PAUL PETERSON, HOST:

This is the Education Exchange of Paul Peterson. I am the director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University. Thank you for joining us. Homeschooling is the most rapidly growing educational sector in the United States. Public schools and private schools are declining in enrollments as fertility rates are falling. The borders have closed immigration, and the numbers of students are fewer than ever before. So, it’s a surprise then to see that homeschooling has doubled in size from 3 percent before the pandemic to 6 percent today. Now that’s still a small share of the U.S. school-age population, but rapid growth has changed homeschooling and what people think about homeschooling. A topic explored in a new book by Dixie Dillon Lane, which is entitled Skipping School, A History of American Homeschooling and How It Went Mainstream. I’m very pleased to have Dixie Dillon Lane with me on the Education Exchange today. Thank you, Dixie, for joining me.

DIXIE DILLON LANE: Thank you so much for having me.

PETERSON: Well, Dixie, we will dig into your historical account but let me ask you the question that many listeners want to know first and foremost. Do you homeschool your own children?

LANE: Well, that is a fair question. I have four children. They are in grades first through 10th. And like many, many parents, I do different things with my different children. So, my 10th grader is in private school and my younger three are currently homeschooled.

PETERSON: Well, what are the greatest joys of homeschooling?

LANE: Oh, man. You know, having extra time with your children is really wonderful and having the chance to observe them more up close and to be the one who gets to see so much of their educational awareness, you know, to see your own child learn to read, see that click, you know, to read a great poem aloud like Tennyson or something and see your children shiver. It’s just a delight. So many of the wonderful things about parenting for everyone, you just get a little bit more of.

PETERSON: Well, how about the challenges? It can’t be all love and happiness. There’s got to be some problems that you encounter. What would you say are some of the things that people should know about?

LANE: Yeah, I mean, homeschooling is a big job. And if any of your listeners do homeschool themselves, I think that will resonate. It is a big job. It requires a lot of time and a lot of effort and attention, usually from one parent in particular. And I think that that’s the hardest part is that you really have to be both teacher and parent. I think all parents are already to a certain degree, but it takes a lot of continuing education for yourself, too, and commitment and humility and willingness to accept help, too, and not be a perfectionist. So, yeah, it’s like everything. It’s a mixed bag.

PETERSON: Well, you mentioned that it’s mainly the job of one of the parents. And in your case, I think you’re doing the lion’s share. But how important is your husband’s role in the in the whole homeschooling experience?

LANE: My husband and I are both historians, but he works full time as a history professor, whereas my work is part time. So, it made sense for us, for me to be the primary homeschooling parent. But he actually still participates. He’s very good about…he’ll take on a certain subject so for example this last year he did handwriting because I was just really tired of it and he was interested because he had always had terrible handwriting and had recently taught himself to write better. So, he was able to bring that to the table and also because we have different perspectives on different subjects, a lot of our dinner table conversation and field trips and things like that are things that he can add a lot to in terms of the children’s education. So, we always say, because I study American history and he studies French history, you know, I will talk with the children about the Civil War, and he will talk with the children about the wars of religion. So, you know, we all bring something to the table, even though, yes, I do the lion’s share of the work in that area of our family life.

PETERSON: Well, now, neither one of you has a background in the sciences. And so, one of the questions that’s always been of concern to me is, can homeschoolers provide adequate instruction in the STEM subjects, whether it’s math or biology or chemistry or physics? How do you address that particular issue? I know your oldest child is going to private school, and maybe that’s one way to handle that. So how do you address that kind of question?

LANE: I think it’s a great question. And I would say if we wanted to step back and try to look at outcomes, I don’t think we have any evidence that homeschoolers struggle more in particular areas than in others. Like when they get to college academically, there’s so much variance. I have a really dear friend who homeschools her four children, and her children are very interested in STEM. And so, she actually sort of struggles to motivate them in the humanities. So, some of it’s going to be your kids and your particular interests. I’m aware that although I really value science. It’s not something that I have as strong a natural interest in as I do in most of the other subjects. So, for me and our family, it’s been a matter of making sure that I have the resources I need to teach that subject well. And for me, a lot of the time that means outsourcing a little bit more. So, with history or literature, my own family style with homeschooling is that I like to create my own assignments and work through books together with my children. But I can’t do that for science, so I’m much more likely to purchase a curriculum. We also rely really heavily on our local library, which has science lessons like a club every week for children. So, they get to do an experiment every week, which is a lot. And then we just try to, I guess, maybe I pay more attention to the subjects I know I’m weaker in. And that’s a matter of self-knowledge, I think.

PETERSON: Well, you’re doing a great job. Of course, everybody wants to know if that’s generally the case, but you say homeschooling is going mainstream in the title of your book. You know, only 6 percent of students are being homeschooled, and that’s a big increase in recent years, but it still is a small share. And so, what do you mean by saying it’s gone mainstream?

LANE: Well, when I use the word mainstream, what I mean is that it’s a norm within the mainstream. So, it’s certainly not the major norm. It’s not the primary way that people educate their children. But it’s no longer odd. I would say two things in response. One, when I looked at the demographic data on homeschoolers for my book, which, you know, if you have any familiarity with homeschool data and homeschool research, it’s very difficult to work with. Very often it’s sort of apples and oranges from one study to the next. But the census has been gathering a lot of data in the past few years on demographics and demographically homeschoolers are now very much like the rest of America even racially we are getting to be very similar to other Americans. So, in that way, it’s part of the mainstream in that it’s not one particular group that does it. We have people of all races, all religions, all political leanings and all locations where they live and also economic status. So, everyone is doing it, even if most people are not. The second thing I would say is just to bring up some of the other minor norms in education. So, for example, Catholic school. Most people do not go to Catholic school, not by a long shot. But it’s not weird to go to Catholic school. If you meet a kid and you say, what school do they go to and they say, well, I go to St. John’s. You go, oh, yeah, you go to Catholic school. Well, there are twice as many homeschoolers in the United States than children who go to Catholic diocesan schools, parochial schools, twice as many.

PETERSON: Yeah, but still, you know, homeschooling sort of began in the evangelical Protestant community. And religion was really a big motivator initially. Isn’t that still a driving force as to why families are choosing to homeschool?

LANE: Well, it did begin among evangelical Christians and also conservative Catholics. It also began in libertarian highly secular sort of part of the alt ed world in the 60s and 70s as well; so, it started in two places. I think it’s true that in the 20th century homeschooling had a larger share of white-evangelical protestants that’s certainly the case although when you look at the numbers it’s actually less than you would think. And today—so I mentioned that homeschooling data is a little bit complex. So even like the NCES, the federal government arm for education research, their surveys, they’ve changed their questions over time. It’s hard to compare. But the number of parents who choose religious reasons as one of the reasons they homeschool has really declined in the past 25 years. So, it used to be in the top three reasons. And now it’s quite a bit farther down. So, I think that religion is still important to a lot of homeschoolers, for sure. And there are a lot of religious groups that support homeschooling. But it’s a lot less common for that to be the primary motivating factor than it ever was before.

PETERSON: But it still is somehow a reaction to what’s going on in the public schools, is it not? Aren’t a lot of people who homeschool sort of saying, I’m unhappy with what is being provided children in the public schools, either in terms of moral instruction or in terms of academic instruction?

LANE: Yes, that’s absolutely true. And also, I think another reason is school safety that people cite. So, that’s true; that’s sort of a push factor. People feel pushed out of public schools or they have some problem with their public schools. And because public schools vary so widely, even within a single district, I think a lot of people find themselves in a situation where they don’t want to use the public school for one reason or another. And then they’re seeking an alternative. And homeschooling is a much more easily accessible alternative than I think it used to be. And so, people are more likely to choose that rather than either to go to the public school anyway or choose a private school.

PETERSON: But people are going back and forth between homeschooling and the public school. That’s the other side of the coin. How much of that are you observing?

LANE: That’s absolutely correct. And I would say even in my family, as I mentioned, although I don’t have any children in public school, I do have a child in private school. And I think one thing that that may indicate is that homeschooling is overall, not for specific families, but overall less an ideological choice than it might have been in the past because parents are willing to move in and out of different kinds of schooling. And it’s also common for parents to do that, have one child in one kind of school and one child in another. And it’s become relatively common among homeschoolers to actually send the preschoolers to a preschool program. Because it makes it a lot easier to teach the 7, 8, 9, 10-year-old if your 4-year-old isn’t drawing on the wall with a Sharpie. So, I think that that flexibility is really interesting and suggests that maybe homeschoolers on average are not as rigid as the stereotype might suggest about their educational choices.

PETERSON: Well, your research focuses quite a bit on Southern California, and I’m wondering why you chose Southern California to focus the study and whether or not that skews your study or whether you can generalize from Southern California to the United States as a whole.

LANE: I hope that you can generalize some, or at least in the way that I tried to do in the book. But homeschooling is so fun because we try to say things about homeschoolers on average or like that there’s a national narrative. But the experience of homeschooling is extremely local and extremely private. It happens in individual families. So how do you tell a story about homeschooling while keeping in mind both the actual experience and looking for national patterns? So, my solution was to do a case study. I did it for a number of reasons, including the difficulty of finding sources. And I also did it because I wanted to have the ability to look at different kinds of homeschoolers. A lot of us live wherever we may live. Often a particular area is dominated by a particular type of homeschooler. So, like I say in the book, if I studied a community in rural Alabama, I would not get any sense of what different kinds of homeschoolers were like, probably. Los Angeles is great for that because there was a diversity all across the ages, or all across the decades, but also it was just a very important place in homeschooling. And California was more generally; you know, had a high number of homeschoolers at the very beginning of the movement. A lot of the homeschool leaders were based there. There were some really interesting litigation court cases there. So yeah, that’s why I chose that. And I think it’s important to acknowledge the limits that you have to put on any study. But I think it does offer a window into homeschooling, both on the personal and the narrative level that you couldn’t get if you didn’t do a case study.

PETERSON: Well, you have a great narration in your book, and I encourage all those interested in homeschooling to introduce themselves to the subject by finding this historical narrative, a way of finding out more about what this world is really like. And you begin with the Turner family, and they were prosecuted by the state of California. And I think that’s a fascinating case. And it happened, I think, in the early 50s. Can you tell us a little bit about the Turner family and what happened to them?

LANE: Sure. So, the Turners had been homeschooling in the Los Angeles area. I believe if I’m remembering correctly, they had moved there relatively recently from New York where they had also been homeschooling. And that was incredibly rare in the 1950s to teach your children at home. And Mary Turner was charged basically with truancy for her children because they were not enrolled in school. And this was a case that was covered by the newspapers, which means it’s accessible. You can read about it. And she was accused of communism. And that was fascinating to me because we forget how much effect the Cold War had on education. It really transformed education in our country. And it seems like for many things at that time, you could be accused of communism on either side of the aisle or whatever you were doing. It was something that could be said. And the court did end up ruling that her children had to return to school. And she was very interesting because although they had done some travel schooling where they were traveling on the road, their everyday schooling was very school-like. It was, you know, in desks and they did all the subjects, and they had the children tested. And yet the state still ruled against them.

PETERSON: Well, was there a particular law in the state of California that was the basis for the judge’s ruling?

LANE: Well, homeschooling…well, the codes of education obviously vary state by state. So homeschooling law is very different state to state. In California, there was no; there’s nothing on the books about homeschooling, which was the case in most states. And so, it was just governed by compulsory education. And the compulsory education code said that you either had to go to school, or you had to go to a private school, or you had to have a tutor. So, Mary Turner’s argument or her lawyer’s argument was that she was qualified as a teacher, as a tutor, even though she didn’t have a teaching credential. And the state didn’t buy that.

PETERSON: So, the law in the book says you have to go to school. It could be a private school, but you’ve got to go to school. You’ve got to have some kind of educated, licensed individual to provide the instruction. Has that changed in California, or did they ever pass a law which said, OK, now you can homeschool in California? What happened?

LANE: The code has not changed. But, you know, to run a private school in California, you do not have to have a teaching credential. You do not have to have a degree, a graduate degree. You do not have to have any kind of credential. So, the loophole that homeschoolers identified was they were as qualified as the teacher or even the principal of a private school. And so, it seemed a little unjust that the reason that they were being prosecuted was that they didn’t have a teaching credential because private school teachers did not have teaching credentials. That’s still the case in California. But what homeschoolers ended up doing was they started registering their homeschools as private schools. They also took advantage of this other option, which was that you could be tutored by someone with a teaching credential. So, if you as the parent had a teaching credential or you had a friend who had one, you could claim that as a sort of exemption to compulsory education. In 2008, this actually went to the California courts through a child abuse case in which a child who was clearly being abused by her family. was ordered to school or her siblings were ordered to school, which is very normal that a child would be ordered to go to school if there was a suspicion of abuse because then they’re in contact with teachers who will report abuse. But in that case, the court also ruled that homeschooling was unconstitutional in California. And that set off all the alarm bells of all the homeschooling advocates. as well as the governor of California, even the LA Unified School Districts filed an amicus brief in favor of it, and the court reversed its ruling. And their argument was very interesting. They argued that there was evidence within California law that the legislators intended homeschooling to be legal, even if they hadn’t made a law exactly saying so. So, for example, in the code where it says you can only smoke—you have to be so many feet away from a school in order to smoke. It says except for homeschools. So, they’re considering it in their law as something that already is legal, even though it wasn’t established clearly that way.

PETERSON: So, I think also it helped that the governor at the time was Governor Schwarzenegger, who was sort of middle of the road liberal Republican, but was not sort of tied to the public-school establishment. And I think he sort of gave the homeschooling community his backing.

LANE: He did. He spoke publicly about it. And a lot of other people did, too. And a lot of different diverse groups did. And I think what that suggests is that Californians generally presumed that it was legal. So, people were surprised that the court ruled that way. So, Schwarzenegger certainly did. And there were just amicus briefs from all different places, some that would be very surprising. And that I think essentially pressured the court into revising the ruling because it was clear that the intention was that homeschooling was legal under this registration as a private school.

PETERSON: Well, now, education is a state and local responsibility, and the federal government doesn’t get involved in education very much. But has the U.S. Supreme Court ever made a decision with respect to homeschooling?

LANE: I’m not sure. I know that the Turner case, for example, I think was appealed to the Supreme Court, but they did not hear it. But of course, the Supreme Court has ruled in ways that are used as precedents in this kind of matter.

PETERSON: One case that doesn’t decide things but comes up, and I think you mentioned it in your book, is the Yoder case. This is the Amish case, and I think it’s in Wisconsin, where they’re homeschooling their adolescent children, I think, starting at the age of 15. And even though there’s a law that says you have to go to a public school or private school until the age of 16, so they were opting out early. And that was found to be illegal in Wisconsin. And then the Supreme Court took that case, I think.

LANE: That’s right. And that’s such an interesting case and the Amish overall are so fascinating in their education and their relationship with public education as well. In the Yoder case, you know, they weren’t really attempting any academics or anything like that after eighth grade. They had a religious objection to academic education after eighth grade, unlike the Mennonites. So, it was adjudicated, I think, based on the religious argument that this was a strongly held, sincere religious belief and they should have an exemption. So, the Supreme Court did rule in favor of the Amish in that case, but some of the language, if I’m recalling correctly, made it clear that the court did not intend this to be applied to all groups asking for an exception to compulsory education. It was pretty specific to this religious case but it’s still in some ways it feels a lot like these homeschooling conflicts because some of the fathers were arrested, the families were very frightened and of course was also on the other side, state officials who were truly very concerned that these children were not getting the educational opportunity they needed. I think that’s very often the case that there are good intentions on both sides in these situations.

PETERSON: Well, you know, I think most states now allow homeschooling. Isn’t that the case? It’s not been a federal solution to this problem. On a state-by-state basis, California rulings have been echoed elsewhere around the country pretty much. Is that not the case?

LANE: Yes, that’s true. And each state regulates to a different degree. I think there are 11 states, though I may have the number wrong, that do not do any registration or reporting of homeschoolers. But every other state does some level of registration and reporting from simply filling out a form and having a test at the end of the year to you know, requirements for regular meetings with the school district and certain number of days of academic work each year and that sort of thing. So, it really does vary state to state. I think that as with private schools, some of the not just federal, but just national movements in education certainly affect homeschooling. The SAT, the AP exams, common core curricula, things like that certainly affect what people do in homeschool. And I think especially as people get to high school, the desire for children to be able to compete in college admissions is an important part of how people frame their high school homeschooling, I think.

PETERSON: So, there’s a big debate in this whole space about how much regulation of homeschool. I think you’re right. Homeschooling has gone mainstream in that it’s now accepted pretty much that some people are going to choose to do this. But, there’s still…there’s a big argument as to how much regulation there should be. How many guardrails should you have to report? Should you have to follow certain procedures? Should you have to provide certain kinds of instruction? What’s your personal view of where we should be going with respect to the state regulation of homeschooling?

LANE: I mean, I think that’s for the people of each state to decide. In terms of my personal opinion, I don’t see homeschooling as merely a private good. I mean, education is not a private good alone. It’s both private and public. And I think that the people, the community, the state, has some interest in ensuring that children get an adequate education. I think as things stand now, because public schools on average are struggling so much with literacy and numeracy, I think it’s a hard sell to say that public school districts and state governments should have close control of homeschooling. I think that’s a hard sell right now. I think giving people an opportunity to try different things makes a lot of sense. I guess I lean toward low regulation, but some— Personally, I really like the freedom of homeschooling. But I do think it makes sense for, you know, some sort of minimal at least check in on children to make sure that they’re not being neglected. Now, we do know that on average, again, they’re doing OK academically, homeschoolers. But that doesn’t mean, you know, a particular family in either way. So, I think one—

PETERSON: What’s the evidence on that? Do we have evidence that homeschoolers are learning as much as children in school or, has this changed, or what’s the documentation on how much is actually learned when kids are taught at home?

LANE: We have scattered evidence of different kinds. We don’t have a national test, for example, that compares homeschoolers to public schoolers. There’s been some research done by the National Home Education Research Institute on small groups that has repeatedly suggested that homeschoolers do perform significantly better than public schoolers. Again, that’s sort of a small sample size. We also have things like the ACT. We can look at ACT results and see that homeschoolers are much, much, much higher than public schoolers, very close to private schools. And I would say that for all of that data, it does not prove that any particular child will do better as a homeschooler than in public school. Because it’s not clear that it’s causal, right? But it does show that homeschoolers on average are doing all right. So, in terms of the concern about homeschooling overall, I think there’s enough evidence to say that they are doing better than their public-school peers on average.

PETERSON: Well, that’s of those that we know who are homeschooling. And you always worry about how about those who never report that they’re homeschooling? We don’t know anything about them.

LANE: That’s true. And I think I mean, my personal opinion is that it does make sense to have to notify if your state has a compulsory education law, at least for them to know that you are homeschooling. But I would just bring this back to the question of public schools again, because I think that if we’re if we’re holding in our mind. a sort of idealized version of public school or maybe a good experiences we have or that our children are having, and we hold that up against our fears for homeschooling, we’re going to become very concerned. But if we’re looking at average performance for public school, it’s really rather poor. So, I think we have to be a little bit careful not to presume that homeschooling must be suspect as compared to public schools and that most children, if they were in public schools, would be doing really well. So, in that context, I think I agree with the sentiment that there should be some reasonable regulation or interest. This is a public good as well as a private one, as I’ve said. But I think the suspicion of homeschooling is often based on false assumptions about the school landscape that’s out there.

PETERSON: Well, how about adults who have been homeschooled? Has anybody ever asked a set of questions that would get us to find out whether they’re odd ducks, are doing unusual things, or are they pretty much like other folks

LANE: You know there is some really interesting data about social engagement from homeschoolers. They’re talking about homeschooled children but of course this would include their parents too about things like how often do they go to the library, the public library, how often do they go to a concert, things like that. And actually, that study found that, I’m sorry, I’m not remembering who it was, but it was a government study. It was a government study. That study found that homeschoolers actually did that on average at a higher rate than other school children. Now, school children may be going to the library at their own school. Again, it does not mean that regular school children do not do these things, but it does mean that homeschoolers are actually out in the public. They’re not just at home hiding. They are going really regularly into these public institutions and engaging. Anecdotally, I would say that just from my experience teaching college, I mean, they’re as varied as any kids coming in. You have some public-school kids coming in who can write a great essay. You have some coming in who don’t know how to come up and ask a question of a professor. And I think the same is true of homeschooling. There’s just a lot of variance.

PETERSON: Now, this is a question, how do homeschoolers get to college? Because generally speaking, you get to college by showing that you have good grades in high school, or maybe you take the SAT test, but you’ve got to have a teacher’s recommendation. How do homeschoolers persuade colleges to accept them?

LANE: I think they do very similar things to other students. Sometimes it’s just there’s a little bit of hacking. So, you know, sometimes mom has to create the transcript. But very often, a lot of people, not everyone, but a lot of people do enroll, especially in high school, with some sort of online teaching program or curriculum so that their children will have a recognizable transcript. A lot of homeschoolers will dual enroll at a community college so that their kids will have some classroom experience and a transcript. Or, you know, you can have a teacher recommendation written by a piano teacher or by, you know, somewhere where you volunteered, someone there. So, I think people have to find little ways like that. And of course, they do take the SAT or the ACT or the CLT. They do write their essays. They do all of those things. It’s a lot easier now. I’d say maybe 30 years ago when homeschooling was less common, people would do things like write letters, you know, arguing for why, even though they were homeschooled, they should get in. But now it’s very familiar. Colleges are very familiar. with homeschool applications.

PETERSON: Well, you know, there’s a lot of homeschooling in the United States if you compare the United States to continental Europe. Now, the Anglo-Saxon countries have some homeschooling, you know, Australia, England, Canada, not as much as in the United States. But if you compare the United States to Germany or France or Scandinavia, they don’t homeschool at all over there. Why is it that there is much more homeschooling on this side of the Atlantic than on the other side?

LANE: I think that’s a historical question about our particular culture and society. And I argue in my book that it’s based on the fact that, as you mentioned, education in the United States is locally controlled. It’s a lot less locally controlled than it used to be, which I think is part of the story of homeschooling. But I do think that Americans over the long term have had a belief that homeschooling should be locally decided and that parents should have a lot of say in it. And I don’t think that a country like Germany or France shares that belief. They have a belief that this should be a national project. And of course, it’s also much more manageable for them to do it as a national project because they’re these smaller states. And, you know, Germany has concerns about subcultures because of what happened in the 1920s, 30s and 40s. So, they just have different cultures. So homeschooling is it is sort of particularly American. And I’m very interested by its growth in places like the United Kingdom and in how that plays out. But I haven’t had a chance to study it in any depth yet.

PETERSON: Well, you did study one German family that refused to go back to Germany because they were concerned that they wouldn’t be able to continue homeschooling their child, and they actually said that they needed political haven to escape this oppression. So that’s a fascinating story that you end up with in your account. Could you share that with our listeners?

LANE: Sure. I’m afraid I’m not quite sure how to pronounce this family’s name. It’s Ramika, or something like that and they were a family who, a Christian family, a conservative Christian family, in Germany. A German family who were homeschooling their children and the situation escalated between them and local school officials where there were conversations first and then there were there were truancy reports, fines and there was a brief removal of the children from the home by their social services not for abuse, but because they would not enroll their children in a school. And the family flew across the ocean to the United States and applied for asylum. Now, this case is still ongoing; I think it’s been about 15 years. And it has been unresolved because the United States cannot decide whether or not this population of homeschoolers is one that would be persecuted in its home country and therefore qualifies for asylum. And periodically there’s a flip-flop in their status. So, every once in a while…you know, for many years they were in this situation where they had not been given asylum, but they were given regular renewals of permission to stay in the United States. They just had to check in once a year. And a couple of years ago, they checked in and were told, no, you can’t stay anymore. We’re going to deport you back. Now, by that point, they’d been in the country for 15 years. So, their older children had married Americans and had American children. I think a couple of the children may have been born in the United States. And so, you know, it fits into all of these conversations we’re having about immigration and deportation. But it really came out of nowhere. Now they’re still back in their once-a-year check-in. But it shows how sort of ambivalent we still are in some ways about homeschooling and what its role is or what its role is as a right in our culture.

PETERSON: But the story reminds me that we did have a Declaration of Independence, which talked about the government being the consent of the governed and focused on the liberties of the individual. And so, there is something special about the United States. And when you think about the United States and homeschooling and say, only there is this likely to have come to scale at the level that we are experiencing today. So, thank you, Dixie, for sharing that story. And thank you for joining me on the Education Exchange.

LANE: Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure.

PETERSON: I’ve been speaking with Dixie Dillon Lane. She is the author of a new book entitled Skipping School, A History of Homeschooling and How It Went Mainstream. I need to mention that on September 17th and September 18th, this coming fall, the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard is hosting a conference that is attracting homeschoolers from across the country. We’re going to have many panels on different aspects of the new approaches to homeschooling. And Daniel Hamlin, the new dean at the University of Texas, and I will be the moderators for the conference. You can learn more about this by going to the PEPG website and clicking on the conference title Emerging School Models. I am Paul Peterson. This is the Education Exchange. Please join me for a new podcast released on the Education Next website every Monday at noon Eastern time. Thank you for joining us.

PAUL PETERSON, HOST:

This is the Education Exchange with Paul Peterson. I am the Director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University. Thank you for joining us. A decade ago, urban charter schools were celebrated for their no excuses model. The largest and most influential of the charters was KIPP Academy, and its motto spoke for the whole movement: Work hard. Be nice. There were no excuses for failure. Every child can go to college. If teachers pour energy into their instruction, everyone at the school encourages one another and students pay attention and do their homework. But 10 or 15 years ago, the urban charter atmosphere changed. Low achievement was blamed on institutional racism, not on the failure to work hard. KIPP dropped its slogan. White administrators were treated with suspicion. Steve Wilson, a white founder of Ascend Learning, another successful charter network, was asked by his board to surrender his leadership position. And in a book about his experience, Wilson speaks of the “Lost Decade” when urban charters lost their way. Well, are these just rumors and reports? Do we have any solid evidence that charters are not pursuing their mission as successfully as they did in the past? To investigate this question, Geoffrey Kocks, an economist at MIT, has taken a careful look at charter school effectiveness in Massachusetts, a state that pioneered the urban charter movement. Kocks’s paper is entitled “Two Decades of Massachusetts Charter School Effects.” Well, I’m very pleased to have Geoffrey Kocks with me on the Education Exchange today. Thank you, Geoffrey, for joining me.

GEOFFREY KOCKS: Thank you for having me on the program.

PETERSON: Well, Geoffrey, we’ll get to your methodology in a minute, but can you first share with our listeners your bottom line? Has charter school effectiveness fallen since 2015 in the schools in Boston?

KOCKS: Yes, I’m certainly happy to. So, I started this project with two key research questions. The first is that we already know from a large body of literature that Massachusetts charter schools have historically boosted student test scores. But these papers only extended through cohorts of students who applied to the schools through 2014. And of course, a lot has happened both to the charter sector and the educational landscape more broadly since that time period. So, the first question was how have the effects of the state’s charter schools evolved since then? And the second question is after seeing potential changes in charter school effects, I was curious what explanations were consistent with both the declines in charter school effects and the subsequent rebounds. So, my headline finding for the first question is that while charter schools did boost student test scores on average over time, these effects varied substantially across the study period. So, during the earliest period, going up to about 2014, I find consistent with the previous literature that charter schools indeed continued to boost student test scores. So, for example, on the MCAS, which is the state test that students take in Massachusetts, each year of charter enrollment increased math scores by about 0.25 standard deviations.

PETERSON: What’s a 0.25 standard deviation? I know you know what it means. I think I know what it means, but can you just put it in layman’s terms?

KOCKS: Yeah, so that’s about equivalent to a 10 percentile point increase. If you have a student that’s starting at about the 50th percentile in math, for example, that would suggest that after about one year of charter enrollment, they’d be in the 60th percentile. on the state test.

PETERSON: Can I say it is something like a half years’ worth of learning or a full year’s worth of learning or anything like that? Is that a little over-interpretation of what you can say?

KOCKS: We don’t have it in those terms in the paper.

PETERSON: So, you’re not sure exactly how to put it in terms of something like, so shift of 10 percentile points or percentage points on the distribution, which is a little tricky.  But it sounds like a big effect.

KOCKS: Yeah, so we don’t map that into years of learning, for example, but we map it in terms of percentile points on the state exams.

PETERSON: All right. So, do you look at any other educational outcomes besides test scores?

KOCKS: So, the main outcomes that I look at are test scores, so both the MCAS scores as well as SAT scores. I find in the first half of the 2010s, these large increases in MCAS scores. But in the second half of the decade, these indeed dropped to about zero. So, for both math and English, there was no effect of the charter schools compared to the traditional public schools.

PETERSON: So, it goes from this 10 percent thing to zero, you’re saying. So, in the recent period of finding no advantage, you might as well go to your neighborhood school as to go to one of these charter schools on average.

KOCKS: Yeah, so in the second half of the decade, there was no differential effect compared to traditional public schools. And then what I find interesting is that these effects seem to reemerge after the Covid pandemic. So, when we look at students who enter in 2020 or later, there’s some rebound in the effects.

PETERSON: I think it’s important to say that you found this decline before Covid, right? It isn’t like this was caused by Covid because the scores were— The difference between charters and the regular public schools in Boston; that difference was narrowing in the period before Covid. Not…It wasn’t caused by Covid.

KOCKS: Yes, that’s exactly right. So, the decline in the charter school effects is a pre-Covid phenomenon. And in fact, they seem to be doing relatively better compared to the public schools since the pandemic.

PETERSON: So, the pandemic actually put an end to this decline, you’re saying, and there’s been a bit of a rebound. Have they gone back to where they were in the early period?

KOCKS: So, in terms of levels of student achievement, we still see that there’s room for both of the sectors to grow compared to how they were doing pre-pandemic. But if we look at the causal effect of a student attending a charter school versus a traditional public school, it seems like that charter advantage has reemerged since the pandemic.

PETERSON: Now, one of the things you just mentioned here is that the charter school advantage depends on two things. One is how well the charter school is doing, but also it depends on how well your traditional public school is doing. And in Boston, one worries a lot about the traditional public schools. There’s a lot of feeling out there that that’s an institution that’s broken. Now, do you see any signs as to whether or not the Boston Public Schools were actually getting quite a bit better in the latter part of the second decade? And maybe that’s the explanation. It has nothing to do with charters, but it’s just that the public schools were getting better.

KOCKS: Yeah, so that’s one explanation that I was interested in. So, when I look at just the levels of the test scores in the traditional public schools, I don’t find any substantial increases in their performance throughout the decade. Now there are some signs of some school practices that may have been improving in organizational changes during that period. So, for example, one characteristic that I look at is whether teachers were qualified in the subject area that they were teaching, which is something that I measure based on whether they had an undergraduate major in that subject area or whether they were licensed to teach in that area. And I find that those shares were declining in the charter sector while they were increasing in the traditional Boston Public Schools so that might reflect changes in how they were recruiting teachers, for example.

PETERSON: Well, did they have more money? I mean, I know that a lot of money became available during Covid, especially to your traditional public sector. But I don’t know about the period just before that. So, did you look at, you know, just the resources available, financial resources available to the two sectors?

KOCKS: So that’s not something that I look at directly in this paper. I think there’s been some anecdotal evidence that the traditional public schools may have been increasing their pay scales during that period, which may have made it more attractive for teachers to teach in that sector, for example.

PETERSON: And did the charter school…how well are they funded? Are their resources as adequate as they are in the traditional sector?

KOCKS: That’s not something that I look at directly in this paper. But of course, they are given public funding for the schools.

PETERSON: But is it at the same level per pupil?

KOCKS: I’m not sure off the top of my head.

PETERSON: OK, well, so that might be a possible explanation is that the charter schools didn’t have as much resources as they had previously. That there was a starving because, you know, there was a lot of political opposition to charters in 2019. The voters were asked to, you know —

KOCKS: Yeah, definitely, so there’s been a lot of attention for example on like the referenda for the charter schools and things like that so what I do in the paper is I try to look at what are the potential explanations for the decline in the 2010s and I pinpoint two potential explanations that coincided with the decline in charter effects. So, one of those which I alluded to earlier is the decline in teacher qualifications, so I find that fewer teachers in the charter schools during that period majored in the subject area that they were teaching or were licensed in that area, for example.

PETERSON: How important is that? You know, when I’ve looked at that, I did study that question. Admittedly, it was in Florida, not Massachusetts, but I couldn’t see any effect of whether you were trained in a particular area or not, because, you know, a lot of this is happening at the elementary and middle school level. You’re teaching a lot of basic material so how important is the…that you have training in the field? Do we have much evidence that that’s important in the literature?

KOCKS: Yeah. That’s a great question. Well, first of all I look at the middle schools and high schools so not the elementary schools in this case but second of all the literature is a bit mixed on those effects. But it might reflect something more fundamental just about how easy it is to attract well-qualified teachers that have sterling academic credentials to fill these positions. So, it might not be the credentials themselves, but rather that’s reflecting how easy it is to get qualified teachers to fill the positions.

PETERSON: I just noticed you mentioned that you’re looking at middle school and high school students. You did not include elementary school students in your analysis.

KOCKS: That’s right. I don’t look at elementary school in this study. It’s just middle school and high school.  I also want to go back quickly to the potential explanation. One is teacher qualifications. The other is leadership turnover, which is another important part of the organizational structure. So, another trend that I find during that same period is that there was a large turnover of school principals in the charter schools during the years immediately preceding this decline. It seems like a lot of the leaders, and especially a lot of the founding leaders of these schools, may have left the organizations around that time that could have created instability in the school practices and also might have moved away a bit from some of the original visions of the schools there.

PETERSON: But wasn’t that happening in the district sector as well?

KOCKS: So not at the same rate. So, what I do in the study is I compare this for the charter sector relative to the traditional public schools.

PETERSON: A lot of people want to know, well, exactly who is going to the charter schools? I know you’re comparing charter schools or district schools using the lottery method. So that method gets you a pretty accurate comparison. But what is the composition of the charter school in your study? What’s the race and ethnic composition, for example?

KOCKS: Yeah, so the charter sector in Massachusetts has more racial minority students and more low-income students than the traditional public schools. The nice thing about using this lottery method is that we’re comparing only the students who applied to the charter schools. So, we’re abstracting from any of those differences in the underlying student characteristics there. By law in Massachusetts, if charter schools have more applicants than seats, they’re required to run an admissions lottery to randomly admit the students. So, it creates a nice random variation in the opportunity to actually attend the charters.

PETERSON: Right. Did that change over time? I mean, is that ethnic composition pretty stable over the time period?

KOCKS: Overall, it’s relatively stable. There have been slight increases in the share of Hispanic and Latino students, slight decreases in the share of black students, but it’s remained a larger share of racial minority students than the traditional publics.

PETERSON: Now, how about the family income, family education? Do you have any information on that?

KOCKS: So I look at that as well. I find that that’s been relatively stable over time. And that rules out that as an explanation for why the effects are changing as well. So it doesn’t seem like it’s due to large changes in the composition of students who are applying or their characteristics.

PETERSON: So how about the comparison between the Boston schools and the charter schools elsewhere in Massachusetts? We’ve been focusing in on Boston. Maybe that’s all my fault. But can you go into a little bit on whether you’re finding the same thing in the charter schools elsewhere in the state?

KOCKS: Yeah, so a lot of the changes that I find are driven by these Boston area charter schools. The effects for the schools outside of Boston have been relatively stable over time. So, it seems like a lot of the action is taking place in Boston. So those were the schools that were performing best in 2014 and earlier. Those are the schools that experienced the biggest decline throughout the 2010s. And they’re also the schools that have experienced the biggest rebound since the pandemic. So, for example, Boston area charter schools, if we look at their effects on state English exams, are doing even better now than they were prior to their decline. So, in the first half of the 2010s.

PETERSON: So, this is sort of a Boston middle school and high school story. It’s not necessarily a story of all charter schools in Massachusetts. So why do you think this is not happening in the other part of Massachusetts, out in, say, Springfield, or … I’m not sure exactly where all the non-Boston charter schools are located, but they’re in a variety of places, rural and suburban and some smaller cities, but you don’t see it out there. So, what do you think is the reason you see it more in one place than another?

KOCKS: Yeah, that’s a great question. You’re right; the non-Boston charter schools are sort of spread geographically across the state, some in more rural areas, some in sort of suburban areas. Some of it could be just accidents of timing. So, it could be when the Boston charter schools had their leaders leave. And some of it could be Boston-specific problems in recruiting teachers. So, as we mentioned, the pay scales may have changed in the Boston public schools, for example, in ways that made it differentially more attractive. There are also issues like higher cost of living that might be more specific to the Boston area, and they’ve made it more difficult to have high staffing in these schools.

PETERSON: Do you have any thoughts as to why the comeback actually occurs since Covid? This is sort of the most encouraging part of your study, is that maybe this lost decade is behind the charter movement and they can move forward with confidence at this point. How confident are you in that finding? Do you have enough observations to know for sure this is happening? And what do you think are the reasons why that might be?

KOCKS: So, the evidence looks pretty strong that the Boston area charter schools in particular and the charter sector as a whole has been performing relatively well since the pandemic. And I was really interested in understanding why. I conducted a survey of Massachusetts charter school administrators to ask about the practices that they’ve been doing since the pandemic and what they’ve actually changed since the pandemic. And this has been motivated by the idea that there’s a rhetoric of charter schools being areas of innovation where there’s more flexibility to experiment with different learning practices and that might have resulted in an ability for them to pivot more readily than traditional public schools did. So, I got responses from 30 schools in that survey and what I do is I correlate the school specific effects since the pandemic with what they report doing since the pandemic and I find some evidence of particular practices that have been the most effective. So, this is all correlations for this part of the study. But for example, I find that schools did better that were adopting more frequent assessments for students. So, they might have been more readily able to gauge exactly how students were doing in the classrooms and respond to learning challenges after identifying those.

PETERSON: Do you find any evidence that the schools that had fallen the most rebounded the most? Was it just sort of like, oh, we’ve got to change our practices, and so we’re going to turn around? Or that wasn’t the factor?

KOCKS: There’s definitely some evidence of that. So, for example, the Boston area charter schools are the ones that had the biggest decline in the second half of the 2010s, and those are also the same schools that experienced the biggest rebound since the pandemic.

PETERSON: So, can you generalize beyond Massachusetts? Is there any research elsewhere?

KOCKS: So to my knowledge, this is the first lottery-based evidence that’s occurred since the pandemic. There have been some studies using observational methods in other areas like Tennessee, for example, and those have found somewhat similar findings of the charter schools potentially doing better at promoting learning recovery since the pandemic. But of course, those are using different methods and might have some of the selection bias that would occur without a lottery study.

PETERSON: So, on the lottery study, are these schools still as popular as they once were? I mean, if there’s signs that they aren’t as effective, you might think that people no longer are pouring into these charter schools as they were. How about the…are all of them oversubscribed today or are there a lot more that are not oversubscribed, and you can’t do a lottery study?

KOCKS: It’s always been the case that not every charter school in the state was oversubscribed. So, I’m always limited to the set of schools that have that oversubscription. There’s still a large number that have been oversubscribed since the pandemic, for example. But there aren’t quite as many students applying as there were during the peak in the early 2010s, for example.

PETERSON: How much of a change has there been? I mean, could that be a possible explanation is that you’re looking at a different set of schools now than in the earlier period?

KOCKS: Yeah, so that’s one explanation that I ruled out as well. So, in some of the analyses, I restrict the sample just to the schools that were oversubscribed and in the early period and can trace the effects of those same schools over time. So that holds a set of schools constant in the analysis and ignores the fact that some schools might be going in and out, for example. And I find very similar results when looking at that subset of schools.

PETERSON: Now, what do you see as the future of the charter school movement? Is it under a lot of pressure, partly because of maybe it not performing as well? You’ve got a big homeschooling movement today. The private sector is popular with these Education Savings Accounts. The Trump administration is supporting a private sector, not really against charters, but not as much for them as it is for the private schools. You see the landscape changing.

KOCKS: I think one interesting thing that I got out of this study is that it’s important for the charter schools to constantly be reevaluating the effectiveness of the methods that they’re using and being able to pivot quickly in response to new challenges. So, I saw how quickly these school effects could change over time, both for better and for worse, and that these charter effects aren’t something static that will always be high regardless of what else is going on. So, I think constant evaluation and constant accountability for the sector is very important for them to maintain this advantage in test scores.

PETERSON: Well, how about moving beyond test scores and sort of academic outcomes? How about social and emotional learning? Many people think this is just as important, maybe more important than academic learning. Were you able to get any window on that?

KOCKS: I don’t look at that directly in the study. All of my outcomes are looking at… test scores for now. There are plans in the future to look at things like chronic absenteeism to continue evaluating how charter schools have affected those sorts of outcomes.

PETERSON: So, at this point, we don’t really know whether or not the charter schools have re… I mean, this absenteeism topic and chronic absenteeism has just totally escalated in the post-Covid era. And maybe the charter schools’ rebound is due in part to their… at getting students to come to school. Is there any signs of that?

KOCKS: Yeah, that’s definitely something that I’m interested in exploring, but I don’t have evidence on that point right now.

PETERSON: Well, we look forward to your next study helping us out in that dimension, because that could be part of what’s going on here.

KOCKS: Thank you. I’m excited for that ongoing work.

PETERSON: Thank you very much, Geoffrey. It’s a great study, but oh, I know what, there is one question that I didn’t ask that I think I really need to ask, and that is Steve Wilson’s book. I started with that at the beginning, and I wasn’t sure whether or not you thought he was onto something there, or was he just talking about his own experience and not something you could generalize to other urban charter schools? Do you think his analysis has something to … are you inclined to agree with him?

KOCKS: Oh yeah, I’m glad that you came back to that. So, one thing that I looked at as a potential explanation is whether these changes in school disciplinary practices could explain what was going on. For example, in Massachusetts, there was a law passed, chapter 222 that went into effect in 2015 that made it more difficult for schools to suspend students. And so, there’s been some rhetoric that that might have been responsible for some declines in charter school effects if it was more difficult for schools to pursue practices that were commonly called “no excuses”. And I find that that doesn’t seem to be a big factor in what was going on. The decline in charter effects actually preceded what was taking place with that law. And I find declines in suspensions in both the traditional public schools and the charter schools within Boston. The charter schools were starting from higher levels, but it seems like it affected both of the sectors.

PETERSON: So you think perhaps there are other factors that are driving this that are more important than the ones that Steve Wilson settled on?

KOCKS: Yeah, so my analysis suggests that the organizational and the staffing factors seem to be more important as a part of that story.

PETERSON: Well, thank you, Geoffrey, for your fascinating analysis. I agree with you. This is the first lottery study, the first random assignment study, the first definitive study that looks at how charter schools work over a long time period. And it greatly enhances what we know about this sector. So thank you very much for joining me on the Education Exchange.

KOCKS: Thank you for having me.

PETERSON: I’ve been speaking with Geoffrey Kocks. He’s an economist at MIT who has just released a new paper entitled “Two Decades of Massachusetts Charter School Effects.” I am Paul Peterson. This is the Education Exchange. Please join me every Monday at noon when our weekly podcast is released on the Education Next website.

PAUL PETERSON, HOST:

This is the Education Exchange with Paul Peterson. I am the director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University. In 2007, the schools in the District of Columbia, under the direction of Chancellor Michelle Rhee, introduced a pay-for-performance plan, often called a merit-pay plan. Over the next 20 years, students in D.C. have been making extraordinary gains in reading and math, well above those nationwide. But those reforms are now in danger. Janice Lewis George, a socialist Democrat, has just won the Democratic Party nomination for mayor of Washington, D.C., and she’s almost certain to become the next mayor. Now, Lewis George has promised the Washington Teachers Union, the WTU as it’s called, she’s promised the WTU that she will drop teacher evaluation essential to this merit-pay program. Well, to discuss this dramatic turnabout in the nation’s capital, I have with me on the Education Exchange, Michelle Rhee, the former chancellor of the Washington, D.C. school system, today a partner at Equal Opportunity Ventures. Thank you, Michelle, for joining me on the Education Exchange.

MICHELLE RHEE: Thanks for having me, Paul. It’s always a pleasure.

PETERSON: Well, Michelle, we want to get into the current situation, but can you first explain to our listeners what happened back when you were the chancellor of the D.C. school system? First of all, describe the program itself. What was the merit-paid program that was put into place? Then we’ll go into the politics.

RHEE: Sure. So just as a little bit of background, which I think some people know, but others do not, is that when Mayor Adrian Fenty took over mayoral control of the schools in D.C. in 2007, D.C. public schools were the lowest performing school district in the nation. We were the only district in the country that was on high-risk status with the U.S. Department of Education, mostly for the misuse of federal funds. And we just had a pretty dismal situation in terms of student achievement where only 8 percent of the city’s eighth graders were performing on grade level in mathematics. At the same time, 98 percent of the teachers were being rated as doing an excellent job. So, there was this real disconnect between student achievement. and teacher performance that we knew we needed to fix. And when we started the reforms, specifically around the teacher evaluation and pay for performance programs, it was really interesting because we did some surveying and the vast majority of both teachers and principals did not like the existing performance evaluation system. And so you would think that that would be like the clarion call for change. Well, everybody wants change until change actually happens and you start implementing it and then everyone, you know, gets skittish. But we knew that based on the data and based on sentiment that we had to significantly change the system. And so, what we did was we developed a new teacher evaluation system where at the time that we introduced it, 50 percent of the teacher evaluation was based on student academic growth. And then the other 50 percent was based on a number of factors, including how the school overall was doing academically on growth measures, the individual contributions of the teachers, and then general professionalism, etcetera. And at the time, it was pretty much unheard of to have student performance factored into a teacher’s evaluation. And it was interesting because back then at the time, I went and did a…I spoke to a Wall Street Journal conference of CEOs, and they asked me, what’s the most innovative thing that you’re doing right now? And I sort of explained the fact that we were restructuring the performance evaluation in that way. And one of the CEOs asked me the question. They were like, well, 50 percent; why wouldn’t it be 90 percent? And I said, look, sir, you don’t understand. Right now, it’s 0 percent, right? We’re going from 0 to 50. That’s a pretty huge difference.

PETERSON: But there was another side of it. You had some professional people coming in and spending some time in the classroom, observing the teachers. Wasn’t that a pretty big, important part of your performance pay plan?

RHEE: Absolutely. And this was important because this was based on feedback, Paul, that we were getting from teachers. So, teachers were saying to us that in the previous model, the way that teachers were evaluated essentially was all coming down to one observation that happened either per semester or per year. And people would say, my principal would come in; they’d look at what I was doing for 10 minutes, and that was, you know, evaluation done. And lots of teachers were saying, things like, I teach three-year-old kids on the autism spectrum, and my principal was a high school gym teacher. They don’t really have the content knowledge to effectively assess my practice. And so based on that, we developed something called the Master Educator Program, where we identified incredibly high-performing teachers across the district. We trained them in this Master Educator Program, and then they were doing evaluations and observations. And basically, they would go in five times a year, not once a year. Three of those times, mind you, were unannounced observations.

PETERSON: So that’s the other thing about the way in which observations are typically done in school districts is they tell the teachers on Thursday morning at 10 o’clock; we’re going to have somebody observe you.

RHEE: That’s right. And then, so what you often see is like the dog and pony show come out for the observation. Right. And this is interesting because kids would tell, give us that feedback all the time, and they were like, yeah, when the when the principal comes in, then my teacher does things that like they don’t do any other day of the year. Right. But they’re putting on a show. And so, we actually felt like it was important to have three of those observations be unannounced observations so the master educator could get a really clear sense of what was going on in the classroom like every day. But that was, you know, while that brought some level of anxiety because it was different from how people used to operate, I think on the flip side of that, teachers were so grateful for the fact that these master educators really were experts in their subject area, and their grade level, and the quality of feedback that they were getting from these folks was unlike anything that they had previously gotten. So, it was sort of like balancing those two things.

PETERSON: But still, you were getting a lot of criticism, and you came up with an idea called the Green Path and the Red Path. And I always thought that was such a brilliant idea. So, what was the Green Path, Red Path story?

RHEE: So basically, there were two pieces to what we were doing. There was the actual teacher evaluation part, but then we also wanted to tie how people did on the evaluation to their compensation so that highly effective teachers who were teaching in high-need subject areas and high-need schools actually had the ability to get paid sometimes almost double what they were in the old system. Right. And so, it was a very significant pay for performance system. It was the kind of pay for performance system that had been unheard of before so before that time there had been some efforts to you know pay teachers usually a few thousand dollars more right for certain things but this is the first time that you were talking about literally like doubling somebody’s salary so it was very, very significant and essentially we knew that it was not going to go over easily, right? And that this was not something that everybody was going to embrace. And one of the things that George Parker, who was the president of the teachers union at the time said, which was very compelling to us was like, look, we have a whole lot of teachers who came into the profession and who came into the district with a different set of expectations, and we thought that was fair. So, what we decided to do was to create two tracks, we had the green track, we had red and green which you know in retrospect may it may not have been the best color choice but…and the green track was like you are going to be evaluated in this way. You have huge possibilities for bonuses that you can earn if you perform well, etcetera. And so, we decided that all new teachers would go onto the green track and that for existing and veteran teachers, they could make the choice to go on the green track if they wanted. If they chose to, they could stay on what we called the red track, which was more similar to what they had been on before.

PETERSON: But they wouldn’t ever get a chance to make this extraordinary salary.

 

RHEE: That’s right. And so, it was interesting to kind of watch the trajectory of that, like over time, because at the beginning, there were a number of veteran teachers who were choosing to stay on the green track.

PETERSON: You mean on the red path?

RHEE: I’m sorry, on the red track. But what happened over time, and a lot of those folks, I think, chose the red track because of fear of the unknown, right? And there were certainly a lot of rhetoric happening all from the union side of people saying like, oh, they’re just doing this so they can get rid of veteran teachers. Because one of the things about going on the green track is you gave up your tenure and your seniority rights. Right. Because this was a new model. And so a lot of folks thought, well, oh, they’re trying to get rid of veteran teachers and more highly paid teachers. Right. And this is the way that they’re going to do it. And so, you—But over time, you would see veteran teachers who had chosen the red track, but somebody else who was also a veteran teacher in their school chose the green track. And they’re like, well, wait a second. Miss Jones chose the green track. And over the last couple of years, she’s been able to pay for her daughter’s wedding and buy a new car and go on vacation. And here I am sitting on the red track. She’s still here, though, right? And so more and more teachers. actually started choosing the green track. And so there was a trajectory towards it.

PETERSON: Well, I know you did this only because the mayor backed you 100 percent. And then Mayor Fenty was really; he’s the person who chose you. He was the person who supported you. He was the person who mobilized the governmental agencies to help make sure the schools adapted. How important is the mayor for school reform in Washington, D.C.?

RHEE: I mean, it was absolutely critical. We could not have done anything that we did in D.C. were it not for, one, mayoral control, but two, mayoral control with a bad mayor is no better than a dysfunctional school board. We had what I would consider the best mayor that you could possibly have and he just 100 percent supported what we were doing. He understood it. He understood that there was going to be a lot of noise and pushback. That didn’t bother him because he was focused on the outcome, which is making D.C. public schools more effective for the kids in the district. So there is zero doubt in my mind that we would not have been able to accomplish what we did, and we would not have been able to set the foundations for 20 years of gains since then, were it not for Adrian and his bravery and courage.

PETERSON: Well, he was so brave he was defeated. And then you resigned. So, it was really sort of a dramatic ending to see, you know, the politics turn against you. But did the plan go down when you were defeated, when he was defeated and you resigned?

RHEE: No, I think one of the most heartening things about the foundation that we set early on is just how stable it was and how it was able to continue over time. And a lot of that is because the person who succeeded me in the job, Kaya Henderson, had been there with me hand in hand over the first four years. She continued that trajectory over the five years that she was chancellor. And that really sort of set the foundation for sure. And that foundation still remains today. In fact, George Parker, the teachers union president, when I was there, told me that he had recently done an assessment of the current teachers union contract. And he said between 90 and 95 percent of it, of what we negotiated back then, is still in place today.

PETERSON: Well, you were very fortunate to have George Parker as the head of the Washington Teachers Union, but he had to fight off a lot of opposition from union leaders around the country. Wasn’t that the case?

RHEE: Absolutely. According to George, he was fielding calls all the time from other teachers union leaders in other cities saying, like, what are you doing? You’re setting a bad precedent. You’re making my life harder because now our superintendent is coming to us and saying, look at what they’re doing in D.C., can we do something like that? But he also said he got pressure from other non teachers, but other union leaders across the country who were saying, hey, you can’t step out of line here. You know, you got to toe the union line. And so, I think the courage that George Parker showed as a leader, and he also was ousted from office shortly after Adrian was, unfortunately. But so often people who are in elected positions, as you know, will make calls that allow them to stay in office as opposed to making the calls that they know are the right things for students. And I think we were incredibly fortunate in both Adrian and George to have leaders who were more about doing what was right for kids than for them.

PETERSON: President Kennedy wrote a book on this before he became president. It was called Profiles in Courage, but it was only six stories. There are not many profiles in courage in politics. So, this is certainly one of them.

RHEE: Yeah absolutely, for those two men, it’s undeniable.

PETERSON: So now tell me about the current position in the district. Janice Lewis George seems to be saying that she wants to go back to the old system. Is that really the case, or have I misinterpreted the storyline that’s out there?

RHEE: Well, she has publicly stated that she would like to roll back impact, which is the teacher evaluation and compensation system. You know, it’s still left to be seen what will actually happen. And I would hope, you know, oftentimes people say things to get elected and then when they get into office, they realize, wait a second, we actually have to do something else. I would hope that is the case here because I think, I mean, when the new mayor takes office, my hope would be that that person really looks first at the results. Like what has been accomplished in D.C. public schools over the last 20 years, going from the lowest performing school district in the country to leading the nation in gains. So, I would hope that they would first take a hard look at that. And then the second thing that I would hope is that they would really get a broader perspective from teachers about what is working and not working as opposed to just kind of listening to this very narrow voice of the teachers union. Because one of the things that I think people find very interesting is the fact that when George and I were negotiating this groundbreaking contract at the time in 2009, we got a lot of pushback from the national unions who didn’t want it to go to a vote, right? Because they were saying the teachers are not going to like this. We can’t take it to a vote. We can’t take it to a vote. Interestingly enough, when we actually did take it to a vote, it passed 80 percent to 20 percent.

PETERSON: Wow.

RHEE: And what it showed us was that the vast majority of people were not the ones that were arguing against this, and a heck bent on like trying to stop this from happening, right? And so I would say the same thing to the new mayor is, you know, instead of listening to sort of a narrow constituency who has a very kind of clear point of view and a clear agenda, really make sure that you’re listening more broadly to the teachers because if you look at some of the surveys and polling and data that has happened over time amongst teachers about the evaluation and the pay for performance system, you will find that there is tremendous support for this. And D.C. public schools has gone from—When I took over the district, we were the lowest paid teachers in the region. And one of the goals that George had was I want our teachers to be the highest paid teachers in the region. We actually achieved that, right? But it was through this paper performance system. And so those are all things that I think need to be really carefully considered before any major changes are made. And I think it would be unfortunate if the most, you know validated through research, validated human capital kind of reform system that has taken place over the last couple of decades in this country, and that has produced the results that it has, would just be undermined for political purposes. I think that would be a big mistake.

PETERSON: Right. There are some really good studies of what happened there in D.C. and have tracked things over time, and they validate what you just said, that the performances in D.C. are real. They’re not just paper.

RHEE: It’s not just the student achievement, which is obviously the most important thing, but the other thing that has increased significantly over time has been teacher retention, and teacher retention of the highest, most highly effective teachers in D.C. looks significantly better than it does in other urban districts.

PETERSON: Well, now, Congress has a veto over any decision that is taken by the government in the District of Columbia. Can you imagine Congress getting involved in this if Louis George actually tries to undo your plan?

RHEE: I don’t know, honestly. I think that politics have changed significantly since I was there. When I was there, we had both Democrats and Republicans in Congress who were supporting our efforts, to be honest. And because they knew that, the situation that we were under and they wanted sort of better results for kids. I fear that now, politically, things are much different than they were before. And I wonder whether Congress could muster a bipartisan coalition of people who look at the data again, look at the data instead of the political dynamics to say; we have to do something about this. I’m not sure, to be honest.

PETERSON: Well, now, Lewis George has supported charter schools. At least she said during the campaign that she wanted equal funding for charter schools. And charter schools are a big part of the story in the district because a high percentage of students are going to charter schools. And I think that’s continuing. How does the charter school story connect with the performance pay plan? Was that sort of part of the story? You needed to do something about the district because of the pressures that the charter schools were placing on the district?

RHEE: Certainly. I mean, well, you know, when we took over the district, between 30 and 40 percent of the kids were in charter schools, and that number was rapidly increasing every year. And so, I think even the people who didn’t want any change to happen in their ideal world, we would have continued down the road that we had been for decades. Even they were looking up and saying, oh, my gosh, if we don’t do something, then 10 years from now, 20 years from now, there might not be a D.C. public school system because it might be an all charter system. So, I think that fear was what helped Adrian to win mayoral control of the schools to begin with. And it certainly… I utilized that pressure a lot in pushing for our reforms to say, look, we can either make sure that the district is reforming, or we can hand more of these schools over to charter schools, your choice. And I think one of the gratifying things, and this is important right now, Paul, because with the rise of Education Savings Accounts these days, you are seeing more and more parents opting out of the traditional public-school district. And so many traditional public-school districts across the country right now are really, having crises around student enrollment. And, you know, one tack would be like to sort of hunker down, put your head in the sand and try to, you know, wait it out. But what we did, and I think, is a lesson to other traditional public-school districts across the country, is we leaned into being more innovative than the charters. And embracing new models and new ways of doing things. And as a result of that embracing of change, we completely reversed a downward trajectory in student enrollment. And I think now student enrollment in the traditional school districts is higher than it’s been in decades. And so, I think that’s a lesson to other district leaders right now who are sort of struggling with enrollment declines is, like, don’t hunker down and put your head in the sand. Like, really figure out, how can we be at the pointy end of the spear on innovation instead? And I think, you know, things like the aggressive teacher evaluation and paper performance system is one thing that needs to be considered.

PETERSON: Well, Michelle, I know you have a hard stop and I have to let you go, but I want to ask you one last question, which is, how about your current role at Equal Opportunity Ventures? Can you tell us a little bit about that in a few words?

RHEE: Yeah. So, I will say that at the end of my career in K–12 public education, I became a bit of a curmudgeon. I was like, you know what, we actually know what we need to do for kids. We just refuse to make the hard decisions associated with it. And so, I kind of pulled out of education. Now I’m back in from this venture capital lens. And I have to say, I’ve been reborn as an optimist again because every day I get to meet with founders, who are building something that they think is going to change the world. Our firm only invests in companies that are somehow helping to move economic mobility in our nation, particularly focused on low-income communities of color. I lead our education investments. And I am really bullish right now because I’m seeing so much being developed that I think could be game-changing for our kids. So, it’s really exciting to be in this role.

PETERSON: Well, thank you very much, Michelle, for joining me on the Education Exchange.

RHEE: Paul, it’s always a pleasure talking to you. Thank you.

PETERSON: I’ve been speaking with Michelle Rhee. She’s the former chancellor of the D.C. Public Schools. I am Paul Peterson. This is the Education Exchange. Please join me for our new podcast released on the Education Next website every Monday at noon Eastern time.