess what some of the school board members actually resigned and some people stepped in to take their place or to run for the seat. So it’s an interesting time in Wisconsin, because as you know, we have some challenges here in Northern Virginia, in terms of school, board, parent relations, but in Wisconsin, I guess what some people say, let’s just recall , whether it’s really critical race theory, whether it’s really the pandemic.
[00:06:43] I think it may be more of that than former, but this is a really interesting time. And as my court said, this, isn’t how we often practice democracy, but it’s something that people are beginning to do right now. What are your thoughts?
[00:06:57] Cara: Oh, , well, , as a school board [00:07:00] member myself, like for current former, I’ve been a couple of school boards.
[00:07:04] non-public school district boards that will say always charter and private school boards. it is a terrible time to be a school board member. And on the one hand it’s, I observed. that parents seem to be much more active for a variety of reasons at school board meetings, which is a positive, because I got to tell you I’ve unfortunately sat through and viewed online, you know, school board meetings where like I was the only parent present or there was barely anybody there.
[00:07:31] but, the way. So many citizens are engaging with school boards right now. whether it’s around critical race theory, concerns about critical race theory or something else seems to be uncivil. we’ve been reading a lot in the news about, and I’m not saying. Or uncivil there is probably a majority who are going and trying to be productive speak their piece.
[00:07:52] But, the ones that make the news are those , who are not behaving very civilly. it’s a scary time and I think it’s indicative, you know, school parts have [00:08:00] become this just battleground as of late. we always want more parent involvement in our schools.
[00:08:05] We always want more parent input, especially in our public schools where. Well, let’s just face it. Parents have less control, right? , , , there are a lot of structures and bureaucracies in place that dictate, what curriculum going gonna look like and what outcomes are gonna look like, et cetera.
[00:08:19] And so it can understand on the one hand, white parents, , want to exercise their voice, but don’t know to exercise it in this way to use a recall. And as, as you’ve noted, not how democracy, usually works. it’s really interesting. And I wonder Gerard half the time, if, when folks are voting for school board, They actually even study what these candidates claim to do. We’ve got school, board elections going on in community. And I see signs that say, you know, I support excellence in education, for example. And my first question in my mind is always, what does that mean to you? So I wish that citizens, I hope that on the one hand.
[00:08:54] Engages parents and citizens more in their local schools and what schools are doing. But man, do I wish we could [00:09:00] have, much more civil conversation and behave in much more democratic ways around what it means to participate in the process that is, governing our public school district.
[00:09:09] So, TBD, I don’t think this is the last time we’re going to be talking about school boards on the learning curve. well, okay, Gerard, , this is cool. I think this is a guest that you have talked about at least to me having on the show for some time. And we are going to be talking with Dr.
[00:09:26] Brewer, sax, Berg MD. I don’t know. Maybe it’s just the first medical doctor we’ve talked to on the show. It could very well be. and he is the vice president of learning science at the Chan Zuckerberg. Initiative. So lots of great questions, great conversation coming up after this with Dr. Sachs Berg. you and I will back after this little musical.[00:10:00]
[00:10:26] Learning curve listeners. We are back with Breuer, sax, Berg. He is the vice president of learning science at the Chan-Zuckerberg initiative in his role sacks. For CZI is thinking about how to apply learning science results at scale to real-world learning environments for our works closely with the summit public schools team to guide learning science research and applications in summit schools and the summit learning program, sax Berg most recently served as chief learning officer at Kaplan, Inc.
[00:10:54] And he received an honors BA in mathematics and a BS in electrical engineering from the university of Washington [00:11:00] and an ma in mathematics from Oxford universe. As well as a PhD in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT and an MD from Harvard medical school, a very accomplished human being.
[00:11:11] Dr. Saxberg, thanks so much for being with us on the learning curve.
[00:11:15] Bror: Thanks so much for asking me. Yeah,
[00:11:18] Cara: we’re excited. Okay. So this is, I can’t tell you how many books I have on my shelf about brain science and education as an ed policy person said, but it’s such a quickly changing and evolving field and what we understand about how the brain works and how, kids and even adults learn.
[00:11:35] it’s just fascinating stuff. So we’re going to hear a little bit about the work that you’ve done. CZI, especially within learning science and understanding how working memory and long-term memory can help improve academic excellence and equity, not something that I think most people think about that learning science and memory science can help us understand how we sort of close gaps.[00:12:00]
[00:12:00] So can you talk a little bit about what we know from cognitive science that if we scaled it would really help K to 12 education reform. drive towards evidence-based student
[00:12:11] Bror: achievement. I’d be happy to I’ll start where in a sense, we all want to end with learning and learners, which is.
[00:12:20] What is expertise? How do human expert minds actually have their expertise, if you will encode it or embedded. And what cognitive psychologists have found is that when you look at somebody who is an expert, who is really good at what they do, who’s spent more than 10 years at work , in a field and, and has become just very good at what they do.
[00:12:42] What you find is that something like 70 or 80%. Of the decision-making that they do comes from what is called long-term memory. In other words, it is like instinctual, tacit. It’s become so native to [00:13:00] them that they see patterns and they don’t even realize that there’s another alternative to it. So if you look at it like a chess master, when they look at a book.
[00:13:09] They will instantly see your queen is a threat. Now I’m a complete Duffer as in like literally not good chess. Like what is this horse do? can’t keep track of what is going on, even with one piece, but a chess master can instantly grasp that weight. There’s that queen is under risk and can keep going from there.
[00:13:29] And this is true. All kinds of different experts have things that are so. Deeply practice that they become part of long-term memory. So the difference between working memory and long-term memory is that working memory is the part of our minds. That is the verbal part is kind of where our verbal self lives.
[00:13:48] So if you’re listening to me and I started talking in a high squeaky voice, you’re thinking, this is a very strange man there, he got on the podcast and you’d be right. But that internal monologue of yours, that saying, who is this guy is [00:14:00] happening in your workplace. The working memory is also the part that handles new, complicated things.
[00:14:05] Things you have no familiarity with. It’s where a lot of creative stuff happens. It is actually quite slow and you can’t have very many things at once going on in your working memory that you quickly get confused and stuff just falls out the side. however, As you practice and get better at things.
[00:14:24] And when you’re doing something new, the practice is part of the working memory. It’s doing new things, working memory draws on what’s already in long-term memory and then combines it with new things. And then you practice, you get feedback, you gradually add new things to long-term memory. So I’ll give you, , an example from, when I was teaching my daughter to drive, a number of years ago.
[00:14:46] So the first time we get out of. Right. And she’s kind of ambidextrous. So it’s kind of like the brakes on the left, the brakes on the left. It’s like, there’s tears and chaos and that’s just me. Right? And so she’s not able to [00:15:00] think of anything except how does the steering wheel work?
[00:15:03] There’s no room at all in there right now, you know, fast forward, six months, nine months later. And she is like many of the rest of us She was able to drive to school. You could sit next to her. She drove to the mall or something, and she would have a conversation about her day and what was going on and what she’s doing.
[00:15:21] While driving perfectly well. And so driving is one of those things where it becomes part of our long-term memory. And many of your listeners may have had the following experience, which is telling when you think about it, You start out at place a and then you get to thinking about your life and what’s going on at work and all this, and you look up and you’ve gone to place B instead, I usually end up at a Starbucks, you know, frequently under caffeinated, right?
[00:15:47] Cara: Yeah.
[00:15:48] Bror: There you go. And you laugh. I can’t believe I did that again. And you drive off, you don’t think about it. Well, let’s pause for a second. Who drove that car? took a ton and a half of [00:16:00] metal, 20, 30 miles an hour, 50 miles an hour for many minutes at a time, if you were thinking about vacation or problems at work or other things, right.
[00:16:11] And this is in fact, the characteristic of all expert minds that. Things decisions that may be over an extended period of time. Even like driving where working memory doesn’t even have to pay attention, that there are decision processes already in long-term memory that make all kinds of complicated decisions driving this complicated.
[00:16:31] Right. And it’s totally learned we didn’t evolve to drive. We had to learn. So in a sense, one of the questions that is often a bit unanswered or not clearly answered is when we’re talking about our students is huh, which are the things that we need students to have in long-term memory. And which are the things that are always going to be a wrestled between working memory and long-term memory.
[00:16:55] So for example, writing without spelling mistakes, It’s [00:17:00] something you can actually pretty much embed in long-term memory over time. I mean, some of us harder, and sometimes there are still some mistakes that we step in, but you can end up in a place where when you’re typing or when you’re writing, you’re not thinking about every single word and what is the spelling and all that it just sort of is happening, straight through.
[00:17:17] But if you’re trying to write a persuasive note to your boss, you will never be able to do that and plan your family vacation at the same. Because working memory is going to be occupied with, how do I talk to my boss? What is the key point I’m trying to make? Is that too angry, a tone, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:17:36] And so often exercise of expertise is this collaboration between working memory as the flexible problem solving part of our mind and in the long-term memory, which has a whole range. Pasadena and skills and noticings and patterns and things that then you can get drawn into working memory and executed potentially very quickly by long-term memory.
[00:17:58] when. so that’s kind of [00:18:00] that relationship. So when we’re thinking about learning, whether it’s in math or history, or in English language arts, or in sciences, we should, if we were our best selves and Quicken designers ask, what do we need kids to have in longterm memory? And then design the learning environment to have enough practice and feedback to get it there because you need a lot of it.
[00:18:18] You can’t just do one and done to get it into long-term memory. And what are those things that are not needed to be in long-term memory, but can rather be either looked up or frankly are complex problem solving things that you just need to try a few times and exercise, but each time it will be something new , for working.
[00:18:34] Now actually, , if you let me, I’d like to pull back from what I’ve just described as the cognitive architecture of, expertise and learning and talk about wider architecture of learning and even expertise. And that’s when you start talking about the whole learner experience, it.
[00:18:53] It’s not enough to only design for kids cognition. So if you’re designing for kids condition, [00:19:00] you’d like to know what does this child already have in long-term memory? How can I draw on that and have them wrestle with new things and working memory, but not too many because working memory is narrow. It can’t take too much stuff.
[00:19:11] Right. So that’s designing for. You also need to think about several other things. One thing is motivation. Why should a child start persist and put in mental effort? And in fact, that’s motivation. There’s a lot of cognitive scientists think about it. You’ll notice that the term liking doesn’t appear in that list because if you study.
[00:19:34] Persist and putting mental effort, you will change your mind if it’s a well-designed living environment. Just like if you go to the gym and you do a well-designed physical exercise routine, you don’t have to like that. But if you start persistent putting physical effort, Muscles will change. So the same thing is true with well-designed, learning environments.
[00:19:53] Well, so a very good, scientists, which are Clark, did a scan of many different traditions of research into [00:20:00] motivation, behavioral psychology, behavioral economics, cognitive psychology, social psychology, and he came out with simple. Four-part framework that you can use as for design purposes or even to use with people, you know, in your family, which is there seem to be four main things that go wrong with motivation, starting persistent and putting in that effort.
[00:20:20] One thing that goes wrong is you don’t see the point. You don’t see the value of what you’re doing or how you’re trying to do it or learn it. And so that’s like a dancer in an algebra. Why am I here? I want to think about Swan lake. Why would I care about this stuff there? You need to find a way to connect what the new thing is, what that challenge is with things that they are interested in.
[00:20:41] So maybe it’s problems about a dance foundation. How do you fund it? How do you let money grow over time? And that turns into algebra and off you go. Second thing that goes wrong, quite different is you just don’t think you can do. So I’m another dancer in the same algebra class. might not even think algebra is important, [00:21:00] but I can’t do math.
[00:21:01] I’m no good at math. Well, they’re talking about how important it is. Just makes you more miserable, right? What you need is something different. You need, stories of other people, just like you, who thought they couldn’t do it? Who did master? You need ways to help the person back up. Just things they can master or have mastered that are similar and then show them how to walk forward and so forth.
[00:21:22] So that’s the second way it goes wrong. The third way motivation fails is if you blame something in your environment and just say, well, I can’t do it because so classic would be, my teacher hates me, so that’s why I can’t do this. Or, I don’t have any space in which to do this work, or I don’t have bandwidth to do this work.
[00:21:41] And the favorite among professionals as well as students and others is I don’t have time. I don’t have time to do this, so I don’t start. I don’t persist. I don’t put in mental effort because the thing that’s in my way is out of my control. Well, that’s where the right answer. Is to sit down and demonstrate none of these things [00:22:00] may be in your control.
[00:22:01] Let’s look at your schedule. Let’s find a space for you. Let’s figure out where can you be, where there is bandwidth let’s change teachers or alter the media you’re using to learn from. that problem solving with the student helps model. Now you can control this. So that’s the thing. The last thing that goes wrong is frankly the hardest to get right or to fix.
[00:22:22] And that is negative emotional states. If you’re angry, if you’re scared, if you’re upset or it’s really hard to start persistent, put a mental effort into some kind of challenging learning environment. And that is as complicated results, it sounds like it could be just a good conversation. Might be helpful all the way out to professional services at some stage.
[00:22:42] And especially, after the pandemic and lots of stress in home. All kinds of people, including our teachers may find themselves in these negative emotional states, which will then get in the way of them trying to do things in new ways. The final thing I’ll say, sorry to stretch away back out is to say.
[00:22:59] There [00:23:00] are other factors as well that get in the way things like your physical and mental wellbeing, that’s related to the negative emotional states. But it’s more than that. It turns out there’s research from 20 years ago, that if you are under hydrated, your math problem solving performance goes down by like 20% or something like that.
[00:23:17] And you don’t even realize that’s the problem. That’s the interesting thing about how our minds work is our minds are not terribly good at diagnosing what’s in our way for learning. So. if you are sleep deprived, that also affects your ability to think and to learn and solve problems.
[00:23:33] And, things around social and emotional skills, do you know how to work with the other kids or other people, if you have never done that before, that becomes a burden in working memory, because you’re not sure what to say and how to say it. You’re not sure who should be doing what.
[00:23:48] And so now suddenly your working memory is flood. Issues and questions about the other people and how I relate to them compared to another student who may be very familiar with these kids or people in their learning [00:24:00] group and who may have done this a lot, and so know exactly how to slot in. And so they have long-term memory skills attached to social and emotional, , connections, and then identity issues, whether it’s racial identity or even identity issues around the academics.
[00:24:14] I’m just not a math person. I’m just not a writing person. Those are the things that will am getting your way as well. And so you really have to think about a whole multi-dimensional set of pieces and each of them actually has input into what’s going on and how to help that comes from cognitive and development science.
[00:24:31] GR: Bror, I have a question for you cause you’ve actually piqued my interest as this work relates to policy. So for the last 30 years, we struggled with more stupid achievement in math and science based upon what you know about learning science, what lessons came up, policymakers, schools of ed and educators learn to try to close performance gap.
[00:24:51] Bror: this is a rich and complicated question. And as often happens when you’re trying to do evidence-based design work, you [00:25:00] first look to see, are we asking the correct question because awesome. The problems begin by trying to answer the wrong question or an irrelevant question. , so one of the questions is.
[00:25:12] what is our goal for our students is our problem that the test scores of students are too low. Or is it that they can’t do any math or they can’t write, or they can’t read and interpret what they’re reading. So, depending on how you’re thinking about what the problem is, you could be guided and this sometimes happens to very instrumental solutions.
[00:25:33] I’m just trying to listen. Math scores by hook or by crook or, you know, reading scores by hook or by crook. And you don’t pay attention to some of those issues of motivation or identity that I mentioned that in fact, you may pick up techniques that lift a score, but that actually ruined the kids’ enjoyment of mathematics or writing or literature forever.
[00:25:54] And that is not a win. So the first step is just trying to define your goals. The [00:26:00] second thing that’s important is what I talked about earlier, which is many educators get this. And they use language like meet kids where they are. And this links to that cognitive science notion of you want to draw on what is already in long-term memory.
[00:26:15] And depending on the kid’s own personal context, their culture, their home, their community, you may have kids with very different things in their longterm. And so you really want your teachers and your materials to be able to adjust and match, especially for hard things to where the kids are as they come in.
[00:26:35] And this relates not just to their skill levels, where they are, but it also leads to what is familiar to them. There’s some really fascinating research where if you give American kids baseball problems and then cricket problems that use the same mathematics, the kids do much worse than the cricket problem.
[00:26:55] Because the context is totally alien and confusing. What the heck is a wicked? Why [00:27:00] do we care? Where does it live? the result is working. Memory gets taken up with the mysterious stuff in there, and therefore it gets in the way of them actually solving the problem. So thinking through context of students, what is familiar to them and then building from there forward would be, you know, is really an essential part of this.
[00:27:19] , and then I think these notions. making sure that our teachers, we understand have a growth mindset, this notion that, no matter where the kids are as they come in, you cannot predict where they will be in five years or 10 years, because practice and feedback environments, if they’re well-designed, we’ll move them from wherever they are.
[00:27:40] To new places that are exciting for them, exciting for their community, and lead them forward. And so having teachers who are curious about kids’ backgrounds, who are curious about, what have they seen before, what are they able to do and draw on that Zen really signals to the kids as well.
[00:27:57] Okay. this is somebody who’s really caring and thinking about [00:28:00] this with me that I really want to, participate in perform. and then finding that sense of belonging. It turns out there’s great research about schools and this is going to be as true for, you know, math or science or English or any of that.
[00:28:11] That if kids have even one adult in a school that they have a close relationship with, it changes very much how they relate to school, how they engage, and a sense of I belong in this place. And that turns out to be critical. You’ve got to get the cart and the horse the right way around here. there’s actually great example out of hurricane Harvey.
[00:28:31] the Nottingham school district, and many other Houston schools were just hammered by Harvey right at the start of the school year. But the Nottingham school district after the four week reconstruction, they spent two more weeks with students coming to the school, focused solely on making everyone feel like they belong in this place, listening to each other’s stories and challenges, the teachers as well, describing what they had gone through in Harvey.
[00:28:56] And then. They did again at school year. So if you think about it, they lost six [00:29:00] weeks out of their school year, which would, you know, it was a panic inducing idea for any school superintendent or principal. In fact, and I actually looked it up. they got better state test score results that year than they had the year before.
[00:29:15] And the reason arguably is they took care of belonging. And are you in the right place, right from the get-go. And then they were able to invest the attention, the working memory, , and the motivation generated in part by that sense of belonging throughout the rest of the year. And they did really.
[00:29:32] Cara: am taking so much away, from what you’re saying, not only personally, I’m going to go with, I might’ve been under hydrated and sleep deprived through most of my high school.
[00:29:41] I did very poorly in math and I’m going to make sure my children are very well-hydrated every day, it also, as somebody who’s spent a lot of time with teacher training, it’s very interesting to me that I think some of the concepts you have named that come out. Science, as you’re saying growth mindset, thinking about context, which I [00:30:00] would frame as somebody who also used to work in large scale assessment, we would talk about that in terms of bias, right?
[00:30:05] Is, are these test questions by, well, what that really means is like, if students don’t have context, often think of it as a cultural thing, but I hadn’t thought of it as your brain sort of going haywire and , your working memory, not being able to focus on the right things. This is all fascinating.
[00:30:19] Idea though that I think , so much in education reform, we maybe use these terms, not realizing that they are in fact rooted in empirical evidence. but then if you’re out with you’re also talking about is creating the right learning environments for students on all of these different levels.
[00:30:38] And one thing that comes to mind is our increased. Reliance mean, especially in the past year and a half forced reminds really on technology, sometimes educational technology and sometimes other technologies. Can you talk a little bit about as we advance our knowledge of how the brain works with regard to education, what role, if any, does technology play either [00:31:00] like liquid or the risks and benefits and in how should we be leveraging it for advanced effort to help students.
[00:31:06] Bror: I’d be glad to talk about that. It’s actually a really interesting question. , we’ve gotten to a state now in our society where we no longer ask or pencils good for learning or not.
[00:31:17] And the reason we don’t ask that is because we know that’s not actually a great question. What are you doing with the pen? And actually the same thing is true for all kinds of technologies books, you can argue, even a teacher is in a sense, the form of technology, you know, the ultimate of artificial intelligence is of course human intelligence, right?
[00:31:37] So the HII in the room, right. And Richard Clark was an extremely good cognitive scientist. I mentioned before, even an article in, I think it was the late seventies, early eighties where what he stated was the. Technology does nothing for learning what technology of any kind does, but especially, you know, computers and things like that.
[00:31:58] What technology does is it [00:32:00] takes any learning approach and can make it more affordable, more, reliable, more available, more data, right. But it will take a terrible learning approach and do that too. I mean, imagine for a second, , all of you are listening, your worst ever high school teacher or college professor.
[00:32:19] I mean your worst one right now, thanks to, the old days that person could only damage the hopes and dreams of in college. Maybe a few thousand students a year. But because of the glories of technology and the web, that same teacher can destroy the hopes and dreams of millions of students around the globe, 24 7.
[00:32:43] Right. And it’s like, no. So the technology is not the problem. So the way to think about this is first ass. Do you know what the learning environment is for your students now? Because sometimes people think they know, and then when you go into a class or observe closely or even use videotape, you [00:33:00] discover it’s not happening the way we thought it was.
[00:33:02] So what is happening now then say, what does evidence suggest we should do better across those multiple dimensions? I laid out not just the academic, but the non-academic summit. And then you ask the question. Aha. If those are the better ways of doing this, how can technology make those better ways of doing it more affordable, more reliable, more available, and more data rich.
[00:33:25] And that’s how you can start to use technology to really help. Students and teachers, because think about what I said earlier, that we want to make it be context sensitive. You want students let’s say, who are learning to write, you want them yes. To have ambitious goals for their narrative structure and then persuasive abilities and their figurative language.
[00:33:44] But you would also like them to start with topics they’ve already mastered. So, , they know what they want to say, and they understand all the underpinnings. They just have to wrestle with the hard work of structuring for an audience and all of this. Right. Well, to have. A different writing prompt for many different subgroups in a, in a [00:34:00] classroom.
[00:34:00] My goodness that, you know, that’s really hard for the teachers to engage in and to grade and mark and all this. But technology may be able to help by providing access to many others who could mark or grade those essays, or potentially eventually even using some, , natural language processing to give them.
[00:34:18] But again, the important thing is you started by saying, we’re going to make the context be as familiar to the student as possible so that their working memory is focused on how do I make a persuasive argument? Not on what the heck is a sailing record. And why would I care? so that’s how I think about technology.
[00:34:38] I think technology has a lot of great opportunities to help things like simulations, for example, to allow students to work inside increasingly realistic environments, practice and feedback with increasingly noisy situations. Before they actually have to get out in the real world and do it. They can actually practice it for themselves.
[00:34:59] These are [00:35:00] powerful things to try. As long as you do the architecture in a way that, , is aligned with how a human commission works and also benefits the motivation of a learner to actually.
[00:35:12] Cara: So , in the really short time that we left, I have what I realize is an unfair question that I’d like to ask you.
[00:35:19] I feel like I’ve learned so much in this like 27 minutes that we’ve had together. my working memory will not retain at all. so what grade I have to go back and listen, but if you, had you know, I’m really interested about implications. For teachers and implications for education reformers.
[00:35:37] And you’ve given us a lot of wonderful information about what we need to know about how the brain works in order to inform how we educate. But if you, I guess I’m asking you to prioritize in a sense, if you had, your 32nd elevator pitch , with the world’s most average. What would you say to that teacher?
[00:35:56] about like, if there was one thing you could do within [00:36:00] your practice or change about your practice tomorrow, is there something you would prioritize? What would you tell that person
[00:36:06] Bror: there’s a couple of things. One is I would want to encourage them to put a sense of belonging first. To not be afraid of investing time at the beginning of the school year, beginning of your experience with the students, making each student feel like I hear you, I want to know your story.
[00:36:24] Tell me your story. And the teacher should tell his or her story too, so that there is a sense of being seen as a human. That then can get moving into the interactions and the plans and the lessons going forward. That’s one thing I would say the second thing I would say is definitely shift the more production by students and less talking by the team.
[00:36:47] So teachers in our country particularly are used to explain things to students. Let me show you et cetera. And you really have to get comfortable with allowing students minds, to wrestle with things and [00:37:00] to wait them out. As opposed to quickly stepping in to give an answer or a guide. Learning is hard.
[00:37:06] Working memory is slow. And so it needs to process and try again. And so you need to give the students a chance to think, to write, to make mistakes, give feedback, or have students give each other feedback and you have to train them how to do that and then have them do it again so that they have to incorporate the feedback and what they do.
[00:37:26] And it’s, it’s amazing how different a learning experience it is for a mine when they’re. Production mode most of the time, instead of just listening, just listening it’s we know this it’s so easy to tune out and say it out, but when you’re producing, you’re really exercising what you know, and it also shows what don’t, you know, in a way that you can then come back to, to say, no, I need to know more about this.
[00:37:50] Cause I didn’t get that right. And off you go from there. So those are a couple of things I’d probably put at the top of that.
[00:37:56] Cara: I love it. And I have to say that the elevator’s probably already arrived at his [00:38:00] floor, but if I were that teacher, I would get off the elevator with you so that I could listen to exactly
[00:38:05] Bror: what you
[00:38:07] Cara: just said.
[00:38:08] Fascinating. And I know our listeners probably going to want more. , but Dr. Burse expert, thank you so much for taking this time with us today. And hopefully maybe we’ll have to have you back again for a part two, because we have many questions that we just didn’t have time to get to thank you.
[00:38:25] Thank you for your time and for your excellent work.
[00:38:27] Bror: I’m more than happy to help. Thank you very much for asking me.[00:39:00]
[00:39:04] Cara: Wow listeners after that, just fascinating. my mind sort of blown interview. We are going to close it out with a mind blowing statistic. Actually, our tweet of the week, this week is from Nick Murray. Nick Murray more than 5,000 main children began to homeschool in 2021. This is up 75% from 20 20, 70 5% from 2020 more than 50 districts, at least doubled their counts.
[00:39:30] The average district loss, , about 80% more students to homeschooling as of March 31st, 2021. This is. Pretty amazing stuff. It is in probably if we had our friend Karen McDonald on, she might call it a homeschool revolution. And as we have talked about. On the learning curve before, parents from all walks of life, homeschooling their kids, and we are going to see more and more of it.
[00:39:56] I think we need to see more and more policy reforms and [00:40:00] mechanisms to let parents do that. Using the public health. that should be there. So as they choose the best form of education for their kids and listeners, we will be back as we are next week, no matter where in the world we are coming to you from next week’s episode, next week’s guest.
[00:40:19] We’re going to be speaking with pastor Robert Soto. He is a Lipan Apache tribal religious leader, and an award-winning feather dance. Awesome. I am very excited to hear about that. And he has successfully upheld his native American cultural heritage and religious liberties in the federal courts.
[00:40:38] Excited to hear all about that until next week, stay safe. Good luck to the Astros in the world series. I think I know we’ve got at least few of you who are going to be watching very closely and looking forward to being back with you all again soon.
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