This week on Hubwonk (our debut video & audio edition), Host Joe Selvaggi talks with research analyst Andrew Mikula about the findings from his recent report, A Timely Tax Cut, in which he explored the relationship between state tax rates and policy and the direction of interstate migration.
Guest
Andrew Mikula is a former Economic Research Analyst at Pioneer Institute and current candidate for a Master’s in Urban Planning at Harvard University.
Read a Transcript of This Episode:
Please excuse typos.
Joe Selvaggi (00:00):
This is Hubwonk, I’m Joe Selvaggi
Joe Selvaggi (00:09):
Welcome to Hudwonk, a podcast of Pioneer Institute, a think tank in Boston. A natural consequence of being a nation of united individual states is that it creates 50 different laboratories of democracy. Each state decides how best to serve its citizens and in turn, by what means it will tax its citizens to pay for those services. The state prerogative to tax and spend has the benefit of creating competition among states to attract more tax paying residents with its value proposition. While a high tech state can assert it offers better services and a low-tech state can lay claim to lower cost of living the arbiter of a state’s value or the people themselves. All citizens can pick candidates in elections. A far more powerful way to express a preference is to optimize great from one state to another, bringing with you all future taxable income, the effect of this migration in the long run.
Joe Selvaggi (01:05):
It can be either to boost the state’s tax base or drain it of its vital revenue. How well is Massachusetts competing with this neighbor states and how are changes in tax law, such as the proposed millionaire’s tax likely to affect the movement of those with higher income who invest in and create new companies in the future? My guest today is Andrew Mikula, former research analyst of Pioneer Institute and current graduate student at Harvard’s graduate school of design. Andrew’s most recent research paper, a timely text that how New Hampshire is taking advantage of Massachusetts graduated income tax proposal maps, current interstate migration, and looks for a correlation between state tax levels and the direction of income flows. Andrew shares with us the findings of his paper and provides color on why residents may vote with their feet. When I return, I’ll be joined by research analyst, Andrew Mikula.
Joe Selvaggi (02:52):
Okay. We’re back. This is Hubwonk, I’m Joe Selvaggi and I’m now joined by Pioneer Institute’s former economics researcher and current Harvard graduate school of design master’s degree student Andrew Mikula. Welcome back to Hubwonk, Andrew.
Andrew Mikula (03:06):
Joe, thanks so much for having me back.
Joe Selvaggi (03:09):
Well, first let me congratulate you on starting your master’s degree in urban planning. I believe. How have your studies been going so far?
Andrew Mikula (03:15):
It’s going well. Yeah, a lot of requirements this semester, but we’ll get to the juicy stuff soon. And it’s an important foundation.
Joe Selvaggi (03:25):
Well, I am, I’m thrilled that you were able to take some time out of your studying to be with us. I want to explore the findings of your newest research paper, entitled a timely tax cut, how New Hampshire is taking advantage of Massachusetts graduated income tax proposal. All right. We’ve covered this topic in different ways in the past on how long, but I want to give the listeners and viewers now we’re viewing we’re now recording the visual of our, of our show. I want to give everyone some background on tax rates, what’s being proposed. What are the relative tax rates in Massachusetts and New Hampshire? Let’s start with Massachusetts. We used to be known as Taxachusetts. Where are we now?
Andrew Mikula (04:04):
Right. So I think in importantly, for our purposes of voters passed a ballot measure in the year 2000, that would lower the income tax rate from 5.9 to 5.0% over the next three years. It was later tied to benchmarks and revenue growth slowing down the tax cuts are that it only reached 5.0% last year, actually in 2020. Okay. so I think that we’ve taken a kind of incremental approach, but we have cut income taxes in recent years. New Hampshire has had a 5% tax on interest in dividends for a while, but what they don’t tax is wage income, right? So it’s only the interest in dividends you would earn on a financial asset that are, are taxed. At least for individuals, corporations is a different matter. But the tax rate is 5% on interest in dividends. Like it is Massachusetts today.
Joe Selvaggi (05:08):
Okay. So that seems like a stark contrast. We have 5% on income here, Massachusetts. So that’s the lowest has been for a while. It just got to 5% recently. But that’s a flat tax for everyone, every dollar earned in Massachusetts tax at that 5% rate in New Hampshire, it’s zero. They do tax some income that comes from interest in dividends, but not from income. So that seems like a pretty stark difference. I want to get to a different aspect of, of the tax code. I, I mentioned that ours is a flat tax rate. Your paper talks about a proposal for a graduated rate. I’m fairly sure we have a federal tax rate that is graduated, but explain to our listeners, what does that mean? What do we have now flat and what what is being proposed
Andrew Mikula (05:52):
That’s right. So the rate itself, Massachusetts levy is in terms of income, personal income taxes, 5% is, is relatively on par with the average for state governments. What’s relatively uncommon is we have a flat tax. So we tax people at 5% of their income, regardless of if they’re making, you know, 40,000 a year or 400,000 a year. And that’s so in the, especially in the context of the Northeast, that makes us pretty unique actually.
Joe Selvaggi (06:28):
So I’m graduate Texas sounds like people who have more money might pay a higher rate. I want to talk about the, sort of the one aspect of raising taxes is raising taxes on everyone is unpopular. I would say the flat tax does have the benefit of, of constraining legislators inclined to raise taxes by it’s very hard to raise taxes on everyone. To me, graduated income taxes, seem a bit like a divide and conquer. We identify a group we’d like to raise the taxes on and every everyone votes yes. To vote to tax the other guy. Do I have a good sense of the power of a graduated tax?
Andrew Mikula (07:09):
Yeah, you, you do Joan, no one thinks that, you know, someone else can spend their money more effectively or better than, than they can, but it’s appealing that to take a small segment of the population and say, they’re going to be paying more because they’re not paying enough now. And the rest of the people are going to accrue the benefits in terms of, you know, public services. I think where that gets complicated is in part the effect on, on the revenue volatility that comes with, you know, having a tax, that’s not quite as broad-based as say a sales tax. And so, you know, income taxes have been shown to lead to, you know, kind of steeper drops in some tax revenue collections, and as a whole during recessions especially the great recession actually,
Joe Selvaggi (08:17):
Okay. So I want to drill down a little more into what we mean by graduated tax. It means we’re, we’re texting higher income people at a higher rate in general and lower income people at a lower rate who, or what is being proposed in Massachusetts, what is this so-called millionaire’s tax and what is it to rate?
Andrew Mikula (08:37):
Right? So the proposal in Massachusetts would levy a 4% surtax on annual personal income, over a million dollars. That’s both wage income, capital gains you know, he’s selling a business, et cetera. And this proposal has a really interesting history. It was, it’s a pretty bottom up proposal, but it was actually struck down by the Massachusetts Supreme judicial court in, in 2018 before being rekindled as a legislative petition the following year and changing the Massachusetts constitution which this tax would do is a very iterative process. And so it’s, it’s not going on the statewide ballot until the fall of 2022 and voters have a chance to weigh in before it’s signed into law.
Joe Selvaggi (09:37):
So we sh we shouldn’t panic right now. This is something that’s coming, as you say, from, from the bottom up, actually from the legislator. So where did it start? Well, let me take a step back. We have a 5% income tax now and we’ve just gone through a recession through a epidemic that had a slight recession the economy shut down for a time. And there was a lot of concern that with the, a depressed economy, you would be a depressed revenue flow. I’ve read that the state has actually had a surplus of revenue. In fact, they surprise to the upside on revenue. Is, do you see this interest in raising the tax rate on millionaires being driven by a need for revenue? Is there a need for revenue in Massachusetts right now?
Andrew Mikula (10:28):
Right. So like I alluded to, you know, this proposal has been on the table since 2015 or so, so I’m not sure it’s, it’s accurate to argue that this is, you know, the reason why this proposal was put forward is not because of the pandemic. Right. but I also think that you know, we we’ve, there were some temporary impacts on the state revenues from COVID, but our, our bounce back has been much quicker than in the great recession, right? Because the, the economic recession that we’ve had because of COVID reflects the presence of the virus whose presence has wavered, you know, a lot over the course of the last year and a half, whereas, you know, kind of more deep rooted problems with our financial system characterized or caused much of the previous recessions wolves. And so it’s true that currently Massachusetts tax collections are, are essentially at record highs in a lot of major categories. And on top of that, we have a large amount of federal stimulus dollars still to spend in the base state. So I think one argument that opponents of the tax hike make is that we don’t meet, we don’t necessarily need this added revenue right now in kind of an urgent way. That’s true.
Joe Selvaggi (12:12):
That’s fair. So I’ll accept that if this has been coming down the line since 2015 and the economic situation has sometimes been better, sometimes been worse. It’s not really motivated by an immediate need for revenue, but rather a, perhaps a longterm desire for additional revenue to be spent at the state level. So let’s take it out of the current events and say, okay, this is the long-term direction of Massachusetts. We’d like to tax those who make more than a million dollars at a higher rate than those who make less than a million dollars. But let’s talk about then let’s shift to the focus of your paper which doesn’t just merely look at the relative tax rates of New Hampshire and Massachusetts. It talks about some other states and their relative tax rates, but the crux of your paper talks about what I like to call the Footloose nature of the individuals within each state that is, each of us has a choice as to which state we want to live in. And sometimes tax rates have an influence on who moves, where tell us from a 10,000 feet view, what your conclusions or your observations were on the relationship between the relative tax rate of a state and the relative inflow or outflow of higher earners to those states.
Andrew Mikula (13:23):
Yeah. Let me say, you know, the tax cut in New Hampshire combined with Massachusetts is a legislative initiative here or constitutional amendment, really. I think some folks are concerned that it will lead to, you know a decrease in economic activity, decreased of investment in Massachusetts are making it harder or less economical to create jobs and invest in businesses. So we can actually measure how the tax bases of certain states are changing because of people moving from one state to another, in a given year. And that’s exactly what I’ve done in this paper. You can see on a graph that in a lot of cases, capital flows between a given pair of states correspond quite closely to changes in tax policy in those states. And, you know, it doesn’t necessarily flip the sign right away in which a state is the risk net receiver of more of those tax dollars, but it’s a long-term effect that plays out over 10 or 15 years, which is one thing that makes, you know, tax proposals like this. So insidious,
Joe Selvaggi (14:49):
Yeah, I was struck by your paper. You do quantify those outflows. And when we talk about this is before any changes, either the ones in Massachusetts currently proposed, or the ones in New Hampshire proposed but in 2019 two years ago, the outflow of income from Massachusetts to New Hampshire in one year was $426 million outflow from Massachusetts to New Hampshire. Now we can’t know the motive for moving north, but it can’t, it can’t be the weather. W what are your thoughts? How is it that, you know it is the tax rate. Is there any other confounding factor that you think might contribute to people moving out of Massachusetts towards New Hampshire?
Andrew Mikula (15:32):
Absolutely. I, you know, taxes are a part of the story, but I think a big one is the cost of living and new Hampshire’s tax rates, you know, on wage income at least have been zero for as long as I can remember. But, you know, even when you, when you start cutting Massachusetts as tax rates, as we have done the past 20 years, there’s still this, this gap here, you know, New Hampshire was not New Hampshire has not been sending folks to Massachusetts on net, as long as we’ve been keeping track of the IRS has been keeping track. So, and I think you’d also see that kind of cost of living cost of housing concern and start to creep in, and places like Rhode Island, Rhode Island has, you know, cut taxes more aggressively than we have in the past, you know, 10 or 15 years.
Andrew Mikula (16:28):
But there are certainly other factors in the mix because, you know, we can see that, you know, people are on net moving from Massachusetts to Rhode Island. And despite their changes in the tax code, the, the top marginal tax rate in Rhode Island is still higher than it is here. So it’s, it’s, it’s really interesting to see how, you know, oftentimes you need to go deeper than just the, you know, headline tax rate and understand how changes in tax rates over time can affect things, because people are also taking into account things like the cost of living and family connections and job growth, et cetera.
Joe Selvaggi (17:09):
I think it’s worth mentioning also a you talk about the cost of living. I think those who assume are higher tax rate means better services, perhaps better schools or better roads, better bridges infrastructure. I’ve been to New Hampshire. It’s less than an hour away in a car from downtown Boston. There bridges and roads look fine to me. Do they have problems with services and frankly, if you have the data, how do they collect revenue to support their state’s requirements?
Andrew Mikula (17:38):
Yeah, so New Hampshire does kind of conform to some of the kind of low tax state paradigms, and that it, it spends a lot less than Massachusetts on a per capita basis. I’d also say that New Hampshire has, you know, the lowest poverty rate in the country. So compared to, you know, how much, if you’re, if your goal is to provide a certain base level of, of services that ensure a certain quality of life, New Hampshire might not have the same needs as most other states and Massachusetts is, is a low poverty state too. But I think it also is, is less than modernist than New Hampshire in terms of socioeconomic status. That said, I think a lot of the difference in terms of the level of spending between New Hampshire and Massachusetts still reflects policy differences, not just different needs, New Hampshire is the only state east of the Mississippi that doesn’t provide some sort of public preschool. They’re also pretty strict about time costs for services to the people using those services. You know, higher education in New Hampshire is largely funded by tuition, as opposed to transfers from the state general fund pension funds for state workers are mostly funded by the workers’ salaries while they’re working as opposed to regular contributions from the state. And there are several examples of that sort of cost cutting measure that has a state, the state money.
Joe Selvaggi (19:24):
So it’s a we, we believe in a Federalist system. So you have different states with different needs and different priorities. So you, you make a great case if there’s more to the story than just a marginal tax rates at the state level. I, I appreciate that. Let’s talk about the the millionaire’s tax, the additional 4% tax on those earning more than a million dollars, there are going to be the ones who are affected, and they’re the ones who are likely to potentially vote with their feet. What’s the profile of someone who earns more than a million dollars in a year. Is it a rich banker or is it someone else,
Andrew Mikula (19:59):
Right? Well, I think, you know, there may be a fair share of rich bankers, but prior work that pioneer has conducted has also shown that, that, you know, a large plurality of the people who, you know, make a million dollars in a year in a given 10 year period or so do so only once that’s based on IRS data. And I think that’s a fairly good indicator that a lot of these people are cashing out on investments they’ve made so that they can either retire or they’re selling a business or a home, or what have you. And so I think an ostensible goal of a new Hampshire’s policy here was to in cutting the interest in dividends tax was to lower the tax burden on some older people and also attract more taxpayers that are, are going to consume a lot in New Hampshire and pay a lot in property taxes as well. But I think it’s more complicated than just, you know, there’s a banker there’s, you know, a real estate developer, et cetera.
Joe Selvaggi (21:26):
So you’re, that’s a very interesting piece of data. We’ve covered it a bit on hub Blanca in the past. So people who earn a million dollars in general and over 10 year period, do it only once, which suggests they’re not earning an income and a salary more than a million dollars, but rather it’s what we would call a liquidity event. They’ve sold a house, they sold a business, something that perhaps they’ve built over the course of their lifetime, and they want to essentially cash out, perhaps retire, perhaps do something else. But even if it is bankers, isn’t it people who are creating businesses by investing and hoping to profit from taking some risks and investing. In other words, isn’t it people who are creating businesses and creating jobs that are most apt to be effected by a tax on ultimately their, their success, their ultimate cash out.
Andrew Mikula (22:13):
Right. And I think that’s, you know, that very reason is, has been one of the strongest arguments in the past for either reducing income taxes or looking for, you know, alternative ways of taxing the economic activity that comes out of a place. And I think the, the, you know, the economic literature might be divided about how exactly to implement something like this, but there is evidence that, that state level of taxes on income well tend to reduce incentives to earn income. And, you know, that’s something we need to weigh against other forms of taxation that have different effects sales or consumption-based taxes might overly burden certain people, depending on, on what they’re buying property taxes might be hard to avoid in the short term might be relatively stable even during recessions when a lot of people are out of work. So it’s a trade off that I think you know Warren, some more discussion, but in general, I’d say, you know, people like earning income taxing it is means less income, less work, less investment for in, into the economy.
Joe Selvaggi (23:57):
Yes. you know, I, it seems intuitively obvious that you tax something, you’d get less of it. I think policy makers understand let’s say, in the form of sin taxes they tax tobacco or alcohol with the stated goal of trying to reduce its use. It seems to follow that taxing income would either make people choose to have to be compensated differently, or take their income with them to a place where it’s taxed less. Out of curiosity, does it, in fact, New Hampshire tax it must raise revenue in other forms it’s in the form of consumption tax, I guess, sales tax and property tax is that how they raise their revenue in New Hampshire?
Andrew Mikula (24:41):
Largely. So they actually also have some higher business taxes and we do in Massachusetts, but you’re right, that instead of a broad-based sales tax, they have some, you know, more targeted excise taxes. And also one thing that’s pretty unique about New Hampshire is they also have state owned you know, kind of stores that do a lot of business to out-of-state customers. And a famous example is the slew of liquor stores that are right over the Massachusetts border that you know, the technically are not taxed, but it’s New Hampshire collecting that sales revenue. And that’s helped explain how almost 20% of new Hampshire’s kind of unrestricted revenue in a given year actually comes from some of these sin taxes or other excise taxes.
Joe Selvaggi (25:52):
Good. So a Massachusetts pays its own income taxes and it pays some new Hampshire’s alcohol taxes. Is that right for helping New Hampshire make ends meet with our, when we drive north to to the state run a liquor store,
Andrew Mikula (26:08):
Essentially. Yes. You know, it’s this sort of paradigm where New Hampshire draws out of state customers to essentially pay its tax bills is already happening on the kind of consumption side of things
Joe Selvaggi (26:27):
I enjoyed in your PC. You didn’t just talk about New Hampshire and Massachusetts, as we’ve talked a little bit about the Connecticut Rhode Island we’ve had inflows from those two states. I was amazed to learn you even tracked New York and New Jersey. We’ve had substantial inflows from those states as well because they have substantially higher income tax on high net worth individuals, $200 million, roughly from each Massachusetts from New York and New Jersey respectively. That’s an impressive number. Would you conclude then that New Hampshire and New York also decamped from those locations largely because of the relative tax rates or are there other confounding issues in those, in those cases?
Andrew Mikula (27:14):
Yeah, I think that’s certainly part of it. You know, there are even in, in some parts of New York, you know, you could make more bang for your buck argument in Massachusetts cost of living wise. But I think what’s really striking to me is in the case of New York, you know, it used to be that, that more, you know, adjusted gross income from migrating taxpayers was going from Massachusetts to New York. And then some point in the mid two thousands, you know, it changed sign. And in 2019, it’s, you know, $170 million that migrating new Yorkers are adding to our tax base every year.
Joe Selvaggi (28:04):
So that’s substantial. And again there are two very, very wealthy states with high services. So really the, the major variable there between, let’s say, New York city and Metro Boston, if you will, if you will is cost of living in primarily income tax.
Andrew Mikula (28:23):
Hmm. I’m also fascinated. I think it’s still kind of, we’re still kind of in this weird limbo with what effect the, or how long-term the remote work revolution will last, which I think can certainly impact whether someone’s willing to, you know, pack up and move to New Hampshire and, and have a longer commute to work. But you know, it’s New York has certainly been hit harder than most states in that regard. So it’s going to be especially interesting to follow the tax flows between New York and Massachusetts in recent, in upcoming years.
Joe Selvaggi (29:06):
That’s very interesting. We didn’t really talk about it too much, but we did, we have talked in past, have long episodes that COVID really made us aware of the fact that we could remote work remotely. And if you want to live in New Hampshire and enjoy the lower income tax and you work in Boston, it’s a heck of a commute. And if you only have to do that three days a week, instead of five days a week, you may be more inclined to explore moving to New Hampshire. Is that what you’re saying?
Andrew Mikula (29:35):
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
Joe Selvaggi (29:38):
Wonderful. All right. So we’re getting close to the end of our time. I, I appreciate you taking time with me. How can our listeners and new viewers find your paper, read more about your work and and see the graphs for themselves.
Andrew Mikula (29:54):
It’s all@pioneerinstitute.org is our recent work. We do a lot of research and do tax policy and, and broader economic opportunity issues. Thanks so much for having me, Joe.
Joe Selvaggi (30:06):
I appreciate your time, Andrew, and best of luck with your studies. I hope you enjoy it.
Joe Selvaggi (30:13):
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. It will be easier for you and better for us. If you subscribe to Hubwonk on iTunes, if you’d like to help others find Hubwonk, it would be great if you would offer a five-star rating or a favorable review, it’s always welcome. If you’d like to share Hubwonk with friends. If you have ideas for me, or comments or suggestions for topics for future episodes, you’re welcome to email me at hubwonk@pioneerinstitute.org. Please join me next week for a new episode of Hubwonk
Check out our most recent episodes:
This week on JobMakers, Host Denzil Mohammed talks with Dr. Bernat Olle, co-founder and CEO of Vedanta Biosciences, about his journey from Catalonia, Spain, to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he continued his Chemical Engineering studies at MIT. Navigating the complex immigration system while seeking purpose in his career, he eventually found his calling and was lucky enough to remain in the U.S. to see it through: designing a new class of medicines to modulate the human microbiome. They duscuss how everyone wins when foreign-born talent is welcomed into vibrant, entrepreneurial ecosystems like those in the U.S., when they’re able to collaborate with others from the U.S. and around the world and come up with incredible ideas to benefit all people. Bernat also expresses a sense of kinship with immigrants far removed from the labs and boardrooms. He knows that the same aspiration – opportunity – attracted those who came here with nothing but a suitcase and a dream, as you’ll discover in this week’s JobMakers.
Guest:
Dr. Bernat Olle is a co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Vedanta Biosciences. He has been a member of the founding teams of several companies of the PureTech portfolio and served as a member of the Board of Directors of Vedanta Biosciences and Follica Biosciences. In 2013 Dr. Olle was named “Innovator of the Year” in MIT Technology Review Spain’s “Innovators under 35” awards. He also received the 2019 Barry M. Portnoy Immigrant Entrepreneur Award from The Immigrant Learning Center. He completed his doctoral work at the Chemical Engineering Department at MIT, where he developed a novel method for large-scale bacterial culture. During his graduate work, Dr. Olle was awarded the “la Caixa” fellowship. Dr. Olle received his B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Universitat Rovira i Virgili, in Catalonia, his M.S. and PhD. in Chemical Engineering Practice from MIT, and his M.B.A. from the MIT Sloan School of Management. He has published his work in journals including Nature and Nature Biotechnology.
Read a Transcript of This Episode:
Please excuse typos.
Denzil Mohammed:
I’m Denzil Mohammed, and this is JobMakers.
Denzil Mohammed:
Is it any surprise that the epicenters of innovation like Kendall square Silicon valley also have incredible diversity that the cities with the highest rates of PhDs like Brookline, Massachusetts, so Palo Alto, California, are multi-ethnic and multicultural, the United States attracts the world’s best and brightest to give us Google Tesla, the Madrona vaccine, but the thing that links the Nobel prize winning immigrants with those picking all vegetables and washing dishes is opportunity for Dr. Bernat Olle, co-founder and CEO of Vedanta biosciences, seeking opportunity, brought him all the way from Catalonia, Spain to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he continued his chemical engineering studies at MIT navigating the complex immigration system while seeking purpose in his career. He eventually found his calling and was lucky enough to remain in the US to see it through designing a new class of medicines to modulate the human microbiome when foreign talent is welcomed into vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystems, like those in the US, when they’re able to collaborate with Americans and some people with people from around the world, they can come up with incredible ideas to benefit humanity, everyone wins. Bernat also feel a sense of kinship with immigrants far removed from labs and boardrooms.
Denzil Mohammed:
He knows that just like those with nothing but a suitcase and a dream, the same thing, brought them here, seeking opportunity, as we’ll discover in this week’s episode of JobMakers.
Bernat Olle:
Good to see you, Denzil.
Denzil Mohammed:
I remember you describing this concept of the microbiome and relating it to antibiotics in this fascinating story of your honeymoon. And you have this radical way of thinking of “no, let, let the body figure it out.” Take us back to that time. And, why is this kind of field of science important today?
Bernat Olle:
All species of animals live colonized with microbes on the skin, on the intestinal track and the mouth and the vaginal tract. All those are chock full of microbes. And that’s the way it’s been from the very beginning before we evolved as a species, this world was a bacterial soup. So every species has evolved surrounded by bacteria. And so it’s not surprising that this bacteria play very important roles in health, and specifically the bacteria that live in humans are referred to with the term human microbiome. And so that’s basically the collection of bacteria that you carry around for life with you. As soon as the moment you were born and specifically in the intestine, that community is more stance that we have the most bacteria, trillions of bacteria, almost as many or more microbial cells in your body than homosapien cells.
Bernat Olle:
And they play very important roles. They help protect from infection. They help calibrate the set point of the immune system, which is important in our immunity and allergy potential in cancer. And there’s a number of things that we do in our modern life that perturb that community. The diet that we eat has a big effect on the microbes that we have inside, because what we eat is what they eat. So the Western diet is generally not great for microbes. That’s maybe the reason why there’s a number of chronic diseases that are advancing more rapidly in the west and in the developing world. The use of antibiotics is another big perturbation. From the time we’re born until our teen years the average person gets tens of courses of antibiotics and cumulatively. Some of them can have a important effect in damaging the communities of microbes in the intestine.
Bernat Olle:
And so one of the things that we’re trying to do as a company is to be able to undo some of the collateral damage that antibiotics leave behind. Their use is sometimes warranted. Sometimes unwarranted, back to the honeymoon story, but they’re here to stay. And they’re very necessary in hospital settings, but also they create a series of issues, you know, use of antibiotics to prevent certain problems, and then other problems emerge. You become more susceptible to picking up infections from the hospital environment when your gut has no natural competitors against those pathogens. So one of the things we’re trying to do is ensure antibiotics have been used for the purpose they need to be used for and undo some of the damage by helping reconfigure or rebalance the community of bacteria that’s in the intestine that had been damaged by the antibiotic and in doing so, we hope as a starting point that we can prevent re-infections that are very problematic, for example, in hospital settings.
Denzil Mohammed:
When you were first starting out as an immigrant with an accent in the Boston area, how were you received? And as a European person, knowing what the entrepreneurial environment was like back then, let’s say in the late nineties, when you started school how do you think it would foreigner would have been received there?
Bernat Olle:
I think my integration in the US was very smooth. Today I am an American citizen. My child is American and Catalan and, and I identify as one of us. And I really have to think hard to think of instances where I have been treated as an immigrant in a negative way. The first year I came. I remember when I was a poor graduate student, I would go to buy my fruit at Haymarket if it had been there on weekend mornings. So it’s very cheap, but but it’s also terrible quality. Like half of the fruit is really literally rotten. And so I remember the first times I’d go there, I would try to pick the fruit rather than have the one that they hand you, because when they handed it to you, like half of it, you have to throw it away, but the store owners hate it when people try to pick the fruit.
Bernat Olle:
And so I remember you know, in one of my first visits, somebody really got ticked off that I was trying to pick the fruit and say, just go back to where you came from. But that’s like the only time that has ever happened to me. And if this was reversed, if it was like a person trying to like come to Spain, especially if you look any different than the locals. I feel like the racism there runs in different ways, the US has issues of course, with race. And there’s a lot of work to do. But I think some of the other countries, like in old-school Europe that have traditionally seen less immigration, and they’ve been more insular are much less prepared to welcome and assimilate people from other origins and get to a point where, where they’re one of them. I’m having a hard time imagining how the experiment in the opposite direction could have been smooth. And so I guess my parting point on this is that for all the issues that we have with immigration in the U S and with racism, the U S has done a much better job at assimilating and benefited from contributions of immigrants as just about any other country in the world.
Denzil Mohammed:
Thank you for acknowledging that. I think that’s a really important point to make, and that’s what makes this country special. I want to take it back a few years. You had the experience as did I, feeling that intense pressure where your visa is about to run out? You’re not sure what what’s going to happen, what you’re going to do is a lot of uncertainty. So tell us about that time for you.
Bernat Olle:
I’ve been doing my PhD at MIT, and I was hoping to find a job in the U S to stay here after the PhD. I was on a J-1 visa and that expired, you know, a short period of time after Igraduated, and I did an atrocious job search. I was just doing the work. And I figured, yeah, like when I’m done, people are going to want to hire me, because look, I went to this great school and the world doesn’t really work like that. Like you have to, you have to really do the homework. And, and basically what I found is that when I interviewed, I didn’t put a lot of care or thought into what I should do.
Bernat Olle:
I just interview with firms that were reputable. Why, because other people did it too. Like some of the well-known strategy consulting firms is a terrible way to go about picking a career incidentally. So I was rejected by just about every one of them. And it was only when I had a few weeks left on my visa and I really had to think through, okay, what do I really want to do that? Finally, I put some thought into like the career that I wanted and ended up going into, the direction that I went. My first job offer, which was in a venture creation firm in town that starts biotech companies,came really, really close to the bell. I guess it could have gone a different way and that bad planning could have resulted in me going back home. Then as you know, like finding a job from abroad becomes a much more complicated process. But because I did get a job here, then I jumped on the train of the H1 green card citizenship, which is a train that at most times in the United States has worked very well. During the last administration, there were some serious steps back as you know, but for me, this was actually a very smooth process.
Denzil Mohammed:
And it was around that time that you were able to secure a work in the US that this idea of purpose was playing a role in the kinds of jobs you were looking for and the kind of trajectory you wanted to have. I vividly recall another MIT grad on this podcast and immigrant entrepreneur saying that everyone from MIT graduates and, you know, wants to do good in the world. And then they go on to work at the biggest consulting firms. You were in a privileged position as an MIT graduate with a PhD. How did that idea of purpose and giving back shape where you are today and where do you plan on going with that?
Bernat Olle:
My career path was very much born out of rejection. I try to follow the career path that others in business school and in graduate school followed which is the classic, you know, try to go to a very well-known firm, like a strategy consulting firm or a bank where you’re paid very well, and it looks beautiful on a resume. And it’s basically the game of compensation, titles, prestige. And I probably very much would have played that game if I hadn’t been rejected The blessing was that by having been rejected from those firms and actually having to really think, okay, what do I really want to do? And the reality is that I had never dreamed about working for clients, evaluating mergers and acquisitions or market shares of consumer products. Like that’s not what I was passionate about. I liked science.
Denzil Mohammed:
That sounds like so much fun. Come on.
Bernat Olle:
I like science. I like biotechnology. In my free time, I would read papers. That’s what I would do. And so basically my first job was going to do something that I already liked to do for free, which was read about cool science, talk with inventors about cool science and try to figure out, you know, can you imagine translating that to people? And is there a role for a biotech company to try to do that? And that’s what I did for my first decade professionally, until one of these projects that I started became obsessive and offer me that I didn’t want to do anything else. And then I decided that I just focus on that full-time, and that was my current company
Denzil Mohammed:
Hearing you talk about your experience. I find it fascinating, and I see that an immigrant has a certain special quality, but at the same time, you were a young person. You were just going with the flow, doing what everyone else was doing. And as you said, you didn’t have this master plan. And so you end up with, you know, a few weeks before your visa is about to end, and then suddenly you have to go beyond what your classmates were doing and think more strategically and position yourself in such a way that you would be able to stay in the US and continue this investment that you had made to come all the way across the world, spend money in and get an education at MIT and continue living that dream. Today, you’re a strong advocate for immigration reform, particularly making it easier for immigrants like you, who are inherently entrepreneurial to start businesses here in the U S that create jobs for Americans. Tell us more about your feelings as to the immigration system being able to work for people like you and other high skilled immigrants.
Bernat Olle:
I think that the immigration system and the immigration culture in the US has been a gift for both the US and for immigrants during most times, and, and this country sort of has cycles and you know, depending on their government, we’ve moved forward or move backwards. But the arc has been in the direction of immigration adding a lot to the country. I think that the US is really in a privileged position where, because of its culture of having been more welcoming to people that come here seeking opportunity it has, and because of being an open liberal place in the world where such immigrant entrepreneurs can find a welcoming environment to actually pursue their objectives, which is something that other superpowers don’t have, like this combination of a welcoming culture.
Bernat Olle:
But because of that, a lot of folks have come here and, and made very substantial contributions to the economy and also benefited by developing their careers in a way that they could not have developed their careers back where they came from. So, you know, I think this is really a unique gift of this land that many other countries in the world would like to have. And I think this is very important very important to preserve because if in the future that sees and the talent entrepreneurial talent in in tech, in biotech and other areas decided that it’s better for them to develop their careers and pursue opportunities in China or somewhere else the US would stop being the very competitive economy and society that it is.
Denzil Mohammed:
And I’d like to direct our listeners to the fact that the Nobel prizes are being announced, and guess who’s winning them in the US? Foreign-Born people who came here to study and innovate has been a huge trend, 30% of all Nobel Laureates have been people born in other countries. Specifically the past four years we saw a dramatic decrease in the number of visas that were issued, the number of international students who were coming here to study. And then we have this pandemic and the first two vaccines came from companies that had immigrant co-founders. Not just that, immigrants are concentrated in industries that got us through the pandemic, like cleaning like healthcare. Can you talk a little bit about the impact of immigration in the U S during this pandemic, from what you’ve seen?
Bernat Olle:
Yeah. I mean, I can talk about biotechnology because that’s the field that’s near and dear to me. And you said, you’re right. The, the impact on how the world got out of COVID was sensational, right? You have the founder of, of BioNTech, the founders on Madronathe CEO of Pfizer and the list goes on because there’s many people that have been involved in this amazing vaccine projects that are immigrants that have been welcome. The combination has been so crucial, right? Because it’s not a coincidence that so much of the innovation with vaccines has happened in the US – it happened here because this is a country that values its pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry as a national security asset in ways that other countries in the world don’t. Other countries in the world are content with free riding with some of the innovation that takes place in the U S and not spending on those industries. In the U S the approach has been different.
Bernat Olle:
And, and then at the same time, you have this, these brilliant immigrants coming in, attracted by this environment and supercharging it by creating these companies that in the moment of need come through, right? And I think that Pfizer, Moderna, these groups coming through with a vaccine that we got in our arms in less than a year which was a completely new technology that had not been used before with precedent. It’s just phenomenal. You know, it’s not surprising to anybody in the industry that there were so many immigrants involved because, you know, you look at any company like our company, there’s a significant portion of folks that were born elsewhere. And the reality is that, you know, talent, intelligence skills are fairly widely distributed all over the world. And you know, the ability to attract it to Cambridge and concentrate it here so that companies can benefit from, is what’s made the biotech industry so powerful and so influential in Massachusetts.
Denzil Mohammed:
You’re in the business of saving lives. You’re a job creator. You’re a scientist, you’re in the heart of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Yet. I know that when you were awarded the Barry Portnoy immigrant entrepreneur award for life science in 2019, you found a link to your own immigrant story to those foreign born students from Africa and Eastern Europe that your mother taught many years ago. What is that link?
Bernat Olle:
My mother who’s now retired used to be a teacher and for, for a good part of her career she taught immigrants that were coming most often from the north of Africa, but other times from Eastern Europe and another times also from central America either because of war or unrest in their areas, or just because of proximity, allowing opportunity in the case of Northern African immigrants. This would often be, you know, a lot of immigration from Northern Africa. It usually came because we grow a lot of fruit in the country, and there was a need for labor to help pick it up. But now those communities have established and they stayed there and they brought their families and they needed to learn the language. They needed to learn how to apply for a driver’s license or how to fill a form for social security.
Bernat Olle:
And if you don’t speak the language and you don’t know some of the basic things it’s hard to do that first step of integrating, right? So my mom helped many of those immigrants with this first step of doing some of the basic things, like learning the language, learning how to learn, how to do some of the basic things that you’re gonna have to do to become a functioning citizen in this place. But, you know, there’s a common element in all forms of immigration, which is this search for opportunity, right? Looking for something better than maybe you don’t imagine being able to do where you are. And so in that sense, the mindset is, it’s the same mindset across all immigrants, right? You’re willing to leave certain things behind that you liked because you want to take the risk of something that could be better.
Denzil Mohammed:
And you’re leaving behind family and a culture that you grew up at and food that you loved in order to seek that opportunity. It’s not an easy thing to do. Bernat Olles, thank you so much for joining us on JobMakers. I really appreciate it talking to you today, and I wish you all the success in the world.
Bernat Olle:
Thanks, Denzil.
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 so much for joining us for today’s inspiring story of another enterprising immigrant entrepreneur. If you have feedback or know someone, we should talk to, email D E N Z I L at jobmakerspodcast.org I’m Denzil Mohammed. Join us next Thursday at noon for another episode of JobMakers.
Related Posts:
This week on “The Learning Curve,” co-hosts Gerard Robinson and Cara Candal talk with Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), a non-partisan research and policy analysis organization developing transformative, evidence-based solutions for K-12 public education. Robin describes the type of research CRPE conducts and how it has evolved over time, and shares her view of the impact it should have on schools, teachers, and families. She discusses CRPE’s work tracking school closures across the country at the height of the pandemic, the methodology used, and the findings so far. Robin reviews key takeaways from CRPE’s July report on how districts are allocating federal COVID-19 relief funds, and talks about how districts should spend those dollars. After sharing what her team will be focusing on as we emerge from the pandemic, she describes the challenges of leading a non-partisan research organization and remaining committed to the mission during a highly partisan era, with schools and curricula increasingly being drawn into political battles.
Stories of the Week: Finance and economics education improves young people’s financial literacy and helps prevent credit card and student loan debt, and insufficient savings for retirement. In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio is ending the school district’s Gifted and Talented program by fall 2022, in favor of a new program which he claims is more equitable.
Guest:
Robin Lake is director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) a non-partisan research and policy analysis organization developing transformative, evidence-based solutions for K–12 public education. Her research focuses on U.S. public school system reforms, including public school choice and charter schools; innovation and scale; portfolio management; and effective state and local public oversight practices. Lake has authored numerous studies and provided expert testimony and technical assistance on charter schools, district-charter collaborations, and urban school reform. She co-authored, with Paul Hill, Charter Schools and Accountability in Public Education, and has provided invited testimonies to the U.S. House of Representatives Education and Labor Committee as well as various state legislatures. Lake holds a BA in International Studies and an MPA in Education and Urban Policy from the University of Washington.
The next episode will air on Wednesday, October 20th with guest, David Reynolds, a Distinguished Professor of English and History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the 2020 author of Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times, selected one of the Top Ten Books of the Year by the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post.
Tweet of the Week:
Researchers at Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research, @NWEA and @caldercenter will partner with a consortium of districts across the United States to provide timely information about tutoring, after-school programs and other interventions https://t.co/VclsW9FuIO
— The 74 (@The74) October 10, 2021
News Links:
New York Post: NY to Phase Out Gifted and Talented Program
CNBC: To raise successful children, teach them about economics
Read a Transcript of This Episode:
Please excuse typos.
[00:00:00] Cara: Hello listeners. It is. , I’m going to call it Nobel prize week here on the learning curve. I am here with the fantastic Mr. Gerard Robinson, who George did. You wouldn’t know about prices?
[00:00:11] GR: Not yet, but, , my time will come.
[00:00:14] Cara: next year. Yeah. I was thinking I might be next year. No, I’m really excited because you know, who did probably read that Joshua anchors of the, Massachusetts Institute of technology also known as MIT has won the Nobel prize in economics, , for his research, which includes research on, , charter school effectively.
[00:00:37] So no that, oh, see, I’m super excited about this because you know, well, you and I are both charter school nerds and years ago with pioneer Institute. , I published a book about charter schools in Massachusetts and, Angrist and his team are heavily cited throughout that book. They studied Boston charter schools in particular at which, they found to [00:01:00] be very effective.
[00:01:00] Can you imagine drug? They actually found these schools to be incredibly effective , and it’s just really feels great for him and his team, such, great team of researchers for Angus who has, uh, you know, in his research goes far beyond charter schools, but his game is really like finding natural.
[00:01:17] Charter schools are among them, right. They provide, a randomized control trial right there without having to actually, separate kids into groups because they separate themselves. And the whole idea being that you can compare kids who applied to charter school lotteries and did not get in, in kids who applied to charter school lotteries and did get in.
[00:01:36] And you’ve got a similarly motivated group. Hence natural. And I just have to share with you Gerard, that I have memories of folks who don’t like charter schools so much saying to me, after reading my books or reading my. I don’t know this research that you cite. It can’t be very high quality and I’m thinking, well, okay, now, now you’ve got a Nobel prize winner.
[00:01:55] So how’s that for high quality. So that’s, it’s gotta be on the learning curve. It is [00:02:00] here we are. We’re prize week Gerard. So what’s on your re I, that’s not even my story the week, by the way, , just the intro, because I’m so excited.
[00:02:09] GR: Well, you actually sent me up. Well, because my article of the week is about economic education and K-12 education.
[00:02:16] Cara: Imagine that I didn’t even mean to. So
[00:02:20] GR: my story is from Michelle Fox and she is with C NBC and it’s from October 11th. And the title is to raise successful. Children, teach them about economics, education experts say. So I grew up in a home where we did not talk a lot about money, whether it was personal finance or whether it was how to say.
[00:02:39] How to use a credit card. We just did not do so and come, we’ll find out I’m not radically different from a lot of families today. And so the author basically said, listen, if we expect. For our children to become responsible handlers of power, which includes personal finance and economics, guess what? They should learn something about [00:03:00] economics.
[00:03:00] And she reminds us that if we don’t think we have an economics problem or a personal finance problem, just take a look at student loan debt, you know, which is 1.6 trillion and take a look at credit card debt. And so in previous, you know, several years, in fact, States have actually made a push to try and talk a lot about financial literacy and that led to April becoming financial literacy month.
[00:03:25] We’re proud to find out that October this month, mark, the first ever national economic education law. And this is something that’s been supported by man works. And who is the president and CEO of the council of economic education. And she’s a member of CNBC’s invest in financial wellness council. And what she said is that people have to start paying attention to how to look at societal issues through the lens of economics, whether that’s.
[00:03:53] COVID whether it’s looking at finance or even education, how we funded that economics [00:04:00] matters a lot. Well, in order for that to take place, we had to take a look and really prove to people that economics was something we needed to study. Because if you look at our family, We have challenges. For example, the author identified that various industry research found that get this two or three families lack any type of emergency savings.
[00:04:19] 78% of families that have paycheck to paycheck and three and five adults and not maintain a monthly budget. And when they did a deeper dive, they found out that many families. For a host of cultural and social reasons that just economics do not talk about finance. And so there is a professor at George Washington university.
[00:04:39] Her name is Anna Marie, who starting, and she’s a professor of business. She’s also a founder and academic director. Of the school’s global financial literacy excellence center. And she said, you know, students come to my class. They don’t even know how credit cards work. And many of them have real ideal how student loans work.
[00:04:59] So with the [00:05:00] push to make, , October. Economic month. The goal is to make sure that a families have conversations about how to make decisions about money in their homes. Teachers can now invite business, community leaders to share with their students, decision-making processes. And for those who are listening, if you want to go to council for.
[00:05:19] Econ ed.org. You can actually find resources for K-12 education programs and others. I think this is important because for all the reasons we say, but here’s what I’ve found really interesting. So they actually conducted a survey. And again, this is, the council for economic education. And in 2020, they identified that 21 states require high school students to take a course in personal finance.
[00:05:46] 25 states require high school students to take a course in economics five to not, and only five states, steel drown include personal finance and their studies. So given the fact that you and I share some states in common in Michigan, you will be [00:06:00] proud to know that of the six categories they have in place.
[00:06:03] Everything from standards to implementation, Michigan. Five of the six
[00:06:08] Cara: box check
[00:06:11] GR: my own home state of Virginia. We have four of the six boxes checking on glad to bed, but for Massachusetts, the state that is home to this, they actually have fewer than we would think for a state that leads so many things.
[00:06:25] So economic. Nobel prize winner economics. We now have an economic education month, so we need to shout this up to the mountain top. And in all seriousness, if we expect to maintain our way of living is going to require people to be financially responsible with their money, but also with the government.
[00:06:47] Cara: I love that story, Gerard, I think it’s really, really important.
[00:06:51] And, I think too, , you say that this is really everybody’s problem it’s we, you might have preconceived notions about who knows how to handle their money and who [00:07:00] doesn’t. But the fact of the matter is is that, I think probably this is my guessing and maybe your article talks about this.
[00:07:07] I would assume that, , in this country probably. The people with the lowest incomes, , know more about what’s coming in and what’s going out, then those who are in the middle class able to be in some sort of debt, have credit cards, things like that. And that’s where we, as Americans are really undereducated and quite frankly, it’s sort of.
[00:07:28] a luxury to be able to be that irresponsible, but it gets us in a lot of trouble. And just like you said, I did not grow up in a home where we talked about this and I can remember going to college and being bombarded with credit card offers and just sort of thinking it was free money. It wasn’t until I had to go to my parents and say, oh yeah, I have this bill.
[00:07:47] And they were like, no, it wasn’t like they were going to pay for me either. I had to learn that hard lesson. It also I’ll share that. as I’ve talked about before, my husband grew up in Argentina, and this is a [00:08:00] place where it’s very uncommon for people to, for example, mortgage their homes. It’s very uncommon for people to have credit cards and credit card debt.
[00:08:08] So you’ll heal just like student loans for him. He just looks at me sideways. He’s like, how on earth do you have student loans of that guys? And I’m like, wow. I went to school for a really long time. So I think that, maybe it’s not an American phenomenon, but it is a distinctly American trait, I think, to not know enough about like what you actually have and what you can actually buy.
[00:08:30] And let’s face it. It’s probably, there are so many statistics about the number one cause of stress is money and, you know, people get divorced over money, stuff like that. This is a really important. Factor in educating our children to be not only, it’s not just about math, which it is about math, right.
[00:08:46] But it’s about being happy, healthy people. and so some of us, even if you were born into a higher economic class, and you live higher up on the income letter that does not mean that folks are financially irresponsible or literate. [00:09:00] Right. So, and I bet probably a lot of people are nodding along at home as they listened to this.
[00:09:04] So I am all for it. I love that story. Thank you for bringing it to our attention. I’m going to take a hard turn in. We’re going to New York where you might’ve heard that mayor bill de Blasio, he has called an end Gerard to the city’s gifted and talented program. , so you know, we’ve been reading a lot of.
[00:09:22] Specialized schools, magnet schools, exam schools. So on in places, many of them here in the Northeast where these things tend to exist. private schools for free in many regards, right? These, exam admission schools, but Blasio at the end of his term, and, his critics are saying that you haven’t really done anything about educational equity.
[00:09:42] And I’m not saying that now, maybe I am a little bit, but, here you are. You’re going to just issue an edict that says this is the end of the city’s gifted and talented program. And the idea here is that this GNT program. Inequitable. it is exam-based so kids have [00:10:00] to test into it. And I think there is something Gerard to the argument that parents who are highly educated themselves, who know the system, know how to navigate the system, know how to help their children be successful on exams, exam taking is a skill.
[00:10:14] Let’s be clear. I think there’s something to that argument. I’m not necessarily convinced that we should abolish gifted and talented programs. I, myself, Gerard now don’t be too surprised, but I was a gifted and talented child in the eighties. And I got to tell you, what I take away from that experience was it made me pretty unpopular my peers and I, who were separated from the rest of the kids in a different, like we have the school, came home with some spit balls in her hair.
[00:10:39] I will say that, but on the upside. You know, we’ve got a highly personalized education. And I think maybe part of de Blasio’s argument is that every kid should have this education. This type of education should be on offer to every child, regardless of how you fare on an entrance exam. However, I have to say, I questioned the ability given its [00:11:00] track record of New York city’s public schools to deliver this kind of education to all kids, because that’s what they’re planning to do.
[00:11:06] and he and his, superintendent introduced. , a program that’s going to replace the gifted and talented program called brilliant NYC. It’s accelerated learning for kids ages eight and up that will take place in their assigned classrooms. so you could imagine being a teacher. So teachers Imagine being a teacher with what, 30 kids in your classroom.
[00:11:26] You’ve been a teacher I’ve been teaching. often what we know is that even the best teachers who can really differentiate instruction, sometimes what you end up doing is teaching to the middle because you’re trying so hard to make sure that everybody gets what they get. And so there were a couple of quotes in this article from teachers saying.
[00:11:42] As if it isn’t already hard enough, you’re expecting us to come in take kids who would have qualified for this other track. And we’re going to have to differentiate for them, differentiate for children who are coming in at, what four or five, six different levels in the name of equity. So I think that this is one [00:12:00] to watch.
[00:12:00] They’re saying, I don’t know, but the article claims that there was not a Lisbon, the New York post, by the way. So no fan of DeBlazio I think, but, there wasn’t a lot of parents. And you can imagine which parents are upset in which parents don’t care much. So the parents of the kids who would have qualified for the GNT programs are indeed pretty upset.
[00:12:19] It’s sort of like these struggles we’re seeing over exam schools. I’m going to watch this one. Gerard, I don’t know exactly where I come down, except I don’t really think that either. , that either camp has the perfect answer. And I’m always left with the question, like, are we looking for a quality of outcomes here, or are we looking for equitable opportunities?
[00:12:38] And you know, I always fall in the camp of the latter. I think this is about creating equitable opportunities for all kids. And it’s just too bad that we didn’t see the mayor get closer to that because I don’t know that this does.
[00:12:51] GR: I am a supporter of having separate programs for people who have the gifts and the talents to take advantage of it.
[00:12:58] So you’ll be [00:13:00] surprised to know that I too was in gifted and talented
[00:13:03] Cara: for
[00:13:05] GR: sports, not academics. And it’s similar if you think about it. And so I had to be, I was tested in terms of how fast I could run a 40. , how many times or how many, , weights, I could lift pounds, got tackle. Could I move?
[00:13:20] And if you didn’t do well, you didn’t make the cut. So there was an examination that wasn’t written, it was non written. And if you were gifted and talented, you find yourself playing the skill level scores that you needed to. If we treated college football and the entrance into becoming a pro athlete at a division one school, the same way we did get that in talent.
[00:13:42] The schools that currently make up the top 50 programs that look radically different. Why? Because taking someone who is gifted and talented, let’s say in stem and someone who is gifted and talented in, let’s say the 40 yard dash, and then putting them in very [00:14:00] different settings where gifted and talented means something different to different people.
[00:14:04] It will be a train wreck. And so I’m all for the idea of looking at schools and saying, well, You don’t have enough women or you don’t have enough, , people of color or you don’t have people from the right zip codes. I get it. But in the absence of gifted and talented programs, how do these programs come into existence in the first place?
[00:14:23] It’s because the traditional school system did not have at certain schools, school levels or certain zip codes. That program here at Virginia, we have a governor school and we created governor’s schools back in the 1970s in part. So if the public school system said, you know what, we’ve got a group of students who are advanced and who should come together during this time.
[00:14:45] Or in a year round program or other programs in order to provide them with what options, same thing we say about other programs. So I think trying to abolish the program will never get you to equity. What it will do will be an [00:15:00] equity of outrage, either from the parents in school closed or for the children like me, who Hey, parents will say, Hey, let’s put Gerard.
[00:15:08] It would have been a disaster for me that they would have been upset. And then the parents, like my, wife’s parents who would, surely would qualify for gifted and talented, they would have been equally upset. You took the class from her and you gave it to Gerard and Gerard can’t handle it. So, I just think this is just more unnecessary social engineer.
[00:15:25] Moving in the wrong direction and in an environment now where families are already riled up, take families at Thomas Jefferson high school, and they’re the Virginia top rated public school in the country where they removed and exam to get in order to try to what I call colorful classrooms. It’s not going over well, so I’m not a fan of abolishing.
[00:15:47] It. If we want to deal with equity. And I agree with you, test taking is something you can learn as a skill. I also don’t think that some of these tests are totally wastefully biased, as much as culturally [00:16:00] bias. Given the fact we have people of color who are in there and they’re not just Asians
[00:16:05] Cara: and not all.
[00:16:08] GR: Yeah. So
[00:16:11] Cara: I think we’re probably pretty close to the same page and you know, something that you were teetering upon there. Here’s an idea. Quit redlining kids in schools make your public schools, distinct from one another offer distinct things to the kids that need them and let parents have an option.
[00:16:28] Right. And that’s something that, of course we don’t think DeBlasio was going to go out with a bang. we will see. If this program, this new, what did I say? It was called the brilliant program. The brilliant NYC. We’ll see how brilliant it turns out to be according to the parents of New York city. some of them will leave for private schools.
[00:16:44] No doubt. If they can afford to as has been the case. So we , could probably ask our next guest to weigh in on this, but she’s got so much cool research to talk about that. I don’t know. We’ll probably we’ll want to change the subject because coming up right after this, we are going to be [00:17:00] speaking with Robin lake and she is director of the center.
[00:17:05] For reinventing public education. I pause there because I just usually call it survey. And it’s also the center on reinventing public education, but I just have a great deal of respect for Robin’s work for the work of her team and for what they do over there in Washington. So we will be back with Robin right after this musical intro.
[00:17:43] Listeners we’re back with Robin lake. She is the director of the center on reinventing public education, otherwise known as SURPI a nonpartisan research and policy analysis organization, developing transformative evidence-based solutions for K to 12 public education. Her research [00:18:00] focuses on us public school system reforms, including public school choice and charter schools, innovation and scale portfolio management and effective state and local public oversight practices.
[00:18:11] Lake has authored numerous studies and provided expert testimony and technical assistance on charter schools, district charter collaborations, and urban school reform. She coauthored with Paul Hill charter schools and accountability in public education. Probably more times than I can count my own dissertation on charter schools.
[00:18:29] And she’s provided invited testimonies to the us house of representatives, education and labor committee, as well as various state legislatures. Robin holds a BA in international studies and an NPA in education and urban policy from the university of Washington, Robin. Thanks so much for joining us today.
[00:18:47] Robin: That was such a pleasure. Great to be with you. Yeah,
[00:18:50] Cara: we’re really happy to have you here and. Just talking before you came on. Um, Joshua Angrist winning the Nobel prize in [00:19:00] economics this week and he of course has done research on charter schools as well. , it was, it felt like , a good day for education,
[00:19:08] Robin: so cool.
[00:19:08] We know a Nobel Laureate. As
[00:19:12] Cara: I was floored when I heard it on the other radio Saturday morning, but well, we want to really focus on your work because as I said, I, have probably cited you and your work more times than I can count. , but , your title is director of the center on reinventing public education.
[00:19:27] And I will say, as somebody who reads your work and uses your work. You are known for rigorous and balanced research, which, which isn’t always the case, no matter what discipline we’re talking about. So can you describe the type of research that you do at SURPI? And I’m really interested in how the work has evolved over time, because you’ve, , you’ve seen a lot of changes just in the past decade, I would say.
[00:19:53] Robin: Yes, we have, I’m an odd duck because I’d been at the center for nearly 30 years, which is pretty crazy, but[00:20:00]
[00:20:02] yeah, five years, it was amazing. Learned how to read at the center now, , I met Paul Hill, our founder, and, , Paul handed me a manuscript for a book. He was writing called reinventing public education. And the premise was really that Paul had been studying. Through the Rand corporation where had been previously effective schools and especially schools that were effective in accelerating and meeting the needs of all kids from all backgrounds.
[00:20:33] And, , there were some emerging research during the eighties around. , what makes for effective schools, coherency internal accountability, clarity about the type of graduate, a distinctiveness, a sense of purpose, all those things. Right. But anybody who’s researched schools knows, but our question Paul’s question at the time was, okay, well, you can always point to some of those schools in a given community, but usually it’s only one or two.
[00:20:59] How could we make [00:21:00] it all? What would it take? And Paul had been studying. Systems and policies for a long time. And he was really acutely aware that there were those kinds of policies that gotten away, , that didn’t allow those kinds of schools to scale and replicate. And so the purpose of the center was really how do we reinvent those systems?
[00:21:20] So all schools can be effective. And it took us immediately to questions around choice with schools are distinctive families need to choose among them, autonomy, staffing, funding, accountability. How does that work? If all schools have different purposes? And then we started working toward this idea called portfolio systems, school systems that had a bunch of distinctive schools, but really managed for equity and performance.
[00:21:45] So, , it’s been an amazing, , 2030 years of working along those lines. And you asked about how things have evolved with. A few years ago, about five for our 25th anniversary. I had taken over as [00:22:00] director of the center and I was thinking, , the world has changed since the eighties alive.
[00:22:05] You know, Future of work is changing. , the need For school systems and schools to think about change and resiliency. I’m really trying to figure out how to maximize the opportunities and pathways for individual kids and look outside the boundaries of the school building. Those are not things that we originally contemplated, but seemed really, really important for us to start thinking about.
[00:22:28] Deeply. So we, we started sketching out ideas along those lines for our 25th and then bone the pen and all of the, worries that we had had about rigidities and lack of ability to meet individual needs. Showcased right in front of us. So we’ve tried to document a lot of that. And luckily we kind of jumped on some data and have been a pretty central resource for how school systems are responding , or not to different needs.
[00:22:57] And now we’ve got to turn [00:23:00] back to, or what does this all mean? Going forward. That’s the work of it, the next five to 10 years. How do we rebuild in a way that meets the promise of this generation of kids, but more importantly, meets the promise of the next generation. Not an easy question.
[00:23:14] No,
[00:23:15] Cara: no, it’s not an easy question at all now. So you mentioned the pandemic and many, many of us relied on, your work during the pandemic. So I want to, get there, but I want to push really quickly on something that you said at the outset. And you said that, , you and Paul discussed.
[00:23:30] Oftentimes it wasn’t, it was about reinventing systems because we sort of knew what works in schools that we have. We have a pretty good idea of what makes schools high-performing highly effective for kids, but that it’s these structures and systems that get in the way. And so, that sounds to me like.
[00:23:45] The desired impact of education research is, to reinvent those systems as you would put it, change those systems so that we’ve got equitable opportunities for kids and kids can sign that families can find places that they will flourish within the public system. [00:24:00] Right. And that can involve different sorts of choice, which we talk about a lot here, but can you describe a time perhaps when you’ve really seen the impact of your research, right.
[00:24:11] in a positive. And an outcome that made you happy.
[00:24:16] Robin: Sure. Sure. yeah, I mean, you know, to your point, we have a little tagline that I think , was Paul’s originally that public education is, , a goal, not a particular set of institutions. And so we’re happiest when we have. , had impact in terms of reframing a question.
[00:24:34] So it can be addressed in a totally different way, helping people challenge assumptions and say, why not? , why couldn’t it be different? Why couldn’t we do things radically differently? Does a school have to look this way , or could it be, , a set of opportunities within a community? That kind of thing, you know, to your point to your question on.
[00:24:54] What’s made me happiest. I would say that if I had to point to one line of [00:25:00] work that I’ve, really dug into personally, it’s been our work on special education. , started it a number of years ago with a focus on charter schooling. , a lot of people were worried about special ed as a vulnerability for the charter school movement, which it was, there were problems that had to be addressed, but we also saw it as a huge opportunity because we thought, well, , special education is not working.
[00:25:24] It hasn’t been working. Can we use this opportunity outside the boundaries of, what has typically been done to, to actually go for something better? And so, , for 10 or 15 years or so, we’ve been really trying to say, where are the bright lights within the charter school world within the district world and the private sector?
[00:25:43] How can we. Learn from that to try to construct something better. We’ve had a line of research going on that front for quite some time and it continues. And, , it’s I think I’m our most rewarding work. For me [00:26:00] personally. And it takes, me right again, to the core question that we we’ve been grappling with for the last five years or so for our most complex kids, we’ve got to think really differently.
[00:26:14] , and special education has a place where we see a lot of possibilities for. Honestly, if you go into any particular school and you want to learn about how do you know contract what individual kids need and what’s possible for them go to the special ed teacher, she’s got ideas. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah,
[00:26:34] Cara: no, , it’s really important line of research and I think shining a light on, , any, you know, at the outset you said, especially when we knew that there were problems in some charter schools, right.
[00:26:42] It’s shining a light on that and really talking about, , how does. Taylor education to meet the needs of individual students, I think is informative for all systems. , okay. So you mentioned the pandemic and. , a series of questions about this, because I have to, my first question is like, [00:27:00] so you guys were, I think a lot of, , ed reform organizations were thinking, oh, somebody should really track this school closures.
[00:27:07] , somebody should really think about like, what are districts doing? But it was a sort of a, not me, not me, not me. And then suddenly there it was and you guys are doing it and you were doing. Can only imagine the amount of work that it was, but can you describe to us what it was like to pivot that hard in that moment in March, I guess 2020, when it all sort of came crashing down in, in like, how did you go about it?
[00:27:30] What did you learn from tracking school closures
[00:27:33] Robin: throughout the. Yeah, it’s been a wild ride. Why live cattle? And, you know, the pandemic was starting to start to emerge. And, , I was looking around at, you know, talking to some local superintendents and thinking, oh my gosh, we had really, we were in for something really serious and we’re not prepared at [00:28:00] all.
[00:28:01] And so I remember thinking, , this I’m going to have to kind of set everything aside. I may have to shift our team. , and I just went on pure instinct. , I just had to trust my gut and kind of trust. But I had learned over the past few decades about system response and system abilities and inabilities.
[00:28:20] And I’m also a warrior probably helped. I thought this could go very, very badly. We’re all in the dark, you know, pulling information together. And as a researcher it’s tight, it was a really tough moment, right. Because there was not anything close to perfect information. What we did was we thought, well, where.
[00:28:42] Can we get something something’s gotta be better than nothing. And we thought, well, districts are posting information on their websites. Let’s just start pulling that together. So , we just quickly went after the largest hundred school districts and, got organized to find [00:29:00] that. And then we, um, got a representative sample together quickly and we just tried to be nimble and responsive.
[00:29:07] And I think one thing that really helped was the fact that it was. Over the years of, we’ve worked with a lot of practitioners. We had people we could call and say, you know, what’s going on? What, um, what are you seeing out there? And we also have a tradition of SURPI at trying to look around the corner, trying to be ahead of other folks in.
[00:29:28] What might be coming, what questions? So that was the approach that we took was let’s roll and let’s connect with as many people as we can figure out what’s needed. And the, , the fundamental tenants that we followed was let’s be helpful. What can we do to be helpful and just use whatever skills and capacities we have to inform the field.
[00:29:55] So that’s what we did, , in terms of what we’ve found. I mean, there’s so much, [00:30:00] and it’s easy to kind of get wrapped up in the masks and the vaccines and, the issue of the moment, we’ve tried to stay really focused on teaching and learning throughout this thing. And on that front, it’s not pretty the, , the kids are not all right in so many ways.
[00:30:18] and in other ways, , they’ve discovered so many important things, , as they’ve been out of traditional schooling. So, but on the not all right front, , we’ve convened some consensus panels of experts to kind of assess where we are. , I won’t get into the details of that, but I think, you know, it’s clear kids love.
[00:30:37] Really really critical learning opportunities and opportunities for gaining knowledge that if we don’t act quickly, they won’t recover. And those individual kids will pay the price and our economy will pay the price. So there’s that the social emotional dynamics are of course, so important. We’ve been talking.
[00:30:56] Closely the mental health and other struggles. And [00:31:00] then finally we’ve been looking at kind of the most vulnerable student populations and trying to understand what’s going on with them. So, you know, it’s not a pretty picture. , and so we’re, starting to think now about, Hey, given all of that, we’re w we’re conditioning to document it and we’ll be producing.
[00:31:16] report called the profile of the American students this winter, where we’re hoping to kind of compile the story into something that’s really understandable, but I think what’s on so many of our minds right now is where do we go from here? Is this just a question of catch-up, which is. , particularly easy problem on its own, or is it a much bigger problem of recovery renewal towards something much better, which is, you know, the biggest challenge that any of us school reform folks have, have faced.
[00:31:49] So it’s going to take all of us. It’s going to take our best ideas and it’s gonna take collaboration partnerships and very, very strong, well.
[00:31:59] GR: In [00:32:00] July, , your center published report that found that most districts are so far spending money on quote, what they know what our district’s doing today. And what would you like districts to think about when it comes to spending these.
[00:32:14] Robin: Yeah, thanks Gerard. Yeah, look, this is a massive cash dump, on districts. And I don’t think anybody was particularly surprised that what they’ve been doing is spending on, , staffing, , pay raises that they felt , were overdue. , just talked to a reporter who had dug into some data and found that there were massive expenditures on things like sports fields and, things that probably were shovel-ready right.
[00:32:39] Districts had plans, maybe somebody, a coach or somebody had been lobbying for this thing for a long time. And, uh, all of a sudden it was available. So. You know, that’s all what it is, not sustainable, right? And it’s not the stuff that’s going to, um, get a kid who, uh, has two more years [00:33:00] to graduate and just lost six months of critical math time into the college of their choice that it’s not going to cut it.
[00:33:08] what I, advise districts to do is really get clear about priorities and, I’m not opposed to sports, you know, let’s get our ducks in order first and make sure that every kid is on the path to college and career readiness. Before we talk about some of those extras. Um, and I think three, three buckets maybe, , the first is.
[00:33:33] , good old evidence-based solutions. It’s shocking to me, how few districts are really pursuing intensive, um, tutoring programs that any researcher would agree is probably the best thing you can do for catching kids up quickly, rigorous curriculum. Those kinds of just evidence-based solutions.
[00:33:52] A second bucket would be just, you know, creative approaches to catch up. We have a lot of people in the communities who have stepped up during the [00:34:00] pandemic. And provided support to kids. Let’s not close them off from the current challenges. Let’s actually bring them in, pay them for helping out with tutoring or, um, partnering for mental health and social service support.
[00:34:15] So the schools don’t have to take that on. And the third bucket would be just making investments in the future, , getting toward that sense of resiliency and, , taking pen. Discoveries and figuring out what we can do with them. Re-imagining the workforce. These are the things that we’re going to have to do.
[00:34:34] And, in three years when the money’s gone, we won’t have the option any longer
[00:34:39] GR: before I pivot to my next question. You’re the first part of your response reminded me when, you know, when you’re talking about, you know, paying for coaches and salaries. I remember when the American recovery and we invest an accurate tune, , 2009.
[00:34:53] Uh, was implemented, there were school systems that were doing the same thing. , some even hiring teachers, they let go because of cuts [00:35:00] and, within 24 months, some of those teachers had to be let go because the money they receive was not. And there wasn’t any planning. So hopefully we don’t have a, repeat of that.
[00:35:12] Robin: You’re absolutely right. History is about to repeat itself and remember the folks who are going to be laid off first , or, the most junior folks, , folks who have a lot of energy ideas and, , not necessarily the folks who are gonna move the needle the fastest for the most kids. So there we have it.
[00:35:31] GR: Well, there you go. Let’s talk about politics. , right now education is very partisan. Even with our reform movement, both public private, very fractured your center, you know, of course describes itself as a nonpartisan research institution by most accounts. , we’re living in that, , very high times of partisanship.
[00:35:50] How do you, as a leader of the center, basically walk the line in terms of talking about. School curriculum talking about research [00:36:00] and being able to do so in a way where the research is clear it’s nonpartisan and is given in a way that people can say, yeah, , the center is just a straight shooter because a lot of people aren’t doing that.
[00:36:11] How are you able to do so?
[00:36:14] Robin: Yeah, well, I do think we’ll probably, I’m pretty well-respected but a lot of different, , more part of this. Oriented folks, policymakers tend to call us from all stripes, which we’ll really proud of. I’m really not sure why, you know, we’re um, we’re people who like to. We liked to be truth tellers.
[00:36:37] , we like to surprise people. We like to be creative and unconventional. , and you know, we just try and stay focused on the question and the question at hand and not get pulled into the noise of the politics. , now, that also means that we make people on both sides angry. , and I’ve always felt like, it’s [00:37:00] a little bit of a lonely position, but on the other hand, as long as they, get over it and call us the next time, then I think , we’re doing our jobs.
[00:37:09] So, , Yeah. unfortunately it is all too unusual, but I think, you know what, we try to be a collection of people to think in the gray, , who just don’t like, , dichotomies. And luckily there seems to be still a little bit of space.
[00:37:27] GR: No. I’m glad to have you in the space because when your name is mentioned and , I’m on the right and right.
[00:37:32] Circles, people like, yeah. You know, good research, there are other names I could mention. And there are a lot of different responses other than good research. So, , continue to agree. Work. There will speak in a research. And this is my last question, , as we emerge out of the time that we’re in right now, Should researchers and educators, , what should they be thinking about?
[00:37:52] You know, we have a cadre of young scholars who are going to enter the field, , with a very different set of data points to look at. , then some of [00:38:00] us, let’s say you had 15 years ago and we’re going to have, , with 30 gubernatorial elections, , they’re going to come up. What are your recommendations to people who sit in academic academies and think tanks, research centers, but also in state and federal government.
[00:38:17] Robin: , far be it for me to really say what people should be doing. I’ll speak from my own experience. What gives me energy ideas? Inspiration is really, , getting down to. Direct contact to a students, families and educators, really listening to them, observing. , and then, trying to from there kind of, , get up to the policy implications.
[00:38:46] , it just makes it also real. And now I can’t imagine a more important time than now to do that when students and families, educators were thrown into such [00:39:00] craziness and have really, really important observations, discoveries, thoughts, reflections. , they have things to say, let’s listen to them. So the most rewarding research that we’re doing right now is interviewing people who have participated in pandemic learning pods, who just when they were out of the traditional system.
[00:39:24] What did they create? What did they discover? And it’s amazing to hear educators talk about their experience, because they’ll say this is the reason I got into teaching this kind of relationship based really, you know, customizing for kids, , families saying, Hey, I never realized that I really enjoy being really more deeply engaged in my kids’ education or kids saying, Hey, It’s really cool to be able to control my own schedule and say, well, I want to study and then have people work around that and [00:40:00] give me something that excites me.
[00:40:02] So there’s just so much rich soup there. , so much risk which soup and so much to contemplate about the systems that we’ve built and kind of ask ourselves why. , and then it’s Siri. It’s also equally important to, to listen about. How, how should we be defining success as we move forward? And how would we know that we’re getting there?
[00:40:24] I don’t think we’ve grappled with that kind of question. So I don’t know if that’s helpful. That’s where my head is. , shame on us. If we don’t take this moment to reflect.
[00:40:36] GR: I like that word, because when we often discuss education, we think of R which is resources, , and that’s important, another ours results, but yeah, let’s just take time to reflect, you know, when I heard you say that teachers.
[00:40:50] You know, we’re excited about what they were doing to say that this is in fact as why I entered the profession. And Cara had an early question, , for you, but also in your background, you worked in [00:41:00] charters, Minnesota in California, where the first two states charter law and both of those laws were created in part to give educators a chance to practice their craft their profession in unique ways.
[00:41:11] And so we can come out of this either crime or crime from. And so hopefully it’s the latter.
[00:41:21] Robin: I love that. So,
[00:41:23] GR: Robin again, thank you so much for joining Kara and I today to talk, shop about the work you’re doing. And, , as always I learned something, what I hear from you and when I read your work, so our listeners, I’m pretty sure are going to be excited to see what you come out with.
[00:41:37] Robin: I thank you so much. Yeah, it was a really fun conversation. And I will say that the pioneer Institute I ran into and I was, visiting Massachusetts and there were 12 charter school laws based at backend. No, no, 1992 or something. So y’all have been on my radar for a very long time and, , really respect your work.[00:42:00]
[00:42:00] Cara: Thank you. Thanks so much.
[00:42:59] All right. Do you [00:43:00] ever going to close it out with a tweet of the week? This one from, , 74. And the tweet is I was just talking with somebody about this this morning. It’s pretty exciting. Researchers at Harvard center for education policy research at N w E a and the Calder center will partner with a consortium of districts across the United.
[00:43:20] To provide timely information about tutoring, afterschool programs and other interventions, , timely. Yes. I love that. They’re going to do this. This is, these are some real , heavy hitters here in, the area of educational research. So figuring out by having this consortium of districts come together, whether or not.
[00:43:40] These tutoring programs, interventions, many of which I’m sure will be funded with relief money. If districts would actually decide to do that, maybe some of them have, um, if they’re actually working. And I think this goes back to conversations that we’ve been having with some of our guests are, are.
[00:43:56] Whether or not how we’re going to know if we’re getting any bang for our buck out of [00:44:00] all of the stimulus money. So, , I think it’s a great effort. We will keep an eye on it and maybe we’ll even get somebody to come talk to us about it. , the learning curve, but that’s all I got this week. My friend, next week, Gerard, we are going to be back with David Reynolds. He is a distinguished professor of English and history at the graduate center of the city, university of New York and biographer of Abe Lincoln.
[00:44:22] , his biography of Abraham Lincoln was selected as one of the top 10 books of the year by the wall street journal. So Gerard until then, I hope you have. A wonderful week. It’s always a pleasure to spend time with you.
[00:44:33] GR: I enjoy the way that we use economy of scales to get done on time.
Related Posts:
“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.
This week on Hubwonk (our debut video & audio edition), Host Joe Selvaggi talks with research analyst Andrew Mikula about the findings from his recent report, A Timely Tax Cut, in which he explored the relationship between state tax rates and policy and the direction of interstate migration.
Guest
Andrew Mikula is a former Economic Research Analyst at Pioneer Institute and current candidate for a Master’s in Urban Planning at Harvard University.
Read a Transcript of This Episode:
Please excuse typos.
Joe Selvaggi (00:00):
This is Hubwonk, I’m Joe Selvaggi
Joe Selvaggi (00:09):
Welcome to Hudwonk, a podcast of Pioneer Institute, a think tank in Boston. A natural consequence of being a nation of united individual states is that it creates 50 different laboratories of democracy. Each state decides how best to serve its citizens and in turn, by what means it will tax its citizens to pay for those services. The state prerogative to tax and spend has the benefit of creating competition among states to attract more tax paying residents with its value proposition. While a high tech state can assert it offers better services and a low-tech state can lay claim to lower cost of living the arbiter of a state’s value or the people themselves. All citizens can pick candidates in elections. A far more powerful way to express a preference is to optimize great from one state to another, bringing with you all future taxable income, the effect of this migration in the long run.
Joe Selvaggi (01:05):
It can be either to boost the state’s tax base or drain it of its vital revenue. How well is Massachusetts competing with this neighbor states and how are changes in tax law, such as the proposed millionaire’s tax likely to affect the movement of those with higher income who invest in and create new companies in the future? My guest today is Andrew Mikula, former research analyst of Pioneer Institute and current graduate student at Harvard’s graduate school of design. Andrew’s most recent research paper, a timely text that how New Hampshire is taking advantage of Massachusetts graduated income tax proposal maps, current interstate migration, and looks for a correlation between state tax levels and the direction of income flows. Andrew shares with us the findings of his paper and provides color on why residents may vote with their feet. When I return, I’ll be joined by research analyst, Andrew Mikula.
Joe Selvaggi (02:52):
Okay. We’re back. This is Hubwonk, I’m Joe Selvaggi and I’m now joined by Pioneer Institute’s former economics researcher and current Harvard graduate school of design master’s degree student Andrew Mikula. Welcome back to Hubwonk, Andrew.
Andrew Mikula (03:06):
Joe, thanks so much for having me back.
Joe Selvaggi (03:09):
Well, first let me congratulate you on starting your master’s degree in urban planning. I believe. How have your studies been going so far?
Andrew Mikula (03:15):
It’s going well. Yeah, a lot of requirements this semester, but we’ll get to the juicy stuff soon. And it’s an important foundation.
Joe Selvaggi (03:25):
Well, I am, I’m thrilled that you were able to take some time out of your studying to be with us. I want to explore the findings of your newest research paper, entitled a timely tax cut, how New Hampshire is taking advantage of Massachusetts graduated income tax proposal. All right. We’ve covered this topic in different ways in the past on how long, but I want to give the listeners and viewers now we’re viewing we’re now recording the visual of our, of our show. I want to give everyone some background on tax rates, what’s being proposed. What are the relative tax rates in Massachusetts and New Hampshire? Let’s start with Massachusetts. We used to be known as Taxachusetts. Where are we now?
Andrew Mikula (04:04):
Right. So I think in importantly, for our purposes of voters passed a ballot measure in the year 2000, that would lower the income tax rate from 5.9 to 5.0% over the next three years. It was later tied to benchmarks and revenue growth slowing down the tax cuts are that it only reached 5.0% last year, actually in 2020. Okay. so I think that we’ve taken a kind of incremental approach, but we have cut income taxes in recent years. New Hampshire has had a 5% tax on interest in dividends for a while, but what they don’t tax is wage income, right? So it’s only the interest in dividends you would earn on a financial asset that are, are taxed. At least for individuals, corporations is a different matter. But the tax rate is 5% on interest in dividends. Like it is Massachusetts today.
Joe Selvaggi (05:08):
Okay. So that seems like a stark contrast. We have 5% on income here, Massachusetts. So that’s the lowest has been for a while. It just got to 5% recently. But that’s a flat tax for everyone, every dollar earned in Massachusetts tax at that 5% rate in New Hampshire, it’s zero. They do tax some income that comes from interest in dividends, but not from income. So that seems like a pretty stark difference. I want to get to a different aspect of, of the tax code. I, I mentioned that ours is a flat tax rate. Your paper talks about a proposal for a graduated rate. I’m fairly sure we have a federal tax rate that is graduated, but explain to our listeners, what does that mean? What do we have now flat and what what is being proposed
Andrew Mikula (05:52):
That’s right. So the rate itself, Massachusetts levy is in terms of income, personal income taxes, 5% is, is relatively on par with the average for state governments. What’s relatively uncommon is we have a flat tax. So we tax people at 5% of their income, regardless of if they’re making, you know, 40,000 a year or 400,000 a year. And that’s so in the, especially in the context of the Northeast, that makes us pretty unique actually.
Joe Selvaggi (06:28):
So I’m graduate Texas sounds like people who have more money might pay a higher rate. I want to talk about the, sort of the one aspect of raising taxes is raising taxes on everyone is unpopular. I would say the flat tax does have the benefit of, of constraining legislators inclined to raise taxes by it’s very hard to raise taxes on everyone. To me, graduated income taxes, seem a bit like a divide and conquer. We identify a group we’d like to raise the taxes on and every everyone votes yes. To vote to tax the other guy. Do I have a good sense of the power of a graduated tax?
Andrew Mikula (07:09):
Yeah, you, you do Joan, no one thinks that, you know, someone else can spend their money more effectively or better than, than they can, but it’s appealing that to take a small segment of the population and say, they’re going to be paying more because they’re not paying enough now. And the rest of the people are going to accrue the benefits in terms of, you know, public services. I think where that gets complicated is in part the effect on, on the revenue volatility that comes with, you know, having a tax, that’s not quite as broad-based as say a sales tax. And so, you know, income taxes have been shown to lead to, you know, kind of steeper drops in some tax revenue collections, and as a whole during recessions especially the great recession actually,
Joe Selvaggi (08:17):
Okay. So I want to drill down a little more into what we mean by graduated tax. It means we’re, we’re texting higher income people at a higher rate in general and lower income people at a lower rate who, or what is being proposed in Massachusetts, what is this so-called millionaire’s tax and what is it to rate?
Andrew Mikula (08:37):
Right? So the proposal in Massachusetts would levy a 4% surtax on annual personal income, over a million dollars. That’s both wage income, capital gains you know, he’s selling a business, et cetera. And this proposal has a really interesting history. It was, it’s a pretty bottom up proposal, but it was actually struck down by the Massachusetts Supreme judicial court in, in 2018 before being rekindled as a legislative petition the following year and changing the Massachusetts constitution which this tax would do is a very iterative process. And so it’s, it’s not going on the statewide ballot until the fall of 2022 and voters have a chance to weigh in before it’s signed into law.
Joe Selvaggi (09:37):
So we sh we shouldn’t panic right now. This is something that’s coming, as you say, from, from the bottom up, actually from the legislator. So where did it start? Well, let me take a step back. We have a 5% income tax now and we’ve just gone through a recession through a epidemic that had a slight recession the economy shut down for a time. And there was a lot of concern that with the, a depressed economy, you would be a depressed revenue flow. I’ve read that the state has actually had a surplus of revenue. In fact, they surprise to the upside on revenue. Is, do you see this interest in raising the tax rate on millionaires being driven by a need for revenue? Is there a need for revenue in Massachusetts right now?
Andrew Mikula (10:28):
Right. So like I alluded to, you know, this proposal has been on the table since 2015 or so, so I’m not sure it’s, it’s accurate to argue that this is, you know, the reason why this proposal was put forward is not because of the pandemic. Right. but I also think that you know, we we’ve, there were some temporary impacts on the state revenues from COVID, but our, our bounce back has been much quicker than in the great recession, right? Because the, the economic recession that we’ve had because of COVID reflects the presence of the virus whose presence has wavered, you know, a lot over the course of the last year and a half, whereas, you know, kind of more deep rooted problems with our financial system characterized or caused much of the previous recessions wolves. And so it’s true that currently Massachusetts tax collections are, are essentially at record highs in a lot of major categories. And on top of that, we have a large amount of federal stimulus dollars still to spend in the base state. So I think one argument that opponents of the tax hike make is that we don’t meet, we don’t necessarily need this added revenue right now in kind of an urgent way. That’s true.
Joe Selvaggi (12:12):
That’s fair. So I’ll accept that if this has been coming down the line since 2015 and the economic situation has sometimes been better, sometimes been worse. It’s not really motivated by an immediate need for revenue, but rather a, perhaps a longterm desire for additional revenue to be spent at the state level. So let’s take it out of the current events and say, okay, this is the long-term direction of Massachusetts. We’d like to tax those who make more than a million dollars at a higher rate than those who make less than a million dollars. But let’s talk about then let’s shift to the focus of your paper which doesn’t just merely look at the relative tax rates of New Hampshire and Massachusetts. It talks about some other states and their relative tax rates, but the crux of your paper talks about what I like to call the Footloose nature of the individuals within each state that is, each of us has a choice as to which state we want to live in. And sometimes tax rates have an influence on who moves, where tell us from a 10,000 feet view, what your conclusions or your observations were on the relationship between the relative tax rate of a state and the relative inflow or outflow of higher earners to those states.
Andrew Mikula (13:23):
Yeah. Let me say, you know, the tax cut in New Hampshire combined with Massachusetts is a legislative initiative here or constitutional amendment, really. I think some folks are concerned that it will lead to, you know a decrease in economic activity, decreased of investment in Massachusetts are making it harder or less economical to create jobs and invest in businesses. So we can actually measure how the tax bases of certain states are changing because of people moving from one state to another, in a given year. And that’s exactly what I’ve done in this paper. You can see on a graph that in a lot of cases, capital flows between a given pair of states correspond quite closely to changes in tax policy in those states. And, you know, it doesn’t necessarily flip the sign right away in which a state is the risk net receiver of more of those tax dollars, but it’s a long-term effect that plays out over 10 or 15 years, which is one thing that makes, you know, tax proposals like this. So insidious,
Joe Selvaggi (14:49):
Yeah, I was struck by your paper. You do quantify those outflows. And when we talk about this is before any changes, either the ones in Massachusetts currently proposed, or the ones in New Hampshire proposed but in 2019 two years ago, the outflow of income from Massachusetts to New Hampshire in one year was $426 million outflow from Massachusetts to New Hampshire. Now we can’t know the motive for moving north, but it can’t, it can’t be the weather. W what are your thoughts? How is it that, you know it is the tax rate. Is there any other confounding factor that you think might contribute to people moving out of Massachusetts towards New Hampshire?
Andrew Mikula (15:32):
Absolutely. I, you know, taxes are a part of the story, but I think a big one is the cost of living and new Hampshire’s tax rates, you know, on wage income at least have been zero for as long as I can remember. But, you know, even when you, when you start cutting Massachusetts as tax rates, as we have done the past 20 years, there’s still this, this gap here, you know, New Hampshire was not New Hampshire has not been sending folks to Massachusetts on net, as long as we’ve been keeping track of the IRS has been keeping track. So, and I think you’d also see that kind of cost of living cost of housing concern and start to creep in, and places like Rhode Island, Rhode Island has, you know, cut taxes more aggressively than we have in the past, you know, 10 or 15 years.
Andrew Mikula (16:28):
But there are certainly other factors in the mix because, you know, we can see that, you know, people are on net moving from Massachusetts to Rhode Island. And despite their changes in the tax code, the, the top marginal tax rate in Rhode Island is still higher than it is here. So it’s, it’s, it’s really interesting to see how, you know, oftentimes you need to go deeper than just the, you know, headline tax rate and understand how changes in tax rates over time can affect things, because people are also taking into account things like the cost of living and family connections and job growth, et cetera.
Joe Selvaggi (17:09):
I think it’s worth mentioning also a you talk about the cost of living. I think those who assume are higher tax rate means better services, perhaps better schools or better roads, better bridges infrastructure. I’ve been to New Hampshire. It’s less than an hour away in a car from downtown Boston. There bridges and roads look fine to me. Do they have problems with services and frankly, if you have the data, how do they collect revenue to support their state’s requirements?
Andrew Mikula (17:38):
Yeah, so New Hampshire does kind of conform to some of the kind of low tax state paradigms, and that it, it spends a lot less than Massachusetts on a per capita basis. I’d also say that New Hampshire has, you know, the lowest poverty rate in the country. So compared to, you know, how much, if you’re, if your goal is to provide a certain base level of, of services that ensure a certain quality of life, New Hampshire might not have the same needs as most other states and Massachusetts is, is a low poverty state too. But I think it also is, is less than modernist than New Hampshire in terms of socioeconomic status. That said, I think a lot of the difference in terms of the level of spending between New Hampshire and Massachusetts still reflects policy differences, not just different needs, New Hampshire is the only state east of the Mississippi that doesn’t provide some sort of public preschool. They’re also pretty strict about time costs for services to the people using those services. You know, higher education in New Hampshire is largely funded by tuition, as opposed to transfers from the state general fund pension funds for state workers are mostly funded by the workers’ salaries while they’re working as opposed to regular contributions from the state. And there are several examples of that sort of cost cutting measure that has a state, the state money.
Joe Selvaggi (19:24):
So it’s a we, we believe in a Federalist system. So you have different states with different needs and different priorities. So you, you make a great case if there’s more to the story than just a marginal tax rates at the state level. I, I appreciate that. Let’s talk about the the millionaire’s tax, the additional 4% tax on those earning more than a million dollars, there are going to be the ones who are affected, and they’re the ones who are likely to potentially vote with their feet. What’s the profile of someone who earns more than a million dollars in a year. Is it a rich banker or is it someone else,
Andrew Mikula (19:59):
Right? Well, I think, you know, there may be a fair share of rich bankers, but prior work that pioneer has conducted has also shown that, that, you know, a large plurality of the people who, you know, make a million dollars in a year in a given 10 year period or so do so only once that’s based on IRS data. And I think that’s a fairly good indicator that a lot of these people are cashing out on investments they’ve made so that they can either retire or they’re selling a business or a home, or what have you. And so I think an ostensible goal of a new Hampshire’s policy here was to in cutting the interest in dividends tax was to lower the tax burden on some older people and also attract more taxpayers that are, are going to consume a lot in New Hampshire and pay a lot in property taxes as well. But I think it’s more complicated than just, you know, there’s a banker there’s, you know, a real estate developer, et cetera.
Joe Selvaggi (21:26):
So you’re, that’s a very interesting piece of data. We’ve covered it a bit on hub Blanca in the past. So people who earn a million dollars in general and over 10 year period, do it only once, which suggests they’re not earning an income and a salary more than a million dollars, but rather it’s what we would call a liquidity event. They’ve sold a house, they sold a business, something that perhaps they’ve built over the course of their lifetime, and they want to essentially cash out, perhaps retire, perhaps do something else. But even if it is bankers, isn’t it people who are creating businesses by investing and hoping to profit from taking some risks and investing. In other words, isn’t it people who are creating businesses and creating jobs that are most apt to be effected by a tax on ultimately their, their success, their ultimate cash out.
Andrew Mikula (22:13):
Right. And I think that’s, you know, that very reason is, has been one of the strongest arguments in the past for either reducing income taxes or looking for, you know, alternative ways of taxing the economic activity that comes out of a place. And I think the, the, you know, the economic literature might be divided about how exactly to implement something like this, but there is evidence that, that state level of taxes on income well tend to reduce incentives to earn income. And, you know, that’s something we need to weigh against other forms of taxation that have different effects sales or consumption-based taxes might overly burden certain people, depending on, on what they’re buying property taxes might be hard to avoid in the short term might be relatively stable even during recessions when a lot of people are out of work. So it’s a trade off that I think you know Warren, some more discussion, but in general, I’d say, you know, people like earning income taxing it is means less income, less work, less investment for in, into the economy.
Joe Selvaggi (23:57):
Yes. you know, I, it seems intuitively obvious that you tax something, you’d get less of it. I think policy makers understand let’s say, in the form of sin taxes they tax tobacco or alcohol with the stated goal of trying to reduce its use. It seems to follow that taxing income would either make people choose to have to be compensated differently, or take their income with them to a place where it’s taxed less. Out of curiosity, does it, in fact, New Hampshire tax it must raise revenue in other forms it’s in the form of consumption tax, I guess, sales tax and property tax is that how they raise their revenue in New Hampshire?
Andrew Mikula (24:41):
Largely. So they actually also have some higher business taxes and we do in Massachusetts, but you’re right, that instead of a broad-based sales tax, they have some, you know, more targeted excise taxes. And also one thing that’s pretty unique about New Hampshire is they also have state owned you know, kind of stores that do a lot of business to out-of-state customers. And a famous example is the slew of liquor stores that are right over the Massachusetts border that you know, the technically are not taxed, but it’s New Hampshire collecting that sales revenue. And that’s helped explain how almost 20% of new Hampshire’s kind of unrestricted revenue in a given year actually comes from some of these sin taxes or other excise taxes.
Joe Selvaggi (25:52):
Good. So a Massachusetts pays its own income taxes and it pays some new Hampshire’s alcohol taxes. Is that right for helping New Hampshire make ends meet with our, when we drive north to to the state run a liquor store,
Andrew Mikula (26:08):
Essentially. Yes. You know, it’s this sort of paradigm where New Hampshire draws out of state customers to essentially pay its tax bills is already happening on the kind of consumption side of things
Joe Selvaggi (26:27):
I enjoyed in your PC. You didn’t just talk about New Hampshire and Massachusetts, as we’ve talked a little bit about the Connecticut Rhode Island we’ve had inflows from those two states. I was amazed to learn you even tracked New York and New Jersey. We’ve had substantial inflows from those states as well because they have substantially higher income tax on high net worth individuals, $200 million, roughly from each Massachusetts from New York and New Jersey respectively. That’s an impressive number. Would you conclude then that New Hampshire and New York also decamped from those locations largely because of the relative tax rates or are there other confounding issues in those, in those cases?
Andrew Mikula (27:14):
Yeah, I think that’s certainly part of it. You know, there are even in, in some parts of New York, you know, you could make more bang for your buck argument in Massachusetts cost of living wise. But I think what’s really striking to me is in the case of New York, you know, it used to be that, that more, you know, adjusted gross income from migrating taxpayers was going from Massachusetts to New York. And then some point in the mid two thousands, you know, it changed sign. And in 2019, it’s, you know, $170 million that migrating new Yorkers are adding to our tax base every year.
Joe Selvaggi (28:04):
So that’s substantial. And again there are two very, very wealthy states with high services. So really the, the major variable there between, let’s say, New York city and Metro Boston, if you will, if you will is cost of living in primarily income tax.
Andrew Mikula (28:23):
Hmm. I’m also fascinated. I think it’s still kind of, we’re still kind of in this weird limbo with what effect the, or how long-term the remote work revolution will last, which I think can certainly impact whether someone’s willing to, you know, pack up and move to New Hampshire and, and have a longer commute to work. But you know, it’s New York has certainly been hit harder than most states in that regard. So it’s going to be especially interesting to follow the tax flows between New York and Massachusetts in recent, in upcoming years.
Joe Selvaggi (29:06):
That’s very interesting. We didn’t really talk about it too much, but we did, we have talked in past, have long episodes that COVID really made us aware of the fact that we could remote work remotely. And if you want to live in New Hampshire and enjoy the lower income tax and you work in Boston, it’s a heck of a commute. And if you only have to do that three days a week, instead of five days a week, you may be more inclined to explore moving to New Hampshire. Is that what you’re saying?
Andrew Mikula (29:35):
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
Joe Selvaggi (29:38):
Wonderful. All right. So we’re getting close to the end of our time. I, I appreciate you taking time with me. How can our listeners and new viewers find your paper, read more about your work and and see the graphs for themselves.
Andrew Mikula (29:54):
It’s all@pioneerinstitute.org is our recent work. We do a lot of research and do tax policy and, and broader economic opportunity issues. Thanks so much for having me, Joe.
Joe Selvaggi (30:06):
I appreciate your time, Andrew, and best of luck with your studies. I hope you enjoy it.
Joe Selvaggi (30:13):
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. It will be easier for you and better for us. If you subscribe to Hubwonk on iTunes, if you’d like to help others find Hubwonk, it would be great if you would offer a five-star rating or a favorable review, it’s always welcome. If you’d like to share Hubwonk with friends. If you have ideas for me, or comments or suggestions for topics for future episodes, you’re welcome to email me at hubwonk@pioneerinstitute.org. Please join me next week for a new episode of Hubwonk
Check out our most recent episodes:
This week on JobMakers, Host Denzil Mohammed talks with Dr. Bernat Olle, co-founder and CEO of Vedanta Biosciences, about his journey from Catalonia, Spain, to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he continued his Chemical Engineering studies at MIT. Navigating the complex immigration system while seeking purpose in his career, he eventually found his calling and was lucky enough to remain in the U.S. to see it through: designing a new class of medicines to modulate the human microbiome. They duscuss how everyone wins when foreign-born talent is welcomed into vibrant, entrepreneurial ecosystems like those in the U.S., when they’re able to collaborate with others from the U.S. and around the world and come up with incredible ideas to benefit all people. Bernat also expresses a sense of kinship with immigrants far removed from the labs and boardrooms. He knows that the same aspiration – opportunity – attracted those who came here with nothing but a suitcase and a dream, as you’ll discover in this week’s JobMakers.
Guest:
Dr. Bernat Olle is a co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Vedanta Biosciences. He has been a member of the founding teams of several companies of the PureTech portfolio and served as a member of the Board of Directors of Vedanta Biosciences and Follica Biosciences. In 2013 Dr. Olle was named “Innovator of the Year” in MIT Technology Review Spain’s “Innovators under 35” awards. He also received the 2019 Barry M. Portnoy Immigrant Entrepreneur Award from The Immigrant Learning Center. He completed his doctoral work at the Chemical Engineering Department at MIT, where he developed a novel method for large-scale bacterial culture. During his graduate work, Dr. Olle was awarded the “la Caixa” fellowship. Dr. Olle received his B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Universitat Rovira i Virgili, in Catalonia, his M.S. and PhD. in Chemical Engineering Practice from MIT, and his M.B.A. from the MIT Sloan School of Management. He has published his work in journals including Nature and Nature Biotechnology.
Read a Transcript of This Episode:
Please excuse typos.
Denzil Mohammed:
I’m Denzil Mohammed, and this is JobMakers.
Denzil Mohammed:
Is it any surprise that the epicenters of innovation like Kendall square Silicon valley also have incredible diversity that the cities with the highest rates of PhDs like Brookline, Massachusetts, so Palo Alto, California, are multi-ethnic and multicultural, the United States attracts the world’s best and brightest to give us Google Tesla, the Madrona vaccine, but the thing that links the Nobel prize winning immigrants with those picking all vegetables and washing dishes is opportunity for Dr. Bernat Olle, co-founder and CEO of Vedanta biosciences, seeking opportunity, brought him all the way from Catalonia, Spain to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he continued his chemical engineering studies at MIT navigating the complex immigration system while seeking purpose in his career. He eventually found his calling and was lucky enough to remain in the US to see it through designing a new class of medicines to modulate the human microbiome when foreign talent is welcomed into vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystems, like those in the US, when they’re able to collaborate with Americans and some people with people from around the world, they can come up with incredible ideas to benefit humanity, everyone wins. Bernat also feel a sense of kinship with immigrants far removed from labs and boardrooms.
Denzil Mohammed:
He knows that just like those with nothing but a suitcase and a dream, the same thing, brought them here, seeking opportunity, as we’ll discover in this week’s episode of JobMakers.
Bernat Olle:
Good to see you, Denzil.
Denzil Mohammed:
I remember you describing this concept of the microbiome and relating it to antibiotics in this fascinating story of your honeymoon. And you have this radical way of thinking of “no, let, let the body figure it out.” Take us back to that time. And, why is this kind of field of science important today?
Bernat Olle:
All species of animals live colonized with microbes on the skin, on the intestinal track and the mouth and the vaginal tract. All those are chock full of microbes. And that’s the way it’s been from the very beginning before we evolved as a species, this world was a bacterial soup. So every species has evolved surrounded by bacteria. And so it’s not surprising that this bacteria play very important roles in health, and specifically the bacteria that live in humans are referred to with the term human microbiome. And so that’s basically the collection of bacteria that you carry around for life with you. As soon as the moment you were born and specifically in the intestine, that community is more stance that we have the most bacteria, trillions of bacteria, almost as many or more microbial cells in your body than homosapien cells.
Bernat Olle:
And they play very important roles. They help protect from infection. They help calibrate the set point of the immune system, which is important in our immunity and allergy potential in cancer. And there’s a number of things that we do in our modern life that perturb that community. The diet that we eat has a big effect on the microbes that we have inside, because what we eat is what they eat. So the Western diet is generally not great for microbes. That’s maybe the reason why there’s a number of chronic diseases that are advancing more rapidly in the west and in the developing world. The use of antibiotics is another big perturbation. From the time we’re born until our teen years the average person gets tens of courses of antibiotics and cumulatively. Some of them can have a important effect in damaging the communities of microbes in the intestine.
Bernat Olle:
And so one of the things that we’re trying to do as a company is to be able to undo some of the collateral damage that antibiotics leave behind. Their use is sometimes warranted. Sometimes unwarranted, back to the honeymoon story, but they’re here to stay. And they’re very necessary in hospital settings, but also they create a series of issues, you know, use of antibiotics to prevent certain problems, and then other problems emerge. You become more susceptible to picking up infections from the hospital environment when your gut has no natural competitors against those pathogens. So one of the things we’re trying to do is ensure antibiotics have been used for the purpose they need to be used for and undo some of the damage by helping reconfigure or rebalance the community of bacteria that’s in the intestine that had been damaged by the antibiotic and in doing so, we hope as a starting point that we can prevent re-infections that are very problematic, for example, in hospital settings.
Denzil Mohammed:
When you were first starting out as an immigrant with an accent in the Boston area, how were you received? And as a European person, knowing what the entrepreneurial environment was like back then, let’s say in the late nineties, when you started school how do you think it would foreigner would have been received there?
Bernat Olle:
I think my integration in the US was very smooth. Today I am an American citizen. My child is American and Catalan and, and I identify as one of us. And I really have to think hard to think of instances where I have been treated as an immigrant in a negative way. The first year I came. I remember when I was a poor graduate student, I would go to buy my fruit at Haymarket if it had been there on weekend mornings. So it’s very cheap, but but it’s also terrible quality. Like half of the fruit is really literally rotten. And so I remember the first times I’d go there, I would try to pick the fruit rather than have the one that they hand you, because when they handed it to you, like half of it, you have to throw it away, but the store owners hate it when people try to pick the fruit.
Bernat Olle:
And so I remember you know, in one of my first visits, somebody really got ticked off that I was trying to pick the fruit and say, just go back to where you came from. But that’s like the only time that has ever happened to me. And if this was reversed, if it was like a person trying to like come to Spain, especially if you look any different than the locals. I feel like the racism there runs in different ways, the US has issues of course, with race. And there’s a lot of work to do. But I think some of the other countries, like in old-school Europe that have traditionally seen less immigration, and they’ve been more insular are much less prepared to welcome and assimilate people from other origins and get to a point where, where they’re one of them. I’m having a hard time imagining how the experiment in the opposite direction could have been smooth. And so I guess my parting point on this is that for all the issues that we have with immigration in the U S and with racism, the U S has done a much better job at assimilating and benefited from contributions of immigrants as just about any other country in the world.
Denzil Mohammed:
Thank you for acknowledging that. I think that’s a really important point to make, and that’s what makes this country special. I want to take it back a few years. You had the experience as did I, feeling that intense pressure where your visa is about to run out? You’re not sure what what’s going to happen, what you’re going to do is a lot of uncertainty. So tell us about that time for you.
Bernat Olle:
I’ve been doing my PhD at MIT, and I was hoping to find a job in the U S to stay here after the PhD. I was on a J-1 visa and that expired, you know, a short period of time after Igraduated, and I did an atrocious job search. I was just doing the work. And I figured, yeah, like when I’m done, people are going to want to hire me, because look, I went to this great school and the world doesn’t really work like that. Like you have to, you have to really do the homework. And, and basically what I found is that when I interviewed, I didn’t put a lot of care or thought into what I should do.
Bernat Olle:
I just interview with firms that were reputable. Why, because other people did it too. Like some of the well-known strategy consulting firms is a terrible way to go about picking a career incidentally. So I was rejected by just about every one of them. And it was only when I had a few weeks left on my visa and I really had to think through, okay, what do I really want to do that? Finally, I put some thought into like the career that I wanted and ended up going into, the direction that I went. My first job offer, which was in a venture creation firm in town that starts biotech companies,came really, really close to the bell. I guess it could have gone a different way and that bad planning could have resulted in me going back home. Then as you know, like finding a job from abroad becomes a much more complicated process. But because I did get a job here, then I jumped on the train of the H1 green card citizenship, which is a train that at most times in the United States has worked very well. During the last administration, there were some serious steps back as you know, but for me, this was actually a very smooth process.
Denzil Mohammed:
And it was around that time that you were able to secure a work in the US that this idea of purpose was playing a role in the kinds of jobs you were looking for and the kind of trajectory you wanted to have. I vividly recall another MIT grad on this podcast and immigrant entrepreneur saying that everyone from MIT graduates and, you know, wants to do good in the world. And then they go on to work at the biggest consulting firms. You were in a privileged position as an MIT graduate with a PhD. How did that idea of purpose and giving back shape where you are today and where do you plan on going with that?
Bernat Olle:
My career path was very much born out of rejection. I try to follow the career path that others in business school and in graduate school followed which is the classic, you know, try to go to a very well-known firm, like a strategy consulting firm or a bank where you’re paid very well, and it looks beautiful on a resume. And it’s basically the game of compensation, titles, prestige. And I probably very much would have played that game if I hadn’t been rejected The blessing was that by having been rejected from those firms and actually having to really think, okay, what do I really want to do? And the reality is that I had never dreamed about working for clients, evaluating mergers and acquisitions or market shares of consumer products. Like that’s not what I was passionate about. I liked science.
Denzil Mohammed:
That sounds like so much fun. Come on.
Bernat Olle:
I like science. I like biotechnology. In my free time, I would read papers. That’s what I would do. And so basically my first job was going to do something that I already liked to do for free, which was read about cool science, talk with inventors about cool science and try to figure out, you know, can you imagine translating that to people? And is there a role for a biotech company to try to do that? And that’s what I did for my first decade professionally, until one of these projects that I started became obsessive and offer me that I didn’t want to do anything else. And then I decided that I just focus on that full-time, and that was my current company
Denzil Mohammed:
Hearing you talk about your experience. I find it fascinating, and I see that an immigrant has a certain special quality, but at the same time, you were a young person. You were just going with the flow, doing what everyone else was doing. And as you said, you didn’t have this master plan. And so you end up with, you know, a few weeks before your visa is about to end, and then suddenly you have to go beyond what your classmates were doing and think more strategically and position yourself in such a way that you would be able to stay in the US and continue this investment that you had made to come all the way across the world, spend money in and get an education at MIT and continue living that dream. Today, you’re a strong advocate for immigration reform, particularly making it easier for immigrants like you, who are inherently entrepreneurial to start businesses here in the U S that create jobs for Americans. Tell us more about your feelings as to the immigration system being able to work for people like you and other high skilled immigrants.
Bernat Olle:
I think that the immigration system and the immigration culture in the US has been a gift for both the US and for immigrants during most times, and, and this country sort of has cycles and you know, depending on their government, we’ve moved forward or move backwards. But the arc has been in the direction of immigration adding a lot to the country. I think that the US is really in a privileged position where, because of its culture of having been more welcoming to people that come here seeking opportunity it has, and because of being an open liberal place in the world where such immigrant entrepreneurs can find a welcoming environment to actually pursue their objectives, which is something that other superpowers don’t have, like this combination of a welcoming culture.
Bernat Olle:
But because of that, a lot of folks have come here and, and made very substantial contributions to the economy and also benefited by developing their careers in a way that they could not have developed their careers back where they came from. So, you know, I think this is really a unique gift of this land that many other countries in the world would like to have. And I think this is very important very important to preserve because if in the future that sees and the talent entrepreneurial talent in in tech, in biotech and other areas decided that it’s better for them to develop their careers and pursue opportunities in China or somewhere else the US would stop being the very competitive economy and society that it is.
Denzil Mohammed:
And I’d like to direct our listeners to the fact that the Nobel prizes are being announced, and guess who’s winning them in the US? Foreign-Born people who came here to study and innovate has been a huge trend, 30% of all Nobel Laureates have been people born in other countries. Specifically the past four years we saw a dramatic decrease in the number of visas that were issued, the number of international students who were coming here to study. And then we have this pandemic and the first two vaccines came from companies that had immigrant co-founders. Not just that, immigrants are concentrated in industries that got us through the pandemic, like cleaning like healthcare. Can you talk a little bit about the impact of immigration in the U S during this pandemic, from what you’ve seen?
Bernat Olle:
Yeah. I mean, I can talk about biotechnology because that’s the field that’s near and dear to me. And you said, you’re right. The, the impact on how the world got out of COVID was sensational, right? You have the founder of, of BioNTech, the founders on Madronathe CEO of Pfizer and the list goes on because there’s many people that have been involved in this amazing vaccine projects that are immigrants that have been welcome. The combination has been so crucial, right? Because it’s not a coincidence that so much of the innovation with vaccines has happened in the US – it happened here because this is a country that values its pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry as a national security asset in ways that other countries in the world don’t. Other countries in the world are content with free riding with some of the innovation that takes place in the U S and not spending on those industries. In the U S the approach has been different.
Bernat Olle:
And, and then at the same time, you have this, these brilliant immigrants coming in, attracted by this environment and supercharging it by creating these companies that in the moment of need come through, right? And I think that Pfizer, Moderna, these groups coming through with a vaccine that we got in our arms in less than a year which was a completely new technology that had not been used before with precedent. It’s just phenomenal. You know, it’s not surprising to anybody in the industry that there were so many immigrants involved because, you know, you look at any company like our company, there’s a significant portion of folks that were born elsewhere. And the reality is that, you know, talent, intelligence skills are fairly widely distributed all over the world. And you know, the ability to attract it to Cambridge and concentrate it here so that companies can benefit from, is what’s made the biotech industry so powerful and so influential in Massachusetts.
Denzil Mohammed:
You’re in the business of saving lives. You’re a job creator. You’re a scientist, you’re in the heart of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Yet. I know that when you were awarded the Barry Portnoy immigrant entrepreneur award for life science in 2019, you found a link to your own immigrant story to those foreign born students from Africa and Eastern Europe that your mother taught many years ago. What is that link?
Bernat Olle:
My mother who’s now retired used to be a teacher and for, for a good part of her career she taught immigrants that were coming most often from the north of Africa, but other times from Eastern Europe and another times also from central America either because of war or unrest in their areas, or just because of proximity, allowing opportunity in the case of Northern African immigrants. This would often be, you know, a lot of immigration from Northern Africa. It usually came because we grow a lot of fruit in the country, and there was a need for labor to help pick it up. But now those communities have established and they stayed there and they brought their families and they needed to learn the language. They needed to learn how to apply for a driver’s license or how to fill a form for social security.
Bernat Olle:
And if you don’t speak the language and you don’t know some of the basic things it’s hard to do that first step of integrating, right? So my mom helped many of those immigrants with this first step of doing some of the basic things, like learning the language, learning how to learn, how to do some of the basic things that you’re gonna have to do to become a functioning citizen in this place. But, you know, there’s a common element in all forms of immigration, which is this search for opportunity, right? Looking for something better than maybe you don’t imagine being able to do where you are. And so in that sense, the mindset is, it’s the same mindset across all immigrants, right? You’re willing to leave certain things behind that you liked because you want to take the risk of something that could be better.
Denzil Mohammed:
And you’re leaving behind family and a culture that you grew up at and food that you loved in order to seek that opportunity. It’s not an easy thing to do. Bernat Olles, thank you so much for joining us on JobMakers. I really appreciate it talking to you today, and I wish you all the success in the world.
Bernat Olle:
Thanks, Denzil.
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 so much for joining us for today’s inspiring story of another enterprising immigrant entrepreneur. If you have feedback or know someone, we should talk to, email D E N Z I L at jobmakerspodcast.org I’m Denzil Mohammed. Join us next Thursday at noon for another episode of JobMakers.
Related Posts:
This week on “The Learning Curve,” co-hosts Gerard Robinson and Cara Candal talk with Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), a non-partisan research and policy analysis organization developing transformative, evidence-based solutions for K-12 public education. Robin describes the type of research CRPE conducts and how it has evolved over time, and shares her view of the impact it should have on schools, teachers, and families. She discusses CRPE’s work tracking school closures across the country at the height of the pandemic, the methodology used, and the findings so far. Robin reviews key takeaways from CRPE’s July report on how districts are allocating federal COVID-19 relief funds, and talks about how districts should spend those dollars. After sharing what her team will be focusing on as we emerge from the pandemic, she describes the challenges of leading a non-partisan research organization and remaining committed to the mission during a highly partisan era, with schools and curricula increasingly being drawn into political battles.
Stories of the Week: Finance and economics education improves young people’s financial literacy and helps prevent credit card and student loan debt, and insufficient savings for retirement. In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio is ending the school district’s Gifted and Talented program by fall 2022, in favor of a new program which he claims is more equitable.
Guest:
Robin Lake is director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) a non-partisan research and policy analysis organization developing transformative, evidence-based solutions for K–12 public education. Her research focuses on U.S. public school system reforms, including public school choice and charter schools; innovation and scale; portfolio management; and effective state and local public oversight practices. Lake has authored numerous studies and provided expert testimony and technical assistance on charter schools, district-charter collaborations, and urban school reform. She co-authored, with Paul Hill, Charter Schools and Accountability in Public Education, and has provided invited testimonies to the U.S. House of Representatives Education and Labor Committee as well as various state legislatures. Lake holds a BA in International Studies and an MPA in Education and Urban Policy from the University of Washington.
The next episode will air on Wednesday, October 20th with guest, David Reynolds, a Distinguished Professor of English and History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the 2020 author of Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times, selected one of the Top Ten Books of the Year by the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post.
Tweet of the Week:
Researchers at Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research, @NWEA and @caldercenter will partner with a consortium of districts across the United States to provide timely information about tutoring, after-school programs and other interventions https://t.co/VclsW9FuIO
— The 74 (@The74) October 10, 2021
News Links:
New York Post: NY to Phase Out Gifted and Talented Program
CNBC: To raise successful children, teach them about economics
Read a Transcript of This Episode:
Please excuse typos.
[00:00:00] Cara: Hello listeners. It is. , I’m going to call it Nobel prize week here on the learning curve. I am here with the fantastic Mr. Gerard Robinson, who George did. You wouldn’t know about prices?
[00:00:11] GR: Not yet, but, , my time will come.
[00:00:14] Cara: next year. Yeah. I was thinking I might be next year. No, I’m really excited because you know, who did probably read that Joshua anchors of the, Massachusetts Institute of technology also known as MIT has won the Nobel prize in economics, , for his research, which includes research on, , charter school effectively.
[00:00:37] So no that, oh, see, I’m super excited about this because you know, well, you and I are both charter school nerds and years ago with pioneer Institute. , I published a book about charter schools in Massachusetts and, Angrist and his team are heavily cited throughout that book. They studied Boston charter schools in particular at which, they found to [00:01:00] be very effective.
[00:01:00] Can you imagine drug? They actually found these schools to be incredibly effective , and it’s just really feels great for him and his team, such, great team of researchers for Angus who has, uh, you know, in his research goes far beyond charter schools, but his game is really like finding natural.
[00:01:17] Charter schools are among them, right. They provide, a randomized control trial right there without having to actually, separate kids into groups because they separate themselves. And the whole idea being that you can compare kids who applied to charter school lotteries and did not get in, in kids who applied to charter school lotteries and did get in.
[00:01:36] And you’ve got a similarly motivated group. Hence natural. And I just have to share with you Gerard, that I have memories of folks who don’t like charter schools so much saying to me, after reading my books or reading my. I don’t know this research that you cite. It can’t be very high quality and I’m thinking, well, okay, now, now you’ve got a Nobel prize winner.
[00:01:55] So how’s that for high quality. So that’s, it’s gotta be on the learning curve. It is [00:02:00] here we are. We’re prize week Gerard. So what’s on your re I, that’s not even my story the week, by the way, , just the intro, because I’m so excited.
[00:02:09] GR: Well, you actually sent me up. Well, because my article of the week is about economic education and K-12 education.
[00:02:16] Cara: Imagine that I didn’t even mean to. So
[00:02:20] GR: my story is from Michelle Fox and she is with C NBC and it’s from October 11th. And the title is to raise successful. Children, teach them about economics, education experts say. So I grew up in a home where we did not talk a lot about money, whether it was personal finance or whether it was how to say.
[00:02:39] How to use a credit card. We just did not do so and come, we’ll find out I’m not radically different from a lot of families today. And so the author basically said, listen, if we expect. For our children to become responsible handlers of power, which includes personal finance and economics, guess what? They should learn something about [00:03:00] economics.
[00:03:00] And she reminds us that if we don’t think we have an economics problem or a personal finance problem, just take a look at student loan debt, you know, which is 1.6 trillion and take a look at credit card debt. And so in previous, you know, several years, in fact, States have actually made a push to try and talk a lot about financial literacy and that led to April becoming financial literacy month.
[00:03:25] We’re proud to find out that October this month, mark, the first ever national economic education law. And this is something that’s been supported by man works. And who is the president and CEO of the council of economic education. And she’s a member of CNBC’s invest in financial wellness council. And what she said is that people have to start paying attention to how to look at societal issues through the lens of economics, whether that’s.
[00:03:53] COVID whether it’s looking at finance or even education, how we funded that economics [00:04:00] matters a lot. Well, in order for that to take place, we had to take a look and really prove to people that economics was something we needed to study. Because if you look at our family, We have challenges. For example, the author identified that various industry research found that get this two or three families lack any type of emergency savings.
[00:04:19] 78% of families that have paycheck to paycheck and three and five adults and not maintain a monthly budget. And when they did a deeper dive, they found out that many families. For a host of cultural and social reasons that just economics do not talk about finance. And so there is a professor at George Washington university.
[00:04:39] Her name is Anna Marie, who starting, and she’s a professor of business. She’s also a founder and academic director. Of the school’s global financial literacy excellence center. And she said, you know, students come to my class. They don’t even know how credit cards work. And many of them have real ideal how student loans work.
[00:04:59] So with the [00:05:00] push to make, , October. Economic month. The goal is to make sure that a families have conversations about how to make decisions about money in their homes. Teachers can now invite business, community leaders to share with their students, decision-making processes. And for those who are listening, if you want to go to council for.
[00:05:19] Econ ed.org. You can actually find resources for K-12 education programs and others. I think this is important because for all the reasons we say, but here’s what I’ve found really interesting. So they actually conducted a survey. And again, this is, the council for economic education. And in 2020, they identified that 21 states require high school students to take a course in personal finance.
[00:05:46] 25 states require high school students to take a course in economics five to not, and only five states, steel drown include personal finance and their studies. So given the fact that you and I share some states in common in Michigan, you will be [00:06:00] proud to know that of the six categories they have in place.
[00:06:03] Everything from standards to implementation, Michigan. Five of the six
[00:06:08] Cara: box check
[00:06:11] GR: my own home state of Virginia. We have four of the six boxes checking on glad to bed, but for Massachusetts, the state that is home to this, they actually have fewer than we would think for a state that leads so many things.
[00:06:25] So economic. Nobel prize winner economics. We now have an economic education month, so we need to shout this up to the mountain top. And in all seriousness, if we expect to maintain our way of living is going to require people to be financially responsible with their money, but also with the government.
[00:06:47] Cara: I love that story, Gerard, I think it’s really, really important.
[00:06:51] And, I think too, , you say that this is really everybody’s problem it’s we, you might have preconceived notions about who knows how to handle their money and who [00:07:00] doesn’t. But the fact of the matter is is that, I think probably this is my guessing and maybe your article talks about this.
[00:07:07] I would assume that, , in this country probably. The people with the lowest incomes, , know more about what’s coming in and what’s going out, then those who are in the middle class able to be in some sort of debt, have credit cards, things like that. And that’s where we, as Americans are really undereducated and quite frankly, it’s sort of.
[00:07:28] a luxury to be able to be that irresponsible, but it gets us in a lot of trouble. And just like you said, I did not grow up in a home where we talked about this and I can remember going to college and being bombarded with credit card offers and just sort of thinking it was free money. It wasn’t until I had to go to my parents and say, oh yeah, I have this bill.
[00:07:47] And they were like, no, it wasn’t like they were going to pay for me either. I had to learn that hard lesson. It also I’ll share that. as I’ve talked about before, my husband grew up in Argentina, and this is a [00:08:00] place where it’s very uncommon for people to, for example, mortgage their homes. It’s very uncommon for people to have credit cards and credit card debt.
[00:08:08] So you’ll heal just like student loans for him. He just looks at me sideways. He’s like, how on earth do you have student loans of that guys? And I’m like, wow. I went to school for a really long time. So I think that, maybe it’s not an American phenomenon, but it is a distinctly American trait, I think, to not know enough about like what you actually have and what you can actually buy.
[00:08:30] And let’s face it. It’s probably, there are so many statistics about the number one cause of stress is money and, you know, people get divorced over money, stuff like that. This is a really important. Factor in educating our children to be not only, it’s not just about math, which it is about math, right.
[00:08:46] But it’s about being happy, healthy people. and so some of us, even if you were born into a higher economic class, and you live higher up on the income letter that does not mean that folks are financially irresponsible or literate. [00:09:00] Right. So, and I bet probably a lot of people are nodding along at home as they listened to this.
[00:09:04] So I am all for it. I love that story. Thank you for bringing it to our attention. I’m going to take a hard turn in. We’re going to New York where you might’ve heard that mayor bill de Blasio, he has called an end Gerard to the city’s gifted and talented program. , so you know, we’ve been reading a lot of.
[00:09:22] Specialized schools, magnet schools, exam schools. So on in places, many of them here in the Northeast where these things tend to exist. private schools for free in many regards, right? These, exam admission schools, but Blasio at the end of his term, and, his critics are saying that you haven’t really done anything about educational equity.
[00:09:42] And I’m not saying that now, maybe I am a little bit, but, here you are. You’re going to just issue an edict that says this is the end of the city’s gifted and talented program. And the idea here is that this GNT program. Inequitable. it is exam-based so kids have [00:10:00] to test into it. And I think there is something Gerard to the argument that parents who are highly educated themselves, who know the system, know how to navigate the system, know how to help their children be successful on exams, exam taking is a skill.
[00:10:14] Let’s be clear. I think there’s something to that argument. I’m not necessarily convinced that we should abolish gifted and talented programs. I, myself, Gerard now don’t be too surprised, but I was a gifted and talented child in the eighties. And I got to tell you, what I take away from that experience was it made me pretty unpopular my peers and I, who were separated from the rest of the kids in a different, like we have the school, came home with some spit balls in her hair.
[00:10:39] I will say that, but on the upside. You know, we’ve got a highly personalized education. And I think maybe part of de Blasio’s argument is that every kid should have this education. This type of education should be on offer to every child, regardless of how you fare on an entrance exam. However, I have to say, I questioned the ability given its [00:11:00] track record of New York city’s public schools to deliver this kind of education to all kids, because that’s what they’re planning to do.
[00:11:06] and he and his, superintendent introduced. , a program that’s going to replace the gifted and talented program called brilliant NYC. It’s accelerated learning for kids ages eight and up that will take place in their assigned classrooms. so you could imagine being a teacher. So teachers Imagine being a teacher with what, 30 kids in your classroom.
[00:11:26] You’ve been a teacher I’ve been teaching. often what we know is that even the best teachers who can really differentiate instruction, sometimes what you end up doing is teaching to the middle because you’re trying so hard to make sure that everybody gets what they get. And so there were a couple of quotes in this article from teachers saying.
[00:11:42] As if it isn’t already hard enough, you’re expecting us to come in take kids who would have qualified for this other track. And we’re going to have to differentiate for them, differentiate for children who are coming in at, what four or five, six different levels in the name of equity. So I think that this is one [00:12:00] to watch.
[00:12:00] They’re saying, I don’t know, but the article claims that there was not a Lisbon, the New York post, by the way. So no fan of DeBlazio I think, but, there wasn’t a lot of parents. And you can imagine which parents are upset in which parents don’t care much. So the parents of the kids who would have qualified for the GNT programs are indeed pretty upset.
[00:12:19] It’s sort of like these struggles we’re seeing over exam schools. I’m going to watch this one. Gerard, I don’t know exactly where I come down, except I don’t really think that either. , that either camp has the perfect answer. And I’m always left with the question, like, are we looking for a quality of outcomes here, or are we looking for equitable opportunities?
[00:12:38] And you know, I always fall in the camp of the latter. I think this is about creating equitable opportunities for all kids. And it’s just too bad that we didn’t see the mayor get closer to that because I don’t know that this does.
[00:12:51] GR: I am a supporter of having separate programs for people who have the gifts and the talents to take advantage of it.
[00:12:58] So you’ll be [00:13:00] surprised to know that I too was in gifted and talented
[00:13:03] Cara: for
[00:13:05] GR: sports, not academics. And it’s similar if you think about it. And so I had to be, I was tested in terms of how fast I could run a 40. , how many times or how many, , weights, I could lift pounds, got tackle. Could I move?
[00:13:20] And if you didn’t do well, you didn’t make the cut. So there was an examination that wasn’t written, it was non written. And if you were gifted and talented, you find yourself playing the skill level scores that you needed to. If we treated college football and the entrance into becoming a pro athlete at a division one school, the same way we did get that in talent.
[00:13:42] The schools that currently make up the top 50 programs that look radically different. Why? Because taking someone who is gifted and talented, let’s say in stem and someone who is gifted and talented in, let’s say the 40 yard dash, and then putting them in very [00:14:00] different settings where gifted and talented means something different to different people.
[00:14:04] It will be a train wreck. And so I’m all for the idea of looking at schools and saying, well, You don’t have enough women or you don’t have enough, , people of color or you don’t have people from the right zip codes. I get it. But in the absence of gifted and talented programs, how do these programs come into existence in the first place?
[00:14:23] It’s because the traditional school system did not have at certain schools, school levels or certain zip codes. That program here at Virginia, we have a governor school and we created governor’s schools back in the 1970s in part. So if the public school system said, you know what, we’ve got a group of students who are advanced and who should come together during this time.
[00:14:45] Or in a year round program or other programs in order to provide them with what options, same thing we say about other programs. So I think trying to abolish the program will never get you to equity. What it will do will be an [00:15:00] equity of outrage, either from the parents in school closed or for the children like me, who Hey, parents will say, Hey, let’s put Gerard.
[00:15:08] It would have been a disaster for me that they would have been upset. And then the parents, like my, wife’s parents who would, surely would qualify for gifted and talented, they would have been equally upset. You took the class from her and you gave it to Gerard and Gerard can’t handle it. So, I just think this is just more unnecessary social engineer.
[00:15:25] Moving in the wrong direction and in an environment now where families are already riled up, take families at Thomas Jefferson high school, and they’re the Virginia top rated public school in the country where they removed and exam to get in order to try to what I call colorful classrooms. It’s not going over well, so I’m not a fan of abolishing.
[00:15:47] It. If we want to deal with equity. And I agree with you, test taking is something you can learn as a skill. I also don’t think that some of these tests are totally wastefully biased, as much as culturally [00:16:00] bias. Given the fact we have people of color who are in there and they’re not just Asians
[00:16:05] Cara: and not all.
[00:16:08] GR: Yeah. So
[00:16:11] Cara: I think we’re probably pretty close to the same page and you know, something that you were teetering upon there. Here’s an idea. Quit redlining kids in schools make your public schools, distinct from one another offer distinct things to the kids that need them and let parents have an option.
[00:16:28] Right. And that’s something that, of course we don’t think DeBlasio was going to go out with a bang. we will see. If this program, this new, what did I say? It was called the brilliant program. The brilliant NYC. We’ll see how brilliant it turns out to be according to the parents of New York city. some of them will leave for private schools.
[00:16:44] No doubt. If they can afford to as has been the case. So we , could probably ask our next guest to weigh in on this, but she’s got so much cool research to talk about that. I don’t know. We’ll probably we’ll want to change the subject because coming up right after this, we are going to be [00:17:00] speaking with Robin lake and she is director of the center.
[00:17:05] For reinventing public education. I pause there because I just usually call it survey. And it’s also the center on reinventing public education, but I just have a great deal of respect for Robin’s work for the work of her team and for what they do over there in Washington. So we will be back with Robin right after this musical intro.
[00:17:43] Listeners we’re back with Robin lake. She is the director of the center on reinventing public education, otherwise known as SURPI a nonpartisan research and policy analysis organization, developing transformative evidence-based solutions for K to 12 public education. Her research [00:18:00] focuses on us public school system reforms, including public school choice and charter schools, innovation and scale portfolio management and effective state and local public oversight practices.
[00:18:11] Lake has authored numerous studies and provided expert testimony and technical assistance on charter schools, district charter collaborations, and urban school reform. She coauthored with Paul Hill charter schools and accountability in public education. Probably more times than I can count my own dissertation on charter schools.
[00:18:29] And she’s provided invited testimonies to the us house of representatives, education and labor committee, as well as various state legislatures. Robin holds a BA in international studies and an NPA in education and urban policy from the university of Washington, Robin. Thanks so much for joining us today.
[00:18:47] Robin: That was such a pleasure. Great to be with you. Yeah,
[00:18:50] Cara: we’re really happy to have you here and. Just talking before you came on. Um, Joshua Angrist winning the Nobel prize in [00:19:00] economics this week and he of course has done research on charter schools as well. , it was, it felt like , a good day for education,
[00:19:08] Robin: so cool.
[00:19:08] We know a Nobel Laureate. As
[00:19:12] Cara: I was floored when I heard it on the other radio Saturday morning, but well, we want to really focus on your work because as I said, I, have probably cited you and your work more times than I can count. , but , your title is director of the center on reinventing public education.
[00:19:27] And I will say, as somebody who reads your work and uses your work. You are known for rigorous and balanced research, which, which isn’t always the case, no matter what discipline we’re talking about. So can you describe the type of research that you do at SURPI? And I’m really interested in how the work has evolved over time, because you’ve, , you’ve seen a lot of changes just in the past decade, I would say.
[00:19:53] Robin: Yes, we have, I’m an odd duck because I’d been at the center for nearly 30 years, which is pretty crazy, but[00:20:00]
[00:20:02] yeah, five years, it was amazing. Learned how to read at the center now, , I met Paul Hill, our founder, and, , Paul handed me a manuscript for a book. He was writing called reinventing public education. And the premise was really that Paul had been studying. Through the Rand corporation where had been previously effective schools and especially schools that were effective in accelerating and meeting the needs of all kids from all backgrounds.
[00:20:33] And, , there were some emerging research during the eighties around. , what makes for effective schools, coherency internal accountability, clarity about the type of graduate, a distinctiveness, a sense of purpose, all those things. Right. But anybody who’s researched schools knows, but our question Paul’s question at the time was, okay, well, you can always point to some of those schools in a given community, but usually it’s only one or two.
[00:20:59] How could we make [00:21:00] it all? What would it take? And Paul had been studying. Systems and policies for a long time. And he was really acutely aware that there were those kinds of policies that gotten away, , that didn’t allow those kinds of schools to scale and replicate. And so the purpose of the center was really how do we reinvent those systems?
[00:21:20] So all schools can be effective. And it took us immediately to questions around choice with schools are distinctive families need to choose among them, autonomy, staffing, funding, accountability. How does that work? If all schools have different purposes? And then we started working toward this idea called portfolio systems, school systems that had a bunch of distinctive schools, but really managed for equity and performance.
[00:21:45] So, , it’s been an amazing, , 2030 years of working along those lines. And you asked about how things have evolved with. A few years ago, about five for our 25th anniversary. I had taken over as [00:22:00] director of the center and I was thinking, , the world has changed since the eighties alive.
[00:22:05] You know, Future of work is changing. , the need For school systems and schools to think about change and resiliency. I’m really trying to figure out how to maximize the opportunities and pathways for individual kids and look outside the boundaries of the school building. Those are not things that we originally contemplated, but seemed really, really important for us to start thinking about.
[00:22:28] Deeply. So we, we started sketching out ideas along those lines for our 25th and then bone the pen and all of the, worries that we had had about rigidities and lack of ability to meet individual needs. Showcased right in front of us. So we’ve tried to document a lot of that. And luckily we kind of jumped on some data and have been a pretty central resource for how school systems are responding , or not to different needs.
[00:22:57] And now we’ve got to turn [00:23:00] back to, or what does this all mean? Going forward. That’s the work of it, the next five to 10 years. How do we rebuild in a way that meets the promise of this generation of kids, but more importantly, meets the promise of the next generation. Not an easy question.
[00:23:14] No,
[00:23:15] Cara: no, it’s not an easy question at all now. So you mentioned the pandemic and many, many of us relied on, your work during the pandemic. So I want to, get there, but I want to push really quickly on something that you said at the outset. And you said that, , you and Paul discussed.
[00:23:30] Oftentimes it wasn’t, it was about reinventing systems because we sort of knew what works in schools that we have. We have a pretty good idea of what makes schools high-performing highly effective for kids, but that it’s these structures and systems that get in the way. And so, that sounds to me like.
[00:23:45] The desired impact of education research is, to reinvent those systems as you would put it, change those systems so that we’ve got equitable opportunities for kids and kids can sign that families can find places that they will flourish within the public system. [00:24:00] Right. And that can involve different sorts of choice, which we talk about a lot here, but can you describe a time perhaps when you’ve really seen the impact of your research, right.
[00:24:11] in a positive. And an outcome that made you happy.
[00:24:16] Robin: Sure. Sure. yeah, I mean, you know, to your point, we have a little tagline that I think , was Paul’s originally that public education is, , a goal, not a particular set of institutions. And so we’re happiest when we have. , had impact in terms of reframing a question.
[00:24:34] So it can be addressed in a totally different way, helping people challenge assumptions and say, why not? , why couldn’t it be different? Why couldn’t we do things radically differently? Does a school have to look this way , or could it be, , a set of opportunities within a community? That kind of thing, you know, to your point to your question on.
[00:24:54] What’s made me happiest. I would say that if I had to point to one line of [00:25:00] work that I’ve, really dug into personally, it’s been our work on special education. , started it a number of years ago with a focus on charter schooling. , a lot of people were worried about special ed as a vulnerability for the charter school movement, which it was, there were problems that had to be addressed, but we also saw it as a huge opportunity because we thought, well, , special education is not working.
[00:25:24] It hasn’t been working. Can we use this opportunity outside the boundaries of, what has typically been done to, to actually go for something better? And so, , for 10 or 15 years or so, we’ve been really trying to say, where are the bright lights within the charter school world within the district world and the private sector?
[00:25:43] How can we. Learn from that to try to construct something better. We’ve had a line of research going on that front for quite some time and it continues. And, , it’s I think I’m our most rewarding work. For me [00:26:00] personally. And it takes, me right again, to the core question that we we’ve been grappling with for the last five years or so for our most complex kids, we’ve got to think really differently.
[00:26:14] , and special education has a place where we see a lot of possibilities for. Honestly, if you go into any particular school and you want to learn about how do you know contract what individual kids need and what’s possible for them go to the special ed teacher, she’s got ideas. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah,
[00:26:34] Cara: no, , it’s really important line of research and I think shining a light on, , any, you know, at the outset you said, especially when we knew that there were problems in some charter schools, right.
[00:26:42] It’s shining a light on that and really talking about, , how does. Taylor education to meet the needs of individual students, I think is informative for all systems. , okay. So you mentioned the pandemic and. , a series of questions about this, because I have to, my first question is like, [00:27:00] so you guys were, I think a lot of, , ed reform organizations were thinking, oh, somebody should really track this school closures.
[00:27:07] , somebody should really think about like, what are districts doing? But it was a sort of a, not me, not me, not me. And then suddenly there it was and you guys are doing it and you were doing. Can only imagine the amount of work that it was, but can you describe to us what it was like to pivot that hard in that moment in March, I guess 2020, when it all sort of came crashing down in, in like, how did you go about it?
[00:27:30] What did you learn from tracking school closures
[00:27:33] Robin: throughout the. Yeah, it’s been a wild ride. Why live cattle? And, you know, the pandemic was starting to start to emerge. And, , I was looking around at, you know, talking to some local superintendents and thinking, oh my gosh, we had really, we were in for something really serious and we’re not prepared at [00:28:00] all.
[00:28:01] And so I remember thinking, , this I’m going to have to kind of set everything aside. I may have to shift our team. , and I just went on pure instinct. , I just had to trust my gut and kind of trust. But I had learned over the past few decades about system response and system abilities and inabilities.
[00:28:20] And I’m also a warrior probably helped. I thought this could go very, very badly. We’re all in the dark, you know, pulling information together. And as a researcher it’s tight, it was a really tough moment, right. Because there was not anything close to perfect information. What we did was we thought, well, where.
[00:28:42] Can we get something something’s gotta be better than nothing. And we thought, well, districts are posting information on their websites. Let’s just start pulling that together. So , we just quickly went after the largest hundred school districts and, got organized to find [00:29:00] that. And then we, um, got a representative sample together quickly and we just tried to be nimble and responsive.
[00:29:07] And I think one thing that really helped was the fact that it was. Over the years of, we’ve worked with a lot of practitioners. We had people we could call and say, you know, what’s going on? What, um, what are you seeing out there? And we also have a tradition of SURPI at trying to look around the corner, trying to be ahead of other folks in.
[00:29:28] What might be coming, what questions? So that was the approach that we took was let’s roll and let’s connect with as many people as we can figure out what’s needed. And the, , the fundamental tenants that we followed was let’s be helpful. What can we do to be helpful and just use whatever skills and capacities we have to inform the field.
[00:29:55] So that’s what we did, , in terms of what we’ve found. I mean, there’s so much, [00:30:00] and it’s easy to kind of get wrapped up in the masks and the vaccines and, the issue of the moment, we’ve tried to stay really focused on teaching and learning throughout this thing. And on that front, it’s not pretty the, , the kids are not all right in so many ways.
[00:30:18] and in other ways, , they’ve discovered so many important things, , as they’ve been out of traditional schooling. So, but on the not all right front, , we’ve convened some consensus panels of experts to kind of assess where we are. , I won’t get into the details of that, but I think, you know, it’s clear kids love.
[00:30:37] Really really critical learning opportunities and opportunities for gaining knowledge that if we don’t act quickly, they won’t recover. And those individual kids will pay the price and our economy will pay the price. So there’s that the social emotional dynamics are of course, so important. We’ve been talking.
[00:30:56] Closely the mental health and other struggles. And [00:31:00] then finally we’ve been looking at kind of the most vulnerable student populations and trying to understand what’s going on with them. So, you know, it’s not a pretty picture. , and so we’re, starting to think now about, Hey, given all of that, we’re w we’re conditioning to document it and we’ll be producing.
[00:31:16] report called the profile of the American students this winter, where we’re hoping to kind of compile the story into something that’s really understandable, but I think what’s on so many of our minds right now is where do we go from here? Is this just a question of catch-up, which is. , particularly easy problem on its own, or is it a much bigger problem of recovery renewal towards something much better, which is, you know, the biggest challenge that any of us school reform folks have, have faced.
[00:31:49] So it’s going to take all of us. It’s going to take our best ideas and it’s gonna take collaboration partnerships and very, very strong, well.
[00:31:59] GR: In [00:32:00] July, , your center published report that found that most districts are so far spending money on quote, what they know what our district’s doing today. And what would you like districts to think about when it comes to spending these.
[00:32:14] Robin: Yeah, thanks Gerard. Yeah, look, this is a massive cash dump, on districts. And I don’t think anybody was particularly surprised that what they’ve been doing is spending on, , staffing, , pay raises that they felt , were overdue. , just talked to a reporter who had dug into some data and found that there were massive expenditures on things like sports fields and, things that probably were shovel-ready right.
[00:32:39] Districts had plans, maybe somebody, a coach or somebody had been lobbying for this thing for a long time. And, uh, all of a sudden it was available. So. You know, that’s all what it is, not sustainable, right? And it’s not the stuff that’s going to, um, get a kid who, uh, has two more years [00:33:00] to graduate and just lost six months of critical math time into the college of their choice that it’s not going to cut it.
[00:33:08] what I, advise districts to do is really get clear about priorities and, I’m not opposed to sports, you know, let’s get our ducks in order first and make sure that every kid is on the path to college and career readiness. Before we talk about some of those extras. Um, and I think three, three buckets maybe, , the first is.
[00:33:33] , good old evidence-based solutions. It’s shocking to me, how few districts are really pursuing intensive, um, tutoring programs that any researcher would agree is probably the best thing you can do for catching kids up quickly, rigorous curriculum. Those kinds of just evidence-based solutions.
[00:33:52] A second bucket would be just, you know, creative approaches to catch up. We have a lot of people in the communities who have stepped up during the [00:34:00] pandemic. And provided support to kids. Let’s not close them off from the current challenges. Let’s actually bring them in, pay them for helping out with tutoring or, um, partnering for mental health and social service support.
[00:34:15] So the schools don’t have to take that on. And the third bucket would be just making investments in the future, , getting toward that sense of resiliency and, , taking pen. Discoveries and figuring out what we can do with them. Re-imagining the workforce. These are the things that we’re going to have to do.
[00:34:34] And, in three years when the money’s gone, we won’t have the option any longer
[00:34:39] GR: before I pivot to my next question. You’re the first part of your response reminded me when, you know, when you’re talking about, you know, paying for coaches and salaries. I remember when the American recovery and we invest an accurate tune, , 2009.
[00:34:53] Uh, was implemented, there were school systems that were doing the same thing. , some even hiring teachers, they let go because of cuts [00:35:00] and, within 24 months, some of those teachers had to be let go because the money they receive was not. And there wasn’t any planning. So hopefully we don’t have a, repeat of that.
[00:35:12] Robin: You’re absolutely right. History is about to repeat itself and remember the folks who are going to be laid off first , or, the most junior folks, , folks who have a lot of energy ideas and, , not necessarily the folks who are gonna move the needle the fastest for the most kids. So there we have it.
[00:35:31] GR: Well, there you go. Let’s talk about politics. , right now education is very partisan. Even with our reform movement, both public private, very fractured your center, you know, of course describes itself as a nonpartisan research institution by most accounts. , we’re living in that, , very high times of partisanship.
[00:35:50] How do you, as a leader of the center, basically walk the line in terms of talking about. School curriculum talking about research [00:36:00] and being able to do so in a way where the research is clear it’s nonpartisan and is given in a way that people can say, yeah, , the center is just a straight shooter because a lot of people aren’t doing that.
[00:36:11] How are you able to do so?
[00:36:14] Robin: Yeah, well, I do think we’ll probably, I’m pretty well-respected but a lot of different, , more part of this. Oriented folks, policymakers tend to call us from all stripes, which we’ll really proud of. I’m really not sure why, you know, we’re um, we’re people who like to. We liked to be truth tellers.
[00:36:37] , we like to surprise people. We like to be creative and unconventional. , and you know, we just try and stay focused on the question and the question at hand and not get pulled into the noise of the politics. , now, that also means that we make people on both sides angry. , and I’ve always felt like, it’s [00:37:00] a little bit of a lonely position, but on the other hand, as long as they, get over it and call us the next time, then I think , we’re doing our jobs.
[00:37:09] So, , Yeah. unfortunately it is all too unusual, but I think, you know what, we try to be a collection of people to think in the gray, , who just don’t like, , dichotomies. And luckily there seems to be still a little bit of space.
[00:37:27] GR: No. I’m glad to have you in the space because when your name is mentioned and , I’m on the right and right.
[00:37:32] Circles, people like, yeah. You know, good research, there are other names I could mention. And there are a lot of different responses other than good research. So, , continue to agree. Work. There will speak in a research. And this is my last question, , as we emerge out of the time that we’re in right now, Should researchers and educators, , what should they be thinking about?
[00:37:52] You know, we have a cadre of young scholars who are going to enter the field, , with a very different set of data points to look at. , then some of [00:38:00] us, let’s say you had 15 years ago and we’re going to have, , with 30 gubernatorial elections, , they’re going to come up. What are your recommendations to people who sit in academic academies and think tanks, research centers, but also in state and federal government.
[00:38:17] Robin: , far be it for me to really say what people should be doing. I’ll speak from my own experience. What gives me energy ideas? Inspiration is really, , getting down to. Direct contact to a students, families and educators, really listening to them, observing. , and then, trying to from there kind of, , get up to the policy implications.
[00:38:46] , it just makes it also real. And now I can’t imagine a more important time than now to do that when students and families, educators were thrown into such [00:39:00] craziness and have really, really important observations, discoveries, thoughts, reflections. , they have things to say, let’s listen to them. So the most rewarding research that we’re doing right now is interviewing people who have participated in pandemic learning pods, who just when they were out of the traditional system.
[00:39:24] What did they create? What did they discover? And it’s amazing to hear educators talk about their experience, because they’ll say this is the reason I got into teaching this kind of relationship based really, you know, customizing for kids, , families saying, Hey, I never realized that I really enjoy being really more deeply engaged in my kids’ education or kids saying, Hey, It’s really cool to be able to control my own schedule and say, well, I want to study and then have people work around that and [00:40:00] give me something that excites me.
[00:40:02] So there’s just so much rich soup there. , so much risk which soup and so much to contemplate about the systems that we’ve built and kind of ask ourselves why. , and then it’s Siri. It’s also equally important to, to listen about. How, how should we be defining success as we move forward? And how would we know that we’re getting there?
[00:40:24] I don’t think we’ve grappled with that kind of question. So I don’t know if that’s helpful. That’s where my head is. , shame on us. If we don’t take this moment to reflect.
[00:40:36] GR: I like that word, because when we often discuss education, we think of R which is resources, , and that’s important, another ours results, but yeah, let’s just take time to reflect, you know, when I heard you say that teachers.
[00:40:50] You know, we’re excited about what they were doing to say that this is in fact as why I entered the profession. And Cara had an early question, , for you, but also in your background, you worked in [00:41:00] charters, Minnesota in California, where the first two states charter law and both of those laws were created in part to give educators a chance to practice their craft their profession in unique ways.
[00:41:11] And so we can come out of this either crime or crime from. And so hopefully it’s the latter.
[00:41:21] Robin: I love that. So,
[00:41:23] GR: Robin again, thank you so much for joining Kara and I today to talk, shop about the work you’re doing. And, , as always I learned something, what I hear from you and when I read your work, so our listeners, I’m pretty sure are going to be excited to see what you come out with.
[00:41:37] Robin: I thank you so much. Yeah, it was a really fun conversation. And I will say that the pioneer Institute I ran into and I was, visiting Massachusetts and there were 12 charter school laws based at backend. No, no, 1992 or something. So y’all have been on my radar for a very long time and, , really respect your work.[00:42:00]
[00:42:00] Cara: Thank you. Thanks so much.
[00:42:59] All right. Do you [00:43:00] ever going to close it out with a tweet of the week? This one from, , 74. And the tweet is I was just talking with somebody about this this morning. It’s pretty exciting. Researchers at Harvard center for education policy research at N w E a and the Calder center will partner with a consortium of districts across the United.
[00:43:20] To provide timely information about tutoring, afterschool programs and other interventions, , timely. Yes. I love that. They’re going to do this. This is, these are some real , heavy hitters here in, the area of educational research. So figuring out by having this consortium of districts come together, whether or not.
[00:43:40] These tutoring programs, interventions, many of which I’m sure will be funded with relief money. If districts would actually decide to do that, maybe some of them have, um, if they’re actually working. And I think this goes back to conversations that we’ve been having with some of our guests are, are.
[00:43:56] Whether or not how we’re going to know if we’re getting any bang for our buck out of [00:44:00] all of the stimulus money. So, , I think it’s a great effort. We will keep an eye on it and maybe we’ll even get somebody to come talk to us about it. , the learning curve, but that’s all I got this week. My friend, next week, Gerard, we are going to be back with David Reynolds. He is a distinguished professor of English and history at the graduate center of the city, university of New York and biographer of Abe Lincoln.
[00:44:22] , his biography of Abraham Lincoln was selected as one of the top 10 books of the year by the wall street journal. So Gerard until then, I hope you have. A wonderful week. It’s always a pleasure to spend time with you.
[00:44:33] GR: I enjoy the way that we use economy of scales to get done on time.
Related Posts:
Competition Amongst States: How Tax Policy Drives Residents to Seek Better Value
/in Economic Opportunity, Featured, Podcast Hubwonk /by Editorial StaffThis week on Hubwonk (our debut video & audio edition), Host Joe Selvaggi talks with research analyst Andrew Mikula about the findings from his recent report, A Timely Tax Cut, in which he explored the relationship between state tax rates and policy and the direction of interstate migration.
Guest
Andrew Mikula is a former Economic Research Analyst at Pioneer Institute and current candidate for a Master’s in Urban Planning at Harvard University.
Get new episodes of Hubwonk in your inbox!
Read a Transcript of This Episode:
Please excuse typos.
Joe Selvaggi (00:00):
This is Hubwonk, I’m Joe Selvaggi
Joe Selvaggi (00:09):
Welcome to Hudwonk, a podcast of Pioneer Institute, a think tank in Boston. A natural consequence of being a nation of united individual states is that it creates 50 different laboratories of democracy. Each state decides how best to serve its citizens and in turn, by what means it will tax its citizens to pay for those services. The state prerogative to tax and spend has the benefit of creating competition among states to attract more tax paying residents with its value proposition. While a high tech state can assert it offers better services and a low-tech state can lay claim to lower cost of living the arbiter of a state’s value or the people themselves. All citizens can pick candidates in elections. A far more powerful way to express a preference is to optimize great from one state to another, bringing with you all future taxable income, the effect of this migration in the long run.
Joe Selvaggi (01:05):
It can be either to boost the state’s tax base or drain it of its vital revenue. How well is Massachusetts competing with this neighbor states and how are changes in tax law, such as the proposed millionaire’s tax likely to affect the movement of those with higher income who invest in and create new companies in the future? My guest today is Andrew Mikula, former research analyst of Pioneer Institute and current graduate student at Harvard’s graduate school of design. Andrew’s most recent research paper, a timely text that how New Hampshire is taking advantage of Massachusetts graduated income tax proposal maps, current interstate migration, and looks for a correlation between state tax levels and the direction of income flows. Andrew shares with us the findings of his paper and provides color on why residents may vote with their feet. When I return, I’ll be joined by research analyst, Andrew Mikula.
Joe Selvaggi (02:52):
Okay. We’re back. This is Hubwonk, I’m Joe Selvaggi and I’m now joined by Pioneer Institute’s former economics researcher and current Harvard graduate school of design master’s degree student Andrew Mikula. Welcome back to Hubwonk, Andrew.
Andrew Mikula (03:06):
Joe, thanks so much for having me back.
Joe Selvaggi (03:09):
Well, first let me congratulate you on starting your master’s degree in urban planning. I believe. How have your studies been going so far?
Andrew Mikula (03:15):
It’s going well. Yeah, a lot of requirements this semester, but we’ll get to the juicy stuff soon. And it’s an important foundation.
Joe Selvaggi (03:25):
Well, I am, I’m thrilled that you were able to take some time out of your studying to be with us. I want to explore the findings of your newest research paper, entitled a timely tax cut, how New Hampshire is taking advantage of Massachusetts graduated income tax proposal. All right. We’ve covered this topic in different ways in the past on how long, but I want to give the listeners and viewers now we’re viewing we’re now recording the visual of our, of our show. I want to give everyone some background on tax rates, what’s being proposed. What are the relative tax rates in Massachusetts and New Hampshire? Let’s start with Massachusetts. We used to be known as Taxachusetts. Where are we now?
Andrew Mikula (04:04):
Right. So I think in importantly, for our purposes of voters passed a ballot measure in the year 2000, that would lower the income tax rate from 5.9 to 5.0% over the next three years. It was later tied to benchmarks and revenue growth slowing down the tax cuts are that it only reached 5.0% last year, actually in 2020. Okay. so I think that we’ve taken a kind of incremental approach, but we have cut income taxes in recent years. New Hampshire has had a 5% tax on interest in dividends for a while, but what they don’t tax is wage income, right? So it’s only the interest in dividends you would earn on a financial asset that are, are taxed. At least for individuals, corporations is a different matter. But the tax rate is 5% on interest in dividends. Like it is Massachusetts today.
Joe Selvaggi (05:08):
Okay. So that seems like a stark contrast. We have 5% on income here, Massachusetts. So that’s the lowest has been for a while. It just got to 5% recently. But that’s a flat tax for everyone, every dollar earned in Massachusetts tax at that 5% rate in New Hampshire, it’s zero. They do tax some income that comes from interest in dividends, but not from income. So that seems like a pretty stark difference. I want to get to a different aspect of, of the tax code. I, I mentioned that ours is a flat tax rate. Your paper talks about a proposal for a graduated rate. I’m fairly sure we have a federal tax rate that is graduated, but explain to our listeners, what does that mean? What do we have now flat and what what is being proposed
Andrew Mikula (05:52):
That’s right. So the rate itself, Massachusetts levy is in terms of income, personal income taxes, 5% is, is relatively on par with the average for state governments. What’s relatively uncommon is we have a flat tax. So we tax people at 5% of their income, regardless of if they’re making, you know, 40,000 a year or 400,000 a year. And that’s so in the, especially in the context of the Northeast, that makes us pretty unique actually.
Joe Selvaggi (06:28):
So I’m graduate Texas sounds like people who have more money might pay a higher rate. I want to talk about the, sort of the one aspect of raising taxes is raising taxes on everyone is unpopular. I would say the flat tax does have the benefit of, of constraining legislators inclined to raise taxes by it’s very hard to raise taxes on everyone. To me, graduated income taxes, seem a bit like a divide and conquer. We identify a group we’d like to raise the taxes on and every everyone votes yes. To vote to tax the other guy. Do I have a good sense of the power of a graduated tax?
Andrew Mikula (07:09):
Yeah, you, you do Joan, no one thinks that, you know, someone else can spend their money more effectively or better than, than they can, but it’s appealing that to take a small segment of the population and say, they’re going to be paying more because they’re not paying enough now. And the rest of the people are going to accrue the benefits in terms of, you know, public services. I think where that gets complicated is in part the effect on, on the revenue volatility that comes with, you know, having a tax, that’s not quite as broad-based as say a sales tax. And so, you know, income taxes have been shown to lead to, you know, kind of steeper drops in some tax revenue collections, and as a whole during recessions especially the great recession actually,
Joe Selvaggi (08:17):
Okay. So I want to drill down a little more into what we mean by graduated tax. It means we’re, we’re texting higher income people at a higher rate in general and lower income people at a lower rate who, or what is being proposed in Massachusetts, what is this so-called millionaire’s tax and what is it to rate?
Andrew Mikula (08:37):
Right? So the proposal in Massachusetts would levy a 4% surtax on annual personal income, over a million dollars. That’s both wage income, capital gains you know, he’s selling a business, et cetera. And this proposal has a really interesting history. It was, it’s a pretty bottom up proposal, but it was actually struck down by the Massachusetts Supreme judicial court in, in 2018 before being rekindled as a legislative petition the following year and changing the Massachusetts constitution which this tax would do is a very iterative process. And so it’s, it’s not going on the statewide ballot until the fall of 2022 and voters have a chance to weigh in before it’s signed into law.
Joe Selvaggi (09:37):
So we sh we shouldn’t panic right now. This is something that’s coming, as you say, from, from the bottom up, actually from the legislator. So where did it start? Well, let me take a step back. We have a 5% income tax now and we’ve just gone through a recession through a epidemic that had a slight recession the economy shut down for a time. And there was a lot of concern that with the, a depressed economy, you would be a depressed revenue flow. I’ve read that the state has actually had a surplus of revenue. In fact, they surprise to the upside on revenue. Is, do you see this interest in raising the tax rate on millionaires being driven by a need for revenue? Is there a need for revenue in Massachusetts right now?
Andrew Mikula (10:28):
Right. So like I alluded to, you know, this proposal has been on the table since 2015 or so, so I’m not sure it’s, it’s accurate to argue that this is, you know, the reason why this proposal was put forward is not because of the pandemic. Right. but I also think that you know, we we’ve, there were some temporary impacts on the state revenues from COVID, but our, our bounce back has been much quicker than in the great recession, right? Because the, the economic recession that we’ve had because of COVID reflects the presence of the virus whose presence has wavered, you know, a lot over the course of the last year and a half, whereas, you know, kind of more deep rooted problems with our financial system characterized or caused much of the previous recessions wolves. And so it’s true that currently Massachusetts tax collections are, are essentially at record highs in a lot of major categories. And on top of that, we have a large amount of federal stimulus dollars still to spend in the base state. So I think one argument that opponents of the tax hike make is that we don’t meet, we don’t necessarily need this added revenue right now in kind of an urgent way. That’s true.
Joe Selvaggi (12:12):
That’s fair. So I’ll accept that if this has been coming down the line since 2015 and the economic situation has sometimes been better, sometimes been worse. It’s not really motivated by an immediate need for revenue, but rather a, perhaps a longterm desire for additional revenue to be spent at the state level. So let’s take it out of the current events and say, okay, this is the long-term direction of Massachusetts. We’d like to tax those who make more than a million dollars at a higher rate than those who make less than a million dollars. But let’s talk about then let’s shift to the focus of your paper which doesn’t just merely look at the relative tax rates of New Hampshire and Massachusetts. It talks about some other states and their relative tax rates, but the crux of your paper talks about what I like to call the Footloose nature of the individuals within each state that is, each of us has a choice as to which state we want to live in. And sometimes tax rates have an influence on who moves, where tell us from a 10,000 feet view, what your conclusions or your observations were on the relationship between the relative tax rate of a state and the relative inflow or outflow of higher earners to those states.
Andrew Mikula (13:23):
Yeah. Let me say, you know, the tax cut in New Hampshire combined with Massachusetts is a legislative initiative here or constitutional amendment, really. I think some folks are concerned that it will lead to, you know a decrease in economic activity, decreased of investment in Massachusetts are making it harder or less economical to create jobs and invest in businesses. So we can actually measure how the tax bases of certain states are changing because of people moving from one state to another, in a given year. And that’s exactly what I’ve done in this paper. You can see on a graph that in a lot of cases, capital flows between a given pair of states correspond quite closely to changes in tax policy in those states. And, you know, it doesn’t necessarily flip the sign right away in which a state is the risk net receiver of more of those tax dollars, but it’s a long-term effect that plays out over 10 or 15 years, which is one thing that makes, you know, tax proposals like this. So insidious,
Joe Selvaggi (14:49):
Yeah, I was struck by your paper. You do quantify those outflows. And when we talk about this is before any changes, either the ones in Massachusetts currently proposed, or the ones in New Hampshire proposed but in 2019 two years ago, the outflow of income from Massachusetts to New Hampshire in one year was $426 million outflow from Massachusetts to New Hampshire. Now we can’t know the motive for moving north, but it can’t, it can’t be the weather. W what are your thoughts? How is it that, you know it is the tax rate. Is there any other confounding factor that you think might contribute to people moving out of Massachusetts towards New Hampshire?
Andrew Mikula (15:32):
Absolutely. I, you know, taxes are a part of the story, but I think a big one is the cost of living and new Hampshire’s tax rates, you know, on wage income at least have been zero for as long as I can remember. But, you know, even when you, when you start cutting Massachusetts as tax rates, as we have done the past 20 years, there’s still this, this gap here, you know, New Hampshire was not New Hampshire has not been sending folks to Massachusetts on net, as long as we’ve been keeping track of the IRS has been keeping track. So, and I think you’d also see that kind of cost of living cost of housing concern and start to creep in, and places like Rhode Island, Rhode Island has, you know, cut taxes more aggressively than we have in the past, you know, 10 or 15 years.
Andrew Mikula (16:28):
But there are certainly other factors in the mix because, you know, we can see that, you know, people are on net moving from Massachusetts to Rhode Island. And despite their changes in the tax code, the, the top marginal tax rate in Rhode Island is still higher than it is here. So it’s, it’s, it’s really interesting to see how, you know, oftentimes you need to go deeper than just the, you know, headline tax rate and understand how changes in tax rates over time can affect things, because people are also taking into account things like the cost of living and family connections and job growth, et cetera.
Joe Selvaggi (17:09):
I think it’s worth mentioning also a you talk about the cost of living. I think those who assume are higher tax rate means better services, perhaps better schools or better roads, better bridges infrastructure. I’ve been to New Hampshire. It’s less than an hour away in a car from downtown Boston. There bridges and roads look fine to me. Do they have problems with services and frankly, if you have the data, how do they collect revenue to support their state’s requirements?
Andrew Mikula (17:38):
Yeah, so New Hampshire does kind of conform to some of the kind of low tax state paradigms, and that it, it spends a lot less than Massachusetts on a per capita basis. I’d also say that New Hampshire has, you know, the lowest poverty rate in the country. So compared to, you know, how much, if you’re, if your goal is to provide a certain base level of, of services that ensure a certain quality of life, New Hampshire might not have the same needs as most other states and Massachusetts is, is a low poverty state too. But I think it also is, is less than modernist than New Hampshire in terms of socioeconomic status. That said, I think a lot of the difference in terms of the level of spending between New Hampshire and Massachusetts still reflects policy differences, not just different needs, New Hampshire is the only state east of the Mississippi that doesn’t provide some sort of public preschool. They’re also pretty strict about time costs for services to the people using those services. You know, higher education in New Hampshire is largely funded by tuition, as opposed to transfers from the state general fund pension funds for state workers are mostly funded by the workers’ salaries while they’re working as opposed to regular contributions from the state. And there are several examples of that sort of cost cutting measure that has a state, the state money.
Joe Selvaggi (19:24):
So it’s a we, we believe in a Federalist system. So you have different states with different needs and different priorities. So you, you make a great case if there’s more to the story than just a marginal tax rates at the state level. I, I appreciate that. Let’s talk about the the millionaire’s tax, the additional 4% tax on those earning more than a million dollars, there are going to be the ones who are affected, and they’re the ones who are likely to potentially vote with their feet. What’s the profile of someone who earns more than a million dollars in a year. Is it a rich banker or is it someone else,
Andrew Mikula (19:59):
Right? Well, I think, you know, there may be a fair share of rich bankers, but prior work that pioneer has conducted has also shown that, that, you know, a large plurality of the people who, you know, make a million dollars in a year in a given 10 year period or so do so only once that’s based on IRS data. And I think that’s a fairly good indicator that a lot of these people are cashing out on investments they’ve made so that they can either retire or they’re selling a business or a home, or what have you. And so I think an ostensible goal of a new Hampshire’s policy here was to in cutting the interest in dividends tax was to lower the tax burden on some older people and also attract more taxpayers that are, are going to consume a lot in New Hampshire and pay a lot in property taxes as well. But I think it’s more complicated than just, you know, there’s a banker there’s, you know, a real estate developer, et cetera.
Joe Selvaggi (21:26):
So you’re, that’s a very interesting piece of data. We’ve covered it a bit on hub Blanca in the past. So people who earn a million dollars in general and over 10 year period, do it only once, which suggests they’re not earning an income and a salary more than a million dollars, but rather it’s what we would call a liquidity event. They’ve sold a house, they sold a business, something that perhaps they’ve built over the course of their lifetime, and they want to essentially cash out, perhaps retire, perhaps do something else. But even if it is bankers, isn’t it people who are creating businesses by investing and hoping to profit from taking some risks and investing. In other words, isn’t it people who are creating businesses and creating jobs that are most apt to be effected by a tax on ultimately their, their success, their ultimate cash out.
Andrew Mikula (22:13):
Right. And I think that’s, you know, that very reason is, has been one of the strongest arguments in the past for either reducing income taxes or looking for, you know, alternative ways of taxing the economic activity that comes out of a place. And I think the, the, you know, the economic literature might be divided about how exactly to implement something like this, but there is evidence that, that state level of taxes on income well tend to reduce incentives to earn income. And, you know, that’s something we need to weigh against other forms of taxation that have different effects sales or consumption-based taxes might overly burden certain people, depending on, on what they’re buying property taxes might be hard to avoid in the short term might be relatively stable even during recessions when a lot of people are out of work. So it’s a trade off that I think you know Warren, some more discussion, but in general, I’d say, you know, people like earning income taxing it is means less income, less work, less investment for in, into the economy.
Joe Selvaggi (23:57):
Yes. you know, I, it seems intuitively obvious that you tax something, you’d get less of it. I think policy makers understand let’s say, in the form of sin taxes they tax tobacco or alcohol with the stated goal of trying to reduce its use. It seems to follow that taxing income would either make people choose to have to be compensated differently, or take their income with them to a place where it’s taxed less. Out of curiosity, does it, in fact, New Hampshire tax it must raise revenue in other forms it’s in the form of consumption tax, I guess, sales tax and property tax is that how they raise their revenue in New Hampshire?
Andrew Mikula (24:41):
Largely. So they actually also have some higher business taxes and we do in Massachusetts, but you’re right, that instead of a broad-based sales tax, they have some, you know, more targeted excise taxes. And also one thing that’s pretty unique about New Hampshire is they also have state owned you know, kind of stores that do a lot of business to out-of-state customers. And a famous example is the slew of liquor stores that are right over the Massachusetts border that you know, the technically are not taxed, but it’s New Hampshire collecting that sales revenue. And that’s helped explain how almost 20% of new Hampshire’s kind of unrestricted revenue in a given year actually comes from some of these sin taxes or other excise taxes.
Joe Selvaggi (25:52):
Good. So a Massachusetts pays its own income taxes and it pays some new Hampshire’s alcohol taxes. Is that right for helping New Hampshire make ends meet with our, when we drive north to to the state run a liquor store,
Andrew Mikula (26:08):
Essentially. Yes. You know, it’s this sort of paradigm where New Hampshire draws out of state customers to essentially pay its tax bills is already happening on the kind of consumption side of things
Joe Selvaggi (26:27):
I enjoyed in your PC. You didn’t just talk about New Hampshire and Massachusetts, as we’ve talked a little bit about the Connecticut Rhode Island we’ve had inflows from those two states. I was amazed to learn you even tracked New York and New Jersey. We’ve had substantial inflows from those states as well because they have substantially higher income tax on high net worth individuals, $200 million, roughly from each Massachusetts from New York and New Jersey respectively. That’s an impressive number. Would you conclude then that New Hampshire and New York also decamped from those locations largely because of the relative tax rates or are there other confounding issues in those, in those cases?
Andrew Mikula (27:14):
Yeah, I think that’s certainly part of it. You know, there are even in, in some parts of New York, you know, you could make more bang for your buck argument in Massachusetts cost of living wise. But I think what’s really striking to me is in the case of New York, you know, it used to be that, that more, you know, adjusted gross income from migrating taxpayers was going from Massachusetts to New York. And then some point in the mid two thousands, you know, it changed sign. And in 2019, it’s, you know, $170 million that migrating new Yorkers are adding to our tax base every year.
Joe Selvaggi (28:04):
So that’s substantial. And again there are two very, very wealthy states with high services. So really the, the major variable there between, let’s say, New York city and Metro Boston, if you will, if you will is cost of living in primarily income tax.
Andrew Mikula (28:23):
Hmm. I’m also fascinated. I think it’s still kind of, we’re still kind of in this weird limbo with what effect the, or how long-term the remote work revolution will last, which I think can certainly impact whether someone’s willing to, you know, pack up and move to New Hampshire and, and have a longer commute to work. But you know, it’s New York has certainly been hit harder than most states in that regard. So it’s going to be especially interesting to follow the tax flows between New York and Massachusetts in recent, in upcoming years.
Joe Selvaggi (29:06):
That’s very interesting. We didn’t really talk about it too much, but we did, we have talked in past, have long episodes that COVID really made us aware of the fact that we could remote work remotely. And if you want to live in New Hampshire and enjoy the lower income tax and you work in Boston, it’s a heck of a commute. And if you only have to do that three days a week, instead of five days a week, you may be more inclined to explore moving to New Hampshire. Is that what you’re saying?
Andrew Mikula (29:35):
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
Joe Selvaggi (29:38):
Wonderful. All right. So we’re getting close to the end of our time. I, I appreciate you taking time with me. How can our listeners and new viewers find your paper, read more about your work and and see the graphs for themselves.
Andrew Mikula (29:54):
It’s all@pioneerinstitute.org is our recent work. We do a lot of research and do tax policy and, and broader economic opportunity issues. Thanks so much for having me, Joe.
Joe Selvaggi (30:06):
I appreciate your time, Andrew, and best of luck with your studies. I hope you enjoy it.
Joe Selvaggi (30:13):
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. It will be easier for you and better for us. If you subscribe to Hubwonk on iTunes, if you’d like to help others find Hubwonk, it would be great if you would offer a five-star rating or a favorable review, it’s always welcome. If you’d like to share Hubwonk with friends. If you have ideas for me, or comments or suggestions for topics for future episodes, you’re welcome to email me at hubwonk@pioneerinstitute.org. Please join me next week for a new episode of Hubwonk
Check out our most recent episodes:
Bernat Olle Gets a Visa to Improve the World
/in Economic Opportunity, Featured, JobMakers /by Editorial StaffThis week on JobMakers, Host Denzil Mohammed talks with Dr. Bernat Olle, co-founder and CEO of Vedanta Biosciences, about his journey from Catalonia, Spain, to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he continued his Chemical Engineering studies at MIT. Navigating the complex immigration system while seeking purpose in his career, he eventually found his calling and was lucky enough to remain in the U.S. to see it through: designing a new class of medicines to modulate the human microbiome. They duscuss how everyone wins when foreign-born talent is welcomed into vibrant, entrepreneurial ecosystems like those in the U.S., when they’re able to collaborate with others from the U.S. and around the world and come up with incredible ideas to benefit all people. Bernat also expresses a sense of kinship with immigrants far removed from the labs and boardrooms. He knows that the same aspiration – opportunity – attracted those who came here with nothing but a suitcase and a dream, as you’ll discover in this week’s JobMakers.
Guest:
Dr. Bernat Olle is a co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Vedanta Biosciences. He has been a member of the founding teams of several companies of the PureTech portfolio and served as a member of the Board of Directors of Vedanta Biosciences and Follica Biosciences. In 2013 Dr. Olle was named “Innovator of the Year” in MIT Technology Review Spain’s “Innovators under 35” awards. He also received the 2019 Barry M. Portnoy Immigrant Entrepreneur Award from The Immigrant Learning Center. He completed his doctoral work at the Chemical Engineering Department at MIT, where he developed a novel method for large-scale bacterial culture. During his graduate work, Dr. Olle was awarded the “la Caixa” fellowship. Dr. Olle received his B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Universitat Rovira i Virgili, in Catalonia, his M.S. and PhD. in Chemical Engineering Practice from MIT, and his M.B.A. from the MIT Sloan School of Management. He has published his work in journals including Nature and Nature Biotechnology.
Get new episodes of JobMakers in your inbox!
Read a Transcript of This Episode:
Please excuse typos.
Denzil Mohammed:
I’m Denzil Mohammed, and this is JobMakers.
Denzil Mohammed:
Is it any surprise that the epicenters of innovation like Kendall square Silicon valley also have incredible diversity that the cities with the highest rates of PhDs like Brookline, Massachusetts, so Palo Alto, California, are multi-ethnic and multicultural, the United States attracts the world’s best and brightest to give us Google Tesla, the Madrona vaccine, but the thing that links the Nobel prize winning immigrants with those picking all vegetables and washing dishes is opportunity for Dr. Bernat Olle, co-founder and CEO of Vedanta biosciences, seeking opportunity, brought him all the way from Catalonia, Spain to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he continued his chemical engineering studies at MIT navigating the complex immigration system while seeking purpose in his career. He eventually found his calling and was lucky enough to remain in the US to see it through designing a new class of medicines to modulate the human microbiome when foreign talent is welcomed into vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystems, like those in the US, when they’re able to collaborate with Americans and some people with people from around the world, they can come up with incredible ideas to benefit humanity, everyone wins. Bernat also feel a sense of kinship with immigrants far removed from labs and boardrooms.
Denzil Mohammed:
He knows that just like those with nothing but a suitcase and a dream, the same thing, brought them here, seeking opportunity, as we’ll discover in this week’s episode of JobMakers.
Bernat Olle:
Good to see you, Denzil.
Denzil Mohammed:
I remember you describing this concept of the microbiome and relating it to antibiotics in this fascinating story of your honeymoon. And you have this radical way of thinking of “no, let, let the body figure it out.” Take us back to that time. And, why is this kind of field of science important today?
Bernat Olle:
All species of animals live colonized with microbes on the skin, on the intestinal track and the mouth and the vaginal tract. All those are chock full of microbes. And that’s the way it’s been from the very beginning before we evolved as a species, this world was a bacterial soup. So every species has evolved surrounded by bacteria. And so it’s not surprising that this bacteria play very important roles in health, and specifically the bacteria that live in humans are referred to with the term human microbiome. And so that’s basically the collection of bacteria that you carry around for life with you. As soon as the moment you were born and specifically in the intestine, that community is more stance that we have the most bacteria, trillions of bacteria, almost as many or more microbial cells in your body than homosapien cells.
Bernat Olle:
And they play very important roles. They help protect from infection. They help calibrate the set point of the immune system, which is important in our immunity and allergy potential in cancer. And there’s a number of things that we do in our modern life that perturb that community. The diet that we eat has a big effect on the microbes that we have inside, because what we eat is what they eat. So the Western diet is generally not great for microbes. That’s maybe the reason why there’s a number of chronic diseases that are advancing more rapidly in the west and in the developing world. The use of antibiotics is another big perturbation. From the time we’re born until our teen years the average person gets tens of courses of antibiotics and cumulatively. Some of them can have a important effect in damaging the communities of microbes in the intestine.
Bernat Olle:
And so one of the things that we’re trying to do as a company is to be able to undo some of the collateral damage that antibiotics leave behind. Their use is sometimes warranted. Sometimes unwarranted, back to the honeymoon story, but they’re here to stay. And they’re very necessary in hospital settings, but also they create a series of issues, you know, use of antibiotics to prevent certain problems, and then other problems emerge. You become more susceptible to picking up infections from the hospital environment when your gut has no natural competitors against those pathogens. So one of the things we’re trying to do is ensure antibiotics have been used for the purpose they need to be used for and undo some of the damage by helping reconfigure or rebalance the community of bacteria that’s in the intestine that had been damaged by the antibiotic and in doing so, we hope as a starting point that we can prevent re-infections that are very problematic, for example, in hospital settings.
Denzil Mohammed:
When you were first starting out as an immigrant with an accent in the Boston area, how were you received? And as a European person, knowing what the entrepreneurial environment was like back then, let’s say in the late nineties, when you started school how do you think it would foreigner would have been received there?
Bernat Olle:
I think my integration in the US was very smooth. Today I am an American citizen. My child is American and Catalan and, and I identify as one of us. And I really have to think hard to think of instances where I have been treated as an immigrant in a negative way. The first year I came. I remember when I was a poor graduate student, I would go to buy my fruit at Haymarket if it had been there on weekend mornings. So it’s very cheap, but but it’s also terrible quality. Like half of the fruit is really literally rotten. And so I remember the first times I’d go there, I would try to pick the fruit rather than have the one that they hand you, because when they handed it to you, like half of it, you have to throw it away, but the store owners hate it when people try to pick the fruit.
Bernat Olle:
And so I remember you know, in one of my first visits, somebody really got ticked off that I was trying to pick the fruit and say, just go back to where you came from. But that’s like the only time that has ever happened to me. And if this was reversed, if it was like a person trying to like come to Spain, especially if you look any different than the locals. I feel like the racism there runs in different ways, the US has issues of course, with race. And there’s a lot of work to do. But I think some of the other countries, like in old-school Europe that have traditionally seen less immigration, and they’ve been more insular are much less prepared to welcome and assimilate people from other origins and get to a point where, where they’re one of them. I’m having a hard time imagining how the experiment in the opposite direction could have been smooth. And so I guess my parting point on this is that for all the issues that we have with immigration in the U S and with racism, the U S has done a much better job at assimilating and benefited from contributions of immigrants as just about any other country in the world.
Denzil Mohammed:
Thank you for acknowledging that. I think that’s a really important point to make, and that’s what makes this country special. I want to take it back a few years. You had the experience as did I, feeling that intense pressure where your visa is about to run out? You’re not sure what what’s going to happen, what you’re going to do is a lot of uncertainty. So tell us about that time for you.
Bernat Olle:
I’ve been doing my PhD at MIT, and I was hoping to find a job in the U S to stay here after the PhD. I was on a J-1 visa and that expired, you know, a short period of time after Igraduated, and I did an atrocious job search. I was just doing the work. And I figured, yeah, like when I’m done, people are going to want to hire me, because look, I went to this great school and the world doesn’t really work like that. Like you have to, you have to really do the homework. And, and basically what I found is that when I interviewed, I didn’t put a lot of care or thought into what I should do.
Bernat Olle:
I just interview with firms that were reputable. Why, because other people did it too. Like some of the well-known strategy consulting firms is a terrible way to go about picking a career incidentally. So I was rejected by just about every one of them. And it was only when I had a few weeks left on my visa and I really had to think through, okay, what do I really want to do that? Finally, I put some thought into like the career that I wanted and ended up going into, the direction that I went. My first job offer, which was in a venture creation firm in town that starts biotech companies,came really, really close to the bell. I guess it could have gone a different way and that bad planning could have resulted in me going back home. Then as you know, like finding a job from abroad becomes a much more complicated process. But because I did get a job here, then I jumped on the train of the H1 green card citizenship, which is a train that at most times in the United States has worked very well. During the last administration, there were some serious steps back as you know, but for me, this was actually a very smooth process.
Denzil Mohammed:
And it was around that time that you were able to secure a work in the US that this idea of purpose was playing a role in the kinds of jobs you were looking for and the kind of trajectory you wanted to have. I vividly recall another MIT grad on this podcast and immigrant entrepreneur saying that everyone from MIT graduates and, you know, wants to do good in the world. And then they go on to work at the biggest consulting firms. You were in a privileged position as an MIT graduate with a PhD. How did that idea of purpose and giving back shape where you are today and where do you plan on going with that?
Bernat Olle:
My career path was very much born out of rejection. I try to follow the career path that others in business school and in graduate school followed which is the classic, you know, try to go to a very well-known firm, like a strategy consulting firm or a bank where you’re paid very well, and it looks beautiful on a resume. And it’s basically the game of compensation, titles, prestige. And I probably very much would have played that game if I hadn’t been rejected The blessing was that by having been rejected from those firms and actually having to really think, okay, what do I really want to do? And the reality is that I had never dreamed about working for clients, evaluating mergers and acquisitions or market shares of consumer products. Like that’s not what I was passionate about. I liked science.
Denzil Mohammed:
That sounds like so much fun. Come on.
Bernat Olle:
I like science. I like biotechnology. In my free time, I would read papers. That’s what I would do. And so basically my first job was going to do something that I already liked to do for free, which was read about cool science, talk with inventors about cool science and try to figure out, you know, can you imagine translating that to people? And is there a role for a biotech company to try to do that? And that’s what I did for my first decade professionally, until one of these projects that I started became obsessive and offer me that I didn’t want to do anything else. And then I decided that I just focus on that full-time, and that was my current company
Denzil Mohammed:
Hearing you talk about your experience. I find it fascinating, and I see that an immigrant has a certain special quality, but at the same time, you were a young person. You were just going with the flow, doing what everyone else was doing. And as you said, you didn’t have this master plan. And so you end up with, you know, a few weeks before your visa is about to end, and then suddenly you have to go beyond what your classmates were doing and think more strategically and position yourself in such a way that you would be able to stay in the US and continue this investment that you had made to come all the way across the world, spend money in and get an education at MIT and continue living that dream. Today, you’re a strong advocate for immigration reform, particularly making it easier for immigrants like you, who are inherently entrepreneurial to start businesses here in the U S that create jobs for Americans. Tell us more about your feelings as to the immigration system being able to work for people like you and other high skilled immigrants.
Bernat Olle:
I think that the immigration system and the immigration culture in the US has been a gift for both the US and for immigrants during most times, and, and this country sort of has cycles and you know, depending on their government, we’ve moved forward or move backwards. But the arc has been in the direction of immigration adding a lot to the country. I think that the US is really in a privileged position where, because of its culture of having been more welcoming to people that come here seeking opportunity it has, and because of being an open liberal place in the world where such immigrant entrepreneurs can find a welcoming environment to actually pursue their objectives, which is something that other superpowers don’t have, like this combination of a welcoming culture.
Bernat Olle:
But because of that, a lot of folks have come here and, and made very substantial contributions to the economy and also benefited by developing their careers in a way that they could not have developed their careers back where they came from. So, you know, I think this is really a unique gift of this land that many other countries in the world would like to have. And I think this is very important very important to preserve because if in the future that sees and the talent entrepreneurial talent in in tech, in biotech and other areas decided that it’s better for them to develop their careers and pursue opportunities in China or somewhere else the US would stop being the very competitive economy and society that it is.
Denzil Mohammed:
And I’d like to direct our listeners to the fact that the Nobel prizes are being announced, and guess who’s winning them in the US? Foreign-Born people who came here to study and innovate has been a huge trend, 30% of all Nobel Laureates have been people born in other countries. Specifically the past four years we saw a dramatic decrease in the number of visas that were issued, the number of international students who were coming here to study. And then we have this pandemic and the first two vaccines came from companies that had immigrant co-founders. Not just that, immigrants are concentrated in industries that got us through the pandemic, like cleaning like healthcare. Can you talk a little bit about the impact of immigration in the U S during this pandemic, from what you’ve seen?
Bernat Olle:
Yeah. I mean, I can talk about biotechnology because that’s the field that’s near and dear to me. And you said, you’re right. The, the impact on how the world got out of COVID was sensational, right? You have the founder of, of BioNTech, the founders on Madronathe CEO of Pfizer and the list goes on because there’s many people that have been involved in this amazing vaccine projects that are immigrants that have been welcome. The combination has been so crucial, right? Because it’s not a coincidence that so much of the innovation with vaccines has happened in the US – it happened here because this is a country that values its pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry as a national security asset in ways that other countries in the world don’t. Other countries in the world are content with free riding with some of the innovation that takes place in the U S and not spending on those industries. In the U S the approach has been different.
Bernat Olle:
And, and then at the same time, you have this, these brilliant immigrants coming in, attracted by this environment and supercharging it by creating these companies that in the moment of need come through, right? And I think that Pfizer, Moderna, these groups coming through with a vaccine that we got in our arms in less than a year which was a completely new technology that had not been used before with precedent. It’s just phenomenal. You know, it’s not surprising to anybody in the industry that there were so many immigrants involved because, you know, you look at any company like our company, there’s a significant portion of folks that were born elsewhere. And the reality is that, you know, talent, intelligence skills are fairly widely distributed all over the world. And you know, the ability to attract it to Cambridge and concentrate it here so that companies can benefit from, is what’s made the biotech industry so powerful and so influential in Massachusetts.
Denzil Mohammed:
You’re in the business of saving lives. You’re a job creator. You’re a scientist, you’re in the heart of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Yet. I know that when you were awarded the Barry Portnoy immigrant entrepreneur award for life science in 2019, you found a link to your own immigrant story to those foreign born students from Africa and Eastern Europe that your mother taught many years ago. What is that link?
Bernat Olle:
My mother who’s now retired used to be a teacher and for, for a good part of her career she taught immigrants that were coming most often from the north of Africa, but other times from Eastern Europe and another times also from central America either because of war or unrest in their areas, or just because of proximity, allowing opportunity in the case of Northern African immigrants. This would often be, you know, a lot of immigration from Northern Africa. It usually came because we grow a lot of fruit in the country, and there was a need for labor to help pick it up. But now those communities have established and they stayed there and they brought their families and they needed to learn the language. They needed to learn how to apply for a driver’s license or how to fill a form for social security.
Bernat Olle:
And if you don’t speak the language and you don’t know some of the basic things it’s hard to do that first step of integrating, right? So my mom helped many of those immigrants with this first step of doing some of the basic things, like learning the language, learning how to learn, how to do some of the basic things that you’re gonna have to do to become a functioning citizen in this place. But, you know, there’s a common element in all forms of immigration, which is this search for opportunity, right? Looking for something better than maybe you don’t imagine being able to do where you are. And so in that sense, the mindset is, it’s the same mindset across all immigrants, right? You’re willing to leave certain things behind that you liked because you want to take the risk of something that could be better.
Denzil Mohammed:
And you’re leaving behind family and a culture that you grew up at and food that you loved in order to seek that opportunity. It’s not an easy thing to do. Bernat Olles, thank you so much for joining us on JobMakers. I really appreciate it talking to you today, and I wish you all the success in the world.
Bernat Olle:
Thanks, Denzil.
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 so much for joining us for today’s inspiring story of another enterprising immigrant entrepreneur. If you have feedback or know someone, we should talk to, email D E N Z I L at jobmakerspodcast.org I’m Denzil Mohammed. Join us next Thursday at noon for another episode of JobMakers.
Related Posts:
CRPE’s Robin Lake on COVID School Closures & Learning Loss
/in Academic Standards, COVID Education, Featured, Podcast, rCOVID /by Editorial StaffThis week on “The Learning Curve,” co-hosts Gerard Robinson and Cara Candal talk with Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), a non-partisan research and policy analysis organization developing transformative, evidence-based solutions for K-12 public education. Robin describes the type of research CRPE conducts and how it has evolved over time, and shares her view of the impact it should have on schools, teachers, and families. She discusses CRPE’s work tracking school closures across the country at the height of the pandemic, the methodology used, and the findings so far. Robin reviews key takeaways from CRPE’s July report on how districts are allocating federal COVID-19 relief funds, and talks about how districts should spend those dollars. After sharing what her team will be focusing on as we emerge from the pandemic, she describes the challenges of leading a non-partisan research organization and remaining committed to the mission during a highly partisan era, with schools and curricula increasingly being drawn into political battles.
Stories of the Week: Finance and economics education improves young people’s financial literacy and helps prevent credit card and student loan debt, and insufficient savings for retirement. In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio is ending the school district’s Gifted and Talented program by fall 2022, in favor of a new program which he claims is more equitable.
Guest:
The next episode will air on Wednesday, October 20th with guest, David Reynolds, a Distinguished Professor of English and History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the 2020 author of Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times, selected one of the Top Ten Books of the Year by the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post.
Tweet of the Week:
News Links:
New York Post: NY to Phase Out Gifted and Talented Program
CNBC: To raise successful children, teach them about economics
Get new episodes of The Learning Curve in your inbox!
Read a Transcript of This Episode:
Please excuse typos.
[00:00:00] Cara: Hello listeners. It is. , I’m going to call it Nobel prize week here on the learning curve. I am here with the fantastic Mr. Gerard Robinson, who George did. You wouldn’t know about prices?
[00:00:11] GR: Not yet, but, , my time will come.
[00:00:14] Cara: next year. Yeah. I was thinking I might be next year. No, I’m really excited because you know, who did probably read that Joshua anchors of the, Massachusetts Institute of technology also known as MIT has won the Nobel prize in economics, , for his research, which includes research on, , charter school effectively.
[00:00:37] So no that, oh, see, I’m super excited about this because you know, well, you and I are both charter school nerds and years ago with pioneer Institute. , I published a book about charter schools in Massachusetts and, Angrist and his team are heavily cited throughout that book. They studied Boston charter schools in particular at which, they found to [00:01:00] be very effective.
[00:01:00] Can you imagine drug? They actually found these schools to be incredibly effective , and it’s just really feels great for him and his team, such, great team of researchers for Angus who has, uh, you know, in his research goes far beyond charter schools, but his game is really like finding natural.
[00:01:17] Charter schools are among them, right. They provide, a randomized control trial right there without having to actually, separate kids into groups because they separate themselves. And the whole idea being that you can compare kids who applied to charter school lotteries and did not get in, in kids who applied to charter school lotteries and did get in.
[00:01:36] And you’ve got a similarly motivated group. Hence natural. And I just have to share with you Gerard, that I have memories of folks who don’t like charter schools so much saying to me, after reading my books or reading my. I don’t know this research that you cite. It can’t be very high quality and I’m thinking, well, okay, now, now you’ve got a Nobel prize winner.
[00:01:55] So how’s that for high quality. So that’s, it’s gotta be on the learning curve. It is [00:02:00] here we are. We’re prize week Gerard. So what’s on your re I, that’s not even my story the week, by the way, , just the intro, because I’m so excited.
[00:02:09] GR: Well, you actually sent me up. Well, because my article of the week is about economic education and K-12 education.
[00:02:16] Cara: Imagine that I didn’t even mean to. So
[00:02:20] GR: my story is from Michelle Fox and she is with C NBC and it’s from October 11th. And the title is to raise successful. Children, teach them about economics, education experts say. So I grew up in a home where we did not talk a lot about money, whether it was personal finance or whether it was how to say.
[00:02:39] How to use a credit card. We just did not do so and come, we’ll find out I’m not radically different from a lot of families today. And so the author basically said, listen, if we expect. For our children to become responsible handlers of power, which includes personal finance and economics, guess what? They should learn something about [00:03:00] economics.
[00:03:00] And she reminds us that if we don’t think we have an economics problem or a personal finance problem, just take a look at student loan debt, you know, which is 1.6 trillion and take a look at credit card debt. And so in previous, you know, several years, in fact, States have actually made a push to try and talk a lot about financial literacy and that led to April becoming financial literacy month.
[00:03:25] We’re proud to find out that October this month, mark, the first ever national economic education law. And this is something that’s been supported by man works. And who is the president and CEO of the council of economic education. And she’s a member of CNBC’s invest in financial wellness council. And what she said is that people have to start paying attention to how to look at societal issues through the lens of economics, whether that’s.
[00:03:53] COVID whether it’s looking at finance or even education, how we funded that economics [00:04:00] matters a lot. Well, in order for that to take place, we had to take a look and really prove to people that economics was something we needed to study. Because if you look at our family, We have challenges. For example, the author identified that various industry research found that get this two or three families lack any type of emergency savings.
[00:04:19] 78% of families that have paycheck to paycheck and three and five adults and not maintain a monthly budget. And when they did a deeper dive, they found out that many families. For a host of cultural and social reasons that just economics do not talk about finance. And so there is a professor at George Washington university.
[00:04:39] Her name is Anna Marie, who starting, and she’s a professor of business. She’s also a founder and academic director. Of the school’s global financial literacy excellence center. And she said, you know, students come to my class. They don’t even know how credit cards work. And many of them have real ideal how student loans work.
[00:04:59] So with the [00:05:00] push to make, , October. Economic month. The goal is to make sure that a families have conversations about how to make decisions about money in their homes. Teachers can now invite business, community leaders to share with their students, decision-making processes. And for those who are listening, if you want to go to council for.
[00:05:19] Econ ed.org. You can actually find resources for K-12 education programs and others. I think this is important because for all the reasons we say, but here’s what I’ve found really interesting. So they actually conducted a survey. And again, this is, the council for economic education. And in 2020, they identified that 21 states require high school students to take a course in personal finance.
[00:05:46] 25 states require high school students to take a course in economics five to not, and only five states, steel drown include personal finance and their studies. So given the fact that you and I share some states in common in Michigan, you will be [00:06:00] proud to know that of the six categories they have in place.
[00:06:03] Everything from standards to implementation, Michigan. Five of the six
[00:06:08] Cara: box check
[00:06:11] GR: my own home state of Virginia. We have four of the six boxes checking on glad to bed, but for Massachusetts, the state that is home to this, they actually have fewer than we would think for a state that leads so many things.
[00:06:25] So economic. Nobel prize winner economics. We now have an economic education month, so we need to shout this up to the mountain top. And in all seriousness, if we expect to maintain our way of living is going to require people to be financially responsible with their money, but also with the government.
[00:06:47] Cara: I love that story, Gerard, I think it’s really, really important.
[00:06:51] And, I think too, , you say that this is really everybody’s problem it’s we, you might have preconceived notions about who knows how to handle their money and who [00:07:00] doesn’t. But the fact of the matter is is that, I think probably this is my guessing and maybe your article talks about this.
[00:07:07] I would assume that, , in this country probably. The people with the lowest incomes, , know more about what’s coming in and what’s going out, then those who are in the middle class able to be in some sort of debt, have credit cards, things like that. And that’s where we, as Americans are really undereducated and quite frankly, it’s sort of.
[00:07:28] a luxury to be able to be that irresponsible, but it gets us in a lot of trouble. And just like you said, I did not grow up in a home where we talked about this and I can remember going to college and being bombarded with credit card offers and just sort of thinking it was free money. It wasn’t until I had to go to my parents and say, oh yeah, I have this bill.
[00:07:47] And they were like, no, it wasn’t like they were going to pay for me either. I had to learn that hard lesson. It also I’ll share that. as I’ve talked about before, my husband grew up in Argentina, and this is a [00:08:00] place where it’s very uncommon for people to, for example, mortgage their homes. It’s very uncommon for people to have credit cards and credit card debt.
[00:08:08] So you’ll heal just like student loans for him. He just looks at me sideways. He’s like, how on earth do you have student loans of that guys? And I’m like, wow. I went to school for a really long time. So I think that, maybe it’s not an American phenomenon, but it is a distinctly American trait, I think, to not know enough about like what you actually have and what you can actually buy.
[00:08:30] And let’s face it. It’s probably, there are so many statistics about the number one cause of stress is money and, you know, people get divorced over money, stuff like that. This is a really important. Factor in educating our children to be not only, it’s not just about math, which it is about math, right.
[00:08:46] But it’s about being happy, healthy people. and so some of us, even if you were born into a higher economic class, and you live higher up on the income letter that does not mean that folks are financially irresponsible or literate. [00:09:00] Right. So, and I bet probably a lot of people are nodding along at home as they listened to this.
[00:09:04] So I am all for it. I love that story. Thank you for bringing it to our attention. I’m going to take a hard turn in. We’re going to New York where you might’ve heard that mayor bill de Blasio, he has called an end Gerard to the city’s gifted and talented program. , so you know, we’ve been reading a lot of.
[00:09:22] Specialized schools, magnet schools, exam schools. So on in places, many of them here in the Northeast where these things tend to exist. private schools for free in many regards, right? These, exam admission schools, but Blasio at the end of his term, and, his critics are saying that you haven’t really done anything about educational equity.
[00:09:42] And I’m not saying that now, maybe I am a little bit, but, here you are. You’re going to just issue an edict that says this is the end of the city’s gifted and talented program. And the idea here is that this GNT program. Inequitable. it is exam-based so kids have [00:10:00] to test into it. And I think there is something Gerard to the argument that parents who are highly educated themselves, who know the system, know how to navigate the system, know how to help their children be successful on exams, exam taking is a skill.
[00:10:14] Let’s be clear. I think there’s something to that argument. I’m not necessarily convinced that we should abolish gifted and talented programs. I, myself, Gerard now don’t be too surprised, but I was a gifted and talented child in the eighties. And I got to tell you, what I take away from that experience was it made me pretty unpopular my peers and I, who were separated from the rest of the kids in a different, like we have the school, came home with some spit balls in her hair.
[00:10:39] I will say that, but on the upside. You know, we’ve got a highly personalized education. And I think maybe part of de Blasio’s argument is that every kid should have this education. This type of education should be on offer to every child, regardless of how you fare on an entrance exam. However, I have to say, I questioned the ability given its [00:11:00] track record of New York city’s public schools to deliver this kind of education to all kids, because that’s what they’re planning to do.
[00:11:06] and he and his, superintendent introduced. , a program that’s going to replace the gifted and talented program called brilliant NYC. It’s accelerated learning for kids ages eight and up that will take place in their assigned classrooms. so you could imagine being a teacher. So teachers Imagine being a teacher with what, 30 kids in your classroom.
[00:11:26] You’ve been a teacher I’ve been teaching. often what we know is that even the best teachers who can really differentiate instruction, sometimes what you end up doing is teaching to the middle because you’re trying so hard to make sure that everybody gets what they get. And so there were a couple of quotes in this article from teachers saying.
[00:11:42] As if it isn’t already hard enough, you’re expecting us to come in take kids who would have qualified for this other track. And we’re going to have to differentiate for them, differentiate for children who are coming in at, what four or five, six different levels in the name of equity. So I think that this is one [00:12:00] to watch.
[00:12:00] They’re saying, I don’t know, but the article claims that there was not a Lisbon, the New York post, by the way. So no fan of DeBlazio I think, but, there wasn’t a lot of parents. And you can imagine which parents are upset in which parents don’t care much. So the parents of the kids who would have qualified for the GNT programs are indeed pretty upset.
[00:12:19] It’s sort of like these struggles we’re seeing over exam schools. I’m going to watch this one. Gerard, I don’t know exactly where I come down, except I don’t really think that either. , that either camp has the perfect answer. And I’m always left with the question, like, are we looking for a quality of outcomes here, or are we looking for equitable opportunities?
[00:12:38] And you know, I always fall in the camp of the latter. I think this is about creating equitable opportunities for all kids. And it’s just too bad that we didn’t see the mayor get closer to that because I don’t know that this does.
[00:12:51] GR: I am a supporter of having separate programs for people who have the gifts and the talents to take advantage of it.
[00:12:58] So you’ll be [00:13:00] surprised to know that I too was in gifted and talented
[00:13:03] Cara: for
[00:13:05] GR: sports, not academics. And it’s similar if you think about it. And so I had to be, I was tested in terms of how fast I could run a 40. , how many times or how many, , weights, I could lift pounds, got tackle. Could I move?
[00:13:20] And if you didn’t do well, you didn’t make the cut. So there was an examination that wasn’t written, it was non written. And if you were gifted and talented, you find yourself playing the skill level scores that you needed to. If we treated college football and the entrance into becoming a pro athlete at a division one school, the same way we did get that in talent.
[00:13:42] The schools that currently make up the top 50 programs that look radically different. Why? Because taking someone who is gifted and talented, let’s say in stem and someone who is gifted and talented in, let’s say the 40 yard dash, and then putting them in very [00:14:00] different settings where gifted and talented means something different to different people.
[00:14:04] It will be a train wreck. And so I’m all for the idea of looking at schools and saying, well, You don’t have enough women or you don’t have enough, , people of color or you don’t have people from the right zip codes. I get it. But in the absence of gifted and talented programs, how do these programs come into existence in the first place?
[00:14:23] It’s because the traditional school system did not have at certain schools, school levels or certain zip codes. That program here at Virginia, we have a governor school and we created governor’s schools back in the 1970s in part. So if the public school system said, you know what, we’ve got a group of students who are advanced and who should come together during this time.
[00:14:45] Or in a year round program or other programs in order to provide them with what options, same thing we say about other programs. So I think trying to abolish the program will never get you to equity. What it will do will be an [00:15:00] equity of outrage, either from the parents in school closed or for the children like me, who Hey, parents will say, Hey, let’s put Gerard.
[00:15:08] It would have been a disaster for me that they would have been upset. And then the parents, like my, wife’s parents who would, surely would qualify for gifted and talented, they would have been equally upset. You took the class from her and you gave it to Gerard and Gerard can’t handle it. So, I just think this is just more unnecessary social engineer.
[00:15:25] Moving in the wrong direction and in an environment now where families are already riled up, take families at Thomas Jefferson high school, and they’re the Virginia top rated public school in the country where they removed and exam to get in order to try to what I call colorful classrooms. It’s not going over well, so I’m not a fan of abolishing.
[00:15:47] It. If we want to deal with equity. And I agree with you, test taking is something you can learn as a skill. I also don’t think that some of these tests are totally wastefully biased, as much as culturally [00:16:00] bias. Given the fact we have people of color who are in there and they’re not just Asians
[00:16:05] Cara: and not all.
[00:16:08] GR: Yeah. So
[00:16:11] Cara: I think we’re probably pretty close to the same page and you know, something that you were teetering upon there. Here’s an idea. Quit redlining kids in schools make your public schools, distinct from one another offer distinct things to the kids that need them and let parents have an option.
[00:16:28] Right. And that’s something that, of course we don’t think DeBlasio was going to go out with a bang. we will see. If this program, this new, what did I say? It was called the brilliant program. The brilliant NYC. We’ll see how brilliant it turns out to be according to the parents of New York city. some of them will leave for private schools.
[00:16:44] No doubt. If they can afford to as has been the case. So we , could probably ask our next guest to weigh in on this, but she’s got so much cool research to talk about that. I don’t know. We’ll probably we’ll want to change the subject because coming up right after this, we are going to be [00:17:00] speaking with Robin lake and she is director of the center.
[00:17:05] For reinventing public education. I pause there because I just usually call it survey. And it’s also the center on reinventing public education, but I just have a great deal of respect for Robin’s work for the work of her team and for what they do over there in Washington. So we will be back with Robin right after this musical intro.
[00:17:43] Listeners we’re back with Robin lake. She is the director of the center on reinventing public education, otherwise known as SURPI a nonpartisan research and policy analysis organization, developing transformative evidence-based solutions for K to 12 public education. Her research [00:18:00] focuses on us public school system reforms, including public school choice and charter schools, innovation and scale portfolio management and effective state and local public oversight practices.
[00:18:11] Lake has authored numerous studies and provided expert testimony and technical assistance on charter schools, district charter collaborations, and urban school reform. She coauthored with Paul Hill charter schools and accountability in public education. Probably more times than I can count my own dissertation on charter schools.
[00:18:29] And she’s provided invited testimonies to the us house of representatives, education and labor committee, as well as various state legislatures. Robin holds a BA in international studies and an NPA in education and urban policy from the university of Washington, Robin. Thanks so much for joining us today.
[00:18:47] Robin: That was such a pleasure. Great to be with you. Yeah,
[00:18:50] Cara: we’re really happy to have you here and. Just talking before you came on. Um, Joshua Angrist winning the Nobel prize in [00:19:00] economics this week and he of course has done research on charter schools as well. , it was, it felt like , a good day for education,
[00:19:08] Robin: so cool.
[00:19:08] We know a Nobel Laureate. As
[00:19:12] Cara: I was floored when I heard it on the other radio Saturday morning, but well, we want to really focus on your work because as I said, I, have probably cited you and your work more times than I can count. , but , your title is director of the center on reinventing public education.
[00:19:27] And I will say, as somebody who reads your work and uses your work. You are known for rigorous and balanced research, which, which isn’t always the case, no matter what discipline we’re talking about. So can you describe the type of research that you do at SURPI? And I’m really interested in how the work has evolved over time, because you’ve, , you’ve seen a lot of changes just in the past decade, I would say.
[00:19:53] Robin: Yes, we have, I’m an odd duck because I’d been at the center for nearly 30 years, which is pretty crazy, but[00:20:00]
[00:20:02] yeah, five years, it was amazing. Learned how to read at the center now, , I met Paul Hill, our founder, and, , Paul handed me a manuscript for a book. He was writing called reinventing public education. And the premise was really that Paul had been studying. Through the Rand corporation where had been previously effective schools and especially schools that were effective in accelerating and meeting the needs of all kids from all backgrounds.
[00:20:33] And, , there were some emerging research during the eighties around. , what makes for effective schools, coherency internal accountability, clarity about the type of graduate, a distinctiveness, a sense of purpose, all those things. Right. But anybody who’s researched schools knows, but our question Paul’s question at the time was, okay, well, you can always point to some of those schools in a given community, but usually it’s only one or two.
[00:20:59] How could we make [00:21:00] it all? What would it take? And Paul had been studying. Systems and policies for a long time. And he was really acutely aware that there were those kinds of policies that gotten away, , that didn’t allow those kinds of schools to scale and replicate. And so the purpose of the center was really how do we reinvent those systems?
[00:21:20] So all schools can be effective. And it took us immediately to questions around choice with schools are distinctive families need to choose among them, autonomy, staffing, funding, accountability. How does that work? If all schools have different purposes? And then we started working toward this idea called portfolio systems, school systems that had a bunch of distinctive schools, but really managed for equity and performance.
[00:21:45] So, , it’s been an amazing, , 2030 years of working along those lines. And you asked about how things have evolved with. A few years ago, about five for our 25th anniversary. I had taken over as [00:22:00] director of the center and I was thinking, , the world has changed since the eighties alive.
[00:22:05] You know, Future of work is changing. , the need For school systems and schools to think about change and resiliency. I’m really trying to figure out how to maximize the opportunities and pathways for individual kids and look outside the boundaries of the school building. Those are not things that we originally contemplated, but seemed really, really important for us to start thinking about.
[00:22:28] Deeply. So we, we started sketching out ideas along those lines for our 25th and then bone the pen and all of the, worries that we had had about rigidities and lack of ability to meet individual needs. Showcased right in front of us. So we’ve tried to document a lot of that. And luckily we kind of jumped on some data and have been a pretty central resource for how school systems are responding , or not to different needs.
[00:22:57] And now we’ve got to turn [00:23:00] back to, or what does this all mean? Going forward. That’s the work of it, the next five to 10 years. How do we rebuild in a way that meets the promise of this generation of kids, but more importantly, meets the promise of the next generation. Not an easy question.
[00:23:14] No,
[00:23:15] Cara: no, it’s not an easy question at all now. So you mentioned the pandemic and many, many of us relied on, your work during the pandemic. So I want to, get there, but I want to push really quickly on something that you said at the outset. And you said that, , you and Paul discussed.
[00:23:30] Oftentimes it wasn’t, it was about reinventing systems because we sort of knew what works in schools that we have. We have a pretty good idea of what makes schools high-performing highly effective for kids, but that it’s these structures and systems that get in the way. And so, that sounds to me like.
[00:23:45] The desired impact of education research is, to reinvent those systems as you would put it, change those systems so that we’ve got equitable opportunities for kids and kids can sign that families can find places that they will flourish within the public system. [00:24:00] Right. And that can involve different sorts of choice, which we talk about a lot here, but can you describe a time perhaps when you’ve really seen the impact of your research, right.
[00:24:11] in a positive. And an outcome that made you happy.
[00:24:16] Robin: Sure. Sure. yeah, I mean, you know, to your point, we have a little tagline that I think , was Paul’s originally that public education is, , a goal, not a particular set of institutions. And so we’re happiest when we have. , had impact in terms of reframing a question.
[00:24:34] So it can be addressed in a totally different way, helping people challenge assumptions and say, why not? , why couldn’t it be different? Why couldn’t we do things radically differently? Does a school have to look this way , or could it be, , a set of opportunities within a community? That kind of thing, you know, to your point to your question on.
[00:24:54] What’s made me happiest. I would say that if I had to point to one line of [00:25:00] work that I’ve, really dug into personally, it’s been our work on special education. , started it a number of years ago with a focus on charter schooling. , a lot of people were worried about special ed as a vulnerability for the charter school movement, which it was, there were problems that had to be addressed, but we also saw it as a huge opportunity because we thought, well, , special education is not working.
[00:25:24] It hasn’t been working. Can we use this opportunity outside the boundaries of, what has typically been done to, to actually go for something better? And so, , for 10 or 15 years or so, we’ve been really trying to say, where are the bright lights within the charter school world within the district world and the private sector?
[00:25:43] How can we. Learn from that to try to construct something better. We’ve had a line of research going on that front for quite some time and it continues. And, , it’s I think I’m our most rewarding work. For me [00:26:00] personally. And it takes, me right again, to the core question that we we’ve been grappling with for the last five years or so for our most complex kids, we’ve got to think really differently.
[00:26:14] , and special education has a place where we see a lot of possibilities for. Honestly, if you go into any particular school and you want to learn about how do you know contract what individual kids need and what’s possible for them go to the special ed teacher, she’s got ideas. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah,
[00:26:34] Cara: no, , it’s really important line of research and I think shining a light on, , any, you know, at the outset you said, especially when we knew that there were problems in some charter schools, right.
[00:26:42] It’s shining a light on that and really talking about, , how does. Taylor education to meet the needs of individual students, I think is informative for all systems. , okay. So you mentioned the pandemic and. , a series of questions about this, because I have to, my first question is like, [00:27:00] so you guys were, I think a lot of, , ed reform organizations were thinking, oh, somebody should really track this school closures.
[00:27:07] , somebody should really think about like, what are districts doing? But it was a sort of a, not me, not me, not me. And then suddenly there it was and you guys are doing it and you were doing. Can only imagine the amount of work that it was, but can you describe to us what it was like to pivot that hard in that moment in March, I guess 2020, when it all sort of came crashing down in, in like, how did you go about it?
[00:27:30] What did you learn from tracking school closures
[00:27:33] Robin: throughout the. Yeah, it’s been a wild ride. Why live cattle? And, you know, the pandemic was starting to start to emerge. And, , I was looking around at, you know, talking to some local superintendents and thinking, oh my gosh, we had really, we were in for something really serious and we’re not prepared at [00:28:00] all.
[00:28:01] And so I remember thinking, , this I’m going to have to kind of set everything aside. I may have to shift our team. , and I just went on pure instinct. , I just had to trust my gut and kind of trust. But I had learned over the past few decades about system response and system abilities and inabilities.
[00:28:20] And I’m also a warrior probably helped. I thought this could go very, very badly. We’re all in the dark, you know, pulling information together. And as a researcher it’s tight, it was a really tough moment, right. Because there was not anything close to perfect information. What we did was we thought, well, where.
[00:28:42] Can we get something something’s gotta be better than nothing. And we thought, well, districts are posting information on their websites. Let’s just start pulling that together. So , we just quickly went after the largest hundred school districts and, got organized to find [00:29:00] that. And then we, um, got a representative sample together quickly and we just tried to be nimble and responsive.
[00:29:07] And I think one thing that really helped was the fact that it was. Over the years of, we’ve worked with a lot of practitioners. We had people we could call and say, you know, what’s going on? What, um, what are you seeing out there? And we also have a tradition of SURPI at trying to look around the corner, trying to be ahead of other folks in.
[00:29:28] What might be coming, what questions? So that was the approach that we took was let’s roll and let’s connect with as many people as we can figure out what’s needed. And the, , the fundamental tenants that we followed was let’s be helpful. What can we do to be helpful and just use whatever skills and capacities we have to inform the field.
[00:29:55] So that’s what we did, , in terms of what we’ve found. I mean, there’s so much, [00:30:00] and it’s easy to kind of get wrapped up in the masks and the vaccines and, the issue of the moment, we’ve tried to stay really focused on teaching and learning throughout this thing. And on that front, it’s not pretty the, , the kids are not all right in so many ways.
[00:30:18] and in other ways, , they’ve discovered so many important things, , as they’ve been out of traditional schooling. So, but on the not all right front, , we’ve convened some consensus panels of experts to kind of assess where we are. , I won’t get into the details of that, but I think, you know, it’s clear kids love.
[00:30:37] Really really critical learning opportunities and opportunities for gaining knowledge that if we don’t act quickly, they won’t recover. And those individual kids will pay the price and our economy will pay the price. So there’s that the social emotional dynamics are of course, so important. We’ve been talking.
[00:30:56] Closely the mental health and other struggles. And [00:31:00] then finally we’ve been looking at kind of the most vulnerable student populations and trying to understand what’s going on with them. So, you know, it’s not a pretty picture. , and so we’re, starting to think now about, Hey, given all of that, we’re w we’re conditioning to document it and we’ll be producing.
[00:31:16] report called the profile of the American students this winter, where we’re hoping to kind of compile the story into something that’s really understandable, but I think what’s on so many of our minds right now is where do we go from here? Is this just a question of catch-up, which is. , particularly easy problem on its own, or is it a much bigger problem of recovery renewal towards something much better, which is, you know, the biggest challenge that any of us school reform folks have, have faced.
[00:31:49] So it’s going to take all of us. It’s going to take our best ideas and it’s gonna take collaboration partnerships and very, very strong, well.
[00:31:59] GR: In [00:32:00] July, , your center published report that found that most districts are so far spending money on quote, what they know what our district’s doing today. And what would you like districts to think about when it comes to spending these.
[00:32:14] Robin: Yeah, thanks Gerard. Yeah, look, this is a massive cash dump, on districts. And I don’t think anybody was particularly surprised that what they’ve been doing is spending on, , staffing, , pay raises that they felt , were overdue. , just talked to a reporter who had dug into some data and found that there were massive expenditures on things like sports fields and, things that probably were shovel-ready right.
[00:32:39] Districts had plans, maybe somebody, a coach or somebody had been lobbying for this thing for a long time. And, uh, all of a sudden it was available. So. You know, that’s all what it is, not sustainable, right? And it’s not the stuff that’s going to, um, get a kid who, uh, has two more years [00:33:00] to graduate and just lost six months of critical math time into the college of their choice that it’s not going to cut it.
[00:33:08] what I, advise districts to do is really get clear about priorities and, I’m not opposed to sports, you know, let’s get our ducks in order first and make sure that every kid is on the path to college and career readiness. Before we talk about some of those extras. Um, and I think three, three buckets maybe, , the first is.
[00:33:33] , good old evidence-based solutions. It’s shocking to me, how few districts are really pursuing intensive, um, tutoring programs that any researcher would agree is probably the best thing you can do for catching kids up quickly, rigorous curriculum. Those kinds of just evidence-based solutions.
[00:33:52] A second bucket would be just, you know, creative approaches to catch up. We have a lot of people in the communities who have stepped up during the [00:34:00] pandemic. And provided support to kids. Let’s not close them off from the current challenges. Let’s actually bring them in, pay them for helping out with tutoring or, um, partnering for mental health and social service support.
[00:34:15] So the schools don’t have to take that on. And the third bucket would be just making investments in the future, , getting toward that sense of resiliency and, , taking pen. Discoveries and figuring out what we can do with them. Re-imagining the workforce. These are the things that we’re going to have to do.
[00:34:34] And, in three years when the money’s gone, we won’t have the option any longer
[00:34:39] GR: before I pivot to my next question. You’re the first part of your response reminded me when, you know, when you’re talking about, you know, paying for coaches and salaries. I remember when the American recovery and we invest an accurate tune, , 2009.
[00:34:53] Uh, was implemented, there were school systems that were doing the same thing. , some even hiring teachers, they let go because of cuts [00:35:00] and, within 24 months, some of those teachers had to be let go because the money they receive was not. And there wasn’t any planning. So hopefully we don’t have a, repeat of that.
[00:35:12] Robin: You’re absolutely right. History is about to repeat itself and remember the folks who are going to be laid off first , or, the most junior folks, , folks who have a lot of energy ideas and, , not necessarily the folks who are gonna move the needle the fastest for the most kids. So there we have it.
[00:35:31] GR: Well, there you go. Let’s talk about politics. , right now education is very partisan. Even with our reform movement, both public private, very fractured your center, you know, of course describes itself as a nonpartisan research institution by most accounts. , we’re living in that, , very high times of partisanship.
[00:35:50] How do you, as a leader of the center, basically walk the line in terms of talking about. School curriculum talking about research [00:36:00] and being able to do so in a way where the research is clear it’s nonpartisan and is given in a way that people can say, yeah, , the center is just a straight shooter because a lot of people aren’t doing that.
[00:36:11] How are you able to do so?
[00:36:14] Robin: Yeah, well, I do think we’ll probably, I’m pretty well-respected but a lot of different, , more part of this. Oriented folks, policymakers tend to call us from all stripes, which we’ll really proud of. I’m really not sure why, you know, we’re um, we’re people who like to. We liked to be truth tellers.
[00:36:37] , we like to surprise people. We like to be creative and unconventional. , and you know, we just try and stay focused on the question and the question at hand and not get pulled into the noise of the politics. , now, that also means that we make people on both sides angry. , and I’ve always felt like, it’s [00:37:00] a little bit of a lonely position, but on the other hand, as long as they, get over it and call us the next time, then I think , we’re doing our jobs.
[00:37:09] So, , Yeah. unfortunately it is all too unusual, but I think, you know what, we try to be a collection of people to think in the gray, , who just don’t like, , dichotomies. And luckily there seems to be still a little bit of space.
[00:37:27] GR: No. I’m glad to have you in the space because when your name is mentioned and , I’m on the right and right.
[00:37:32] Circles, people like, yeah. You know, good research, there are other names I could mention. And there are a lot of different responses other than good research. So, , continue to agree. Work. There will speak in a research. And this is my last question, , as we emerge out of the time that we’re in right now, Should researchers and educators, , what should they be thinking about?
[00:37:52] You know, we have a cadre of young scholars who are going to enter the field, , with a very different set of data points to look at. , then some of [00:38:00] us, let’s say you had 15 years ago and we’re going to have, , with 30 gubernatorial elections, , they’re going to come up. What are your recommendations to people who sit in academic academies and think tanks, research centers, but also in state and federal government.
[00:38:17] Robin: , far be it for me to really say what people should be doing. I’ll speak from my own experience. What gives me energy ideas? Inspiration is really, , getting down to. Direct contact to a students, families and educators, really listening to them, observing. , and then, trying to from there kind of, , get up to the policy implications.
[00:38:46] , it just makes it also real. And now I can’t imagine a more important time than now to do that when students and families, educators were thrown into such [00:39:00] craziness and have really, really important observations, discoveries, thoughts, reflections. , they have things to say, let’s listen to them. So the most rewarding research that we’re doing right now is interviewing people who have participated in pandemic learning pods, who just when they were out of the traditional system.
[00:39:24] What did they create? What did they discover? And it’s amazing to hear educators talk about their experience, because they’ll say this is the reason I got into teaching this kind of relationship based really, you know, customizing for kids, , families saying, Hey, I never realized that I really enjoy being really more deeply engaged in my kids’ education or kids saying, Hey, It’s really cool to be able to control my own schedule and say, well, I want to study and then have people work around that and [00:40:00] give me something that excites me.
[00:40:02] So there’s just so much rich soup there. , so much risk which soup and so much to contemplate about the systems that we’ve built and kind of ask ourselves why. , and then it’s Siri. It’s also equally important to, to listen about. How, how should we be defining success as we move forward? And how would we know that we’re getting there?
[00:40:24] I don’t think we’ve grappled with that kind of question. So I don’t know if that’s helpful. That’s where my head is. , shame on us. If we don’t take this moment to reflect.
[00:40:36] GR: I like that word, because when we often discuss education, we think of R which is resources, , and that’s important, another ours results, but yeah, let’s just take time to reflect, you know, when I heard you say that teachers.
[00:40:50] You know, we’re excited about what they were doing to say that this is in fact as why I entered the profession. And Cara had an early question, , for you, but also in your background, you worked in [00:41:00] charters, Minnesota in California, where the first two states charter law and both of those laws were created in part to give educators a chance to practice their craft their profession in unique ways.
[00:41:11] And so we can come out of this either crime or crime from. And so hopefully it’s the latter.
[00:41:21] Robin: I love that. So,
[00:41:23] GR: Robin again, thank you so much for joining Kara and I today to talk, shop about the work you’re doing. And, , as always I learned something, what I hear from you and when I read your work, so our listeners, I’m pretty sure are going to be excited to see what you come out with.
[00:41:37] Robin: I thank you so much. Yeah, it was a really fun conversation. And I will say that the pioneer Institute I ran into and I was, visiting Massachusetts and there were 12 charter school laws based at backend. No, no, 1992 or something. So y’all have been on my radar for a very long time and, , really respect your work.[00:42:00]
[00:42:00] Cara: Thank you. Thanks so much.
[00:42:59] All right. Do you [00:43:00] ever going to close it out with a tweet of the week? This one from, , 74. And the tweet is I was just talking with somebody about this this morning. It’s pretty exciting. Researchers at Harvard center for education policy research at N w E a and the Calder center will partner with a consortium of districts across the United.
[00:43:20] To provide timely information about tutoring, afterschool programs and other interventions, , timely. Yes. I love that. They’re going to do this. This is, these are some real , heavy hitters here in, the area of educational research. So figuring out by having this consortium of districts come together, whether or not.
[00:43:40] These tutoring programs, interventions, many of which I’m sure will be funded with relief money. If districts would actually decide to do that, maybe some of them have, um, if they’re actually working. And I think this goes back to conversations that we’ve been having with some of our guests are, are.
[00:43:56] Whether or not how we’re going to know if we’re getting any bang for our buck out of [00:44:00] all of the stimulus money. So, , I think it’s a great effort. We will keep an eye on it and maybe we’ll even get somebody to come talk to us about it. , the learning curve, but that’s all I got this week. My friend, next week, Gerard, we are going to be back with David Reynolds. He is a distinguished professor of English and history at the graduate center of the city, university of New York and biographer of Abe Lincoln.
[00:44:22] , his biography of Abraham Lincoln was selected as one of the top 10 books of the year by the wall street journal. So Gerard until then, I hope you have. A wonderful week. It’s always a pleasure to spend time with you.
[00:44:33] GR: I enjoy the way that we use economy of scales to get done on time.
Related Posts: